Snopes have finally come clean about Lisa Holst. : UnresolvedMysteries
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A few years ago I posted a write-up exploring the silly mystery of Lisa Holst. In a nutshell: Snopes posted an article in 2001 in which they explained that the "you eat eight spiders in your sleep" factoid was invented by a journalist called Lisa Birgit Holst as a demonstration of the sort of bullshit people tend to accept as fact without checking. Trouble is, if you were to follow up on Snopes' own sources, there was a frustrating lack of evidence for this claim -- Lisa Holst didn't even seem to exist.
In 2015 someone figured out that "Lisa Birgit Holst" is an anagram for "this is a big troll". I explored the plausibility of this in my aforementioned write-up -- tl;dr, Snopes had pulled shit like this before, so it was looking pretty damn plausible -- but ultimately, it was impossible to prove, because absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. For their part, Snopes had kept mum on the topic, refusing to address it or respond to requests for information...
...Until this month, that is, when they finally updated their spiders article with a link to this confession, a full 20 years after the original post.
