The White Pine Monograph Series was a series of carefully researched, high quality brochures, paid for by Weyerhaeuser mills and edited by Russell Whitehead, that collected together photographs, drawings, and descriptions of early American buildings built with white pine. It was published bimonthly between 1915 and 1940, and sent to architects, with the goal of encouraging them to use white pine as a building material. The series was considered to be so expertly produced, that many architects preserved bound copies of the monographs in their offices. The series can still be found in many architectural libraries today.

Given its intended audience, the White Pine series was not the kind of publication that contained a lot of humor. However, it did include one unusual item. The April 1920 issue (vol. VI, No. 2) contained an article, written by Hubert G. Ripley, about the town of Stotham, Massachusetts. It contained many photographs of houses and buildings in the town.


The article began by offering a short history of the town:



Ripley proceeded to paint a picture of Stotham as a village seemingly untouched by modernity, where ancient traditions were kept alive. He offered brief histories of some of the homes, such as the Rogers mansion, known locally as the "Haunted House." He also praised the townsfolk themselves:


Stotham, Ripley concluded, was a village "where the quintessence of naturalness finds its ultimate expression."

For over two decades no one questioned Ripley's article about the idyllic town of Stotham. It was only when Leicester B. Holland, head of the Fine Arts Department of the Library of Congress, asked his staff to catalog all the material in the White Pine Series, that anyone realized something was amiss.

Holland's staff reported back to him that they had successfully cataloged everything in the series, but that they had encountered a problem when they came to the article about Stotham. Try as they might, they couldn't find any evidence of the town's existence, despite having pored over maps and histories of Massachusetts. Nor could they find references to any of the characters, such as Zabdiel Podbury, mentioned by Ripley in his article.


Later Holland ran into Russell Whitehead, the former editor of the White Pine Series, and took the opportunity to ask his help in identifying the details of Stotham. John Harbeson, in an article that appeared in the May 1964 issue of The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, described what happened next.


In other words, although Stotham would have been a charming place to visit, it unfortunately didn't exist.

The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas was a tongue-in-cheek travel book presented to the public as the real-life adventures of Walter E. Traprock and his band of compatriots on the (non-existent) Filbert Islands in the South Pacific. The book included this picture of the nest of the bizarre Fatu-Liva, a bird that supposedly lay square, spotted eggs. The caption noted: "Skeptics have said that it would be impossible to lay a square egg. To which the author is justly entitled to say: 'The camera never lies.'" The picture demonstrates, satirically, that a caption can falsify a picture just as well as darkroom tricks can. The square eggs are, of course, dice.

A soldier appears to be lifted in the air by the pressure from a water hose. The source of this photo is uncertain. Mark Sloan credits it to "The New York Times; courtesy National Archives and Wide World Photos."

It is unlikely the soldier actually was lifted in the air by the pressure from the hose. For a start, the blast from the hose is not directed at his center of gravity. Therefore, it would not be pushing him upwards. Some have noted that the soldier resembles Buster Keaton. If it is Keaton, then this may be a scene from a movie, in which case the effect most likely was created with hidden wires. Although the picture was obviously intended as a joke, its status is listed as undetermined since it is not clear what technique was used to create it.

A Berlin newspaper ran this image as an April Fool's Day joke, claiming it showed a runway constructed over a "large German city." The paper described how passengers were ferried up and down to the runway in an elevator.

Ada Emma Deane spent most of her life working as a cleaning lady before launching a new career as a photographic medium at the age of 58. She quickly became one of the most famous mediums in Britain. Her signature effect was that eerie, disembodied heads would appear in pictures taken by her. These heads, so it was claimed, were the manifestation of departed spirits. Skeptics pointed out that in order to produce this effect, Deane required that photographic plates be submitted to her in advance so that she could "pre-magnetise" them with her psychic powers. This gave her ample opportunity to tamper with the plates. But her defenders (who included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) insisted that no trickery was involved. They often argued that she was merely a simple cleaning lady who lacked the expertise to pull off such deception.

Deane's most famous photos were those she took, with the help of spiritualist Estelle Stead, during the two minutes silence at services commemorating Armistice Day and the end of World War I. In these photos ghostly figures and faces — supposedly the spirits of dead war heroes — could be seen floating above the crowd. She took the first such picture in 1921, and then again in 1922 (top) and 1923 (second from top). By 1924 her Armistice Day photo was highly anticipated, and newspapers bid on the rights to it. The Daily Sketch won the rights and published the resulting photo (second from bottom) on November 13, 1924. The photo showed a group of faces floating in a cloud above the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

But two days later The Daily Sketch announced it had discovered the photo to be a fraud. The faces in the cloud were not dead war heroes. Instead, they appeared to be living football players and boxers, including Battling Siki and Jimmy Wilde. The paper published portraits of the athletes alongside Deane's spirit photo (bottom). It denounced Deane as a "charlatan" who had perpetrated "a cruel fraud designed to deceive credulous people and bereaved relatives of the glorious dead."

