Lavender Town Syndrome
The early series of Pokemon was a children's game based on animated fictional animals dueling against one another. You advance in the game by traveling from city to city and beating each cities representative in a Pokemon Battle. One city in the game, Lavender Town, is a city based on mourning and the deceased Pokemon and their Trainers. Lavender Town Syndrome is an urban legend that the music originally added to the game had very high frequencies. The frequencies were too high for young children's ears. The effect would cause major trauma to the brain stem. It is said that symptoms include: Headaches, Migraines, Concussions, Bleeding of the ears, and in some cases Death. It was recorded in Japan that within three months of the games release 300+ kids were found dead. The game was recalled and edited, then it was later released in the USA in 1999 and has become a huge phenomenon.
Missing Frequencies
After hearing the story of Lavender Town Syndrome one teen in Michigan decided to run the original frequencies of Lavender Town through a Spectrogram. A Spectrogram is a computer program that tells the user how high or low audio frequencies are. After running the song multiple times the teen found out that the frequencies show a picture of the Pokemon "Ghost" and several Unown that spell the words "Leave Now".
Unown are Pokemon in the game that take the shape of random letters. After making this discovery the teen was stunned and had to be taken to the hospital.
Buried Alive
In the original game once you reach the top of Lavender Tower you find: Team Rocket, Gary (Rival), Mr. Fuji, and Marrowak's Spirit (Cubone's Mother). You have to fight a series of battles to release Mr. Fuji and to advance to the next city. In the case of Buried Alive, instead of finding all those people at the top level and fighting Marrowak's Spirit, you find a corpse oppenent named "Buried Alive". His dialogue includes: "You're here! It's so lonely... so lonely. Won't you join me?" After which you have a battle with him which is near impossible to win. Once you lose the game freezes and it shows a picture of Buried Alive dragging your player away and eating him. This was a very dissapointing ending as people never got to finish the game.
Austin Kirchhefer
aka KearnsKid