She whispered she was Andrew Carnegie's secret daughter, waved a forged $2 million note, and Ohio's bankers were too polite to call and check.

Elizabeth Bigley of Ontario reinvented herself as Cassie Chadwick and spent nearly a decade pulling millions out of Cleveland-area banks on the strength of a whisper: Andrew Carnegie was her father, and here was his signature. No banker dared phone the old man to confirm, which was the entire trick. When it unraveled in 1904, Citizens National of Oberlin collapsed and Senator Charles Beckwith died broke; Carnegie himself sat in the Cleveland courtroom in 1905 and calmly testified he had never laid eyes on her.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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A fake Scottish lord conned Jay Gould out of nearly a million in Erie stock, then Minnesota sent a posse over the Canadian border to grab him back.

Horace Greeley vouched for him. Jay Gould handed him $40,000 as pocket-money commission. When 'Lord Gordon-Gordon' skipped to a Manitoba farmhouse in 1872, a group of Minneapolis worthies — including a future governor — crossed the border, bagged him, and got themselves arrested by the Mounted Police for their trouble. Minnesota called up the state militia; the Lieutenant Governor demanded extradition; the whole mess almost cracked the young Dominion open. Then, hours after his hearing ended in August 1874, Gordon-Gordon shot himself, and nobody ever did learn who he actually was.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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For twenty-six years he sold Philadelphia investors a motor that ran on vibration and willpower. When he died, they pulled up his floorboards.

John Keely spent 1872 to 1898 charging Philadelphia's rich to watch his 'vibratory liberator' hum along on nothing but water and good intentions. Clara Bloomfield-Moore, the paper-magnate widow bankrolling him, poured roughly $100,000 into the dream before he conveniently died. Then Scientific American's men pried up the workshop planks and found a three-ton iron sphere of compressed air in the cellar, quietly piped up through the legs of every prop he'd ever demonstrated. How does one man keep an entire city of engineers fooled for a quarter century? The Philadelphia dailies that November had opinions.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

Support the show