FAKING FORTEANA
Manufactured and misleading news is not an invention of the Internet age. Its roots go back much further – in part to the 1920s, and a forgotten journalistic revolution improbably conceived by ‘the father of modern bodybuilding’ and a socialist muckraker.
Manufactured and misleading news predates the Internet age. Its roots go back in part to the 1920s, and a forgotten journalistic revolution improbably conceived by ‘the father of modern bodybuilding’ and a socialist muckraker. MIKE
DASH dons his fedora to report.
He stood no more than 5ft 6in tall, and yet he was a giant of a man. Bernarr Macfadden may be barely remembered now, but he was among the most famous public figures of his day. He was a master of reinvention: born plain Bernard McFadden in 1868, he crafted what he decided was a more distinguished version of his name, the rolling “r”s intended to evoke a lion’s roar. He was an entirely self-made man: an orphaned Mid-West farm-boy at 11, he turned himself by force of will into a multi-millionaire publisher who influenced thousands of lives. He championed self-improvement, popularised bodybuilding, and, well into his 70s, continued to pose practically nude to show off his physique.
Macfadden matters for many reasons. He inspired and promoted others who became influential themselves; Charles Atlas, the star of a thousand comic book adverts, first found fame as the winner of a ‘World’s most perfectly developed man’ contest promoted by Macfadden. He was a bizarre amalgam of prescience and quackery; a lifelong promoter of the virtues of whole foods, eating fresh vegetables, shedding corsets and being honest about sex (all ideas he championed well before they were remotely commonplace), he also implacably opposed vaccination, and believed that encroaching baldness was best treated by attacking the scalp. The remarkable pompadour that Macfadden sported throughout his adult life was the product of decades spent violently yanking his own hair by the roots.
For a fortean, however, Macfadden matters for quite another reason. He was the inventor and populariser of confessional journalism, the prurient, semi-fictionalised tell-all form that went on to underpin Confidential in the 1950s, Oprah and Jerry Springer in the 1990s, and the apparently bottomless well of ‘reality’ TV we’re so familiar with today. In consequence, he was also responsible – inadvertently – for polluting our field with a myriad of the inventions and ‘improvements’ that bedevil it today. For much of the 1920s, indeed, magazines that Macfadden launched behaved much like the fake news mills that became infamous in the aftermath of the recent US presidential election. They took tales that might possess a kernel of truth, and elaborated them until they turned into something more incredible, more memorable – and much less ‘true.’
VANISHING LIGHTHOUSEMEN
So let me tell you my confession. I first encountered Macfadden quite unexpectedly, some time ago, while chasing down a reference that had eluded me for years. The trouble dated back, in fact, to 1998, when I wrote a paper for Fortean Studies on the mystery of the vanishing lighthousemen of Eilean Mor. Three men had disappeared, around Christmas 1900, from a lonely lighthouse in the uninhabited Flannan Isles – the ‘Seven Hunters,’ they were called, 20 miles (32km) west of the Hebrides, out in the Atlantic. The men – who comprised the entire lighthouse crew – vanished without trace, leaving behind a puzzle that was considerably deepened by the strange, quasi-mystical entries that they were understood to have left in their logbook.
MACFADDEN WAS AN AMALGAM OF PRESCIENCE AND QUACKERY
Without the details of the log, indeed, the mystery was less compelling. Lighthouse keeping can be dangerous work, and Eilean Mor (the rock on which the lamp was perched) had been hit by an enormous storm shortly before Christmas. It would have been easy to suppose that the men were all out working in the storm, and were swept into the sea by a freak wave, had the entries not made it clear that their disappearance took place after the storm had passed.
It seems to have been Vincent Gaddis, a well-known writer of the 1960s, who first mentioned the existence of this logbook in a fortean work. Written in the scrawled hand of the Third Officer, Thomas Marshall (Gaddis noted in Mysterious Fires and Lights), the Flannan log charted a steadily-intensifying atmosphere of unspoken dread – one familiar to any horror movie fan – that seemingly overcame the First Officer, Thomas Ducat, and his assistant, Donald McArthur:
Dec. 12: Gale, north by north-west. Sea lashed to fury.
