Bloody Prankster

Hey, pranksters, do you love pulling off a good one? Maybe you're a fan of the classics, short sheeting the bed, saran wrap on the toilet bowl, salt instead of sugar in the homemade cake. Are you one of these people who cooks up elaborate April Fool's stunts that somehow end up being not only successful, but actually hilarious? Not me. Even if I could dream up an amazing prank, I don't have the kind of poker face to pull it off.

Plus, I always worry about backfires, because even a seemingly harmless prank can go really wrong. If you're lucky, the worst that happens is a little embarrassment, maybe some hurt feelings. But if you're unlucky, terribly unlucky, that prank can end up in bloodshed and one of the most famous April Fool's Day pranks ever goes to possibly the least zany, least madcap, least reckless company you can think of, the BBC. Yep, the BBC, that august, sober paragon of television virtue, etc., etc., the world's oldest national broadcaster and possibly the world's largest employer of broadcast and television pros. Today, the BBC, like all media, is under near constant fire for what they report and how, for programming choices, casting decisions, budgets, profits, biases and blind spots. Today, reality itself feels so fractured and warped and peculiar that any major broadcaster would have a super hard time pranking their jaded audience. Once upon a time, the U.S. military shooting down a Chinese spy balloon over Myrtle Beach would have been the plot of a slapstick comedy, not a breaking news story just two months ago. But April 1st, 1957, that was a different time. You've probably at least heard of the venerable documentary program, Panorama. It's been on the air for over 70 years now. It's the longest running TV news program in the world. And Panorama is the show that featured the now legendary interview of the late Princess Diana by journalist Martin Bashir that aired back in 1995. Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. It was front page news again in 2020 when the BBC apologized to Princess Diana's brother, Lord Spencer, for the sketchy and unethical reporting methods used to obtain the interview. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to say highly dubious methods. That's posh Brit speak for sketchy and unethical. So Panorama, a revered television institution today, was only four years old in 1957. It was a baby, and babies are far more playful than serious minded adults who worry about boring things like legacy and reputation. One of Panorama's camera operators, a gentleman named Charles de Jaeger, was a prankster. And when he realized that the weekly Monday night airing of Panorama would land exactly on April Fool's Day in 1957, he coaxed his boss, Michael Peacock, into letting him have a little fun. I'm kind of surprised Peacock agreed, what with that stiff British upper lip and the air of hallowed seriousness that hung about the BBC and all. But he did. And since De Jaeger was already on assignment in Switzerland, he had to make that location fit his plan. He was given a little bit of extra budget for his April Fool's idea, amounting to about $3,700 or so in today's money. De Jaeger hired a group of local Swiss women, dress them up in the Swiss national costume, which was every bit as yodel-ay-hee-hoo as you can imagine, purchased 20 pounds of homemade spaghetti, and commenced hanging the pasta on the camera as these apple-cheeked Swiss missus proceeded to cheerfully gather the spaghetti

tree harvest into their large wicker baskets. And because this was Panorama, jewel in the BBC programming crown, the whole thing was narrated by legendary BBC anchor Richard Dimbleby. My God, even the man's name conjures up country houses and crumpets and old leather-bound books read by a roaring fire. Let's listen. It isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise. Here, in the Ticino, on the borders of Switzerland and Italy, the slopes overlooking Lake Lugano have already burst into flower, at least a fortnight earlier than usual. But what, you may ask, has the early and welcome arrival of bees and blossom to do with food? Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory, has had its effect in other ways as well. Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop. The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always the chance of a late frost, which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets. But now these dangers are over, and the spaghetti harvest goes forward.

Spaghetti cultivation here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry. Many of you, I'm sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po Valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair. Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the tiny creature whose depredations have caused much concern in the past. After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.

And now the harvest is marked by a traditional meal. Toasts to the new crop are drunk in these boccalinos, and then the waiters enter bearing the ceremonial dish, and it is, of course, spaghetti. Picked earlier in the day, dried in the sun, and so brought fresh from garden to table at the very peak of condition. For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real home-grown spaghetti. Now, the only problem was that no one, not Michael Peacock, not Charles De Yeager, not Richard Dimbleby, no one bothered to mention to the big dogs at the BBC that they had a little something extra planned for that April 1st broadcast of Panorama.