Deane's defenders argued that they failed to see the similarity to the athletes — that, in fact, the faces were too blurry to positively identify. Deane herself said, "If I had wanted to produce a fraudulent photograph, is it likely I would have used portraits of well-known footballers or boxers?" Nevertheless, the incident put a serious dent in her reputation. She continued to work as a photographic medium for a number of years, but she never again took an Armistice Day photo.

On January 22, 1905 (January 9 in the Old Style calendar) workers in St. Petersburg marched toward the Winter Palace intending to hand a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. Soldiers stopped them at the Narva Gate and opened fire. In Russia the day came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The event exposed the brutality of the Russian police and undermined popular support for the Tsarist regime.

In 1925 director Vyacheslav Viskovsky made a propaganda film about Bloody Sunday titled Devyatoe Yanvarya (January 9). The film included a reenactment of the soldiers firing on the crowd. This image shows the reenactment. (It is not clear whether it is a retouched still from the film itself, or a photograph that was taken during the filming.)

The image was more dramatic than any existing photographs of the Bloody Sunday massacre, and was soon distributed by the Soviet Tass News agency, which described it as an actual photograph of the 1905 event. Later it appeared in numerous Soviet textbooks, again presented as a photograph of the event itself, not as a staged reenactment.

Harry Warnecke, a photographer for the New York News, got a phone tip about a cat trying to carry its kittens home who was tying up traffic because a policeman had stopped the cars on a busy street to allow it to cross. Warnecke arrived after the event was over, but he convinced the policeman and cat's owner to allow him to recreate the scene. Despite the policeman's initial reluctance, the cat's inclination to cross the street diagonally instead of in front of the cars, and furious honking motorists, Warnecke finally got his shot -- after three attempts.

Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot, published in 1933, purported to be the diary of an anonymous World War I RAF pilot killed in combat. The manuscript, which included numerous spectacular shots of aerial combat, was presented to the publisher by a Mrs. Gladys Cockburn-Lange, who claimed to be the widow of a British pilot.

The photos attracted enormous interest, since there were very few images of World War I aerial combat in existence. However, many people were skeptical. Why was the name of the pilot not revealed? How could the RAF have had no knowledge of these photos? And how could such clear shots have been taken with a camera mounted on an airplane (given the state of camera technology during WWI)?

The photos weren't definitively debunked until 1984 when archivists at the Smithsonian realized that "Mrs. Gladys Cockburn-Lange" was actually Betty Archer, the wife of Wesley David Archer, a model maker in the film industry. Archer had created models of all the aircraft, and then had superimposed images of the planes onto aerial backgrounds.

Below are examples of three of the faked photographs, along with the captions that accompanied them in Death in the Air.

The Madison Capital-Times ran this photo on its front page to accompany an article, in honor of April Fool's Day, about the dome of the Wisconsin state capitol supposedly collapsing because "large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the Senate and Assembly chambers, had in some way been ignited."

By modern standards the picture looks phony, but many readers in 1933 were fooled. One particularly irate reader wrote in declaring the hoax "was not only tactless and void of humor, but also a hideous jest."

In 1933, a picture supposedly showing Adolf Hitler as a baby began circulating throughout England and America. The child in the picture looked positively menacing. Its fat mouth was twisted into a sneer, and it scowled at the camera from dark, squinted eyes. A greasy mop of hair fell over its forehead.


The image was distributed by Acme Newspictures, Inc. and appeared in many newspapers and magazines. For instance, in October 1933 the Chicago Tribune printed it alongside a photo of the adult Hitler addressing 500,000 farmers and storm troopers, above the caption, "Two Pictures of Hitler." The Winnipeg Free Press ran the picture with the caption: "This is a picture of a man who controls the destiny of a mighty nation, as he appeared when he was not quite one year old. Do you think this photo is prophetic of the figure he has become? The picture is one of Adolf Hitler, who was born in 1889."


However, the baby picture didn't actually show the infant führer. The German consulate in Chicago wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune correcting the error:




Subsequent investigation by Acme Newspictures found that the Baby Adolf picture had come from the syndicate's London bureau, which, in turn, received it from Austria, Hitler's native country. Beyond that, the trail went cold. The identity of the hoaxer was unknown.

If the baby in the picture wasn't Adolf Hitler, then who was it? The answer to this question wasn't known until 1938.

Mrs. Harriet Downs of Ohio happened to see the picture in a magazine and immediately recognized it as her son (by a former marriage), John May Warren. However, in the original image her son looked cute, bright, and wholesome. Someone had darkened the shadows around the child's face to give him a more sinister look.


Mrs. Downs contacted Acme Newspictures, who, in May 1938, issued a correction:


It still remained a mystery how John Warren's picture had ended up in Austria in the hands of a photo forger. That mystery has never been solved.

Tragically, John Warren died a few months after Acme issued its correction, when he fell from his bicycle and pierced his heart on a milk bottle.