7 Famous Imposters Throughout History

From phony princesses to bogus businessmen, history is chock-full of people who aren’t who they claim to be. While some do it for fame and fortune, a select few do it for the sheer fun of it. Whether it be through elaborately crafted personas or just sheer gall, these posers show us just how far some are willing to take their bald-faced lies.

1. Princess Caraboo
2. Cassie Chadwick
3. Sacheen Littlefeather
4. Misha Defonseca
5. Barry Bremen
6. Anna Anderson
7. Tania Head

Princess Caraboo

In early 1817, a mysterious woman appeared in the English city of Bristol. Murmuring in an indecipherable language, the woman was taken to the local magistrate, Samuel Worrall, who asked local sailors and merchants to visit with the woman in hopes one would be able to translate on her behalf.

After a Portuguese sailor claimed to have been able to understand the mysterious woman, she revealed to the curious villagers that she was Princess Caraboo, a royal princess from the fictitious Indonesian island Javasu. The purported princess said she was kidnapped by pirates and had escaped their ship to swim ashore near Bristol. Quickly becoming something of a local celebrity, Princess Caraboo’s portrait was published in local newspapers while townsfolk began flocking to Worrall’s Knole Park for a chance to meet the princess.

Despite this, Princess Caraboo’s royal treatment quickly came to a close when Mrs. Neale, a local boarding house owner, recognized Princess Caraboo to be Mary Baker, a poor servant girl who had previously stayed at Neale’s lodge. When Mrs. Neale made the Worralls aware of Princess Caraboo’s true identity, the Worralls were surprisingly sympathetic, allowing Mary to continue staying with them and later financing her passage to the United States, where she hoped to start over.

When Mary arrived in the United States, she tried to keep up her Princess Caraboo act to minimal success. After a few years abroad, Mary returned to England in 1824, initially trying once more to capitalize upon the Princess Caraboo persona but again failing to find an audience. Once more seeking to start anew, Mary later changed her last name from Baker to Burgess in hopes of starting a life away from public scrutiny.

Cassie Chadwick

Growing up in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth Bigley developed a propensity for sticky fingers early in her life. Following a series of petty thefts throughout her youth, Bigley found herself in serious trouble in 1879 after she was arrested for using forged bank notes, claiming she was the heiress to a $15,000 fortune (just shy of half a million dollars today).

After being found not guilty by reason of insanity, Bigley’s family sent her to live with her sister in the United States. While in the United States, Bigley assumed a plethora of false identities, frequently offering her services as a clairvoyant or medium to make ends meet.

Following a series of failed marriages, Bigley was arrested for fraud once more in 1889, this time serving four years at a penitentiary in Toledo, Ohio. After being released, Bigley assumed yet another alias and began working as a madam for a brothel she’d opened.

After conning her way into another shambolic marriage, this time with a wealthy doctor by the name of Leroy Chadwick, Bigley would assume her most notorious pseudonym to date: Cassie Chadwick. Shortly after her marriage to Dr. Chadwick, Bigley would use her new identity as Cassie Chadwick to pass herself off as the illegitimate daughter of Scottish-American industrial tycoon Andrew Carnegie.

After she began carefully spreading the “secret” of her “true” identity as the daughter of Carnegie, banks began approaching Bigley to offer her sizable loans she’d never been able to secure otherwise. After fraudulently accumulating roughly $2 million (about $70 million today) in bank-issued loans,

Bigley’s lavish spending quickly caught up with her. When lenders came to collect on their loans, Bigley fled Ohio before being arrested at the Hotel Breslin in New York City. By this point, Bigley’s spending had become so extravagant that she’d effectively bankrupt Oberlin, Ohio’s Citizens National Bank upon failure to repay her loans. Beginning in early 1905, Bigley’s second fraud trial quickly became a media circus, even obliging Andrew Carnegie himself to publicly comment on the affair. Bigley would ultimately be sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, serving just a few years of her sentence before passing away at the age of 50 in 1907.

Sacheen Littlefeather

At the 45th annual Oscars, Marlon Brando was selected to be given that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his career-defining performance as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. After Brando was announced as that year’s winner by presenters Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann, a woman in a beaded deerskin dress approached the stage in Brando’s stead. Refusing the award on the actor’s behalf, the woman introduced herself as Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American woman of Apache and Yaqui descent, chosen by Brando to decline the award on account of Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.

Garnering both cheers and jeers from the crowd, after Sacheen’s brief remarks, she was quickly ushered offstage and into the press pool to take questions from clamoring reporters. Following her appearance at the Academy Awards, Littlefeather was briefly inundated with requests for modeling and acting jobs, but she’d later state that she’d been quickly blacklisted from the film industry on account of her Native American rights activism. Despite her Hollywood shunning, Littlefeather would continue her activism throughout her life, later making a career for herself as a speaker and hospice worker.

Though the Academy refused to acknowledge Littlefeather for years, they formally issued her an apology in 2022, just a few months before Littlefeather’s death at the age of 75. Despite this, Littlefeather’s legacy would be called into question again just a few months later, after two of her biological sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi, publicly came forward with claims that Littlefeather had fabricated her Native American heritage.

Born Marie or Maria Louise Cruz, Littlefeather had adopted her Native American identity “Sacheen Littlefeather” in her early 20s when she first became involved in activism, despite allegedly being of Spanish-Mexican, not Native American, descent.

More Like This:

Add Mental Floss as a preferred news source!

Misha Defonseca

In April 1997, Belgian author Misha Defonseca published her memoir Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years with Mt. Ivy Press. Chronicling her early life as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Defonseca’s memoir claimed that she’d spent her early childhood wandering Europe in search of her parents, who had been deported from their native Belgium by the Nazis.

