Pokemon Red Blue: MissingNo and the Ghost of Lavender Town

MissingNo is not a designed Pokemon. It is a data collision — what happens when the game’s Pokemon lookup table encounters index numbers that were never assigned to a creature. The encounter is triggered by speaking to the old man in Viridian City who teaches you to catch Pokemon, then surfing along the right coast of Cinnabar Island.

The encounter loads based on the third, fifth, and seventh characters of your trainer name, which the game stored in memory near the coast encounter table. The result is a glitched sprite — usually a backwards L shape, an aerodactyl fossil graphic, or a ghost — that uses Metronome as its first move and has a Sky Attack in its moveset.

Catching MissingNo duplicates the sixth item in your bag. This was used extensively to duplicate Rare Candies and Master Balls, making it the most practically useful glitch in any mainline Pokemon game.

The Lavender Town connection — a separate creepypasta claiming the original Japanese version’s music caused illness in children — has no evidence but persists because Lavender Town’s music is genuinely unsettling by Game Boy standards. It was changed for international releases, which fuelled the myth. MissingNo and the Lavender Town theory together defined an era of Pokemon urban legend that the internet amplified into something close to mythology.