On Season 1, episode 19 of the sitcom Home Improvement, entitled Unchained Malady, Tim the Toolman Taylor, receives a mysterious anonymous letter in the mail. The letter instructs Tim to forward the message to 10 people within 24 hours. If he doesn't do that, he's going to have some bad luck. Tim, of course, being a man of science, finds this whole thing ridiculous and throws the letter away. But everyone around him warns him that he shouldn't have done that — sure enough, a string of bad luck follows. At first, Tim refuses to believe in such superstitions — there's gotta be a logical explanation for everything. But incident after incident starts to shake his belief until he questions whether or not he's actually been cursed. His wise neighbor, Wilson, makes him realize that his expectations of bad luck might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but he also gave him some wolfsbane to ward off curses.

Pretty much every single sitcom from the 80s and 90s had an episode like this. It was relatable because chain letters used to be so ubiquitous, you couldn't avoid them. But at this point, most of the people watching this video have probably never received a chain letter in the mail.

It was once a common enough occurrence to be a universal TV trope, and now it's completely vanished from our culture. In part because mail in general has gone away except for bills and stuff like that. But at some point, these things did make a transition to the internet. Back when we used to actually open the random things people send us.

As you can see from this real screenshot from my phone, that's no longer the case. But of course, on the internet, you need more of a hook than just "send this or you'll have bad luck." So email chain letters are often attached to wild, unbelievable stories. You know, like, giving strangers AIDS on purpose or poison to perfume samples.

So today, let's take a look at some of the insane email chain letters that used to make their way around the internet.

The year is 1999. You go with your friends to the Metro Theater in Austin, Texas to watch what you didn't expect would be one of the greatest movies you've ever seen in your entire life. Of course, I'm talking about none other than Deep Blue Sea. You get to the theater, you take a leak, you buy some popcorn, and then in the darkness of the theater, you find a good spot, and you plop yourself down in your seat without even taking a look. Then you feel a sharp pain. It must be the old sciatica acting up. But then after a while, that sharp pain turns into an itch. You get up to go to the bathroom and take a look at what's going on. Then your friends notice a sticker on your back, and it reads, "Welcome to the world of AIDS." It seems like a practical joke of some sort. Then a few weeks later, you get a blood test, and boom, you're HIV positive. Then the police tell you this has been happening a lot recently. This was the premise of a chain email that had been circulating in 1999.

As reported by the Austin Chronicle, it had been making the rounds locally a lot in that time, but of course, it spread all over everywhere else. In reality, you're very, very unlikely to actually catch HIV this way, but HIV has always had that mysterious, scary component to it where people just think they're going to get it anywhere.

This particular email was actually a rehash of a similar story that had been going around years prior, titled "AIDS Mary."

Snopes spoke about this one in 2000, back when the site was primarily dedicated to this sort of thing. This is how the AIDS Mary email read. A guy's friends throw him a 21st birthday party. They get him drunk, and then a hotel room and a prostitute for his present. In the morning when this guy wakes up, the prostitute is gone. When he goes to the bathroom, written on the mirror with lipstick is, "Welcome to the world of AIDS." Snopes dated this email all the way back to 1994, but noted that these kinds of urban legends had been circulating for even longer than that. So much so that they had to create a separate page just for pinprick AIDS attacks.

And that's not to say that such a thing never happens at all. A while back, I covered a story where a man named Brian Steeman attacked a woman at a grocery store with a syringe full of his own semen. Fortunately, the woman tested negative for any kind of infection she could have gotten from that, and they put her on antivirals to prevent anything from happening.

Snopes' coverage also points to a few instances where people did get AIDS on purpose, or at the very least through negligence. They mentioned two men in particular, Darnell "Boss Man McGee, and Nushawn Williams. They had both infected nearly 20 people a piece.

But perhaps the most publicized case of all was that of a Tennessee woman named Pamela Wiser. According to Pamela, she had gotten HIV from a man she slept with three years prior, so in an act of revenge, she decided to infect as many men as possible. At the time of questioning, she said that that number was over 50 men. She would later claimed that it was just five men, and then after that, split the difference to 22 men. And also, she said that she didn't really infect men on purpose, she was just really horny. And she would say that she did, in fact, inform them. But some of the people who got HIV from her claimed that that was never the case, and she never let them know.

In Tennessee, of course, it's a felony to expose someone to HIV without their knowledge. And ultimately, she would plead guilty, receiving 26 and a half years in prison.

Here's another classic. I actually covered this one very early on, but for some reason, I decided to title it, "Woman Masturbates with Lobster and Fucking DIES!" which got buried a little bit because YouTube doesn't like when you put "fucking" and "masturbation" in your title. Seven years after I made this video, this is still one of the most disgusting things I've ever read in my life.

So let's run it back.

The email begins:

I'm trying to think of a guy who just has a one-disgusting-story-a-year quota, picturing him just like coming back to my channel every December, sorting through his options like some kinda royal king: "Ah, yes 'Parasite Man' will do nicely for this year."

Not to be confused with soap opera legend Susan Lucci — and it should be noted that Sussy DeLucci's name is spelled several different ways throughout this email.

What, you mean you guys never shit out your dick before?

