Debunked cases — United States
Debunked cases — United States. 47 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Uri Geller on the Tonight Show
By 1973 Uri Geller was bending spoons around the world and being tested at the Stanford Research Institute. On 1 August 1973 he was booked on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had begun as a magician and asked James Randi's advice: the props were prepared by the crew, the spoons and sealed cans of water sat on the table from the morning, and Geller's people were kept away from them. For twenty-two minutes of airtime Geller sat repeating that he felt no strength and that he was being pressed into it. Nothing bent and nothing moved. The tape has served ever since as the standard demonstration that preparing the props is the entire trick.
The Davenport Brothers and the Spirit Cabinet
From 1854 Ira and William Davenport of Buffalo toured both sides of the Atlantic with a cabinet in which they were tied up with rope; the doors were shut, and out of the darkness came flying trumpets, ringing guitars and hands at the little window. Nobody could tie them until, in Liverpool in 1868, two sailors used a knot that held: the séance collapsed and the audience wrecked the hall. In 1911 Ira, an old man, received Harry Houdini at home and showed him the method in detail — how the rope is slipped and taken up again — and confirmed that there had never been any spiritualism in the act. Houdini set it down in a book.
Eusapia Palladino at Columbia
For twenty years the Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino lifted tables and materialised hands in front of the best scientists in Europe, and some of them went home convinced. Her method never varied: in the dark she substituted one hand or foot for another among the people controlling her, freeing a limb. The Cambridge sittings of 1895 showed it, and the matter was closed in New York in 1910, when investigators from Columbia University hired two conjurors. They took turns lying under the table and watched, in the dark, her foot come out of its shoe and brace against the leg. The report was printed in full and the American tour ended there.
Margery and the Scientific American Prize
Mina Crandon, the wife of a Boston surgeon and known as Margery, was the leading claimant for the $2,500 Scientific American had offered for a genuine mediumistic phenomenon. Harry Houdini sat on the committee; he built a wooden cabinet that closed around her to the shoulders, and after the sittings stated that she produced everything with her head and a foot, ringing the bell box with her knee. Her dead brother Walter left a thumbprint in wax, and that was held to be conclusive — until 1932, when the print was identified as that of the Crandons' living dentist, Frederick Caldwell, who had once shown her how an impression is taken. The prize was never awarded.
The Columbus Poltergeist
In March 1984, in Joan and John Resch's house in Columbus, telephones, lamps and glasses flew around their fourteen-year-old adopted daughter Tina. A Columbus Dispatch photographer caught a sequence of a handset in mid-air and the picture went round the country. A WTVN crew left a camera running while Tina believed she was not being filmed: the tape shows her reach out and pull a standard lamp over. James Randi, who came later, showed that every flight happened strictly outside an observer's line of sight, and the photographer admitted he had only pressed the shutter when the girl was looking away. The parapsychologist William Roll went on regarding the case as genuine.
Brookfield: The Devil Made Me Do It
On 16 February 1981 in Brookfield, nineteen-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson stabbed his landlord Alan Bono to death. The defence, supported by Ed and Lorraine Warren, argued that Johnson was possessed by a demon passed to him from eleven-year-old David Glatzel — the first attempt in American legal history to enter possession as a defence. Judge Robert Callahan refused to admit it: it cannot be proved and the law has no such ground. Johnson was convicted of manslaughter. The boy's older brother Carl Glatzel later sued the Warrens, calling the whole affair an invention got up for a book contract.
The Snedeker House at Southington
In 1986 the Snedeker family rented half a house on Meriden Avenue in Southington and found the remains of a funeral parlour in the basement: a coffin lift, drainage channels, a box of photographs of the dead. After that, according to a book and two films, came the demons. The book was written by Ray Garton, and Garton himself described how it ended: the family's accounts contradicted one another, and Ed Warren told him to make things up and make them scary — they were all crazy, he could put it together however he liked. Neighbours and the landlord told reporters that nothing had happened during the tenancy at all.