And now the phones were ringing off the hook at the BBC. Oops! If you're shaking your head right now in disbelief that anyone could fall for something as silly and stupid as spaghetti growing on trees, I get it. But you have to remember that this is the UK in 1957. Pasta was a way more exotic meal in those days for the British, not the weeknight dinner mainstay that it's become. In fact, when one of the biggest of the big BBC bosses, Sir Ian Jacob, saw the broadcast, he and his wife were initially fooled themselves, reaching for his trusty Encyclopedia Britannica to confirm what they'd just seen. Sir Ian could find no spaghetti tree nor even a single mention of spaghetti, period, in the entire encyclopedia. That's how not mainstream spaghetti was for the British public. Thanks to waves of Italian immigrants settling in the U.S., we had a solid head start on spaghetti. True, but it took World War II and the U.S. Army commissioning an Italian chef named Hector Biardi to produce rations for the troops to truly make spaghetti an American staple. Hector Biardi. Yup, Chef Boyardee, his own bad self. Chef Boyardee was a real person, one who passed away in 1984 at his home in Parma, Italy, with a net worth of about $60 million. His company is thriving today with sales in the billions. No, uh-oh, SpaghettiOs about that. That canned pasta and believe me, my Italian grandmothers are spinning in their graves that I'm even letting the words Chef Boyardee slide past my lips. It found a whole new life during the COVID pandemic. Easy, convenient, relatively cheap, nostalgic. Mmm, B for roni. But it's time now to zoom back to rainy England, April 1957. Panorama viewers were melting the switchboards at the BBC. Why? Why on earth were they calling? Someone had helped settling arguments. Wives were exasperated by husbands who refused to accept that spaghetti was made of flour and water because, hello, Richard Dimbleby himself had just clearly declared that it grew on trees. Marriage, right? Others were hoping that BBC operators might be able to tell them where a spaghetti tree could be purchased. And also, how would such a tree fare in the cool, damp British climate? Oh, those stuffy Brits. You'd never see Americans falling for that kind of nonsense. Spaghetti growing on trees. So stupid, lol, lol. Yeah, we'd never fall for a silly prank like that here in the USA. Except, the whole country sort of did fly into a giant panic back in 1938 when we thought Martians were invading New Jersey.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, out at the Wilmeth Farm, Grover's Mill, New Jersey. I'm the person who myself made the 11 miles from Princeton in 10 minutes. Well, I hardly know where to begin. Paint for you a word picture of a strange thing before my eyes, but nothing out of a modern Arabian night. Well, I just got here. I haven't had a chance to look around yet. I guess that's it. Yes, I guess that's the thing directly in front of me. Half buried in a vast pit. Must have snuck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree. It must have struck on its way down. But I can see of the very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I've seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder.

Has a diameter of, what would you say, Professor Pearson? What's that? What would you say? What's the diameter of this? About 30 yards. About 30 yards. Now, I will grant you that A, an interstellar attack is more serious than pasta, and B, the people of 1938 had more trust in mass media, in this case radio, than we can even begin to imagine having today. But still, people tend to believe what they see and hear, whether it's Martians, spaghetti trees, The Bachelor.

The BBC's spaghetti tree prank created a lot of good conversation around truth and news and gullibility. It's quaint and it's adorable to imagine that people back then could be fooled by something so silly. But you know what's not so adorable? The echo chamber of lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and 100 proof insanity that the internet has become.

We're at a moment in history where we don't even have a shared reality anymore. We really don't. Instead, we have infinite shared realities. An endless, deafening, chaotic carnival of deepfakes, half-truths, photoshop, clickbait, and look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, screaming into the digital void. Tell me you wouldn't rather be picking spaghetti in the Swiss sunshine. Tell me it wouldn't be a relief if the only scary story in your newsfeed right now was a bunch of Martians taking a vacation in New Jersey. It's kind of perfect that the whole existence of April Fool's Day is a little bit of a mystery. No one can say for certain where or when or how or why it began. I had an English teacher in high school who said that the whole idea originated with Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the 10th grade assault on your teenage sanity that is the Canterbury Tales. I have no idea. 98% of the time, I couldn't even fathom what the hell Chaucer was saying. And I was as nerdy a bookworm then as I am now. So here's a taste of that. Ready?

