August 17, 2011 • 32 mins
Historical hoaxes are surprisingly common. For example, a N.Y. cigar maker once commissioned a gypsum skeleton to pass off as a 10-foot-tall petrified man called the Cardiff Giant. Join Deblina and Sarah as they explore history's most successful hoaxes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chocolate boarding and I'm fair out.
And we just talked about the famous radio hoax on
a recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the
(00:21):
World's Broadcast. But hoaxes in general were around long before that.
A lot of experts believe that the seventeen hundreds, also
known to some as the Age of Enlightenment, gave birth
to them. Doesn't really make sense, doesn't know it doesn't
I mean you would think that around that time it
would be all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely,
(00:42):
But I like the way that Alex Berza, who is
the curator of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually
calls himself a hoax Burt, which I love hoax. He
put it this way in an interview with a history
magazine in two thousand nine. He said, quote, in order
to be able to perceive a hoax, one needs to
see the world in terms of a contrast between reason
(01:03):
and ignorance, fact and fiction, and that way of thinking
only clearly came into focus in the eighteenth century. So
we're going to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history,
not necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the Worlds,
but ones that fooled a lot of folks just the same.
And we promised we're not pulling any hoaxes on you.
All of these are true historical hoaxes. Yes, not this time,
(01:24):
not this time. So our first one is Cottingly Fairies,
and it started with two little English girls named Frances
Griffith's and her cousin, Elsie Wright, And they were a
couple of cousins and they were basically just trying to
put one over on their parents, as kids sometimes do.
They were ten and sixteen years old at the time, respectively,
and so in nineteen seventeen, the two of them used
(01:47):
to play at the Rights home and Cottingly, which was
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
after a day of play soaking wet after falling into
the brook on the property, and the parents weren't really
pleased with this. They'd grill the girls what happened? Why
do you keep falling into the brook all the time?
And the girl's explanation was that they went down close
(02:10):
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there naturally, right, naturally, so the parents also naturally
weren't buying this at all. So the girls asked to
borrow a camera, and they produced two photos kind of
as proof of their adventures, one with Frances looking toward
the camera and a little troop of fairies kind of
(02:31):
prancing around in front of her, and the second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So Arthur right after this pretty
much he didn't believe them at all. He quit loaning
the girls his camera. So the incident was all but
forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen. And that's when
Arthur's wife, Polly Right, she was pursuing an interest in
the occult and a supernatural at the time, and she
(02:51):
attended a lecture hosted by the local Theosophical Society, which
they come up from time to time in these podcasts.
I've noticed, yeah, whenever we talk about spiritualists and so forth.
But she mentioned the fairy photos when she was there,
and among the people to show a special interest in
these photos was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, our
old friend yes from the who was the real Sherlock
(03:12):
Holmes podcast. Yeah, so Conan Doyle is of course most
famous for for that Sherlock Holmes connection, but he was
also a famous spiritualist at the time too, and a
believer in the supernatural. It was very important to him,
and so he wanted to check out this whole fairy
photo thing because he was conveniently enough working on a
piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. And I think
(03:35):
you mentioned it was a quite serious, scholarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conan Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
wasn't fiction at all, and that's why he wanted to
make sure he had proof before he wrote about this.
So he may have had a few doubts of his own.
So he personally visited the girls and Cottingly along with
Edward Gardner, another leading spiritualist, and they brought their own
(03:57):
cameras along, and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them, just to be sure before
he wrote this piece. And they had taken some measures
at this point to like marking the plates just so
things couldn't be tampered with. Yeah, they wanted to be
extra sure that what they were getting was authentic. But
apparently the test wasn't too hard, because the girls passed
it pretty easily, and some people accepted the photos as genuine,
(04:20):
just as conn and Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including
Elsie's father, author Right, remain skeptical about it. One commentator
put it this way, He said, quote for a true
explanation of these fairy photographs, what is wanted is not
a knowledge of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.
So we see that it didn't take much for a
lot of people to get to the bottom of this,
(04:40):
And some skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites
looked like cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's book.
So that's probably the first thing you'd think too, if
you saw these pictures today, which you can by looking
for them online, they look like nice, little romantic illustrations
of fairies. Yeah, and some people point out that what
we see to day, if you do happen to google
(05:02):
the photos or whatever, you'll notice that these are the
enhanced versions of the photos. So the original photos may
have been a little easier to believe, but probably not
that much. But Conon Doyle did believe this, and in
fact died believing this, and it wasn't until that the
girls finally confessed that four out of five of the
photos were fakes. According to a two thousand four piece
(05:25):
in British Heritage, Francis said of the most famous photo quote,
my heart always thinks when I look at it, when
I think of how it's gone all around the world.
I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies.
But there's one more thing to add to that quote.
While the girls did admit that most of the photos
were faked, they never admitted that the fairies were imaginary,
(05:46):
and to her dying day, Francis swore that the final
photo was real. So well, an interesting little twist for
the end of this hoax, yeah maybe leaves us a
little something to wonder about maybe maybe, yeah, depending on
how you look at it. So our next hoax involves
a historical animal, which I know is a favorite topic
(06:08):
of many listeners, and this one, of course reminded me
of the Mr. Ed theme song too. I couldn't help
but humming into my head or singing in my head
the whole time I was researching this. But around the
turn of the twentieth century, this truly remarkable horse caught
the world's attention. And his name was Clever Hans, and
he was owned by a school teacher named wilhelms On Austin.
(06:33):
And this horse wasn't I mean, he really made Mr
Ed look pretty low key with all of the stuff
he could do. He could do addition and subtraction, multiplication, division.
He could also select any color named to him from
choosing among a group of different colored cloths. And he
couldn't talk and sing like Mr Ed could, but he
could communicate by stamping his hoof on the ground. So
(06:55):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoofs stamps. Yeah, and we're gonna
just twist things entirely here. Put it to a new level.
Hans could even read minds. You didn't have to ask
him a question out loud. You could put the question
to him mentally and he would still get it right.
And to to add even further to this, it didn't
(07:18):
have to be Von Austin who was asking the question.
Anybody could do it and the horse would still get
the answers right. So it wasn't just a simple matter
of a trainer who had secret cues with his animals.
So After initially causing this great sensation in Germany, which
is where Hans lived, he started to get international coverage
(07:39):
when this team of experts they were called the Hans Commission,
examined him to determine if von Austin was perpetuating some
kind of fraud somehow or enough because people were suspicious
of this, right, they thought it was a hoax. Yeah,
people were very suspicious. This was not within the normal
realm of horse abilities, and the experts were pretty prominent men.
