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
1 episodes
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...