In 1800, robber and housebreaker Pierre Coignard was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor in the prison at Toulon. After five years he escaped, journeyed to Catalonia, assumed the identity of a local nobleman, won glory fighting in the Spanish ranks, entered the French army, rose to become a decorated colonel …
… and was recognized in Paris by one of his former cellmates.
He was tried, convicted, and returned to the same prison he had escaped 18 years earlier.
After discovering a talent for forgery during the Civil War, James Reavis headed west and started one of the most ambitious hoaxes of all time. He invented a Spanish nobleman named Miguel de Peralta, devised his entire family tree, and began assiduously forging documents claiming 10 million acres of prime Arizona land for the don’s descendants. Then he traveled throughout Spain and Mexico, carefully seeding libraries and archives with the forged deeds, mortgages, and wills.
When all was ready, he went before the U.S. surveyor general in 1881 and showed that rights to these lands now belonged to him. He imposed taxes on residents throughout Arizona, including the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Silver King Mine, but when their lawyers sought to challenge the claims they found Reavis’ carefully forged documents on file.
The ruse made Reavis one of the richest land barons in Arizona, and soon he’d bought mansions in New York, Washington, St. Louis, and Mexico. But it all lasted less than 10 years, unraveling in 1890 when a Spanish linguist detected the forgeries. Reavis served six years in prison and spent the rest of his life on the streets of Santa Fe.
In February 1852, the New York Tribune published an account by a Charles Seabury, master of the whaleship Monongahela, of a titanic struggle with a sea serpent in the South Pacific. The crew harpooned the 103-foot monster on Jan. 13 and killed it with lances the following morning:
None of the crew who witnessed that terrible scene will ever forget it; the evolutions of the body were rapid as lightning, seeming like the revolving of a thousand enormous black wheels. The tail and head would occasionally appear in the surging bloody foam, and a sound was heard, so dead, unearthly, and expressive of acute agony, that a thrill of horror ran through our veins.
The serpent was too large to get into port, so the crew resolved to save the skin, head, and bones. As they were dissecting the creature they encountered the brig Gipsy, to whom Seabury gave his story. “As soon as I get in I shall be enabled to furnish you a more detailed account.”
That’s the story. But neither Seabury, his serpent, nor his detailed account ever appeared, and the Gipsy later told the Philadelphia Bulletin that it had never met such a ship. By that time the original 2700-word account had run in Galignani’s Messenger, the Illustrated London News, the London Times, and Spenerishe Zeitung.
Zoologist editor Edward Newman concludes, “Very like a hoax, but well drawn up.” You can decide for yourself — the original account is here.
In the 1840s P.T. Barnum found himself a victim of his own success. His New York museum of curiosities proved so popular that it was regularly filled to capacity and could admit no more customers.
Barnum studied the problem and hired a carpenter. Soon a new door appeared in the museum with a sign reading THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.
Those who followed it found themselves on Ann Street.
Canada saw a sensation in 1836 — a woman named Maria Monk claimed to have been a nun in a Montreal convent where priests from the nearby seminary would enter through a secret tunnel, force sex on the terrified nuns, and dispose horribly of any resulting children:
[Father Larkin] first put oil upon the heads of the infants, as is the custom before baptism. When he had baptized the children, they were taken, one after another, by one of the old nuns, in the presence of us all. She pressed her hand upon the mouth and nose of the first so tight that it could not breathe, and in a few minutes, when the hand was removed, it was dead. She then took the other and treated it in the same way. No sound was heard, and both the children were corpses. The greatest indifference was shown by all present during this operation; for all, as I well knew, were long accustomed to such scenes. The little bodies were then taken into the cellar, thrown into the pit I have mentioned, and covered with a quantity of lime.
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became a bestseller, but an investigation showed that the whole thing had been a fake; Monk had apparently never even visited the convent. She fled to Philadelphia, wrote an unsuccessful sequel, had a child out of wedlock, and died in 1839.
“Spirit photographs” created by hoaxer William Hope in 1919.
From left: Mr. and Mrs. Gibson with their deceased son; Mrs. Longcake with her dead sister-in-law; the Rev. Charles Tweedale and his wife, with her father.
Arthur Conan Doyle (below, center) defended Hope even when skeptic Harry Price had shown that he was manipulating his plates. “The credulity of dupes,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.”
In 1885, explorer Richard Willoughby claimed to have discovered a wonderful mirage above Alaska’s Muir glacier: He’d seen a modern city, he said, with buildings, church towers, vessels, even citizens. This photograph sold “like hot cakes” in the summer of 1889, and Willoughby sold the negative to a San Francisco photographer for $500.
There it all unraveled. An American consul, home from England, noted that the “silent city” bore a striking resemblance to Bristol. It turned out that Willoughby had paid an English tourist $10 for an overexposed photo of his hometown, and the rest was hot air. Still, he deserves credit for invention.
Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola told an inspiring story: Born in West Africa, he wandered to the sea at age 7 and found himself aboard a steamer bound for Scotland. From there he made his way to the United States, where he took up lecturing. His 1930 autobiography, LoBagola; An African Savage’s Own Story, gives vivid details about life in the bush:
“If you should climb a tree, the lion can easily get help from the elephant, because the elephant and the lion are friendly. … [T]he lion tells the elephant that it wants you down from the tree, and the elephant shakes the tree or pulls it up by the roots, and down you come.”
The truth was more prosaic: His real name was Joseph Lee and he was born in Baltimore. “Small opportunities,” wrote Demosthenes, “are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
Workers were digging a well in New York in 1869 when they made a sensational discovery: a 10-foot man made of stone.
Was it an ancient statue? A huge petrified human? The truth turned out to be more mundane: The “Cardiff Giant” had been carved out of gypsum and deliberately buried by a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He turned a good profit: His $2,600 investment sold for $37,500 when it was “discovered.”
The continuing hysteria drove profits higher, and P.T. Barnum offered $60,000 to lease it for three months. Rebuffed, he built his own plaster replica and decried the original as a fake, leading exhibitor David Hannum to grumble, “There’s a sucker born every minute” — a remark later misattributed to Barnum himself.
Eventually the whole thing blew over; by 1870 both giants had been revealed as fake. But the old gypsum carving still makes a good show — it’s on display today in a Cooperstown, N.Y., museum.
That’s Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, as captured by “spirit photographer” William H. Mumler.
The story goes that Mary sat for the photo in the early 1870s, when she had taken the name Lindall, and that the photographer didn’t know her identity until the exposure revealed the martyred president.
That’s the story. Skeptics immediately accused Mumler of fakery, and he didn’t win any friends with his new career, “revealing” the ghosts of Civil War dead for their grieving families.
That practice was too low even for P.T. Barnum (!), who testified against Mumler in a fraud trial in 1869. He was acquitted, but he died penniless in 1884.
Perhaps Mumler really had discovered an astonishing new technique … but it seems telling that his own ghost has never been photographed.