8 outstanding impostors who have gone down in history: Princess Karabou, Captain of Köpenick, etc

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

History is full of outstanding personalities who inspire pride and respect. But it is also full of impostors, cleverly pretending to be other people in order to get what they want. Remember Perkin Warbeck, who was called Richard by the opponents of Henry VII, Duke of York (the youngest of the two princes in the Tower) and therefore the rightful king of England. And how did it all end up? However, at the beginning of the 17th century in Russia there were at least three "False Dmitry", all of them claimed the title of the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. The first of them even made it to the throne, but all three were overtaken by an evil fate …

1. Captain from Köpenick

Wilhelm Voigt (1849-1922) spent most of his life in prison for theft, burglary and document forgery, before gaining fame for his so-called “criminal masterpiece” in October 1906. Dressed in the uniform of a captain of the German army (which he collected from various used items), Wilhelm played the unquestioning obedience expected of Prussian / German soldiers.

Passionate about his own game, he commanded two small groups of soldiers (dismissing a sergeant who could test his powers as an officer) and took over the town hall in Köpenick, near Berlin. Claiming that the city authorities were suspected of fraud, he forced the soldiers to guard the building, and he himself "confiscated" just over four thousand marks. Then he left, telling the soldiers to wait half an hour and, having changed into civilian clothes, simply disappeared.

Voigt was later arrested and served part of a four-year sentence before being pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II. As a result, Wilhelm became an international celebrity who admired Germans and foreigners alike in the way he emphasized the absurdity of German militarism.

During his machinations, he managed to amass a decent fortune and, having retired in complete comfort, was soon financially ruined by inflation after the First World War. Several films, plays and television dramas have been made about him.

2. Princess Karabou

In 1817, a young woman appeared in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, speaking a strange language and dressed in exotic clothes. In the following days, it was revealed that she was a princess from the East Indies and was abducted by pirates, but escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Strait.

Princess Karabou (1792-1864) instantly aroused great interest among the local nobility with her curious language and habits, and made an indelible impression on the people when she visited the fashionable resort of Bath.

But the so-called princess ended up being Mary Willcox, the daughter of a Devon shoemaker. After being exposed, she traveled to America, where her fame allowed her to modestly save money for a living by exposing herself, and at one point she made a decent fortune selling leeches for medical purposes. She eventually returned to England, where she ended her days.

An interesting point: the story that she stopped (or was shipwrecked) on the island of St. Helena on the way to America, where the exiled emperor Napoleon fell in love with her, unfortunately, is unfounded. It is also worth mentioning that Phoebe Cates played Mary in the 1994 film Princess Karabou.

3. Lobsang Rampa

Lobsang Rampa wrote several books on occult and Eastern religions, which were readily purchased by people in Britain in the 1950s and 60s. The first such book, The Third Eye, claimed to be the memoir of a Tibetan monk, and was published despite reservations from publishers about its authenticity.

Rampa was later exposed as Cyril Hoskin, the son of a plumber. Upon meeting, he did not deny this and explained that he agreed to have his body captured by the spirit of Rampa after he fell from a tree at Thames Ditton while trying to photograph an owl.

Hoskin / Rampa wrote several other books that have contributed greatly to the popularization of Buddhism in Britain and America. One of them, "Life with a Lama," was, as the writer claimed, dictated to him by his beloved Siamese cat Mrs. Fifi Greyviskers.

4. Joseph Seer

Ferdinand Demara was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family, but left home at the age of sixteen to become a monk, and in 1941 he joined the US Army. This was the beginning of his career as an impostor.

Demara borrowed the name of a comrade, deserted, became a monk again, then joined the US Navy, faked his own suicide, and under a different name became a professor of psychology. After Demar was caught and served time for desertion, he joined another religious order before borrowing the name of a young doctor he knew.

As Dr. Joseph Cyr, he was a surgeon on a Canadian destroyer during the Korean War. When sixteen wounded were delivered to the ship, he quickly read several medical textbooks and successfully operated on all of them.

The real Doctor Syrah's mother read about the operation in the newspaper and complained, but the Royal Canadian Navy decided not to press charges, and Demara returned to the United States, where he worked in various jobs under pseudonyms. This included working as a hospital chaplain in California, but when this deception was also exposed, he was still allowed to remain in office because he was popular with patients and staff. He performed his final rites on actor Steve McQueen when he died in 1980. Tony Curtis stars as Demara in The Great Pretender.

