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What history didn't tell you about Honest Abe.

"Historians still argue as to whether Shakespeare was gay, a front for the Earl of Oxford and/or Sir Francis Bacon, or a cyborg from the future sent back in time to found Western civilization, thereby hastening the creation of the McRib sandwich."
"11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy", by Michael Swaim, on Cracked.comnote 

The "revelation" that a famous Real Life historical figure actually had a secret life far more fantastic (figuratively or literally) and/or magical than history records. A historical retcon, if you will. Artists and writers tend to be the most common examples, followed by American Presidents. (At times, per the Men in Black II example below, a current figure also can be a subject of this trope, as can groups, per the National Treasure and Transformers Film Series examples below.)

This is sometimes a way for a show to capitalize on sudden popular interest in some historical figure, or just to exercise a writer's pet interest.

In such a story, Plausible Deniability is almost always the order of the day; we have to be given this fantastic secret history in such a way that we can believe that the fantastic elements were kept out of public record.

In Time Travel stories, this often involves Retroactive Precognition, and one possible form it can take is You Will Be Beethoven.

Ancient Astronauts does this for entire ancient civilizations.

While the mixing of fantastic elements into historical texts is as old as mankind (see the Arthurian cycle for one example), the modern form of this trope probably originates with Dracula, essentially the incorporation of a fantastic secret life into the history of Vlad the Impaler.

This trope can very effectively add an air of mystique to otherwise familiar historical material and personages, but it can become distracting if overused, to say nothing of the unpleasant implications of having everyone remotely skilled at anything in history be nonhuman or relying on superhuman powers.

Commonly results in a Weird Historical War or leads to a Historical Badass Upgrade. May involve Gender Flipping (see Historical Gender Flip), in which case expect a Samus Is a Girl reaction (or "Samus Is a Guy", if "Samus" was originally a girl in the first place) when the character's true identity is revealed. If the historical figure in question has superpowers or supernatural abilities, then it's Historical Domain Superperson. If an alien spy initially appears to be a fictional character, and only late in the story is revealed to be a historical figure, it's a Historical Person Punchline.

We Didn't Start the Führer is a subtrope of this. For a specific Biopic example, check out Biography à Clef. Contrast No Such Thing as Wizard Jesus. Compare Literary Work of Magic (when a Real Life fictional work has an agenda in the universe of another), Real Event, Fictional Cause (with real events instead of people), and Been There, Shaped History (when a fictional character helped shape real-life history).

See also Julius Beethoven da Vinci and, for one of a few particularly popular alien spies, see Elvis Has Left the Planet, Elvish Presley, Rasputin the Mad Monk or — in Japanese media — Demon King Nobunaga.


