#35: The OG

Let’s start with the original example of the Mandela effect, the one that started it all back in 2009: Nelson Mandela himself. Supernatural researcher Fiona Broome coined the term “Mandela effect” when she learned that multiple people, herself included, distinctly remember hearing that South African activist and leader Nelson Mandela had died years earlier.

But Nelson Mandela wasn’t dead at that point: he would die four years later, in 2013. How did so many people remember otherwise, then? So Broome started a website to document this and other examples of “the Mandela effect.” Personally, this one freaks me out a little, because if you’d asked me before I heard about all this, I would have sworn that Nelson Mandela died in 1993.