3: Charles Dawson
Although he could still concievably been the hapless victim of the Piltdown
man hoax, it’s perhaps kinder to think of Charles Dawson as the perpetrator
of that celebrated piece of archaeological fakery. Hailed at the time as %26lsquo;by
far the most important ever made in England, and of equal, if not of greater
consequence than any other discovery yet made, either at home or abroad the
Piltdown Man skull later proved to be the combination of two quite disparate
hominds. From its ‘discovery’ in 1912 to the exposure of the fraud in the
1950s Eoanthropus dawsoni was considered as the ‘missing link’
between ape and man. Click
here for more4: Elizabeth
Parsons
Perhaps the most successful fake haunting in history is the Cock Lane Ghost..
The site of the haunting, in Cock Lane in the City of London, attracted many
curious observers. The Duke of York and Samuel Johnson were just two
dignitaries who were drawn to witness the celebrated phenomena. They were,
of course, entirely fraudulent the work of an eleven-year-old girl called
Elizabeth Parsons who convinced witnesses by means of assorted scratchings,
feats of ventriloquism and bumps in the night that the house was inhabited
by the shade of girl murdered by a former lodger. Her father ended up
standing trial for the imposture, and was sentenced to the pillory but
remained comparatively untouched by a sympathetic London mob. Click
here for more 5: Mary Willcocks
On Good Friday 1817, a young woman wearing a black turban and speaking an
unknown language was found wandering in Almondsbury, north-east of Bristol.
Convincing the locals that she was the exotic princess Caraboo she was the
centre of much excitement involving dancing, swimming, and the cooking of
chicken curries. It was only in the June of that year that Princess Caraboo
was exposed as Mary Willcocks, a former nursemaid from Witheridge. She
continued to trade on the Princess Caraboo name even after exposure, finally
dying in a houseful of cats at the turn of the last Century. Click
here for more6: Frances
Griffiths
Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright were the teenage cousins behind the
still-famous Cottingley Fairies photographs. Although the pictures did not
initially fool the family members to which the girls showed them, in 1920
they came to the attention of celebrated author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle, who had become obsessed with the supernatural after the loss of
his son in the Great War, made a cause c%26eacute;l%26egrave;bre of the
photos, which made it almost impossible for the girls to admit their
deception. The maintained the veracity of the images for over sixty-five
years, only confessing that the ‘fairies’ were in fact paper cut-outs in
1983. Click here
for more
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Tags: cot, cousins, family, family members, fraud, mena, rth