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Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (usually shortened to simply Beyond Belief) is an anthology TV show that ran for four seasons on FOX from the years 1997-2002, and revived in Germany in 2021. Each episode featured five short stories that involved unbelievable coincidences or the paranormal, and viewers were challenged to judge which were Inspired by… real events and which were entirely fictional. The show was hosted by James Brolin for the first season and by Star Trek: The Next Generation alumnus Jonathan Frakes thereafter with Don LaFontaine as the announcer. (And yes, he does say "In a world.") Although your mileage may vary as to how seriously one should take the show's claims of truthfulness, it remains a cult favorite and a great source of nostalgia for anyone who watched it during its original run.


This series provides examples of:

  • Abusive Parents: The deceased stepdaughter in "Secret of the Family Tomb" was revealed to have run away because her biological mother was horribly abusive to her, which led to her running away and dying. After the mother passed away, both were put in her stepfather's family tomb, where strange activity causes destruction that leads to graffiti reading "Not Here". The pastor from the burial reveals the information of the abuse to the policeman involved and believes the destruction is the daughter being unable to rest in peace with her mother by her side. After removing the mother from her husband's family tomb, all activity ends.
  • All for Nothing: From the tale of "The Wealthy Widow". Dirk marries Cassie, the titular widow, because her deceased husband didn't trust banks and hid a chest full of money on their property and planned on finding it. Not only is Dirk killed by Cassie's husband's ghost tricking him into shooting blindly and making the chest fall on his head, Cassie had already found the chest. Unlike her husband, she trusted the bank and deposited all of it, meaning Dirk's plans were ruined before he even formed them.
  • Alliterative Title: Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction
  • Alone with the Psycho: In "Anatole", a seemingly harmless old man named Anatole Guttenoff shares a prison cell with William Pope, a hardened Serial Killer. Will both of them survive? No, but Pope is the one who dies. It turns out that one of Pope's victims was Anatole's son, and the old man came to that cell to get revenge.
  • Ambiguously Evil:
    • The mysterious casket salesman from "The Warning", who made Rob fear from his behavior that he was going to cause his death. However, it if weren't for Rob's terrified reaction to the man that apparently only he could see, he and wife would have died when the elevator crashed.
    • The old women in "The Gathering". They have access to and knowledge on witchcraft, and chant while circled around a pentagram to hex the home invader, yet they only do that in self-defense. Other than that, the four are shown amiable and speaking fondly of their families.
    • The man that farmer Joss Myrtle reaches out to in "The Land". He wears dark clothes and Joss's daughter, the narrator, notes he seemed oddly familiar. He notes to Joss when asking for 20 years of crops that he's not the one who calls the shots or can assure how long it'll be. He's not referred to as the devil, only that he gives the daughter a bad feeling. He also makes sure to ask Joss if he's sure if he wants to perform the ritual that seemingly kills him and disappears once it was done, and seemed to have kept his word. However, an inverted cross was shown inside the house.
  • Ambiguously Human: Due to the stories and their settings, tales featuring a mysterious character will leave it questionable if said character was a ghost, angel or some other entity who either rewards the good or punishes the bad.
  • Asshole Victim: If someone dies in these stories, chances are they deserved it. Stories like "Used Car Salesman" and "Anatole" are good examples.
  • Bad Boss: In "The Cake" the bakery owner is a total Jerkass who is corrupt and assassinated a crime boss. The ghost of the crime boss returns and takes a deliciously ironic revenge by baking him into a cake that he was baking for the hitman that assassinated the crime boss.
  • Badass Normal: "Second Story Murder" is an interesting example, as it features a somewhat more normal event than to suggest anything supernatural happened. Three circus performers do a human tower to murder their sister's abusive husband after he got away with her murder.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: "Creepy Comics", Kip Sherman, an offensive comic publisher, threatens to fire his artist, Izzy Wilson, for not making his comics scary enough. He demands Izzy make something to "scare him to death". Izzy commits suicide after Kip's harassment and comes back as a ghost to do just that.
  • Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Napoléon Bonaparte sat in The Hooded Chair before he lost at Waterloo.