Stormbound 9pm. Never seen such a storm. Everything shipshape. Ducat irritable.
12pm. Storm still raging. Wind steady. Stormbound. Cannot go out. Ship passed sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins. Ducat quiet. McArthur crying.
Dec. 13: Storm continued through night. Wind shifted west by north. Ducat quiet. McArthur praying.
12 noon. Grey daylight. Me, Ducat, and McArthur prayed.
Dec. 15: 1pm. Storm ended. Sea calm. God is over all.
“Ducat,” Gaddis observed of this odd evidence, “usually very good-natured, had just returned from his leave on shore. Why should he be irritable?... McArthur, a hardened, veteran seaman… well known as a lusty, fearless brawler on land, crying! What could have been the mysterious, extraordinary situation that would make strong McArthur weep? And Michael Harrison – a writer who never encountered a mysterious detail he was not happy to endorse – went further in his own version of the tale. “With that last mysterious entry,” he wrote, “the log closed, and the three terrified, praying men vanished for ever from this world.”
When I first wrote about all this in 1998, I gave several reasons for suspecting that these entries were fakes. Nautical logs are not impressionistic diaries, kept by just one person, but precise records of events, written up by a changing rotation of officers of the watch. It was unlikely that Marshall – the most junior of the lighthousemen – would have made insubordinate notes in a log that his superiors would read. And, read carefully, it seemed likely that the entries were written after the event:
It would hardly be peculiar, during a routine and tedious turn of duty, for a lighthouseman to be ‘quiet’, so why would Marshall think to note the fact? Sensationalist writers have hinted that the notes were made because the men were increasingly aware of looming, supernatural disaster. I believe they point, rather, to the entries being a fabrication. Ducat’s and Macarthur’s moods of 12 and 13 December are significant only because of what happened to them on the 15th.
Further than that I could not go at the time. Gaddis had recorded where he had found his information: it had been published in an American magazine called True Strange Stories in August 1929. But it was not easy then to consult TSS, and I let the matter rest for more than a decade until, in 2008, the science writer Giles Sparrow found me at the FT Unconvention and handed me a copy of the article itself.
It was immediately obvious that True Strange Stories was indeed the source of the mysterious entries. The author of the piece, one Ernest Fallon, insisted that the details of the log were drawn “from English sources”, but gave no further details – and large chunks of the remainder of his story were either heavily fictionalised or altogether wrong. One mystery had replaced another. Who was Fallon? What sort of things did True Strange Stories publish? And was it possible that these “English sources” existed?
Details from the archives of the Northern Lighthouse Board and contemporary
newspapers suggested that the answer to the last of these questions was “No”. Both made it clear that the log was kept only up to 13 December, with subsequent entries being noted, in chalk, on a slate for later transfer to the book; the whole notion of a log extending as late as 15 December is a fallacy. Even if we are charitable, and count the entries on the slate as part of the log, it is explicitly stated that the last notes (a record of the weather) were written at 9 on the morning of 15 December. The contemporary record is clear that no entry was made as late as 1pm. This must imply the records quoted by Harrison and Gaddis are a hoax.
As for Fallon, it seemed impossible to prove he even existed. A superb Internet resource, ‘The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Magazine Index’ compiled by Phil StephensonPayne, notes the existence of this article, but it was apparently the only one that Fallon ever wrote. His name appears absolutely nowhere else in the literature of pulp magazines or fortean phenomena. Intriguingly enough, the same unusual claim to fame was shared by at least six other named contributors to True Strange Stories.
I was driven back to look at TSS – and, with the realisation that the magazine had been part of Macfadden’s stable, the story came suddenly into focus.
MUSCLES AND MUCKRAKING
Macfadden was such a remarkable character that his life has been well studied, as has his considerable impact on publishing and journalism. Beginning with a single title, Physical Culture – at first little more than an advertising sheet promoting the sale of fitness gear – he slowly built a publishing empire. The real breakthrough came in 1919 when, noting the popularity of the first-person stories of triumph over adversity sent in by readers of his fitness title, he launched True Story, a magazine made up entirely of such features, which became the publishing sensation of the next two decades. A compelling mix of sex and sin, covering hitherto barely mentionable topics such as illegitimacy, adultery, unemployment and crime (a mix readily satirised by critics as “I’m ruined!” journalism), the magazine peaked with sales in excess of two million copies a month, made Macfadden’s fortune, and received, its proud proprietor claimed, in excess of 70,000 readers’ submissions every year.
