We might not be living in the year 2022. In fact, human civilization itself might not be nearly as
old as you think. At least according to one modern conspiracy theory that casts doubt on just about
everything in our history after around 614 CE. Known as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, this wild
theory came about in the 1990s, thanks to a man named ​​Heribert Illig. According to Illig,
Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II got together and added around 300 years to
the calendar to place them in power in the year 1000. Apparently, ruling during
a nice round number like that was something of a conversation starter, and the duo wanted in on it.
After deciding to manipulate time on a whim, they then concocted a vast conspiracy
involving countless monks throughout the Western world who helped fill in
the missing centuries with all sorts of tall tales about an emperor named Charlemagne and
something called the Middle Ages—most of which, Illig argues, is basically ancient fanfiction.
As for his evidence? Illig points to perceived inconsistencies in the Gregorian calendar
as an explanation for how 300 years could have been plucked from thin air.
It is true that early history often stretched the truth or created it entirely out of whole cloth,
but we’d have to discount a heck of a lot of primary sources and artifacts to even begin
considering Illig’s theory plausible. Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor in chief
of Mental Floss, and welcome to The List Show. OK, so you’re probably not
convinced that we’re really living in the year 1722, but that’s only the beginning
of the strange historical conspiracy theories we’re bringing you today. Let’s get started.
History is full of stories of entire cities burning or nearly burning to the ground
after a simple fire grew out of control. It happened in Chicago in 1871, London in 1666,
and—perhaps most famously—it happened in Rome. You probably know part of the story:
In 64 CE, a fire spread from ​​Circus Maximus stadium and wound up damaging or completely
destroying 10 of the capital’s 14 districts. Hundreds died; thousands lost their homes.
Rumors spread about the origin of the inferno soon after it was extinguished.
Many people at the time, and in the centuries since, put the blame squarely on Emperor Nero.
There are two main theories proposed as to why the emperor would purposely burn his own capital city:
One, Nero just didn’t like the way Rome looked, and the Senate wouldn’t permit him to make the
changes he wanted, so he chose to redecorate things in his image by burning most of it to the
ground first. Not exactly an HGTV-approved strategy, but a strategy nonetheless.
Others thought Nero orchestrated the fire so he could blame the Christians for starting it,
believing that would curb their increasing influence in Rome.
The thing is, much of the information about the fire comes to us from suspect sources
like Tacitus, who was just a child when the fire started, and was certainly no big fan of Nero to
begin with. Tacitus and others relied on a number of unconfirmed accounts of the fire
that may have been misunderstood or embellished along the way. You know that famous image of Nero
fiddling as Rome burned? Not true—as we covered in our episode of Misconceptions About Ancient Rome.
One of the things that possibly helps a theory like this survive is the fact that Nero is
recognized as one of the most heinous of the Roman emperors—and that’s a pretty competitive
field. He’s been blamed—with varying degrees of evidence—for killing his mother, wife,
and stepbrother. And in the wake of the fire, he put countless Christians to death. So, even if
most modern historians believe the fire was simply an accident, it's not that outlandish to blame the
guy who was feeding Christians to animals. To run down the list of great works by
William Shakespeare would be a waste of everyone’s time—you know most of them,
have probably read a bunch of them, and maybe even understand one or two without
CliffsNotes. But not everyone is convinced that he really penned the works that bear his name.
According to Vox, the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasn’t a real author gained prominence
during the mid-19th century, when two books were published on the matter: One was by Delia Bacon,
an American playwright, and the other by an Englishman named William H. Smith. Both
argued that Sir Francis Bacon—no relation to Delia—was actually the quill behind masterpieces
like Hamlet. Or that Shakespeare was actually a whole gaggle of writers using one pseudonym.
The evidence in these books was, well, a lack of evidence. The authors claimed that there was
no written documentation that Shakespeare was well-educated (which, to their minds,
cast doubt on his ability to write such memorable works), or that he ever penned a play. Smith
wrote: “No plays bearing Shakespeare’s name were published between 1609 and 1622; but in
the year 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death) a folio of thirty-six plays was brought
out as The Workes of William Shakespeare.’” Since then, the conspiracy theories have only
proliferated, with figures such as the Earl of Oxford and Christopher Marlowe being suggested as
the real Bard. To this day, books, documentaries, and organizations like the Shakespeare Oxford
Fellowship exist solely to circulate these theories. Public figures like Mark Twain,
Helen Keller, and even former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens bought into them.
