January 16, 2013 • 32 mins
Historical hoaxes are surprisingly common. For example, a N.Y. cigar maker once commissioned a gypsum skeleton to pass off as a 10-foot-tall petrified man called the Cardiff Giant. Join Deblina and Sarah as they explore the Cardiff Giant, Clever Hans, the Cottingley Fairies, David Wyrick, Mary Toft's bunny births and the Newark Holy Stones.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bling a Chok reboarding and I'm faired out and
we just talked about the famous radio hoax on a
recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the World's Broadcast.
(00:23):
But hoaxes in general were around long before that. A
lot of experts believe that the seventeen hundreds, also known
to some as the Age of Enlightenment, gave birth to them.
Doesn't really make sense, doesn't No, it doesn't. I mean
you would think that around that time it would be
all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely, But I
like the way that Alex Boza, who is the curator
(00:45):
of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually calls himself
a hoax Burt, which I love a hoax. He put
it this way in an interview with a history magazine
in two thousand nine. He said, quote, in order to
be able to perceive a hoax, one needs to see
the world in terms of a contrast between reason and ignorance,
fact and fiction, and that way of thinking only clearly
(01:07):
came into focus in the eighteenth century. So We're going
to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history, not
necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the Worlds, but
ones that fooled a lot of folks just the same.
And we promised we're not pulling any hoaxes on you.
All of these are true historical hoaxes. Yes, not this time,
not this time. So our first one is Cottingly Fairies,
(01:28):
and it started with two little English girls named Frances
Griffith's and her cousin, Elsie Wright, And they were a
couple of cousins and they were basically just trying to
put one over on their parents, as kids sometimes do.
They were ten and sixteen years old at the time, respectively,
and so in nineteen seventeen, the two of them used
to play at the Rights home and Cottingly, which was
(01:50):
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
after a day of play soaking wet after falling into
the brook on the property, and the parents weren't really
pleased with this. They'd grill the girls what happened? Why
do you keep falling into the brook all the time?
And the girl's explanation was that they went down close
(02:10):
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there, naturally, right, naturally, so the parents also naturally
weren't buying this at all. So the girls asked to
borrow a camera, and they produced two photos kind of
as proof of their adventures, one with Frances looking toward
the camera and a little troop of fairies kind of
(02:31):
prancing around in front of her, and a second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So Arthur right after this pretty
much he didn't believe them at all. He quit loaning
the girls his camera. So the incident was all but
forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen, and that's when
Arthur's wife, Polly Right she was pursuing an interest in
the occult and a supernatural at the time, and she
(02:51):
attended a lecture hosted by the local Theosophical Society, which
they come up from time to time in these podcasts.
I've noticed, yeah, whenever we talk about spiritualists and so forth.
But she mentioned the fairy photos when she was there,
and among the people to show a special interest in
these photos was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, our
old friend, yes from the who was the real Sherlock
(03:12):
Holmes podcast Yeah. So Conan Doyle is of course most
famous for for that Sherlock Holmes connection, but he was
also a famous spiritualist at the time too, and a
believer in the supernatural. It was very important to him,
and so he wanted to check out this whole fairy
photo thing because he was conveniently enough working on a
piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. And I think
(03:35):
you mentioned it was a quite serious, scholarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conan Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
wasn't fiction at all, and that's why he wanted to
make sure he had proof before he wrote about this.
So he may have had a few doubts of his own.
So he personally visited the girls and Cottingly along with
Edward Gardner, another leading spiritualist, and they brought their own
(03:57):
cameras along, and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them, just to be sure before
he wrote this piece. And they had taken some measures
at this point to like marking the plates just so
things couldn't be tampered with. Yeah, they wanted to be
extra sure that what they were getting was authentic. But
apparently the test wasn't too hard because the girls passed
it pretty easily, and some people accepted the photos as genuine,
(04:20):
just as conn and Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including
Elsie's father, author Right, remained skeptical about it. One commentator
put it this way. He said, quote for a true
explanation of these fairy photographs, what is wanted is not
a knowledge of a cult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.
So we see that it didn't take much for a
lot of people to get to the bottom of this,
(04:40):
And some skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites
looked like cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's books.
So that's probably the first thing you'd think too, if
you saw these pictures today, which you can by looking
for them online, they look like nice, little romantic illustrations
of fairies. Yeah, And some people point out that what
we see to day, if you do happen to google
(05:02):
the photos or whatever, you'll notice that these are the
enhanced versions of the photos. So the original photos may
have been a little easier to believe, but probably not
that much. But Connin Doyle did believe this, and in
fact died believing this, and it wasn't until that the
girls finally confessed that four out of five of the
photos were fakes. According to a two thousand four piece
(05:25):
in British Heritage, Francis said of the most famous photo quote,
my heart always thinks when I look at it, when
I think of how it's gone all around the world.
I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies.
But there's one more thing to add to that quote.
While the girls did admit that most of the photos
were faked, they never admitted that the fairies were imaginary,
(05:46):
and to her dying day, Francis swore that the final
photo was real. So well, an interesting little twist for
the end of this hook yeah maybe leaves us a
little something to wonder about maybe maybe yeah, depending on
how you look at it. So our next hoax involves
a historical animal, which I know is a favorite topic
(06:08):
of many listeners, and this one, of course reminded me
of the Mr. Ed theme song too. I couldn't help
but humming into my head or singing in my head
the whole time I was researching this. But around the
turn of the twentieth century, this truly remarkable horse caught
the world's attention, and his name was Clever Hans, and
he was owned by a school teacher named Wilhelm von Austin.
(06:33):
And this horse wasn't I mean, he really made Mr
Ed look pretty low key with all of the stuff
he could do. He could do addition and subtraction, multiplication, division.
He could also select any color named to him from
choosing among a group of different colored cloths. And he
couldn't talk and sing like Mr. Ed could, but he
could communicate by stamping his hoof on the ground. So
(06:55):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoofs stamps. Yeah, and we're gonna
just twist things entirely here. Put it to a new level.
Hans could even read minds. You didn't have to ask
him a question out loud. You could put the question
to him mentally and he would still get it right.
And to to add even further to this, it didn't
(07:18):
have to be Von Austin who was asking the question.
Anybody could do it and the horse would still get
the answers right. So it wasn't just a simple matter
of a trainer who had secret cues with his animals.
So after initially causing this great sensation in Germany, which
is where Hans lived, he started to get international coverage
(07:39):
when this team of experts they were called the Hans Commission,
examined him to determine if von Austin was perpetuating some
kind of fraud somehow or enough because people were suspicious
of this, right, they thought it was a hoax. Yeah,
people were very suspicious. This was not within the normal
realm of horse abilities, and the experts were pretty prominent men.
