According to legend, Pope Joan was a woman who concealed her gender and ruled as pope for two years, from 853-855 ad. Her identity was exposed when, riding one day from St. Peter's to the Lateran, she stopped by the side of the road and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave birth to a child. The legend is unconfirmed. Skeptics note that the first references to Pope Joan only appear hundreds of years after her supposed reign. However, supporters argue that the Church may have attempted to erase all evidence of her existence from the historical record. More→

Martin Guerre, a French peasant, married Bertrande de Rols in 1538. She bore him one son. But in 1548, after a falling out with his father, Martin disappeared. Eight years passed without any sight of him. Because of Catholic law, Bertrande could not remarry. But in 1556 Martin suddenly returned. Or did he?

The man who claimed to be Martin Guerre was similar in appearance and knew many details of Guerre's life. Bertrande accepted him as her husband, and lived with him for three years, bearing him two children. But when the new Martin sued his uncle for part of the inheritance of his father, the uncle became suspicious and accused him of being an impostor. Specifically, the uncle claimed that the new Martin was actually Arnaud du Tilh, a man from a nearby town.

The case went through a series of trials and appeals. The court seemed to be favoring the authenticity of the new Martin, until suddenly the original Martin Guerre showed up. He had been serving in the Spanish army, where he had lost a leg.

The fake Martin Guerre was executed. The real one eventually reconciled with his wife, who bore him another child.

A film based on the story of Martin Guerre was released in 1982.

During the early eighteenth-century a white-skinned, blond-haired man showed up in northern Europe claiming to be from the island of Formosa (Taiwan). He attracted the attention of curious scholars and members of high society with his tales of the bizarre practices of Formosa, such as the supposed annual sacrifice of 20,000 young boys to appease the gods. Luckily for him, no one in Europe knew what a Taiwanese person should look like. He was able to keep up his masquerade for four years before finally being exposed.
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Between April and October 1722 a series of letters appeared in the New England Courant written by a middle-aged widow who called herself Silence Dogood. In her correspondence she poked fun at various aspects of life in colonial America, such as the drunkenness of locals, religious hypocrisy, the persecution of women, the fashion for hoop petticoats, and particularly the pretensions of Harvard College.

Silence Dogood's letters became quite popular. Some of the male readers of the Courant were so taken with her that they offered to marry her. But unfortunately for these would-be suitors, Silence Dogood did not exist. She was the invention of sixteen year-old Benjamin Franklin, who was working at the time as an apprentice to his older brother, James, a Boston printer.

Franklin initially concealed his authorship of the letters from his brother. When he finally confessed to his brother that he was the author, his brother grew quite displeased, fearing that all the compliments paid to Silence Dogood would make young Benjamin grow vain. Soon after this, Franklin decided to run away and seek his fortune in Philadelphia.

Silence Dogood was the first of many hoaxes Franklin perpetrated throughout his life. More→

On Thursday April 3, 1817, a strange woman appeared in Almondsbury, a small town outside of Bristol, England. She wore a black shawl twisted turban-style around her head and had to communicate via hand gestures because she spoke no known language. She was initially sent to the Overseer of the Poor, but was subsequently taken in by a wealthy couple, Mr. and Mrs. Worrall, who found her fascinating. Slowly her story was pieced together, with the help of a sailor who was passing through the town and claimed to speak her language. She said that she was Princess Caraboo, from the faraway island of Javasu. She had been abducted from her home by sailors and, after a long and arduous journey, had escaped from her captors by jumping overboard in the English Channel and swimming to shore. More→

Joice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Heth entertained audiences with tales about the young George Washington, and her exhibition drew substantial attention.

When the public's interest in her waned, Barnum rekindled its curiosity by spreading a rumor that Joice Heth was actually not a person at all, but instead a mechanical automaton. People then revisited the exhibit to determine for themselves whether she was an automaton or a real person. Barnum displayed her until February 19, 1836, on which day she died.