(08:00):
There was a circus proprietor and army captain, the director
of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, of veterinary surgeon, and other
guys who were just really familiar with horses and with
horse training and would be able to presumably tell if
something fishy was going on. And after they did their work,
there was a headline printed in the New York Times
on October twod nineteen o four, which read expert commission
(08:24):
decides that the horse actually reasons. So it really was
global news. Yeah, But even more than that, they determined
that the horse was not trained in in the traditional ways. Instead,
Von Austin's techniques were more like those used to teach children,
which makes sense since he is a school teacher. But
some people still weren't convinced by this, and one man,
Oscar Funkst, got Von Austin's permission to come in and
(08:48):
investigate the horse, and after some pretty serious examinations, he
learned two things. One, the horse could only answer questions
in which the answer was all already known to the questioner,
so you can ask, what is twelve divided by three?
But maybe not some more outrageous piece of division. And
(09:08):
he could also only answer unless he could see the questioner.
And so clever Hans was used to being questioned with
somebody right in front of him. If he stood by
his side, he'd try to move his head so he
would be looking at you faith on, and if he
had blinders on, he couldn't answer the question at all.
So this gave fools some ideas about the limits of
(09:29):
Hans's ability, Right, okay, so what did this mean? It
suggested basically that there were some sort of unconscious movements
coming from the questioner, and sure enough, when he looked
more closely, he found that nearly every test question or
would ask a question and then bent his head forward,
which made the horse start tapping and then as soon
(09:51):
as the correct number of taps had occurred, the questioner
would jerk up his head and the horse would stop.
So Funks found that while almost everyone made these movements,
hardly anyone was aware of it. Yeah, so this makes
it kind of a hoax, but kind of not in
a way. People were suspicious of it. That's very hoax like,
But it seems like nobody was trying to perpetuate fraud,
as we'll see in most of our other hoaxes. So
(10:13):
Folks published a book on his findings in nineteen eleven,
and it got a really glowing review from the New
York Times. Although I liked that, the article also noted
quote it detracts nothing from the merit of his being
clever Hans achievements and leaves him as wonderful a horse
as he was before. I e. We still love you know,
(10:34):
we still love Hans. We still think he's great. And
today you might still see mentions of Clever Hans. When
you're reading about animal psychology or articles about animal intelligence research,
you'll see something sometimes called the Clever Hans effect. And
it's something that researchers have to be very careful of
that they are not either willingly misleading the animal or
(10:58):
giving some sort of subcon just cues, or doing it
without even being aware of it. So this actually led
to something kind of useful. Yeah, it dead lead to
something useful, unlike our next entry, which just led to
a very peculiar hoax craze for a few decades there.
It started in eighteen sixty nine when a couple of
(11:20):
well diggers in Cardiff, New York made this startling find
while digging a well in the property of William stub Newell. Yes,
after hitting stone three ft down and clearing off the
top soil, one of them recognized a foot and he said, quote,
I declare some old Indian has been buried here. So
(11:42):
there was an ancient burial here, at least that's what
it seemed. But pretty soon they realized that it wasn't
just the skeleton of a normal man. It was ten
ft long and clearly the remains of some sort of
ancient giant. So Newell got right to work marketing this
fine try and make some money off of his farm.
He set up a tent and charged admission for people
(12:06):
to come and take a peek at the so called
Cardiff Giant, and he bumped it up after attendance was
so good he bumped it up to fifty cents, and
people were coming from all over the area to gawk
and marvel at this strange stone man. Yeah. Here's how
the first president of Cornell, Andrew White, described his own visit.
(12:27):
He said, quote lying in its grave, with a subdued
light from the roof of the tent falling upon it,
and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle,
it produced a most weird effect. An air of great
solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.
Sounds pretty cool, doesn't except that White even himself realized
(12:49):
that the skeleton was clearly made from stone. He actually
realized it wasn't even a very good carving, and that
the two well diggers had would have had no reason
to dig in that very spot, suggesting some sort of
planned fraud. Very suspicious. So we have to backtrack a
little bit to eighteen sixty six to figure out what happened.
(13:10):
And that's when a New York cigar maker named George
hall Or Hole got an idea. He was an accli
Iowa investigating his brother in law for a late payment
on a large shipment of cigars, and while he was
there he got into an argument with the Methodist revivalist
over giants, and he later spent the night quote wondering
about why people would believe these remarkable stories in the
(13:31):
Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a
stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man. Okay,
so that's probably not where most people's train of thought
would go after that argument, but he really runs with
it once the once the thought strikes him, but he
knows that he can't make the giant close to home
because it's got to be secret. It's obviously a ten
(13:54):
foot stone giant. I think it weighed about three thousand
pounds all said and done, would cause quite a sturf.
So in eighteen sixty eight he hires some guys to
quarry a block of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and
just so they don't talk and so it stays secret,
he tells them that it's for some sort of new
Lincoln monument that's going to be going up, and from
(14:16):
there he has his giant block of gypsum shipped to
Chicago and carved again in secret by a German stone cutter.
I think he's he's paid money and sworn to secrecy.
In fact, finally, the finished statue was sent on a
train to Cardiff, where Hole met up with his cousin
Stubbed Newell, and the men buried it on the farm.
(14:38):
So they waited about a year I think to dig
it up right, just so it could get some authentic
dirt scenes around it and and look convincing enough. But
there's a good plan if you if you're going to
go through all the trouble, you might as well put
in that extra year to make it work. But once
the giant was on earth, of the story didn't last
that long. Newell even told some people that it was
(14:59):
a hoax, which seems like a really bad idea if
you're trying to make fifty cents ahead on your farm.
But Whole realized he would have to lock somebody into
buying this giant get a large amount of money up
front before the story broke the fraud, so he sold
the giant to a businessman named David Hannum for twenty
three thousand dollars, and Hannum took it on the road
(15:22):
as kind of a syndicate show. It caught the attention
from there of P. T. Barnum again, our old friend.
He just pops up all the time. He offered to
buy the giant for fifty thousand dollars and hand him refused.
So Barnum, who isn't going to be thwarted by not
possessing the quote authentic giant, decided to build his own
(15:42):
replica and had an agent go to Handhem show make
them covert wax models. And of course all the newspapers
were running stories about the Cardiff Giants, so he had
all of the measurements ready to go, and Um just
started touring his own plastered giant. It did really really well.