  • Beneath Suspicion: The nanny in "Red-Eyed Creature".
  • Blessed with Suck: There was one story about a guy who could kill people by painting their portrait. He tried to make it at least somewhat useful by only painting portraits of patrons who were either in great suffering or very near death. Until he learned his last subject was a perfectly healthy young woman who was depressed after her boyfriend left her, which he did not know. He then paints his own portrait and kills himself.
  • Boulder Bludgeon: One short story involves a murderer who killed a man by smashing his head in with a chunk of asphalt. He gladly recounts this story to his cellmate... who turns out to be the victim's father, who isn't too happy to hear it.
  • Broken Aesop: So the moral of "Couch Potato" is to... love your TV as if it were a real person?
  • Can't Get Away with Nuthin': The prisoner in "The Escape".
  • Cassandra Truth: Naturally, nobody believes the main child from "The Kid in the Closet" over his titular closet having a monster in it.
  • Changed My Jumper: "Ghost Town": A photographer wearing a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and boots finds himself in the Wild West, 1848. The locals harass him and ask why he's walking around in his underpants.
  • Concealing Canvas: In "Mail Oder Degree," a scam artist is cursed by one of his victims. Making a fortune, the conman hollows out the wall behind a bookcase to hide the money from his victims and the government. Bad move, he stripped away the lead shielding that protected his office from the x-ray lab next door, and he died from radiation sickness.
  • Connected All Along: From "The Newsstand", Vinny learns his friend and mentor Doc was the abusive father who walked out on him after he died in surgery and left everything he owned in his son's name as an act of redemption.
  • Cooked to Death: In the segment "The Cake" a mobster named Marty Jr. owns the bakery where Dom works as the baker, and orders him to make a cake for a celebration he's going to attend. When Dom gets to work, he sees an eerie face screaming in pain inside the oven, and tells Marty Jr. that he won't bake the cake because of what he just saw, and Marty Jr. fires him and says he'll bake the cake himself. Back home, Dom tells his wife what happened and he spots the face of the man he saw in the oven on a newspaper reporting that Jake Phillips, a local mob boss, was recently killed in a car bombing and they receive a call from a neighboring business owner saying that there's smoke coming from the bakery. After Dom tells his wife to call the fire department he rushes to the bakery where he discovers Marty Jr.'s charred corpse baked into the cake he was preparing, and the closing narration heavily implies that Marty Jr. was killed by Jake Phillip's vengeful ghost.
  • Crazy-Prepared: A security guard teaches himself to use telekinesis just in case of a robbery during "The Perfect Record", and it works.
  • Dead All Along:
    • In "The Getaway", it turns out that Diane Lerner crashed into the boulder that she claimed to have swerved around; the kids playing in her yard and cryptically informing her that "it's time" are also revealed to have died in a bus accident the same day. They were waiting for Diane to realize/remember what had really happened, so that they could all move on together.
    • In "They Towed My Car", Edward, the man who wandered around town for his missing car turned out to have been the ghost of the man in the trunk of that car.
  • Death by Materialism: One segment revolves around a crooked accountant who had a Voodoo curse placed upon him by an angry (former) client. To hide some of the money he's not reporting to his clients (or the government) he installs a wall safe to keep it hidden from view, but would keep it open when he was alone, because of the money's mysterious green aura. Suddenly he starts losing his hair in clumps, and even teeth, because by installing his wall safe, he stripped the wall's lead shielding that protected him from the X-ray lab next door, and he died from radiation poisoning.
  • Death Seeker: Defied with Sheldon Ludavik from "Cursed". Despite the belief that he's under the curse of the werewolf, he does not want to die.
  • Died on Their Birthday: The segment "Bad Dreams" from Season 4, Episode 9 is about a woman who keeps dreaming about dying on her 30th birthday. She believes this is a premonition, and she spends her birthday alone with her husband in sheer terror, as events from her premonition come true, but when she survives, she's relieved, and she stops having the dreams. However, one year later, when a proper birthday party is being held in her honor, a relative explains to her husband that her grandmother (Who helped raise her after her parents died when she was a small child) actually got her age wrong and reveals that she is one year younger than she thought she was, meaning this second party is actually her 30th birthday. Once again, events from the woman's original premonition start happening, and moments later she is found stone dead. At the end of the episode, Jonathan Frakes reveals this story to be a work of fiction.
