August 4, 2018 • 29 mins
Today's episode revisits a Sarah and Deblina episode about historical hoaxes. 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 the Cardiff Giant, Clever Hans, the Cottingley Fairies, Mary Toft's bunny births and David Wyrick and the the Newark Holy Stones.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello listeners, and Happy Saturday. Today's archival episode is from
and it was the work of prior hosts Sarah and Bablina.
It's a collection of historical hoaxes, from the Cardiff Giants
to Mary toss claim that she was giving birth to bunnies.
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
(00:25):
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Deblina chokerate Boarding and I'm Sarah and
we just talked about a famous radio hoax on a
recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the World's Broadcast.
But hoaxes in general were around long before that. A
(00:48):
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 No, it doesn't. I mean
you would think that around that time it would be
all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely. But I
like the way that Alex Bruza, who is the curator
of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually calls himself
(01:09):
a hoax Burt, which I love a 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 and ignorance,
fact and fiction, and that way of thinking only clearly
came into focus in the eighteenth century. So we're going
(01:32):
to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history, not
necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the World's, 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,
not this time. So our first one is Coddingly Fairies,
And it started with two little English girls named Frances
(01:54):
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
to play at the Rights home and Coddingly, which was
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
(02:16):
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 grilled 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
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there naturally, right, naturally, So the parents also naturally
(02:40):
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
prancing around in front of her, and a second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So aren't the right? After this
pretty much he didn't believe them at all, he quit
(03:01):
learning the girls his camera, so the incident was all
but forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen, and that's
when Arthur's wife, Pauli Wright, she was pursuing an interest
in the occult and the supernatural at the time, and
she 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.
(03:22):
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
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
(03:43):
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
you mentioned it was a quite serious, gallarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conon Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
(04:04):
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
cameras along and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them just to be sure before
(04:24):
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,
just as Conan, Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including Elsie's father,
(04:46):
author right, remained skeptical about it. One commentator put it
this way, he said, quote for a true explanation of
these very photographs, what is wanted is not a knowledge
of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children. So we
see that it and take much for a lot of
people to get to the bottom of this. And some
skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites looked like
cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's book. So
(05:09):
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 today
if you do happen to google 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
(05:31):
to believe, but probably not that much. But Connon Doyle
did believe this, and in fact died believing this, and
it wasn't until night three that the girls finally confessed
that four out of five of the photos were fakes.
According to a two thousand four piece in British Heritage,
Francis said of the most famous photo quote, my heart
(05:51):
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, and to
her dying day, Frances swore that the final photo was real.
(06:14):
So well, an interesting little twist for the end of
this hoax. Yeah, maybe leaves us a little something to
wonder about that baby. Maybe, yeah, depending on how you
look at it. So our next hoax involves a historical animal,
which I know is a favorite topic of many listeners,
and this one, of course, reminded me of the Mr.
(06:35):
Ed theme song too. I couldn't help but humming it
in my head the 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 Wilhelm von Austin.
(06:55):
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
(07:17):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoof 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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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.
(08:22):
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
(08:46):
commission 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 the 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 Funks, got von Austin's
(09:08):
permission to come in and 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
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 he could also only answer
(09:32):
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 face on, and if he had blinders on, he
couldn't answer the question at all. So this gave Fooks
some ideas about the limits of Hans's abilities, right Okay,
(09:53):
so what did this mean? It suggested basically that there
were some sort of unconscious movements coming from the question ner,
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 as the correct number
(10:13):
of taps had occurred, the questioner would jerk up his
head and the horse would stop. So Folks 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 Folks published a book
(10:37):
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, we still love Hans. We
still think he's great, and today you still see mentions
(11:01):
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 giving some sort of subconscious cues,
(11:22):
or doing it without even being aware of it. So
this actually led to something kind of useful. Yeah, it
did 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
(11:49):
a couple of well diggers in Cardiff, New York made
this startling find while digging a well on 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 there was an
(12:12):
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 to come and
(12:37):
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. He said,
(12:57):
quote lying in its grave, with a subdue 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 that
(13:19):
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. And
(13:39):
that's when a New York cigar maker named George hall
or Hole got an idea. He was an Acti, 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 Bible about giants.
(14:02):
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 foot stone giant.