But the thing is, we do have evidence that Shakespeare was the real deal.
There’s written evidence that he was an actor and playwright, and his work is mentioned in multiple
contemporary sources, including a 1598 book called Palladia Tamia by a man named Francis Meres,
where plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dreams and Titus Andronicus are mentioned specifically.
If you wanna take Shakespeare down a peg, you don’t have to claim he never existed:
just admit that Macbeth is boring. Abraham Lincoln was no stranger to
conspiracy theories throughout his presidency.
For years, Southern politicians and members of the press claimed that northerners were secretly
encouraging revolts of enslaved people throughout the region. Another said Lincoln’s first-term VP,
Hannibal Hamlin, was actually part Black and involved in a northern plot to destroy
the Southern way of life. After Lincoln was assassinated, the theories just kept coming.
One of the most unlikely scenarios comes to us from an Austrian chemist named Otto Eisenschiml,
who published the 1937 book Why Was Lincoln Murdered? In it, Eisenschiml proposed that
the president was done in by his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. Eisenschiml suggests
that Stanton wasn’t particularly happy with Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction,
which Stanton felt was too soft. To get his more hardline approach underway, Stanton supposedly
put the assassination plot in motion. What proof did Otto have? The holy trinity
of conspiracy theories: hearsay, conjecture, and circumstantial evidence. According to Eisenschiml,
Stanton did a number of questionable things in the days leading up to Ford’s Theater: He allegedly
ordered Ulysses S. Grant away from the theater on the night of the assassination. He also turned
down Abe’s request to have Major Thomas T. Eckert there for protection and closed all of the bridges
into the city other than the one John Wilkes Booth used to escape. In Eisenschiml’s version,
Booth still pulled the trigger, but he was under the watchful eye of the vengeful Secretary of War.
Of course, scholars haven’t found any real evidence to back up these claims,
but that didn’t stop Eisenschiml’s book from winding up as part of Civil War curriculums at
universities for years after it was published. Circling back to Booth for a moment: There are
a bunch of theories that he actually survived his supposed death days after the assassination
and lived out the rest of his days as a drifter of note. One theory even claims
that he wound up in Egypt where he buddied up with a sultan and owned more than 100 camels.
Now that’s the movie Spielberg should have made. Daniel Day-Lewis would kill it as Camel #5.
Queen Elizabeth I was, undoubtedly, a woman. You know it; I know it. The problem is that Dracula
author Bram Stoker and plenty of others weren’t so convinced. In 1910, Stoker published a book called
Famous Imposters, in which the author shed light on a number of historical hoaxes. In it, he helped
thrust the absurd theory that Queen Elizabeth was a man in disguise further into the mainstream.
This theory suggests that when Elizabeth was still a child, she was sent to the English village of
Bisley for a time—some say it was to avoid a plague, others say it was just for “a season of
outing.” Regardless, a young Elizabeth soon got sick, just as her father, King Henry VIII, was
coming to visit her. The child allegedly died, but rather than face the King’s wrath, the governess
in charge hatched a very ‘80s sitcom plot and decided to replace her with a lookalike from
the neighborhood. Unfortunately, no girls fit the bill, so she was forced to go with a local boy.
The idea was that King Henry didn’t take much of an interest in young Elizabeth, so he wouldn’t
notice a difference. The ruse was somehow then maintained until Elizabeth died at the age of 69.
For conspiracy believers, it was a convenient reason why the Virgin Queen never married.
This was a story that had been bouncing around the locals for centuries,
and according to Stoker were further emboldened when a coffin was unearthed in Bisley during
the early 1800s that contained the body of a child dressed in fine clothes that were well
beyond the reach of a commoner. That, they said, was airtight proof of baby Elizabeth’s fate.
