History is full of impostors, but these five took pretending to a completely different level.
Long before background checks could ruin a perfectly good lie, people had room to reinvent themselves completely.
These five claimed titles, careers and bloodlines that belonged to somebody else. A few were so convincing that exposing them took years.
Here are five historical impostors who fooled almost everyone.
#5 Princess Caraboo
On April 3, 1817, a young woman appeared in the English village of Almondsbury wearing unusual clothes and speaking a language nobody understood.
She called herself Caraboo. That was about the only part anyone could make out.
A Portuguese sailor later claimed he understood her language and translated an extraordinary story. She was supposedly a princess from Javasu, an island in the Indian Ocean. Pirates had kidnapped her, but she escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Channel and swimming ashore.
Local magistrate Samuel Worrall and his wife took her into their home. For roughly ten weeks, Caraboo became a minor celebrity. She wore elaborate clothing, demonstrated archery and continued speaking her invented language while scholars tried to determine where she came from.
One expert even declared the strange marks on her head to be evidence of “oriental surgery.” They were actually scars from a medical cupping procedure she had undergone as a child. Expertise was having a difficult month.
The story collapsed after a boarding-house keeper named Mrs. Neale recognized Caraboo from a newspaper portrait. The mysterious princess was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler’s daughter from Devon who had worked as a servant and created the entire identity herself.
Mary had no royal bloodline, no island kingdom and no known connection to pirates. She did, however, fool wealthy families, local officials and supposed experts using little more than invented words and the confidence to keep speaking them.
That was enough to make Princess Caraboo one of the most famous impostors of her time.
#4 Wilhelm Voigt, the Captain of Köpenick
On October 16, 1906, Wilhelm Voigt walked into Berlin wearing the uniform of a Prussian army captain.
There was one fairly important problem. Voigt was not a captain. He was an unemployed shoemaker with a criminal record, and the uniform had been assembled from pieces bought at secondhand shops.
Still, he looked official enough.
Voigt approached a group of real soldiers and ordered them to follow him. The men saw the uniform, heard the commands and fell into line. Nobody asked for identification, written orders or even a quick explanation of who this captain was. The hat had spoken.
Voigt marched the soldiers to Köpenick Town Hall, placed the building under guard and ordered the arrest of the mayor and treasurer. He then seized more than 4,000 marks from the town treasury, issued a receipt for the money and sent the arrested officials to Berlin under military escort.
Issuing a receipt was an especially confident touch. Robbery is one thing. Robbery with paperwork suggests management experience.
Once he was safely away, Voigt changed back into civilian clothes and disappeared. He was arrested ten days later and sentenced to four years in prison, but by then the story had spread across Germany.
People found it hilarious that an unemployed shoemaker in a used uniform had exposed how automatically Prussian society obeyed military authority. Kaiser Wilhelm II eventually pardoned him after he had served less than two years.
Voigt left prison as a folk hero, published an account of the stunt and made public appearances dressed as the captain everyone now knew he had never been.
For a man with no military rank, he got an impressive amount done before lunch.
#3 Anna Anderson, the “Surviving” Romanov
In 1920, an unidentified woman was pulled from a canal in Berlin after attempting to take her own life. She refused to give her name and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where staff called her Fräulein Unbekannt, or “Miss Unknown.”
Before long, people around her began wondering whether she was actually Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Russia’s last tsar.
Anastasia and the rest of the Romanov family had been executed by Bolshevik forces in 1918. Confusion surrounding the location of the bodies allowed rumors to spread that one of the children had escaped. The unidentified woman eventually embraced the story and became known as Anna Anderson.
Some people who had known the Romanovs rejected her immediately. Others became convinced. Anderson appeared to recognize family details, carried scars that supporters connected to the execution and behaved in ways they considered suitably royal. Once people want a lost princess to be alive, nearly everything starts looking like evidence.
In 1927, a private investigation identified Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who had disappeared in Berlin around the same time. Anderson and her supporters rejected the finding, and the dispute moved into the German courts.
