Five Folklore Hoaxes

I’m a bit of a wet cat when it comes to April Fool’s Day, but I can appreciate a good hoax. I hate being taken in by them, and doubt I could pull off some sort of “I’m never writing again!” prank for an April 1st blog (although the sheer act of blogging at all on April 1st might be construed as a prank, considering my absence), but the lengths others will go to trick others — and the lengths innocent pranks get taken out of hand — always catch my eye.

In honour of my least observed holiday, I give you five great folklore hoaxes.

The Surgeon’s Photo

The classic Nessie photo cropped up in 1934, brought to light by respected British surgeon Colonel Robert Wilson. Wilson claimed he’d been driving along the shore of Loch Ness when he noticed something rise out of the water. He, of course, stopped his car and grabbed his camera. His famous photo was also the first to capture the head and neck, as opposed to just mysterious bumps in the water.

For decades skeptics argued the photo was a hoax, suggesting a water bird or even an otter, as the water disturbance around the subject could not have been from a large creature, but it wasn’t until 1994 that the truth came out. Before his death at the age of 90, Christian Spurling confessed his involvement in the hoax, explaining that  his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherell, famed big-game hunter, had come to make the serpent model for the photograph. The winter before the Surgeon’s photo was taken, Wetherell had hired to travel to the loch and hunt the monster. He discovered bizarre footprints leading into the water, but researchers eventually determined the tracks had been made by dried hippo’s feet — a popular fixture for umbrella stands. Whetherell retreated from the public eye in humiliation, and purportedly concocted the photo plot to get revenge.

Spurling made the sea serpent model, which was attached to the top of a toy submarine, and the model was photographed in Loch Ness. The photo was then given to Wilson, as a credible third party to claim the photo as his own work. The full image was cropped in close on the ‘monster’ to give it the appearance of a greater size.

Nessie’s Body Found

Among many suspect photos and videos of the Loch Ness Monster, we also have this hoax staged the day before April Fool’s Day in 1972. That morning, a team of British zoologists having breakfast near the loch were notified by passers-by of a strange carcass floating in the water. The team had been working with the Loch Ness Phenomena Bureau searching for proof of the monster’s existence. They put out a boat and came back dragging a creature somewhere between 12 and 18 feet long, very heavy, and definitely not rubber. The zoologists began to transport the body when they were stopped by police.

With the removal of unidentified creatures from Loch Ness prohibited, the carcass was taken nearby for examination. The discovery garnered widespread attention and the carcass earned the nickname “Son of Nessie,” before scientists identified it as a bull elephant seal.

John Shields, a colleague of the team, confessed the next day that he’d been responsible for the prank. A bull elephant seal had died a week earlier at the Dudley Zoo and he had taken the body, keeping it frozen for a week to prank the team. After dumping the carcass in Loch Ness he phoned in a tip to ensure his colleagues would find it. The police and massive media attention that followed had been well beyond what he’d intended.

The Cerne Abbas Giant

This enormous chalk figure of a naked man wielding a club is one of England’s most famous hill figures, in part because of his sizable endowment. Folklore holds that if couples have sex on his phallus, they are guaranteed to conceive, and the giant is widely believed to be thousands of years old. In recent years though, historians suggest the giant may only date to the seventeenth century. And that he may have been a prank.

A mock trial was held in Cerna Abbas in 1996, to determine the age of the giant. During it, historians pointed to the first written reference of the giant occurring only in 1694, and not because descriptions of the landscape were scarce. Nor, as I’ve seen mentioned sometimes, because the giant was such a commonplace figure that descriptions rarely thought to mention him. The Uffington Horse, another iconic hill figure, has references dating back to the 11th century.

The prank, they suggested, was done by a local land owner during the English Civil War. Oliver Cromwell was often represented like a modern, club-wielding Hercules, and so the prankster, with a passionate hatred of Cromwell, carved a massive rude caricature of him into the hillside. The mock trial ended undecided, and historians still debate over the age of the chalk figure.

The Dead Fairy Hoax

A few days before April Fool’s in 2007, sculptor and illusion designer Dan Baines posted on his website a photo of the mummified remains of a fairy. A story accompanying it described how it had been found in the Derbyshire countryside, and how many other bodies had been found in the same barrow. The fairy was described with a build like a child’s and hollow bones, like a bird’s. The remains were supposedly examined by anthropologists and forensic experts and verified genuine. The image, unsurprisingly, generated a huge amount of attention from skeptics and believers alike.

Even when Baines posted an update on April 1st say that the image was an April Fool’s joke, many people refused to believe him. Some were even upset that the location of the fairy barrow had been revealed. Baines thanked readers for their interest in the story, and hoped that the magic created by the possibility of fairies would remain with those who saw the picture. He later put his fairy sculpture on eBay, where it sold for nearly £300.

The Cottingley Fairies

In 1920, a series of photographs emerged potentially proving once and for all that fairies exist. Ten-year-old Frances Griffiths and her thirteen-year-old cousin Elsie Wright borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera to take a picture of the fairies they had been playing with down by Cottingley Beck. When they came back, triumphant, with proof, Elsie’s father developed the plate and found an image of Frances with four fairies on a bush in front of you. Elsie’s father dismissed the photo as a joke.

A month later the girls came back from the beck with another photo, this time of Elsie with a winged gnome about to leap into her lap. Again her father dismissed the photo as a joke, but her mother took them more seriously. She brought them to the speaker at a lecture on spiritualism, inquiring about their authenticity. From there, the photos garnered wider attention as more people used them to argue the existence of fairies, or debated their validity. The photos were examined, and confirmed to have no evidence of tampering — that is to say, nothing done to them in a dark room to doctor them. The photos indeed showed whatever the girls had pointed the camera at.

The photos gained widespread interest after this so-called stamp of approval, and even caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a passionate believer of spiritualism. At his urging, the girls took three more photographs. Doyle then wrote an article defending the veracity of the photos and his belief in the existence of fairies, bringing the Cottingley Fairies to even more people, and sparking debates between believers and skeptics. Skeptics argued problems with the photographs, including elongated hands, current French fashions on the fairies, and missing wings, but it wasn’t until 1978 that magician and scientific skeptic James Randi had the photos examined with computer enhancement and declared them fakes.

In 1983 the cousins, both long since grown and married, admitted in an article for The Unexplained magazine that the images were faked. The figures of the fairies had been copied from images in a children’s book published shortly before the girls took the pictures. Elsie copied the images and made cardboard cut-outs, which they supported with hat pins for the photos. Once the photos had been taken, they disposed of their props in the beck.