Debunked cases — mystical places on the map
Cases that are closed. Not «unexplained so far» but closed: the author of the photograph was found, the costume turned up in a garage, the film was taken apart frame by frame, the confession was given while the hoaxer was still alive. The place stays on the map because a legend usually outlives its own debunking — and here the two stand side by side: what was told, and what it turned out to be.
100 places
Sylvia Browne and the Living Amanda Berry
The medium Sylvia Browne spent decades on television answering the families of missing people. In November 2004, on the Montel Williams show, she told Louwana Miller that her daughter Amanda Berry, missing in Cleveland, was dead: in the water, in the rubbish. Her mother died a year later believing it. On 6 May 2013 Amanda Berry got out of Ariel Castro's house on Seymour Avenue, where she had been held for ten years, and called the police herself. A year earlier Browne had likewise pronounced Shawn Hornbeck dead; he was found alive. These two cases are rare in the genre: a checkable statement that refuted itself.
James Hydrick and the Turning Pages
In 1980 James Hydrick, a martial-arts instructor from Salt Lake City, became famous for turning the pages of a telephone directory by looking at them and spinning a pencil on a table. In February 1981 he appeared on That's My Line, where James Randi set the conditions: the pages stayed, but the table was surrounded with polystyrene packing that the least breath would scatter. Hydrick sat over the book for an hour and a half and turned nothing, explaining it as static electricity. He later admitted to the reporter Dan Korem that he had spent years practising it, blowing from the corner of his mouth, and had learned it in prison so that people would admire him.
Sathya Sai Baba and the Gold Chain
Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi took sacred ash, rings and chains out of the air in front of millions of followers, among them Indian ministers and judges. In 1992 the state broadcaster Doordarshan filmed a ceremony with several cameras, and one angle shows an assistant passing him a gold chain from below, out of the base of the stand, a second before it materialised in his palm. The tape went round the country. The physicist H. Narasimhaiah, vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, had offered as early as 1976 to test the phenomena under controlled conditions and was refused; he wound up his committee saying there was nothing left to test.
Carlos at the Sydney Opera House
In 1988 Carlos arrived in Australia — the channel of a two-thousand-year-old spirit, worked by José Alvarez, with press releases, forged clippings and stories of people fainting in New York auditoriums. The press took all of it on trust, no newsroom rang the American telephone numbers supplied, and the tour ended with a full house at the Sydney Opera House. It was a production by James Randi, designed as an experiment on journalism: Alvarez was his student, the spirit an invention, the documents forgeries, and the whole itinerary planned in advance. That same evening 60 Minutes showed how it had been done.
Peter Popoff and the Earpiece
The televangelist Peter Popoff filled arenas by telling strangers their names, addresses and diagnoses — the Lord was telling him. In 1986 James Randi and the engineer Alec Jason came to a service with a radio scanner and recorded a transmission on 39.17 MHz: the preacher's wife Elizabeth, backstage, reading her husband the prayer cards the congregation had filled in at the door. Popoff had a receiver in his ear. The recording was played on Johnny Carson's show, synchronised with the video of the prophecy. A few months later Popoff's organisation filed for bankruptcy.
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.
Florence Cook and the Spirit Katie King
The London medium Florence Cook would go behind a curtain and Katie King would come out — a full materialisation, photographed and vouched for by the physicist William Crookes. Everyone remarked on the resemblance between the medium and the spirit. In December 1873 William Volckman seized Katie round the waist and held on until confederates pulled her away; when the curtain was opened, Cook lay there with her clothing disarranged. In January 1880, at a sitting in Hackney, Sir George Sitwell caught the spirit Marie and did not let go: it was Cook in her underclothes, and her corset and dress were found in the cabinet. Her career ended there.
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.
