Urban Legends
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The Lake George Monster

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added1904

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.

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The Curse of the Hope Diamond

The 45-carat blue diamond on show at the Smithsonian in Washington is famous as a stone that destroys its owners: prised from the eye of an Indian idol, it sent Marie Antoinette to the scaffold and ruined the Hope family. The Smithsonian historian Richard Kurin followed every episode through the documents and showed that the legend was assembled and sold by Pierre Cartier around 1910 to persuade Evalyn Walsh McLean to buy the stone — she had told him herself that unlucky things brought her luck. Half the victims never owned the diamond and some never existed. The stone really was cut from the French Blue of the crown jewels, but it was stolen from a storeroom in 1792, not taken from an idol.

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