(08:00):
There was a circus proprietor and army captain, the director
of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, the veterinary surgeon, and other
guys who were just really familiar with horses and with
horse training and would be able to presumably tell if
something fishy was going on. And after they did their work,
there was a headline printed in the New York Times
on October twod nineteen o four, which read expert commission
(08:24):
decides that the horse actually reasons. So it really was
global news. Yeah. But even more than that, they determined
that the horse was not trained in the in the
traditional ways. Instead, Von Austin's techniques were more like those
used to teach children, which makes sense since he is
a school teacher. But some people still weren't convinced by this,
and one man, Oscar Funkst, got Von Austin's permission to
(08:47):
come in and investigate the horse, and after some pretty
serious examinations, he learned two things. One, the horse could
only answer questions in which the answer was our are
you known to the questioner? So you can ask what
is twelve divided by three? But maybe not some more
outrageous piece of division. And he could also only answer
(09:10):
unless he could see the questioner. And so clever Hans
was used to being questioned with somebody right in front
of him. If he stood by his side, he'd try
to move his head so he would be looking at
you faith on, and if he had blinders on, he
couldn't answer the question at all. So this gave fools
some ideas about the limits of Hans's abilities, Right, okay,
(09:31):
So what did this mean? It suggested, basically that there
were some sort of unconscious movements coming from the questioner,
and sure enough, when he looked more closely, he found
that nearly every test questioner would ask a question and
then bent his head forward, which made the horse start tapping,
and then as soon as the correct number of taps
(09:52):
had occurred, the questioner would jerk up his head and
the horse would stop. So Funks found that while almost
everyone made these movements, hardly anyone was aware of it. Yeah,
so this makes it kind of a hoax, but kind
of not in a way. People were suspicious of it.
That's very hoax like, but it seems like nobody was
trying to perpetuate fraud, as we'll see in most of
our other hoaxes. So Folks published a book on his
(10:16):
findings in nineteen eleven, and it got a really glowing
review from the New York Times. Although I liked that,
the article also noted quote it detracts nothing from the
merit of his being clever Hans achievements and leaves him
as wonderful a horse as he was before. I e.
We still love you know, we still love Hans. We
still think he's great. And today you might still see
(10:39):
mentions of Clever Hans. When you're reading about animal psychology
or articles about animal intelligence research, you'll see something sometimes
called the Clever Hans effect. And it's something that researchers
have to be very careful of that they are not
either willingly misleading the animal or giving some sort of
(10:59):
SubCom just cues, or doing it without even being aware
of it. So this actually led to something kind of useful. Yeah,
it did lead to something useful, unlike our next entry,
which just led to a very peculiar hoax craze for
a few decades there. It started in eighteen sixty nine
when a couple of well diggers in Cardiff, New York
(11:22):
made this startling find while digging a well on the
property of William stub Newell. Yes, after hitting stone three
ft down and clearing off the top soil, one of
them recognized a foot and he said, quote, I didclare
some old Indian has been buried here, So there was
(11:42):
an ancient burial here, at least that's what it seemed.
But pretty soon they realized that it wasn't just the
skeleton of a normal man. It was ten ft long
and clearly the remains of some sort of ancient giant.
So Newell got right to work marketing this fine try
and make some money off of his farm. He set
up a tent and charged admission for people to come
(12:07):
and take a peek at the so called Cardiff Giant,
and he bumped it up after attendance was so good
he bumped it up to fifty cents, and people were
coming from all over the area to gawk and marvel
at this strange stone man. Here's how the first president
of Cornell, Andrew White, described his own visit. He said,
(12:27):
quote lying in its grave, with a subdued light from
the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with
the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it
produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity
pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper. Sounds
pretty cool, doesn't, except that White even himself realized that
(12:49):
the skeleton was clearly made from stone. He actually realized
it wasn't even a very good carving, and that the
two well diggers had would have had no reason to
dig in that very spot, suggesting some sort of planned fraud.
Very suspicious. So we have to backtrack a little bit
to eighteen sixty six to figure out what happened. And
(13:10):
that's when a New York's cigar maker named George hull
or Hole got an idea he was an acqui Iowa
investigating his brother in law for a late payment on
a large shipment of cigars, and while he was there,
he got into an argument with the Methodist revivalist over giants,
and he later spent the night quote wondering about why
people would believe these remarkable stories in the Bible about giants.
(13:33):
When suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and
passing it off as a petrified man. Okay, so that's
probably not where most people's train of thought would go
after that argument, but he really runs with it once
the once the thought strikes him, but he knows that
he can't make the giant close to home because it's
got to be secret. It's obviously a ten foot stone giant.
(13:55):
I think it weighed about three thousand pounds, all said
and done, would cause quite a sturve. In eighteen sixty eight,
he hires some guys to quarry a block of gypsum
from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and just so they don't talk
and so it stays secret, he tells them that it's
for some sort of new Lincoln monument that's going to
be going up, and from there he has his giant
(14:17):
block of gypsum shipped to Chicago and carved again in
secret by a German stone cutter. I think he's he's
paid money and sworn to secrecy. In fact, finally, the
finished statue was sent on a train to Cardiff, where
Hole met up with his cousin Stubbed Newell, and the
men buried it on the farm. So they waited about
(14:38):
a year I think to dig it up right, just
so it could get some authentic dirt scenes around it
and and look convincing enough. But there's a good plan. Yeah,
if if you're going to go through all the trouble,
you might as well put in that extra year to
make it work. But once the giant was on earth, though,
the story didn't last that long. Newell even told some
people that it was a hoax, which seems like a
(15:00):
really bad idea if you're trying to make fifty cents
ahead on your farm. But ho realized he would have
to lock somebody into buying this giant get a large
amount of money up front before the story broke at
the fraud, so he sold the giant to a businessman
named David Hannum for twenty three thousand dollars, and Hannum
(15:21):
took it on the road as kind of a syndicate show.
It caught the attention from there of P. T. Barnum, again,
our old friend. He just pops up all the time.
