That story is bonkers. I don't know how any student of chemistry mistakes a rocky crumbly cream-colored solid for an extremely hazardous red-orange liquid with a literal aura of evil wafting off of it.
Yep, that's it. A lot of links to other blog posts on older posts are broken, but you can usually change the "blogsdev" subdomain to "blogs" and it'll work.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/not-do-bromine