Focalore and superstition are fluid, flexible things.

There's no set formula for how they're born, no rules or recipes to create them.

They just happen.

Sometimes folklore is instructive.

It comes first and teaches us how to behave.

Other times it's reactive.

It sprouts up long after a key historical event, like a sapling that grows from an acorn

buried by a forgetful squirrel.

Neither way, it's always been a mirror showing us who we all really are.

There've been times though, when people have crafted their own tales, and then set out

to convince everyone else of their truth.

Counterfeit folklore.

Sometimes it's done for the money, and sometimes for that drug we all seem to be addicted to.

Attention!

Take George Hull, for example.

In 1860, he purchased a 10-foot-long block of gypsum from Aquari in Iowa.

Then he had it shipped to New York, where he paid a sculptor to carve it into the likeness

of an enormous human corpse.

And finally, he transported it to the small New York town of Cardiff, where he buried

it on his cousin's farm.

When that cousin, William Newell, hired two men to dig a well about a year later, he pretended

to be shocked when they uncovered the stone figure.

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