Word: hoaxing
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Irate President Arosemena, suspecting that he was the victim of a hoax, demanded to know why the Governor of Chiriqui and Captain Sagel had confirmed the "discovery" in the first place. He received the official explanation that "someone must have interpreted a message wrongly." This was too much for the President's patience. He dismissed both the Governor of Chiriqui and Captain Sagel, ordered a judicial inquiry...
...Montgomery's roommate, who immediately notified the police. To them, Nurse Montgomery babbled that two men had abducted her, bound her, released her when she promised to warn Mr. Rockefeller to "stop being a great lover." Under further questioning, Nurse Montgomery admitted that the whole tale was a hoax to renew Mr. Prentice's interest in her. "I wanted to be a martyr," confessed she. "Some woman called me and told me he was going with another girl." "Well, I'm surprised," said John Rockefeller Prentice...
...1890s reporter Ralph Delahaye Paine, famed young Yale rowing man breaking into journalism on the Philadelphia Press, was inspired to perpetrate a monumental hoax. With rich detail he told readers about one Pierre Grantaire who made a good living by raising and selling spiders for the spurious cobwebbing of wine bottles. After visiting the "spider farm" on Lancaster Pike outside Philadelphia, Reporter Paine said that 4,000 spiders of the species Nephila plumipes (who spun the "finest webs") were busy working for M. Grantaire, that he shipped them to customers in "little paper boxes, so many dozen in each crate...
Last week, the hoary hoax raised its head once more, in highly respectable surroundings, when readers of the June Atlantic Monthly spied the yarn as the leading article in the "Contributors' Club" department. The anonymous Atlantic contributor, borrowing many a phrase from the 40-year-old original, credited the spider farm to "my grandfather." Like all effective hoaxes, the spider story survived its creator. Ralph D. Paine died in 1925. His son and namesake is Business Editor of TIME...
...Famous hoax publications by students of the college make up an exhibition on the Ground Floor Hall of Widener Library...