Hydesville and the Fox Sisters' Rappings
In March 1848, in a rented house at Hydesville, the sisters Margaret and Kate Fox, fourteen and eleven, began answering a murdered pedlar in raps: one for yes, two for no. Neighbours came in crowds, their older sister Leah took them to Rochester and sold tickets, and out of that room grew the whole of American Spiritualism. On 21 October 1888 Margaret walked onto the stage of the New York Academy of Music and, before a full house, showed how it was done: she cracked the joint of her big toe, and the sound carried through the boards as though the walls were knocking. Kate sat in a box and nodded. A year later Margaret retracted the confession, badly in need of money, but the doctors who examined her foot on that stage had already confirmed the mechanism.
The Lake George Monster
In the summer of 1904 a green horned head began surfacing beside boats on Lake George in upstate New York. The painter Harry Watrous, who lived at Hague, had made it from a log: painted, with tin teeth and glass eyes, sunk on a rope and pulley so it could be raised at the right moment — the joke was aimed at his friend and fishing rival William Mann, who had been boasting of his catches. Watrous admitted it the same year, once the joke escaped their circle. The log survives: since 1934 the Hague Chamber of Commerce has displayed Harry the Hoax at the local museum on the shore of the same lake.
Canóvanas and the Chupacabra from the Cinema
In the spring of 1995 drained goats began turning up in the Puerto Rican town of Canóvanas, and Madelyne Tolentino described the thing she had seen through her window: about four feet tall, huge black almond eyes, a ridge of spines down its back, thin arms. The world's entire image of the chupacabra comes from that description. The investigator Benjamin Radford tracked her down in 2010 and established that a few weeks earlier she had seen the film Species, in which the alien Sil looks exactly like that. The animal carcasses, when vets opened them, had been killed by dogs and coyotes, and still had their blood.
Bluff Creek and Wallace's Wooden Feet
In August 1958 the bulldozer operator Jerry Crew brought a plaster cast of a sixteen-inch footprint into the office of the Humboldt Times, taken from a logging road at Bluff Creek in northern California. The headline coined the word Bigfoot and the story went national — this is where the creature got its name. The contractor on that road was Ray Wallace. After he died in 2002 his family showed reporters a pair of feet carved from alder that he had used to make the prints, and said he had been doing it from the start. His son put it plainly: the reality is, there is no Bigfoot.
Silver Lake and the Canvas Serpent
In the summer of 1855 a sea serpent began to be seen in Silver Lake beside the village of Perry, New York. The papers took it up, excursion trains ran from Buffalo and Rochester, and the Walker House hotel was full for two seasons. In 1857 the hotel burned down, and in the attic the firemen found what was left: a frame of wire and whalebone covered in canvas, with a system of ropes and a blacksmith's bellows to raise the monster off the bottom and make it breathe smoke. The proprietor, Artemus Walker, had already left town.
Philadelphia and the Kangaroo with Bronze Wings
For a week in January 1909 southern New Jersey and Philadelphia lived in a panic: thousands reported tracks in the snow and a flying creature, schools closed, factories sent workers home. In the middle of it Norman Jefferies, publicity agent for Philadelphia's Arcade Museum, announced that the Jersey Devil had been captured. In the case sat a kangaroo he had bought, with bronze wings fastened to its back, and a man poking the cage to keep it moving. Jefferies admitted it himself years later — along with the fact that some of that week's eyewitness reports had also been his work.
Montauk and the Ditch Plains Carcass
In July 2008 something washed up on Ditch Plains beach near Montauk: a bald grey carcass with long clawed limbs and a face like a beak. The photograph spread instantly, and the theories ran from a chimera escaped from the laboratory on nearby Plum Island to an alien. The palaeontologist Darren Naish worked through the anatomy from the picture: the limb proportions, the dentition and the shape of the skull are an ordinary raccoon's, after weeks in the water had taken the fur off and the soft tissue of the face had rotted back to the nasal bones. The body vanished before anyone examined it in person.
North Georgia and the Bigfoot in the Freezer
In the summer of 2008 the police officer Matt Whitton and his friend Rick Dyer announced they had found the body of a Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia — five hundred pounds, over seven feet — and were keeping it in a freezer. A press conference was called in Palo Alto on 15 August and the story ran worldwide. Three days later the investigator Steve Kulls thawed the contents: a rubber costume stuffed with offal bought from a butcher, with moulded rubber feet. Whitton was sacked by the Clayton County police, and Dyer ran the same trick a few years later with a dummy he called Hank.
