The Manel Monteagudo of history I + History

The case of the writer Manel Monteagudo has jumped by word of mouth these days and we have been following the news as if it were a series. It started as a story of overcoming and ended as a farce when his 35 years in a coma they have come apart like a house of cards, as you begin to detect the inconsistencies in your story. Nothing new under the sun.

Every so often an unlikely character appears who becomes the center of attention until they are discovered the lies it hides. We will leave the study of these minds to psychology, because we already have enough work reviewing some of the most emblematic cases that history has left us.

This type of people usually look for an element that impacts society. Not too many years ago, in our country it was discovered that Enric Marco was a false survivor of the Nazi extermination. Like him, other men and women around the world have made up biographies, pretending they suffered the Holocaust. The Belgian Catholic Misha Defonseca it was invented that she was a Jewess who, during the German occupation, had crossed Europe on foot and protected by a pack of wolves until she managed to locate her parents. The American Rosemarie Pence She published an autobiography in which she explained that, as a child, she had been interned in Dachau and that later she had been welcomed by some nuns who had taught her to ski. According to her, she had even participated in the 1956 Winter Olympics.

In the United States, other great shocking historical events have also served as the basis for the impostores. The novelist and university professor H. G. Carrillo He claimed to have been born in Cuba and that his family had escaped the Castro dictatorship when he was seven years old. It was not until his death – in 2020, due to the coronavirus – that the truth was known. His real name was Herman Glenn Carroll and he was the son of an African American family from Detroit. The discovery of his imposture reached the pages of the ‘Washington Post’. Anyway, there the usual thing in the world of false biographies is to ensure that indian blood. The list of supposed descendants of chiefs of all kinds of tribes is so long that we would never end.

The falsification of personal accounts is not a thing of four days ago. In 1704 in England ‘Description of Formosa’ was published, written by George Psalmanazar, which he said was the first person from that island (now Taiwan) who had traveled to Europe. In reality, he was a French Catholic who had taken advantage of the pull of the Christianization campaigns in Asia to invent a life that made him a personality in London. His book was a mixture of preconceptions of what was then believed to be the Orient mixed with disjointed data from the societies of pre-Columbian America. In short, a mess that allowed him to live on income. He dedicated the last years of his life to writing an autobiography in which he confessed his inventions. The text was released when he died.

The British Isles are prone to impostors, but no one can overshadow the Princess Caraboo, born in Java and kidnapped by pirates, from whom she would have escaped in 1817 by jumping over the side of the ship where she was enslaved, when the ship anchored in the Bristol Channel. Thanks to the collaboration of a Portuguese sailor who helped her in the deception, the story worked and the girl became a celebrity. So much so that she was recognized as a guest house owner. The princess, in reality, was called Mary Willcocks, a maid who tried to get the money she lacked to emigrate to the United States by scamming people. She used the stories her ex-husband had told her, a sailor who had sailed through Asia. Instead of reporting her to the police, the family that had taken her in gave her the means to cross the Atlantic. In America he tried to continue giving life to the princess but it was not too successful.

His case is still remembered and books, plays and a movie have been dedicated to him. After all, if you have good writers who can come up with great stories, it’s a shame to waste it.

Anastasia

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During the 20th century, many impostors took advantage of the mystery that surrounded the assassination of the russian imperial family during the Bolshevik Revolution to pose as survivors of the massacre. The most famous case is that of Anna Anderson (1896-1984), who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov. It was a lie. It was a Polish woman with mental problems.