I know that this was written to evoke some kind of disturbing, horrifying imagery, but going back to it now, all I could picture is some canceled Binding of Isaac boss battle — you just got your little soy milk gun and then you got fucking Sludge Vagina Shrimp Monsters coming at you.

Then, the medics arrived to the scene and find her dead on the bathroom floor, wearing nothing but a bathrobe.

Then they make an even more horrifying discovery.

The letter goes on to explain that she died after seeing the same thing the medic saw. She has passed out and hit her head on the toilet.

It's a very likely outcome of passing out in the bathroom — many people have died this way. But you have to ask the question, why did she vagine-shrimp out of her all over the place all of a sudden? Well, you see, after discovering the evidence, that being: lesbian VHS tapes; and a lobster, the best minds of CSI pieced together the story.

They know all this because her DNA was found on the lobster, which she had thrown in the garbage — kind of inconsiderate. Oh, and also they found

And also the lobster's face was burned from the lighter. Of course, lobsters don't give birth to shrimp. It's like people who think that all cats are female and all dogs are male. So what's the explanation here?

I love how, in the middle of this supposedly serious medical warning, they call her vagina a "cunt." Can you imagine you go to the gynecologist and he's like, "All right... let's take a look at that cunt."

Clearly, this is all the most bullshit story to have ever been bullshitted. Like, they found this woman dead in the bathroom, yet somehow they know her entire internal monologue. They know the sound of the massive pussy fart she made, that she thought this was going to be diarrhea, but then it wasn't. The fact that the mud shrimp used her vagina pH balance to gestate makes me think that this story might have originated from some kinda fetish news group and then made its way to the outside world where it was rebranded as a horror story. Then you got to send it to all your friends or you're going to have bad luck or you're going to poop shrimp out your cunt.

Snopes liken this chain letter to an even older story which had been circulating since at least 1948. In that story, a woman gives birth to an octopus. In the 1984 version of this octopus story, a teenage girl is showing all the signs of pregnancy, but she swears to her parents that she was a virgin and she had "never done it." Of course, as she gets more and more pregnant, nobody believes her. But then finally, she gets an X-ray and she's proven right.

It turns out that it's actually a tumor. A tumor that mimics a pregnancy is something that actually does happen sometimes.

But here's what doesn't typically happen. They take a closer look, and then it turns out the tumor isn't a tumor, it's an octopus. If somehow this octopus had been born inside of her after somehow ingesting an octopus egg and had been feasting on her stomach lining. Of course, neither a mud shrimp nor an octopus can receive what it needs to live inside of a woman. But scientific accuracy isn't the point.

Finally, let's take a look at the old Poison Perfume story. This one picked up steam a bit later than these other stories. It's from 2001.

So a month after 9/11, a photographer for The Sun who worked in Florida, died suddenly unexpectedly. The autopsy revealed that he was killed by the bacteria called anthrax.

Robert was the first American anthrax death since 1976, in which a person was infected by imported wool.

In the weeks following Robert's death, several letters contaminated with anthrax would be discovered, including one sent to media outlets and senators. These would infect and kill several more people. The anthrax would come attached to letters like this one sent to Tom Brokaw.

Although the targets of all these attacks fit a certain profile, the idea that you had this invisible killer going around that could just get you and you'd never know about it — it's still a scary thought, even if you have no connection to the media or the government.

So of course, this was primed to be the subject of these kinds of hoax chain letters. One example was published by Snopes in November of 2001:

And there was another one going around saying that anthrax poison in Tide detergent packs is coming through the mail.

Amusingly, that one says, "This is real, not a chain letter." And this one does take a bit of a different angle from the usual chain letters. It's not, "Send this to your friends or you'll get bad luck." It's, "Send this to your friends or they'll die in an anthrax attack." Of course, there is no record of any such deaths, and CNN never issued a warning, as some of these emails said.

Interestingly, despite there being no confirmed anthrax deaths in the US since 2009, in which a person got it from an imported traditional African drum, this is a hoax that keeps on coming back every few years.

In 2010, the original chain email started to circulate again as a text message, prompting Gleneagle's hospital to respond that no such thing ever happened at their hospital. And also, it should be noted that Gleneagle's hospital isn't even in the US, it's in Singapore. But, you know, you put the name of a hospital in an email like this, and Facebook Americans will just assume it's like some Mayo Clinic type deal.

Around the same time, the Tide Detergent hoax would come back again, too, prompting Tide to issue a statement.

Then in 2016 it starts making the rounds again, this time as a Facebook post, prompting Gleneagle's hospital to respond — once again — nope, this didn't happen here, and we're not American.

Still, it's strange that of all of these hoaxes, this seems to be the one that keeps coming back every few years. Perhaps it's just that it's more believable than, y'know, fucking vagina shrimp. But it's also that kind of fear where it's like most of the things you're scared of, you think you can take some measures to prevent it. But anthrax is this silent killer where if someone wanted to infect you with it, there's really nothing you could do about. Perhaps it's also that the prime suspect in the original anthrax attacks, Bruce Edward Ivins, killed himself before he could ever be tried for the crime.

Despite the government being sure of it, a lot of people who know about the science of anthrax don't believe it, which means that the real killer could still be out there.