When I was a kid in the '70s the big rumor was that Rod Stewart had to go to the hospital once to have a gallon of sperm pumped out of his stomach. I was surprised when I saw a fairly recent interview with Stewart where he mentioned this rumor and he was even aware of where it came from.
Where's the one about Rod Stewart's stomach getting pumped at the hospital? That was a doozy that I heard in two different countries and two different languages, and this was in the late-70s/early-80s, people didn't even have fax machines then. How did this one get around so quickly?
It wasn't millennials who started that one. I heard it from my genx history teacher. Who honestly I had a lot of respect for at the time, maybe because he told us stories like that, but the more I learn about the world the more I find he was so full of shit and he was like my favorite teacher so its disappointing. One of these days I'm going to find out that the Maginot Line was actually a great idea and if you are France after WW1 you should always build the Maginot Line.
Re Catherine the Great's horse thing, my understanding is that the stories were contemporaneous with her rule and that all powerful women in europe had similar sorts of things said about them. There as a whole early tabloid industry describing in detail the various imagined exploits of Marie Antoinette.