To hand him though, is pretty dismissive of this plastic
(16:04):
copy of Barnum's and all of those who paid to
go see it. And he even said there's a sucker
born every minute, which is obviously painfully ironic to hear that.
But my favorite part of this is that it started
kind of a petrified man trend, right, did well? I mean,
it's easy to see how it would too if if
you could make so much money off of having a
(16:27):
petrified man in your backyard. But for a few decades
there there were lots of petrified men turning up giants
or just normal size, and Mark Twain even wrote a
little newspaper article a spoof of finding a petrified man,
and it got picked up by real outlet. So um. Yeah,
for a for a few years there there was a
(16:47):
rush and petrified men, and then they lost their cachet,
you know, yeah, you know, Well, that's what happens when
you find a hoax that works, you tend to see
it kind of over run into the ground. But I
have to say this next one on our list is
one Sarah that I'm really glad did not catch on.
It is about a woman named Mary Toft, and it's
a medical hoax that's been called the top fraud of
(17:08):
the Enlightenment. It started when an englishwoman named Mary Toft,
who was a mother of three already, had a miscarriage
around September of About a month after that, she and
her husband Joshua Toft sent for the doctor, who in
this case was a male midwife named John Howard, because
she was having these full on labor pains. And after
(17:31):
she called in John Howard, she gave birth to a
dead skinned baby rabbit and then proceeded to continue giving
birth to dead rabbits at the rate of about one
per day, and Howard claimed that he could even feel
and see these baby bunnies jumping in the womb before
they died. I know he could see. He claimed that
(17:53):
you could see kind of the bedclothes move over her stomach,
and that it would shake the bed sometimes so this
dead bunny would come out. Yeah, not pleasant at all.
So obviously people are skeptical of the story, and so
people wouldn't think that he was lying. Howard put out
an open invitation for other doctors to come check out
the situation, maybe even deliver a rabbit for themselves, and
(18:14):
see the truth in this pretty invasive yeah it was.
But several people took him up on that, including Nathaniel
Saint Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also the personal
surgeon of King George. The first we have to mention
though St Andre had an interesting resume before he got
into the doctoring business, which maybe makes it so he
(18:35):
wasn't the most qualified person to be the public face
of this. He was originally a dancing and a fencing instructor.
Kind of a strange backstory for him. That is definitely odd.
But what's perhaps most surprising about this whole story in
general is that how many doctors were convinced that the
births were real. I mean, it wasn't just St. Andre, right,
it was some other people too, who really thought that
(18:58):
this was happening. As a kind of proof of this phenomenon,
St Andre didn't experiment in which he put the organs
of the bunnies in water, and it's unclear I guess
as to why that actually provided any proof, but it
was supposed to have been century doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though,
(19:19):
including a Sir Richard manning Ham. And to figure out
what was going on once and for all, Mary was
brought to London and put under a twenty four hour watch,
which pretty soon put a stop to these strange births.
Then they discovered a porter trying to smuggle a rabbit
into Mary at her hotel. Her sister, who was kind
of playing nurse to her at the time. She also
(19:41):
confessed to this, but claimed that they were bringing the
rabbit into her for eating purposes only, not for birthing purposes,
which sounds pretty fishy. Yeah, it didn't look good to
say the least, but Mary, just if you were giving
birth to rabbits, would you really still be eating them?
That is a very good by. I mean, if you're
going to think this out a little bit, that's a
(20:02):
good point, Sarah, I would think that you wouldn't want
to eat meat in general. But apparently she didn't have
a problem with that while she was staying in London,
but she did still claim even after that instant that
she was telling the truth. Finally, though, they had to
resort to threatening her. They said, basically they would do
a painful procedure operate on her the next time she
was about to go into labor. Instead of just letting
(20:23):
the bunnies be born, they would they would do an
operation and examine her uterus. And so at that point
she finally confessed the whole thing was a scam to
get a pension and and live easy for the rest
of her life. Specifically, she said quote, her goal was
to get so good a living that I should never
want as long as I lived, Which is another strange
(20:45):
thing to think about, that you would be pensioned for
the very act of giving birth to baby bunnies. Yeah, well,
it's strange to plan that as a way. I think
to get your your fortune in your future. But she
didn't work alone. She said an accomplice helped her get
the animal parts in return for part of the potential profits.
So someone else may have been involved here, maybe multiple
(21:06):
someone else's. Her husband was probably part of it, at
least a little bit. He I think was implicated in
getting it was found that he had purchased for rabbits. Yeah,
so Mary was charged as a quote to vile, cheat
and impostor and thrown in jail, but she was later
released and the doctors didn't come out of it very well.
Many of their reputations were ruined, and a popular purchase
(21:29):
in the early eighteen hundreds in England was a book
of writings about Toft, which was bound in of course
rabbit skin and one more note about these bunnies. Even
though Mary Toft apparently did not lose her appetite for
rabbit meat while perpetuating this fraud, a lot of people
in England did, and rabbit stew took a little nose
(21:52):
dive in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew. The
story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But the
last story on our list is one that is still
sort of in question. People have called this a hoax
for years, and it's cited as a common example of
a hoax, but there are still some people who think
(22:14):
that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county surveyor and amateur archaeologists named David Wyrick
was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in the
American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about this
these quite recently in the Cohokia podcast, But most people
(22:36):
believe that these mounds were the work of pre Columbian
native civilizations. However, a common belief during this time period
that we're talking about right now was that the mounds
were built by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I
think we we even mentioned that in the Khokia we
may have. They were believed to have vanished after being
captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter of
(22:57):
this theory, and that's kind of what made what happened
next very suspicious, all Right. So Wyrick was digging near
New York's fifty acre Octagon Mound in eighteen sixty when
he discovered the keystone, which was the first of the
holy stones in the shallow Hole. And the keystone is
basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and it
(23:21):
has Hebrew inscriptions on all four sides, and they read
the Laws of Jehovah, the Word of the Lord, King
of the Earth, and the Holy of Holy. So this
was really really big news because some people thought that
it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other people thought, well,
(23:41):
maybe it's not an ancient Hebrew text, maybe it's a
Masonic keystone because of that shape and everything. It didn't
take long though, for some people to just call it
out as an outright fake. Yes. Charles Whittlesey, for example,
a noteworthy ohio archaeologist, he thought that it was neither
mace son I nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact.
