Mario Morgana

The Incident
"Mario Morgana" is a nickname given to a case of supposed mass hysteria that took place during the day of new year in 1995 in Shanghai, China. At approximately 6 AM people started to report to the police that they saw an hallucination taking the form of a gigantic, transparent figure resembling the model of Mario from Super Mario 64 wearing something resembling the at the time unknown Wing Cap, slowly rising up the horizon and staying there, casually looking down at the city, until the dawn of the next day.

The Impact
As one can imagine, the population was in a state of disarray and discomfort during this event. At approximately 9 AM, the police departments of Shanghai had to give out a public statement, asking the people to stop calling because of the overwhelming amount of calls. Witnesses and shop owners reported that violent robberies and supposed "lootings" of stores started to happen all around the city at around noon. There are claims of seemingly entranced people roaming the streets, reportedly attacking and hunting down specific human targets that were in some way closely related to the attackers, continuing for at least a week after the initial incident had already concluded.

Survivors reported having delusions, feeling like their thoughts were being manipulated and information was forcefully imprinted into their minds. However, most of these symptoms have been accounted to the history of mental illnesses in the group of witnesses that supposedly experienced them. The information these people claim to have forcefully received include visuals of overwhelmingly complex geometry, a voice speaking in a demanding tone and a language that is believed to have been Japanese, and constantly envisioning a person staring at them in their minds which, by their accounts, lead to experiencing a dissociative state that apparently lasted for months.

Staring at the figure on the horizon for too long would supposedly lead to extreme headaches, loss of consciousness, loss of complex thought and increased levels of aggression in the population. Survivors reported seeing a floating mountain with a tower on top of it appearing behind the Mario figure after staring at it for an extended amount of time.

At around 5 PM, Mario Morgana began to move again.

An especially gruesome case, that is supposedly linked to Mario Morgana, involved the cannibalization of an around 50 year old man in a driving subway. Now destroyed police reports revealed that at around 1 PM, a whispering subway conductor called an ambulance in a state of panic. The man held back tears and had to be comforted before he was able to start describing his situation. He apparently left the driver cabin of the subway to check for tickets, but instead saw 5 people kneeling over a corpse in the middle of the wagon. After silently walking back to the driver cabin and securing its door, he heard some of them right at the other side of it, repeating every sound he made with surprising accuracy. The conversation between the man and the police dispatcher came to an abrupt ending and four police cars were sent to his location after the subway conductor asked the dispatcher: " Did you just say that twice?". The call has since been investigated by the police who consider it to have been a prank.

The Aftermath
Information on this incident has been scarce because of the attempts of covering it up and the defamation campaigns that were used to discredit witnesses. The event began to attract attention in china because of an urban legend that circulated around at that time, which claimed that a big part of Shanghai's population was being evacuated to underground bunkers during this event, most of these people are said to have never been seen again although there has never been any records of the police investigating where they could have ended up. People that claimed to have been evacuated into these bunkers and survived, all autonomously recounted the supposed events that have taken place in there as deeply disturbing. The bunkers were seemingly accessed by climbing down into a very deep hole in the ground, which would lead into a decrepit lab of sorts. Not long after the security guards arrived, they forcefully started injecting the civilians with some sort of red liquid, without saying a word. Some witnesses claimed to have seen a painting of a demonic face at the end of the hallway they were in, before they supposedly blacked out and woke up in a random location on the surface about a week later.

These legends appear very unlikely to be true, however new evidence has made it undeniable that something happened on that day.

Trivia

 * CCTV-3, a television channel that's based mainly on dance and music broadcasts, was proven to have reported on this event a day before it took place in form of a news broadcast, which is very unusual for the channel. They even used what appears to be a photo of the event.
 * The naming of the character Mario Morgana in the game Super Mario Sunshine is theorized by some to be a way for Nintendo to make research about this event even harder.
 * After the Event, China's media outlets pretended like it never happened,
 * Politicians that have been publicly asked about the event would never respond and instantly change the topic.
 * The "every copy is personalized" trend is part of a Psyop, with the goal of distracting the public from researching the Mario Morgana event.