About the Museum
The Museum of Hoaxes, founded by Alex Boese in 1997, is dedicated to promoting knowledge about the phenomenon of hoaxes. On our blog (to the left) we post about dubious-sounding claims — and whatever else strikes our fancy. But there's more to the museum than the blog. Check out our historical wing, which contains hundreds of articles about famous hoaxes, arranged chronologically from the Middle Ages right up to the present. Our Gallery of the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Ever celebrates that one day of the year devoted to pranks and practical jokes. In our forum, you can chat with other MoH members. And there's much, much more.

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Meet Angie from Chernobyl. She's the biggest cat in the world. She belongs to Dr. Maricek, who's a radiation scientist. Angie's missing a gene that controls her growth. As a result, she just keeps growing and growing (and growing!). She currently weighs about 800 lbs and eats 60 lbs of food a day. Despite her size, Angie behaves like a normal cat, though she is extremely shy with people.

Angie's very cute (and looks a bit like my cat Boo), but if she ever curled up on someone's lap, I think the result would be a very flat human.

Thanks to Sarah of messybeast.com for the link. Sarah says, "With some dodgy photo-editing. I can't work out how this hasn't yet ended up in a chain email. Eat your heart out Snowball!"


The Coleman Frog, explains a recent article on Canada.com, is an enormous stuffed frog -- it weighs 19 kilograms, or about 42 lbs -- on display in the York-Sunbury Museum in Fredericton, Canada. According to legend, the frog originally belonged to Fred Coleman, who owned a lodge near Fredericton back in the 1880s. He used to feed it whiskey and whey, causing it to grow to its enormous size. After it died, he had it stuffed. It sat in the saloon of a hotel for a while before coming into the possession of the York-Sunbury Museum.

There are skeptics who say that the Coleman Frog is a fake. They suggest that the frog was actually originally a display item used to advertise a cough medicine guaranteed to relieve "the frog in your throat" (See Canada's Mysterious Maritimes), but the York-Sunbury Museum dismisses such skepticism. Tim Andrew, a local expert on the frog who defends its reality, says, "I don't suppose we'll ever put the controversy to rest. It was suggested doing DNA testing on it, but I think we're reluctant to disturb the peace of a stuffed beast that's been around quite happily for 123 years now." (Thanks, Joe)
A young Indian boy is claiming to be the reincarnation of an American scientist. According to the article linked below, he speaks mostly gibberish with a few "scientific" words mixed in. Proof enough for me! I especially like the next-to-last paragraph of the article. [Thanks to the reader who submitted this story]

Indian boy claims to be reincarnation of American scientist
I guess with over one billion people, it's inevitable that China would produce its share of kooks, quacks and crazies. This 71-year-old man who claims to let 220 volts flow through his body as a form of exercise and says he can cook fish in his bare hands in two minutes fits into at least two of those categories. Oh, he can cure arthritis, too. I just upped him to all three categories.

Chinese man cures arthritis with electricity
This is a weird one. A book allegedly written by a young man, JT LeRoy, made a sensation recently. JT was a truck stop hooker, got involved with drugs, was possibly transgendered and generally had a pretty screwed-up life. The book was billed as non-fiction, supposedly the true story of JT's life. Naturally, it sold very well.

Oprah loved it, the movie director Gus VanSant and other Hollywood types were interested in it. Then the JT LeRoy saga started coming apart. Funny story, turns out there is no such person as JT LeRoy.

Even funnier, also turns out that more than one person, some of them female, portrayed JT at book signings and other appearances. As you'd expect, the people who put up good money to produce a book based on "JT"'s life story didn't see the humor in the situation. They sued Laura Albert, the woman who really wrote the book and who recruited friends and relatives to play JT.

The case came to trial this week. I don't want to spoil the ending for you, so click on the link and see how the case turned out. Oh, and you're gonna LOVE Albert's lawyer's defense of her actions. It's, uh, creative, I'll give him that.

AOL News, JT LeRoy.

OK, this is annoying. The article that link takes you to had a summary of Albert's defense of her actions, but it's been changed since I originally copied the link. The gist of it is that the lawyer said that Albert suffered from "multiple personalities." Now you *might* be able to buy that, but she claims that her multiples were contagious (my term) to explain how other people portrayed "JT" when the "author" needed to make an appearance. I've found the reference elsewhere, though.

From the Augusta Chronicle:

Albert and her lawyers say the matter is more complicated.

The middle-aged Albert testified during the trial that she had been assuming male identities for decades as a coping mechanism for psychological problems brought on by her sexual abuse as a child. To her, she said, Leroy was real — something akin to a different personality living inside her, but one that was capable of transferring to the people she hired to impersonate him.

