© Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesPeople in Uttar Pradesh feared they may turn into stone if they slept. Above, a craftsman slept peacefully in Kolkata, Sept. 8.
It all started with a message late Monday, claiming that anyone who slept that night would turn into stone. Word spread across the state of Uttar Pradesh through cellphone messages, phone calls, and eventually even local television flashed it.
In Tundla, a small town near Agra, 18-year-old Rachna and her family of eight were woken by a neighbor at 3 am. The neighbor had received a call from someone in Kanpur saying that several people who were sleeping had turned into stone. Other people got such calls from state capital Lucknow and elsewhere, Rachna told India Real Time on Wednesday.
This news, twinned with doomsday predictions of the world ending in 2012, was enough to scare everyone, said Rachna. She and her family, including two children, joined the rest of their colony to sit out in the cold, apparently unaware of the irony that sitting in freezing temperatures was the most likely way for them to end up in frozen, stone-like form.
Rachna said her family remained outside for just a quarter of an hour before returning home, where they stayed awake till 6 am.
In Lucknow, people patrolled the streets chanting slogans in a bid to stay awake, according to a report from The Pioneer newspaper, which added that even those from well-educated communities were panicking.
The rumor began in the state's Unnao District and quickly spread to other areas including Varanasi, Rae Bareilly and Kanpur, according to a police spokesman.
D.P. Srivastav, a public relations officer for the state's police department, said in an interview that he saw groups of 10 to 20 people standing at several crossroads on the streets of Lucknow on Monday night. The next day, the police tried to calm people by telling them that no one had, in fact, been turned into stone.
Mr. Srivastav said the police are actively looking for the source of the rumor and plan to take strict action against the perpetrators. He didn't elaborate on the form of punishment, but stoning won't be an option.
The rumor wasn't limited to residents of Uttar Pradesh. Dharmesh Jaiswal, a 31-year-old living in Delhi, got a call from his sister in Lucknow at 3 am on Tuesday asking him to wake up everyone in the house. Mr. Jaiswal said he was "very angry" at being woken up, and at the fact that his sister believed the rumor.
For many people, the event was reminiscent of a frenzy in the mid-nineties, when idols of Lord Ganesha were reportedly drinking milk offered to them by devotees, prompting hundreds of people in different parts of the country to line up to feed the elephant god.
is a prime example of how people will believe just about anything you tell them.