(24:02):
The Hebrew, for example, was thought to be too modern
to be authentic to be from that previous time period
when the Lost Tribes would have been around. So that
November Wyrick gets a little bit more evidence. Maybe he
discovers another stone, the Decalogue Stone, and the Jackson Town
Stone Mound, which is a few miles southeast of Newark,
and it's found in case in a custom made stone box.
(24:25):
Sounds pretty cool, yeah, And it's shaped like a tombstone
that's intricately carved all over with Hebrew letters that convey
an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments, so completely different
from the keystone. On the front side, the inscription lines
an arch that frames the image of a man named Moses,
and the style of Hebrew was some unique archaic style.
(24:47):
They couldn't quite place that. It wasn't the modern style
that they found on the keystone, but it wasn't also
ancient Hebrew, right It wasn't what they knew to be
an ancient Hebrew style that was recognizable. So many people
thought the was a fraud right away too, had too
many scriptural mistakes and a lack of patina that made
people very suspicious. Should have left it in the ground
(25:07):
for longer, like the Cardiff Giant, But it is book
fantastic archaeology. Steven Williams says that the stones feel every
possible archaeological test. Their inscriptions are the only ones of
their kind known and are not correct for the time period. Others, though,
we're wondering, if ancient Hebrews were present in the America's
(25:31):
why can't we find evidence of their settlements? So not
just like why can't we find their their stones and
their inscriptions, but why can't we find anything from their settlement.
It's a good question. One problem with the stout about
the stones, though, is trying to figure out, Okay, if
they're not real, who made them. Of course, some people
thought it could be Wyrick. I read that before Wyric's
(25:52):
death he actually wondered himself if somebody had fooled him.
So it seems unlikely that he would bring that up
if he didn't want to put suspicion on himself. So
archaeologist Brad Lepper believes that it was actually a man
named Reverend John W. McCarty who translated the text on
the keystone for Wyrick overnight. So it just seemed too
fast for him to be able to be too familiar
(26:13):
with it exactly. And the theory is that McCarty hoped
the stones would prove that Adam and Eve were mother
and father to all races, a good argument against slavery. Yeah,
So in eighteen sixty four, two additional Hebrew inscribed stones,
which are now unfortunately lost, were found during the excavation
of a mound on the George A Wilson farm, which
(26:35):
is east of Newark, and people again got really excited.
But soon a local dentist named John H. Nickel claimed
that he himself carved the stones, introduced them into the
excavation with the intention of discrediting the two earlier finds
from Wyrick, of course, and these inscriptions actually dispelled out
(26:57):
his name, so the plan did pretty much were these
new stones, which are so obviously frauds, kind of made
the earlier fine again. It kind of like the card
off effect. All the all the petrified men sort of
make the original one not seemed so great. Hence why
for years this has been believed to be a hoax.
(27:17):
But then attention came back to the story around the
nineteen eighties or so, and there are some now who
believe that the stones are authentic. They say they're just
too detailed and thought out to be hoaxes, and the
fact that they're so different from each other, they're so
unique and distinct. Um, Yeah, I think it was maybe
the decologue you were describing to me earlier you said
(27:38):
that it was just perfectly laid out. You know, there
were no there are no places where the words were
crammed in. Everything was planned. Yeah, it didn't look like
you were just trying to quickly put this together to
pull off some kind of hoax. That looked like something
that had been meticulously done. But today you can decide
for yourself. The visitors can view the Holy Stones at
(27:58):
the Johnston hommerk House Museum in Ohio. So I think
it's only fitting that we leave off with one that's
still kind of hanging in the balance or in question,
because we love to leave you guys with a question
to answer. Um. Even though, as Sarah said when we
started this, these are all true hoaxes we did. This
is not a hoax in itself. Would have been pretty
That would have been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that
(28:19):
some other time, but for now we're going to move
on to listener mail. Our first piece of mail was
from Catherine and she wrote, Hello, Sara Dablina. I'm a
big fan of her podcast and would love to hear
you talk about Bonnie Prince, Charlie or Flora McDonald, the
woman who helped him escape She even has a Highland
(28:40):
dance named after her, Flora McDonald's fancy. I'm enclosing some
rulers quote rulers for you to pass around at work.
Maybe you'll find a future podcast topic on one of them.
I just wanted to say thank you to Catherine for
sending us about five or six rulers. Yeah, they're awesome,
and I think they do have some podcast ideas on
the just wanted to take more than one or keep
(29:02):
them all, but I just took one, just to give
you guys examples. It was like patriots, and then it
would be a big list, starting with Ben Franklin a
picture of him, and then a big list of worldwide patriots.
I think we had women and art, scientists, all sorts
of cool things. So thank you Catherine for those. I
also wanted to read an email from Lori Leadfoot, and
(29:26):
I just I mean, I kind of picked it because
of her nickname, but Lori wrote, just wanted to drop
a quick note to say hi and to thank you.
And then over the road truck driver And finally bought
my first iPod about six months ago. While browsing the
podcast in search of something to listen to, I came
across stuff you missed in history class. Being a fan
of history, I decided to check it out. I finally
(29:47):
caught up with past shows and wanted to let you
know I think you're doing a great job and say
thank you. So I thought i'd read Lorie Leadfoot's email
sort of in tribute to all of the long hall
all drivers we have as listeners. Um, we get a
lot of listeners from folks who are driving trucks, which
I think is so cool. I when I was younger,
(30:07):
I was kind of obsessed with the idea of being
a truck driver. I think it sounds so adventurous to
be driving across country. So I was like the kid
trying to make them honk their horns. Yeah, I did
that as well. So we're glad to hear that we
have so many listeners who are doing the long haul
and learning about history while they're at it. So if
you have any comments, any postcards you want to send us,
(30:31):
go ahead. You can also send us more hoax suggestions.
This was pretty fun. I definitely enjoyed this episode. We're
at History podcast at how Stuff works dot com. I've
noticed lately a lot of people have been confused about
how to contact us. We've gotten things on Twitter. That
is the only email address, so if you want to
send us an email, that's the place to go. History
(30:52):
podcast at how stuff works dot com. But you should
also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter,
and it's in history yep. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about how maybe you could
pull off your own hoax, Not that we encourage that
at all, but we do have an interesting article on
our website called how Lying Works, and it talks about
how you can lie, how you can learn how to lie,
(31:15):
and also how you can learn to spot a lie,
which may be the more valuable skills. Were pitch that part, Yes,
we will pitch that part of it because we do
not condone lying. But you can find that on our
website by searching on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(31:36):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chocolate boarding and I'm fair out.