But even in death Barnum continued to use her to draw crowds. He allowed a public autopsy to be performed on her body, supposedly for the purpose of verifying her age. Unfortunately for Barnum, the doctor who performed the autopsy declared she could not have been older than eighty. Barnum struck back by planting a story in the New York Herald (February 27, 1836) explaining that the body that had been autopsied had not actually been the body of Joice Heth.

Barnum's collaborator in the scheme, Levi Lyman, later added another chapter to the saga by supplying the Herald with what he claimed was the real Joice Heth story. This ran in the Herald beginning on September 8, 1836 in a series of six articles. In this article, Lyman claimed that Barnum had discovered the elderly black woman on a plantation and had taught her to pretend she had been George Washington's nurse. But again, this story was also false. The truth was that Barnum had not found Heth on his own. Instead, he had simply bought the rights to exhibit Joice Heth from another showman. He had never coached her.

In 1854 a wealthy young aristocrat named Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne disappeared at sea and was presumed dead. His distraught mother, refusing to believe he was actually dead, placed ads in newspapers around the world, seeking information about his whereabouts.

In 1866 she received a response from an Australian man who claimed to be her son. What followed was one of the most intriguing and debated cases of (possible) impersonation of all time.

There were dramatic differences between Roger Tichborne and the Australian claimant. Roger Tichborne had weighed 125 pounds and spoke French as well as English when he disappeared. The Australian man, by contrast, weighed over 300 pounds and spoke no French. However, the facial features of the two men were similar.

Lady Tichborne embraced the Australian man as her long-lost son, making him the full heir to her estate. But when she died, the other heirs lost no time in bringing suit against him to stop him from gaining the inheritance. On the witness stand he proved unable to remember basic facts about the past of Roger Tichborne, and the court ruled that he was a fraud. But as he sat in jail for the next ten years, he lost a great deal of weight and began to resemble Roger Tichborne more and more. Many began to suspect that he really was the long-lost Roger.

It seems almost certain that the Australian man was a fraud, but when he died in 1898 the family allowed the name “Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne” to be inscribed on his tombstone.

Lord Gordon-Gordon was the most famous alias of a nineteenth-century imposter whose specialty was posing as a wealthy Scottish landowner. He did this so well that he succeeded in convincing many people who really were wealthy to trust him with their money, which he then spent. His most famous victim was the railroad developer/robber baron Jay Gould, for which reason Gordon-Gordon is sometimes referred to as the "robber of the robber barons". The peak of Lord Gordon-Gordon's criminal career were the two years 1871 and 1872. He spent the next two years on the run, before committing suicide in 1874. More→

Between 1897 and 1904, Cassie Chadwick scammed millions of dollars from Ohio banks by claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. The banks, believing they could charge Carnegie high interest rates, happily loaned her the money without asking too many questions.

Chadwick had used a simple ruse to lay the groundwork for her scam. She had asked a Cleveland lawyer to accompany her to Carnegie's house. He waited in the carriage while she went inside to conduct her business. On the way out, she "accidentally" dropped a promissory note for $2 million, signed by Carnegie. When the lawyer saw the note, she told him her secret — that she was Carnegie's daughter — but swore him to secrecy, confident he would immediately break his vow and tell every banker in Ohio, which he promptly did. In reality, the note was forged and the only business Chadwick had conducted inside Carnegie's house had been to chat with his maid.

Chadwick's con fell apart in 1904 when a bank demanded she repay a loan of $190,800. She couldn't repay, and finally bankers thought to ask Carnegie if she really was his daughter. Carnegie's reply: "I have never heard of Mrs. Chadwick."

Chadwick was sentenced to over ten years in prison, but died in jail after two and a half years.