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    Anime & Manga 
  • Ayakashi Triangle:
    • Garaku Utagawa is an ayakashi created from the effort "a famous painter" put into his brush. That painter is very heavily implied to be Kuniyoshi Utagawa. Kuniyoshi often painted and made wood-prints of cats, which is why Garaku loves cats so much.
    • It's similarly implied one of the past lives of the ayakashi medium was the shaman Toyo/Iyo or her mother Himiko. The current ayakashi medium Suzu is partially an Expy of the heroine of Kentaro Yabuki's first manga, Yamato Gensouki, who is a fictional version of Iyo. Eventually, it's specified the power of worship made Himiko a God in Human Form, then she passed her power onto her daughter, making Iyo the first ayakashi medium.
  • Beyblade:
  • In Black Butler, Jack the Ripper was a female doctor and her Shinigami butler.
  • Grigori Rasputin appears as one of Diva's Chevaliers in Blood+.
  • Le Chevalier d'Eon is built on this trope. At least two historical figures (including the titular character) share their bodies with the souls of their dead sisters and most others are involved in an arcane conspiracy and/or actual sorcerers themselves.
  • Daimos: In episode 32, it's said that New Zealand was devastated from a war at some point in the past, but thanks to the support of the Baam Peace Corps, the country was able to get back on its feet. To repay their kindness, New Zealand welcomed Baam refugees and allowed them to have their own colony, Utopia, where both humans and Baamites live in peace.
  • DEVILMAN crybaby: As part of the Freeze-Frame Bonus in Episode 10 when Satan explains to Akira how long back the demons had it and how unconsciously woven they are into all human myths and legends, an image of Vlad III the Impaler comes up, signifying the legendary king of Wallacia was a devilman.
  • Code Geass: An alternate version of C.C.'s past in the Nightmare of Nunnally manga reveals that she is the "Witch Of Britannia". Since she was an Eden Vital, a witch, she didn't die. Her scar was cut into her by Joan of Arc.
  • In Dance in the Vampire Bund Ambrose Bierce's mysterious disappearance is explained as him having been turned into a vampire, now allied with the Tepes clan. Grigori Rasputin also makes an appearance in as Ivanovic, head of one of the three pure-blooded vampire clans. The woman he chased and originally lusted over, shown in the manga as 'Natasha', is also a case of this, being Anastasia Romanova.
  • Sigmund Freud and Carl-Gustav Jung were both Travellers in Dreamland it seems, and a pretty strong one for the former. Considering it's Freud, it's not all that surprising...
  • In Fantastic Children, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was an alien, sort of.
  • Jabberwocky: Galileo, Helen of Troy, and maybe even Adam and Eve were actually intelligent dinosaurs.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In Master Of Mosquiton, the mysterious Big Bad is revealed to be an immortal — most recently known as Grigori Rasputin — who had manipulated most of human history so he could fight against a monster that had exiled him on Earth, and was planning to eat the world's souls.
  • In Phantom Thief Jeanne, it is revealed that Jeanne d'Arc's military achievements were only a side thing — her real mission was to cleanse the worlds of demons.
  • In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, historically powerful/influential/famous women like Cleopatra, Queen Himiko of Yamataikoku, Saint Joan of Arc and Anne Frank were Magical Girls, as well as some others from throughout other points in history, such as a Viking. One of them would get her own series.
  • Queen Millennia: Cleopatra VII is shown to be one of the past Queens Millennia and one of Yayoi's predecessors.
  • Read or Die - maybe. It contains "I-jin" which are clones of various historic characters, but with super-powers. It's a bit unclear exactly how powerful the original historical figures were supposed to have been - it's made clear that the I-jin have been "enhanced" during the cloning process. Most of the story revolves around a book written by Beethoven himself, suggesting that the original Beethoven was more special than generally known.
  • Steins;Gate takes Internet hoaxer "John Titor" and makes his claims of being a time-traveling soldier entirely true. Her claims on her gender, on the other hand, are false.
  • Tokimeki Tonight seldom uses this as a nice little throwaway gag. Mori Eto (a vampire by birth)'s family tree shows that one of his relatives is... Christopher Lee. Also, one panel that shows a vampire village in Magic World has Vlad Tepes as one of the inhabitants (among other references such as Graf Orlok and... Frank N. Furter!?).
  • Karin Yuuki of UQ Holder! is actually revealed to be Judas Iscariot, Jesus' betrayer.
  • The Vision of Escaflowne strongly implies that its main villain is Isaac Newton.
  • In Yaiba's Universe, the famous poet Basho Matsuo was actually a ruthless assassin whose goal was to Take Over the World with the power of Ryujin's Orb.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, Alexander the Great had the Millennium Ring, which helped him conquer the world.

    Audio Plays 
  • Big Finish Doctor Who:
    • "The Kingmaker" paints William Shakespeare in rather a different light, revealing that he was, later in life, actually Richard III. (He'd traveled back in time to goad the pragmatic and unpleasant-but-not-actually-villainous Richard into following the version of history outlined in his play, and ended up victim of a case of mistaken identity at Bosworth thanks to a broken arm and wounded leg. The Doctor sent the real Richard back to Stratford with some play outlines.) Richard, for his part, had many experiences with aliens, having been visited regularly since his youth by time-tourists, who routinely pestered him about whether or not he was going to kill his nephews, and ran away if he mentioned doctors. And the Princes in the Tower? Well, they were actually girls, and following his relocation, Richard/Shakespeare raised them as his daughters.
    • The Eighth Doctor travels with Mary Shelley, and she bases Frankenstein on her experiences.
    • In "Invaders from Mars", the Doctor uses Orson Welles' radio version of The War of the Worlds to persuade some not-especially-bright aliens that Earth has already been invaded, by a force far superior to their own, making it a poor choice of breeding ground.

