5

Florabel Muir Tried To Get A Criminal Confession Using Fake Ghosts, Racism

Los Angeles Times

Florabel Muir was a trailblazer. She was the first woman journalist in multiple newspapers, and the first one to be allowed to cover an execution, after getting an Attorney General to rule that she was "a reporter, not female." She was also, unfortunately, someone who once glimpsed into the future, watched an episode of Scooby-Doo, and thought "that shit is just crazy enough to work".

In 1922, Hollywood was reeling from the mysterious murder of silent film magnate William Desmond Taylor. With no evidence and no witnesses, it was a complex case that would baffle investigators for decades. Or the butler did it. That was Muir's version of events, and by god, she was going to prove it, no matter how many guys she had to rope in to help kidnap said butler. Seriously.

via dmairfield.com
This was before that even became a cliche, so she was a real visionary.

Muir and her cohorts at first tried to get the butler to confess by pretending to be cops ... who carried out their interrogations in the offices of a newspaper, for some reason. When that didn't work, they moved on to plan B: exploiting the well-known and completely accurate (according to racist 1920s movies, anyway) fact that black people are extremely terrified of g-g-g-ghosts.

4

Tom Howard Dons A Hidden Camera To Photograph An Execution

via murderpedia.org

In the aftermath of any tragedy, you don't have to look hard to find an outlet throwing out horrific images with wild abandon, whether you wanted to confront the abyss of human suffering on your lunch break or not. However, this weird compulsion isn't a modern phenomenon. Case in point: the photographer who wired a hidden camera to his leg in order to record an execution.

New York Daily News
Or some old-timey creepshots, at the very least.

3

Arthur "Weegee" Fellig Was The Real Nightcrawler

via threepennyreview.com

Although Tom Howard deserved the shade that we threw at him, he was an amateur compared to the real scourge of old-timey media: crime scene photographers. Prowling the streets, they made top dollar snapping the grisliest crime scenes and selling the photos to the highest bidder. However, among their ranks, one man stands above them all. Arthur Fellig, also known as "Weegee": The man who made that shit look good.

2

WT Stead "Buys" A 13-Year-Old Sex Slave

E.H. Mills

WT Stead is considered the granddaddy of investigative journalism, having singlehandedly gotten the age of consent raised from 13 to 16 in Victorian England through his chilling expose on child prostitution, The Maiden Tribute Of Modern Babylon. In case you were wondering, that name is a reference to the virgin tributes sent to the Minotaur in Greek myth (don't worry; he only ate them). What Stead didn't mention is that one of the "Minotaurs" he was exposing was in fact himself.

via islingtontribune.com
"Hey, the story I wrote was half bull."

Stead wanted to prove how easy it was to buy a child prostitute in London by actually doing that, but he ran into a little problem: It wasn't that easy. Perhaps distrusting his formidable beard, several brothels refused his offers. Stead ended up buying a 13-year-old girl under false pretenses (her mother thought she would be working as a maid), but he still wanted the experience to be as authentic as possible, dammit -- he had her examined to make sure she was a virgin, chloroformed her, and took her to a brothel, just to prove he could. Once the girl was sufficiently freaked out, Stead figured "Eh, that's close enough" and shipped her off to France.

In his articles, Stead wrote about how some monster who totally wasn't him bought a girl, took her to a brothel, and had his way with her.

thenorthernecho.co.uk
"I cannot divulge his identity, but I will reveal that he possesses luscious, luscious facial hair."

1

Two Journalists Moved into Hitler's Apartment, Stole His Shit

Photos.com/PHOTOS.com/Getty Images

The year was 1945, and the tyranny of the Nazis had literally ended with a bang. At the same time, Lee Miller of Vogue and David Scherman of Life Magazine were exploring Munich in the hope of achieving the impossible: finding a story amidst the bombed-out ruins, refugees, and general post-war misery. After ignoring all that worthless article fodder, the two eventually got an apartment-sharing story weirder than anything that Airbnb could ever result in.

After finding a miraculously unbombed apartment building, Miller and Scherman started noticing something weird about it. There were swastikas and photos of the Nazi high rank everywhere. That wasn't that weird for the time, but several items (such as the china) also had the initials "A.H." on them. Hmmm.

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
And an autograph that said "From me, Adolph Hitler, to me, Adolph Hitler. The famous Nazi."

It turned out they had found themselves standing in Hitler's apartment. Yes, that Hitler. Naturally, they decided that the sensible thing to do would be to jump into Hitler's bath tub and put it to good use by scrubbing themselves clean from their previous excursion to Dachau. Oh, and by taking pictures there.

David Scherman
Joke's on her. Hitler was a chronic shower masturbator.

After spending several nights sleeping in Hitler's bed, Miller and Scherman then travelled to a nearby villa owned by Eva Braun, where they pulled the same shit. They slept, poked through her possessions, and even tried a telephone especially reserved for calls to Hitler's office in Berlin. It's like they were begging for Zombitler to answer and demand that they leave -- a premise that we'll exploring in our sitcom Not In Mein House.

As it's regarded as poor form to sneak 'round someone's house, regardless of how evil they were, the two were rightfully chastised in the press. If that wasn't enough, it also transpired that Scherman went a'pillaging and stole a bunch of shit. This included a special edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, which he sold for $10,000. We wouldn't have liked to witness the moment when its new owners learnt the truth, but it probably helped in explaining why someone had replaced Shylock with a new character called Eagle von Aryan.

For more from Adam, check out The 6 Stupidest Acts of Journalistic Fraud Ever Attempted and 6 Ways To Make Money Off The Internet (If You're An Asshole). You can also contact him at adamwearscracked@gmail.com, if that's your thing.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see the sad state of journalism today in 8 Local News Segments Gone Horribly Wrong, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook because you'll get to see us eat human flesh very soon.