Creative Fakelore for Fun and Enlightenment

The January-February 2022 issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER includes an article by statistical ecologist Charles G. M. Paxton, narrating his experiment of creating an imaginary water monster to masquerade as an authentic legend. He was inspired by an account of an eighteenth-century ghost in London that turned out to be a hoax promulgated in the 1970s. Paxton wondered whether his lake monster could gain similar credence. One intriguing thing about this experiement, to me, is that not only did his invented sightings get retold as genuine by multiple sources, new reports of alleged historical sightings sprang up, independent of any effort on his part.

He decided to create, not a generic sea serpent like Nessie in Loch Ness, but a "monstrous aquatic humanoid." He located it in two freshwater lakes in England's Lake District that, as far as he knew, had no existing tradition of monster lore. Paxton named this creature Eachy and devised a false etymology for the word. He also invented a nonexistent book to cite as a source. After he had an article about Eachy uploaded to Wikipedia, references to the monster began to spread. Although the Wikipedia article on Eachy no longer exists, the Cryptid Wiki has a straightforward page on him or it as a real piece of folklore:

Eachy

The Cryptid Wiki piece mentions the earliest reported appearance of Eachy having occurred in 1873, an imaginary "fact" taken directly from Paxton's material. Moreover, in 2007 the monster sneaked into an actual nonfiction book, a cryptozoology guide by Ronan Coghlan. By January of 2008, Eachy T-shirts were being sold on the internet by someone unconnected to Paxton. At the time the Wikipedia Eachy page was deleted in 2019, it held the status of second-longest surviving hoax on that site.

What do we learn from this story? Paxton proposes that "the tale of the Eachy tells us the dangers of how Wikipedia can be subject to manipulation." As he mentions, however, in more recent years Wikipedia has tightened its standards and introduced more safeguards. On a broader scale, the Eachy hoax demonstrates the danger of how easily recorded history can be distorted or even fabricated from nothing, then accepted as fact. An important caution I'd note, as Paxton also alludes to, is the hazard of uncritically believing what appear to be multiple sources when in truth they're bouncing the same "facts" around in a self-referential echo chamber, repeating what they've picked up from previous sources in endless circularity. That phenomenon can be seen in a field I'm somewhat familiar with, scholarship on Bram Stoker's DRACULA. For instance, after an early biography suggested that Stoker might have died from complications of syphilis, numerous authors since then (in both nonfiction and novels) have accepted without question the truth of the assumption, "Bram Stoker had syphilis, which influenced the writing of DRACULA." The tale of Eachy also reinforces the obvious warning not to believe everything you read on the internet or even in books.

It's fascinating to me that a legend can be invented, disseminated, and perceived as authentic so quickly. Some authorities believe the story of Sawney Bean, the alleged patriarch of a sixteenth-century Scottish cannibal family, first reported in the NEWGATE CALENDAR centuries after the supposed events and repeated as fact in numerous publications since, was just such a fictional legend. And Sawney Bean's tale became deeply rooted in the public imagination long before the internet. In our contemporary electronic age, the chilling scenario in Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR comes to mind. If history is whatever is written, what happens when history becomes so easy to rewrite? That's one good reason why, even if it ever became possible to digitize and make available on the web every book in existence, we should still hang onto the physical books. Ink on paper can't be altered at whim like bytes in an electronic file.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Plausibility of Modern Legends

I subscribe to the magazine SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, which I highly recommend to fans and writers of SF and fantasy. Its coverage of myths, legends, and hoaxes offers lots of story seeds and can help authors ensure that their characters respond rationally to incredible events rather than acting overly gullible. The latest issue contains a review of a new book about the Loch Ness Monster. I would like to believe in the monster (alas, the only mark of its presence we saw on our one-hour Loch Ness cruise during a tour of Scotland was a steep hill where Nessie was supposed to have slid down into the lake). Everything I've read about it, though, seems to support the position that the reported sightings in modern times comprise a combination of mistaken perceptions and deliberate photographic hoaxes. That a breeding population of large animals could survive in a confined area with no physical evidence being found after decades of searching does seem unlikely. (If the monster weren't a natural animal but an intelligent, magical creature, as in Jean Lorrah's Nessie series, that would be a different matter.)

Bigfoot (which I'd also love to believe in) seems more plausible. If Sasquatches existed, they'd be a small breeding population of a near-extinct species of primate, a very few individuals living in a vast tract of millions of acres of forest in the Pacific Northwest. There's nothing inherently unlikely about their existence being real but unproven, since they would have a strong motivation to remain hidden.

On the other hand, while I certainly believe life exists elsewhere in the universe, I reluctantly disbelieve all UFO "evidence" I've read about. Sightings and photographs have been convincingly debunked. As for the personal narratives of face-to-face contact and abductions, they sound like attempts at writing science fiction by people who don't know much of anything about science fiction. They don't make sense in terms of motivation. If aliens advanced enough to travel here from other stars wanted to make contact with us, maybe to pass on their wisdom and save us from extinction, wouldn't they reveal themselves openly to people in a position to change the world? Would beings of superior intelligence and unimaginably powerful technology make contact with an alien planet by grabbing random inhabitants whose reports are certain to be disbelieved? And if the aliens wanted to observe us without being noticed, they'd surely have the ability to do so.

Now, maybe they're observing us and don't care about remaining unseen. Maybe they're gradually accustoming us to their presence, like Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees. In that case, though, the alleged abductions don't make sense; the events as reported couldn't be telling the aliens anything about us they don't already know.

Slightly more plausible motivations: Earth is under galactic quarantine; visits to our solar system are forbidden under the alien equivalent of the Prime Directive. The briefly, ambiguously glimpsed craft in the sighting reports aren't supposed to be here. They're interstellar smugglers or other shady characters taking refuge from pursuit in a forbidden zone. As for the abductions, if they actually happened, I can think of only one credible explanation—the aliens are just messing with our heads. Either the rogue visitors are playing random pranks in a spirit of cruel fun, or extraterrestrial scientists are conducting psychological experiments on us inferior beings to find out how our culture will interpret this irrational behavior on the part of superior entities.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt