Fun Fact of the Week #431

While exploring an idea for another potential article, someone sent me a link that shared a bunch of examples of real-life Scooby-Doo hoaxes where people dressed up as fake monsters. I thought this was such a cool concept that I'd never explored before, so I wanted to highlight some of the most interesting examples. Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list of every instance in the world where someone has tried to pull off a Scooby-Doo like hoax, but I pulled out the most interesting ones that I found and wanted to share them with you all.

As far back as the 1200s, a castle near modern Luxembourg was abandoned due to legends of it being haunted by sinister sounds and eerie lights. King Louis IX hired some Carthusian monks to rid the place of ghosts, but the monks reported back that the "hauntings" were nothing but a group of criminals trying to scare people away from their hideout.

In 1926, an ape-man was sighted  on an old farm in North Stonington, Connecticut. Two young girls had recently inherited the farm from their father who tragically passed away. The neighbors theorized that someone was trying to scare the young girls into selling their father's farm, and planned a stakeout to catch the ape-man. It was then discovered that the girls themselves were the ones who created the ape man legend. They created a homemade ape man suit, because they were being pestered by solicitors. The girls wanted to scare the solicitors into thinking the place was unsellable due to being haunted.

In a similar case, Ray Wallace was the boss of a logging crew who was the first person to ever sight Bigfoot's footprints in 1958. After Ray died, the Wallace family divulged that Ray actually faked the whole thing in hopes of scaring away hooligans who were pranking his work vehicle.

Ivan T. Sanderson, a private investigator, uncovered some evidence that the Jersey Devil of 1909 was actually just real estate developers who dressed up to incentivize people to sell their properties by tricking them.

During the Vietnam War, the US used an exercise called Operation Wandering Soul to scare away their enemies. The US Military used tape recordings of eerie moaning and creepy voices to weaken their enemy's morale. The tactic saw varied success. Sometimes the enemy would be frightened away, but other times, the enemy would quickly realize it was a recording and attack anyway.

A British ghost hunter was called by a hotel owner to investigate a haunting. The ghost hunter found no signs of anything, but the hotel owner begged him to just "make up a haunting" because he felt the image of owning a haunted hotel would drive up business.