"“As I write this letter on September 14 at 2:20 AM, I feel my soul rising to greatness. I am God, a great leader. These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. But you will see, I am immortal. My body may lay here right now, but in less than 24 hours I will rise from the dead just like the great Lazarus, exactly like Jesus – because I am God!”"
The bogus report was from last May. It was shot down immediately:
On 15 May 2015, the web site United Media Publishing reported that notorious criminal Charles Manson had been found dead in his prison cell:
Charles Manson was found unresponsive in his cell by deputies at the Corcoran State Prison in California. He was pronounced dead at 2:00 AM Friday morning after medics worked to revive the prisoner to no avail. The cause of death is currently unknown and impending autopsy results.
This report is a false, single-source story promulgated by a small site that scrapes material (including bogus claims and fake news) from other sites. No other media outlets or authorities (at California State Prison, Corcoran or elswhere) have either reported or confirmed that Charles Manson has died.
Unlike many fake news sites, Now 8 News doesn’t really denote the true nature of its content anywhere on the web page, and since crazier things have happened, you get a pass if you were one of the ones who shared it.
But Snopeslooked in to this story after a few of the supporting details came off as a little too crazy to be real and found it was just another piece of satire. From the Snopes story.
“On 17 July 2015, Now8News published cannibalized a fabricated claim (involving a man on a park bench being eaten by pigeons) which first appeared on the similar fake news site NewsWatch28. On the same date, Now8News published a different, entirely made-up story claiming McDonald’s was caught using aborted fetuses in Chicken McNuggets.”
Long story short: anyone can publish these days, folks. Check those sources before sharing something as fact.