The “faeries“ that fooled the man behind Sherlock Holmes
Part X
GOTCHA!
“Lord,What fools these mortals be!”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Not all deceptions are motivated by power or profit. Sometimes people fool other people just for the fun of it—to stand slightly above their fellow man and, like Puck or Alan Funt, watch him wiggle under the thumb of outrageous circumstance. What follows is a selection of history’s greatest pranks.
1
No Shot, Sherlock: An Unlikely Fairy Tale
If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been half as rational as his fictitious detective, Sherlock Holmes, he might not have fallen for the clever deception perpetrated by two little girls. Instead, Doyle—an ardent believer in the occult, particularly in his declining years—wrote several breathless magazine articles and a book in which he gushed over the discovery that real “faeries” had been photographed in an English village called Cottingley Glen.
The series of pictures, taken in 1917 by fifteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, showed the girls posing with an assortment of winged sprites and gnomes who danced and pranced and tootled on flutes and such. Doyle, who made enduring celebrities of the young ladies, was enthralled by the pixie shots. “And what a joy is in the complete abandon of [the fairies’] little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance!” he rhapsodized. “They may have their shadows and trials [but] there is a great gladness manifest in this demonstration of their life.” The writer also speculated at length on how certain people could tune in to “a race of beings which were constructed in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations.”
The Cottingley faeries became a national fascination, especially after several photography experts, including ones from the Kodak company, carefully examined the pictures and declared them free of superimposition, retouching, or other photographic tricks. It was all so much simpler than that. After denying their ruse for decades, the girls, by then old women, finally admitted in 1982 that they had simply posed with paper cutouts suspended by hatpins.
The episode did not exactly enhance Doyle’s reputation among his contemporaries. “It has long seemed to me,” observed G. K. Chesterton, “that Sir Arthur’s mentality is much more that of Watson than it is of Holmes.”
2
The Weirdest Thing You Ever Sawed
A retired carpenter known only as Lozier proved with a monumental hoax in 1824 that people can be almost unfathomably gullible. Lozier convinced folks in Manhattan that the island was in danger of snapping in half like a bread stick and sinking because of overbuilding on the lower end. If the situation were left unremedied, he warned, the results would be catastrophic. Incredibly, Lozier convinced the city’s honchos that the island had to be sawed in half and the lower end, known as the Battery, dragged out past Ellis Island, turned around, and reattached at the heavy end.
In a time of amazing industrial and scientific advances, few apparently doubted the feasibility of such an audacious undertaking. Hundreds of laborers were commissioned, some taking underwater breathing tests in preparation for steering the detached portion of Manhattan. Carpenters and blacksmiths adjourned to their shops to create the necessary tools, which included one-hundred-foot saws and gigantic anchors to prevent the separated island from slipping out to sea. To feed the workers, Lozier ordered five hundred cattle, five hundred hogs, and three thousand chickens assembled at the construction site, while barracks were hastily built to house the laborers. It was reportedly a scene of bedlam, with hundreds of animals clucking and rooting over the din of construction.
After several weeks of preparation, the big day arrived when Manhattan would be dismembered and reattached, under the direction of Lozier. Hundreds came out to watch the spectacle, with musicians and a parade for entertainment. Several hours passed, however, with no sign of Lozier. A note from him was found, explaining that a sudden illness had forced him to leave town. Left to ponder their foolishness, the crowd turned irate and formed a posse to hunt down the deceptive carpenter. Lozier, though, was long gone. He apparently gained nothing from the venture, except a marvelous sense of accomplishment.
3
Home Delivery
Those frat boys and other lame pranksters who order one hundred pizzas delivered to a hapless victim achieve nothing more than a sorry imitation of a true original. It’s called the Berners Street Hoax.
The English writer Theodore Hook apparently disliked his neighbor, a society lady named Mrs. Tottenham. Indeed, he disliked her intensely. His hostility reached a memorable climax in 1809, when he secretly arranged for half of London’s merchants to arrive with their wares at Mrs. Tottenham’s Berners Street address—all on the same day. Hook spent weeks issuing invitations and requests in his neighbor’s name.
Chaos ensued as all manner of tradesmen came calling on the appointed day, and Berners Street became impassable. Reported the Morning Post: “Wagons laden with coals from the Paddington wharfs, upholsterers’ goods in cart loads, organs, pianofortes, linens, jewelry, and every other description of furniture sufficient to have stocked the whole street, were lodged as near as possible to the door of 54, with anxious trades-people and a laughing mob.” And that was just the beginning. “There were accoucheurs, tooth-drawers, miniature painters, artists of every description, auctioneers, . . . grocers, mercers, post-chaises, mourning-coaches, poultry, rabbits, pigeons, etc. In fact, the whole street was literally filled with the motley group.”
