This is the story of the body of a nude woman in Berlin, Alabama.

In 1991 BFB (before Facebook), the daughter of a wealthy family in Winston County, Alabama, was kidnapped, starting a massive search by law enforcement agencies in three counties.

It wasn’t long after that the rumors and stories began to circulate: the woman had been seen in Birmingham; her husband killed her and dumped her body in one of the abandoned coalmines that dotted the county. The woman in question ran off with another man and was somewhere in Mexico.

And then there was the topper — the body of a nude woman had been found in the dumpster of a convenience store in Berlin (pronounced “burlin”).

I was editor of the Cullman Times in Cullman, Alabama, at the time, and once the rumor surfaced I put my police reporter on the story. She was a very intelligent individual with good contacts in the community and with law enforcement, but she hit a wall. The police had not received a call about a dead woman, let alone one who was nude. The county coroner never responded to a death call in Berlin, let alone a homicide. Our efforts were hitting dead ends.

With our efforts exhausted, I called a trooper source with the Alabama State Police who worked the Cullman area and was a good source of accurate information. He confirmed what I guess I suspected all along. There never was the body of a woman in a dumpster in Berlin. It was, as so often happens when something tragic like the kidnapping occurs, another in a series of rumors that starts out one way and ends up another.

In all my years in this business, it’s always amazed me how fast news travels and how the stories expand as they go along until the end result is nowhere near the true story — shots fired somewhere in the city eventually becomes murder; a fender bender on Interstate 20 is a multiple vehicle wreck with a bunch of people injured (or dying); an argument at a picnic ends up in a riot.

It’s not that people lie. It’s our human nature that we hear and misunderstand things, and in the retelling of information from one person to another things unintentionally get changed or misinterpreted or exaggerated. And all of us are guilty.

The stories are varied and entangled, and as reporters we check out a lot of rumors and innuendo, usually learning the version that gets to us is nowhere near what actually happened.

It is no revelation the information age we now live in offers us a wide range of options to send and receive information, and the Internet has replaced word of mouth, as the primary highway for information and misinformation, and it means refraining from writing about things we truly know little or nothing about.

Reading posts online can be interesting and fun, but we need to sometimes ask, “Is this right?”

John Surratt is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com