Helen Duncan and the Last Witchcraft Trial
The Scottish medium Helen Duncan produced ectoplasm from her mouth, out of which the shapes of the dead were formed. In 1931 Harry Price obtained a sample after a London sitting: cheesecloth stitched to paper and stiffened with egg white. On 19 January 1944 police arrested her in the middle of a séance in Portsmouth — above the naval port preparing for the Normandy landings, where she had been telling relatives that a ship was lost before the Admiralty said so. She was tried at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, for pretending to call up spirits, and given nine months. It was the last conviction under that Act in British history; the Act itself was repealed in 1951.
The Hexham Heads
In February 1971 two boys digging a garden behind a house on Rede Avenue in Hexham turned up two small stone heads. A neighbour soon reported seeing a half-man, half-wolf at night, the researcher Anne Ross said the same creature had appeared to her in her own house in Southampton, and the heads were declared Celtic and eighteen hundred years old. Then Desmond Craigie, a previous occupant of the house, came forward: he had made them in 1956 for his daughter Nancy, out of concrete and sand. To prove it he made a third in front of witnesses, indistinguishable from the others. Geologists confirmed the material was cast concrete with quartz sand, not carved stone.
Gef, the Talking Mongoose of Dalby
From 1931 the Irving family lived at the lonely farm of Cashen's Gap above Dalby on the Isle of Man with a creature that called itself Gef: not a spirit, an earthbound animal with clever hands, the eighth wonder of the world. It spoke from behind the wooden panelling, knew the gossip of neighbouring villages, sang and threw stones. Harry Price and Richard Lambert came and never saw Gef, but they were given tufts of his fur. Julian Huxley passed them to the Zoological Society, where F. Martin Duncan reported that the hair was a dog's — almost certainly the Irvings' sheepdog Mona. The voice, by every account of it, belonged to the farmer's daughter Voirrey.
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.
The Hammersmith Ghost and the Smith Case
Through the winter of 1803–04 a figure in white went about Hammersmith throwing itself at passers-by; it was said to be a suicide from the churchyard. The parish organised night patrols, and in the early hours of 3 January 1804 the excise officer Francis Smith fired at a white shape in Black Lion Lane and killed Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer walking home in the white linen of his trade. Smith was sentenced to death for murder, commuted to a year's hard labour, and the case served English law for two centuries as the standard problem of whether an honest mistake can excuse force. The ghost itself was accounted for soon afterwards by a shoemaker, John Graham, who admitted wrapping himself in a sheet to frighten his apprentice.
The Stockwell Ghost
On 6 January 1772, in Mrs Golding's house at Stockwell, china began to come off the shelves, clocks fell from the walls and a ham stepped off its hook. She fled to the neighbours and it all happened again there. The two houses had one thing in common: her twenty-year-old maid Ann Robinson went with her. The maid was dismissed and the destruction stopped at once. Years later Robinson told the clergyman Samuel Horsley how it was done — horsehair tied to the crockery, wire, fixings filed through in advance, and a careful sense of when to leave the room. She had wanted the house empty so that her young man could visit.
The Cock Lane Ghost
In the winter of 1762 a house on Cock Lane near Newgate was knocked on by the ghost of Fanny Lynes, a young woman who had died and who now accused her own lover, in raps, of poisoning her. London lost its head: carriages blocked the street, money was taken at the bedroom door, the affair was discussed in Parliament. A commission that included Samuel Johnson spent a night in the vault of St John's and summoned the ghost to the coffin, where nothing happened. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Parsons was then put in a hammock with her hands tied and the knocking stopped; watched closely, she was found with a small board hidden on her. Her father Richard Parsons was sentenced to two years and stood three times in the pillory.
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.
De Loys's Ape
In 1920 the Swiss geologist François de Loys, prospecting for oil on the Venezuela–Colombia border, shot what he described as a large tailless ape that came at his party by the Tarra river. The single photograph — the animal propped on a crate with a stick — was published in 1929 by George Montandon as Ameranthropoides loysi, the missing link of American man; Montandon used it in a racist theory of the separate origin of races. The picture shows an ordinary white-fronted spider monkey, common in those forests: the crate gives a true height of about a metre, and the tail is hidden behind the body. De Loys's companion later said the whole thing had been a joke at Montandon's expense.
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.