For years, you’d heard tales of the glamorous princess who mysteriously washed up in the
next village over.
Allegedly, she’d come all the way from an exotic island in the middle of the ocean after
pirates kidnapped her and she escaped.
She must have liked it here in England, because she decided to move in permanently, setting
up camp by the village lake and spending all day swimming and meditating.
Tourists came from near and far to see her.
Tourists like you.
One day, you finally got round to visiting the village to lay your eyes on the elusive
princess.
And there she was, sitting on the ground by the lake just a few meters away from you.
You can’t believe your eyes — this Princess looks oddly familiar.
Is that — it can’t be — why, that’s just the girl that used to work for you!
But before we get to the bottom of one strange tale, let’s launch into another.
1918 was the year of revolution in Russia, and unsurprisingly, the royals were on the
receiving end of the proletariat uprising.
One of the royals killed was Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of the last Russian tsar ever,
Nicolas the second.
But for some reason, people refused to believe that she and her brother had truly died.
This paved the way for claims that Anastasia had risen from the grave.
It was the perfect rumor for posers to capitalize on.
I don’t think I’d fancy pretending to be somebody who authorities had executed,
but hey, each to their own.
A few years after Anastasia supposedly died, a woman emerged claiming to be her, and she
had come from — wait for it — a mental asylum.
Always a promising sign for credibility.
Then again, if Anastasia genuinely had survived her execution by some miracle and started
telling everyone who she was, I guess she would end up in an asylum.
So, we can’t rule out this claim outright.
In fairness to the woman, she did look an awful lot like the young Princess.
She also seemed to know plenty about the personal details of her life.
Anastasia’s living relatives dismissed the woman as a fraud, but for some reason a group
of wealthy and powerful Russians who had left the country decided to believe the woman anyway,
even supporting her as the rightful heir to the throne.
The ruse went pretty well.
The former mental asylum patient ended up moving to the US and starting a new life under
the name of Anna Anderson.
Naturally, she made no effort to actually become heir to the throne or reunite with
her family, but she did inspire various books and movies.
Well played, Anna.
Eventually, the wonders of science put this absurd theory to the test once and for all.
A DNA test carried out after the woman’s death confirmed what, apparently, the ability
of a family to recognize their own relative couldn’t.
Anna wasn’t Anastasia.
Shock horror.
So, who was she?
That, nobody truly knows…
It’s pretty crazy to successfully pose as a royal for most of your life.
But not as crazy as pretending to be a royal from a place that doesn’t even exist.
In the early nineteenth century, there was a man called Gregor MacGregor, and I guess
he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder from having such a stupid name.
Poor guy.
So, he told everyone in London who’d listen that he wasn’t just some dumb Scotsman whose
parents hated him, but he was in fact the prince of a mysterious country called Poyais.
By mysterious, I mean that nobody but Gregor knew anything about this country and whether
it actually existed.
The things people got away with before Google Maps…
According to Gregor, Poyais was a small country in Central America with fertile land, lovely
people, and even a working government.
Weird that nobody had ever heard of such a prosperous nation.
Oh, and they called princes of Poyais like Gregor Caziques.
It’s all about the small details.
The Cazique even produced various maps, drawings, and writings about his homeland to prove it
was real.
Seems legit.
But Gregor wasn’t just doing this for the fun and games — he was a savvy businessman
with a plan.
Once he convinced Europeans that Poyais would be the perfect country to visit and invest
in, he sold them land.
Damn, he was good.
We can only assume that he dug himself into a bit of a hole and things escalated too far
for him to control them because eventually, his investors decided to actually head across
the Atlantic to begin their ventures.
Gregor said nothing, maybe hoping they’d die on the perilous journey.
The investors arrived in jungles where Poyais was supposed to be, and many died of local
diseases.
Tragic for them, but very handy for Gregor.
He fled to France and tried his luck at the same swindle a second time, only this time
round he was promptly arrested.
It’s all very well making some dollars or fooling people, but imagine creating a delusion
so successful that it actually landed you the throne?
That’s what the man now known as False Dmitri the first managed to achieve.
Let’s go back to Russia, this time in the seventeenth century.
The infamous Ivan the Terrible had died, and challengers to the throne had assassinated
his son Dmitri.
Feodor the first, the son of one of Ivan’s favored leaders during his reign, was ruling
as the Tsar of Russia.
Luckily, Russia’s royals have a useful tendency to rise from the dead.
Some guy in Poland turned up out of nowhere one day claiming to be Dmitri.
Apparently, he’d fled from his captures before they could murder him.
Convenient.
Amazingly, when the supposed Dmitri arrived in Russia, the public actually believed his
story.
His speeches charmed them and, against all odds, he assumed power.
In 1605, he became Tsar.
Unfortunately, False Dmitri just couldn’t resist taking things too far.
Instead of going about his reign quietly to avoid arousing suspicion, he decided to go
about implementing all kinds of radical reforms and policies, like restoring a day where serfs
were allowed to move to another lord.
He even had the audacity to marry a woman who didn’t convert to the Eastern Orthodox
religion.
This angered elites and eventually led to his downfall — he was overthrown and killed
in less than a year.
Confusingly, False Dmitri the first was followed by a False Dimitri the second and a False
Dimitri the third, who were also pretending to be Ivan the Terrible’s son.
Together, they’re known as the three pretenders.
But it was only the OG False Dmitri who actually managed to achieve power — the Russians
aren’t quite that gullible.
In most of the tales we’ve told so far, historians have figured out what was really
going on.
But now for a mystery that we still don’t know the truth about.
Richard of York was the great-grandson of King Edward the third.
