5 Fake Photos That Once Fooled Everyone But Now Fool Only Fools

Published October 20, 2017
Updated July 29, 2024

Colin Evans, The Levitating Man

Colin Evans Levitating Man

Wikimedia Commons

Colin Evans was an early 20th-century Welsh spiritualist and medium who claimed to be able to levitate.

Evans would routinely host seances in large halls and request that the room be completely dark. As his believers gathered around him and chanted, there would suddenly be a flash. In the instant of blinding light, Colin Evans could supposedly be seen levitating.

Anyone who wasn’t a believer before the seance would certainly be one after.

However, skeptics soon noticed that all of his levitation photos seemed to feature a cord running out of his left hand and that in almost every photo, his feet seemed to be blurred slightly.

Eventually, the truth came out, and it was discovered that Evans was employing the simplest of methods to trick his followers: jumping.

Evans would hold his seances in complete darkness, and as soon as his followers were getting into it, he would jump, straight into the air. The cord was a trigger for a camera placed in the ceiling.

author
Katie Serena
author
A former staff writer at All That's Interesting, Katie Serena has also published work in Salon.
editor
Maggie Donahue
editor
Maggie Donahue is an assistant editor at All That's Interesting. She has a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor's degree in creative writing and film studies from Johns Hopkins University. Before landing at ATI, she covered arts and culture at The A.V. Club and Colorado Public Radio and also wrote for Longreads. She is interested in stories about scientific discoveries, pop culture, the weird corners of history, unexplained phenomena, nature, and the outdoors.
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Serena, Katie. "5 Fake Photos That Once Fooled Everyone But Now Fool Only Fools." AllThatsInteresting.com, October 20, 2017, https://allthatsinteresting.com/famous-fake-photos. Accessed February 23, 2025.