Hoax!

A girl showed up at a town near Bristol in 1817 wearing a turban, and everyone went nuts.
SOURCES:
"The Caraboo Hoax," Margaret Russell
John Matthew Gutch's narrative
English Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell
"Devonshire Characters and Strange Events"
"British Performances of Java," Matthew Isaac Cohen
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This episode of Hoax is no fun at all. April Fool's! For our (almost) April 1 episode, we explore the holiday's origins and some of the best pranks of the 20th and 21st centuries: Google's various exploits (Pokemon Go!), that time the BBC produced a piece on Spaghetti Trees, and the Curious Case of Sidd Finch, the Mets pitcher who could throw 168 MPH.
SOURCES:
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-did-april-fools-day-get-started
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/03/april-fools/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/01/king-kugel-an-april-fools-history-lesson/
https://frenchmoments.eu/april-fools-day-traditions-in-france-le-1er-avril/
https://bylines.scot/society/hunt-the-gowk-day/
https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/hunt-the-gowk-april-fools-scotland/
https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-celebrates-april-fools%E2%80%99-day/
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cancels-april-fools-day-pranks-coronavirus-2021-3
https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/15/curious-case-sidd-finch
https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/21/si-60-curious-case-sidd-finch-mark-mulvoy-myra-gelband
https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/sports/legendary-sidd-finch-finally-makes-it-to-mets-home-game-40-years-later/
https://niemanstoryboard.org/2014/04/01/whys-this-so-good-no-90-george-plimpton-and-sidd-finch/
https://www.milb.com/news/legend-of-sidd-finch-lives-on-in-brooklyn-145695984
https://sports.yahoo.com/still-curious-catching-those-brought-150800240.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/sports/baseball/an-old-baseball-april-fools-hoax.html
https://www.mlb.com/news/sidd-finch-hoax-recalled-at-sabr-convention/c-133074166
ESPN: Unhittable: Sidd Finch and the Tibetan Fastball
BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/greatest-april-fools-prank-of-all-time-the-story-of-the-bbcs-spaghetti-trees/
https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/09/25/the-spaghetti-trees-of-ticino/
https://ericajurus.ca/2024/04/02/the-tradition-of-pranking-and-fooling/
http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/cucina/when-i-was-a-kid-i-learned-that-spaghetti-grew-on-trees
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Stockmarkets are now battlefields. An aide-de-camp arrived in Dover with the startling, thrilling news that Napoleon had been killed, and the British stock market behaved accordingly. The problem was, Napoleon wasn't dead.
SOURCES:
Napoleon Is Dead by Richard Dale
Trial transcript
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Messages from extraterrestrial visitors? Evidence of strange atmospheric conditions? No one knows where crop circles come from or what they mean. Except, we do know, but for believers, that's the start, not the end, of the story. The history of crop circles is a case study in conspiratorial thinking...plus art in wheat fields!
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P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was purchasing an enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom he displayed as a public spectacle, promoting her a 161-year-old woman who once nursed George Washington.
SOURCES:
'The Showman and the Slave' by Benjamin Reiss
'Medical Apartheid' by Harriet A. Washington
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/
“P.T. Barnum and Africa” Bernth Lindfors
The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader, edited by James W. Cook
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