On October 16, 1906, an out-of-work German shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt donned a second-hand military captain's uniform he had bought in a store, walked out into the street, and assumed control of a company of soldiers marching past. He led them to the town hall of Köpenick, a small suburb of Berlin, arrested the mayor and the treasurer on charges of embezzlement, and took possession of 4,000 marks from the town treasury. He then disappeared with the money. The incident became famous as a symbol of the blind obedience of German soldiers to authority — even fake authority.

The police tracked him down nine days later, and he was sentenced to four years in jail. But he proved to be such a likable character (and popular hero) that the Kaiser pardoned Voigt after he had served less than two years. Voigt subsequently pursued a career in show business, where he entertained audiences by re-enacting his stunt on the stage.

In the early 1930s the French government informed the German reich that it had discharged all the prisoners of war taken during World War I. All soldiers still missing had to be presumed dead. But in May 1932 this statement appeared to be contradicted when a soldier, Oscar Daubmann, returned to Germany, claiming he had spent the last sixteen years in a French prisoner-of-war camp.

Daubmann told a dramatic tale of imprisonment and escape. He said he had been captured by the French in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme and was placed in a prison camp. After killing a guard during an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was sentenced to 20 years hard labor and transferred to Algeria. There he was tortured, starved, and kept in solitary confinement. Finally, years later, he was transferred to the prison tailor shop on account of good behavior, and from there was able to make a successful escape. He walked 3000 miles along the coast and was picked up by an Italian steamer that took him to Naples. He then returned to Germany. More→

The Third Eye, by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was first published in 1956. It purported to be his autobiographical account of growing up in Tibet and studying Tibetan Buddhism.

Rampa claimed he had been born into a wealthy Tibetan family and had studied in Lhasa to become a lama. He had then undergone an operation to open up the "third eye" in the middle of his forehead. This operation had bestowed upon him amazing psychic powers. More→

Many child stars achieve success and stability as adults, but some child stars go from stardom to the opposite extreme of anonymity and failure, as if dragged down by the weight of their early fame. According to a segment that aired on ABC News's 20/20 in October 1990, this appeared to be the fate of the actor who had played Buckwheat in the 'Our Gang' comedies of the 1930s and '40s.

Buckwheat was the wide-eyed, African-American character played for almost ten years by William Thomas. He was famous for his signature phrase, "O-Tay!" After leaving the show, Thomas dropped from the public eye. 20/20 claimed that it had tracked him down to Tempe, Arizona where he was working at a low-paying job as a grocery bagger. It aired an interview with him in which he talked about the cruel twists and turns his life had taken.

Unfortunately for 20/20, the man they interviewed was not William Thomas. Thomas had worked as a film lab technician before dying in 1980 at the age of 49. The man 20/20 interviewed was an imposter named Bill English who had been claiming to be Buckwheat for the past 30 years. The week after it aired the segment, 20/20 admitted its mistake. In the ensuing scandal, a producer was fired and 20/20 was sued for negligence by the son of the real William Thomas.

Kaycee Nicole was a nineteen-year-old girl from Kansas dying of cancer. Or so believed the thousands of people who visited her website on which she kept a diary of her fight against leukemia.

For over a year Kaycee Nicole had added updates to her diary, letting people know about the ups and downs of her struggle with the disease, about her hope as the cancer went into remission, and about her fear as it reappeared. Kaycee's mother, Debbie, maintained a companion journal in which she discussed what it was like caring for a child with cancer. Many people grew extremely close to Kaycee. They communicated with her via e-mail, chatted with her in online chatrooms, and some even phoned her.

Then on May 15, 2001 Kaycee Nicole died of a brain aneurysm. Her online friends were distraught. They sought for ways to express their sorrow. They wanted to send gifts to her family. Some even wanted to attend her funeral. And that's when things began to get suspicious... More→

Samukeliso Sithole was a rising female star in the world of Zimbabwe athletics. The 17-year-old track-and-field athlete had won awards at various regional athletic events, including five gold medals at the Southern Region Youth Championship in 2004. But in 2005 her career came to an abrupt halt when it was revealed that she was actually a he. More→