Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of history’s most iconic detective,Sherlock Holmes, believed the French medium seen in these photographs, Eva Carrière, was authentic. You see, unlike his famous fictional creation, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a sucker.

The Spiritualist movement of the late 19th century conned a lot of incredibly intelligent people, and probably attracted a few reasonably amused gawkers, as well. If you think there’s nothing interesting about a woman dragging out a bunch of newspaper cutouts and faking a connection with the spiritual world, please note that some of the pictures below are of nude Carrière, though her dirty pillows have been retouched. Yes, Eva C. regularly got naked and received paranormal gynecological exams from her “assistant” and rumored girlfriend, Juliette Bisson. It’s also said that she engaged in sexual activities with séance participants, so before you paint the attendants of such events with a broad and gullible brush—remember, this was before Internet porn.

The photos here are from the 1910s, when the séance craze was already winding down, thanks in no small part to “evidence” like this, I’m sure. Debunking spiritualists was quite the hobby of many a sober-minded Edwardian, and they weren’t particularly impressed with Carrière’s ectoplasm—identifiable as scraps of a French magazine. You’ll notice the faces featured in her communion with the spirits include Woodrow Wilson, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the French president Raymond Poincaré, none who were dead at the time…
 

 

 

 
More fake spiritualism after the jump…

 
Perhaps you noticed a number of your friends posting—and then deleting—a “rare” cover version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on their Facebook walls today. The track in question was supposedly recorded by David Bowie and members of New Order.

Here’s what it said on YouTube:

A chance meeting in 1983 had David Bowie, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook chatting away over beers in the Kings Arms in Salford. “...So we were all there just having a laugh and we joked that he should come n have a jam with us, then next minute - well, it was the next day actually, but i didn’t expect he’d definitely come by - and we were in the practice rooms and we were playing Love Will Tear Us Apart and i was like, f%$K we’re playing Love Will Tear Us Apart with David Bowie singing, this is crazy. We never released it - Bowie took a recording of it, and just layered some more vocals on for fun, sent it back to me…” - Bernard Sumner.

Yeah, right.

Was this the handiwork of Tim Heidecker?

Was Adam Buxton responsible, perhaps?

Until the perpetrator steps forward we may never know who was behind this clever prank, but Joy Division’s Peter Hook has weighed in on Twitter to say that… it’s a fake (as if that already wasn’t already totally obvious to anyone with ears, although I did appreciate the low-fi “bootleg” sound quality, which lent an air of authenticity to the proceedings. Extra points for that).
 

 

 
Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower, was a hugely popular and tragic sixties French pop star who in reality never existed. She’s the creation of conceptual artist, and former art director of New York Magazine, Josh Gosfield. He’s done an astonishingly convincing job of documenting a life that never was, through photo-shopped pictures, a mock documentary, a video shot by Jean Luc Godard (not), newsclippings and fictional biographical ephemera.

We see her Gypsy family’s escape from Bulgaria, her affair with her stepbrother, her first guitar, her rise up (and fall down) the charts,  the car crashes, funerals, love triangles and the murder trial. All this played out in a garish media spotlight before the insatiable eyes of her public.

I was initially fooled by Gosfield’s elaborate hoax and went looking for information on the French chanteuse, including checking Amazon for cds, only to discover that I’d been had.

Gosfield has included fictional quotes from icons of the era, including this one by Norman Mailer from a nonexistent Esquire article.

As Norman Mailer wrote, in a 1974 Esquire story:

Could this Black Flower with a voice like Piaf have guessed that when she bloomed into a teenage singing idol for post-war European youth, and later became the Continental fashion icon and sexy French pin-up girl on the bedroom walls of the hippest kids, that the future would strangle her dreams of normalcy, like the protagonists in one her romantically fatalistic songs? No, of course not. Because the characters of Greek tragedies are always the last to know their fates.

Here we a have Gosfield’s perfectly realized faux Jean Luc Godard video and the trailer for the documentary.

Check out Josh’s website and be prepared to be amazed by the depth of detail and work that went into creating his pop fantasy.
 

 
More photos of The Black Flower and the documentary trailer after the jump…