April Fools Day - 1844
Type: April Fool’s Day Hoaxes. Summary: Notable hoaxes perpetrated on April Fool’s Day, 1844.April Fool’s Day Content in the Museum of HoaxesTop 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes—The Origin of April Fool’s Day—April Fool’s Hoaxes by Year1698 | 1708 | 1844 | 1860 | 1866 | 1878 | 1888 | 1900…

April Fools Day - 1860
Type: April Fool’s Day Hoaxes. Summary: Notable hoaxes perpetrated on April Fool’s Day, 1860.April Fool’s Day Content in the Museum of HoaxesTop 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes—The Origin of April Fool’s Day—April Fool’s Hoaxes by Year1698 | 1708 | 1844 | 1860 | 1866 | 1878 | 1888 | 1900…

April Fools Day - 1866
Type: April Fool’s Day Hoaxes. Summary: Notable hoaxes perpetrated on April Fool’s Day, 1866.April Fool’s Day Content in the Museum of HoaxesTop 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes—The Origin of April Fool’s Day—April Fool’s Hoaxes by Year1698 | 1708 | 1844 | 1860 | 1866 | 1878 | 1888 | 1900…

Bequest of Francis Douce
Type: A practical joke played from the grave. Summary: Sixty-six years after his death, a scholar lets his colleagues know how he really felt about them. Francis Douce, portrait by James BarryFrancis Douce (1757-1834) was a wealthy English antiquarian, known for his collection of books, prints, drawings, coins, and artifacts.…

Berners Street Hoax
Theodore Hook (1788-1841)In 1810 London was the largest, wealthiest city in the world, linked by trade with every continent, and fed by the manufacturing might of northern British cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. Almost anything could be obtained in its shops, and on November 10 all of this mercantile…

Calaveras Skull
Type: Hoax. Summary: A practical joke by miners confused scientists for decades. Front view of the Calaveras SkullOn February 25, 1866 workers found a human skull buried deep inside a mine on Bald Mountain in Calaveras County, California. The skull was located 130 feet below the surface, beneath a layer…

Civil War Gold Hoax
Type: Stockmarket Hoax. Summary: A plot to manipulate the price of gold during the American Civil War. Joseph Howard, city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. (Image from Harper’s Weekly, June 4, 1864.)It was May, 1864. Grant was closing in on Lee in Virginia. New Yorkers were growing hopeful that the…

Empire City Massacre
Type: Media Hoax. Summary: Mark Twain invented a tale of a gruesome murder in order to embarrass the San Francisco newspapers. In 1863 San Francisco newspapers were spilling a lot of ink lambasting mining ventures that were cooking their books, and these same papers were encouraging investors to put their…

Fortsas Bibliohoax
Cover of the Fortsas CatalogJean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he…

Great Chess Automaton
Type: Technology Hoax. Summary: Centuries before IBM built Deep Blue, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed was a “thinking machine” that could play chess against human opponents. A woodcut of the Turk that accompanied Poe’s 1836 article. According to Poe it was a ‘tolerable representation’ of the automaton.…

Joice Heth
Type: Show-business hoax.    Summary: An elderly black woman claimed to be the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. A pamphlet advertising the exhibition of Joice HethJoice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161 year…

Journal of Charles LeRaye
Title page of A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, And LouisianaIn 1812 a Boston printer published an anonymously authored book titled A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana. Appended to this book was a section described as “An Interesting Journal of…

Locals - 19th Century Newspaper Hoaxes
The creation of the penny press during the 1830s completely changed the character of the news business. The older six-penny papers had confined themselves to business and political news, but the penny papers discovered that there was a huge market for local news: stories about neighborhood crimes, police reports, social…

Miscegenation Hoax
Type: Political “dirty trick” campaign. Summary: The origin of the word ‘miscegenation’ from a nineteenth-century hoax. Shortly before Christmas, 1863 a 72-page pamphlet appeared for sale on newsstands in New York City. It cost a quarter and was titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to…

Monkeys Pick Cotton
Type: Urban Legend. Summary: A nineteenth-century rumor described an experiment in which a Southern planter trained monkeys to pick cotton. Monkeys picking pecans (see end of article). Throughout the nineteenth century a rumor circulated in the southern states of America alleging that a planter had experimented with training monkeys to…

New York Sawed in Half
During the Summer of 1824, a number of butchers and tradesmen used to meet every afternoon in the New York City neighborhood of Mulberry and Spring Streets to talk about the news of the day. One afternoon this group began discussing a popular rumor they had heard about the Island…

Nondescript
Type: Taxidermical Hoax. Summary: A nineteenth-century British naturalist claimed to have discovered a strange creature in the forests of South America. The Nondescript of Charles WatertonWhen Charles Waterton, a famous English eccentric and naturalist, returned to England in 1821 from an expedition to Guiana, he had with him hundreds of…

Paulding County Hyena
On February 6, 1858 readers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer read the following shocking news: A HYENA LOOSE IN PAULDING COUNTY. — On Wednesday morning last, between three and four o’clock, a striped hyena broke loose from his cage in the barn of Mr. Eli Watson, a few miles west…

Petrified Man
Type: Media Hoax. Summary: A newspaper article published in 1862 described the discovery of a petrified human body. The following news report appeared in the Territorial Enterprise, Virginia City, Nevada’s leading newspaper, on October 4, 1862: A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly…

Princess Caraboo
Type: Impostor Summary: A nineteenth-century British maid pretended to be a princess from the exotic land of Javasu. Princess Caraboo, by Edward BirdOn Thursday April 3, 1817, a strange woman appeared in Almondsbury, a small town near Bristol in Gloucestershire, England. She was five foot two, extremely attractive, and wore…

Railways and Revolvers in Georgia
Type: Media Hoax. Summary: A London newspaper provoked trans-Atlantic controversy when it reported that a series of brutal killings had occurred on a Georgia train. American society has long had a reputation for violence. Therefore, when in 1856 the London Times received a letter from an Englishman living in America…

Roorback
Type: Political dirty trick. Summary: A “roorback” is a political dirty trick. The term originated during the American presidential campaign of 1844. The term roorback refers to a fictitious claim invented to smear a political opponent, i.e. a political dirty trick. In 1940 the Chicago Tribune offered this definition: “A…

Stock Exchange Hoax of 1814
Lord Cochrane, possible stock manipulatorThe Napoleonic wars were a long and trying experience for the British. Therefore, when on February 21, 1814 a man wearing the uniform of a British military officer showed up at an inn on the coast of the English Channel announcing that the war was over,…

Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley
Type: Media Hoax. Summary: In 1867 Nevada journalist Dan De Quille described some stones with a curious property—whenever separated from each other they spontaneously moved back together. On October 26, 1867 a story appeared in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise newspaper describing some unusual stones recently found in the Pahranagat Valley of…

Vrain Lucas
Type: Forgery. Summary: The counterfeits of a successful forger strained credulity. Few accounts of forgery are as strange as the case of Vrain Lucas. Lucas’s career as a forger began in 1851 when he met the esteemed French mathematician Michel Chasles. Lucas showed the mathematician a few letters he claimed…