When that April with his shirr's suit, the drogue of March hath pursed to the root, and bathed every vein and switched liqueur which virtue engendered as the flower. When Zephyrus' eke with his sweat-breathe inspired hath in every halt and heave, the tender crops and the young soon hath in the ram his half-course he run, and small fowls make him melody that sleep in at the nought with open ye. Oh my God, I'm breaking into a sweat just remembering that overheated classroom, trying to keep my eyes open, stay awake while crawling through the barbed wire of Chaucer's ye old, what the frack version of English is this?

But hey, I will remind you, in the beginning you heard the word April, it was in there somewhere. And then there are some historians that say that April Fool's Day goes back to ancient Rome and the festival of Ilaria. No, not Alec Baldwin's wife, silly. This Ilaria was about the resurrection of a Roman god named Attis. And the people celebrate it by dressing up in disguises and mocking each other. Others saying no, no, no, no. April Fool's started when France switched from the Julian calendar where the new year began on March 1st to the Gregorian calendar where the new year begins on January 1st. True weird sidebar. Do you see how made up everything is?

That's what humans do. We just make stuff up and then we get all pissed off at each other and start drama and wars over sh** that we literally are just making up as we go. Time, calendars, rules. Humans are just a pack of savage weirdos. But anywho, back to France in the 16th century and this massive change to reality that happened when they shifted to the new calendar.

Since news took its sweet time making the rounds back then, it was a while before everyone caught on to the change and not all the people embraced it. Many just flatly refused to accept it. Those who clung to the old calendar insisted on continuing to celebrate the new year in the spring. Ha ha ha, you morons! Jeered the folk who'd accepted the switch. What a bunch of poisson d'avril you are! Excuse my French and I do mean that sincerely. Poisson d'avril or something translates to the words April fish and what a cutting insult that was circa 1500.

It had something to do with there being so many fish choking the streams and the rivers in the month of April that catching one was ridiculously easy. So being called an April fish was kind of like being called a simpleton. You can see how we got from there to here sort of ish. Because pranking is an ancient human art and experts, we're talking psychologists and anthropologists, say that if the prank stops short of complete humiliation and physical harm, it can be a real bonding experience. Now the very bad news is there are way too many pranks that end up being more cruel and comical. Think of some of the nastier frat hazing incidents of recent years like just last summer when eight students at Bowling Green State University in Ohio were sentenced for their role in the death of a classmate, a kid named Stone Foltz, who died of acute alcohol intoxication during a frat initiation event.

And then there are the more slapsticky pranks like replacing the cream filling in an Oreo cookie or donut with toothpaste. The classics, in other words. It's all meant in fun and most of the time nobody gets hurt. Then there are the pranks that are meant to knock you down a peg before raising you up as a full member of the group. These are the kind of pranks that get played in very high pressure environments like the military, law enforcement, cheerleading camp. One of my most favorite stories of a ritual prank like this comes from the Daribi people of Papua New Guinea.

I apologize. I was planning to be an anthropologist when I grew up. So, Daribi children are instructed to build a small box and the kids are told that if they bury that box in the ground and are very patient and don't try to peek or cheat in any way, eventually their little boxes will fill with treasure. And you know how kids are. Treasure. It's so hard to be patient.

It's so hard to contain your curiosity. And it's treasure. I'm sorry, but who could resist treasure? What child has the willpower for that? Not the Daribi children. Inevitably, the kids can stand it no longer and they give in to the overwhelming hold those little boxes have on their imaginations. And so, they dig the boxes up. And what do they find? Not treasure. Clumps of human excrement. Ouch. What a harsh lesson, right? And you know the dads were just weak from laughing about it because that's like such a dad joke kind of a thing, isn't it? The old box treasure trick.