  • Dies Wide Open: The hairdresser from "The Ring".
  • Downer Ending: A good many, such as "The Wrestler", "Blind Man's Dog", "Bon Voyage", etc.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: A couple of the stories during the first season were simply narrated by James Brolin like a campfire tale instead of being filmed for us to see ourselves. Perhaps this was due a lack of budget.
  • Every Episode Ending: Jonathan Frakes always delivered a pun at the end of every story with a grin, which always related to the story's theme or subject matter. The only time he didn't do this was in the case of a woman and her daughter being reunited with the woman's long-lost mother, a Holocaust survivor.
  • Evil Old Folks: Alan Young and Marjorie Lovett in "The Diner" that own a diner who kill homeless people by poison, accidentally killing their son believed to have been killed during The Vietnam War.
  • Exact Words: From "The Girl Next Door", Curtis meets Florence, who tells him that she lives across the street. The two enter a relationship that, once his womanizing ways is revealed, ends in heartbreak. He goes to what he thought was her house, only to find it unused. He sees running towards a church next to said house and follows. He finds a gravestone with her name on it. While Curtis himself isn't the narrator, Frakes points out that Florence herself said she lives across the street.
  • Fate Worse than Death: For "The Sleepwalker", Leon Woodward's sleepwalking curse causes him to disappear... only for a doll with a near identical resemblance to him to appear in his daughter's dollhouse, with Frakes suggesting his soul is probably trapped inside it.
  • Flat-Earth Atheist: Often subverted. It is a common staple for characters to initially brush off supernatural happenings as strange coincidences or their eyes playing tricks on them, only to come to accept the mystical explanation by the end of the segment.
  • Gainax Ending: "Town Of Remembrance", "Room 245", and "Anatole" spring to mind.
  • Gaslighting: In the story "Room 245," a woman and her ailing mother check into a hotel, and when the mother's condition deteriorates, she calls a doctor that prescribes her an antibiotic. When she returns to the hotel, the receptionist and the doctor claim that she was never in the hotel, and the room in question is empty. Frakes states that one possibility is that while the woman was getting the prescription, her mother died of a rare infectious disease, and to avoid a panic/loss of business, the hotel's management and the doctor clandestinely got rid of the body and lied that the women had never checked into the hotel.
  • Gold Digger: "The Wealthy Widow" (Season 4, Episode 9A) featured Dirk Sidwell, who seduced and married a woman named Cassie Youngston, whose husband, Milo, was killed in a thresher accident two years prior, leaving her lonely, but completely wealthy with a thriving dairy farm. Dirk married Cassie for the reason of finding a strongbox full of cash hidden somewhere on the property since Milo didn't believe in banks. The farm foreman, Jake Rudolph, didn't like Dirk and saw him for who and what he really was in the beginning, and it was either him or Milo's ghost that gave him the scare of his life. However, unlike Milo, Cassie did believe in banks, having put all the money into her mutual fund account after he died to keep anyone from stealing it, since the strongbox turned up empty after it dropped from the barn and killed Dirk with a blow to the head.
  • Good All Along: "Bright Lights" features the young woman being stalked by the truck of Gunner, whose interests in her she quickly rebuffed. Most notable is that he has his high beams on. She thinks he's hunting her down and attempts to do her harm for rejecting him. Once he catches up to her, it turns out he was trying to save her from a killer who hid in her backseat, the lights were so that the killer wouldn't try anything where he'd be seen.
  • The Grim Reaper: "Halloween" has a mysterious stranger dressed in a Grim Reaper costume, terrorizing the main character on Halloween night.
  • Guardian Angel: A pretty common trope in these stories.
