Wisconsin's Petrified Man
Perhaps Wisconsin's most successful hoax began with a story in a small weekly newspaper on January 21, 1926. Manley Hinshaw originally ran the story in the Rusk County Journal, probably as a space filler on a slow news week. Local readers were familiar with his occasional eccentric stories and recognized it as a piece of fiction.
The story told of two loggers who found the remains of a French explorer lost in 1663. He was discovered petrified inside a tree with his clothing intact and his old muzzle-loading flintlock rifle and a muzzle-loading pistol still with him.
You can read the entire story at historybuff.com.
The Spencer Lake Horse Skull
Sometimes a prank gets out of hand and becomes very hard to stop. This is what happened with the horse skull found deep in an Indian mound. The rest of the contents of the mound were dated between circa 500-1000 AD.
The horse's skull had actually been placed in the mound in 1926 by some teen-agers who had been digging and thought it would be fun to leave a horse's skull they had found nearby. Unfortunately the skull received a great deal of publicity and stories about it were in print before the story was proven to be a hoax. There are still references to it as fact in a number of places, both in print and on the Internet.
The Hodag
Some hoaxes have a much longer lifespan than others. The hodag, identified variously as:
A terrifying creature native to Wisconsin, believed to be the 'long-sought missing link between the ichthyosaurus and the mylodoan.'"
Or "a creature native to Wisconsin, has the head of a bull, the back of a dinosaur, and the leering features of a giant man. Its legs are short, its claws are long, and its tail is spear-tipped. "
The creature was tracked down and captured near Rhinelander, Wisconsin, by Eugene S. Shepard and a group of companions. They displayed the creature for many years at county fairs, usually in dim light. The hodag's name is a combination of 'horse' and 'dog'. At one time there were many postcards for sale showing a hodag that had been captured. Similar pictures also hung in many saloons.
Lady Liberty of the Lake
Some hoaxes are relatively recent. In February 1979 motorists were surprised to see the head and torch holding hand of the Statue of Liberty rising out of the waters of Lake Mendota. The story was that "the statue had been flown in by helicopter, but that the cable holding it had snapped causing Lady Liberty to crash through the ice until only the top of her head and her arm remained above water."
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