He offered to buy the giant for fifty thousand dollars
and hand him refused. So Barnum, who isn't going to
be thwarted by not possessing the quote authentic giant, decided
(15:41):
to build his own replica and had an agent go
to Handhum show make some covert wax models. And of
course all the newspapers were running stories about the Cardiff Giants,
so we had all of the measurements ready to go,
and Um just started touring his own plastered giant. It
did really well. To hand Hum, though, is pretty dismissive
(16:03):
of this plastic copy of Barnum's and all of those
who paid to go see it. And he even said
there's a sucker born every minute, which is obviously painfully
ironic to hear that. But my favorite part of this
is that it started kind of a petrified man trend, right,
did well? I mean it's easy to see how it
would too if if you could make so much money
(16:25):
off of having a petrified man in your backyard. But
for a few decades there there were lots of petrified
men turning up giants or just normal size think Mark
Twain even wrote a little newspaper article, a spoof of
finding a petrified man, and it got picked up by
real outlet. So um, yeah, for a for a few
(16:46):
years there there was a rush and petrified men, and
then they lost their cachet, you know, yeah, you know, Well,
that's what happens when you find a hoax that works,
you tend to see it kind of over run into
the ground. But I have to say this next one
on our list is one Sarah that I'm really glad
did not catch on. It is about a woman named
Mary Toft, and it's a medical hoax that's been called
(17:07):
the top fraud of the Enlightenment. It started when an
englishwoman named Mary Toft, who was a mother of three already,
had a miscarriage around September of About a month after that,
she and her husband, Joshua Toft sent for the doctor,
who in this case was a male midwife named John Howard,
because she was having these full on labor pains, and
(17:30):
after she called in John Howard, she gave birth to
a dead skinned baby rabbit and then proceeded to continue
giving birth to dead rabbits at the rate of about
one per day. And Howard claimed that he could even
feel and see these baby bunnies jumping in the womb
before they died. I know he could see. He claimed
(17:53):
that you could see kind of the bedclothes move over
her stomach and that it would shake the bed sometimes.
So this dead bunny would I'm out. Yeah, not pleasant
at all. So obviously people are skeptical of the story,
and so people wouldn't think that he was lying. Howard
put out an open invitation for other doctors to come
check out the situation, maybe even deliver a rabbit for themselves,
(18:14):
and see the truth in this pretty invasive Yeah it was.
But several people took him up on that, including Nathaniel
st Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also the personal
surgeon of King George. The first we have to mention,
though st Andre had an interesting resume before he got
into the doctor in business, which maybe makes it though
(18:35):
he wasn't the most qualified person to be the public
face of this. He was originally a dancing and a
fencing instructor. No kind of a strange backstory for him
that is definitely on. But what's perhaps most surprising about
this whole story in general is that how many doctors
were convinced that the births were real. I mean, it
wasn't just St. Andre, right, it was some other people too,
(18:56):
who really thought that this was happening. As a kind
of proof of this phenomenon, St Andre didn't experiment in
which he put the organs of the bunnies in water,
and it's unclear I guess as to why that actually
provided any proof, but it was supposed to have been
(19:16):
ury doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though, including a Sir
Richard Manningham, and to figure out what was going on
once and for all, Mary was brought to London and
put under a twenty four hour watch, which pretty soon
put a stop to these strange births. Then they discovered
a porter trying to smuggle a rabbit into Mary at
her hotel. Her sister, who was kind of playing nurse
(19:39):
to her at the time. She also confessed to this,
but claimed that they were bringing the rabbit into her
for eating purposes only, not for birthing purposes, which sounds
pretty fishy. Yeah, it didn't look good. To say the least.
But Mary, if you were giving birth to rabbits, would
you really still be eating them? That is a very
(19:59):
good point. I mean, if you're going to think this
out a little bit, that's a good point. Sarah, I
would think that you wouldn't want to eat meat in general.
But apparently she didn't have a problem with that while
she was staying in London, but she did still claim
even after that incident, that she was telling the truth. Finally,
though they had to resort to threatening her. They said,
basically they would do a painful procedure operate on her
the next time she was about to go into labor.
(20:21):
Instead of just letting the bunnies be born, they would
they would do an operation and examine her uterus. And
so at that point she finally confessed the whole thing
was a scam to get a pension and and live
easy for the rest of her life. Specifically, she said quote,
her goal was to get so good a living that
I should never want as long as I lived, Which
(20:44):
is another strange thing to think about, that you would
be pensioned for the very act of giving birth to
baby bunnies. Yeah, well, it's strange to plan that as
a way I think to get your your fortune, look
in your future. But she didn't work alone, she said
an accomplice helped her get the animal parts in return
for part of the potential profits. So someone else may
(21:05):
have been involved here, or maybe multiple someone else's. Her
husband was probably part of it, at least a little bit.
He I think was implicated in getting it was found
that he had purchased first for rabbits. Yeah, so Mary
was charged as a quote to vile, cheat and imposter
and thrown in jail, but she was later released and
the doctors didn't come out of it very well. Many
(21:25):
of their reputations were ruined, and a popular purchase in
the early eighteen hundreds in England was a book of
writings about Toft, which was bound in of course rabbit
skin and one more note about these bunnies. Even though
Mary Toft apparently did not lose her appetite for rabbit
meat while perpetuating this fraud, a lot of people in
(21:49):
England did, and rabbit stew took a little nose dive
in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew the
the story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But
the last story on our list is one that is
still sort of in question. People have called this a
hoax for years, and it's cited as a common example
(22:12):
of a hoax, but there are still some people who
think that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county surveyor and amateur archaeologist named David Wyrick
was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in the
American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about this
(22:32):
these quite recently in the Cookio podcast, But most people
believe that these mounds were the work of pre Columbian
native civilizations. However, a common belief during this time period
that we're talking about right now was that the mounds
were built by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I
think we we even mentioned that in the Cohokia we
may have. They were believed to have vanished after being
(22:54):
captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter of
this theory, and that's kind of what made what happened
next very suspicious, all right. So Wyrick was digging near
New York's fifty acre Octagon Mound in eighteen sixty when
he discovered the keystone, which was the first of the
holy stones in the Shallow Hole. And the keystone is
(23:17):
basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and it
has Hebrew inscriptions on all four sides and they read
the Laws of Jehovah, the Word of the Lord, King
of the Earth, and the Holy of Holy. So this
was really really big news because some people thought that
it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other people thought, well,
(23:41):
maybe it's not an ancient Hebrew text, maybe it's a
Masonic keystone because of that shape and everything. It didn't
take long though for some people to just call it
out as an outright fake. Yes, Charles Whittlesey, for example,
a noteworthy ohio archaeologist, he thought that it was neither
Masnic nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact. The Hebrew,
(24:03):
for example, was thought to be too modern to be
authentic to be from that previous time period when the
Lost Tribes would have been around. So that November Wyrick
gets a little bit more evidence. Maybe he discovers another
stone the Decalogue Stone and the Jackson Town Stone Mound,
which is a few miles southeast of Newark, and it's
found encased in a custom made stone box. Sounds pretty cool, yeah,
(24:27):
And it's shaped like a tombstone that's intricately carved all
over with Hebrew letters that convey an abbreviated form of
the Ten Commandments, so completely different from the keystone. On
the front side, the inscription lines an arch that frames
the image of a man named Moses, and the style
of Hebrew was some unique archaic style. They couldn't quite
(24:48):
place that. It wasn't the modern style that they found
on the keystone, but it wasn't also ancient Hebrew, right
It wasn't what they knew to be an ancient Hebrew
style that was recognizable. So many people thought this was
a fraud right away too. It had too many scriptural
mistakes and a lack of patina that made people very
suspicious should have left it in the ground for longer,
(25:08):
like the Cardiff Giant that In his book Fantastic Archaeology,
Stephen Williams says that the stones feel every possible archaeological task.
