For months, a rumor has circulated online that a Canadian nun based in Belgium poisoned and killed 45 Nazi officers by lacing their soup with arsenic during a 1943 Christmas lunch.
The Facebook page
Other iterations of the rumor appeared on YouTube (archived) and Facebook (archived) in December 2025 and January 2026, respectively, and Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether the claim was true.
In short, the rumor was fictional. It originated from a near-identical story about a Polish nun and was shared by social media accounts using artificial intelligence tools to create inspiring or shocking stories. Therefore, we have rated this claim false.
Snopes contacted a manager of the Gossip Central Facebook page for comment on the fabricated story. We will update this article if they reply.
Creators of such content capitalize on social media users' willingness to believe and share the fabricated stories, profiting from advertising revenue on external websites to which the posts link. (Snopes has previously reported on this business strategy.) For example, the Facebook post included a link to an advertisement-filled blog page hosted by Wordpress, not a reputable news media outlet.
A Google search for the story revealed a Dec. 24, 2025, AI-generated YouTube video (archived) titled, "The Canadian Nun Who Poisoned 45 Nazi Officers With Soup During Christmas Lunch," a title identical to the caption in the Facebook post. The content of the post and the blog was also identical to YouTube's automatic transcription of the video, which is what a person sees when they turn on closed captioning.
The post and blog even included the same mistakes present in YouTube's automatic transcription. For example, on-screen text in the video started with, "December 1943 Dinant Belgium Sister Marie Claire Beaumont..." However, the video's automatic, closed caption transcription, the Facebook post and the blog post began the story with, "December 1943, Dant, Belgium. Sister Mariah Clare Bulma." Additionally, Dinant is a city in Belgium, but Dant is not.
Numerous Google searches uncovered no credible reports about a nun, Canadian or otherwise, killing dozens of Nazi officers with poisoned soup.
The same searches revealed a a podcast episode on YouTube (archived) dated Nov. 22, 2025, that recounted a nearly identical AI-generated story about a Polish nun killing Nazis with poisoned lunchtime soup. A search for this story limited to content from before the release of this YouTube podcast episode found no earlier references to nuns killing Nazis with poisoned soup.
Based on these searches, the Polish nun story appeared to originate from the Nov. 22 podcast episode. The Canadians At War YouTube channel then created its version of the story with the Canadian nun on Dec. 24. There is no credible evidence either stories are true, despite both posts saying the nuns' stories were first publicized decades ago.
Snopes reached out to Canadians At War via email. We will update this report if we hear back from the channel.
The Canadian nun video included several indicators it was produced using artificial intelligence tools.
For example, the video's automatic transcription likely misspelled "Marie Claire Beaumont" as "Mariah Clare Bulma" because the video's narrator pronounced the name in an odd way, an error AI narrators sometimes make. As part of that mispronunciation, the narrator pronounced "Marie" as "Ma-rye."
The video described vastly different amounts of arsenic the nun believed she needed. For example, the nun first calculated she would need roughly 60 grams of arsenic per man. She allegedly later found a jar with 230 grams of arsenic which was "more than enough," even though that amount would kill only three or four of the 45 Nazi officers, according to her calculations. The nun later determined she would need 65 grams per man, totaling up to 2,925 grams of arsenic in the soup.
Since she had only 230 grams available, the nun determined she would only have enough arsenic for
A human writing or narrating a script would typically acknowledge how surprising it was that the nun's plan worked with more than 13 times less arsenic than she believed she needed, but the video did not acknowledge this.
The fictional story about the Canadian nun resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as "stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental."
For further reading, Snopes keeps a list of fact-checks based on AI-generated content.