Macfadden was quick to see potential in True Story, and numerous spin-off titles were launched – True Romances, True Confession, True Detective and, eventually, both Ghost Stories and the short-lived True Strange Stories, which was born and died in the year of the Wall Street Crash, 1929. All shared the formula honed by True Story – a mix Macfadden himself liked to call “the folk literature of the common people of America” but that his critics denounced as trash that followed a simple formula: its subjects sinned, suffered and repented, eventually finding redemption (except in Ghost Stories, where, as Will Murray sagely notes, they died, dematerialised and repented). For Jacqueline Hatton, though – a scholar who wrote a PhD thesis on Macfadden’s publishing empire – something much stranger and more remarkable was going on:
The relationship between truth and reality in True Story is too complex to be reduced to a yes/no question… The true/false conundrum is unresolvable, and indeed pretty much irrelevant, because the concept of truth itself was highly ambiguous in True Story. [It] inscribed truisms rather than truths, beliefs rather than realities.
Or, as Macfadden himself was said to have observed – in terms that have a very current resonance – if a story merely sounded true, it was true enough for him.
True Strange Stories, then, published articles that were “true” in Macfadden’s meaning of the word. And it looked very much as though the spooky details that appeared in Fallon’s article ‘The Strange Log of the Seven Hunters’ were exactly the sort of elaborations that a Macfadden title would happily condone. So everything pointed to the piece in TSS being a very 1920s version of fake news. But could I prove it?
FINDING FALLON
The answer, it seemed, had to come from finding out who Ernest Fallon was. And the solution to that mystery turned out to lurk in the memoirs of the editor of True Strange Stories – another forgotten man who was famous in his time. His name was John L Spivak, and in 1929 he was only just getting his start as a writer, which explained why he was willing to work for a notorious cheapskate like Bernarr Macfadden. In the 1930s, though, Spivak went on to better things. His socialist convictions led him to turn out a series of muckraking exposés of American anti-Semitism, the conditions of black prisoners on Georgia chain gangs, and the infamous ‘business plot’, an apparent planned coup involving George W Bush’s grandfather, which sought the overthrow of democratic government and the installation of a fascist dictatorship in the United States of the Depression era. It’s thanks in large part to Spivak’s work that we know as much about these things as we do.
Spivak’s memoirs make three key points about his tenure as the editor of TSS, “a magazine they were launching to see if there was a market for something besides rape, adultery and muscles”. One was that the budget was tight. The second was that the magazine required huge quantities of copy – 16 to 18 features each month, each of at least 5,000 words. And the third was that a kernel of
IFASTORY SOUNDED TRUE, ITWAS TRUE ENOUGH FOR HIM
truth was plenty for a true strange story:
In desperation, I decided to write them myself. One Saturday morning I went down to the [NewYork Public Library]. All I needed for a Macfadden “true” story were a few unusual facts, a name or two, a place or two, and, if possible, a picture to give a semblance of believability. In two or three hours of research I took enough notes for half a dozen such stories.
By nightfall I had done a once-over-lightly draft for the first story; Sunday morning I did another. Each... meant from $100 to $120. By then I was married and had a daughter, Jacqueline, who used to watch me, fascinated, as I pounded the typewriter keys. I explained that she should not distract me; every keystroke was worth two cents. That, considering how much she could purchase with two cents, impressed her… She would clap her hands in time with the clacking of the keys and cry delightedly, “Two cents, two cents, two cents!”
It is not exactly a confession, but it is near enough. ‘Ernest Fallon’ was John L Spivak. The mystical logbook entries were examples of the elaborations that he added to make mundane mysteries exciting. The crying, praying lighthousemen never existed.
And Macfadden’s 1920s fake news mill had added another – especially memorable – true story that would pollute fortean potboilers for several lifetimes.