And we just talked about the famous radio hoax on
a recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the
(00:21):
World's Broadcast. But hoaxes in general were around long before that.
A lot of experts believe that the seventeen hundreds, also
known to some as the Age of Enlightenment, gave birth
to them. Doesn't really make sense, doesn't know it doesn't
I mean you would think that around that time it
would be all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely,
(00:42):
But I like the way that Alex Berza, who is
the curator of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually
calls himself a hoax Burt, which I love hoax. He
put it this way in an interview with a history
magazine in two thousand nine. He said, quote, in order
to be able to perceive a hoax, one needs to
see the world in terms of a contrast between reason
(01:03):
and ignorance, fact and fiction, and that way of thinking
only clearly came into focus in the eighteenth century. So
we're going to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history,
not necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the Worlds,
but ones that fooled a lot of folks just the same.
And we promised we're not pulling any hoaxes on you.
All of these are true historical hoaxes. Yes, not this time,
(01:24):
not this time. So our first one is Cottingly Fairies,
and it started with two little English girls named Frances
Griffith's and her cousin, Elsie Wright, And they were a
couple of cousins and they were basically just trying to
put one over on their parents, as kids sometimes do.
They were ten and sixteen years old at the time, respectively,
and so in nineteen seventeen, the two of them used
(01:47):
to play at the Rights home and Cottingly, which was
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
after a day of play soaking wet after falling into
the brook on the property, and the parents weren't really
pleased with this. They'd grill the girls what happened? Why
do you keep falling into the brook all the time?
And the girl's explanation was that they went down close
(02:10):
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there naturally, right, naturally, so the parents also naturally
weren't buying this at all. So the girls asked to
borrow a camera, and they produced two photos kind of
as proof of their adventures, one with Frances looking toward
the camera and a little troop of fairies kind of
(02:31):
prancing around in front of her, and the second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So Arthur right after this pretty
much he didn't believe them at all. He quit loaning
the girls his camera. So the incident was all but
forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen. And that's when
Arthur's wife, Polly Right, she was pursuing an interest in
the occult and a supernatural at the time, and she
(02:51):
attended a lecture hosted by the local Theosophical Society, which
they come up from time to time in these podcasts.
I've noticed, yeah, whenever we talk about spiritualists and so forth.
But she mentioned the fairy photos when she was there,
and among the people to show a special interest in
these photos was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, our
old friend yes from the who was the real Sherlock
(03:12):
Holmes podcast. Yeah, so Conan Doyle is of course most
famous for for that Sherlock Holmes connection, but he was
also a famous spiritualist at the time too, and a
believer in the supernatural. It was very important to him,
and so he wanted to check out this whole fairy
photo thing because he was conveniently enough working on a
piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. And I think
(03:35):
you mentioned it was a quite serious, scholarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conan Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
wasn't fiction at all, and that's why he wanted to
make sure he had proof before he wrote about this.
So he may have had a few doubts of his own.
So he personally visited the girls and Cottingly along with
Edward Gardner, another leading spiritualist, and they brought their own
(03:57):
cameras along, and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them, just to be sure before
he wrote this piece. And they had taken some measures
at this point to like marking the plates just so
things couldn't be tampered with. Yeah, they wanted to be
extra sure that what they were getting was authentic. But
apparently the test wasn't too hard, because the girls passed
it pretty easily, and some people accepted the photos as genuine,
(04:20):
just as conn and Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including
Elsie's father, author Right, remain skeptical about it. One commentator
put it this way, He said, quote for a true
explanation of these fairy photographs, what is wanted is not
a knowledge of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.
So we see that it didn't take much for a
lot of people to get to the bottom of this,
(04:40):
And some skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites
looked like cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's book.
So that's probably the first thing you'd think too, if
you saw these pictures today, which you can by looking
for them online, they look like nice, little romantic illustrations
of fairies. Yeah, and some people point out that what
we see to day, if you do happen to google
(05:02):
the photos or whatever, you'll notice that these are the
enhanced versions of the photos. So the original photos may
have been a little easier to believe, but probably not
that much. But Conon Doyle did believe this, and in
fact died believing this, and it wasn't until that the
girls finally confessed that four out of five of the
photos were fakes. According to a two thousand four piece
(05:25):
in British Heritage, Francis said of the most famous photo quote,
my heart always thinks when I look at it, when
I think of how it's gone all around the world.
I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies.
But there's one more thing to add to that quote.
While the girls did admit that most of the photos
were faked, they never admitted that the fairies were imaginary,
(05:46):
and to her dying day, Francis swore that the final
photo was real. So well, an interesting little twist for
the end of this hoax, yeah maybe leaves us a
little something to wonder about maybe maybe, yeah, depending on
how you look at it. So our next hoax involves
a historical animal, which I know is a favorite topic
(06:08):
of many listeners, and this one, of course reminded me
of the Mr. Ed theme song too. I couldn't help
but humming into my head or singing in my head
the whole time I was researching this. But around the
turn of the twentieth century, this truly remarkable horse caught
the world's attention. And his name was Clever Hans, and
he was owned by a school teacher named wilhelms On Austin.
(06:33):
And this horse wasn't I mean, he really made Mr
Ed look pretty low key with all of the stuff
he could do. He could do addition and subtraction, multiplication, division.
He could also select any color named to him from
choosing among a group of different colored cloths. And he
couldn't talk and sing like Mr Ed could, but he
could communicate by stamping his hoof on the ground. So
(06:55):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoofs stamps. Yeah, and we're gonna
just twist things entirely here. Put it to a new level.
Hans could even read minds. You didn't have to ask
him a question out loud. You could put the question
to him mentally and he would still get it right.
And to to add even further to this, it didn't
(07:18):
have to be Von Austin who was asking the question.
Anybody could do it and the horse would still get
the answers right. So it wasn't just a simple matter
of a trainer who had secret cues with his animals.
So After initially causing this great sensation in Germany, which
is where Hans lived, he started to get international coverage
(07:39):
when this team of experts they were called the Hans Commission,
examined him to determine if von Austin was perpetuating some
kind of fraud somehow or enough because people were suspicious
of this, right, they thought it was a hoax. Yeah,
people were very suspicious. This was not within the normal
realm of horse abilities, and the experts were pretty prominent men.
