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

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For forty years, historians swore Sir Francis Drake himself nailed this brass plate to a California oak in 1579. A bunch of Berkeley faculty knew otherwise and kept laughing.

In 1936 a chauffeur pulled a battered brass plate from the dirt near San Francisco Bay and Herbert Bolton, the most powerful historian in California, declared it Drake's lost claim on New Albion. The catch: Bolton's own drinking buddies in a club called E Clampus Vitus had forged it as a gag aimed squarely at him, then panicked when he believed it and spent decades unable to confess. Metallurgy finally hanged the plate in 1977, but by then the prank had been displayed at a World's Fair, taught in textbooks, and bought by the Bancroft Library for $2,500.

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

A Wapping butcher from the Australian outback walked into a London courtroom and swore he was the missing heir to one of England's oldest baronetcies. His mother believed him.

Roger Tichborne drowned at sea in 1854, or so everyone assumed until a 25-stone Wagga Wagga butcher named Arthur Orton answered Lady Tichborne's newspaper ad and got a kiss on the forehead. The civil trial ran 102 days, the criminal trial another 188, and by the end the working class of England had a folk hero, a defense fund, and riots in his name. Wendell unpacks how a man who couldn't speak French convinced half a country he'd been to Stonyhurst. Drawn from the trial transcripts and the Pall Mall Gazette's day-by-day coverage.

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

In 1817 a barefoot woman knocked on an English door, spoke a language no scholar could place, and bewitched Bristol society for ten weeks before a neighbor recognized her.

She called herself Princess Caraboo of Javasu, fenced with a sword, climbed trees, prayed to Allah Tallah, and wrote in a script Oxford linguists pretended to decipher. She was Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter from Devon who'd been a servant girl and made the whole island up. The gentry who'd paraded her in silk for ten weeks did not press charges; they bought her a ticket to Philadelphia and tried to forget. The Bristol Journal that June covered every twist of the unmasking, and somehow she comes off better than the marks.

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

P.T. Barnum took the stand against a Boston engraver who sold grieving mothers $10 photographs of their dead sons standing behind them.

William Mumler charged Civil-War widows ten dollars a portrait and threw in a smudgy son, husband, or brother thrown in over their shoulder for free. The Tombs courtroom got Barnum testifying for the prosecution and a former New York Supreme Court justice swearing the ghosts were real, before Justice Dowling discharged Mumler on insufficient evidence May 3, 1869. A country that had just buried 750,000 boys was not in the mood to hear that the blur behind grandma was a double-exposure trick. The Herald that spring nicknamed Dowling 'Judge Rhadamanthus' and could not decide whether to laugh.

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