    • The most obvious story would be "The Guardian", where a teenager is threatened by two hoodlums with a knife before a man named Big Al stops them and lets the main character go. When the main character returns to thank him, Big Al claims he never saved him and his work records prove that he wasn't there. The story suggests that perhaps a guardian angel taking Big Al's shape was sent to protect him.
    • "The Woods" features one taking the form of a quadriplegic doctor who saves a boy from a rattlesnake bite.
    • "Firestation 32" has a tragic one where the young boy who often hung around the fire station died trying to save a family from a house fire, but his spirit still came by to warn the firefighter he was close with to come help the people trapped in the house.
    • "The Prescription" had a pharmacy with a grandson and grandfather team. A prescription for a customer that the grandfather tacked on the board vanishes and the grandson tries to find it to no avail. The grandfather calls the doctor and discovers that the prescription called for 1 milligram and not 10 milligrams as the note said. After it's corrected, the note reappears on the board. Although not stated in the story, Frakes suggests that an angelic spirit could have caused this phenomenon.
  • Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: In the "Positive I.D." episode, a reporter goes to the local police precinct to find a story, only to be identified as a liquor store robber, and he's even shown footage of him holding the cashier at gunpoint. After spending several hours in lockup where he doubts his own innocence, he's freed and shown the real robber who looks like him. He manages to dig up information on the robber, and it turns out they are twin brothers given up for adoption. While the reporter was adopted by a loving couple, his brother through different foster homes, being abused all the while, until he aged out of the system.
  • Historical Domain Character: Henry Lee (aka Lighthorse Harry, the Revolutionary War hero, Governor of Virginia and father of Robert E. Lee) and his wife Anne are the main characters of "The Burial." Frank and Jesse James appear in "Mysterious Strangers." Other stories feature No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of historical or entertainment figures.
  • Hanging Judge: Judge Roy Bean is described to have been one of these in "The Card Game" and was even photographed posing by a noose with his dog. It's suggested that Bean's spirit may have returned to the saloon where his picture hung to teach Lucky Gene Avery, a skilled poker cheat, a hard lesson about fair play.
  • Identical Grandson: "Ghost Town", it's implied the bartender that Thomas encountered is the ancestor of the ranger he met much later, assuming it wasn't some elaborate prank to mess with him.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: The story of "The Weatherman", the titular weatherman named Brent Phillie is a rude jerk with a massive ego, but there are two points where he's actually in the right to defend himself. He's told he's going to lose his job because viewers find his weather reports repetitive, he states that he just reports the weather, not change it. A woman harasses him because her father died of a heart attack while weatherproofing their home from a tornado he makes up and while Brent is unsympathetic to her, he also points out he didn't cause the man's heart attack or tell him to weatherproof their home.
  • Kick the Dog: Anyone who exhibits any meanness will surely get what's coming to them. In contrast, sympathetic protagonists usually receive a happy ending.
  • Killer Cop: The protagonist of one story is a cop who discovers that he killed a young woman while sleepwalking. He is completely unaware of this until he compares the bullet found at the scene to one in his gun.
  • Know When to Fold 'Em: In "The Greedy Investor," a man forces his wife to go into real estate speculation as a way to retire within ten years, and he cold-heartedly evicts an old lady who used her mortgage payments to pay for her late husband's medical bills, and the old lady responds that: "mark my words: This house will never be yours." Whenever the husband tries to sell the house something happens that makes the potential buyer back out, and after spending thousands on a new furnace, upgrading the plumbing, new carpeting and now having to deal with paranormal occurrences the wife threatens to leave him if he doesn't forget about the house. Just then, a young couple arrives to look at the house, and everything goes fine, and the wife sells them the house for $1. When the husbands tries to question why he sold at such a low price, she said that it was much cheaper than a divorce, the husbands wryly chuckles, and accompanies his wife to get the paperwork, and it turns out that the old lady's passed away soon after she was evicted, and the young woman was her granddaughter, who assumed the house would be willed to her after her grandmother's death.
  • Lack of Empathy: Many characters will show a complete disinterest in the well-being of others, whether they're hurt or they've died. It never ends well for them.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Most stories will end with a segment where the host, either Brolin or Frakes, suggests there might have been some logical explanation to the supernatural events that occur. Although sometimes, the host will point out one situation that doesn't seem to have a real world solution.
