Was The Inspiration For ‘Freddy Krueger’ Actually From Buffalo?

While scrolling through facebook today, I saw a post from a facebook page that said the inspiration for the character "Freddy Krueger" was actually from Buffalo.  Could it be true?

The post is spreading like wildfire now...

So I had to look it up.  Could it be real?  It seems plausible.

I checked snopes and found that it's NOT true.  It's something that people have been doing by copying and pasting a story then just replacing their city with the previous city.

However, the story is that the character who terrorized families across the nation in the 80's and 90's was based on a news story that creator Wes Craven had seen about a Cambodian family who escaped the killing fields.

“I’d read an article in the L.A. Times about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and managed to get to the U.S. Things were fine, and then suddenly the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

While this one was written as a form of entertainment, some of the stuff that gets spread on facebook really shouldn't be.  Always check before you spread things like this.