Story highlights The owners of a bookstore next door to the "Pizzagate" pizza shop described the incident that occurred when a man investigating a conspiracy theory fired a gun on their block

Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham recounted businesses on their street receiving "threatening" messages

(CNN) The owners of beloved DC bookstore located on the same block as the "pizzagate" pizza restaurant recounted their experience Thursday when a viral conspiracy theory drew a man to fire a gun on their street.

In an interview on "New Day," Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham -- who own the "Politics and Prose" book store -- described how many of the nearby businesses got caught up in the frightening fake news controversy.

"We had become aware of it in the weeks before then, in kind of fits and starts really, and we knew from the owner of Comet (pizza) that he had been receiving weird things on his social media," Muscatine said. "And then we ended up consulting with other businesses on the block, and it turned out we all, over the weeks of November, started to receive phone calls, things on social media, complete fantastical assertions about all of our businesses that attempted to connect all of our business, in totally preposterous ways."

"Pizzagate" spun up on 4chan, Reddit, Twitter and other web sites in the final days before the 2016 presidential election. It was a made-up story incorporating fake leaks from "police sources" and misinterpreted Wikileaks emails about an alleged pedophilia ring supposedly being run out Comet Ping Pong -- a pizza shop next door to Politics and Prose -- that somehow involved Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta, among other Democrats.

It was an anti-Clinton narrative -- just one of many -- spread by online commenters who described themselves as Donald Trump supporters.

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