  • Misplaced Retribution: Frakes' closing statements on "The Weatherman" suggests the woman whose father died from a heart attack while weatherproofing their home might have tampered with Brett's car and cause his death. Brett himself points out he did not instruct the man to weatherproof his home, as well as not even consider his heart attack might have happened regardless, meaning his claims of calling the woman a nut are a bit spot on.
  • Mistaken for Pregnant: In "Morning Sickness", a girl named Marissa seems to have symptoms of pregnancy, but states she's still a virgin. The doctors say she has a cyst in her intestines. During surgery, they discover a baby octopus. Frakes has to tell the audience at the end, just to be clear, Marissa didn't give birth to an octopus.
  • The Mirror Shows Your True Self: The end of "Mirror of Truth" where the protagonist looks in the mirror to see her hideously deformed face, but when the mirror is set down, her face actually looks fine. The curse she may have only shows her inner beauty or lack thereof.
  • Mercy Kill: The elderly couple's "master plan" from the segment "the Diner" is based on the belief that they are doing the local homeless population a favor by killing them so they don't have to continue living on the street anymore.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution: The couple from "The Diner" justify their awful murders of homeless people by thinking it will end their suffering.
    • Numerous other entries also revolve around either the consequences of a character enforcing this this trope, or end with this trope.
  • Mugging the Monster: There was one story called "The Gathering" where a guy tries to rob a bunch of little old ladies playing cards...who turn out to be a coven of evil witches.
  • Never My Fault: "Used Car Salesman": Sonny Rhodes, a swindling car salesman who rips off customers, sells a van with broken brakes to a group of musicians, who die on their way to Vegas for a show. He denies any responsibility selling a car he knew wasn't safe, stating that the guy was in a hurry, saying this is fate's doing. Guess what happens to him? It involves cars coming to life and Sonny never ripping off another customer again.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: A decent number of segments are based on fairly well-known events.
    • The recently deceased hero of the segment, "Where Have All The Heroes Gone" is a western actor named Lash Connors. However, several details about his life, IE a death by gunshot ruled suicide but believed by many to be murder, the fact that he died right before he was slated to make a comeback in a new TV show, and that he played a beloved character that stood for justice, seem to indicate that he was actually based on George Reeves, who reportedly does still haunt the house where he died. Not unlike Lash, his spirit has also been seen in full costume. Since the segment was labeled true, it would indicate that the real story was about Reeves and the writers tweaked the details to avoid any legal issues. His name is also likely a reference to real Western actors, Alfred "Lash" LaRue and Chuck Connors.
    • An episode about Morgan Robertson writing Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan renames the author as Harris Fisher.
    • Another segment is closely modeled on the Terisita Basa murder case, with only the names changed.
    • "The Curse of Hampton Manor" is inspired by Dunnellen Hall, a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut which also has a history of its owners meeting bad ends, including bankruptcy, imprisonment and even suicide. Its most notorious resident was hotelier and real estate developer Leona Helmsley, who purchased the property soon before her conviction for financial crimes in the late 1980s, and on whom the Bev Conklin character is loosely based.note 
    • "Secret of the Family Tomb" is based on the famous Chase Vault in Barbados, where it was alleged that coffins moved within a sealed mausoleum over the course of several years in the early 19th Century. The story is relocated to the modern United States but otherwise follows the traditional lore very closely.
    • "Malibu Cop," about a detective who realizes that he committed the murder he's investigating while sleepwalking, is based on the story of French policeman Robert Ledru, which happened in La Havre in 1887.
  • Obfuscating Disability: The mundane solution to the mystery of "Anatole". We see the titular character in a prison cell where he kills his son's murderer, then learn he couldn't have been there since he lives in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair since he had a stroke. Is he faking his disability, or did he use some form of Astral Projection?
