10 Fake Viral News Stories From The Early 20th Century

When people complain that “fake news” is a modern problem, the early 20th century quietly clears its throat.
Long before social media, rumors, hoaxes, and doctored “evidence” were spreading through newspapers, pamphlets,
and radio broadcasts at impressive speed. If you swap Twitter for telegraphs and clickbait for screaming headlines,
the pattern looks eerily familiar.

In this Listverse-style tour, we’ll walk through 10 fake viral news stories and hoaxes from roughly 1899 to the
late 1930san era when new technologies (cheap mass-printing, photography, and radio) collided with old human
weaknesses (gullibility, fear, and an appetite for drama). These stories fooled experts, panicked the public,
ruined reputations, and in some cases, helped fuel prejudice and propaganda. Sound familiar?

10. Tearing Down the Great Wall of China (1899)

Our countdown starts right on the doorstep of the 20th century, with four frustrated Denver newspaper reporters who
needed a front-page story and didn’t let reality get in the way. In June 1899, they invented a tale that American
companies had secured a contract to demolish the Great Wall of China and replace it with a modern road. Local papers
ran it as fact; then larger East Coast papers picked it up, adding imaginary quotes from Chinese officials and
illustrations of the “soon-to-be-removed” wall .

The hoax spread across the United States and into Europe, mutating as it went, exactly like today’s viral misinformation.
Only years later did one of the reporters finally confess. To this day, some retellings even falsely claim the article
helped spark the Boxer Rebelliona meta-hoax built on top of the original hoax. In other words, misinformation about
misinformation is not new at all.

9. The Jersey Devil Panic of 1909

In January 1909, South Jersey and the Philadelphia area basically experienced a week-long horror movie sponsored by
the local press. Newspapers breathlessly reported strange hoofprints in the snow, dead livestock, and a winged,
fire-breathing creature that allegedly attacked trolley cars and social clubs. Police supposedly fired at it. Schools
closed. Workers stayed home. Some papers claimed even the Philadelphia Zoo offered a reward for the beast .

In reality, at least some of the “evidence” was staged: later accounts describe faked footprints and even a kangaroo
outfitted with claws and bat wings and passed off as the captured monster. Still, the Jersey Devil scare shows how a
local folk legend can explode into “viral news” when editors realize fear sells papers. Swap the kangaroo for a blurry
smartphone video and you’ve got a perfect 2020s-style hoax.

8. Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years (1911)

If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at clickbait headlines, know that in 1911 even The New York Times joined in.
Influenced by American astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed he saw enormous “canals” carved by intelligent
Martians, the paper ran a now-famous headline:
“MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO YEARS.” The article framed it as a giant engineering project
completed by our “planetary neighbors” .

The problem? Those canals didn’t exist. The “canali” Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had described in the
19th century were probably optical illusions, and the word itself meant “channels,” not human-made waterways. But
the mistranslation plus Lowell’s vivid imagination created decades of breathless coverage and fueled a Martian craze
in popular culture. The story is basically an early 20th-century case study in how scientific uncertainty can be turned
into definitive-sounding “proof” when a dramatic narrative is more fun than the boring truth.

7. Piltdown Man, the Missing Link That Never Was (1912)

In 1912, English amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced that he had found the long-awaited “missing link”
between apes and humans in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The skull fragments seemed to show a human-like cranium
and an ape-like jaw, and “Piltdown Man” was quickly embraced by parts of the scientific establishment and celebrated
in popular media as a triumph of British science .

For decades, textbooks and newspapers presented Piltdown Man as real. It wasn’t until the 1950s that new dating
techniques exposed the fossil as a clumsy composite of a medieval human skull and an orangutan jaw, artificially aged
and filed down. The hoax had worked, in part, because it confirmed what many British scientists wanted to be
truethat the earliest humans must surely have come from their own backyard. Confirmation bias plus prestige plus
eager media coverage? That’s a recipe for viral fake news in any century.

6. The Cottingley Fairies: The Original Viral Selfies (1917–1920)

Two English schoolgirls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, just wanted to prank their relatives. In 1917, they
posed with paper cut-out fairies near a stream, photographed themselves, and presented the pictures as proof that
fairies were real. Their family believed them, and a few years later, so did a large chunk of the world.
Spiritualist circles, hungry for photographic “evidence” of the supernatural, embraced the images. Even
Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle publicly defended the photos, arguing that the camera couldn’t lie .

Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran the photos uncritically, and the story became an early 20th-century
equivalent of a viral Instagram hoax. Only in the 1980s did the now-elderly women admit that the fairies were cut-outs
from a book, carefully staged with pins and string. The Cottingley case feels extremely modern: staged images, a
flattering narrative, ideological echo chambers, and a press all too happy to boost the story because it drove
readership.

5. The Sisson Documents: Forged Proof of a Red Conspiracy (1918)

During World War I, the United States Committee on Public Informationessentially the government’s propaganda arm
got its hands on a set of Russian documents obtained by agent Edgar Sisson. These “Sisson Documents” allegedly proved
that Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders were paid German agents plotting to betray Russia from within .

In 1918, the U.S. government released the documents to the press, and many American newspapers ran them as fact,
framing the Russian Revolution as a German-engineered conspiracy. Only a few skeptical outlets questioned their
authenticity at the time. Decades later, historians showed convincingly that the documents were forgerieslikely
assembled from real bits of German and Russian paperwork and stitched together into a narrative that served wartime
propaganda goals. It’s a sobering reminder that even official sources can be vectors for fake news when fear and
political convenience line up.

4. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Deadly “News” Document (1903–1920s)

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not just fake newsit’s one of the most destructive pieces of
disinformation ever written. Produced in the early 1900s, likely by elements of the Russian secret police, the
text pretended to be the minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Despite being plagiarized from
an earlier political satire and repeatedly exposed as a forgery, the Protocols were treated as genuine by many newspapers
and commentators in Europe and the United States in the 1910s and 1920s .

American journalists and scholars did publish debunkingsHerman Bernstein’s The History of a Lie in 1921,
for examplebut the myth proved stubborn. The Protocols continued to circulate as “evidence” for antisemitic claims
and later fed directly into Nazi propaganda. This is fake news at its worst: not just silly or sensational, but a
fabricated “document leak” that helped justify real-world persecution and violence.

3. Loch Ness Monster: The “Surgeon’s Photograph” (1934)

If you’ve ever seen the classic black-and-white image of a long-necked creature rising from the waters of Loch Ness,
you’ve met one of the 20th century’s most famous fakes. In 1934, a photograph published in the London
Daily Mailpurportedly taken by a respectable surgeonseemed to offer definitive proof of “Nessie.”
Newspapers across the world reprinted the image, and the monster exploded into pop culture fame .

Decades later, investigators revealed that the “monster” was almost certainly a small toy or model mounted on a
submarine-like base. One participant in the hoax reportedly confessed that it was payback after the newspaper had
mocked him over earlier, bogus Nessie footprints. The public, meanwhile, had spent years treating the photo as
near-sacred proof. Today’s AI-generated “creature sightings” are just the latest chapter in a very long story of
people wanting to believe that the blurry thing in the water is more exciting than a log.

2. War of the Worlds: Panic, Then Panic About the Panic (1938)

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds. The show used realistic “news bulletin” style interruptions to portray an ongoing Martian
invasion. Some listeners who tuned in late reportedly believed the invasion was real. But here’s the twist: the idea
that America plunged into mass panic that night is itself partly exaggerated by newspapers that were eager to portray
radio as irresponsible competition .

Modern research suggests there was confusion and anxiety among some listeners, but no nationwide mass hysteria.
The day after the broadcast, newspapers hyped isolated incidents into a sweeping narrative of chaos, partly to score
points against the upstart medium of radio. So you get a layered fake news sandwich: a fictional Martian invasion
presented as news inside the show, then sensational media coverage that overstated the public reaction to that fiction.

1. An “Epidemic” of Fake News About Vaccines (1920s)

In the 1920s, as governments tried to control outbreaks of diseases like smallpox, organized anti-vaccination groups
responded with something that looks a lot like today’s misinformation campaigns. Pamphlets, letters to editors, and
local speeches spread alarming but inaccurate claims: vaccines were useless, deadly, or a plot to violate personal
liberty. Public health officials described facing a “clamorous minority” repeating stories of people allegedly
injured or killed by vaccines without solid evidence .

