The City of Buffalo is claiming the Freddy Kruger character from Nightmare on Elm Street is based on a real serial killer who lived in Buffalo NY in the 1800s.

The City of Buffalo Facebook post is claiming Mr. Kruger had killed at least twenty children within a three-mile radius murdering them using a gardening claw while living in an abandoned factory that also had a boiler room.

To this day (and LONG before the Elm St. films) Buffalo Psych Hospital was said to be haunted by the ghost of Freddy Kruger. And is still haunted till this day. Dont belive, search it youself!

Notice all the spelling errors in the last sentence. Don't, believe and yourself are all misspelled which leads us to think it's a hoax. So off we go to Snopes.

For those not familiar with Snopes, it's the to go source to see if rumors are true or false. In this case, the fact-checking guru's say "Iterations of the rumor placed the “real-life” Freddy Krueger murders (often misspelled “Kruger”) as local to Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and other areas. But copied and pasted versions elided the last line of what appeared to be the original share."

Notice the last line "(Actually, I just found this picture and made all that shit up. Happy October everyone!) 🎃🎃🎃 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂" in the original post is not on the circulating posts. Snopes says Wes Craven the creator of the film series did say it was based on 'scary news.'

“I’d read an article in the L.A. Times about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and managed to get to the U.S. Things were fine, and then suddenly the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

So Wes Craven’s explanation above was real, the “Frederick Kruger” gravestone picture is not linked to the “real” Freddy Kruger, and it was just a Halloween joke from 2014 that's been copied and pasted without its last line.


Bonus Video:

More From 96.1 The Eagle