Ever since the Jack the Ripper murders started making headlines, there have been more theories
around the case than corpses. The list of supposed suspects has ranged from average
blokes to writer Lewis Carroll to some of the most powerful people in England.
Take Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston. During his political career,
Randolph was Secretary of State for India and leader of the House of Commons. And, according
to one theory, he also headed up a secret group of Masons that had a mission to kill five sex
workers who had dirt on the Royal Family. The dirt in question was that Prince Albert
Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, had secretly married and had a child with a Catholic woman.
At the time, this would have been a scandal of the highest order. The problem is that there’s
no record of the wedding, or the child, and there seems to be evidence that Churchill
was in Scotland for some of the murders. There’s another theory that involves the prince,
but this one suggests that Albert Victor himself was the one knocking off the Whitechapel women,
supposedly in revenge for contracting syphilis from a sex worker. This story came courtesy of
a man named Dr. Thomas Stowell, who was friendly with the family of the royal family physician.
Stowell said the physician had claimed he once treated a young gay man with syphilis who he had
suspected of being Jack the Ripper since the young man happened to be in the Whitechapel
district of London on the nights of the murders. While Stowell wouldn’t explicitly name names when
he came forward with his story in 1970, it was heavily implied that the man the physician was
working on was Prince Albert. Rumors about Albert’s sexuality had swirled for years,
after all, and the royal family’s involvement just made the whole thing irresistible for theorists.
Albert, however, wasn’t in the city at the time of all of the murders, and it doesn’t
seem he died of syphilis. But hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story—and Albert
the Ripper’s story is so good that parts of these theories were adapted as the comic book From Hell
by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell. In 1898, war hawks were waiting impatiently for
the United States to declare war against Spain. At the time, Spain was in a war
with insurgents in Cuba over the island’s independence, but the U.S. had, up until
that point, stopped short of getting involved. Then, on February 15, 1898, the pro-war sect got
its wish, in a way. The USS Maine sank after an explosion while it was stationed in Havana Harbor,
eventually propelling the U.S. into the conflict, which ultimately ended with Cuban independence.
At first, it was concluded that the Maine was brought down by a submerged mine. A different
theory said that a fire ignited the onboard ammunition, leading to the disaster. But some
have always believed that it was a deliberate act of self-sabotage meant to get the U.S.
public behind the war. While some say the American government acted alone in bringing down the Maine,
others believe media mogul and war lover William Randolph Hearst, who had been advocating for the
United States to enter the conflict for more than a year, orchestrated the whole thing in order to
push the nation into the conflict. And theorists had plenty of anecdotal evidence to glom on to.
On February 11, a few days before the Maine tragedy, Hearst’s yacht, the Buccaneer,
was seized in Havana Harbor, prompting Hearst’s New York Journal to dub this the “Spanish-Journal
War.” The publication also asked why the Maine had allowed this to happen to a U.S. ship,
clearly showing frustration with the country’s unwillingness to engage the Spanish. The fact
that the Maine itself was destroyed a few days later immediately caught the attention of some,
who believed it was the culmination of Hearst’s plan to bring the country to war
and sell a boatload more papers in the process.
He definitely sold those papers: Immediately after the Maine was destroyed,
Hearst-owned publications printed flashy, sensationalist headlines
putting blame for the Maine squarely on Spain with no evidence to speak of. Within a few months,
Hearst’s papers were beating out its closest competition by more than 200,000 readers,
and by the end of 1898, his combined readership was said to total 1.25 million people a day.
But as American University professor W. Joseph Campbell told History.com, “No serious historian
of the Spanish-American War period embraces the notion that the yellow press of [William
Randolph] Hearst and [Joseph] Pulitzer fomented or brought on the war with Spain in 1898.”
For what it’s worth, the idea that the Maine’s explosion was the work of the U.S. government
is the official view of the Cuban government. On a memorial plaque for the Maine in Havana,
an inscription reads: ''To the victims of the Maine,
who were sacrificed to imperialist greed in its fervor to seize control of the island of Cuba.”
We’ve got an upcoming episode on explorers who disappeared without a trace.
If you know of a cool story from history about, well, you know,
drop it in the comments below for a chance to be featured in that episode.
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