  • Offing the Offspring: An accidental example. At the end of "The Diner," it's revealed that one of the elderly couple's homeless "master plan" victims was their son, who the husband believed to have been killed in Vietnam.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Eric Crayton of "Blood Bank" is able to feed off blood even when it's drained into his veins as opposed to just his fangs, which he can apparently still do. His bite doesn't seem to cause others to become vampires, as his sole victim is not said to have become one. He also doesn't turn into a bat, since he jumps out the window of the sixth floor of the hospital and still managed to escape.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Sheldon Ludavik in "Cursed" doesn't grow hair or any wolf-like traits, but under a full moon he acts more beast-like. He also learns that during the eclipse of a full moon, werewolves exposed to it will die. If the scratches on his door are to be believed, he also gained inhuman strength.
  • Parental Abandonment: "The Caller" features a radio talk show host who frequently insults his viewers being harassed by the titular caller, who appears to be the son he abandoned. Said son died last summer.
  • Pen Name: The story "The Writer's Agent" features a dark variant. Mary Jane Layden, an author, gets into a pay dispute with Stan Trask, her agent, because he hasn't gotten anything of hers published. When she fires him he accidentally kills her and hides the body in a compost heap, and releases her recently written manuscript under the name Lucille Carns, and the book is a critical and financial hit. As people ask Trask to interview Lucille, since he "represents" her, he keeps telling people she doesn't do interviews. However, when Lucille shows up for a book signing, Trask goes to event and sees a Mary Jane. As Trask digs through the compost heap, he finds that Mary Jane's body is still there, juts as two cops who got an anonymous tip find him, and Frakes states that months into his prison sentence, Trask hung himself.
  • Pet the Dog: "Mysterious Strangers" which has Frank and Jesse James helping out an old woman pay her mortgage.
  • The Power of Hate: "The Bloody Hand" ends with the question of how the body of the already deceased woman got fresh blood in her fingernails from her ex-husband. Frakes suggests her hate for her ex was enough to come back to life one last time to fight back.
  • The Reveal: Many of the stories that have a supernatural element will end with a variation of "Oh my god, I just talked to someone who looks just like the deceased person before us now," there "lucky you saw/heard what you did when you did, even if no else did, or you may have gotten injured/killed by the disaster that left so many casualties."
  • Shout-Out: In one episode, a character is reading aloud from a Goosebumps book.
  • So Beautiful, It's a Curse: The main character from "Mirror of Truth" actually tells her hairdresser that her looks have always been a handicap because "no-one has ever truly appreciated her."
  • Square-Cube Law: In "Second Story Murder", knowledge of this foreshadows the solution of the story. It is indicated that the killer weighed approximately 500 pounds. A real 18-foot tall person would weigh over ten times that, while the weight is accurate (if a bit on the lean side) for three average-sized men forming a human tower.
  • Strictly Formula: A large number of stories follow this basic formula: the spirit of a dead person warns someone of an impending doom, rescues someone in danger, or exacts revenge on the person who killed them. Another common theme is an apparently inanimate object coming to life (an animatronic gorilla, mannequins, a wax figure, a rubber hand, a doll).
  • Teens Are Monsters: Troy Crane from "1st Time Offender" is violent boy with a Disappeared Dad who started stealing anything he wanted while putting on a good from for his mother while not wanting her to know his crimes. His mother comes to his defense when he steals a watch and reveals she was going to get it for him for his birthday and is willing to pay for the damages. He's about to get free until the judge recognizes the amulet Troy wears was stolen from his wife and gave her a permanent scar, which ended up getting him arrested in the end.
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: In the "Kid in the Closet" episode, the bullying sibling of a child who is terrified of a monster in his closet lets himself get locked in the closet in order to show his friends what a baby his brother was being, and when they open it up, he was gone, leaving just a pile of clothes behind. It turned out to be a Fact. According to Word of God from the man who collected the true stories though, in Real Life it turned out the child had escaped through a hidden panel and was found living in his friend's attic two weeks later.
  • Too Dumb to Live: In "The Curse of Hampton Manor", Beverly is electrocuted while taking a bath in the eponymous manor, which she just bought. Curse or no curse, taking a bath/shower in an electrical storm is obviously unsafe, as is using a plugged-in electrical appliance, such as the telephone in the story, while in a bathtub. Doing all three things at the same time takes the stupidity up to eleven.
