Futility Closet

"Spirit photographs" created by hoaxer William Hope in 1919.

From left: Mr. and Mrs. Gibson with their deceased son; Mrs. Longcake with her dead sister-in-law; the Rev. Charles Tweedale and his wife, with her father.

Arthur Conan Doyle (below, center) defended Hope even when skeptic Harry Price had shown that he was manipulating his plates. "The credulity of dupes," wrote Edmund Burke, "is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves."

A moving Sermon being preached in a Country Church, all fell a weeping but one Man, who being ask'd, Why he did not weep with the rest? Oh! said he, I belong to another parish.

– The Jester's Magazine, November 1766

opsimath
n. one who studies late in life

In 1885, explorer Richard Willoughby claimed to have discovered a wonderful mirage above Alaska's Muir glacier: He'd seen a modern city, he said, with buildings, church towers, vessels, even citizens. This photograph sold "like hot cakes" in the summer of 1889, and Willoughby sold the negative to a San Francisco photographer for $500.

There it all unraveled. An American consul, home from England, noted that the "silent city" bore a striking resemblance to Bristol. It turned out that Willoughby had paid an English tourist $10 for an overexposed photo of his hometown, and the rest was hot air. Still, he deserves credit for invention.

Count Valavoir, a general in the French service under Turenne, while encamped before the enemy, attempted one night to pass a sentinel. The sentinel challenged him, and the count answered 'Va-la-voir,' which literally signifies 'Go and see.' The soldier, who took the words in this sense, indignantly repeated the challenge, and was answered in the same manner, when he fired; and the unfortunate Count fell dead upon the spot,–a victim to the whimsicality of his surname.

– Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890

I'm in a 10der mood to-day
& feel poetic, 2;
4 fun I'll just — off a line
& send it off 2 U.

I'm sorry you've been 6 O long;
Don't B disconsol8;
But bear your ills with 42de,
& they won't seem so gr8.

– Anonymous

In the Medical Times & Gazette, May 21, 1853, George Budd recounts the case of 94-year-old Henry Hall, who was fighting a fire at the Eddystone lighthouse near Plymouth in the winter of 1755 when a quantity of molten lead fell from the roof and struck him in the head and face. "From that moment he had a violent internal sensation, and imagined that a quantity of the lead had passed down his throat into his body."

Hall was attended by a Dr. Spry at Stonehouse, "and swallowed many things, both liquid and solid, till the 10th or 11th day." But then he suddenly grew worse, seized with cold sweats and spasms, and he died soon afterward.

Spry reports: "Examining the body, and making an incision through the left abdomen, I found the diaphragmatic upper mouth of the stomach greatly inflamed and ulcerated, and the tunica in the lower part of the stomach burnt"—and he drew forth "a great piece of lead" weighing 7 ounces, 5 drams, and 8 grains.

In 1890, Daisy Ashford wrote The Young Visiters, a novella parodying upper-class English society. That might seem unremarkable—but the author was 9 years old:

They all went out by a private door and found themselves in a smaller but gorgous room. The Prince tapped on the table and instantly two menials in red tunics appeared. Bring three glasses of champaigne commanded the prince and some ices he added majestikally. The goods appeared as if by majic and the prince drew out a cigar case and passed it round.

One grows weary of Court Life he remarked.

The whole immortal thing is here.

"I saw the book, but I didn't read it at all — didn't think it worth reading. Mother thought as I did." — Walt Whitman's brother George, on Leaves of Grass