I used to know guy from a forum. He kept posting about how when he was a teenager he witnessed this fictional character kill his all of friends and for whatever reason the character spared him. In real life. It was always told as if it was something that really happened just like it was told. He'd give telephone interviews and ask for the phone numbers of anyone who has seen this character.

The character himself was from a show that had came out like three weeks prior to the whole 'it came to life and ate my friends' story. For (copyright?) reasons he didn't mention that it was the character but the illustrations and descriptions were literally an exact match. The show actually existed irl. he even made fake newspaper articles documenting his friends going missing, all mysterious like. and he made sockpuppet accounts where he pretended to be the families of the victims if anyone became skeptical of his story. He also pretended to be people who personally knew and interacted with the four boys who were 'eaten' by a fictional character.

His first iteration of his story was in Fate Magazine in 1965, the volume was titled ''strange fates''. He was 19 at the time he wrote it, so by the time the internet was introduced, this guy was middle aged. Apparently this guy spent a lot of time in a mental hospital in Jacksonville, was a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, and he kept talking about how people not believing him made him feel very depressed. He died a couple of years ago, barely into his seventh decade. If his name was his real name and not some alias, he didn't really contribute much, he's only known for this one fictional tale and he kept trying to sell it for pretty much all of his life. Crazy guy.