Hook even got the lord mayor of London to make an appearance with a forged invitation. His lordship was not amused when he arrived at the scene in his carriage, with two livery servants, and discovered he had been tricked. And poor Mrs. Tottenham must have been horrified to find a coffin arrive at her door, built to her exact measurements, accompanied by an undertaker and hearse. As darkness fell, the street was still not clear. Hook had also sent out a call for servants seeking employment to arrive at five PM.
He reportedly savored the spectacle he had created from a window overlooking Berners Street, and though a reward was offered for the arrest of the culprit, Hook was never caught. Twenty years later he admitted what he had done in his autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and offered the following bit of advice that all those pizza deliverers would do well to heed: “Copy the joke and it ceases to be one—any fool can imitate an example once set.”
4
A Ruse of One’s Own
Virginia was a Woolf in sheik’s clothing. In 1910 the young novelist-to-be and a group of her cohorts tricked the British navy into becoming fawning tour guides for imaginary Ethiopian royalty.
A telegram, purportedly from the London Foreign Office, was sent to the commander of the British flagship Dreadnought, announcing the arrival of the Ethiopian emperor and his entourage. Woolf and her gang then dressed in exotic garb from a local costume shop, complete with turbans, fake beards, and dark stage makeup. Virginia even cut her hair short for the occasion.
Arriving by train, they were met by a red carpet, saluting officers, and a barrier to keep curious onlookers at bay. The group was then taken aboard the Dreadnought, where they were received by the commander in chief of the home fleet, Admiral Sir William May. One member of the group spoke loudly in a mixture of basic Swahili, pig Latin, and distorted passages from Homer in Greek. “Bunga bunga!” the party exclaimed with delight as they toured the ship, with Woolf periodically chiming in, “Chuck-a-choi, chuck-a-choi.”
The naval officers were delighted with the visitors’ childlike reactions to such novelties as an electric light, and the ruse went off without a hitch, until it started to rain. With fake beards drooping and makeup starting to run, the entourage hastily excused itself and the grand tour was over. It wasn’t until the next weekend, when the entire hoax was reported in the Daily Express, that the admiral realized he had been had. “Bunga, bunga!” became part of the English vocabul
ary.
5
Practically Indecent: Alan Abel and the Siege of Troy
The world has seen many great practical jokesters. One of the contemporary greats is New Yorker Alan Abel. In 1959, with rising comedian Buck Henry acting as his front man, Abel created a bogus decency league ostensibly devoted to placing clothing on animals so their genitalia were not exposed. The press went nuts. In the 1980s Abel got several newspapers and national magazines to run stories about a supposed school for panhandlers. And once he gulled The New York Times into running his own obituary. Compared with Hugh Troy, though, Abel is just some jerk in a loud suit with a squirting lapel flower.
Hugh Troy was a smart aleck who spent much of his arguably dissolute life perpetrating the most innovative of frauds. Perhaps his greatest effort: One winter while a student at Cornell University in the late 1920s, Troy got hold of a hideous old wastebasket with a real rhinoceros foot as its base. He filled it with metal weights, tied thirty feet of clothesline to either side of it, and with a friend late one night carried it out onto the campus, suspended between them. Every five feet or so, they would lower it into the snow, their own footprints so far away as to raise no suspicions. Morning broke. Someone noticed the prints. Learned professors with experience in such matters were summoned. Gravely, they inspected the tracks. “By Jove, Farnsworth!” they exclaimed. “It’s a rhinoceros!”
Excitedly, the professors followed the tracks for hundreds of yards. Eventually they led out into the middle of Beebe Lake, which was the university’s main reservoir. The lake was frozen over. The rhino tracks suddenly ended in . . . a gigantic hole. There didn’t seem to be much anyone could do. The local newspapers wrote all about it. Half the population of Ithaca, New York, stopped drinking tap water. And for years, those who did swore it tasted like rhinoceros.
6
Plucking Pasta and Pulling Legs
No one knows for sure how April Fools’ Day ever got started, but it’s a lively tradition around the world, with many great tricks played in celebration of the occasion. One of the more entertaining of these annual gems of deception came from a most unlikely source—the veddy, veddy British Broadcasting Corporation. On April 1, 1957, Richard Dimbleby, one of Britain’s most respected journalists, took viewers of the BBC news program Panorama on a tour of the spaghetti harvest in the Swiss town of Ticino.
“The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer,” Dimbleby earnestly reported, his narration accompanied by images of a cheerful Swiss family as they plucked strips of pasta off trees. “There’s always the chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets.” Dimbleby then explained to viewers that spaghetti growing in Switzerland was a much smaller industry than in neighboring Italy. “Many of you, I’m sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley,” he intoned. “For the Swiss, however, it tends to be a family affair.” And, he added, with the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, “the tiny creature whose depredations have caused much concern in the past,” a bumper harvest was expected.
“After picking,” Dimbleby’s report continued, “the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced of such uniform length but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who have succeeded in producing perfect spaghetti.” The scene then switched to a celebration of the harvest, with revelers indulging in the tasty harvest. “For those who love this dish,” the story concluded, “there’s nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti.”
