Top 10 Disturbing Ghost Hoaxes

#10: The Drummer of Tedworth

Many people regard this as the first-ever ghost hoax in modern history, when a poltergeist tormented a Wiltshire landowner, John Mompesson, in the 1660s. The story claims that Mompesson was cursed after taking a drum from a vagrant named William Drury, who was apparently gifted at witchcraft. Mompesson was then plagued by drumming sounds in his own house, which didn’t cease until the drum was returned. Crucially, though, Mompesson had young children, and it’s now widely believed that the scratches, drumming, and objects moving in the night were probably pranks being played by them. Earlier, though, and people thought Drury and his friends were the culprits. He got the drum back in the end, anyway.

#9: Helen Duncan

Was she a fraud? The courts certainly seemed to think so, since Duncan became the last woman convicted under the Witchcraft Act in 1944. The Witchcraft Act was the law that put an end to England’s witch trials, making it a crime to claim that you or anybody else possessed supernatural powers, and Duncan actually ended up receiving a custodial sentence of nine months. This came after years of claiming she was a medium, including supposedly predicting people’s deaths and even summoning the spirits of her clients’ loved ones in the form of crude puppets, rubber gloves, and bits of cloth. All of this was caught on camera at the time, and yet, people continued to believe in her until her death.

#8: Gef the Talking Mongoose

While a talking mongoose is a world away from a ghost, this alleged phenomenon was still studied by renowned paranormal investigators at the time, including Harry Price – who was also instrumental in proving Helen Duncan was a fraud. A small family living in an isolated house on the Isle of Man in the 1930s, the Irvings, claimed that they had a talking mongoose living among them. Nobody ever saw the mongoose, of course, they only heard it talk through the walls, and it’s widely believed that the Irvings’ daughter was simply performing ventriloquism from elsewhere in the building. A strand of Gef’s fur was provided as evidence, but it later proved to belong to their pet dog.

“Gef” = “Jeff”

#7: The Enfield Poltergeist

In 1977, an ordinary house in Enfield, London, became the centre of a paranormal investigation when the two daughters, Janet and Margaret Hodgson, claimed there was a poltergeist in the house. There was a media circus around it, with all the paranormal activity centring on the two girls, including levitations, strange voices, and knocking sounds; any seasoned investigator knows that ghosts LOVE knocking on things. Not everybody was convinced, however, with many coming away believing that the entire thing was an elaborate prank engineered by the girls. They even later admitted to some of it being a hoax. It’s lived on as one of the best-known poltergeist cases, however.

#6: The Highgate Vampire

Some of you watching might even remember this happening back in the late 60s and early 70s, because it led to an incident of mass hysteria. In 1970, people began reporting that they’d seen ominous figures in and around Highgate Cemetery in north London. It began with stories about ghosts, but quickly transformed into a vampire, linked to an earlier story about another London cemetery having its graves desecrated. Vampire hunters converged on Highgate, and later claimed that they’d broken into a tomb and found the coffin of the supposed vampire, very nearly staking it through the heart. One of the men involved, David Farrant, was even sent to prison for graveyard vandalism.

#5: Crystal Skulls

Today, crystal skulls are well and truly part of popular culture, but every single one of them is a fake, and nearly all belong to the 19th or 20th centuries. We know this because it’s very clear that they were carved using advanced tools, with some even being made as recently as the 1950s according to extensive research performed by the British Museum. But why would somebody want to fool the world into thinking Mesoamerica was overflowing with these inhuman skulls? For money, of course. There was a huge market for Central and South American relics in the 19th century, with skulls appearing to appease a market demand for the exotic artefacts. You can still see some of them on display in museums today.

#4: Loftus Hall

We’re sailing across the sea to County Wexford, Ireland, where this mansion has stood for four-hundred years. Or, has it? Widely known as one of the most haunted buildings in the British Isles, Loftus Hall has made a name for itself charging people for scary, overnight stays, opening its doors to anybody who wants to go ghost hunting. Its claim to fame is the story that the Devil himself once visited, and flew up through the ceiling, leaving a conspicuous hole. Except that actually, the original house was knocked down and rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, long after the Devil’s alleged visit, meaning that most of the supernatural tales don’t add up. It’s more tourist trap than ghost trap these days.

#3: The Cock Lane Ghost

A hundred years after the Drummer of Tedworth, and the City of London got its own hard-to-believe ghost story via the Cock Lane ghost. A debt dispute led to claims that the debtor, William Kent, was a murderer who’d poisoned his common-law wife Fanny with arsenic and got away with it. The source? None other than Fanny’s ghost, delivering messages from beyond the grave. The whole truth eventually came out: a bitter feud between William Kent and his former landlord, Richard Parsons, had led to Parsons and his daughter Elizabeth cooking up this spooky scheme. When they were found out, Parsons went to prison for two years and was publicly pilloried.

#2: The Hammersmith Ghost

If you shoot someone under the belief that they are a ghost and, therefore, already dead, are you guilty of murder? That was the question the courts had to answer in 1804, when a man in Hammersmith, Francis Smith, wrongly assumed that local bricklayer Thomas Millwood was a ghost, shooting him dead. This came off the back of weeks of hysteria about an alleged, violent ghost stalking the streets of Hammersmith, with locals patrolling to try and find the phantom – or, more realistically, the prankster. Smith WAS found guilty and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to hard labour. But just who was the Hammersmith Ghost? A man named John Graham eventually admitted to being the spectre.

#1: “Ghostwatch” (1992)

This was a hoax on top of a hoax, since “Ghostwatch” drew most of its inspiration from the Enfield poltergeist – just with the production value of a BBC programme rather than simply what two teenage girls could cobble together. Fascinatingly, “Ghostwatch” predated ghost hunting shows like “Most Haunted”, seemingly predicting the live TV investigation that would come to exist ten years later. But it’s best remembered for the fact that it tricked the entire viewing public who’d missed the disclaimer at the beginning into thinking it was really happening, and Sarah Greene from “Blue Peter” HAD been murdered by a vengeful spirit named Pipes in the cellar of a semi-detached house in London.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve ever been victim of a hoax… or if you’ve ever perpetrated one yourself.