It's this style of pranking that's given Sal and Murr and Q and Joe an unexpected television career that's now in its 12th year. We're talking about that basic cable phenomenon known as impractical jokers. And this intro says it all. Warning, the following program contains scenes of four friends who compete to embarrass each other. I love this show probably because I grew up in the middle of nowhere being tormented by my brothers. And although I'm no prankster myself, I really do appreciate the art form. And no matter how stupid the stunt, the impractical joker guys are never vicious or mean-spirited. They're goofy. And more often than not, the poor unsuspecting prankies end up getting the better of them. It's silly and it's fun and it makes you, the viewer, feel like you're part of the gang. Which is exactly what you want in a first-rate prank. What you don't want is a prank that ends in murder. Even if that murder is faked, a hoax. Human beings can be so breathtakingly stupid that I swear to God if we didn't keep records, we'd struggle to believe just how stupid.

Though to be fair, times do change and what you might get away with in one era could easily send you to prison in another. April Fool's Day, 1943, Dover, Delaware. It started like any other weekday at the Kent County Courthouse. Court officials and county workers clocked in expecting the usual parade of, you know, attorneys and bailiffs and defendants and candidates for jury duty. And then suddenly, a gunshot. A piercing scream. The sound of something tumbling, clattering in the stairway outside the courtroom. You can imagine the panic, the sheer chaos of that moment. People poured through the courtroom doors, shoving and jostling. Where was the shooter? What was happening? And oh no, that's, that's blood. And scene. The terrible murder that panicked the courthouse that spring morning wasn't a murder at all. It was a prank staged by a gentleman named E.J. Boggs, who just happened to be a Delaware state trooper. LOL, everybody. What fun. If you think you could pull that one off today, state trooper or not, no way. You'd be lucky to even survive the attempt.

And there's pretty much a zero chance that your annex would be met with a chuckle. You'd get charged with everything they could think of. And then the rest of us will be bludgeoned half to death by the endless news coverage of your idiocy on our TVs and phones. Now fast forward a little bit to April Fool's Day, 1948, Chicago. 28 year old Harold Goodmanson rang up the Chicago police and told them that he was carrying a heavy burden on his conscience and that he needed to confess.

Then he launched into this lurid tale of love, rejection and violence. He said that he'd proposed to 17 year old Patricia Soule of Houston, Texas. Patricia rejected his offer of marriage and he became so enraged that he shot her, hastily buried her body and then fled Texas for Chicago. Holed up in a flop house on the west side, he found himself unable to cope with what he'd done.

Hence the phone call to the Chicago PD. The Chicago police found his story so rich with detail and so compelling and cold that they contacted law enforcement in Houston to help investigate. Turns out that Miss Soule was alive and well and completely clueless. What a knee slapper, right? What's funnier than a good crime of passion, a murdered teenage girl, a shallow grave and police officers in two states running around trying to solve a crime that never happened? Good Lord. The assistant police chief in Houston described the whole event as, quote, a grim April Fool's prank. Now flip it and try confessing on April Fool's Day to a crime you did commit, only to have the cops giggle, slap you on the back.

Chicago, April Fool's Day, 1907. Charles Graff walked into the Maxwell Street Police Station and informed the officer at the desk that he'd murdered his wife with an axe. Cop thought he was joking, trying to pull off a big old April Fool's prank. Get out of here, Graff was told. Then he made his way to a nearby saloon where, again, he told anyone within earshot that he killed his wife with an axe. Same reaction. Charles, you jokester. Eventually, he made his way to a lodge he belonged to. I don't know, elk, moose, freemasons, woodsmen of the world.

They're all mysterious to me, one of those. So he's at the lodge and the secretary of the lodge, as he's confessing, said he doubted the tale at first, but Charles Graff was insistent. And coincidentally, at this point, police had actually found the body of a murdered woman. And that body was soon identified as Mrs. Graff. Finally, Charles got his wish and was arrested.

