20 Impostors Who Fooled Everyone Before Photo ID Existed

In 1951, American serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara posed as a physician on board a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, HMCS Cayuga, using the stolen credentials of a genuine doctor, Dr. Joseph Cyr. During the Korean War, as wounded sailors and South Korean army troops were brought on board, Demara quietly studied a surgical text before carrying out chest and abdominal surgeries as the ship’s trauma surgeon. All the patients he operated on survived. He was exposed only when Cyr’s mother read about his deception in the newspaper.

A woman who was pulled out of a canal in Berlin in 1920 was committed to a mental asylum, where she claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Russia’s murdered Tsar Nicholas II. She knew intimate details of the Romanov family and was accepted by some former Russian aristocrats. For decades, German courts examined her claims but never resolved them. In the United States, she died in 1984, known as Anna Anderson. A later DNA test showed she was actually a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

The missing heir, Sir Roger Tichborne, an English baronet, was believed to have drowned when his ship sank in 1854. Years later, though, an Australian butcher called Arthur Orton showed up claiming to be him, even though, unlike Roger, he spoke no French and was a lot heavier than the slender heir. Roger’s mother, Lady Tichborne, took to him and allowed him to draw on her purse. Working-class masses, disgusted with the upper class, rallied behind him in the longest trial of Victorian Britain. He was convicted of perjury in 1874.

In 1906, Wilhelm Voigt, a penniless German cobbler with a criminal record, bought bits of a used uniform belonging to an army captain. He put it on, directed four actual soldiers standing on a Berlin street to accompany him, went to the town hall in the nearby suburb of Köpenick, and arrested the mayor there. He collected 4,000 marks from the treasury, thinking perhaps that he would find a passport there for which his record prevented him from applying. No such luck. Ten days later he was captured, but amused Kaiser Wilhelm II enough to be pardoned.

In 1820, a Scottish army veteran, Gregor MacGregor, showed up in London claiming he’d been made king by a Honduran chief over a wealthy, fertile country called Poyais. He set up shop as an ambassador, sold bogus property deeds, and issued £200,000 in Poyaisian bonds for a nonexistent state. About 250 immigrants arrived expecting to find farmland and towns but discovered a tropical wasteland instead. Over 180 succumbed to malaria and starvation, and a British warship rescued the rest.

In 1548, Martin Guerre, a prosperous peasant in France, left his village and his wife, Bertrande de Rols, behind. Several years later, a peasant called Arnaud du Tilh appeared in the village, claiming to be Guerre. With his detailed knowledge of his predecessor’s life, he convinced everyone. He cohabited with de Rols for three years and fathered two children with her, although one historian has suggested that she may have known he wasn’t Martin and quietly played along. But when they got involved in a land dispute, du Tilh’s deception came under scrutiny. The real Martin Guerre, who’d lost a leg in battle, then strolled into court. Du Tilh confessed and was subsequently hanged.

A British charlatan named Lord Gordon Gordon, who came to America in 1871 to pose as a rich Scottish aristocrat, managed to swindle railroad magnate Jay Gould out of almost $1 million worth of stock and cash. He then ran off to Manitoba, Canada. Gould’s bounty hunters had kidnapped Gordon from Canada, but were arrested by the Canadians. The resulting international incident sparked a diplomatic crisis, and when courts approved his extradition, Gordon shot himself rather than face prison. Gordon Gordon’s true identity has never been confirmed.

The Dauphin Louis XVII, aged 10, son of the guillotined Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, died in a Parisian prison in 1795. In the years after his death, however, a Prussian clockmaker called Karl Wilhelm Naundorff claimed to be the dauphin. He had been smuggled out of the country as a child, he said, and was familiar enough with royal etiquette to convince former Bourbon courtiers and the prince’s old nanny, among others, of his identity. The French police eventually forced him to leave France, and he died in the Netherlands with his tombstone identifying him as Louis XVII. DNA testing more than 100 years later showed that the boy who had died in prison was indeed the dauphin.

In 1817, Mary Baker, the daughter of an English cobbler and former servant girl, appeared in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, dressed in a turban she’d made herself and speaking a tongue she’d created out of nothing. She told people that she was the princess of some imaginary island who had been abducted by pirates. The local magistrate kept her for ten months while experts attempted but were unable to translate her invented language. It wasn’t until a boarding-house proprietor spotted her likeness in a newspaper sketch that the charade fell apart.

In 1921, Stephen Jacob Weinberg, a Brooklyn-born serial impostor who called himself Stanley Clifford Weyman, falsely identified himself as a State Department naval liaison officer, promising to get Princess Fatima of Afghanistan an audience at the White House. He spent $10,000 of her money to charter a private train and bribed staff along the way. He escorted the princess into the Oval Office to meet President Warren G. Harding, then posed with her in front of the cameras. But federal agents recognized him in the photographs. He was arrested and served two years in prison.