Their inscriptions are the only ones of their kind known
and are not correct for the time period. Others, though,
we're wondering if ancient Hebrews were present in America's why
(25:31):
can't we find evidence of their settlements? So not just
like why can't we find their their stones and their inscriptions,
but why can't we find anything from their settlements. It's
a good question. One problem with this doubt about the stones, though,
is trying to figure out, Okay, if they're not real,
who made them. Of course, some people thought it could
be Wyrick. I read that before Wyric's death he actually
(25:53):
wondered himself if somebody had fooled him. So it seems
unlikely that he would bring that up if he didn't
want to put suspicion on himself. So archaeologist Brad Lepper
believes that it was actually a man named Reverend John W.
McCarty who translated the text on the keystone for Wyrick overnight.
So it just seemed too fast for him to be
able to be too familiar with it exactly. And the
(26:14):
theory is that McCarty hoped the stones would prove that
Adam and Eve were mother and father to all races,
a good argument against slavery. Yeah, so in eighteen sixty four,
two additional Hebrew inscribed stones, which are now unfortunately lost,
were found during the excavation of a mound on the
George A Wilson farm, which is east of Newark, and
(26:37):
people again got really excited. But soon a local dentist
named John H. Nickel claimed that he himself carved the stones,
introduced them into the excavation with the intention of discrediting
the two earlier find from Wyrick. Of course, and these
inscriptions actually just spelled out his name, So the plan
(26:59):
did pretty much where these new stones, which are so
obviously frauds, kind of made the earlier fines again. It
kind of like the card off effect. All the all
the petrified men sort of make the original one not
seemed so great. Hence why for years this has been
believed to be a hoax. But then attention came back
(27:19):
to the story around the nineteen eighties or so, and
there are some now who believe that the stones are authentic.
They say they're just too detailed and thought out to
be hoaxes, and the fact that they're so different from
each other, they're so unique and distinct. Um, Yeah, I
think it was maybe the decologue you were describing to
me earlier. You said that it was just perfectly laid out.
(27:40):
You know, there were no there were no places where
the words were crammed in. Everything was planned. Yeah, it
didn't look like you were just trying to quickly put
this together to pull off some kind of hoax. It
looked like something that had been meticulously done. But today
you can decide for yourself. The visitors can view the
Holy Stones at the Johnston homework House Museum in Ohio.
(28:01):
So I think it's only fitting that we leave off
with one that's still kind of hanging in the balancer
in question, because we love to leave you guys with
a question to answer. Um. Even though, as Sarah said
when we started this, these are all true hoaxes we did.
This is not a hoax in itself. That would have
been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that some other time.
(28:25):
Our first piece of mail was from Catherine, and she wrote, Hello,
Sara Dublina. I'm a big fan of her podcast and
would love to hear you talk about Bonnie Prince, Charlie
or Flora McDonald, the woman who helped him escape. She
even has a Highland dance named after her Flora McDonald's fancy.
I'm enclosing some rulers quote rulers for you to pass
(28:47):
around at work. Maybe you'll find a future podcast topic
on one of them. I just wanted to say thank
you to Catherine for sending us about five or six rulers. Yeah,
they're awesome, and I think they do have some podcast
ideas on them. Almost wanted to take more than one
or keep them all, but I just took one, just
to give you guys examples. It was like patriots, and
then it would be a big list starting with Ben
(29:10):
Franklin a picture of him, and then a big list
of worldwide patriots. I think we had women and art, scientists,
all sorts of cool things. So thank you Catherine for those.
I also wanted to read an email from Lori Leadfoot
and I just I mean, I kind of picked it
because of her nickname, but Lori wrote just wanted to
(29:31):
drop a quick note to say hi and to thank you.
And then over the road truck driver. And finally bought
my first iPod about six months ago. While browsing the
podcast in search of something to listen to, I came
across stuff you missed in history class. Being a fan
of History, I decided to check it out. I finally
caught up with past shows and wanted to let you
know I think you're doing a great job and say
(29:51):
thank you. So I thought i'd read Lorie Leadfoot's email
sort of in a tribute to all of the long
haul drivers we have as listeners. Um, we get a
lot of listeners from folks who are driving trucks, which
I think is so cool. I when I was younger,
I was kind of obsessed with the idea of being
a truck driver. I think it sounds so adventurous to
(30:13):
be driving across country. So I was like the kid
trying to make them honk their horns too. I did
that as well. So we're glad to hear that we
have so many listeners who are doing the long haul
and learning about history while they're at it. So if
you have any comments, any postcards you want to send us,
go ahead. You can also send us more hoax suggestions.
(30:34):
This was pretty fun. I definitely enjoyed this episode. We're
at History podcast at half stuff works dot com. I've
noticed lately a lot of people have been confused about
how to contact us. We've gotten things on Twitter. That
is the only email address, so if you want to
send us an email, that's the place to go. History
podcast at half stuff works dot com. But you should
(30:55):
also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter,
and it's in history yep. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about how maybe you could
pull off your own hoax, not that we encourage that
at all, but we do have an interesting article on
our website called how Lying Works, and it talks about
how you can lie, how you can learn how to lie,
(31:15):
and also how you can learn to spot a lie,
which may be the more valuable skill. Pitch that part. Yes,
we will pitch that part of it because we do
not can go online, but you can find that on
our website by searching on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:36):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House doff works iPhone app
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. The tak
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bling a Chok reboarding and I'm faired out and
we just talked about the famous radio hoax on a
recent podcast, the nineteen thirty eight War of the World's Broadcast.
(00:23):
But hoaxes in general were around long before that. A
lot of experts believe that the seventeen hundreds, also known
to some as the Age of Enlightenment, gave birth to them.
