LOS ANGELES (LALATE) – A Carmen Winstead death email about a sewer drain and David Gregory got reborn this week. Carmen Winstead “death”, a fabricated tale about Winstead being pushed down a sewer drain, is making news yet again this week. In a mixture of new technologies merging with old, the fabricated tale about Carmen Winstead is finding new life this week on Facebook. While no security threat appears at issue, persons are using the fictitious urban legend of Carmen Winstead this week to increase their Facebook presence.

Carmen Winstead is not a real person. She didn’t get pushed down a sewer drain. And she didn’t died in 1823. But in roughly 2006, MySpace users created the fabricated tale of a girl named Carmen Winstead as a way to increase friends on MySpace. Now that “ill luck avoidance” chain email about Carmen is dominating news yet again this week with persons using it to gain popularity on Facebook while scaring others at the same time.

Carmen Winstead is not the first ill luck avoidance chain letter to make news this week. Her fabricated story is similar to fake celebrity death reports dominating news. But in 2006, person(s) came up with a means by which to scare MySpace users into adding them as friends. The idea was the Carmen Winstead ill luck email. Now that tale if finding new life on Facebook this week.

Users would get one of three possible letters. In it, readers would learn the tale of a given Carmen Winstead. One version of the fake email would read “About 6 years ago in Indiana, Carmen Winstead was pushed down a sewer opening by 5 girls in her school, trying to embarrass her in front of her school during a fire drill.” It adds “When she didn’t submerge the police were called. They went down and brought up 17 year old Carmen Winstead’s body, the neck broke hitting the ladder, then side concrete at the bottom. The girls told everyone she fell… They believed them.”

The email then claims that David Gregory recently learned of Winstead’s death two months ago. “Two months ago, 16 year old David Gregory read this post and didn’t repost it. When he went to take a shower he heard laughter from his shower, he started freaking out and ran to his computer to repost it, He said goodnight to his mom and went to sleep.” Hours later, Gregory was dead, claims the tale. The same email is often sent with the title characters of Winstead replaced by Jessica Smith and Gregory replaced with Ron Anderson.

The fabricated death story was created in the pre-Twitter years before current Facebook popularity. It was devised by MySpace users as a way to gain friends by warning of fake trouble if they didn’t add them as a friend and repost the message. Now, the Carmen Winstead claim is getting new life this week with people using it for the same purpose on Facebook.

If it sounds familiar to another notable ill-fate email of October, it should. In October 2011, the infamous “8.4 Earthquake California Prediction Email” warning made news yet again. The email first dominated a FOX news telecast in 2009. But in October 2011, hours after the (real) Berkeley / San Francisco earthquake of October 2011, the infamous old “8.4 Earthquake California Prediction Email” began resurfacing.

The fake earthquake warning has been online since 2009 and is usually sent out following a real California quake. “State of California Predicts an 8.4 Earthquake within the Next 24 hours” alarms the erroneous email. Since last year, the viral false alert is most often spread through social networking than by email delivery. The fabricated email claims the wife works in the “seismology department of Los Angeles”, a department that doesn’t exist.