In some communities, the fake news worked. Parents refused vaccination for their children; school mandates triggered
protests; and outbreaks were harder to control. The parallels with today are almost too on-the-nose: a mix of fear,
ideology, and distrust of institutions, amplified by the best communication technology available at the time. The
tools have changed; the emotional script hasn’t.

What These Old Hoaxes Teach Us About “Fake News”

Looking back at these early 20th-century fake news stories, a few patterns jump out:

• Spectacle sells. Monsters, Martians, conspiracy documents, and magical cures travel farther than boring reality.
• Technology amplifies, not causes, misinformation. Cheap mass-market newspapers, photography, and radio didn’t invent fake news; they just made it faster and louderjust like social media today.
• People believe what fits their worldview. Scientists who wanted a British “missing link,” spiritualists who wanted fairies, antisemites looking for “proof” of a plot, or skeptics of public health measureseach found what they were already primed to accept.
• Corrections lag far behind the myth. Debunks of the Sisson Documents, the Protocols, Martian canals, and Piltdown Man all came long after the original story went viral.

The lesson isn’t that we’re uniquely gullible today. It’s that humans have always mixed curiosity with credulityand
that we need habits, not just tools, to keep our critical thinking switched on.

of “Experience”: How It Feels to Live Through Fake News

It’s easy to laugh at people who believed in Martian irrigation projects or a dinosaur living in a Scottish lake. But
if you mentally strip away the old-timey fonts and grainy photos, their situation isn’t that different from what we
experience now. Imagine being an ordinary listener on that 1938 Halloween night, tuning into the radio a little late.
You don’t know you’ve missed the intro; all you hear are realistic bulletins about explosions and mysterious cylinders.
You change stationsmore music elsewhere, but you’re hooked. Do you panic? Maybe not. Are you at least unsettled?
Probably.

Or picture being a newspaper reader in 1911, opening the Sunday paper to see “MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO
YEARS” screaming from the page. This is the New York Times, the serious paper. They cite a respected
astronomer with an observatory in Arizona. Other outlets repeat the story. There’s no easy way to pull real images or
raw data yourself; you rely on experts and editors. Believing the headline isn’t stupidityit’s a rational response to
the information ecosystem you live in.

Fast-forward to the 1920s vaccine debates. Parents might get a public health leaflet explaining why vaccination matters,
then hear a neighbor argue that “a healthy child died right after the shot.” A pamphlet circulates claiming smallpox
is exaggerated, or that vaccine injuries are being hidden. There’s no Snopes, no real-time fact-checking, and no easy
way to know whether the anonymous pamphlet writer is a crank or a doctor. Your decision about your child’s health is
made in a fog of partial information and strong emotion. Again, that’s not so far from scrolling a modern feed filled
with scientific studies you can’t fully parse and alarming viral posts from strangers with confident opinions.

The Jersey Devil week of 1909 might be the most relatable of all. The public saw a constant drip of sensational
“updates”: strange tracks, terrified witnesses, armed posses roaming the woods. Some people probably treated it as a
joke, others as a real threat. Rumors leapt across towns more quickly than facts could catch up, and the line between
playful storytelling and genuine fear blurred. Replace hand-set type with push notifications and you can almost feel
your own anxiety spiking along with theirs.

The real takeaway from living (or imagining living) through these episodes is that fact-checking is never purely
intellectual; it’s emotional. When a story taps into fear, hope, identity, or outrage, it feels more “true” on a gut
level. That’s why the Cottingley fairies were so seductive to spiritualists who wanted scientific validation, and why
conspiracy texts like the Protocols found such a ready audience among people already inclined to blame a single group
for complex problems.

So if there’s a modern skill we can steal from these old cases, it’s this: when a story makes you feel something
strong very quicklypanic, righteous anger, smug satisfactionthat’s the moment to slow down. Ask: Who benefits
if I believe this? How would this story look if it turned out to be false? And is there another explanation that’s less
dramatic but more likely? Early 20th-century readers didn’t have the digital tools we do, but they faced the same
internal challenge. Being on the receiving end of fake news doesn’t make you weak; refusing to question it is what
keeps the hoax alive.