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If you are experiencing distress, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit online here. In June 2019, the @SixthFormPoet Twitter account posted a 10-part story that captured the imaginations (and inspired some skepticism) of millions of readers worldwide. The account's creator — whose identity is not publicly known but who goes by the name Matt — is best known for posting throwaway jokes and punny one-liners. But on 9 June he published an apparently earnest account of how a visit to his father's grave led him to meet his wife, by way of a dramatic Christmas Day family annihilation. The following story, and elements of our fact check, contain mentions of suicide and murder that some readers might find disturbing: The story circulated widely on Twitter and formed the basis of numerous news articles, including those published by the U.K. tabloids The Sun and The Mirror, as well as the New Zealand Herald, the Indian news channel News18, and the iHeart Radio website, which made a point of describing the anecdote as dark but true. @SixthFormPoet had himself introduced the story as being ENTIRELY TRUE. However, the anecdote's dramatic twists and turns, romantic ending, and its viral spread online in the second week of June 2019 prompted multiple inquiries from Snopes readers about the veracity of its claims. We have so far been unable to find any evidence that supports the details of @SixthFormPoet's graveyard story, nor any evidence that definitively disproves them. Until such evidence emerges, we issue a rating of Unproven. However, some elements of the story appear implausible, and it is likely to contain at least a significant measure of fabrication. 10 seconds later I found him The author claims that he was able to discover the grisly circumstances surrounding the death of the man whose grave he had been visiting within 10 seconds of performing a Google search for the man's name. Although we can't replicate exactly that search because we don't know the man's name, we were unable to find any record of a triple murder and suicide of the kind described in the story, despite using some of the other specific details and keywords included by @SixthFormPoet: We searched newspaper archives, spoke with journalists based in Sussex, and consulted local and national law enforcement agencies, as well as local people with a particular knowledge of, and interest in, recent Sussex history. Despite these extensive efforts, we found not a single incident that matched the descriptions provided by @SixthFormPoet, even though he claimed to have been able to obtain all those details with a 10-second Google search using only one piece of information, the man's name. Also notable is that murder-suicides and family annihilations are relatively rare in the United Kingdom, and such horrific incidents tend to both attract extensive news coverage and stand out in the collective memories of local people. This would likely be especially so if the murder-suicide took place on Christmas Day. And yet, not a single local person whom we consulted had any awareness or memory of such a series of events. As such, the details provided by @SixthFormPoet likely were either mistaken on several counts, or the result of a whole-cloth fabrication. The only train that Christmas night As a general rule, passenger trains do not run on Christmas Day in the United Kingdom. In 2007, the Guardian reported that: Christmas Day service is, in a word, zero. And Boxing Day, next-to-zero. Indeed, so eroded has the timetable become across the whole festive season that Britons now accept this as normal. But why? Can we not have proper railways that carry us around the country seeing (and crucially, fleeing) our loved ones at Christmas? Lack of public demand is the key reason cited by the Association of Train Operating Companies. 'After 1948, Christmas Day train services went into in decline,' it says, with passenger numbers falling throughout the 1950s -- 'one reason being that cars were more accessible.' The last passenger train at Christmas ran in 1964. Following that lead, London Underground's last Christmas Day tube was in 1979. The man described in @SixthFormPoet's anecdote, therefore, likely would have been unable to take his own life in front of a passenger train in the Balcombe Tunnel (or on any other stretch of railway in the United Kingdom) on any Christmas Day in roughly the last half century. However, non-passenger trains do continue to run on Christmas Day in the United Kingdom, as employees of the government-owned company Network Rail perform maintenance and repairs, taking advantage of the lack of passenger traffic on 25 December. In principle, someone could possibly commit suicide in front of a non-passenger train in the Balcombe Tunnel on Christmas Day, although it is statistically unlikely (because Network Rail does not routinely perform repairs on the entire rail network, only certain parts) and would also make little sense as a suicide method, since the man would have had to wait by the tracks on the off-chance that a maintenance train might pass by while likely also knowing that no passenger trains were passing that day. Although sound logical reasons exist to view the Christmas Day train element of the story as being highly unlikely, we cannot definitively rule it out as a possibility. We contacted @SixthFormPoet through his publisher, asking him for the name of the man whose grave he had been visiting — the piece of information he claims allowed him to quickly discover the details about the murder-suicide that forms the basis of his story. Unfortunately, we did not receive a response of any kind in time for publication.
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