Doesn't really make sense, doesn't No, it doesn't. I mean
you would think that around that time it would be
all about reason thinking really hard. Yeah. Absolutely, But I
like the way that Alex Boza, who is the curator
(00:45):
of the online Museum of Hoaxes, he actually calls himself
a hoax Burt, which I love a hoax. He put
it this way in an interview with a history magazine
in two thousand nine. He said, quote, in order to
be able to perceive a hoax, one needs to see
the world in terms of a contrast between reason and ignorance,
fact and fiction, and that way of thinking only clearly
(01:07):
came into focus in the eighteenth century. So We're going
to take a look at some hoaxes throughout history, not
necessarily broadcast ones like the War of the Worlds, but
ones that fooled a lot of folks just the same.
And we promised we're not pulling any hoaxes on you.
All of these are true historical hoaxes. Yes, not this time,
not this time. So our first one is Cottingly Fairies,
(01:28):
and it started with two little English girls named Frances
Griffith's and her cousin, Elsie Wright, And they were a
couple of cousins and they were basically just trying to
put one over on their parents, as kids sometimes do.
They were ten and sixteen years old at the time, respectively,
and so in nineteen seventeen, the two of them used
to play at the Rights home and Cottingly, which was
(01:50):
in West Yorkshire, and Francis would often come back home
after a day of play soaking wet after falling into
the brook on the property, and the parents weren't really
pleased with this. They'd grill the girls what happened? Why
do you keep falling into the brook all the time?
And the girl's explanation was that they went down close
(02:10):
to the water to hang out with the fairies that
were there, naturally, right, naturally, so the parents also naturally
weren't buying this at all. So the girls asked to
borrow a camera, and they produced two photos kind of
as proof of their adventures, one with Frances looking toward
the camera and a little troop of fairies kind of
(02:31):
prancing around in front of her, and a second had
Elsie entertaining a gnome. So Arthur right after this pretty
much he didn't believe them at all. He quit loaning
the girls his camera. So the incident was all but
forgotten until the summer of nineteen nineteen, and that's when
Arthur's wife, Polly Right she was pursuing an interest in
the occult and a supernatural at the time, and she
(02:51):
attended a lecture hosted by the local Theosophical Society, which
they come up from time to time in these podcasts.
I've noticed, yeah, whenever we talk about spiritualists and so forth.
But she mentioned the fairy photos when she was there,
and among the people to show a special interest in
these photos was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, our
old friend, yes from the who was the real Sherlock
(03:12):
Holmes podcast Yeah. So Conan Doyle is of course most
famous for for that Sherlock Holmes connection, but he was
also a famous spiritualist at the time too, and a
believer in the supernatural. It was very important to him,
and so he wanted to check out this whole fairy
photo thing because he was conveniently enough working on a
piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. And I think
(03:35):
you mentioned it was a quite serious, scholarly piece. It
wasn't a piece of Conan Doyle's typical fiction. No, it
wasn't fiction at all, and that's why he wanted to
make sure he had proof before he wrote about this.
So he may have had a few doubts of his own.
So he personally visited the girls and Cottingly along with
Edward Gardner, another leading spiritualist, and they brought their own
(03:57):
cameras along, and they asked the girls to take a
couple more photos for them, just to be sure before
he wrote this piece. And they had taken some measures
at this point to like marking the plates just so
things couldn't be tampered with. Yeah, they wanted to be
extra sure that what they were getting was authentic. But
apparently the test wasn't too hard because the girls passed
it pretty easily, and some people accepted the photos as genuine,
(04:20):
just as conn and Doyle and Gardner did. Others, including
Elsie's father, author Right, remained skeptical about it. One commentator
put it this way. He said, quote for a true
explanation of these fairy photographs, what is wanted is not
a knowledge of a cult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.
So we see that it didn't take much for a
lot of people to get to the bottom of this,
(04:40):
And some skeptics also pointed out how much the sprites
looked like cut out illustrations from a nineteen fifteen children's books.
So that's probably the first thing you'd think too, if
you saw these pictures today, which you can by looking
for them online, they look like nice, little romantic illustrations
of fairies. Yeah, And some people point out that what
we see to day, if you do happen to google
(05:02):
the photos or whatever, you'll notice that these are the
enhanced versions of the photos. So the original photos may
have been a little easier to believe, but probably not
that much. But Connin Doyle did believe this, and in
fact died believing this, and it wasn't until that the
girls finally confessed that four out of five of the
photos were fakes. According to a two thousand four piece
(05:25):
in British Heritage, Francis said of the most famous photo quote,
my heart always thinks when I look at it, when
I think of how it's gone all around the world.
I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies.
But there's one more thing to add to that quote.
While the girls did admit that most of the photos
were faked, they never admitted that the fairies were imaginary,
(05:46):
and to her dying day, Francis swore that the final
photo was real. So well, an interesting little twist for
the end of this hook yeah maybe leaves us a
little something to wonder about maybe maybe yeah, depending on
how you look at it. So our next hoax involves
a historical animal, which I know is a favorite topic
(06:08):
of many listeners, and this one, of course reminded me
of the Mr. Ed theme song too. I couldn't help
but humming into my head or singing in my head
the whole time I was researching this. But around the
turn of the twentieth century, this truly remarkable horse caught
the world's attention, and his name was Clever Hans, and
he was owned by a school teacher named Wilhelm von Austin.
(06:33):
And this horse wasn't I mean, he really made Mr
Ed look pretty low key with all of the stuff
he could do. He could do addition and subtraction, multiplication, division.
He could also select any color named to him from
choosing among a group of different colored cloths. And he
couldn't talk and sing like Mr. Ed could, but he
could communicate by stamping his hoof on the ground. So
(06:55):
if you said, for example, what is twelve divided by three?
You would get four hoofs stamps. Yeah, and we're gonna
just twist things entirely here. Put it to a new level.
Hans could even read minds. You didn't have to ask
him a question out loud. You could put the question
to him mentally and he would still get it right.
And to to add even further to this, it didn't
(07:18):
have to be Von Austin who was asking the question.
Anybody could do it and the horse would still get
the answers right. So it wasn't just a simple matter
of a trainer who had secret cues with his animals.
So after initially causing this great sensation in Germany, which
is where Hans lived, he started to get international coverage
(07:39):
when this team of experts they were called the Hans Commission,
examined him to determine if von Austin was perpetuating some
kind of fraud somehow or enough because people were suspicious
of this, right, they thought it was a hoax. Yeah,
people were very suspicious. This was not within the normal
realm of horse abilities, and the experts were pretty prominent men.
