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, fenced with a sword, climbed trees, prayed to Allah Tallah, and wrote in a script Oxford linguists pretended to decipher. She was Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter from Devon who'd been a servant girl and made the whole island up. The gentry who'd paraded her in silk for ten weeks did not press charges; they bought her a ticket to Philadelphia and tried to forget. The Bristol Journal that June covered every twist of the unmasking, and somehow she comes off better than the marks.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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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 son, husband, or brother thrown in over their shoulder for free. The Tombs courtroom got Barnum testifying for the prosecution and a former New York Supreme Court justice swearing the ghosts were real, before Justice Dowling discharged Mumler on insufficient evidence May 3, 1869. A country that had just buried 750,000 boys was not in the mood to hear that the blur behind grandma was a double-exposure trick. The Herald that spring nicknamed Dowling 'Judge Rhadamanthus' and could not decide whether to laugh.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

Support the show