I mean, geez, what does an axe murderer have to do in the Windy City to get a little bit of is the one that begins as a joke and ends in a violent, bloody homicide. In the not so distant future, Kaufman, Texas, will be able to lay claim to a couple of very interesting events. It was the first place where a headstrong and beautiful sociopath named Bonnie Parker would be incarcerated. Bonnie Parker, as in Bonnie and Clyde. And later, in the 1940s, Kaufman, Texas, housed German POWs captured during World War II. But in 1886, there's a pretty quiet little spot, not but 30-some miles southeast of Dallas, you know, rural. Kaufman was home to a man named Tom Rogers, a dude apparently known for being a little bit of comedian. And that year, Tom came up with what he thought was a brilliant April Fool's prank.

This was back when doctors not only made house calls, house calls were kind of the norm. I know, I know what misty, ancient utopia is this. But yeah, it's true. Once upon a time, if you were sick, or someone in your family was ailing, you'd send for the doctor and the doctor would come. This wild scenario still exists today. Although now we call it concierge medicine. And it's something only the wealthy get to enjoy. The rest of us are huffing essential oils and praying that we don't end up homeless due to a medical bankruptcy. But on that April night in Kaufman, Texas, Dr. Mosley was on call. So Tom Rogers goes to the doctor's office, and he adds an appointment to the little slate hanging on the door. How cute is that, right? When you wanted to see the doctor, you just wrote your name on a chalkboard hanging on the door. So that's what Tom Rogers did. And Dr. Mosley honored that request for care, journeying three miles outside of town to attend to this young woman whose symptoms suggested that she wasn't just unwell, but critically ill.

And when Dr. Mosley arrived at the appointment, he discovered there was no such person, no such illness. He'd been the victim of a trick, a prank, a hoax. By the time Dr. Mosley made it back to Kaufman, Texas that night, he was incandescent with fury. We can guess at some of the reasons maybe. I mean, a three mile journey in 1886 wasn't all that quick or easy to make. And the fake house call came at the end of what might have been a really long, tiring day. And or Mosley might have been one of those people who cannot bear to be the butt of a joke. And or maybe he just freaking snapped. Because when Mosley got back to Kaufman and put two and two together and realized that it was Tom Rogers who'd sent him off on this little April Fool's errand, he flew into a frenzy. Dr. Mosley stabbed Rogers again and again and again in his body, his neck, his face. There were multiple fatal wounds. This was a crime of pure savage rage. And if that's not shocking enough, the news coverage of the day was kind of like, hey, Tom Rogers, you had it coming, you know, at least a little bit. Max, will you read the last bit of this story about the case that was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution?

Such butchery was not justified by the provocation, but Rogers brought his punishment upon himself. His idiotic little joke was well calculated to provoke wrath. And the man who without just cause makes his neighbor angry should stand the consequences. If Kaufman could get rid of all of his foolish April Fool jokers, the community would be better off. Does that does that surprise you a little bit? Yeah, it does. You know, it was a it was a stupid prank and it was it was ill thought out at all. But basically, the newspaper saying, yeah, you know, mostly kind of went off a little bit, but, you know, he wasn't wrong. So, OK, then listen, it's not like I'm siding with Tom Rogers here. He sounds like he might have been a real jackass. I mean, come on, And yet I also can't really get behind Dr. Mosley either. We've all had crap days at work, but the answer to a rough day surely isn't ramming a knife into a neighbor's eye socket.

I mean, we can at least agree on that, right? So be careful this April Fool's Day. Be careful who you prank and how. And if someone manages to pull off a masterpiece of a joke and the joke's on you, try to laugh it off. Might be hard. You might be seething. Maybe you're embarrassed. I get it. Just do yourself a favor and do not murder anyone. That mess never ends well.

Trust me. Trust me. Happy April Fool's Day, everyone. Next time on True Weird Stuff. With Easter on the horizon, it's bunny rabbit season. Old Peter Cottondale loading up a basket of chocolates and jelly beans and heading your way. But I'm here to tell you that rabbits are far stranger and more mysterious than you know.

Bunnies, my friends, are a whole pile of peculiar. And on the next True Weird Stuff, we're going inside the body of the bunny. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. Now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff.

Hit our website, TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

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