The Minnesota Iceman
From 1967 Frank Hansen toured Midwest fairs with a refrigerated case holding a hairy humanoid in a block of ice, twenty-five cents to look. In 1968 the zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson examined it, declared a new species, Homo pongoides, and approached the Smithsonian. While the institution deliberated, Hansen swapped the case: he admitted commissioning a latex model in Hollywood from Howard Ball, who made figures for Disneyland. Nobody ever saw anything but the model, and in 2013 it sold at auction for eleven thousand dollars to a museum in Texas.
Barnum's Feejee Mermaid
In the summer of 1842 New York read in the papers that an English naturalist, Dr Griffin, had arrived with a dried mermaid from the South Seas. There was no Dr Griffin — he was Barnum's employee Levi Lyman, and Barnum wrote the letters to the editors himself. The specimen, leased from the Boston showman Moses Kimball, was the upper half of a monkey sewn to the tail of a large fish, one of dozens made by Japanese or East Indian craftsmen in the nineteenth century. Takings at the American Museum tripled. The original most likely burned with the museum in 1865.
The Cardiff Giant
On 16 October 1869 men digging a well on William Newell's farm at Cardiff, near Syracuse, struck a stone man ten feet tall. It cost fifty cents to see, the queue lasted all day, and clergymen argued over whether this was a petrified giant out of Genesis. It had been commissioned by Newell's cousin George Hull, a tobacconist and an atheist who had lost his temper in an argument with a preacher: a block of gypsum hauled from Fort Dodge in Iowa, carved in Chicago, aged with sulphuric acid, stippled with darning needles for pores, and buried a year before it was found. Hull confessed that December. P. T. Barnum, refused the original, exhibited a copy of his own — and the public paid to see both.
Ridgway and the Trail-Camera Sasquatch
The forested Appalachian foothills surrounding the borough of Ridgway in Elk County, northwestern Pennsylvania, USA (immediately adjacent to the borders of Allegheny National Forest). In September 2007, an automatic game trail camera deployed in the private woodlands captured a series of images depicting a hunched, shaggy creature with elongated limbs. Widely publicized across international media as the "Jacobs photo" or the "juvenile Sasquatch," the sequence became one of the most prominent cryptozoological media sensations of the 21st century.
Manistee and the Gable Film
In 2007 a Michigan radio station aired an 8mm home movie apparently from the seventies: a picnic, some shooting at cans, and at the end a creature running at the cameraman on all fours as the camera falls sideways. It became the central evidence for the Michigan Dogman and went out on television. In 2010 Mike Agrusa of Michigan admitted he had shot it himself in 2003 on a digital camera, aged the footage, and played the monster in a suit; the second found reel was part of the same joke.
Palomar and Adamski's Venusian Scout Ships
George Adamski ran a hamburger stand at the foot of Palomar Mountain and from 1952 published photographs of a Venusian scout ship — a bell with three spheres underneath and a dome on top. The shape gave it away at once: the spheres match General Electric light bulbs exactly, and the hull matches the cover of a surgical lamp, or the hood of a chicken brooder lamp sold in the same hardware stores. Joe Nickell and others rebuilt the model from period parts and got the same photograph. Adamski maintained until his death in 1965 that he had flown to Saturn.
Ted Serios and the Thoughtographs
From the early sixties the Chicago bellhop Ted Serios projected images straight onto Polaroid film: buildings, shopfronts, cars, blurred but recognisable. The Denver psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud gave him a book and ten years of research. In 1967 Charles Reynolds and David Eisendrath of Popular Photography sat in on a session and described the gizmo — a rolled paper tube Serios held against the lens and would not let anyone examine. A tube that size holds a lens and a transparency; the conjuror James Randi reproduced the whole body of work the same way.
Mumler and the First Spirit Photographs
In 1861 the Boston engraver William Mumler found a translucent figure on a self-portrait and announced he had photographed his dead cousin. For years afterwards he photographed Civil War widows beside their dead — his most famous print shows Mary Todd Lincoln with the hands of the murdered president on her shoulders. New York tried him for fraud in 1869: P. T. Barnum appeared for the prosecution and produced a spirit portrait of his own, made in an evening. Mumler was acquitted because the court could not prove the method, but several of his ghosts were recognised as living Bostonians he had photographed earlier.