The elaborate hoax of Princess Caraboo in British society

In 1817, a woman stumbled into a British town wearing a turban and speaking total nonsense. Instead of being confused, the local elites were obsessed. They were so desperate to seem "worldly" they immediately crowned her Princess Caraboo of the fictional island Javasu.

The "princess" was actually Mary Baker, a servant girl who realized high society is easy to scam with fake exoticism. She spent weeks performing bizarre rituals while the wealthy paid for everything.

She performed a fantasy the British upper class was already dying to believe.

Wait, how did this whole charade finally blow up in her face?

It wasn't a world traveler who busted her. It was a landlady named Mrs. Neale who saw the "Princess's" face in the newspaper and did a massive double-take.

She recognized Mary Baker, her former servant who used to entertain her children by wearing turbans and speaking gibberish. The "exotic" rituals were just recycled babysitting tricks.

The scandal was instant. The elites who had bowed to her were suddenly the laughingstock of England, proving a bored maid could outsmart the aristocracy just by playing to their vanity.

So, did those furious aristocrats actually throw her in a dungeon for that?

You’d think they’d lock her up for making them look like clowns. But a public trial meant more headlines, and the elites were already drowning in enough shame to last a century.

Instead of a cell, they opted for a "please go away" fund. They bundled Mary onto a ship to Philadelphia, essentially paying her to become America’s problem just to bury the story.

Mary eventually snuck back to England, trading her fake throne for a bucket. She spent her final years selling medicinal leeches to a hospital. From princess to leech-peddler—quite the glow-down.

Hold on, was selling leeches actually a legitimate career back then?

In the 1800s, leeches were basically the high-tech medical devices of the day. Doctors were obsessed with "bloodletting," convinced that if you were sick, you just had too much "bad blood" and needed a tiny vampire to drain the evil out.

Mary wasn't just being weird; she was a professional supplier for a local hospital. She would wade into swampy bogs, let the leeches latch onto her own bare legs, and then peel them off to sell. It was a grueling, bottom-tier "dirty job" for someone who once had aristocrats bowing to her.

It is the peak of irony. She spent her youth sucking the resources out of the rich with a fake story, and her old age selling literal parasites to suck the blood out of the sick. Talk about a full-circle career path.

But why did doctors think draining blood was actually a good idea?

It all boils down to the "Four Humors," an ancient medical theory that treated the human body like a temperamental soup. Doctors believed you were made of four fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—and health meant keeping them perfectly balanced.

If you had a fever or even just a bad mood, they assumed you had "too much" blood. Instead of looking for germs, they figured they’d just drain the excess to reset the system. It was the 19th-century version of "turning it off and on again," but with more leakage.

Of course, this usually just made the patient too weak to fight the actual illness. But since everyone from kings to peasants believed in the "balance," the leech business stayed booming.