urban legends ✓

the man who "spoke" with god ☹

Picture this scene: The year is 1983. A group of religious scientists have come up with an interesting new theory that any human brain untroubled by stimuli would be able to sense the presence of God. Finding a willing volunteer—an old man with a terminal illness—they painstakingly seal off his nerve endings. Then they sit back and wait.

What happened next is like H.P Lovecraft's worst nightmare. For a couple of days, the old man whispered about his deteriorating state of mind. On the fourth day, he claimed to hear distant voices. On the sixth, his dead wife began speaking to him.

Then things really went downhill.

As the days passed, the voices of the dead began to grow louder, more hostile. They became angry, mocking, and started to tell the man things—things nobody should ever have to hear. According to the legend, the man began to scream and tear at his unseeing eyes, shrieking "no heaven, no forgiveness" over and over and over. Finally he began to hysterically bite at his own flesh, saying he'd met God and "he has abandoned us."

Luckily, the tale is nothing more than a particularly spine-chilling example of an urban legend. But it's creepy enough to have utterly freaked some people out, and now seems to periodically resurface whenever the Internet is in need of some gut-wrenching terror.