The Footnote
History remembers the famous. It tends to lose the people in the margins — the swindlers, the hoaxers, the spectacular liars who, for a few months or a few years, mattered far more than they should have, and then didn't matter at all.
This is a show about them. Every episode digs one forgotten fraud out of the old newspapers — the ones nobody reads anymore, in archives nobody visits — and asks the question the courtroom usually skipped: not how did they pull it off, but who on earth fell for it, and why did they so badly want to?
I'm Wendell Marchant. I read the papers so you don't have to. The stories are true, the quotes are real, and the people are worse than you'd think.
A vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.
Episodes
8 episodes
The Pigott Forgeries: How 'Hesitency' Sank a Scandal
The Times ran letters framing Ireland's biggest politician for murder. One misspelled word on the witness stand collapsed the whole thing inside a week. In 1887 a broke Dublin hack named Richard Pigott sold The Time...
Cassie Chadwick: Carnegie's Fake Daughter
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 a...
Lord Gordon-Gordon: The Erie Swindle That Almost Started a
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-m...
John Keely's Etheric Force and the Cellar Sphere
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 ...
The Drake Plate of Brass: A Berkeley Prank
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 p...
The Tichborne Claimant: 188 Days in Court
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,...
Princess Caraboo: The Cobbler's Daughter from Javasu
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, f...
Mumler's Ghosts: The 1869 Spirit Photograph Trial
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...