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Some faux news stories (often ones invented by tabloids such as the Weekly World News) are so bizarrely appealing to the world at large that they continue to live on no matter how many stakes are driven through their hearts. Thus, despite having long since been debunked, far out tales about ogling women's breasts being good for a man's health or an employee's dying at his desk and going completely unnoticed by his co-workers for five days continue to circulate as real news year after year and are even occasionally reprinted as fact by the legitimate press. So it is with the story of the hapless circus dwarf who supposedly died when he bounced off a trampoline straight into the maw of a hippopotamus, a tale that has been disseminated via the Internet for nearly thirty years now, with occasional appearances in straight news media along the way: As far as we've been able to ascertain, the Hippo Eats Dwarf story made its Internet debut in 1994, when it was posted to a USENET newsgroup as part of a collection of odd news accounts taken from National Lampoon magazine's True Facts feature (where it was attributed to the Las Vegas Sun newspaper). Although many of the other items appearing in that True Facts collection along with the Hippo Eats Dwarf tale might seem to be nothing more than inventive fiction, they appear to be real in the sense that (true or not) they were taken from standard news sources. (For example, the account of fraternity members at the University of Washington being caught in possession of stolen sheep while dressed in their underwear, with white grease on their hands and peanut butter and other substances on their bodies was in fact reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Where the hippo-dwarf incident ostensibly took place isn't even clear, as the three-sentence summary quoted above is ambiguous: Was the deceased an Austrian dwarf working for a circus of indeterminate locale, or was he a dwarf of unidentified nationality employed by an Austrian circus? Either way, since many circuses typically engage in tours, we can't assume his fatal plunge took place in Austria. Nonetheless, despite conducting extensive searches of databases that index newspapers from the U.S. and around the world, we have been unable to find any evidence that this news story ran in the Las Vegas Sun (or any other newspaper) prior to its initial appearance on the Internet or in National Lampoon. The closest items we could find were 1990 news stories from the UK about a three-ton hippo named Hilda (apparently a popular appellation for the large creatures, perhaps due in part to the influence of popular children's books written and illustrated by Richard Scarry) who briefly escaped onto the grass verge of the A303 near Thruxton, Hampshire, after the trailer carrying her from Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire to Windsor Safari Park overturned. (Unfortunately, Hilda did not survive the process of being tranquilized and re-loaded into the truck.) The Hippo Eats Dwarf tale experienced a renaissance when it was published by Thailand's Pattaya Mail newspaper in 1999. That version set the incident in northern Thailand, changed the ill-fated dwarf's name to Od, and added some rather dubious details (such as noting that Hilda was a vegetarian who had not previously digested a circus performer and that the police sent the circus trampoline out for forensic analysis): The Pattaya Mail's account was quickly picked up and re-published by several Australian newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, the Advertiser, and the Sunday Mail, leading to another round of Look at this genuine news story! sightings. The story has continued to grow since then, picking up even more loopy embellishments about vegetarianism, alcoholism, and laxatives along the way: Scanned copies of various newspaper re-printings of the Pattaya Mail article have been circulated on the Internet, lending credence to the notion that Hippo Eats Dwarf was a creditable news story: The Express' Beachcomber columnist penned a tongue-in-cheek column about the phenomenon of the mutating Hippo Eats Dwarf tale a few years ago, in which he noted: Based on the lack of any reputable source to document the expiration of a trampoline-bouncing Austrian circus dwarf at the hands (er, mouth) of a Hippopotamus amphibius, we have to opt for the former alternative (i.e., practical joke masquerading as fact). Its truthfulness notwithstanding, the famous headline has since been memorialized as the name of an Auckland band.
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