5. Elizabeth Bogley (Cassie L. Chadwick)

Canadian-born Elizabeth Bogley went by various names (she married several times) a clairvoyant, a brothel keeper and a crook. An extremely accomplished copycat with a long criminal history, hidden personality changes, she claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. The fabulously wealthy steel tycoon, she claimed, had given her several millions of dollars in bills, and she was to receive a fabulous sum after his death.

This meant that the banks were willing to lend her very large sums. She correctly calculated that no one would embarrass Mr. Carnegie with questions about her. In addition, all loans were issued at absurdly high interest rates - a fact that banks would not want to advertise.

Over the course of eight years, Bogli received between ten and twenty million dollars and lived in luxury, buying herself several diamond necklaces, as well as a posh house with a pretentious interior and a gold organ.

When Bogli was finally brought to trial, Andrew Carnegie was present at her trial. The sensation of this case was such that she was allowed to take many luxuries with her to the prison cell, where she died on her anniversary at the age of fifty.

6. Kasik of the state of Poyais

A Scottish native, McGregor joined the British Army at the age of sixteen and served without distinction until leaving in 1810. He then traveled to South America to fight anti-Spanish rebels in Venezuela and New Granada (modern-day Colombia), where his military track record was tarnished.

Returning to Great Britain in 1821, McGregor declared that he was Kasik - the ruler of the state of Poyais, a land with a favorable climate, fertile soil and an established British colony. Through an aggressive and shrewd PR campaign, McGregor raised a large amount of investment and sent groups of colonists there, who, when they arrived, were very disappointed with what they saw. When the scandal erupted, he attempted a similar scheme in France, followed by smaller scams, none of which resulted in his imprisonment.

After moving to Venezuela, McGregor demanded citizenship and an honorary rank of general, and was eventually recognized as a hero of liberation. When he died in 1845, he was buried with all military honors, and the President and the Cabinet of Ministers followed the coffin. The Poyais on the maps he used is in present-day Honduras and remains largely wild even today.

7. George Psalmanazar

In 1704, the historical and geographical description of Formosa went on sale in London bookstores. The author was George Psalmanazar, who claimed to be a native of an island (present-day Taiwan) that very few Europeans visited. He attributed his pale European skin (he was probably French) by the fact that the upper class of Formosa, like himself, lived underground.

The book sold well. It was full of all sorts of details about the life and customs of the inhabitants of Formosa: he argued that eating human meat was considered vulgar, but not sinful, and that eighteen thousand boys were sacrificed annually. The book was illustrated with images of Formosans of various classes and professions, and also described the Formosan language, grammar and alphabet.

Psalmanazar won great trust and sympathy in Protestant Britain, claiming that he was expelled from his country by Catholic missionaries. It was several years before cracks began to appear in its history thanks to the stories of people who actually were in Formosa. By 1710, Psalmanazar had become a laughingstock, and he had to get a job as a clerk.

George lived another fifty-three years, the rest of his life being a long atonement for indefatigable hack and conscientious scholarship. In 1749, he wrote an article on Formosa for a gazetteer in which he defiantly ridiculed his own story.

According to a friend of Psalmanazar and a constant drinking companion of Dr. Johnson, Psalmanazar was a kind, respected and very beloved member of the community in his old age.

8. Gray Owl

Archibald Belani was abandoned by both parents as children and was raised in Hastings by an overbearing and snobbish aunt he hated. It is possible that this unhappy family life brought him to life in a fantasy world in which he became obsessed with Native Americans and spent many hours practicing his knife thrower and marksman skills.

After being fired from his job at a local forestry company when he nearly destroyed the firm's premises (his other hobbies included practical jokes and making improvised explosives), he emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a guide and fur hunter in Northern Ontario. During this time, he took the guise of a Gray Owl and began to claim that he was the son of a Scottish father and an Apache mother.

Serving in the Canadian Army during World War I, Gray Owl was easily accepted by his comrades, who commented on his sniper and knife throwing skills and his ability to remain stationary in no-man's land, as if stalking prey, for a very long time.

Influenced by a Mohawk woman named Gertrude Bernard (one of several wives or common-law wives), Gray Owl gave up fur hunting and instead became a conservationist, and between the wars he published several books and articles that made him famous. More than a quarter of a million people heard him speak when he toured Britain in the 1930s. throughout the English-speaking world, the Gray Owl was a pioneer of the modern conservation movement.

Belani was only exposed after his death in 1938.

His exploits were featured in the 1999 biopic, The Gray Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, starring Pierce Brosnan.

Continuing the theme of "impostors" - the story of eleven women posing as men, were able to achieve tremendous success and universal recognition.