(08:00):
There was a circus proprietor and army captain, the director
of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, of veterinary surgeon, and other
guys who were just really familiar with horses and with
horse training and would be able to presumably tell if
something fishy was going on. And after they did their work,
there was a headline printed in the New York Times
on October twod nineteen o four, which read expert commission
(08:24):
decides that the horse actually reasons. So it really was
global news. Yeah, But even more than that, they determined
that the horse was not trained in in the traditional ways. Instead,
Von Austin's techniques were more like those used to teach children,
which makes sense since he is a school teacher. But
some people still weren't convinced by this, and one man,
Oscar Funkst, got Von Austin's permission to come in and
(08:48):
investigate the horse, and after some pretty serious examinations, he
learned two things. One, the horse could only answer questions
in which the answer was all already known to the questioner,
so you can ask, what is twelve divided by three?
But maybe not some more outrageous piece of division. And
(09:08):
he could also only answer unless he could see the questioner.
And so clever Hans was used to being questioned with
somebody right in front of him. If he stood by
his side, he'd try to move his head so he
would be looking at you faith on, and if he
had blinders on, he couldn't answer the question at all.
So this gave fools some ideas about the limits of
(09:29):
Hans's ability, Right, okay, so what did this mean? It
suggested basically that there were some sort of unconscious movements
coming from the questioner, and sure enough, when he looked
more closely, he found that nearly every test question or
would ask a question and then bent his head forward,
which made the horse start tapping and then as soon
(09:51):
as the correct number of taps had occurred, the questioner
would jerk up his head and the horse would stop.
So Funks found that while almost everyone made these movements,
hardly anyone was aware of it. Yeah, so this makes
it kind of a hoax, but kind of not in
a way. People were suspicious of it. That's very hoax like,
But it seems like nobody was trying to perpetuate fraud,
as we'll see in most of our other hoaxes. So
(10:13):
Folks published a book on his findings in nineteen eleven,
and it got a really glowing review from the New
York Times. Although I liked that, the article also noted
quote it detracts nothing from the merit of his being
clever Hans achievements and leaves him as wonderful a horse
as he was before. I e. We still love you know,
(10:34):
we still love Hans. We still think he's great. And
today you might still see mentions of Clever Hans. When
you're reading about animal psychology or articles about animal intelligence research,
you'll see something sometimes called the Clever Hans effect. And
it's something that researchers have to be very careful of
that they are not either willingly misleading the animal or
(10:58):
giving some sort of subcon just cues, or doing it
without even being aware of it. So this actually led
to something kind of useful. Yeah, it dead lead to
something useful, unlike our next entry, which just led to
a very peculiar hoax craze for a few decades there.
It started in eighteen sixty nine when a couple of
(11:20):
well diggers in Cardiff, New York made this startling find
while digging a well in the property of William stub Newell. Yes,
after hitting stone three ft down and clearing off the
top soil, one of them recognized a foot and he said, quote,
I declare some old Indian has been buried here. So
(11:42):
there was an ancient burial here, at least that's what
it seemed. But pretty soon they realized that it wasn't
just the skeleton of a normal man. It was ten
ft long and clearly the remains of some sort of
ancient giant. So Newell got right to work marketing this
fine try and make some money off of his farm.
He set up a tent and charged admission for people
(12:06):
to come and take a peek at the so called
Cardiff Giant, and he bumped it up after attendance was
so good he bumped it up to fifty cents, and
people were coming from all over the area to gawk
and marvel at this strange stone man. Yeah. Here's how
the first president of Cornell, Andrew White, described his own visit.
(12:27):
He said, quote lying in its grave, with a subdued
light from the roof of the tent falling upon it,
and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle,
it produced a most weird effect. An air of great
solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.
Sounds pretty cool, doesn't except that White even himself realized
(12:49):
that the skeleton was clearly made from stone. He actually
realized it wasn't even a very good carving, and that
the two well diggers had would have had no reason
to dig in that very spot, suggesting some sort of
planned fraud. Very suspicious. So we have to backtrack a
little bit to eighteen sixty six to figure out what happened.
(13:10):
And that's when a New York cigar maker named George
hall Or Hole got an idea. He was an accli
Iowa investigating his brother in law for a late payment
on a large shipment of cigars, and while he was
there he got into an argument with the Methodist revivalist
over giants, and he later spent the night quote wondering
about why people would believe these remarkable stories in the
(13:31):
Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a
stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man. Okay,
so that's probably not where most people's train of thought
would go after that argument, but he really runs with
it once the once the thought strikes him, but he
knows that he can't make the giant close to home
because it's got to be secret. It's obviously a ten
(13:54):
foot stone giant. I think it weighed about three thousand
pounds all said and done, would cause quite a sturf.
So in eighteen sixty eight he hires some guys to
quarry a block of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and
just so they don't talk and so it stays secret,
he tells them that it's for some sort of new
Lincoln monument that's going to be going up, and from
(14:16):
there he has his giant block of gypsum shipped to
Chicago and carved again in secret by a German stone cutter.
I think he's he's paid money and sworn to secrecy.
In fact, finally, the finished statue was sent on a
train to Cardiff, where Hole met up with his cousin
Stubbed Newell, and the men buried it on the farm.
(14:38):
So they waited about a year I think to dig
it up right, just so it could get some authentic
dirt scenes around it and and look convincing enough. But
there's a good plan if you if you're going to
go through all the trouble, you might as well put
in that extra year to make it work. But once
the giant was on earth, of the story didn't last
that long. Newell even told some people that it was
(14:59):
a hoax, which seems like a really bad idea if
you're trying to make fifty cents ahead on your farm.
But Whole realized he would have to lock somebody into
buying this giant get a large amount of money up
front before the story broke the fraud, so he sold
the giant to a businessman named David Hannum for twenty
three thousand dollars, and Hannum took it on the road
(15:22):
as kind of a syndicate show. It caught the attention
from there of P. T. Barnum again, our old friend.
He just pops up all the time. He offered to
buy the giant for fifty thousand dollars and hand him refused.
So Barnum, who isn't going to be thwarted by not
possessing the quote authentic giant, decided to build his own
(15:42):
replica and had an agent go to Handhem show make
them covert wax models. And of course all the newspapers
were running stories about the Cardiff Giants, so he had
all of the measurements ready to go, and Um just
started touring his own plastered giant. It did really really well.