He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful nobles in England during his time and had
a strong claim to the throne thanks to his royal ties, but never ascended during his
lifetime.
Although he secured an agreement stating that he would become the King after the current
ruler, Henry the sixth, died, Richard unfortunately died in battle before that was possible.
So close but so far.
If only a miracle could happen, like him coming back from the dead…
Oh, wait.
He did.
A man called Perkin Warbeck sprang up out of nowhere in 1491 in Ireland and claimed
to be Richard.
And people believed him.
To be fair to them, though, there was a lot of mystery at the time over how and whether
Richard really had died.
Perkin was so talented at bluffing that he even managed to convince James the fourth
of Scotland and Maximilian the first of Austria of his plight.
Whilst not exactly huge names now, they were pretty big deals back in the day.
Fast forward a few years and Perkin — or should I say, Richard — had an entire army
consisting of thousands of people.
He was ready to take back the throne that was rightfully his.
Supposedly.
Actually, he came pretty close.
But just as he was about to battle the King and his forces, Perkin decided to flee.
Imposter’s syndrome is a bitch.
Taking the coward’s way out didn’t do him any favors either since he ended up being
captured and hanged anyway.
But listen up, because this is where things get juicy.
The only evidence we have that Perkin was an imposter comes from Henry the seventh himself,
the king at the time who was almost dethroned.
So, some historians have suggested that the so-called imposter could have been the real
Richard of York after all.
Crazy stuff.
Now we’re back to Russia again, the prime location of royal wannabes and scammers, for
an even weirder story.
Catherine the Great is one of Russia’s best-known rulers and its longest-ever-ruling female
leader.
But she was almost usurped by a cunning lookalike.
Well, kind of.
Peter the third was the Emperor of Russia preceding Catherine before he was deposed.
He was a pretty unpopular guy and there were various conspiracies over his death.
Some said his own wife — that’s Catherine herself, who went on to succeed him — led
an uprising against him that resulted in his assassination.
Others said he had a drunken fight with his brother whilst he was captured by uprisers,
and died that way.
Either way, he suffered a cruel betrayal by those closest to him.
The mysterious circumstances surrounding his death provided the perfect opportunity to
claim that he’d never died at all.
A former Russian soldier called Yemelyan Pugachev had the blessing and the curse of being the
spitting image of Peter.
One day he presumably decided oh, what the hell, may as well see where using the identity
of the former ruler could take me.
And that’s what he did.
Turned out it would take him pretty far because plenty of people got behind Yemelyan and it
resulted in a huge peasant uprising.
One of the biggest in Russian history, in fact.
Yemelyan promised to give the people what they wanted: an end to the feudal system that
was keeping many peasants poor.
He managed to take control of a good chunk of Russian territory, between the Volga River
and the Urals.
Because the move took them by surprise, it took the government a while to respond.
But eventually, they began to act, and the challengers suffered defeat.
Then Pulgychin’s own lieutenants handed him into the Empress he was pretending to
be the wife of, and he was executed.
Oh, how the mighty fall.
Now for the most bizarre tale of the video.
We all know one of those people who claims to be way more special than they actually
are.
Well, Karl Willhelm Naundorff was one of those people.
The German watchmaker and clockmaker spent practically his entire life insisting that
he wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill tradesman but he was, in fact, the son of Marie Antoinette
and the rightful king of France.
Right.
Another daydreamer who didn’t twig that the worst time to pretend to be royalty is
when the royalty you’re claiming to be part of are currently being hunted down and killed.
Karl thought it would be a fantastic idea to head over to Paris and loudly claim he
was Prince Louis-Charles.
Don’t be like Karl.
I’ve got to give it to him though, many people believed his tall stories, including
some powerful figures and the prince’s former governess.
Unfortunately, nothing came of his grand show, because there was literally no evidence that
he was Prince Louis-Charles other than the vague similarity between the two men.
His supposed sister didn’t vouch for him, which doesn’t bode well.
He was expelled from France, but he should probably count himself lucky that he survived
the ordeal with his head intact.
Still, it was sort of a happy ending.
Karl moved on to the Netherlands, where he was still claiming to be the Prince, and nobody
there knew any better, so they believed him.
In case there’s still any doubt in your mind, a posthumous DNA test has since proven
he’s conclusively not related to Marie Antoinette.
Amazingly, Karl wasn’t the only one to attempt this feat.
There were several men claiming to be Prince Louis-Charles around the same period.
None of them were successful.
But anyway, were you wondering what happened to that princess I was talking about in the
intro?
It’s time to finally find out.
Who wouldn’t be taken in by the tale of a mysterious young woman speaking a foreign
language and claiming to be a princess from a faraway, exotic land?
Apparently, not the small English village of Almondsbury.
In 1817, a woman turned up who fit the above description.
After using a Portuguese interpreter to figure out what she was saying, it turned out that
she was Princess Caraboo from an island in the Indian Ocean called Javasu.
Funny how someone from the middle of the Indian Ocean would look English and speak Portuguese.
But anyway.
Apparently, pirates had kidnapped her and taken her away from her homeland and family.
Luckily, she’d managed to swim ashore to safety.
Everyone lapped the story up.
What could be more exciting than a glamorous princess who had escaped from her oppressors
against all odds?
From then on, she slept on the ground in the village, swam in a lake, and prayed to her
gods from the tops of trees.
Word spread and she became something of a tourist attraction.
Eventually, her reputation preceded her, when a woman recognized who she really was.
Mary Baker — the most painfully ordinary of all names.
Even worse, she was the woman’s servant.
Awkward.
For more content like this, check out our videos about insane ways people have faked
their death and the man from a country that doesn’t exist.