British hoaxes that fooled the public

British newspaper The Telegraph has just recently published a list of curious cases that caused confusion among the public. Lots of people were fooled to believe in impossible stories of fairies, false identities, giving birth to rabbits and so on. That only shows the naivete of some, but naivete based on actual news that appeared in newspapers. True magic of the press - and most of the cases were revealed even if there still was no TV, not to mention Internet! Hoaxes, that's what the Telegraph calls such incidents. And some of them are really curious. Some other include famous people. Here is my subjective selection of cases, and for the whole story go to the official page of The Telegraph, who knows, you might find something more to it.

This is supposedly a proof that fairies exist in real life. This photograph comes from 1917, when two girls in Yorkshire became super-famous after a series of them being published. Even Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes' father) believed in the story! As late as in 1980s one the girls admitted that those were fakes, but the other still continued to maintain the story.

What's with the fairies, one might ask. As recently as in 2007 a prop maker from Britain claimed that he has found a corpse of a fairy and managed to sell it for 300 pounds. Later admitted that it was an April Fool's joke, but you know how people are, some still believe it is true. Most probably the buyer and his family.

And this one has Virginia Woolf as one of the protagonists. In 1910 the author and five friends in disguise of Abyssinian royals, managed to persuade the Royal Navy to show them its flagship HMS "Dreadnought." The Navy was embarassed when the truth was revealed. Woolf is pictured above on the far left. Handsome young lad she is.

This is actually not really interesting to me because of a hoax connected to the picture, but rather what do we see in the photo.Well, this is a fake building. Located down Leinster Gardens in Bayswater Rd in London, under numbers 23 and 24, the houses are just facades. They were build to disguise the exposed part of the Metropolitan underground railway that runs behind. Remember to check it out!