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In 2002, visitor Nicholas Whitehead erected a road sign to an international airport outside Llandegley, Wales.
There is no such airport.
Flights of Fancy
Hoaxes
In Other News
This monster was found in the kingdom of Santa Fe, Peru, in the province of Chili and in the Lake of Fagua, located in the lands of Prosper Voston. It emerged during the night in order to devour the swine, cows and bulls of the area. Its length is eleven feet; its face is roughly that of a man; its mouth is as wide as its face; it is provided with teeth two inches long; it has twenty-four-inch horns like those of a bull; its hair reaches to the ground; it has four-inch ears like those of an ass; it has two batlike wings; its thighs and legs are twenty-five inches long and its claws eight; it has two tails, one very flexible and provided with rings that help it seize its prey, and the other ending in a dart which helps it kill; its entire body is covered with scales. The monster was captured by many men who had laid traps into which it fell. It was entangled in nets and brought alive to the viceroy, who succeeded in nourishing it with a steer, a cow, a bull, given to it every day with three or four swine, to which it is quite partial. As it would be necessary to load too great a quantity of cattle to nourish it during the crossing, which takes at least five or six months to pass Cape Horn, the viceroy has sent orders along the entire land route to provide for the needs of this unique monster while making it march by stages to the Gulf of Honduras, where it will embark for Havana. From there to the Bermudas, to the Azores, and in three weeks it will disembark at Cadiz. From Cadiz it will be taken by short trips to the royal family. It is hoped that the female will be captured so that the species will not die out in Europe. The species seems to be that of harpies, heretofore considered legendary.
— Courier de L’Europe, Oct. 22 and 29, 1784
(Another hoax, but a widely credited one. From the Bibliothèque Nationale: “This monster frequently emerged from Lake Fagua at night to devour pigs, cows and bulls. It has even been caught using nets; but needs feeding daily with an ox, cow or bull and three or four pigs.”)
Extra Large
When this photo appeared in the Loveland [Colo.] Reporter in 1895, farmer Joseph B. Swan was besieged with requests for pieces and seeds of his giant potato — the story implied that it was 2 feet 5 inches long and weighed more than 86 pounds.
Editor W.L. Thorndyke was forced to admit the spud had been carved out of wood — they’d arranged the hoax to promote a local street fair.
The Hurt Locker
The iron maiden, the medieval torture device consisting of a hinged cabinet with a spike-lined interior, seems to have been a myth. There’s no mention of it before the 19th century.
Bielefeld University legal historian Wolfgang Schild suggests that enterprising exhibitors may have pieced together the first specimens using artifacts gathered from museum collections, to attract paying customers. It’s possible that German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees invented a history for the device — in his writings he claims that it was first used on Aug. 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger. But there’s no reliable evidence for it in the Middle Ages.
Tête-à-Tête
It is related that Anne of Austria one day told Bautree — a councillor of State, poet, and member of the French Academy, but famous for his facetiousness — that she desired to see his wife. Bautree promised to present her. ‘Only, madame,’ he added, ‘she is hard of hearing.’
‘Never mind,’ replied the Queen; ‘I’ll speak loud.’
Bautree hurried home and announced this flattering news to his wife, but at the same time told her to raise her voice, even to the pitch of shouting, as Her Majesty could only hear with difficulty. As soon as the Queen perceived Madame Bautree she began to raise her voice and Madame Bautree shouted back with all her might. The two ladies made a pretty noise between them, and the King, to whom Bautree had confided the audacious hoax, held his sides with laughter.
— “Hoaxes,” Strand, October 1903
In a Word
locodescriptive
adj. describing a particular place or places
hippocrepiform
adj. shaped like a horseshoe
elsewhither
adv. in a different direction
mirific
adj. working wonders; wonderful
The Rochester Institute of Technology contains a portal to another dimension. In 2013, student Michael Lacanilao deliberately set out to create a record of an “Escherian stairwell” on campus that forms a perpetual downward loop.
Lacanilao has long since graduated, but the stairwell is still commemorated on the school’s website.
(Thanks, Colin.)
