Gather around, people! What we’re looking for today is the absolute best and wildest story you’ve got. You know that story you tell at parties that always kills? We want to hear it!
OK, to give you the idea, I’ll start us off with one of mine!
For this story, we must travel back to 1995 when the thriller Seven, starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, was in the theaters and EVERYONE was talking about it.
In the movie (warning: 24-year-old spoiler) Kevin Spacey plays a serial-killer whose final, most devastating act is killing the wife of Brad Pitt’s character (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), putting her head in a box, and leaving it in a field for Pitt to find.
If you’ve ever heard someone jokingly cry, “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!” they are referencing this movie.
Anyhoo, one day shortly after the film’s release, my friends and I were walking down the sidewalks of Westwood, California, when I threw away a soda can (dramatically re-enacted in this photo):
That's when, inside the trash can, I noticed a brown box that looked uncannily like the one that contained Gwyneth’s head in the movie.
Upon closer inspection I saw red liquid dripping from the bottom of the box, and on the top a label addressed to: Detective David Mills and Detective William Somerset.
That's Mills and Somerset — as in the detectives in Seven.
I started freaking out, so my friends came over and promptly started freaking out too.
Some passing college-aged girls asked what we were freaking out about, and when we showed them they freaked out too!
Within a matter of minutes there were about 30 people standing around the trash can like this:
Soon someone asked: “What if this is the handiwork of a copy cat murderer inspired by the movie and there’s an ACTUAL HUMAN HEAD IN THE BOX?!
We all stood there, unsure what to do, until a frat boy-type said, “You know what? I'm going to open it.”
The frat boy moved to pull the box out, but before he could a woman yelled, "WAIT! What if there’s a bomb in there? We need to leave it alone and call the police.”
All of us at the thought there might be a bomb in the box:
The frat boy considered this a minute, then said, “No way. If we call the cops, they will send us away and we’ll probably never find out what’s in there." He then reached into the trash can, and the rest of us were like:
Once at a safe distance, we looked back to see the frat boy pull the box out and say, "It’s heavy! There’s definitely something in it!” He then set the box on the ground, and…after a few moments of deliberation...opened it.
It didn’t explode.
But the frat boy did stare into the box, expressionless, for a long moment.
It was then someone among us (un-ironically) yelled:
Finally, the frat boy looked over to us and said, “It's just a watermelon!”
That's right. A freaking watermelon.
Turns out it was all just an elaborate prank some knucklehead went to great trouble to pull (long before cell phone videos or viral videos existed). But hey, at least we all got a story out of it!