To hand him though, is pretty dismissive of this plastic
(16:04):
copy of Barnum's and all of those who paid to
go see it. And he even said there's a sucker
born every minute, which is obviously painfully ironic to hear that.
But my favorite part of this is that it started
kind of a petrified man trend, right, did well? I mean,
it's easy to see how it would too if if
you could make so much money off of having a
(16:27):
petrified man in your backyard. But for a few decades
there there were lots of petrified men turning up giants
or just normal size, and Mark Twain even wrote a
little newspaper article a spoof of finding a petrified man,
and it got picked up by real outlet. So um. Yeah,
for a for a few years there there was a
(16:47):
rush and petrified men, and then they lost their cachet,
you know, yeah, you know, Well, that's what happens when
you find a hoax that works, you tend to see
it kind of over run into the ground. But I
have to say this next one on our list is
one Sarah that I'm really glad did not catch on.
It is about a woman named Mary Toft, and it's
a medical hoax that's been called the top fraud of
(17:08):
the Enlightenment. It started when an englishwoman named Mary Toft,
who was a mother of three already, had a miscarriage
around September of About a month after that, she and
her husband Joshua Toft sent for the doctor, who in
this case was a male midwife named John Howard, because
she was having these full on labor pains. And after
(17:31):
she called in John Howard, she gave birth to a
dead skinned baby rabbit and then proceeded to continue giving
birth to dead rabbits at the rate of about one
per day, and Howard claimed that he could even feel
and see these baby bunnies jumping in the womb before
they died. I know he could see. He claimed that
(17:53):
you could see kind of the bedclothes move over her stomach,
and that it would shake the bed sometimes so this
dead bunny would come out. Yeah, not pleasant at all.
So obviously people are skeptical of the story, and so
people wouldn't think that he was lying. Howard put out
an open invitation for other doctors to come check out
the situation, maybe even deliver a rabbit for themselves, and
(18:14):
see the truth in this pretty invasive yeah it was.
But several people took him up on that, including Nathaniel
Saint Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also the personal
surgeon of King George. The first we have to mention
though St Andre had an interesting resume before he got
into the doctoring business, which maybe makes it so he
(18:35):
wasn't the most qualified person to be the public face
of this. He was originally a dancing and a fencing instructor.
Kind of a strange backstory for him. That is definitely odd.
But what's perhaps most surprising about this whole story in
general is that how many doctors were convinced that the
births were real. I mean, it wasn't just St. Andre, right,
it was some other people too, who really thought that
(18:58):
this was happening. As a kind of proof of this phenomenon,
St Andre didn't experiment in which he put the organs
of the bunnies in water, and it's unclear I guess
as to why that actually provided any proof, but it
was supposed to have been century doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though,
(19:19):
including a Sir Richard manning Ham. And to figure out
what was going on once and for all, Mary was
brought to London and put under a twenty four hour watch,
which pretty soon put a stop to these strange births.
Then they discovered a porter trying to smuggle a rabbit
into Mary at her hotel. Her sister, who was kind
of playing nurse to her at the time. She also
(19:41):
confessed to this, but claimed that they were bringing the
rabbit into her for eating purposes only, not for birthing purposes,
which sounds pretty fishy. Yeah, it didn't look good to
say the least, but Mary, just if you were giving
birth to rabbits, would you really still be eating them?
That is a very good by. I mean, if you're
going to think this out a little bit, that's a
(20:02):
good point, Sarah, I would think that you wouldn't want
to eat meat in general. But apparently she didn't have
a problem with that while she was staying in London,
but she did still claim even after that instant that
she was telling the truth. Finally, though, they had to
resort to threatening her. They said, basically they would do
a painful procedure operate on her the next time she
was about to go into labor. Instead of just letting
(20:23):
the bunnies be born, they would they would do an
operation and examine her uterus. And so at that point
she finally confessed the whole thing was a scam to
get a pension and and live easy for the rest
of her life. Specifically, she said quote, her goal was
to get so good a living that I should never
want as long as I lived, Which is another strange
(20:45):
thing to think about, that you would be pensioned for
the very act of giving birth to baby bunnies. Yeah, well,
it's strange to plan that as a way. I think
to get your your fortune in your future. But she
didn't work alone. She said an accomplice helped her get
the animal parts in return for part of the potential profits.
So someone else may have been involved here, maybe multiple
(21:06):
someone else's. Her husband was probably part of it, at
least a little bit. He I think was implicated in
getting it was found that he had purchased for rabbits. Yeah,
so Mary was charged as a quote to vile, cheat
and impostor and thrown in jail, but she was later
released and the doctors didn't come out of it very well.
Many of their reputations were ruined, and a popular purchase
(21:29):
in the early eighteen hundreds in England was a book
of writings about Toft, which was bound in of course
rabbit skin and one more note about these bunnies. Even
though Mary Toft apparently did not lose her appetite for
rabbit meat while perpetuating this fraud, a lot of people
in England did, and rabbit stew took a little nose
(21:52):
dive in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew. The
story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But the
last story on our list is one that is still
sort of in question. People have called this a hoax
for years, and it's cited as a common example of
a hoax, but there are still some people who think
(22:14):
that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county surveyor and amateur archaeologists named David Wyrick
was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in the
American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about this
these quite recently in the Cohokia podcast, But most people
(22:36):
believe that these mounds were the work of pre Columbian
native civilizations. However, a common belief during this time period
that we're talking about right now was that the mounds
were built by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I
think we we even mentioned that in the Khokia we
may have. They were believed to have vanished after being
captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter of
(22:57):
this theory, and that's kind of what made what happened
next very suspicious, all Right. So Wyrick was digging near
New York's fifty acre Octagon Mound in eighteen sixty when
he discovered the keystone, which was the first of the
holy stones in the shallow Hole. And the keystone is
basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and it
(23:21):
has Hebrew inscriptions on all four sides, and they read
the Laws of Jehovah, the Word of the Lord, King
of the Earth, and the Holy of Holy. So this
was really really big news because some people thought that
it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other people thought, well,
(23:41):
maybe it's not an ancient Hebrew text, maybe it's a
Masonic keystone because of that shape and everything. It didn't
take long though, for some people to just call it
out as an outright fake. Yes. Charles Whittlesey, for example,
a noteworthy ohio archaeologist, he thought that it was neither
mace son I nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact.