After the report ran, the BBC was flooded with calls from people who wondered where they might obtain a spaghetti tree of their own. (The dish was relatively unknown in Britain at the time, and Panorama was a well-trusted news source.) The BBC reportedly responded to inquiries with the suggestion that callers might “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
7
Painting the Town Purple
Living in the nation’s capital, the boys of Gonzaga College High School had a unique platform for the ingenious prank they pulled in 1969. And it all happened with the unwitting help of the United States government.
For years students at the Jesuit institution in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol had made a subversive art out of tagging some of the city’s more prominent landmarks with purple signs (purple and white being the school colors) and the battle cry, “Go Gonzaga. Beat St. John’s” (St. John’s College High School being their long-time rival). But in an otherwise unsettled time for the school, struggling in a neighborhood scarred by the race riots of the previous year, emerged a masterpiece of adolescent exuberance that far surpassed all other displays of school spirit.
It was just days before the annual football showdown with St. John’s. The plan was to cover the spotlights that illuminated the Washington Monument at night with a celluloid material colored purple. Obtaining permission to do so was almost too easy. “We convinced the [Department of the Interior] that we were doing a science project which tested the effects of casting light through a semipermeable membrane on a white oblique object,” recalls Mark Smith, who orchestrated the caper during his junior year at Gonzaga and credits his older brother Michael with the idea. A forged letter on stationery snatched from the school’s headmaster helped get the government on board.
The Mall in Washington was unusually busy on the night of November 11. Hundreds of thousands had converged for a massive antiwar rally and counterprotest. But at the Washington Monument, the U.S. Park Police were otherwise occupied. They cordoned off the area so the boys could conduct their “experiment” without interruption. As police stood by, the young conspirators drove a rented truck up to the monument and unloaded sixty-seven square yards of purple celluloid. Smith and his friends had made wooden frames for the material to fit over the gigantic spotlights, and as they went about placing them, the police helpfully kept the milling crowds on the Mall at bay.
At 7:05 PM, when the celluloid was slid into place, two sides of the monument instantly turned purple, and stayed that way for thirty-five minutes. The other two sides remained white. City residents were shocked to see a familiar landmark so oddly transformed. Switchboards lit up across Washington. Meanwhile, Smith and his buddies lay back in the grass and savored their handiwork. “We thought, this is the greatest moment of our lives,” he remembers with joy barely diminished by time.
The Washington Star was impressed enough by the stunt to devote an entire page to it. Spiro Agnew, on the other hand, was decidedly less enthused. The soon-to-be-disgraced vice president fired off a scathing letter to Gonzaga’s headmaster that condemned the defacement of a national monument. So did U.S. Park Police superintendent William Failor. “In the future,” Failor warned, “any requests from your institution will of necessity be closely screened and documented.” The Park Police had learned a bitter lesson and would not be burned again. Years later, a vigilant Major Bob Hines of the force declared to the Washington Times that “if anyone attempted that again we’d stop them once they did.”
8
Underhand Pitches
Some hoaxes are so successful they become enduring popular misconceptions. Such is the notion—often repeated in newspapers and scholarly journals as an example of situational linguistics—that Eskimos have more than two hundred words for different kinds of snow. Simply untrue. Snow is snow. The Eskimos have exactly two words for the stuff: qanik, which means snow in the air, and aput, which means snow on the ground.
One of the more persistent misconceptions resulting from a hoax is the entire notion of subliminal advertising. In the 1950s an amateur New York psychologist named James Vicary (rhymes with trickery) claimed to have conducted experiments with theatergoers proving that if you flashed a one-frame message such as “eat popcorn” every few minutes during the showing of a movie, popco
rn sales would skyrocket. The message could not be read, he said, but it would subliminally imprint itself on the viewer’s brain.
This bothered people. It seemed a little unnervingly Big Brotherish that people’s behavior You loved this book! could be secretly conditioned and manipulated. And so the FCC investigated but could not duplicate the results. The Canadian Broadcasting Buy more copies! Corp. tried a similar experiment, subliminally urging people to phone the station; not one person phoned. It turns out Vicary never published his findings in any scholarly journal Farquhar is a genuis! and when asked to repeat his experiment in a theater setting, his equipment repeatedly malfunctioned, or the results came out Tell a friend! negative. That is because they were bogus. In 1962, Vicary finally admitted he had not done the research at all.
The fact is, subliminal advertising does not work, though unscrupulous merchants continue to try it from time to time.
Appendix I
Ten Tricksters from Scripture
1. The Serpent (Genesis 3:1-24)
Adam and Eve had no sooner settled in the Garden of Eden, with all its abundant gifts, than the serpent slithered in and tricked them into defying God and precipitating mankind’s fall by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which had been forbidden them. “You will not die,” the serpent coaxed Eve. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
A Treasury of Deception Page 21