(08:00):
There was a circus proprietor and army captain, the director
of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, the veterinary surgeon, and other
guys who were just really familiar with horses and with
horse training and would be able to presumably tell if
something fishy was going on. And after they did their work,
there was a headline printed in the New York Times
on October twod nineteen o four, which read expert commission
(08:24):
decides that the horse actually reasons. So it really was
global news. Yeah. But even more than that, they determined
that the horse was not trained in the in the
traditional ways. Instead, Von Austin's techniques were more like those
used to teach children, which makes sense since he is
a school teacher. But some people still weren't convinced by this,
and one man, Oscar Funkst, got Von Austin's permission to
(08:47):
come in and investigate the horse, and after some pretty
serious examinations, he learned two things. One, the horse could
only answer questions in which the answer was our are
you known to the questioner? So you can ask what
is twelve divided by three? But maybe not some more
outrageous piece of division. And he could also only answer
(09:10):
unless he could see the questioner. And so clever Hans
was used to being questioned with somebody right in front
of him. If he stood by his side, he'd try
to move his head so he would be looking at
you faith on, and if he had blinders on, he
couldn't answer the question at all. So this gave fools
some ideas about the limits of Hans's abilities, Right, okay,
(09:31):
So what did this mean? It suggested, basically that there
were some sort of unconscious movements coming from the questioner,
and sure enough, when he looked more closely, he found
that nearly every test questioner would ask a question and
then bent his head forward, which made the horse start tapping,
and then as soon as the correct number of taps
(09:52):
had occurred, the questioner would jerk up his head and
the horse would stop. So Funks found that while almost
everyone made these movements, hardly anyone was aware of it. Yeah,
so this makes it kind of a hoax, but kind
of not in a way. People were suspicious of it.
That's very hoax like, but it seems like nobody was
trying to perpetuate fraud, as we'll see in most of
our other hoaxes. So Folks published a book on his
(10:16):
findings in nineteen eleven, and it got a really glowing
review from the New York Times. Although I liked that,
the article also noted quote it detracts nothing from the
merit of his being clever Hans achievements and leaves him
as wonderful a horse as he was before. I e.
We still love you know, we still love Hans. We
still think he's great. And today you might still see
(10:39):
mentions of Clever Hans. When you're reading about animal psychology
or articles about animal intelligence research, you'll see something sometimes
called the Clever Hans effect. And it's something that researchers
have to be very careful of that they are not
either willingly misleading the animal or giving some sort of
(10:59):
SubCom just cues, or doing it without even being aware
of it. So this actually led to something kind of useful. Yeah,
it did lead to something useful, unlike our next entry,
which just led to a very peculiar hoax craze for
a few decades there. It started in eighteen sixty nine
when a couple of well diggers in Cardiff, New York
(11:22):
made this startling find while digging a well on the
property of William stub Newell. Yes, after hitting stone three
ft down and clearing off the top soil, one of
them recognized a foot and he said, quote, I didclare
some old Indian has been buried here, So there was
(11:42):
an ancient burial here, at least that's what it seemed.
But pretty soon they realized that it wasn't just the
skeleton of a normal man. It was ten ft long
and clearly the remains of some sort of ancient giant.
So Newell got right to work marketing this fine try
and make some money off of his farm. He set
up a tent and charged admission for people to come
(12:07):
and take a peek at the so called Cardiff Giant,
and he bumped it up after attendance was so good
he bumped it up to fifty cents, and people were
coming from all over the area to gawk and marvel
at this strange stone man. Here's how the first president
of Cornell, Andrew White, described his own visit. He said,
(12:27):
quote lying in its grave, with a subdued light from
the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with
the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it
produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity
pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper. Sounds
pretty cool, doesn't, except that White even himself realized that
(12:49):
the skeleton was clearly made from stone. He actually realized
it wasn't even a very good carving, and that the
two well diggers had would have had no reason to
dig in that very spot, suggesting some sort of planned fraud.
Very suspicious. So we have to backtrack a little bit
to eighteen sixty six to figure out what happened. And
(13:10):
that's when a New York's cigar maker named George hull
or Hole got an idea he was an acqui Iowa
investigating his brother in law for a late payment on
a large shipment of cigars, and while he was there,
he got into an argument with the Methodist revivalist over giants,
and he later spent the night quote wondering about why
people would believe these remarkable stories in the Bible about giants.
(13:33):
When suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and
passing it off as a petrified man. Okay, so that's
probably not where most people's train of thought would go
after that argument, but he really runs with it once
the once the thought strikes him, but he knows that
he can't make the giant close to home because it's
got to be secret. It's obviously a ten foot stone giant.
(13:55):
I think it weighed about three thousand pounds, all said
and done, would cause quite a sturve. In eighteen sixty eight,
he hires some guys to quarry a block of gypsum
from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and just so they don't talk
and so it stays secret, he tells them that it's
for some sort of new Lincoln monument that's going to
be going up, and from there he has his giant
(14:17):
block of gypsum shipped to Chicago and carved again in
secret by a German stone cutter. I think he's he's
paid money and sworn to secrecy. In fact, finally, the
finished statue was sent on a train to Cardiff, where
Hole met up with his cousin Stubbed Newell, and the
men buried it on the farm. So they waited about
(14:38):
a year I think to dig it up right, just
so it could get some authentic dirt scenes around it
and and look convincing enough. But there's a good plan. Yeah,
if if you're going to go through all the trouble,
you might as well put in that extra year to
make it work. But once the giant was on earth, though,
the story didn't last that long. Newell even told some
people that it was a hoax, which seems like a
(15:00):
really bad idea if you're trying to make fifty cents
ahead on your farm. But ho realized he would have
to lock somebody into buying this giant get a large
amount of money up front before the story broke at
the fraud, so he sold the giant to a businessman
named David Hannum for twenty three thousand dollars, and Hannum
(15:21):
took it on the road as kind of a syndicate show.
It caught the attention from there of P. T. Barnum, again,
our old friend. He just pops up all the time.
