Joseph Mulhatton

Joseph Mulhatton (sometimes credited as Joseph Mulhattan; c. 1852 - December 5, 1913) was an American travelling hardware salesman, miner, and serial hoaxer, the author of a multitude of fabricated stories that were widely published in local, American national, and international newspapers as legitimate news, including: alleged plans to have George Washington's petrified remains put on public display at Washington Monument; the exploration of an enormous underground river beneath Birmingham, Alabama; the fall of the largest meteor ever known; the calculation of the precise location of the Star of Bethlehem; an invisible moon thirty-thousand miles from the Earth; a lost pyramid and the golden treasures of an extinct race in Kentucky; hemp-harvesting monkeys and a plan to import them in huge numbers; the hair bleaching and reddening properties of Mono Lake, California; and the discoveries of the Magnetic Saguaro Cacti of Arizona and the Arbor Diaboli (Devil Tree) of Mexico. He was frequently compared to Ananias, the Biblical figure of Acts 5 who was struck dead for lying, and in later years to Raspe's Baron Munchausen character, amassing an impressive array of headline titles from "Prince of Liars" to "King of Romancers."

Timeline
A work in progress.

George Washington's Petrified Remains

 * &mdash; original story credited to the Washington Correspondence of the San Francisco Chronicle.

''Brief bio. note.''

Grand Crystal Cave of Glasgow Junction, Ky.
Mulhattan's Glasgow Junction Cave story, a precursor to his Birmhingham Subterranean River story of 1884.



Meteor Fall in Texas


''Bio. note''
 * &mdash; in which Mulhattan boasts to having established "novelistic journalism," relating his beginnings writing for the Pittsburgh Leader, to which he contributed "stories of marvelous oil wells, of romantic highway robberies, and things of that kind", and later the Big Clifty fight, the Cave at Glasgow Junction "with navigable rivers, mummies 2,000 years old, and a hundred other marvelous things," and a Leitchfield story "about the finding of Masonic emblems that had been buried for thousands of years, showing a prehistoric race of Masons." (Mulhattan would later recycle both the Glasgow Junction Cave and the Leitchfield story in the Birmingham Underground River story a year later.)

Great Subterranean River at Birmingham, Ala.

 * &mdash; in which Mulhattan fabricates the story of an underground river beneath Birmingham, Alabama, "greater in volume than the Mississippi", as well the remnants of a prehistoric peoples, who left in the cave "numerous articles of bronze, also statuary, numerous masonic emblems, and mummies with sandals on their feet &mdash; all in a perfect state of preservation," the fossils of prehistoric marine animals, including an Ichthyosaurus, and eyeless sea-creatures, reptiles, and amphibians.

National Drummer Party Candidate

 * &mdash; Mulhattan had been self-nominated as candidate for the U.S. Presidency by the National Drummer Party, drawing rebuke from the National Merchant Traveler Party.

Arbor Diaboli of Mexico

 * See: Arbor Diaboli, the Devil Tree of Mexico

1891

 * &mdash; in which Mulhatton takes credit for a story about a cave in Pike County, Ky., "three miles long and a mile wide", including one chamber "lined with the richest of gold quartz" and another with "diamonds and rubies" that "sparkled like the stars in the firmament", in which were found a "score of mummies" said to be "eighteen feet long and having red hair all over."

Mulhattan was reported as having spent time at an insane asylum, later claimed to have been either to deal with alcoholism, or, if you believe the story, a head injury that left bone penetrating his brain.



Accused of theft in Pittsburgh, Pa.



1893
Mulhatton's mother is reported as having been impoverished and receiving funds for her care.

Mulhatton is reported as having acquired placer claims in the area of the Rio Chama in New Mexico.
 * &mdash; Mulhatton briefly left the state to recuperate from a back injury, and returned in September of the same year.
 * &mdash; Mulhatton briefly left the state to recuperate from a back injury, and returned in September of the same year.
 * &mdash; Mulhatton briefly left the state to recuperate from a back injury, and returned in September of the same year.

1895
Mulhatton is reported to have tramped by rail from Arizona to Los Angeles, on the way to San Francisco.

1896
Mulhatton encourages Kentuckians to mine in Arizona, and a visit from his sister.

1897
Mulhatton at the Ripsey Mines in Pinal Co., Arizona
 * &mdash; Mulhatton apparently reported a meteor fall near Ripsey "some months" prior to this notice.

1898
Mulhatton still mining in Arizona.
 * &mdash; in which Mulhatton is related to have fabricated a story about an underground water source in Iowa suddenly rushing to the surface after being struck by diggers, threatening to "develop into a mighty river rivaling the Mississippi."

Magnetic Saguaro Cactus of Arizona

 * See: Magnetic Saguaro Cactus

1901
Mulhatton was reported as having been confined at the Arizona Hospital for the Insane, apparently after suffering hallucination that he killed a man.

1902




1904
Mulhatton was reported to have been arrested at San Francisco, Cal., for the theft of a coat, caught by police while giving a lecture on phrenology at a Salvation Army gathering.



1905
Mulhatton's brother, Robert Allen, was reported to have sought him out in Arizona.



1908
Mulhatton as a miner, working from his plot at Dagger Well, near Kelvin, Az.


 * &mdash; in which his sister's married name is given as Ledlie.
 * &mdash; in which his sister's married name is given as Ledlie.

1909
Mulhatton's brother, Robert, reported as having been arrested.