Here is one:
Lucknow Residents Scared Sleep Will Turn Them to Stone
There are plenty of reasons why we sometimes struggle to sleep, but being scared of turning into stone overnight is rarely one of them. That fear, however, kept dozens of people awake in Lucknow and other parts of India’s most populous state this week.
It all started with a message late Monday, claiming that anyone who slept that night would turn into stone. Word spread across the state of Uttar Pradesh through cellphone messages, phone calls, and eventually even local television flashed it.
In Tundla, a small town near Agra, 18-year-old Rachna and her family of eight were woken by a neighbor at 3 am. The neighbor had received a call from someone in Kanpur saying that several people who were sleeping had turned into stone. Other people got such calls from state capital Lucknow and elsewhere, Rachna told India Real Time on Wednesday.
This news, twinned with doomsday predictions of the world ending in 2012, was enough to scare everyone, said Rachna. She and her family, including two children, joined the rest of their colony to sit out in the cold, apparently unaware of the irony that sitting in freezing temperatures was the most likely way for them to end up in frozen, stone-like form.
Rachna said her family remained outside for just a quarter of an hour before returning home, where they stayed awake till 6 am.
In Lucknow, people patrolled the streets chanting slogans in a bid to stay awake, according to a report from The Pioneer newspaper, which added that even those from well-educated communities were panicking.
The rumor began in the state’s Unnao District and quickly spread to other areas including Varanasi, Rae Bareilly and Kanpur, according to a police spokesman.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/01/04/lucknow-residents-scared-sleep-will-turn-them-to-stone/