(24:02):
The Hebrew, for example, was thought to be too modern
to be authentic to be from that previous time period
when the Lost Tribes would have been around. So that
November Wyrick gets a little bit more evidence. Maybe he
discovers another stone, the Decalogue Stone, and the Jackson Town
Stone Mound, which is a few miles southeast of Newark,
and it's found in case in a custom made stone box.
(24:25):
Sounds pretty cool, yeah, And it's shaped like a tombstone
that's intricately carved all over with Hebrew letters that convey
an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments, so completely different
from the keystone. On the front side, the inscription lines
an arch that frames the image of a man named Moses,
and the style of Hebrew was some unique archaic style.
(24:47):
They couldn't quite place that. It wasn't the modern style
that they found on the keystone, but it wasn't also
ancient Hebrew, right It wasn't what they knew to be
an ancient Hebrew style that was recognizable. So many people
thought the was a fraud right away too, had too
many scriptural mistakes and a lack of patina that made
people very suspicious. Should have left it in the ground
(25:07):
for longer, like the Cardiff Giant, But it is book
fantastic archaeology. Steven Williams says that the stones feel every
possible archaeological test. Their inscriptions are the only ones of
their kind known and are not correct for the time period. Others, though,
we're wondering, if ancient Hebrews were present in the America's
(25:31):
why can't we find evidence of their settlements? So not
just like why can't we find their their stones and
their inscriptions, but why can't we find anything from their settlement.
It's a good question. One problem with the stout about
the stones, though, is trying to figure out, Okay, if
they're not real, who made them. Of course, some people
thought it could be Wyrick. I read that before Wyric's
(25:52):
death he actually wondered himself if somebody had fooled him.
So it seems unlikely that he would bring that up
if he didn't want to put suspicion on himself. So
archaeologist Brad Lepper believes that it was actually a man
named Reverend John W. McCarty who translated the text on
the keystone for Wyrick overnight. So it just seemed too
fast for him to be able to be too familiar
(26:13):
with it exactly. And the theory is that McCarty hoped
the stones would prove that Adam and Eve were mother
and father to all races, a good argument against slavery. Yeah,
So in eighteen sixty four, two additional Hebrew inscribed stones,
which are now unfortunately lost, were found during the excavation
of a mound on the George A Wilson farm, which
(26:35):
is east of Newark, and people again got really excited.
But soon a local dentist named John H. Nickel claimed
that he himself carved the stones, introduced them into the
excavation with the intention of discrediting the two earlier finds
from Wyrick, of course, and these inscriptions actually dispelled out
(26:57):
his name, so the plan did pretty much were these
new stones, which are so obviously frauds, kind of made
the earlier fine again. It kind of like the card
off effect. All the all the petrified men sort of
make the original one not seemed so great. Hence why
for years this has been believed to be a hoax.
(27:17):
But then attention came back to the story around the
nineteen eighties or so, and there are some now who
believe that the stones are authentic. They say they're just
too detailed and thought out to be hoaxes, and the
fact that they're so different from each other, they're so
unique and distinct. Um, Yeah, I think it was maybe
the decologue you were describing to me earlier you said
(27:38):
that it was just perfectly laid out. You know, there
were no there are no places where the words were
crammed in. Everything was planned. Yeah, it didn't look like
you were just trying to quickly put this together to
pull off some kind of hoax. That looked like something
that had been meticulously done. But today you can decide
for yourself. The visitors can view the Holy Stones at
(27:58):
the Johnston hommerk House Museum in Ohio. So I think
it's only fitting that we leave off with one that's
still kind of hanging in the balance or in question,
because we love to leave you guys with a question
to answer. Um. Even though, as Sarah said when we
started this, these are all true hoaxes we did. This
is not a hoax in itself. Would have been pretty
That would have been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that
(28:19):
some other time, but for now we're going to move
on to listener mail. Our first piece of mail was
from Catherine and she wrote, Hello, Sara Dablina. I'm a
big fan of her podcast and would love to hear
you talk about Bonnie Prince, Charlie or Flora McDonald, the
woman who helped him escape She even has a Highland
(28:40):
dance named after her, Flora McDonald's fancy. I'm enclosing some
rulers quote rulers for you to pass around at work.
Maybe you'll find a future podcast topic on one of them.
I just wanted to say thank you to Catherine for
sending us about five or six rulers. Yeah, they're awesome,
and I think they do have some podcast ideas on
the just wanted to take more than one or keep
(29:02):
them all, but I just took one, just to give
you guys examples. It was like patriots, and then it
would be a big list, starting with Ben Franklin a
picture of him, and then a big list of worldwide patriots.
I think we had women and art, scientists, all sorts
of cool things. So thank you Catherine for those. I
also wanted to read an email from Lori Leadfoot, and
(29:26):
I just I mean, I kind of picked it because
of her nickname, but Lori wrote, just wanted to drop
a quick note to say hi and to thank you.
And then over the road truck driver And finally bought
my first iPod about six months ago. While browsing the
podcast in search of something to listen to, I came
across stuff you missed in history class. Being a fan
of history, I decided to check it out. I finally
(29:47):
caught up with past shows and wanted to let you
know I think you're doing a great job and say
thank you. So I thought i'd read Lorie Leadfoot's email
sort of in tribute to all of the long hall
all drivers we have as listeners. Um, we get a
lot of listeners from folks who are driving trucks, which
I think is so cool. I when I was younger,
(30:07):
I was kind of obsessed with the idea of being
a truck driver. I think it sounds so adventurous to
be driving across country. So I was like the kid
trying to make them honk their horns. Yeah, I did
that as well. So we're glad to hear that we
have so many listeners who are doing the long haul
and learning about history while they're at it. So if
you have any comments, any postcards you want to send us,
(30:31):
go ahead. You can also send us more hoax suggestions.
This was pretty fun. I definitely enjoyed this episode. We're
at History podcast at how Stuff works dot com. I've
noticed lately a lot of people have been confused about
how to contact us. We've gotten things on Twitter. That
is the only email address, so if you want to
send us an email, that's the place to go. History
(30:52):
podcast at how stuff works dot com. But you should
also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter,
and it's in history yep. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about how maybe you could
pull off your own hoax, Not that we encourage that
at all, but we do have an interesting article on
our website called how Lying Works, and it talks about
how you can lie, how you can learn how to lie,
(31:15):
and also how you can learn to spot a lie,
which may be the more valuable skills. Were pitch that part, Yes,
we will pitch that part of it because we do
not condone lying. But you can find that on our
website by searching on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(31:36):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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