Hoax!

A girl showed up at a town near Bristol in 1817 wearing a turban, and everyone went nuts.  SOURCES:"The Caraboo Hoax," Margaret RussellJohn Matthew Gutch's narrativeEnglish Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell"Devonshire Characters and Strange Events""British Performances of Java," Matthew Isaac Cohen See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of Hoax is no fun at all. April Fool's! For our (almost) April 1 episode, we explore the holiday's origins and some of the best pranks of the 20th and 21st centuries: Google's various exploits (Pokemon Go!), that time the BBC produced a piece on Spaghetti Trees, and the Curious Case of Sidd Finch, the Mets pitcher who could throw 168 MPH. SOURCES:https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-did-april-fools-day-get-startedhttps://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/03/april-fools/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/01/king-kugel-an-april-fools-history-lesson/https://frenchmoments.eu/april-fools-day-traditions-in-france-le-1er-avril/https://bylines.scot/society/hunt-the-gowk-day/https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/hunt-the-gowk-april-fools-scotland/https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-celebrates-april-fools%E2%80%99-day/https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cancels-april-fools-day-pranks-coronavirus-2021-3https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/15/curious-case-sidd-finchhttps://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/21/si-60-curious-case-sidd-finch-mark-mulvoy-myra-gelbandhttps://nypost.com/2025/04/08/sports/legendary-sidd-finch-finally-makes-it-to-mets-home-game-40-years-later/https://niemanstoryboard.org/2014/04/01/whys-this-so-good-no-90-george-plimpton-and-sidd-finch/https://www.milb.com/news/legend-of-sidd-finch-lives-on-in-brooklyn-145695984https://sports.yahoo.com/still-curious-catching-those-brought-150800240.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/sports/baseball/an-old-baseball-april-fools-hoax.htmlhttps://www.mlb.com/news/sidd-finch-hoax-recalled-at-sabr-convention/c-133074166ESPN: Unhittable: Sidd Finch and the Tibetan FastballBBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino https://fox59.com/news/national-world/greatest-april-fools-prank-of-all-time-the-story-of-the-bbcs-spaghetti-trees/https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/09/25/the-spaghetti-trees-of-ticino/https://ericajurus.ca/2024/04/02/the-tradition-of-pranking-and-fooling/http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/cucina/when-i-was-a-kid-i-learned-that-spaghetti-grew-on-trees See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stockmarkets are now battlefields. An aide-de-camp arrived in Dover with the startling, thrilling news that Napoleon had been killed, and the British stock market behaved accordingly. The problem was, Napoleon wasn't dead. SOURCES:Napoleon Is Dead by Richard DaleTrial transcript See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Messages from extraterrestrial visitors? Evidence of strange atmospheric conditions? No one knows where crop circles come from or what they mean. Except, we do know, but for believers, that's the start, not the end, of the story. The history of crop circles is a case study in conspiratorial thinking...plus art in wheat fields! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was purchasing an enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom he displayed as a public spectacle, promoting her a 161-year-old woman who once nursed George Washington. SOURCES:'The Showman and the Slave' by Benjamin Reiss'Medical Apartheid' by Harriet A. Washingtonhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/“P.T. Barnum and Africa” Bernth Lindfors The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader, edited by James W. Cook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer masterpiece to high-ranking Nazi Herman Goring, dutch painter Han van Meegeren had an innovative and shocking defense: he was guilty not of collaboration but of art forgery, faking half a dozen "Vermeers" over the previous decade. But under the reign of the Third Reich, where do you draw the line between opportunism and profiteering? SOURCEShttps://museumhack.com/anniversary-forgery-meegeren/https://www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.htmlhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/27/dutch-masterhttps://www.culturedmag.com/article/2023/03/16/han-van-meegeren-forgery-nazi-vermeer/https://www.salon.com/2016/11/27/faking-it-does-the-forged-vermeer-that-fooled-goering-belong-in-a-museum/The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan LopezHow Pleasure Works by Paul Bloomhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnnkuOz08GQhttps://www.npr.org/2008/07/12/92483237/how-mediocre-dutch-artist-cast-the-forgers-spellhttps://www.thecollector.com/han-van-meegeren/Van Meegeren: The Forger Who Fooled The Nazis (BBC) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In December 1912, Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist at the British Museum, presented something extraordinary to the Geographical Society: a "missing link" fossil, a species he named "Dawson's Dawn-man" after the Sussex solicitor who found the original fossil. It was the find of a lifetime, and a much-needed bit of national pride for the English. The only problem? It wasn't real. SOURCES:The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson by Miles Russell (Tempus, Stroud, 2003)https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-problem-of-piltdown-man/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/23/piltdown-man-remains-exposed-as-fake-1953https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/08/folklore-piltdown-man-hoax/'The Perpetrator at Piltdown' by J Winslow and A Meyer, Science (September, 