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
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.
The Surgeon's Photograph
The most reproduced photograph in the history of cryptozoology: a long neck above the water of Loch Ness, published by the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934 and credited to a respectable London gynaecologist, Robert Kenneth Wilson — hence the surgeon. The neck was a Woolworth's toy submarine with a head of plastic wood, about a foot high. The story surfaced in papers in 1975, and in 1993 the ninety-year-old Christian Spurling, stepson of the hoax's organiser Marmaduke Wetherell, described building the model. Wetherell was paying back the Daily Mail, which had publicly ridiculed his own monster footprints — prints left by an umbrella stand made from a hippopotamus foot.
Cottingley and the Paper Fairies
In the summer of 1917 sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths came back from the beck behind the house with five photographs of themselves sitting beside tiny winged figures. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had just buried his son, published them in the Strand Magazine and defended them for the rest of his life. The fairies were cut from card, copied from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, and held up on hatpins — one pin is visible in a print. Both women confessed in 1983, a few years before they died; Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was real.