The Cardiff Giant: America's Favorite Petrified Fraud

You pay your fifty cents, file into the tent behind the Newell farmhouse, and there he lies in a pit: a naked stone man ten feet long, toes curled in what looks like agony, the whole giant the color of old soap. The farmer says they found him digging a well. Half the state has come to argue about it.

The giant was the work of a grudge. George Hull, a cigar maker from Binghamton, New York, and a committed unbeliever, had fallen into an argument with a minister over a passage in Genesis about giants once walking the earth. Rather than let it drop, Hull decided to manufacture a giant and watch the faithful fall for it. He bought a five-ton block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, shipped it quietly to Chicago, and hired stonecutters to carve it into a naked man roughly ten feet tall, then had the surface pitted with darning needles to mimic pores and washed with acid to fake great age.

The well that found a wonder

In November 1868 the finished giant was buried on the farm of Hull's cousin William Newell, near the hamlet of Cardiff in Onondaga County, New York. Almost a year later, in October 1869, Newell hired two men to dig a well exactly where the giant lay, and the discovery duly followed. Newell pitched a tent, charged admission, and the crowds poured in. Some visitors believed they were looking at a petrified antediluvian man, proof of the Bible's giants; others guessed it was an ancient statue. Money changed hands either way.

Barnum, and the sucker line

Scientists were not long in doubt. The paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh of Yale pronounced it a recent and rather clumsy fake, noting fresh tool marks and gypsum's poor odds of surviving underground. That verdict barely dented attendance. When Hull's syndicate declined to sell to P.T. Barnum, the showman simply commissioned his own plaster copy and exhibited it in New York as the real thing, so that audiences were paying to see a fake of a fake. The famous line about a sucker being born every minute is often pinned to Barnum here, though it may have been said by a banker named David Hannum, who had bought into the original and watched Barnum's imitation draw bigger crowds than his genuine hoax.

What was actually dug up

Nothing supernatural was ever in the ground at Cardiff, only quarried Iowa gypsum, carved in a Chicago shop, aged with acid, and buried by a man making a point about credulity. Hull eventually confessed, apparently pleased with himself. The Cardiff Giant survives today, on display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York, a heavy monument to how badly people want the extraordinary to be true. It fooled no geologist and a great many ticket-buyers, which was precisely the plan.

The lasting oddity is not the stone but the wanting. Even after Marsh's verdict, even after the confession, people kept paying, and some kept believing, because the sight of a giant in a pit spoke louder than any expert. That impulse did not die with Hull. It just moved on to the next buried wonder.

Below, readers have filed their own encounters with giants, buried marvels and things that looked too big to be real, voting each True, Fake or Not sure. Step up to the pit and decide.