"Lavender Town Syndrome": In 1996, Japanese children heard a Pokémon song and...

This story has been circulating on English websites for over a decade, and it has also been reposted on Chinese gaming forums.

The claim is: In 1996, shortly after the release of Pokémon Red and Green in Japan, there was a town in the game called "Lavender Town" (known as "Lavender Town" in the English version), a town where Pokémon are buried, with very shrill background music. In the two or three weeks after release, over a hundred—or some say several hundred—Japanese children around the age of ten reportedly suffered headaches, nosebleeds, and even committed suicide after hearing that music.

The cause was said to be a very high frequency in the music, around 8 kHz, audible only to children's ears, which stimulated the nerves and caused people to lose emotional control. Later, the manufacturer changed the music, and no one mentioned it again.

This claim appeared around 2010 on foreign horror fiction forums; the original post was a deliberately written fictional story, which was later circulated as true.

Later, many players and media outlets investigated, and there was no such news in Japan at the time, no statistics, and the game's music was never changed; the original version can still be heard in Red and Green today.

There is one related true event that people often confuse with this: In December 1997, an episode of the Pokémon anime aired on Japanese television featuring rapid red and blue flashing, after which hundreds of children were sent to the hospital. That is a documented true event and has nothing to do with Lavender Town's music.

So, the Lavender Town story is fake, while the other event is true. However, the former is written so convincingly that people keep asking about it.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #都市传说