THE HOODOO CAR
True Strange Stories was not a proper precursor to Fortean Times. Each issue ran to 100 pages and contained an eclectic mix of true confession pieces, crime, offbeat celebrity features and fiction serials. All this meant that no more than two or three of the articles that appeared in any given issue focused on strange phenomena. But, in the course of its short life, TSS nonetheless managed to cover a number of cases that are still familiar to us today. Among the content that Spivak churned out were features on Phineas Gage, the railway worker who lost a large part of his brain to a tamping iron in an 1848 blasting accident; the curse supposedly attached to the Koh-inoor diamond; and stories of children raised by wolves. (For Gage, see FT38:30, 258:18-19; for the Koh-i-noor curse, see FT161:6; and for children raised by wolves, see Paul Sieveking ‘Wild Things’, FT161:34-41.)
It’s worth taking a closer look at a second example from TSS’s files, if only to establish that the sort of techniques that Spivak deployed to tell the story of the vanishing lighthousemen were typical of his magazine’s approach to other features. Its treatment of another fortean classic in its August 1929 issue shows this was the case.
“The Hoodoo Car That Started a World War” is a feature attributed to ‘Arthur Willstach’. But it is another example of Spivak’s work. We can be certain this was the case not only by referring once again to ‘The Science Fiction Index’ (which confirms this article was the only one that ‘Willstach’ ever apparently produced, and hence that this was likely one of Spivak’s many pseudonyms), but also by working through the contents of the private papers that the writer willed to Syracuse University Library. Box 32 of these papers turns out to contain a typescript of what is substantially the same article, revised for resubmission to another magazine during the 1950s. It is attributed to ‘Monroe Fry’ – the name under which the blacklisted radical Spivak was forced to live for around a decade during the McCarthy years.
The “Hoodoo Car” story is a cursed car legend. It looks at the numerous deaths supposedly associated with the Gräf & Stift touring car in which the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was driving when he was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914. That murder triggered the outbreak of World War I, and the millions of deaths and unimaginable suffering that came with it. It’s not surprising, in such circumstances, that the car should become associated with an elaborate curse legend.
Spivak did not invent the “Hoodoo Car” story; early versions of it began to circulate around the mid-1920s. It may be that the story originated somewhere in eastern Europe, but the earliest account that I have been able to trace was written by an unnamed journalist in the London office of the United Press news agency in November 1926. This version of the story appeared in several American newspapers in the autumn of that year, including the Freeport Journal Standard, published in Freeport, Illinois (30 November 1926), and in Kansas’s Emporia Gazette on 7 December.
In the Standard’s item, the Gräf & Stift was a large comfortable six-seater car, painted an attractive red that not only seemed destined to carry misfortune and disaster”, but also “justified its evil reputation to the end”. Pressed back into service after spending the war years in a museum, it came close to killing the Yugoslavian governor of Bosnia, and did see off its next owner, who “was found dead in a ditch with the car on top of him”. The vehicle was then recovered and sold to a Transylvanian second-hand car dealer named Tiber Hirschfield.
By this time, the account went on, it had such a fearsome reputation that Hirschfield could find no buyer for it, and took to driving it himself. He was “taking six friends to a wedding in it when it came into collision with another car which it was attempting to pass at top speed. The car was completely smashed, and those who were not killed were badly injured”.
The UP story, or another very like it, fairly clearly served as a basis for Spivak’s “The Hoodoo Car That Started a World War”. Its chief features, just to recap, were the limo’s wartime career in a museum, and three later owners – at least one of whom was killed by it. The car ends the story “completely smashed” and unfit for any further service.
This version had changed considerably by the time that True Strange Stories had finished with the cursed tourer. The first elaboration
that Spivak introduced was to make a telling change to the car’s colour – from an “attractive red” to “devil red”. He also seems to have decided that the Standard’s version of the story was too tame. Out went the years spent in a museum; in came General Oskar Potoriek, governor of Bosnia at the time of the assassination, and the Austro-Hungarian commander on the Serbian front in World War I. In life, Potoriek proved so inept that he was replaced and retired before Christmas 1914, but – in Spivak’s version of events – after taking care to “clean the blood-stained cushions and repair the bullet holes in the woodwork” of the car, he pressed the Gräf & Stift straight back into service, commandeering it to tour the front, only to see his army suffer a crushing defeat that drove him mad and into an asylum.