Ha!
In 1722, Jonathan Swift published the “last speech” of one Ebenezer Elliston, “a malefactor executed for street robbery,” “published at his desire for the common good”:
Now as I am a dying man I have done something which may be of good use to the public. I have left with an honest man (and, indeed, the only honest man I was ever acquainted with) the names of all my wicked brethren, the present places of their abode, with a short account of the chief crimes they have committed, in many of which I have been their accomplice, and heard the rest from their own mouths: I have likewise set down the names of those we call our setters, of the wicked houses we frequent, and of those who receive and buy our stolen goods. I have solemnly charged this honest man and have received his promise upon oath, that whenever he hears of any rogue to be tried for robbing or housebreaking, he will look into his list, and if he finds the name there of the thief concerned, to send the whole paper to the government. Of this I here give my companions fair and public warning, and hope they will take it.
Did it work? Who knows?
Company
In 1907, historian Reginald Hine, photographer Thomas Latchmore, and artist F.L. Griggs took a camera to Hertfordshire’s Minsden Chapel hoping to photograph the ghost of a murdered monk whose spirit was said to haunt the place. Hine published this photo in his 1929 History of Hitchin, pointing out “the cowled apparition whose form can faintly be discerned” in the image:
In 1930 Latchmore admitted that the image had been a hoax, created with a double exposure; the ghostly figure may be Hine himself.
While we’re at it: In 1963 by the Rev. Kenneth Lord took this photo in the Church of Christ the Consoler on the grounds of Newby Hall in North Yorkshire:
Ostensibly the figure is another ghostly monk, this one wearing a shroud over its face. If it’s not a double exposure then the figure stands as much as 9 feet tall; make your own judgment.
And a reader sent this image in to the Strand in July 1897:
Taken at Scale Force, the Lake District’s highest waterfall, “It is a perfect representation of a stately, long-bearded old man, clothed in a flowing robe, with a crown and sceptre. … The form is perfect natural. I did not notice it until after the photo was developed.”
Interestingly, as recently as 2006 the old man was still there:
Whatever he’s looking for, he hasn’t found it yet.
Never Mind
In 1812, inventor Charles Redheffer caused a sensation in Philadelphia when he announced a perpetual motion machine. Residents could view the device for a fee, he said, but none could approach it lest they damage the apparatus. When city commissioner Nathan Sellers arrived to observe the device, he happened to bring his son Coleman, who noticed something that all the adults had missed: The machine’s cogs were worn on the wrong side. The device that the machine was ostensibly driving was itself impelling the whole apparatus.
Redheffer decamped to New York City and tried again with an altered machine, but Robert Fulton noticed that this one ran unsteadily. He traced a catgut cord to an upper room, where an old man was turning a hand crank. Spectators destroyed the machine, and Redheffer fled the city.
“The Adventure of the Tall Man”
After Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, his biographer Hesketh Pearson claimed to have discovered among his papers the scenario of an uncompleted tale.
A girl appeals to Sherlock Holmes for help — her uncle has been found shot in his bedroom, and her lover has been arrested as a suspect. The lover has recently had a quarrel with the old man; a revolver is found in his house that could have fired the fatal shot; and he owns a ladder whose feet match marks below the dead man’s window and which bears incriminating soil on its feet. The girl suspects another man who has been paying court to her.
Holmes and Watson go to the village, where they discover a pair of stilts in a disused well. When the accused man is found guilty of murder, Holmes is driven to a desperate stratagem: He dresses an actor as the murdered man, mounts him on the stilts, and has him approach the villain’s bedroom window, crying, “As you came for me, I have come for you!” Terrified, the man makes a full confession: He had planted the revolver and smeared the ladder’s feet with soil, hoping to win the girl and her money.
Pearson adds, apparently without intending the pun, “Presumably Doyle scrapped this because he felt on reflection that the episode of the stilts was rather tall.”
Of the story, Richard Lancelyn Green wrote, “there is no evidence to show that it is by [Doyle] and strong internal evidence to suggest that it’s not.” For what it’s worth, Robert A. Cutter completed the adventure in 1947.