He offered to buy the giant for fifty thousand dollars
and hand him refused. So Barnum, who isn't going to
be thwarted by not possessing the quote authentic giant, decided
(15:41):
to build his own replica and had an agent go
to Handhum show make some covert wax models. And of
course all the newspapers were running stories about the Cardiff Giants,
so we had all of the measurements ready to go,
and Um just started touring his own plastered giant. It
did really well. To hand Hum, though, is pretty dismissive
(16:03):
of this plastic copy of Barnum's and all of those
who paid to go see it. And he even said
there's a sucker born every minute, which is obviously painfully
ironic to hear that. But my favorite part of this
is that it started kind of a petrified man trend, right,
did well? I mean it's easy to see how it
would too if if you could make so much money
(16:25):
off of having a petrified man in your backyard. But
for a few decades there there were lots of petrified
men turning up giants or just normal size think Mark
Twain even wrote a little newspaper article, a spoof of
finding a petrified man, and it got picked up by
real outlet. So um, yeah, for a for a few
(16:46):
years there there was a rush and petrified men, and
then they lost their cachet, you know, yeah, you know, Well,
that's what happens when you find a hoax that works,
you tend to see it kind of over run into
the ground. But I have to say this next one
on our list is one Sarah that I'm really glad
did not catch on. It is about a woman named
Mary Toft, and it's a medical hoax that's been called
(17:07):
the top fraud of the Enlightenment. It started when an
englishwoman named Mary Toft, who was a mother of three already,
had a miscarriage around September of About a month after that,
she and her husband, Joshua Toft sent for the doctor,
who in this case was a male midwife named John Howard,
because she was having these full on labor pains, and
(17:30):
after she called in John Howard, she gave birth to
a dead skinned baby rabbit and then proceeded to continue
giving birth to dead rabbits at the rate of about
one per day. And Howard claimed that he could even
feel and see these baby bunnies jumping in the womb
before they died. I know he could see. He claimed
(17:53):
that you could see kind of the bedclothes move over
her stomach and that it would shake the bed sometimes.
So this dead bunny would I'm out. Yeah, not pleasant
at all. So obviously people are skeptical of the story,
and so people wouldn't think that he was lying. Howard
put out an open invitation for other doctors to come
check out the situation, maybe even deliver a rabbit for themselves,
(18:14):
and see the truth in this pretty invasive Yeah it was.
But several people took him up on that, including Nathaniel
st Andre, a surgeon from Switzerland and also the personal
surgeon of King George. The first we have to mention,
though st Andre had an interesting resume before he got
into the doctor in business, which maybe makes it though
(18:35):
he wasn't the most qualified person to be the public
face of this. He was originally a dancing and a
fencing instructor. No kind of a strange backstory for him
that is definitely on. But what's perhaps most surprising about
this whole story in general is that how many doctors
were convinced that the births were real. I mean, it
wasn't just St. Andre, right, it was some other people too,
(18:56):
who really thought that this was happening. As a kind
of proof of this phenomenon, St Andre didn't experiment in
which he put the organs of the bunnies in water,
and it's unclear I guess as to why that actually
provided any proof, but it was supposed to have been
(19:16):
ury doctors. Some doctors were skeptical, though, including a Sir
Richard Manningham, and to figure out what was going on
once and for all, Mary was brought to London and
put under a twenty four hour watch, which pretty soon
put a stop to these strange births. Then they discovered
a porter trying to smuggle a rabbit into Mary at
her hotel. Her sister, who was kind of playing nurse
(19:39):
to her at the time. She also confessed to this,
but claimed that they were bringing the rabbit into her
for eating purposes only, not for birthing purposes, which sounds
pretty fishy. Yeah, it didn't look good. To say the least.
But Mary, if you were giving birth to rabbits, would
you really still be eating them? That is a very
(19:59):
good point. I mean, if you're going to think this
out a little bit, that's a good point. Sarah, I
would think that you wouldn't want to eat meat in general.
But apparently she didn't have a problem with that while
she was staying in London, but she did still claim
even after that incident, that she was telling the truth. Finally,
though they had to resort to threatening her. They said,
basically they would do a painful procedure operate on her
the next time she was about to go into labor.
(20:21):
Instead of just letting the bunnies be born, they would
they would do an operation and examine her uterus. And
so at that point she finally confessed the whole thing
was a scam to get a pension and and live
easy for the rest of her life. Specifically, she said quote,
her goal was to get so good a living that
I should never want as long as I lived, Which
(20:44):
is another strange thing to think about, that you would
be pensioned for the very act of giving birth to
baby bunnies. Yeah, well, it's strange to plan that as
a way I think to get your your fortune, look
in your future. But she didn't work alone, she said
an accomplice helped her get the animal parts in return
for part of the potential profits. So someone else may
(21:05):
have been involved here, or maybe multiple someone else's. Her
husband was probably part of it, at least a little bit.
He I think was implicated in getting it was found
that he had purchased first for rabbits. Yeah, so Mary
was charged as a quote to vile, cheat and imposter
and thrown in jail, but she was later released and
the doctors didn't come out of it very well. Many
(21:25):
of their reputations were ruined, and a popular purchase in
the early eighteen hundreds in England was a book of
writings about Toft, which was bound in of course rabbit
skin and one more note about these bunnies. Even though
Mary Toft apparently did not lose her appetite for rabbit
meat while perpetuating this fraud, a lot of people in
(21:49):
England did, and rabbit stew took a little nose dive
in popularity for for a short time after this fraud.
So it's clear that the people of England knew the
the story of Mary Toft was definitely a hoax. But
the last story on our list is one that is
still sort of in question. People have called this a
hoax for years, and it's cited as a common example
(22:12):
of a hoax, but there are still some people who
think that it might be true. So here's the basic story.
It all started in Newark, Ohio in eighteen sixty when
a local county surveyor and amateur archaeologist named David Wyrick
was excavating some of the huge earthen mounds in the
American Midwest. And you may recall us talking about this
(22:32):
these quite recently in the Cookio podcast, But most people
believe that these mounds were the work of pre Columbian
native civilizations. However, a common belief during this time period
that we're talking about right now was that the mounds
were built by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I
think we we even mentioned that in the Cohokia we
may have. They were believed to have vanished after being
(22:54):
captured by the Assyrians. But Wyrick was a supporter of
this theory, and that's kind of what made what happened
next very suspicious, all right. So Wyrick was digging near
New York's fifty acre Octagon Mound in eighteen sixty when
he discovered the keystone, which was the first of the
holy stones in the Shallow Hole. And the keystone is
(23:17):
basically a polished wedge shaped piece of sandstone, and it
has Hebrew inscriptions on all four sides and they read
the Laws of Jehovah, the Word of the Lord, King
of the Earth, and the Holy of Holy. So this
was really really big news because some people thought that
it finally confirmed the ten Lost Tribes theory. Other people thought, well,
(23:41):
maybe it's not an ancient Hebrew text, maybe it's a
Masonic keystone because of that shape and everything. It didn't
take long though for some people to just call it
out as an outright fake. Yes, Charles Whittlesey, for example,
a noteworthy ohio archaeologist, he thought that it was neither
Masnic nor Jewish, but a relatively modern artifact. The Hebrew,
(24:03):
for example, was thought to be too modern to be
authentic to be from that previous time period when the
Lost Tribes would have been around. So that November Wyrick
gets a little bit more evidence. Maybe he discovers another
stone the Decalogue Stone and the Jackson Town Stone Mound,
which is a few miles southeast of Newark, and it's
found encased in a custom made stone box. Sounds pretty cool, yeah,
(24:27):
And it's shaped like a tombstone that's intricately carved all
over with Hebrew letters that convey an abbreviated form of
the Ten Commandments, so completely different from the keystone. On
the front side, the inscription lines an arch that frames
the image of a man named Moses, and the style
of Hebrew was some unique archaic style. They couldn't quite
(24:48):
place that. It wasn't the modern style that they found
on the keystone, but it wasn't also ancient Hebrew, right
It wasn't what they knew to be an ancient Hebrew
style that was recognizable. So many people thought this was
a fraud right away too. It had too many scriptural
mistakes and a lack of patina that made people very
suspicious should have left it in the ground for longer,
(25:08):
like the Cardiff Giant that In his book Fantastic Archaeology,
Stephen Williams says that the stones feel every possible archaeological task.