    Comic Books 
  • 2000 AD:
  • Action Man: Apparently, Victor Hugo was at one point head of the Action Man program.
  • The Authority never comes out and says it, but via some well-placed art, hints that figures like Jesus, Gandhi, and Albert Einstein were previous Shamans. In addition, Einstein was apparently involved in at least one cross-dimensional adventure with Jenny Sparks.
  • The Avengers (Jason Aaron) #50 reveals that Wong Fei-hung was an Iron Fist and Miyamoto Musashi was a Spirit of Vengeance.
  • Howard Chaykin's Barnum!: In Secret Service to the U.S.A. has P.T. Barnum and his menagerie of sideshow entertainers thwart an assassination of President Grover Cleveland, then get recruited to stop Nikola Tesla's attempt to overthrow the United States.
  • Cleopatra in Space: What if young Cleopatra VII (albeit an obviously fictionalized version of her) was the savior of a galaxy far away?
  • Conan the Barbarian: In "Citadel at the Center of Time", the historical Babylonian king Shamash-shum-ukin is a sorcerer who avoided his recorded death via Time Travel.
  • Uri Geller is implied to have superpowers in Daredevil #133 (1976), and to have fought the villain Mind-Wave.
  • Matt Fraction's graphic novel The Five Fists of Science features Nikola Tesla teaming up with Mark Twain and Baroness Bertha von Suttner to bring peace to the world using a giant robot, and is opposed by a Lovecraftian cult led by J.P. Morgan, with the assistance of Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, and Andrew Carnegie. The Morgan-financed cover-up of the comic's events is intended both to explain why Tesla, despite being a brilliant engineer, was later perceived as an unstable quack, and also to ground the story in true reality as a chapter of the main characters' lives that has been lost to history.
  • In the Italian comic book Gea, the eponymous character is a member of a group of super-powered individuals who work to send intruders from parallel worlds back, under the orders of a mysterious man known just as "the uncle" whom she's never met, bringing them to a nexus dimension. Said dimension looks a lot like the surreal landscapes of Roger Dean. Near the end of the series, Gea meets "uncle" and finds out he is Roger Dean—turns out his paintings were inspired by frequent visits in the nexus.
  • Helen Killer is the story of how Alexander Graham Bell gives an adult Helen Keller a device that allows her to see and hear, and she becomes a super-ninja, trying to stop the assassination of President McKinley and an attempt to turn all of the world's gold into lead to get revenge for losing out on the telephone patent. Seriously.
  • Hellboy extrapolates Hitler's real life fascination with the occult to astronomical proportions, up to and including an attempt to hire out the vampire Count Giurescu and funding a project to create artificial vampires to ravage Europe should the war's tide turn against him.
    • Rasputin wasn't merely a mad mystic—he was also friends with the Baba Yaga and a servant of the Cthuloid Ogdru Jahad. He hired himself out to Hitler in an attempt to use Nazi resources to cause the end of the world.
    • Earlier in Russian history than that, Peter the Great had three demons summoned to aid him in seizing Swedish land. As payment, they ensured that his sons would die young and that his heart would be cold and unfeeling.
  • In the Image comic Invincible, the superhero known as "The Immortal" looks very familiar to students of U.S. history — one of his previous identities in his long life was Abraham Lincoln. Interestingly, this wasn't intended. Rather, it was Ascended Fanon on the part of the author when fans pointed out how much The Immortal looked like Honest Abe.
  • In the Italian satiric webcomic Jenus Ronnie James Dio, who had come to Earth to spread music and left in disgust at the Church shortly before the Second Coming. Incidentally, "Dio" is Italian for "God".
  • Spanish webcomic-turned-comic-book El Joven Lovecraft ("Young Lovecraft") features young Howie summoning the monsters he'd later write about (a pet Ghoul, someone?), meeting Poe's ghost and overall having a boring pre-teenage life. The initial strip says that other works have fictionalized Lovecraft's history by either presenting him as a forced transvestite child or as an Indiana Jones-like adventurer fighting sectarian minions, but El Joven Lovecraft was to show, for the very first time, The Truth.