1983)https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2016/august/piltdown-man-charles-dawson-likely-fraudster.htmlhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/piltdown-man-paleoanthropologys-april-fools-176401927/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Midcentury New Yorkers who couldn't sleep found a friend in Jean Shepherd, the iconoclastic radio personality whose middle of the night monologues made him a cult comedy figure and leader of the underground Night People movement. When he proposed to prank the book world by demanding a novel that didn't exist, the title became so popular his followers more or less willed it into being. SOURCEShttps://web.archive.org/web/20020427051336/https:/flicklives.com/Articles/Wall_Street_Journel/8-1-56/8-1-56.jpghttps://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-media-hoax-of-i-libertine/Excelsior, You Fathead! By Eugene B BergmannI, Libertine by Theodore Sturgeonhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-listhttps://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/did-this-book-buy-its-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list.phphttps://www.vulture.com/2017/09/handbook-for-mortals-lani-sarem-23-hour-new-york-times-bestseller.htmlhttps://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lani-sarem-blues-traveler-manager-novelist-bestseller-list-7957648/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During the 18th century, as the industrial revolution picks up.... steam, people are dazzled by expertly constructed mechanical marvels: automatons. But Wolfgang von Kempelen brings something to the royal court in Vienna that people have never seen before: an automaton capable of playing chess. SOURCES:The Mechanical Turk by Tom Standagehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/debunking-mechanical-turk-helped-set-edgar-allan-poe-path-mystery-writing-180964059/Maelzel’s Chess Player by Edgar Allan Poe Last of a Veteran Chess Player by Silas Weir Mitchell See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When YouTube was barely a year old, the the site's users were gripped by the slowly unfolding tale of Bree, the sheltered, beautiful 16 year old girl whose parents  kept her locked in her bedroom with no one but the internet and her only friend, Daniel, for company. As Bree's situation grew more dire, she became one of the first online obsessions, paving the way for hundreds of hoaxes to come. SOURCEShttps://www.youtube.com/@lonelygirl15https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-m-JXcppohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5S2Kdb8Io4&t=3shttps://medium.com/@vocativ/the-strange-saga-of-lonelygirl15-an-oral-history-dd94687e9976https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-they-now-creators-of-lonelygirl15-turned-web-series-into-a-multi-million-dollar-company-2010-7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnjZzDeepE8https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/16/lonelygirl15-bree-video-blog-youtubehttps://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-lonelygirl15-story.htmlhttps://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/how-the-secret-identity-of-lonelygirl15-was-found/https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/154b603/how_did_people_of_the_2000s_fall_for_lonelygirl15/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's the Civil War, and the nation is in deep mourning. William Mumler of Boston has something to help: "spirit photographs" of you and a deceased loved one. Is it a scam, or is technology now capable of traversing the thin line between life and death? Eventually, it will be up to the court to decide.  Sources:Special thanks to u/Naturalog on Reddit and Stephen Berkman'The Apparitionists' by Peter Manseauhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/meet-mr-mumler-man-who-captured-lincolns-ghost-camera-180965090/ https://www.vox.com/22918581/mumler-victorian-spirit-ghost-photographyhttps://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=sat2698811#page/33/mode/1up https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/when-cameras-took-pictures-of-ghosts/281010/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At the height of the Cold War, a "leaked Top Secret Memo" from inside the government proposed a controversial and radical idea: the worst thing that could happen to humanity was worldwide ... peace. Sources:https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/30/us/l-c-lewin-writer-of-satire-of-government-plot-dies-at-82.htmlGhost of Iron Mountain by Phil TinlineJFK (1991, O. Stone)https://hvmag.com/life-style/a-history-of-iron-mountain-an-information-storage-facility-in-germantown-ny/https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-many-lives-of-iron-mountainhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/16/iron-mountain-hoax-anti-vietnam-war-satire-conspiracy-theories See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The court anatomist returned the King George I with astonishing news: a woman named Mary Toft has been giving birth.... to rabbits.  Sources: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/05/an-extraordinary-delivery-of-rabbits/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mary-toft-gave-birth-to-rabbitshttps://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/aug2009.htmlhttps://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/80/1/33/665070?login=falsehttps://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/238/1/43/4822513?redirectedFrom=fulltexthttps://www.godalmingmuseum.co.uk/articles/mary-tofts See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A painting purportedly by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is discovered at a little-known auction house in New Orleans in 2005; a decade later, it fetches the highest price for a work of art ever sold at auction. Sources:The Lost LeonardoSavior For Salehttps://therenaissanceworkshop.com/leonardo-da-vinci/https://www.mos.org/leonardo/biography.htmlhttps://www.rct.uk/collection/912525/the-drapery-of-a-chest-and-sleevehttps://www.rct.uk/collection/912524/the-drapery-of-a-sleevehttps://web.archive.org/web/20200524085434/https://www.history.com/news/how-a-priceless-da-vinci-masterwork-disappeared-from-view-for-centurieshttps://salvatormundirevisited.com/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/sep/09/lost-leonardo-da-vinci-film-solved-mystery-worlds-most-expensive-painting-salvator-mundihttps://apnews.com/general-news-91be03753b7d4dbbacfc4bb0d1dcca3dhttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/how-saudi-royal-crushed-his-rivals-shakedown-ritz-carlton-n930396https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/arts/design/salvator-mundi-louvre-abu-dhabi.