  • Twin Telepathy: A set of identical twins (both played by Jewel Staite) were able to sense the other's pain, and one was able to use this sense to save the other's life when she was in a serious car accident.
  • Uncertain Doom: The fate of Clive Kincaid at the end of "The Caller". He's last seen collapsing from yelling at the ghost of his dead son to leave him alone, even though he's the only one who could hear him. After the segment, Frakes says that was the last time he was ever heard on the radio, leaving his fate uncertain. Either he died of shock from the experience or lost his career and likely was sent to an institution.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Certain segments are narrated by characters in the story. However, given scenarios where they aren't present during the supposed supernatural events, Frakes will comment on whether or not they were involved in what happened to make something appear less realistic than it did. Their wording doesn't exactly clarify how they were aware of these things happening.
  • Urban Legends: A number of stories are based on popular urban legends, such as "killer in the backseat" and "the vanishing hitchhiker". The show shares several stories with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, another compendium of urban legends.
  • Vampire Episode: The segments "Blood Bank" and "Night Walker" depict encounters with alleged vampires.
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The show's premise. When a story is revealed to be "true", we are often not told anything more than something like "according to our research, yes, a similar event did happen," so frankly, any of the stories could be true given how liberal of a definition of "similar" they used. Except in relatively rare cases when the segment was based on a well-known event, tracking down verification for the stories is next-to-impossible. The host would sometimes provide some vague information as to the location or time period in which the event supposedly occurred, but not always.
    • The show would often cite author Robert Tralins as a reference for many of the FACT stories.
    • One of the better segments, "Titan", subverts this trope. The story was about a guy who wrote a book detailing the events of a ship called the Titan crashing and sinking due to an iceberg fourteen years before the actual RMS Titanic sank. The actual book more or less is eerily similar to the events of 1912.
    • Amusingly, some stories that were presented as "Fiction" could have easily been based on a few true events, such as the story of a man on trial who hallucinates the woman he murdered being present in the court room and it driving him crazy. This could have fit any true court room story of a defendant faking insanity to avoid a guilty verdict (or at least prolong the trial).
    • One FACT segment is based on a story known to be an urban legend known as "The Vanishing Hotel Room."
  • Wife-Basher Basher: In "Second Story Murder," a detective is investigating the death of a wealthy business man whom witnesses insist that he was choked by man that was almost twenty feet tall. As the detective looks at the businessman's apartment for clues, he mentally states that he remembers police units answering calls of Domestic Abuse at the residence, and despite the woman dying under suspicious circumstances, the businessman was found not guilty of any wrong doing. As he walks through the apartment, the detective remembers that the woman was an Italian circus acrobat, whose act consisted of being at the very top of the human tower made up her brothers. The detective concludes that the woman's brothers used their circus training to reach the second story balcony where their ex-brother in law was, killed him and fled the country. With a wry smile, the detective states, "Italy is out my jurisdiction."
  • Woman Scorned: "The Impossible Dream Car" has a young man, whose father was fired by his greedy boss, has a dream where he buys a car for $1. He finds his impossible dream car when an old woman is selling to him for this reason, as her husband has been seeing a younger woman and since the car he loves is under her name as to avoid a creditor coming for it, it'd break his heart. While it's not revealed to him or his parents, his father's boss was the cheating husband who just lost his beloved car.
  • Wrong Guy First: A story has a young woman going to a match-making service. The elderly woman running the business has a son who she feels the woman may be interested in, but she ends up with a seemingly charming man, who one day as they're out driving and ostensibly run into some car trouble, decides to rape and murder her. After attempting to flee from him on foot, he catches up with her, only for the son to almost materialize out of nowhere, find them and fight off the attacker. They end up together after that.

"Did Tropey the Wonder Dog really save Captain Space, Defender of Earth! when he was Trapped by Mountain Lions? We got you. It's fiction. We made it up. Not possible. No way. Not a chance. It's false. A total fabrication made up by a writer."

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