Carrion Luggage

Ferry Tale

Fair warning: the link here, from The Guardian, is damn near nine years old, an eternity in internet time. I don't think it matters much, though some things mentioned therein may be outdated.

    New York monument honors victims of giant octopus attack that never occurred  
Cast-bronze sculpture by Joseph Reginella, who made up the story of a Staten Island ferry disaster, directs people to a fake museum nearby

For instance, since the article was published, Spider-Man also managed to wreck a Staten Island Ferry, and a lot of lives might have been lost were it not for the timely intervention of Iron Man.

Oh, wait. This just in: that was fake, too! Who knew?

A cast-bronze monument for the victims of the sinking of a steam ferry recently appeared in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, near other somber memorials to soldiers, sailors and mariners lost at sea or on the battlefield.

This was reported on in several outlets at the time, not just The Guardian. What I couldn't find was any follow-up articles.

The 250lb monument, which depicts a Staten Island ferry, the Cornelius G Kolff, being dragged under the waves by a giant octopus, is part of a multi-layered hoax that includes a sophisticated website, a documentary, fabricated newspaper articles and glossy fliers directing tourists to a phantom Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum, across the harbor.

I'll give the hoaxer credit here: he really went all-in. Even way back in 2016, most hoaxes involved thinking up something false and then posting it on the internet, in hopes that it would go viral.

“The story just rolled off the top of my head,” he said, and it evolved to become “a multimedia art project and social experience – not maliciously – about how gullible people are”.

"People are gullible, and I'll prove it" isn't the flex you think it is.

Puzzled tourists looking for the memorial museum on Staten Island and its supposed collection of wreckage with “strange suction-cup-shaped marks” sometimes wander into the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, asking for directions.

Now, I'm of two minds about this. One mind says, "Yes, yes, fuck with tourists in this relatively harmless fashion." That part of my brain also likes whimsy and absurdity.

The other mind thinks, "We have enough misinformation in the world already. Adding to it isn't helping anything."

It's kind of like with that Godzilla statue in Japan that I featured here a while back. That's undeniably glorious. But the difference is, the vast majority of people know that Godzilla is a movie thing. As with most fiction, we willingly partake in the lie, for fun.

This, however, was trolling. And however well-executed, it's not even plausible trolling, relying on low-information people to act like low-information people. It also might have engaged those who had heard of the filming, off the coast of Japan in 2015, of a deep-sea giant squid.

In short, it has all the hallmarks of a "social experiment," which is misnamed because it's antisocial and not much of an experiment. We don't need to be reminded how gullible people are. It makes people feel stupid because they're suddenly exposed to something outside their normal range.

And, at worst, it adds to general public distrust of everything, weakening the social structure and perpetuating the idea that nothing is real.

The best I can say about it is that at least the guy didn't bilk people out of money for it, like a certain famous con-man over a century earlier, who sold shares in another method for getting the hell out of Manhattan.

So yeah, if you believe a giant octopus sank a ferry in 1963, I have a bridge to sell you.