Trekking across Belgium, Ukraine, and Poland, Defonseca claimed that when she was near starvation, she was taken in by a pack of wolves that helped her survive her ordeal. Alongside this, Defonseca made claims that she’d killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and had snuck inside the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland’s capital city.

Garnering a warm critical reception in both the United States and Europe, film rights to Defonseca’s memoir were quickly snapped up by French director Véra Belmont, who directed the 2007 film Survivre avec les loups (Surviving With the Wolves), based on Defonseca’s purported experience.

Despite this, many critics began to doubt the veracity of Defonseca’s memoir, citing a litany of historical inaccuracies that placed the author’s honesty under intense scrutiny. By early 2008, Defonseca’s web of lies came tumbling down when it was revealed that her actual name was Monque de Wael and she’d totally fabricated much of her memoir. Though de Wael’s parents actually were killed by Nazis, they were targeted for their ties to the Belgian resistance, not for being Jewish.

After her true identity was publicly revealed, de Wael admitted to fabricating her memoir and was ordered to pay back a sum of $22 million to her publisher from an earlier lawsuit surrounding the book’s film rights. In 2021, Netflix released a documentary about de Wael’s memoir imbroglio titled Misha and the Wolves.

Barry Bremen

Nicknamed “The Great Imposter,” Barry Bremen was an American insurance salesman and prankster known for his litany of sports-centric impersonations across the late ‘70s and mid-‘80s.

A lifelong sports enthusiast, Bremen began his career as an impersonator during a 1979 NBA All-Star Game in Pontiac, Michigan. Using a Kansas City Kings warm-up uniform he was known to play racquetball in, Bremen bet his friends $75 he’d be able to sneak onto the court and get off a few warm-up shots before being discovered. The next day, Bremen made his way to the game with his Kings warm-up uniform hidden under his clothes. After losing his street clothes, Bremen was able to slip onto the court alongside the team undetected.

After managing to get off a few shots alongside pros like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, security at the venue quickly caught on and Bremen was escorted from the stadium premises.

Being named “Sportsman of the week” on NBC’s Today Show, Bremen had become something of a minor celebrity and began plotting his next stunt. Over the next few years, Bremen would diversify his prank portfolio, infiltrating professional sports games across the country by posing as a cheerleader, a referee, and members of the teams themselves. Bremen was even able to crash the 1985 Emmy Awards, making his way onto the stage when actress Betty Thomas was announced as the winner for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama, accepting the award on her behalf before being stopped by security and thrown out.

Though Bremen would not officially “retire” from his stunts until the late 1990s, he seriously slowed down after the Emmys imbroglio, citing increased security at events and the blurred line between harmless entertainment and harassment.

Anna Anderson

Following the conclusion of the Bolshevik Revolution, the abdicated Tsar Nicholas Romanov and his wife, Alexandra, were killed by Bolshevik soldiers alongside their five children: Tatiana, Olga, Alexei, Maria, and Anastasia. After they’d been executed, the bodies of the Russian royal family were taken to a nearby forest where they would be mutilated and buried in a mass grave to prevent them from being discovered.

Though the rising Soviet regime would later take responsibility for the mass murder, they’d spent the years following the royal family’s deaths sowing disinformation about them, leading to an abundance of conspiracy theories surrounding their demise (chief among them that Anastasia Romanov, the Tsar and Tsarina’s youngest daughter, had escaped the Bolsheviks).

A few years after the Romanovs had been killed, a woman was admitted to a Berlin psychiatric hospital under the name “Miss Unknown” after refusing to identify herself. After a few patients noticed the woman had resembled the late Anastasia Romanov, the woman began going by the name Anna Anderson, gradually adopting the Anastasia Romanov persona as her own.

With the help of Gleb Blotkin, son of the Romanov’s court physician, Anderson soon began publicly claiming to be Anastasia Romanov and spent decades surviving through the patronage of varying minor Russian nobles and distant relatives of the Romanovs. While many close to the Romanov family claimed Anderson was an imposter, Anderson’s story quickly caught on in the public, making her something of an international celebrity by the mid-1920s.

Though a private investigator hired by the late Tsarina’s brother had determined the woman was in fact a poor factory worker from Poland with a long history of mental illness named Franziska Schanzkowska, Anderson held strong to her claim and continued to insist she was Anastasia until her death in 1984. Despite this, by 1994, DNA evidence had definitively concluded Anderson was of no relation to the Romanovs (though public opinion had largely reached this conclusion many decades prior).

Tania Head

After joining the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network (a support group for the families of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks) in 2004, Spanish businesswoman Tania Head quickly rose to become one of the group’s most visible and vocal members.

Through volunteering with and donating to the group, Head began making media appearances as a representative of the group, claiming to have been inside the South Tower when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Purportedly one of the few people to be at or above the plane’s impact point to have survived the attack, Head also made claims that her husband, Dave, had been killed when the North Tower collapsed.

For years, Head would continue to recount her harrowing story of survival to hundreds of tourists, reporters, and fellow survivors until a 2007 New York Times article revealed she’d fabricated the entire tale.

After The New York Times decided to include Head in a retrospective piece about the events of September 11, reporters began looking into Head’s story, only to uncover lie after lie. Not only was Head not in New York City at all during 9/11, but she also entirely made up her relationship with Dave, an actual victim of the events whose name and identity she’d bastardized to fabricate a tragic relationship. When the NYT made the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network aware of Head’s deception, she was ousted as the group’s president and quickly fled Manhattan.

Since the unveiling of her deception, Head has returned to Spain, unsurprisingly retreating from public life.