(14:24):
I think it weighed about three thousand pounds all said
and done, would cause quite a stir 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 there he has
(14:46):
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. So they waited
(15:08):
about a year I think, to dig it up right,
just so it could get some authentic dirt scenes around
it and look convincing enough. But the 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 a hoax, which seems like a
(15:29):
really bad idea if you're trying to make fifty cents
ahead on your farm. But Hole realized he would have
to lock somebody into buying this giant get a large
amount of money up front before the story broke as
a fraud, so he sold the Giant to a businessman
named David Hannum for twenty three thousand dollars and Hannum
(15:50):
took it on the road as kind of a syndicate show.
It caught the attention from there of P. T. Barnum again,
her old friend. He just pops up all the time.
He offered to buy the Giant for fifty thou dollars
and hand him refused. So Barnum, who isn't going to
be thwarted by not possessing the quote authentic giant, decided
(16:11):
to build his own replica and had an agent go
to hand hum show make some covert wax models. And
of course all the newspapers were running stories about the
Cardiff Giants, so we had all of the measurements ready
to go, and Um just started touring his own plastered giant.
It did really well to hand him though, is pretty
(16:31):
dismissive of this plastic 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
(16:52):
would too if if you could make so much money
off of having a petrified man in your backyard. But
for a few decades there there were lots of petrified
men turning up giants or just normal size think 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
(17:15):
years there there was a rush and petrified men, and
then they lost their cache, you know, yeah, you know,
Well that's what happens when you find a hoax that works,
you tend to see it kind of 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
(17:37):
fraud of the Enlightenment. It started when an englishwoman named
Mary Toft, who was a mother of three already had
a miscarriage around September of sev 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
(18:00):
after 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
(18:22):
that 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
(18:42):
themselves and see the truth in this pretty invasive yeah
it was. But several people took him up on that,
including Nathaniel st Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also
the personal surgeon of King George. The first we have
to mention though st Andre had a interesting resume before
he got into the doctoring business, which maybe makes it
(19:04):
so he wasn't the most qualified person to be the
public face of this. He was originally a dancing and
a fencing instructor. H 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
(19:25):
people too, who really thought that 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 good enough eight century doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though,
(19:49):
including a Sir Richard Manningham, 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
(20:10):
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 may just if you were giving
birth to rabbits, would you really still be eating them?
That is a very good point. I mean, if you're
going to think this out a little bit, that's a
(20:31):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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 imposter 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
(21:59):
in the early eight 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
(22:22):
dive in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew that
the story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But
the last story on our list is one that is
(22:43):
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 that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county serve they're an amateur archaeologist named David
Wyrick was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in
(23:06):
the American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about
this these quite recently in the Cookia podcast. But most
people 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 Cohokia.
(23:28):
We may have they were believed to have vanished after
being captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter
of 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
(23:50):
the holy stones in the Shallow Hole. And the keystone
is basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and
it 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 Holies. So
this was really really big news because some people thought
(24:12):
that it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other
people thought, well, 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
(24:36):
was neither Masonic nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact.
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
(24:56):
Stone Mound, which is a few miles southeast of Newark,
and it's found encased in a custom made stone box.
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
(25:17):
an arch that frames the image of a man named Moses,
and the style of Hebrew was some unique archaic style.
They couldn't quite place it. 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 this was a fraud right away too. It had
(25:38):
too many scriptural mistakes and a lack of patina that
made people very suspicious. Should have left it in the
ground for longer like the Cardiff Giant, but it is
book fantastic. Archaeology Steven Williams says that the stones feel
every possible archaeological task. Their inscriptions are the only ones
of their kind known and are not correct for the
(26:01):
time period. Others, though, we're wondering if ancient Hebrews were
present in the America's why can't we find evidence of
their settlements? So not just like why can't we find
their their stones in 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
(26:21):
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 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 Leper believes that it
was actually a man named Reverend John W. McCarty who
(26:44):
translated the text on the keystone for Wyrick overnight, so
it just seemed too fast for him to be able
to do too familiar 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,
(27:07):
were found during the excavation of a mound on the
George A Wilson farm which 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 fines from Wyrick, of course, and
(27:32):
these inscriptions actually just spelled out his name, so the
plan did pretty much work. There's these new stones, which
are so obviously frauds kind of made the earlier fines again,
kind of like the card off effect. All the all
the petrified men sort of make the original one not
seems so great. Hence why for years this has been
(27:53):
believed to be a hoax. 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
(28:14):
me earlier. You said 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. It
looked like something that had been meticulously done. But today
you can decide for yourself. Visitors can view the Holy
(28:34):
Stones at the Johnston homework 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. We don't. That
(28:55):
would have been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that some
other time. Thank you so much for joining us for
this Saturday Classic. Since this is out of the archive.