Spivak’s account next ramps up the horror in expert fashion, passing the car on to a pair of Potoriek’s staff officers, who experience an unexplained loss of control that makes them swerve into two peasants, who are crushed and killed. A new owner, General Sarkotic – who really was military governor of Bosnia in 1915 – brings in a chauffeur, who kills two more peasants in a similar accident, but survives to insist that the accident occurred when the wheel “turned by itself”. The Yugoslavian governor inherits the car next, and we get significantly more details of his experiences: there are three accidents in two months, and then a fourth in which the car swerves into a tree and costs the governor a forearm.
According to Spivak, the limousine’s next owner was a “Dr M Srskic” – a name that TSS seems to have borrowed from Milan Srškic, a fairly prominent Yugoslav politician at the time he wrote. Spivak’s Srskic is “a man of science”, though, killed when the car unaccountably overturns on a smooth stretch of road. After that, the Gräf & Stift passes to a Bosnian landowner, who commits suicide, and then to Peter Sveatich, an industrialist. He is lucky to survive a further accident – a headon collision that kills one person in the other car and badly injures four others. Once again, the horror is turned up a notch. According to Spivak’s version of events, the car “seemed to jump – literally to jump” into the path of the oncoming vehicle.
By 1926, the limousine had been repaired again and passed into the hands of a Swiss racing driver, “Monsieur Blunti”, who dies in another head-on crash, this one in a high pass through the Dolomites that drives the other vehicle involved over a cliff, killing all its passengers. Spivak’s account concludes with the cursed car passing into the hands of Tiber Hirschfield. Like the Standard, he has the “gorgeous, fiery” car wiped out in one final bloody disaster involving a wedding party. In Spivak’s revised version of events, however, the Gräf & Stift kills five of the six wedding guests – and it appears that the lone survivor is allowed to live solely to recount the terrifying detail that the accident occurred because the cursed limo “physically leapt” into the path of the approaching car.
In Spivak’s telling, then, the number of accidents involving the Gräf & Stift is more than doubled, and the death toll rises from fewer than five to well over a dozen. Even more significantly, perhaps, the cursed car acquires a sort of sentience – apparently, the reader is led to suppose, as a result of the leading role it played in the horrific chain of events that saw Europe slide into war.
THE LEGEND LIVES ON…
If we compare Spivak’s version of events with accounts of the cursed car that began to appear in other works years later – most influentially in Frank Edwards’s 1950s fortean potboiler Stranger Than Science, and most elaborately in a Weekly World News spread dating to April 1981 – a couple of things are immediately apparent. One is that many of the innovations introduced by True Strange Stories have been retained in these later accounts; the story as it’s told today still moves from Franz Ferdinand to Potoriek to two staff officers who kill two peasants, the car still costs the Yugoslavian governor an arm, and the tale still includes the disastrous deaths of a wedding party.
But it’s equally obvious that some of the fine details that Spivak introduced have been lost along the way. Monsieur Blunti becomes merely an unnamed “Swiss racing driver”, Dr Srskic gets passed over, and – perhaps most intriguingly – the vehicular sentience that is the central horror in the True Strange Stories account gets written out.
That’s perfectly consistent, it seems clear, not only with the nature of ‘fake news’ as we understand it now, but with the way in which stories (including folklore) have always been transmitted. Strong, memorable details get reinforced and elaborated. Incidental, overcooked, hard to recall ones wither and die.
And, all too often, nobody checks even the most basic details of the story – which may have been hard to do in the case of the lighthouse logbook from Eilean Mor, but is entirely straightforward in the case of Franz Ferdinand’s Gräf & Stift. Because the fabled cursed car still exists – painted, as it always has been, a defiant drab green, not Spivak’s “devil red” – in the sameVienna museum where it has sat, unmoving, since it was first placed there in the summer of 1914, before its entirely fictional rampage across the roads of the Balkans even began.