As estimates of the death toll rose in the days following the 9/11 attacks, enormous amounts of sympathy and media attention flowed out towards those who had lost loved ones in the attack. Those who had participated in rescue efforts were hailed as national heroes. But simultaneously, many people (motivated, perhaps, by a desire for sympathy or attention) fabricated tales of phony heroics and lost loved ones in the weeks and months following 9/11. Listed are a few of the more notable cases of these phony 9/11 tales: More→

An almanac released by Isaac Bickerstaff in February 1708 predicted that a rival astrologer, John Partridge, would die on March 29 of that year. On March 31st Bickerstaff released a follow-up pamphlet announcing that his prediction had come true. Partridge was dead.

However, Partridge was actually still very much alive. He was woken on April 1st by a sexton outside his window announcing the news of his death. Isaac Bickerstaff was actually a pseudonym for Jonathan Swift, who would later become famous as the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s intention was to embarrass and discredit Partridge, apparently because he was annoyed by the astrologer’s attacks upon the church. More→

Benjamin Franklin published a highly successful, yearly almanac from 1732 to 1758. He called it Poor Richard’s Almanac, adopting the literary persona of "Poor" Richard Saunders, who was supposedly a hen-pecked, poverty-stricken scholar.

In the first year of its publication, Franklin included a prediction stating that rival almanac-writer Titan Leeds would die on "Oct. 17, 1733, 3:29 P.M., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury."

The prediction was intended as a joke. Nevertheless, Leeds took offense at it and chastised Saunders (Franklin) for it in his own almanac.

Franklin responded by turning the death of Leeds into a running joke. When the date and time of the prediction arrived, and Leeds did not die, Franklin declared that Leeds actually had died, but that someone had usurped his name and was now using it to falsely publish his almanac.

In the following years Franklin continued to insist Leeds was dead until finally, in 1738, Leeds actually did die. This prompted Franklin to congratulate the men who had usurped Leeds’s name for finally deciding to end their pretense.

Franklin adapted the Titan Leeds hoax from Jonathan Swift’s similar Bickerstaff hoax of 1708.

The December 1845 edition of the American Whig Review contained an account of an unusual experiment designed to test whether hypnotism could delay the arrival of death. According to the article, a terminally ill patient, M. Ernest Valdemar, who only had hours left to live, was placed in a trance by a hypnotist. The effect was quite remarkable. Valdemar appeared to go into a state of suspended animation, moving only in response to the hypnotist's commands. He remained in this state for over a day, much to the surprise of his doctors who hadn't given him that long to live. Then Valdemar's pulse stopped and his breathing ceased. He was dead, but his brain remained alive, bound to the will of the hypnotist. Valdemar could gurgle out brief responses to questions.

For seven months Valdemar remained in this condition, halfway between death and life, until finally the doctors agreed the trial had gone on long enough. The hypnotist gave the command for the patient to wake from the trance. As he did so the man's body immediately collapsed inwards, disintegrating into a puddle of "detestable putridity."

The account of this experiment was widely reprinted both in America and in Europe. A prominent Boston hypnotist, Robert Collyer, declared that he had no doubt of the truth of the case, since he himself had once brought a man back to life who had died from overdrinking.

However, the article was actually a piece of fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. When a Scottish correspondent wrote to Poe inquiring about the veracity of the experiment, Poe replied bluntly, "Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case."

During the 1890s reports began to emerge from Bosnia (at the time, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) of peasants, innocent of any crime, surrendering themselves to the authorities with the request that they be beheaded. When the authorities investigated, they discovered that the peasants had heard a rumor alleging that the wealthy Austrian banker Albert Salomon von Rothschild had been sentenced to death for some crime and had offered a million florins to anyone willing to undergo the penalty for him. More→

In 1939 a secretive cult known as the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians made headlines when its leader, James Bernard Schafer, announced their intention to conduct an unusual experiment. They were going to raise an immortal baby. More→

In 1943 the body of a British officer, Major William Martin, was discovered off the coast of Spain, near Huelva. British diplomats strongly requested that all documents found with the body be returned to them, and the Spanish government eventually complied. But upon examination, it was obvious the documents had been opened and read before their return. This was exactly what the British had hoped would happen, because Major Martin did not exist. He was part of a military hoax, codenamed Operation Mincemeat, designed to fool the Germans.