Tsarevich Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, died mysteriously in 1591. During the “Time of Troubles” that followed, one Grigory Otrepyev, a renegade monk, declared himself to be the survivor. Supported by Polish nobles and Cossacks, he found troops following the death of Tsar Boris Godunov, and was crowned tsar. But his Polish ways offended Moscow’s nobles, and within a year a conspiracy stormed the Kremlin, killed the pretender, and fired his ashes from a cannon towards Poland.

In 522 BC, when the Persian King Cambyses II had secretly assassinated his brother, Bardiya, a Zoroastrian priest called Gaumata declared himself the prince and ruled in his place. Gaumata remained concealed, according to ancient stories, and gained popularity by canceling taxes and military conscription. The nobleman Darius and six other nobles became suspicious, noticed he was missing the mutilated ears that marked the real prince, and slew him following a seven-month rule. Some contemporary scholars believe Darius fabricated the story in order to legitimize the murder.

Shortly after the Roman emperor Tiberius assumed the throne in AD 14, Agrippa Postumus, Augustus’ exiled grandson, was put to death. Postumus’ slave, Clemens, grew out his hair and beard to match his former master, absconded with his ashes, and roamed Italy claiming he had narrowly escaped execution and that he was the grandson of Augustus. In a country that still mourned the beloved Augustus, this Pseudo-Agrippa amassed a following. The threat prompted Tiberius’s administration to move swiftly against Clemens. After capturing him in AD 16, Clemens reportedly told Tiberius he had become Agrippa “the same way you made yourself a Caesar.” Tiberius had him quietly executed inside the palace.

In 1771, an English servant named Sarah Wilson stole from Queen Charlotte’s household and was transported to Maryland as an indentured servant. She escaped from the planter who bought her and, during a tour of the Carolinas and Virginia, claimed to be a royal relation of Queen Charlotte. And while she did so, she received gifts and loans from colonial elites, who hoped to secure the patronage of royalty. Two years after her escape, she was unmasked by her ex-master, who advertised her as his runaway servant.

James Addison Reavis arrived in Arizona from Missouri, where he had been a lowly clerk. Through the 1880s, he hid fake documents in archives in Mexico City, Seville, and Madrid to create a whole 18th-century Spanish noble family. He took an orphan girl named Sophia Treadway to be his wife, who really did believe she was the sole surviving member of that family. He styled himself the Baron of Arizona and claimed roughly 12 million acres covering Phoenix. He extorted millions from railroads and settlers for quitclaim deeds until experts established that the papers were written with modern pens and the ink was chemically aged. He went to prison for two years, dying destitute.

In 1483, Richard, Duke of York, one of the two “princes in the tower,” disappeared from English custody. In the next decade, a Flemish commoner called Perkin Warbeck came to Ireland proclaiming himself the lost royal. The king of France and the Duchess of Burgundy supported him, and European courts acknowledged him as the rightful king of England for six years. He organized unsuccessful attempts to invade England against King Henry VII. After his arrest, Warbeck admitted, while in Tudor hands, that he was the son of a Flemish burgess. He was hanged in 1499.

In 1703, a man who called himself George Psalmanazar, though no one knew his real name, showed up in London and said he was a native of Formosa, now known as Taiwan. He demonstrated strange rituals, ate uncooked meat seasoned with spices, and conversed in a completely made-up language. His book of fabricated traditions was sufficiently popular that a bishop took him under his wing, and Oxford subsequently employed Psalmanazar to teach the language. A few years on, academics began to cast doubt on his story. He ended his days as a London editor, never revealing what his actual name was.

Mary Carleton, née Mary Moders, the daughter of a Canterbury musician, posed as a wealthy German princess when she married John Carleton, a surgeon’s clerk, in 1663 for her expected wealth. After the marriage, his family unearthed forged letters, and she was tried for bigamy. She won her case by successfully arguing that the letters were faked by his family. She even performed in a play based on the incident under her own name. A decade later, however, she was found guilty of theft of silver plate and hanged at Tyburn in January 1673.

A con artist from Tasmania named Amy Bock dressed up like a man at a New Zealand boarding house in the first few months of 1909, and claimed to be a rich sheep rancher on the North Island. She wooed the owner’s daughter, Agnes Ottaway, showing her forged property deeds, and borrowing money from her to pay for “wedding preparations.” The pair were married in a local church, and the event was reported by newspapers across the region. Four days after the wedding, however, the police found that the deeds were fake, and that Bock’s real name and gender had been lies. She spent four years in jail, and the marriage was annulled.

In 1487, Yorkist rebels crowned a 10-year-old commoner named Lambert Simnel as king in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. The Yorkists claimed he was the imprisoned Earl of Warwick, the real Yorkist heir. Henry VII marched through London with the real Earl of Warwick in tow, to prove the pretender was a fake. Then he defeated them at the Battle of Stoke Field, where more than 4,000 Yorkists were killed. Henry VII spared the young pretender because he thought the boy had been used by other men, and gave him a job in the kitchens, turning spits. He went on to spend years working in the royal household’s kitchens before reportedly being promoted to falconer.

This content was created with the help of AI.