Their inscriptions are the only ones of their kind known
and are not correct for the time period. Others, though,
we're wondering if ancient Hebrews were present in America's why
(25:31):
can't we find evidence of their settlements? So not just
like why can't we find their their stones and their inscriptions,
but why can't we find anything from their settlements. It's
a good question. One problem with this doubt about the stones, though,
is trying to figure out, Okay, if they're not real,
who made them. Of course, some people thought it could
be Wyrick. I read that before Wyric's death he actually
(25:53):
wondered himself if somebody had fooled him. So it seems
unlikely that he would bring that up if he didn't
want to put suspicion on himself. So archaeologist Brad Lepper
believes that it was actually a man named Reverend John W.
McCarty who translated the text on the keystone for Wyrick overnight.
So it just seemed too fast for him to be
able to be too familiar with it exactly. And the
(26:14):
theory is that McCarty hoped the stones would prove that
Adam and Eve were mother and father to all races,
a good argument against slavery. Yeah, so in eighteen sixty four,
two additional Hebrew inscribed stones, which are now unfortunately lost,
were found during the excavation of a mound on the
George A Wilson farm, which is east of Newark, and
(26:37):
people again got really excited. But soon a local dentist
named John H. Nickel claimed that he himself carved the stones,
introduced them into the excavation with the intention of discrediting
the two earlier find from Wyrick. Of course, and these
inscriptions actually just spelled out his name, So the plan
(26:59):
did pretty much where these new stones, which are so
obviously frauds, kind of made the earlier fines again. It
kind of like the card off effect. All the all
the petrified men sort of make the original one not
seemed so great. Hence why for years this has been
believed to be a hoax. But then attention came back
(27:19):
to the story around the nineteen eighties or so, and
there are some now who believe that the stones are authentic.
They say they're just too detailed and thought out to
be hoaxes, and the fact that they're so different from
each other, they're so unique and distinct. Um, Yeah, I
think it was maybe the decologue you were describing to
me earlier. You said that it was just perfectly laid out.
(27:40):
You know, there were no there were no places where
the words were crammed in. Everything was planned. Yeah, it
didn't look like you were just trying to quickly put
this together to pull off some kind of hoax. It
looked like something that had been meticulously done. But today
you can decide for yourself. The visitors can view the
Holy Stones at the Johnston homework House Museum in Ohio.
(28:01):
So I think it's only fitting that we leave off
with one that's still kind of hanging in the balancer
in question, because we love to leave you guys with
a question to answer. Um. Even though, as Sarah said
when we started this, these are all true hoaxes we did.
This is not a hoax in itself. That would have
been pretty clever. Maybe we'll do that some other time.
(28:25):
Our first piece of mail was from Catherine, and she wrote, Hello,
Sara Dublina. I'm a big fan of her podcast and
would love to hear you talk about Bonnie Prince, Charlie
or Flora McDonald, the woman who helped him escape. She
even has a Highland dance named after her Flora McDonald's fancy.
I'm enclosing some rulers quote rulers for you to pass
(28:47):
around at work. Maybe you'll find a future podcast topic
on one of them. I just wanted to say thank
you to Catherine for sending us about five or six rulers. Yeah,
they're awesome, and I think they do have some podcast
ideas on them. Almost wanted to take more than one
or keep them all, but I just took one, just
to give you guys examples. It was like patriots, and
then it would be a big list starting with Ben
(29:10):
Franklin a picture of him, and then a big list
of worldwide patriots. I think we had women and art, scientists,
all sorts of cool things. So thank you Catherine for those.
I also wanted to read an email from Lori Leadfoot
and I just I mean, I kind of picked it
because of her nickname, but Lori wrote just wanted to
(29:31):
drop a quick note to say hi and to thank you.
And then over the road truck driver. And finally bought
my first iPod about six months ago. While browsing the
podcast in search of something to listen to, I came
across stuff you missed in history class. Being a fan
of History, I decided to check it out. I finally
caught up with past shows and wanted to let you
know I think you're doing a great job and say
(29:51):
thank you. So I thought i'd read Lorie Leadfoot's email
sort of in a tribute to all of the long
haul drivers we have as listeners. Um, we get a
lot of listeners from folks who are driving trucks, which
I think is so cool. I when I was younger,
I was kind of obsessed with the idea of being
a truck driver. I think it sounds so adventurous to
(30:13):
be driving across country. So I was like the kid
trying to make them honk their horns too. I did
that as well. So we're glad to hear that we
have so many listeners who are doing the long haul
and learning about history while they're at it. So if
you have any comments, any postcards you want to send us,
go ahead. You can also send us more hoax suggestions.
(30:34):
This was pretty fun. I definitely enjoyed this episode. We're
at History podcast at half stuff works dot com. I've
noticed lately a lot of people have been confused about
how to contact us. We've gotten things on Twitter. That
is the only email address, so if you want to
send us an email, that's the place to go. History
podcast at half stuff works dot com. But you should
(30:55):
also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter,
and it's in history yep. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about how maybe you could
pull off your own hoax, not that we encourage that
at all, but we do have an interesting article on
our website called how Lying Works, and it talks about
how you can lie, how you can learn how to lie,
(31:15):
and also how you can learn to spot a lie,
which may be the more valuable skill. Pitch that part. Yes,
we will pitch that part of it because we do
not can go online, but you can find that on
our website by searching on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:36):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House doff works iPhone app
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. The tak
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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