The British military had obtained a cadaver, chained a briefcase containing supposedly top-secret papers to its wrist, and dropped it in the sea off the coast of Spain. The plan was that the Germans, via the Spanish, would find the body and read the fake papers. The papers stated that the Allies' planned invasion of southern Europe would begin with an attack on Greece and Sardinia. In reality, the Allies planned to attack Sicily first. The hoax was successful. When the Allies launched their offensive on Sicily, most of the heavy German equipment had been moved to defend these other locations.

Ewen Montagu, the British officer who devised the operation, later wrote a book about it titled The Man Who Never Was. The book was subsequently made into a movie.

In the Fall of 1969 a rumor swept around the world alleging that Paul McCartney, singer and bassist for the Beatles, was dead. In fact, that he had died three years ago on November 9, 1966 in a fiery car crash while heading home from the EMI recording studios. Supposedly the surviving band members, fearful of the effect his death might have on their careers, secretly replaced him with a double named William Campbell (an orphan who had won a Paul McCartney lookalike contest in Edinburgh). However, they also planted clues in their later albums to let fans know the truth, that Paul was dead. More→

In 1970, scientists researching the link between diet and heart disease visited the small town of Vilcabamba, located high in the Ecuadorian Andes. The scientists included Dr. Alexander Leaf of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Harold Elrick of the University of California at San Diego, and a group from the University of Quito.

The scientists found that the residents of Vilcabamba, who were principally of European descent, had very low cholesterol levels and very few of them ever suffered from heart disease. But more remarkable was the longevity of the Vilcabambans. Many of the town residents claimed to be over 100 years old. A few of them stated their age as being over 140 years old. These ages appeared to be confirmed by birth and baptismal records. More→

On January 2, 1980 the New York Times announced the death of Alan Abel on its obituary page. It provided a flattering account of his career. The obituary read, in part:


Unfortunately for the Times, Abel was not dead. The Times learned this when Abel held a press conference the next day in which he revealed that the news of his death was a hoax engineered by himself and a team of twelve accomplices. It is reported that the editor of the Times was so mad at the deception, that he vowed to never print Abel's name again. This was a vow the editor was unable to keep.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Russian government struggled to mend its ailing economy, but the nation's financial situation remained dire. In November 1991, Forbes FYI, an American business magazine, revealed just how hopeless the Russian economic situation had become. It reported that the Russian government, desperate for foreign currency, had decided to sell the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin to the highest bidder. The body had been on public display in a Red Square mausoleum for decades. The bidding would start at $15 million.

ABC News and USA Today both repeated the story. Subsequently the editor of Forbes FYI revealed that it was a hoax. Russian Interior Minister Viktor Barrannikov denounced the joke as "an impudent lie."

In March 1999, an ad appeared in a variety of weekly magazines, such as the L.A. Weekly and the Village Voice. It read, "Death got you down? At last an alternative! www.finalcurtain.com"

The website that it led to announced the imminent launch of a novel kind of cemetery. At the Final Curtain Cemetery artists would be allowed to design their own graves before they died. The result would be a cemetery that would be part memorial, part art gallery, and part theme park. As the website explained:

More→

During the summer of 1999 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of such classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude, was treated for lymphatic cancer. Following this, there were persistent rumors about his failing health.

On May 29, 2000 these rumors appeared to be confirmed when a poem signed with his name appeared in the Peruvian daily La Republica. The poem, titled "La Marioneta" or "The Puppet," was said to be a farewell poem Garcia Marquez had written and sent out to his closest friends on account of his worsening condition... More→

The comedian Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984. But twenty years later, on May 16, 2004, a press release announced that he was still alive and living in New York City on the Upper West Side. Simultaneously, a blog authored by Kaufman appeared online. The press release explained that Kaufman had merely faked his death twenty years ago. But now he was back! During his life Kaufman had been fascinated with the idea of faking his death, and had even promised that if he did 'pull an Elvis' he would return 20 years later to tell everyone about it. Consequently there was a flurry of speculation on the internet about whether Kaufman really had returned from the dead. There is no evidence he had. After several weeks, the joke got old for whoever was behind it, and new posts stopped appearing on Kaufman's blog.