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Claim A says Manchester students invented fake mole beasts called Blue Meanies. Claim B says the Blue Meanies hoax was started by a local pub landlord. Claim A is true, and Claim B is completely made up.
In 1962, a group of bored University of Manchester students cooked up one of Britain's most delightful campus pranks. They invented a terrifying creature: the "Blue Meanie," supposedly a ferocious mole-like beast lurking beneath the campus grounds, burrowing through lawns and menacing unsuspecting students.
The students didn't just whisper the rumor to each other — they went full tabloid. They staged fake sightings, left mysterious burrow marks, and fed breathless "eyewitness" accounts to local reporters who, remarkably, didn't ask too many questions.
The story snowballed fast. Local newspapers ran it as real news, and before long the tale of a mole-like menace terrorizing Manchester had spread to national outlets, with readers across the country genuinely worried about this new cryptid threat.
Eventually the students came clean, revealing the whole saga as an elaborate prank designed to see just how far a ridiculous story could travel before anyone bothered to fact-check it. The answer: pretty much nationwide.
The hoax wasn't started by any pub landlord — it was homegrown mischief from the students themselves, with zero bar owners involved in the scheme at any point.
Would you have believed the Blue Meanies were real — or were you already side-eyeing this one?