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/world/middleeast/saudi-crown-prince-salvator-mundi.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsUFvwgvCohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P64rDJkX4HYhttps://artwatch.org.uk/two-developments-in-the-no-show-louvre-abu-dhabi-leonardo-salvator-mundi-saga/https://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/menteleonardo/emdl.asp See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

People traveling through the west by train in the 1800s expected shootouts and danger and cowboys. The citizens of Palisade gave it to them.  Sources:"Westward Hoax: The Secret History of Palisade, Nevada," Very Special Episodes.Fakes, Frauds & Other Malarkey by Kathryn Lindskoog."Mark Twain's Nevada Newspaper Hoaxes" Andrew R. Giarrelli.Mark Twain's writing for the Territorial Enterprise (1851-1865) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two bored poets decide to prank their least favorite snobby magazine editor by submitting intentionally bad poetry to his literary journal and watching with mirth as he and his fellows delight in publishing it. Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m3bytB5ULwhttps://theconversation.com/the-greatest-poet-who-never-lived-ern-malley-at-80-234905https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4533011085https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-29/ern-malley-literary-hoax-angry-penguins-1944/100412208https://www.ernmalley.net/https://www.literaturelust.com/post/the-great-poet-ern-malley-who-never-existedhttps://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/harris-maxwell-henley-max-29615https://quirosonline.com/jindyworobaks-part-one/https://time.com/archive/6821805/books-angry-penguins/https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/33/wertheim.phphttps://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcauley-james-phillip-10896https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stewart-harold-frederick-29423http://jacketmagazine.com/17/fact2.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Samuel Ireland was an avid collector, the type of man who boasted and tried to make himself look important. His son, William Henry, just wanted to make his dad proud of him.   Sources: The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare, by Doug StewartShakespeare and Others by S. Schoenbaum'The Poet's Hand,' Adam Gopnik, The New Yorkerhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Irelandhttps://www.npr.org/2010/06/19/127931669/william-henry-irelands-great-shakespearean-hoax See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For a few tense hours in October 2009, the entire world watched as a homemade aircraft purportedly carrying a 6-year-old boy drifted in mid-air on live television. When the balloon landed, there was no boy inside. Sources: Wife Swap Season 5, Episode 1: “Heene/Martell”Wife Swap Season 5, Episode 18: “Heene/Silver” The video that I showed Dana of the YourShakeDown invention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xAX2Y8-g4g Compilation of news coverage from the time of the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAlwBcvb9RA Internet Historian video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWhUvm8SunY&t=1s Richard Heene’s response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axgyj7g5XZY The gawker essay: https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5383858/exclusive-i-helped-richard-heene-plan-a-balloon-hoax Transcripts from 911 and CNN: https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ng/date/2009-10-21/segment/01 The Denver magazine that cracked the case: https://www.5280.com/the-balloon-boy-hoax-solved/ More reporting: https://people.com/human-interest/10-years-later-balloon-boy-dad-insists-saga-no-hoax/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345497/Four-years-Balloon-Boy-aged-10-finally-set-worlds-youngest-heavy-metal-band-brothers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/us/19balloon.html https://nypost.com/2025/02/22/us-news/infamous-balloon-boy-starts-tiny-home-building-business-in-florida/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1917, two young cousins returned from the creek behind their house with thrilling news: they had photographed fairies! Their parents were skeptical, but soon the photos of the "Cottingley Fairies" were circulated, eventually finding a champion in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.    Sources: ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event.’ Strand Magazine, 1920'The Coming of the Fairies' by Arthur Conan Doyle (London: Hodder & Stoughton)‘That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies,' by G. Crawley. British Journal of Photographyhttps://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/power-at-play-in-paranormal-history/ https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/father-and-son-who-believed-faeries See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hoax! is a new show from Dana Schwartz (Noble Blood) and Lizzie Logan (Vulture, Reductress). Listen to the first episode on August 4th. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.