Just Rankin’ Sh!t

The 5 Most Perplexing Examples of the Mandela Effect, Ranked

Grab your tinfoil hats!

LEVEL Editors
LEVEL
Published in
2 min readMar 6, 2021

--

2 people dressed in Berenstain Bears costumes
Photo Illustration: Save As/Medium; Source: Getty Images

Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.

5. Nelson Mandela’s premature death

Let’s just get this out of the way: The phenomenon dubbed the Mandela Effect stems from White people not knowing basic Black history. Yet rather than copping to cultural ignorance, someone created a concept based on a rift in the space-time continuum to explain it away. (Whoops! Did we say that out loud?) Anyway, there is a sect of people who believe that Nelson Mandela died in the ’80s while he was incarcerated. We might even understand the mistake — if he hadn’t been instrumental in toppling South Africa’s apartheid and becoming the country’s first president in 1994, before dying 19 whole years later.

4. Ed McMahon making house visits

Remember those videos of Ed McMahon pulling up on people’s doorsteps and handing them big-ass checks for Publisher’s Clearing House? Yeah, that never happened. Instead, Johnny Carson’s old sidekick actually worked briefly for a magazine marketing company called American Family Publishers, which only paid out its own employees…

--

--

Responses (12)