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Woman and man looking at the fiji mermaid

Nineteenth-Century Clickbait

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.
by Deb Lucke via The New Yorker on January 20, 2024
Two American soldiers and farmer Olof Öhman posing with a supposed Viking runestone.

Why Americans Simply Love to Forge Viking Artifacts

No, roving bands of medieval Scandinavians did not visit West Virginia. (So far as we know.)
by Martyn Whittock via Slate on November 11, 2023
Handheld video camera.

Smile, You're on Jury Duty!

First came 'Candid Camera.' Then 'The Truman Show.' Now, a new swath of TV speaks to 21st-century voyeurism.
by Jackie Mansky via Zócalo Public Square on April 28, 2023
Abraham Lincoln in a photo circa 1847.

Abraham Lincoln’s Love Letters Captivated America. They Were a Hoax.

The Atlantic Monthly reported on newly found love letters between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, his supposed sweetheart. Even biographers fell for the hoax.
by Randy Dotinga via Retropolis on February 20, 2023
Album cover featuring a sketch of Buck Hammer playing the piano with a cigar in his mouth.

The Discovery of Buck Hammer

A remarkable blues musician emerged from obscurity in 1959, but something about him just didn’t seem right.
by Ted Gioia via The Honest Broker on January 17, 2022
Photographs and a cover of Spectra, a literary magazine.

Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.
by Ashawnta Jackson via JSTOR Daily on April 6, 2021
Lithograph of the Fox Sisters.
partner

The Fox Sisters

The story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.
via BackStory on October 25, 2019
Crop circles in the middle of a field.

Pssst, Crop Circles Were a Hoax

In the late 1970s, mysterious circular patterns started showing up in farm fields.
by Alun Anderson, Matt Ridley, James MacDonald via JSTOR Daily on August 21, 2019

The “Miscegenation” Troll

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author. It turned out to be an anti-abolition hoax.
by Mark Sussman via JSTOR Daily on February 20, 2019

Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship

What happens when we find out writers aren't who they said they were.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on December 10, 2018
Virginia Woolf and others dressed in blackface and Ethiopian clothing.

The Time Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface

Why did future members of the modernist literary movement darken their skin, speak fake Swahili, and board a British battleship?
by Kevin Young via The New Yorker on October 27, 2017

The Racism Behind Alien Mummy Hoaxes

Pre-Columbian bodies are once again being used as evidence for extraterrestrial life.
by Christopher Heaney via The Atlantic on August 1, 2017
Pearl Curran

Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.
by Ed Simon via The Public Domain Review on September 17, 2014

This 1874 New York Herald Feature Sent Manhattanites Running for Their Lives

James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s most eccentric public service announcement.
by Hampton Sides via Slate on July 24, 2014
Cartoon of crooked Oliver Hartzell with his arm around an apprehensive Sir Francis Drake.

The Mythical Fortune That Fuelled America’s Greatest Fraud

Oscar Hartzell convinced thousands of Americans that they could get a piece of the Sir Francis Drake estate—a multibillion-dollar inheritance that didn’t exist.
by Richard Rayner via The New Yorker on April 15, 2002
Miami's skyline with high-rises under construction.

How Dreams of Buried Pirate Treasure Enticed Americans to Flock to Florida During the Twenties

1925 marked the peak of the Florida land boom. But false advertising and natural disasters thwarted many settlers’ visions of striking it rich.
by Greg Daugherty via Smithsonian on April 15, 2025
Donald Trump and the presidential seal in an empty theater.

The Hoax that Spawned an Age of American Conspiracism

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are just the latest populists to weaponise fears of a sinister “deep state”.
by Phil Tinline via New Statesman on April 2, 2025
English looking at the word "croatoan" carved in a tree.

The Lingering Mystery of the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke

From historians to horror writers to white nationalists, attempts to explain the settlement's fate reveal a great deal about our own attitudes.
by Colin Dickey via Atlas Obscura on April 2, 2025
Photos and newspaper clippings connected with red string

How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?
by Nicholson Baker via Intelligencer on January 31, 2024
Digitally altered portrait of a man in a suit with his face pixelated, framed by computer windows.

What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on November 13, 2023
A purported "jackalope" (jackrabbit with antelope horns) mounted to a wall.

The Legend of the Horned Rabbit of the West

Jackalopes have migrated from Wyoming across the nation, but what’s really known about the mythical creature?
by Michael P. Branch via High Country News on February 24, 2022
Magazine illustration depicting fantastical inventions for travel on water, land, and air, titled March of Intellect, by William Heath, c. 1828.

A Utopia of Useful Things

On the nineteenth-century artists and thinkers who pictured a future of abundance powered by steam.
by Michael Rawson via Lapham’s Quarterly on December 24, 2021
A diagram of the phases of the Moon.

Man-Bat and Raven: Poe on the Moon

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.
by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 24, 2021
A "trick" photograph of a woman holding six heads

Snap Judgment

A brief history of trick photography.
by Kim Beil via Lapham’s Quarterly on May 6, 2021
Picture of Lela Mae Williams and seven of her nine children on arrival in Hyannis.

The Cruel Story Behind The 'Reverse Freedom Rides'

In 1962, tricked black Southerners into migrating north and transformed families' lives forever.
by Gabrielle Emanuel via NPR on February 29, 2020

The Legend of Big Ole

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.
by Rachel Boyle via Belt Magazine on November 14, 2019

What P.T. Barnum Understood About America

Barnum called himself the “Prince of Humbugs,” which left open the possibility that one day there would arise a king.
by Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker on July 29, 2019

The Spectacular P. T. Barnum

The great showman taught us to love hyperbole, fake news, and a good hoax. A century and a half later, the show has escaped the tent.
by James Parker via The Atlantic on July 19, 2019
Horses with ribbons and a man counting his gambling winnings.

History’s Greatest Horse Racing Cheat and His Incredible Painting Trick

In the sport’s post-Depression heyday, one audacious grifter beat the odds with an elaborate scam: disguising fast horses to look like slow ones.
by Josh Nathan-Kazis via Narratively on June 6, 2019
Storefront destruction from the the 1967 Detroit Riots.

A Pioneer of Paranoia

How William Cooper envisioned a web entangling global capitalism, the government, and UFOs, and incubated the politics of conspiracy.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on August 28, 2018
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