COMMONSCUT

Commons Cut Stories

Hoaxes, Mysteries and the Unexplained

Spiritualists, fake survivors, invented authors, Cottingley fairies.

Fake fossils, paper fairies and a history of the bathtub made up as a joke. This section tells how famous hoaxes were built, who believed them, and how they came apart, from Piltdown Man to the Cottingley Fairies.

It also has the story of The Vampyre, the 1819 tale published under Lord Byron's name that John Polidori wrote.

5 stories

  • London, 1 April 1819

    Who Stole the Vampire?

    A London magazine ran it under Lord Byron’s name. He didn’t write it.

  • The Times announced the hoax on Nov 21, 1953 (73rd anniversary Sat Nov 21, 2026).

    The Piltdown Man Hoax

    For 41 years Britain's oldest human ancestor sat in the Natural History Museum. Its jaw came from an orangutan, its teeth had been filed flat, and one tooth was stained with paint.

  • Dec 1, 2026

    Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies

    For the Strand Magazine's 1920 Christmas Number, the creator of Sherlock Holmes announced that two girls in Yorkshire had photographed fairies. He called it "an epoch-making event." The fairies were paper cut-outs held up with hatpins.

  • Mid-December Santa-letter season (USPS Operation Santa runs every December).

    The Santa Claus Man

    The man who first got New York's Santa letters answered at scale was a young publicist who signed himself as Santa's helper, raised money from 76,000 donors and movie stars, promised a marble "Santa Claus Building" that never rose, and was finally pushed out by the city's charity watchdog.

  • Dec 28, 2026

    Mencken’s Bathtub Hoax

    In the dead week after Christmas 1917, H. L. Mencken invented the history of the American bathtub as a joke, confessed nine years later, and still could not stop it: a sitting President repeated it in 1952.

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from Half-In Productions