UPDATE:

If the meme of the 90's was, "I know I did something wrong, but I apologize from the bottom of my heart and, by the way, I've found Jesus," the Ought's version seems to be, "I have no idea why you think what I did was wrong. I'm a misunderstood genius unappreciated by philistines like you."

I direct your attention to:

Gawker story on J T LeRoy.
A series of articles by Dave Clarke of the Star Courier has revived interest in the legend of the Deerman. The legend is local to Kewanee, Illinois. It tells of a creature, with the upper body of a deer and the lower body of a man, that lurks in the woods, occasionally popping up to scare lovers parked on moonlit nights or people wandering around alone. Supposedly if you see Deerman three times you die.

Clarke credits Jerry Moriarity, the editor and publisher of the Star Courier during the '50s and '60s, with popularizing the legend of the Deerman in his column "Mostly Malarkey."

Half-human/half-animal creatures are a staple of local legends. Some of the other famous ones that I know about are Mothman of West Virginia, the Owlman of Cornwall, the Goatman of Maryland, and the Lizard Man of South Carolina. I'm sure there must be many others. (Thanks, Joe)
The Japanese poodle scam - wherein thousands of gullible buyers were sold lambs instead of the dogs they were expecting - was first reported in UK Sun newspaper. The story went that rich women were buying cut-price poodles from a company named Poodles For Pets, and were astonished to find later that they were sheep.

The story itself was immediately dubious (aside from being in The Sun, which tends to be somewhat lax in the fact-checking department), when you consider snippets like:


The story unravelled when police in Sapporo, where the company was claimed to be based, said they had never heard of the scam. The talk-show story was not as it seemed, either. It appears that Kawakami had told a story about a lamb being sold instead of a poodle. However, she'd said that it had happened to a friend of hers.

It seems that nobody had heard of the scam - it hadn't been reported in any Japanese newspapers.

The final nail in the coffin? The original article claims that the scam "capitalised on the fact that sheep are rare in Japan, so many do not know what they look like."
In fact, Sapporo has had a sheep farm since 1848.

Forum thread here.
The Wisconsin Historical Society has just posted a large collection of tall-tale postcards online, along with some accompanying history. Definitely worth checking out. Highlights include galleries devoted to two early masters of the tall-tale genre, William H. Martin and Alfred Stanley Johnson. It's also possible to buy reproductions of these prints through their website.

The only thing I find regrettable is that their site is full of all kinds of warnings threatening people not to use any image from the site without first obtaining written permission from them. If an image is public domain (as many of these tall-tale postcards are, since they were published before 1923), then can the Historical Society actually set conditions on their usage? It seems to me that would be like a publisher selling Shakespeare's works along with a warning that their permission must be obtained before any play is actually performed.
We set up the Christmas tree in the house a few days ago, and in a flash of inspiration I figured, why not have some hoax-themed ornaments. So I created a few. All that was required was printing the pictures on card paper and cutting them out. I created a whole bunch. (I was procrastinating.) Pictured below (clockwise from top left) are the jackalope, fur-bearing trout, Bigfoot, Cottingley fairy, Nessie, and Touristguy. Nessie and Bigfoot kept fighting, so I had to move them apart. Now Bigfoot keeps wandering around and hiding behind the tree. I can tell already that he's a troublemaker.

The one flaw with the tree is that it's real. Next year I'll need to get a fake tree just for the hoax ornaments.


A few months ago one of the site-related projects I was working on was revising the Tall-Tale Creature Gallery. Before I got totally sidetracked by having to focus on my next book, I managed to add quite a few new creatures to it. I also added a feature allowing people to post haiku about the creatures, thus returning to the theme of hoax haiku first seen here two years ago.

I didn't expect to get many haiku contributions. After all, I hadn't told anyone that I had updated the gallery, and it usually only gets a few visitors. But to my surprise people have found it and have been posting haiku. So I wanted to give a heads up about it here on the front page in case anyone else feels like trying their hand at poetry. Here are a few examples of contributions so far:

The Tree Squeak
Tree hugging tree squeek
why do you squeek so loudly
hush I cannot think.

The Haggis
Shy, furry haggis
lover of the highland glens
stay safe in your den

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
Eight armed octopus
Swinging through the trees above
what on earth was that?

Eventually I want to integrate hoax haiku throughout more of the galleries, but that will have to wait until I have more time. Though I definitely plan to add it as a feature to the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes before next April 1, so if anyone wants to start posting haiku in the comments there, feel free to do so. A few of the hoaxes in the 'Hoaxes Throughout History' Gallery also have haiku in the sidebar: The Shroud of Turin, Pope Joan, The Feejee Mermaid, Cardiff Giant, Piltdown Man, Cottingley Fairies, Loch Ness Monster, War of the Worlds, and Bigfoot.