Here’s the twenty ninth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly
LiteratEye #29: Kidnapped by Slavers! Abducted and Tortured by Wild Savages! Worse Yet, Branded a ‘Reckless Liar’!
By W.J. Elvin III
September 4, 2009
Let’s say you had to choose, which would it be:
Abducted off the streets as a child, cast into the dingy hold of a sailing ship and, when it got filled with other unfortunates like yourself, carried off to a foreign land to be sold into slavery “¦ or “¦ captured by merciless wild Indians, witness to the brutal slaughter of numerous of your own people – men, women and children, and cruelly tortured for the mocking amusement of your captors?
Well, if you happen to be as lucky as Peter Williamson of Aberdeen, Scotland, back in the mid-1700s, you could have all that, plus a few other horrors and terrors for good measure.
Williamson, known later in life as “Indian Peter,” made the best of it. He wrote a book that sold well in his own day and remains an oft-quoted classic among tales of Indian captivity.
It’s quite the yarn, as some of the chapter headings indicate: Continue reading “LiteratEye #29: Kidnapped by Slavers! Abducted and Tortured by Wild Savages! Worse Yet, Branded a ‘Reckless Liar’!”
Email tale about a ‘very pleasant attendant’ who, for 25 years running, showed up every day at Bristol Zoo and collected parking fees from visitors, then one day simply disappeared with all the cash. Turns out no one had ever officially hired a car park attendant for the zoo. The man now lives in a villa in Spain.
Back in the days of the sailing ships there were many tales of the perilous lives of castaways, some marooned – kicked off their ship on an island in the middle of nowhere — and others survivors of catastrophes. Robinson Crusoe’s story is one of the best-known castaway tales.
It was a bumpy weekend for the rich and famous, with the entertainment industry mourning the loss of three pop culture icons even as the Internet churned out one hoax after another declaring more celebrities dead. 
Can an urban myth be galactic in its silliness?