8 Celebrity Deaths That Never Really Happened

8. Nelson Mandela

By far the strangest deaths that never happened was the one of Nelson Mandela. When the news of his death broke in 2013, many were confused because they thought he had already died in prison years prior. Some even went so far as to cite seeing his funeral on TV.

This has given rise to the so-called Mandela Effect, a testament to the fragility of human memory, where people remember things that have never happened in reality, or at least, not the way they remember. It’s possible that they remember the deaths of other black activists like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, or conflated Mandela’s death with his release in 1990.