
Unown famously spelled out written messages in the third There are many different versions, some with the message "leave now" spelled out by a pokémon called Unown, which wasn't released in Japan until 1999.

Holy shit, that looks like the in-game sprite for Lavender Town's ghost, hidden within the song itself! The problem-well, one problem-is that no one seems to agree on exactly what the ghost image looks like. If you run the original background music through a spectrograph app, which generates a visual map of the frequencies in a piece of audio, you'll allegedly get Later versions of the theory include even more elaborate proof. Takes credit for expanding the original tale "to make it seem more legit."Ĭonvincing details he added include the alleged case studies of dead and damaged children and the line about Kyoto corporate disclosure laws, as well as some made-up names of Game Freak employees and a quote from an alleged "interview" with one of the game's developers about changing the creepy original music. The Lavender Town Suicide story-which, to be clear again, is totally invented-apparently started in early 2010s as a creepypasta-an online ghost story-written by an anonymous user of the messageboard 99chan. The Lavender Town Child-Suicide Conspiracy Body discovered beside road April 20 1996. Developed into deafness, and went missing. Migraines, sluggish and slow behaviour, unresponsiveness. Developed into violent streaks against others and eventually himself.

General irritability, insomnia, addiction to videogame, nosebleeds. Obstructive sleep apnea, severe migraines, otorrhagia, tinnitus. This would all still be a secret today if a Game Freak employee hadn't leaked the company's chilling report on what's now called Lavender Town Syndrome, including these disturbing excerpts from a list of names and symptoms of the child victims: All unsold first editions of the game were quietly recalled, and the Lavender Town music was replaced with a new version without the tone that had driven the children mad.

Game Freak successfully covered up the children's deaths and illness with some help from Kyoto prefecture's favorable corporate disclosure laws and, some reports say, from the Japanese government itself.

Their suicides, headaches and erratic behavior were later determined to have been caused by the unsettling background music in Lavender Town, which, aside from containing a high tone undetectable to adult ears, was also an early experiment inīinaural beats (a phenomenon created by playing a distinct tone from each of two audio channels, said to affect human behavior by syncing with listeners' brainwaves). Most of them had been wearing headphones or earphones while playing. The affected children were all found to have stopped playing the game after reaching Lavender Town, the spooky area that's home to the Pokémon Tower-a seven-story graveyard for dead pokémon. The lucky ones turned it off before it was too late. Many others suffered serious migraine headaches or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away. In the spring of 1996, more than 200 Japanese children between the ages of seven and 12 were driven to suicide by a distressing, high-pitched tone hidden in the hit Game Boy game None of the next five paragraphs is true.