The legal battle continued for decades. Anderson never proved that she was Anastasia, but she remained famous enough to inspire books, plays and films. The hopeful version of the story was simply more appealing than a missing factory worker with a borrowed identity.
Anderson died in 1984. Ten years later, DNA taken from preserved tissue showed that she was not related to the Romanovs. It instead matched a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska.
The results finally settled what decades of testimony and court hearings could not. Anna Anderson was not Anastasia, but her claim had already helped turn the missing princess into one of the twentieth century’s most enduring royal legends.
#2 False Dmitry I
Most impostors on this list talked their way into comfortable homes or respectable careers. False Dmitry I went considerably further. He became the tsar of Russia.
The real Dmitry Ivanovich was the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. He died in 1591 at the age of eight, officially after suffering a seizure and cutting his throat with a knife. Many Russians suspected that the child had actually been murdered to clear the path for Boris Godunov to take power.
Years later, a young man appeared in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth claiming that Dmitry had survived. He said another child had been killed in his place and that he had been hidden for his own protection.
His true identity remains disputed. Boris Godunov’s government claimed he was a runaway monk named Grigory Otrepyev, but historians have never established the matter with complete certainty. Whoever he was, he understood that Russia’s political chaos had created an opening.
The pretender gained support from Polish nobles, Russian opponents of Godunov and people who believed the rightful heir had returned. With a small army behind him, he invaded Russia in 1604.
Then events broke his way. Boris Godunov died suddenly in 1605, support for his family collapsed and Dmitry entered Moscow in triumph. Maria Nagaya, the real Dmitry’s mother, publicly recognized him as her son. Whether she believed him or saw a chance to improve her own position is still debated.
In July 1605, the impostor was crowned tsar.
His reign lasted less than a year. Dmitry’s connections to Poland, tolerance toward Catholics and willingness to challenge Russian customs angered powerful nobles. In May 1606, conspirators stormed the Kremlin and killed him.
False Dmitry did not merely claim to be royalty from a safe distance. He raised an army, took Moscow and ruled one of the largest countries in the world. For eleven months, the throne made his story official.
#1 Ferdinand Demara, the Great Impostor
Ferdinand Waldo Demara did not build his reputation around one convincing disguise. He spent years moving through identities as if they were temporary jobs.
During his career, Demara posed as a monk, a teacher, a psychologist, a civil engineer, a prison official and a cancer researcher. He had no formal qualifications for most of these positions, but he possessed an excellent memory and an unusual ability to understand what people expected from him.
His most dangerous impersonation began in 1951, when he assumed the identity of Canadian physician Joseph Cyr and joined the Royal Canadian Navy as a surgeon lieutenant.
The navy was short of medical officers and did not examine his background closely enough. Demara was assigned to HMCS Cayuga, a destroyer serving in Korean waters. He was suddenly responsible for the health of an entire ship despite having no medical degree.
At first, he handled routine cases. He treated minor injuries, performed dental work and removed the captain’s infected tooth. Then wounded South Korean fighters were brought aboard requiring serious treatment.
Demara reportedly studied medical textbooks before operating and relied heavily on his skilled medical assistant. Ship records credited him with several procedures over a two-month period, including removing bullets and amputating a gangrenous foot. The patients survived.
His performance was impressive enough that the navy considered recognizing him for his work. The resulting publicity reached people who knew the real Joseph Cyr, which was an unfortunate development for the other Joseph Cyr currently performing surgery at sea.
Demara was exposed and returned to Canada. Remarkably, the navy released him without criminal charges. Crew members who had watched him work reportedly struggled to believe that their doctor had never actually been a doctor.
Demara earns the number one spot because he did not simply imitate authority. He repeatedly entered professions that required years of specialized training and performed well enough to avoid immediate suspicion. As the ship’s surgeon, the consequences of failure could have been fatal, yet his deception was uncovered by publicity rather than his work.
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