If you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete now so here is our current
contact information. We are at history podcast at how stuff
(29:17):
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Hello listeners, and Happy Saturday. Today's archival episode is from
and it was the work of prior hosts Sarah and Bablina.
It's a collection of historical hoaxes, from the Cardiff Giants
to Mary toss claim that she was giving birth to bunnies.
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
(00:25):
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Deblina chokerate Boarding and I'm Sarah and
we just talked about a famous radio hoax on a
recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the World's Broadcast.
But hoaxes in general were around long before that. A
(00:48):
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 No, it doesn't. I mean
you would think that around that time it would be
all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely. But I
like the way that Alex Bruza, who is the curator
of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually calls himself
(01:09):
a hoax Burt, which I love a 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 and ignorance,
fact and fiction, and that way of thinking only clearly
came into focus in the eighteenth century. So we're going
(01:32):
to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history, not
necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the World's, 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,
not this time. So our first one is Coddingly Fairies,
And it started with two little English girls named Frances
(01:54):
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
to play at the Rights home and Coddingly, which was
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
(02:16):
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 grilled 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
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there naturally, right, naturally, So the parents also naturally
(02:40):
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
prancing around in front of her, and a second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So aren't the right? After this
pretty much he didn't believe them at all, he quit
(03:01):
learning the girls his camera, so the incident was all
but forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen, and that's
when Arthur's wife, Pauli Wright, she was pursuing an interest
in the occult and the supernatural at the time, and
she 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.
(03:22):
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
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
(03:43):
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
you mentioned it was a quite serious, gallarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conon Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
(04:04):
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
cameras along and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them just to be sure before
(04:24):
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,
just as Conan, Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including Elsie's father,
(04:46):
author right, remained skeptical about it. One commentator put it
this way, he said, quote for a true explanation of
these very photographs, what is wanted is not a knowledge
of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children. So we
see that it and take much for a lot of
people to get to the bottom of this. And some
skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites looked like
cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's book. So
(05:09):
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 today
if you do happen to google 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
(05:31):
to believe, but probably not that much. But Connon Doyle
did believe this, and in fact died believing this, and
it wasn't until night three that the girls finally confessed
that four out of five of the photos were fakes.
According to a two thousand four piece in British Heritage,
Francis said of the most famous photo quote, my heart
(05:51):
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, and to
her dying day, Frances swore that the final photo was real.
(06:14):
So well, an interesting little twist for the end of
this hoax. Yeah, maybe leaves us a little something to
wonder about that baby. Maybe, yeah, depending on how you
look at it. So our next hoax involves a historical animal,
which I know is a favorite topic of many listeners,
and this one, of course, reminded me of the Mr.
(06:35):
Ed theme song too. I couldn't help but humming it
in my head the 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 Wilhelm von Austin.
(06:55):
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
(07:17):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoof 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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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.
(08:22):
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
(08:46):
commission 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 the 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 Funks, got von Austin's
(09:08):
permission to come in and 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
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 he could also only answer
(09:32):
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 face on, and if he had blinders on, he
couldn't answer the question at all. So this gave Fooks
some ideas about the limits of Hans's abilities, right Okay,
(09:53):
so what did this mean? It suggested basically that there
were some sort of unconscious movements coming from the question ner,
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 as the correct number
(10:13):
of taps had occurred, the questioner would jerk up his
head and the horse would stop. So Folks 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 Folks published a book
(10:37):
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, we still love Hans. We
still think he's great, and today you still see mentions
(11:01):
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 giving some sort of subconscious cues,
(11:22):
or doing it without even being aware of it. So
this actually led to something kind of useful. Yeah, it
did 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
(11:49):
a couple of well diggers in Cardiff, New York made
this startling find while digging a well on 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 there was an
(12:12):
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 to come and
(12:37):
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. He said,
(12:57):
quote lying in its grave, with a subdue 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 that
(13:19):
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. And
(13:39):
that's when a New York cigar maker named George hall
or Hole got an idea. He was an Acti, 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 Bible about giants.
(14:02):
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 foot stone giant.
(14:24):
I think it weighed about three thousand pounds all said
and done, would cause quite a stir 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 there he has
(14:46):
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. So they waited
(15:08):
about a year I think, to dig it up right,
just so it could get some authentic dirt scenes around
it and look convincing enough. But the 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 a hoax, which seems like a
(15:29):
really bad idea if you're trying to make fifty cents
ahead on your farm. But Hole realized he would have
to lock somebody into buying this giant get a large
amount of money up front before the story broke as
a fraud, so he sold the Giant to a businessman
named David Hannum for twenty three thousand dollars and Hannum
(15:50):
took it on the road as kind of a syndicate show.
