8 Bonkers Hoaxes That Actually Fooled People

6. Mary Toft's Rabbit Babies

"Fur babies" might be a millennial obsession, but to find the the fur baby OG, we'll have to go all the way back to the 1700s.

18th Century Britain was a weird place to begin with, but it got a whole lot weirder when, in September of 1726, Mary Toft started giving birth to rabbits.

Mary claimed that, during a normal pregnancy, she had been startled by a rabbit, which had caused her to miscarry. After that she began to give birth to various animal body parts including (and you might want to make sure that you're not eating right now) "three legs of a Cat of a Tabby Colour, and one leg of a Rabbet: the guts were as a Cat's and in them were three pieces of the Back-Bone of an Eel". At the height of the hoax, she had several doctors convinced, including the surgeon to the Royal Household of King George I.

After it became apparent that the whole thing had been faked, it came out that, following her initial miscarriage whilst the cervix allowed it, she had an accomplice insert a cat and a rabbit into her womb. The subsequent animal parts had been held in the vagina.

In the light of this information, it sounds much more like a case of severe mental illness, perhaps triggered by the trauma of a miscarriage, than a magic rabbit lady.