A recent Yale grad is at the center of a news story today. Unfortunately for her, all the characters in this one are real life actual human beings, rather than in her head.

Tuesday morning, the Wall Street Journal posted this on their website:

“Many of the names contained in the article about the re-opening of the 103rd Street Pedestrian Bridge in Manhattan were fabricated by reporting intern Liane Membis, and the quotes couldn’t be independently verified. Ms. Membis is no longer working at The Wall Street Journal.”

This can be trusted, and if need be verified, because the people at the Wall Street Journal are all real, and not in our collective imaginations. It seems like Membis has a pretty active imagination, as two other pieces she contributed during her less than three week internship have been edited on the Journal’s website to remove quotes that couldn’t be verified.

Membis has also contributed articles to the Huffington Post, CNN, and Ebony. At Yale, Membis was notably a staff writer for The Yale Daily News, collecting 41 bylines in two years at the newspaper. In a statement posted Tuesday afternoon, Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Max de La Bruyère writes that the paper is “investigating the work she did for us and, so far as possible, verifying its accuracy.”

However, as is the Law of Journalism, once you mess up, everything you’ve ever done is immediately called into question. So now, we may never know if Gandhi won Mr. Yale, or if Bill Gates is anti-diarrhea. And the devastating Yale Zombie Attack of 2010? It may never have even happened.