It caught the attention from there of P. T. Barnum again,
her old friend. He just pops up all the time.
He offered to buy the Giant for fifty thou dollars
and hand him refused. So Barnum, who isn't going to
be thwarted by not possessing the quote authentic giant, decided
(16:11):
to build his own replica and had an agent go
to hand hum show make some covert wax models. And
of course all the newspapers were running stories about the
Cardiff Giants, so we had all of the measurements ready
to go, and Um just started touring his own plastered giant.
It did really well to hand him though, is pretty
(16:31):
dismissive of this plastic 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
(16:52):
would too if if you could make so much money
off of having a petrified man in your backyard. But
for a few decades there there were lots of petrified
men turning up giants or just normal size think 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
(17:15):
years there there was a rush and petrified men, and
then they lost their cache, you know, yeah, you know,
Well that's what happens when you find a hoax that works,
you tend to see it kind of 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
(17:37):
fraud of the Enlightenment. It started when an englishwoman named
Mary Toft, who was a mother of three already had
a miscarriage around September of sev 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
(18:00):
after 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
(18:22):
that 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
(18:42):
themselves and see the truth in this pretty invasive yeah
it was. But several people took him up on that,
including Nathaniel st Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also
the personal surgeon of King George. The first we have
to mention though st Andre had a interesting resume before
he got into the doctoring business, which maybe makes it
(19:04):
so he wasn't the most qualified person to be the
public face of this. He was originally a dancing and
a fencing instructor. H 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
(19:25):
people too, who really thought that 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 good enough eight century doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though,
(19:49):
including a Sir Richard Manningham, 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
(20:10):
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 may just if you were giving
birth to rabbits, would you really still be eating them?
That is a very good point. I mean, if you're
going to think this out a little bit, that's a
(20:31):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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 imposter 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
(21:59):
in the early eight 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
(22:22):
dive in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew that
the story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But
the last story on our list is one that is
(22:43):
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 that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county serve they're an amateur archaeologist named David
Wyrick was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in
(23:06):
the American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about
this these quite recently in the Cookia podcast. But most
people 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 Cohokia.
(23:28):
We may have they were believed to have vanished after
being captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter
of 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
(23:50):
the holy stones in the Shallow Hole. And the keystone
is basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and
it 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 Holies. So
this was really really big news because some people thought
(24:12):
that it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other
people thought, well, 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
(24:36):
was neither Masonic nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact.
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
(24:56):
Stone Mound, which is a few miles southeast of Newark,
and it's found encased in a custom made stone box.
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
(25:17):
an arch that frames the image of a man named Moses,
and the style of Hebrew was some unique archaic style.
They couldn't quite place it. 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 this was a fraud right away too. It had
(25:38):
too many scriptural mistakes and a lack of patina that
made people very suspicious. Should have left it in the
ground for longer like the Cardiff Giant, but it is
book fantastic. Archaeology Steven Williams says that the stones feel
every possible archaeological task. Their inscriptions are the only ones
of their kind known and are not correct for the
(26:01):
time period. Others, though, we're wondering if ancient Hebrews were
present in the America's why can't we find evidence of
their settlements? So not just like why can't we find
their their stones in 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
(26:21):
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 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 Leper believes that it
was actually a man named Reverend John W. McCarty who
(26:44):
translated the text on the keystone for Wyrick overnight, so
it just seemed too fast for him to be able
to do too familiar 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,
(27:07):
were found during the excavation of a mound on the
George A Wilson farm which 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 fines from Wyrick, of course, and
(27:32):
these inscriptions actually just spelled out his name, so the
plan did pretty much work. There's these new stones, which
are so obviously frauds kind of made the earlier fines again,
kind of like the card off effect. All the all
the petrified men sort of make the original one not
seems so great. Hence why for years this has been
(27:53):
believed to be a hoax. 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
(28:14):
me earlier. You said 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. It
looked like something that had been meticulously done. But today
you can decide for yourself. Visitors can view the Holy
(28:34):
Stones at the Johnston homework 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. We don't. That
(28:55):
would have been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that some
other time. Thank you so much for joining us for
this Saturday Classic. Since this is out of the archive.
If you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete now so here is our current
contact information. We are at history podcast at how stuff
(29:17):
works dot com, and then we're at missed in the History.
All over social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
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and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.