Poor Glen Powell was fooled by a cannibal date urban legend for years

Stars: They’re just like us. They, too, can get fooled by a scary story shared at a sleepover or a prank anecdote told by one sibling to make the other look stupid when they retell it to all their friends. Glen Powell is the victim of one of these scenarios; it’s unclear if his sister fooled him on purpose, but he’s apparently been going around repeating the same cannibalism urban legend for years without ever realizing that it was an urban legend. Does this make Glen Powell all the more charming and relatable to you?

Powell’s day of reckoning for his favorite dating horror story came after he told the tale on the Therapuss podcast with TikTok influencer Jake Shane in May. He explained that his little sister’s friend had gone on a date with a guy and went back to his apartment after, where she started getting “weird vibes.” The date asked if he could give her a massage, but after he spent some time massaging her shoulders, she decided to leave and go home. The next day her skin started “itching like crazy” so she went to a doctor, who told her that it was a result of “black market lotion that breaks down skin for human consumption.” This led to a police investigation wherein they discovered the man had “several girls’ bodies in the house.” Powell told the story with confidence, though he did add, “I gotta get all my facts on this story. I’m gonna tell you this story, and then I’m gonna let my sister fact check it.”

No need to turn to his sister—the Internet, of course, is happy to take on that role. As the clip gained virality in early June, sleuths turned to Snopes to debunk the story. As it turns out, the fact-checking site has tracked versions of this tale floating around the Internet for more than 20 years. In some original tellings, the hook-up story led to the discovery that the woman’s partner was a necrophiliac; the cannibalism version reportedly evolved later. The bottom line is, there’s no evidence any version of this story is based on fact. Instead, it’s more likely “a cautionary tale about the dangers of incautious intimacy with those we don’t know well,” as Snopes puts it.

Who knows who misled poor Glen Powell about the veracity of this tale—whether he was purposely fooled by his sister, or his sister’s friend, or if they were all victims of the same game of telephone that spread this scary story far and wide in the first place. The Hit Man star, good-natured guy that he is, owned up to his part in disseminating an urban legend, reposting BuzzFeed’s debunking on Twitter/X. “Props to my little sister’s friend who told her this dating story…I’ve been telling this for years. I’m questioning my whole life now…” he wrote. “False alarm. Back rubs are back.”