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| - A story is spreading online about a high school lunch lady, "Aileen G. Ainuse", who supposedly poisoned the school's water supply and killed over 300 students and staff in 1949.
The story spread via a video purportedly containing images of the woman and school — "Sunnydale High School" in "Goobersville" — along with narration. One Facebook user captioned the video (archived): "Horrifying Story about Deadliest Massacre."
According to the tale, as "students and staff began collapsing" from the "colorless, odorless poison," Aileen calmly returned home. She was discovered baking cookies and listening to the radio, and, upon her arrest, she allegedly said, "I was saving them from the pain of living." Later, investigators supposedly uncovered journals detailing her elaborate plans.
Below is the video's narration transcribed:
This American woman killed 300 people in one day. In the quiet town of Goobersville, Indiana, in 1949, a woman named Aileen G. Ainuse was the beloved lunch lady at Sunnydale High. For 20 years, Aileen served meals with a smile, but one morning she had other plans. She laced the school's water supply with a colorless, odorless poison. By noon, students and staff began collapsing. Chaos erupted. The hospital was overwhelmed. Parents rushed to the school in panic. As sirens wailed, Eileen calmly walked home, humming a cheerful tune. The death toll rose to 352 lives lost. An entire generation of Sunnydale gone. Aileen was found in her kitchen baking cookies and listening to the radio. Her only words upon arrest: "I was saving them from the pain of living." Investigators later discovered 20 years' worth of journals detailing her plans. The Sunnydale massacre remains one of the deadliest single-day killings. In 1954, police decided to investigate her home more. They decided to break the walls, and what they found there was truly horrifying.
The story spread on multiple social media platforms, including Instagram.
Social media users were divided over the authenticity of the story. One Facebook user wrote: "Google deleted certain content, you can't claim this is fake just because you can't find something in Google or youtube. Something like this did happen, I heard about it many years back."
However, the story was fictional. The creator of the video, TikTok user @storiess_untold, said they made up the script and used artificial intelligence (AI) software for the clip's images and sound.
"I made the original story and the story is fake [sic] it's made up and only for entertainment purposes," the TikTok user said in a statement. "I post scary stories that include satire and comedy at times."
The video was first posted in mid-September 2024. As of this writing, it was pinned (archived) to the user's account and has amassed more than 19.3 million views.
The TikTok user frequently shares similar videos with AI-generated images and fictional narratives. For the in-question video, they said they created the visuals using MidJourney, an AI image generator, and produced the voice narration with ElevenLabs, an AI audio generator.
(TikTok user @storiess_untold)
Finally, a Google search yielded no credible evidence or reports to corroborate the story, and no historical records aligned with the events described in the video. No town or city in Indiana is named "Goobersville", and "Sunnydale High School" is the name of a fictional school in the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Furthermore, in November 2013, the Indiana newspaper The Indianapolis Star published an article listing notorious mass murders in the state's history. The report made no mention of the poisoning story.
Snopes has investigated similar fictional stories in the past, including a tale about a doctor supposedly creating "quantum glasses" to help fix his daughter's eyesight and the invention driving her insane. That story, too, spread via a video featuring AI-generated media.
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