Advertisement
Do you believe in life after life?
Do you believe in life after life?
GETTY IMAGES

Following the death of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on April 8, 2013, the memorial hashtag #nowthatchersdead began trending worldwide. But it didn’t take long before Tweeters misread the missive as “Now that Cher’s dead,” improbably plopping the “Life After Love” artist into the centre of the Internet news mill for a day. Cher’s not dead. And she certainly isn’t the first celebrity falsely declared deceased by dubious reportage or an out-and-out hoax. Read on for our favourite weird celebrity death hoaxes and rumours.

Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber

The “Ghost” singer is no stranger to celebrity death hoaxes. To hear the Internet tell it, Justin Bieber has committed suicide (2009), been shot to death in a nightclub (January 2010), suffered a fatal drug overdose (June 2010), and just straight-up kicked the bucket (May 2012 – via an unexplained “RIP Justin Bieber” Twitter trend). Such celebrity death hoaxes have become routine in the age of Internet stardom – though we do extend our sincere condolences to the Biebs’ late hamster, Pac.

Lil Wayne
Lil Wayne
GETTY IMAGES

Rap mogul Lil Wayne actually did end up in a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a seizure in March 2013, but reports that the Young Money millionaire was being administered his last rites were straight-up trash talk. Weezy tweeted the same afternoon, “I’m good everybody. Thx for the prayers and love,” and began touring his newest album (ominously titled I Am Not A Human Being II) later that year.

Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan
GETTY IMAGES

Within hours of its creation on August 17, 2011, the Facebook group called “Jackie Chan R.I.P.” earned nearly 150,000 likes, and spawned a global Twitter trend. Earlier, in March ’11, Chan was falsely reported dead of a heart attack – as if the Heart of Dragon could be so easily defeated.

Rihanna
Rihanna
GETTY IMAGES

Barbadian pop princess Rihanna has both died in a fiery plane crash (via Twitter rumours in January ’11) and “sunk into an [alcohol-induced] coma before succumbing to heart attack” (via a photoshopped article on a phony French news site in August of the same year). RiRi is actually alive and well, as is former abusive beau Chris Brown, who has also been said to have died once or twice.

Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney
GETTY IMAGES

The rumour that Paul McCartney died in 1966 remains one of the most famous urban legends of rock. Reports of a late ’60s car crash and diminished public appearances by the Cute Beatle spiralled into an international conspiracy investigation after a student newspaper released a probing article titled “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?” The hundreds of “clues” that emerged from coded messages in The White Album and Abbey Road (the final garbled seconds of “I’m So Tired,” for example, supposedly rewind to say “Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him”) are hard to ignore – but a very much breathing Paul some 55 years on is pretty compelling evidence too.

Kim Jong-Un
Kim Jong-Un
GETTY IMAGES

Speaking of young money, remember in February 2012 when all those news sites started picking up the story that Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un was assassinated? Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, broke the story that the Korean dictator was shot and killed by “unknown persons,” subsequently setting the global news mill into a frenzy. The rumours were fake, as anyone within earshot of a TV set knows too well, though the Internet persists in picking on li’l Kim to this day.

Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
GETTY IMAGES

When crime-writer Agatha Christie went missing from her Berkshire estate for 11 days, friends and family feared the worst. Over 15,000 volunteers were sent to scour the countryside for the presumed-dead author; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the mind behind Holmes himself, even took one of Agatha’s gloves to the neighbourhood psychic. Turns out Agatha stormed off to begrudge her adulterous husband, and may have experienced a spell of stress-induced, out-of-body amnesia known as a “fugue state” along the way. Christie was discovered alone, confused and using an assumed name, making this disappearance the Crime Queen’s most enduring mystery.

Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson
GETTY IMAGES

This was less a celebrity death hoax and more just Internet users not reading carefully enough and jumping to conclusions. After cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson died in November 2017 after over 40 years in prison, several Twitter users began mourning the wrong Manson. Tweets like “RIP Marilyn Manson, so sad to see such talent go to waste” and “RIP Charles Manson. You changed music in the 90s forever” revealed that some people mistook the deceased criminal for the heavy metal rocker.

Betty White
Betty White
GETTY IMAGES

While the 99-year-old Golden Girl has now sadly passed away, the Internet gave her fans a good false scare in May 2017 when rumours of her death began swirling on Twitter – including one message saying that her publicist had confirmed her death. The rumours were dispelled later that same day, when White appeared on The Late Late Show With James Corden.

Carlos Santana
Carlos Santana
GETTY IMAGES

In 2015, a CBC reporter’s Twitter account claimed that the “Smooth” guitarist had been found dead in his car. Commemoratory tweets began flying until Santana’s own Twitter account posted, “Carlos is alive and well and enjoying his morning!” The reporter who started the hoax later tweeted an apology.

Macaulay Culkin
Macaulay Culkin
GETTY IMAGES

The Home Alone actor has been the victim of multiple celebrity death hoaxes. Most famously, a non-legitimate website posted a “report” stating that the then-34-year-old star had been found dead in his apartment. He was on tour with his band at the time. Luckily, though, he’s maintained a sense of humour about it, posting a photo of himself “playing dead” with the caption “Weekend at Bernie’s.” “I die all the time,” he joked on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in early 2018. “I’m just a spectre right now.”

This article first appeared on Reader’s Digest.