  • In the French comic La Licorne, Ambroise Paré, Andreas Vesalius and other Renaissance scientists (including Paracelsus and Leonardo da Vinci) are members of a secret sect controlling the "Primordials", monstrous creatures that mimic legendary beasts such as griffins or dragons.
  • In the Weird West flavored Dystopian Oz series Legend of Oz: The Wicked West, it is explained that the office of Witch of the East has been stuck in a You Kill It, You Bought It cycle, with Amelia Earhart having crashed into Oz onto the previous Wicked Witch of the East, taking her place and being gradually corrupted by the Wicked Witch of the West's influence before Dorothy's house ended up landing on her.
  • The comic book series Lovecraft featured H. P. Lovecraft as its main character, revealing his stories were all based on actual adventures involving monstrous god-like extraterrestrial horrors he encountered and personally did battle with.
    • The aforementioned War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches makes nearly the same claim, but with a twist: Lovecraft's writing was inspired by his own suppressed memory that he is one of the godlike horrors the Martians had invaded Earth to escape.
    • The Atomic Robo story arc "The Shadow from Beyond Time" starts out with two issues where Lovecraft turns out to be possessed by a true Lovecraftian monster that breaks out and rampages through the streets of New York.
  • The Magdalena, from the same universe as Witchblade, is descended from a long line of women warriors sworn to protect the Catholic Church (and supposedly descended from the offspring of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene). She also wields The Spear of Destiny as a weapon.
  • The Manhattan Projects has this as its central premise — almost everything you've heard about the scientists who shaped the latter half of the 20th century is a lie. Fermi? A man-eating, shapeshifting alien. Einstein? The real Einstein's less intelligent Evil Twin from an alternate universe. von Braun? Had a giant robotic left arm. And they're all working together to take over the world, and thereafter the entire galaxy. Mentions are made here and there of other noted figures in science, industry, and politics and what they're "really" up to in the same period; for instance, Soichiro Honda, founder of the car company that bears his name, designed samurai Mecha-Mooks for the Japanese military.
  • Marvel 1602:
    • Virginia Dare, the first colonist born in the United States, is a mutant with the uncontrollable ability to change into animals native to the New World.
    • Witch Hunter Angela, James VI of Scotland and I of England turns out not to be James Stuart but James Howlett.
  • The Marvel Universe has the Voluntary Shapeshifting race of Skrulls.
    • Deep Throat was really a Skrull spy living as a government official, who had come to love the United States.
    • The Beatles aren't Skrulls, but they did have Skrull impersonators who went native.
  • The Phantom Stranger, he of the Multiple-Choice Past, was revealed to be a penitent Judas Iscariot.
  • Rough Riders: In the case of poor Colonel George Armstrong Custer, driven insane by an alien brain parasite only to be shot to death by an alien spaceship. At the end of the first volume, Rasputin the Mad Monk is possessed by a similar parasite. Annie Oakley has an arguably kinder fate as a immortal zombie brought back to life by Thomas Edison.
  • In The Sandman (1989), some of the historical figures who have had encounters with Dream include Emperor Norton, Harun al-Rashid, Emperor Augustus and William Shakespeare.
  • In The Secret History, this is the natural result of the Archons' conspiracies. A number of historical figures are aware of who and what the Archons are, and are able to assist them in their plots, sometimes using lesser forms of the runestones. Once tarot cards are developed as mini-runestones, they become known as "players." The players include Moses, Renaud de Chatillon, Nostradamus, Benvenuto Cellini, John Dee, William Sidney Smith, Napoléon Bonaparte, T.E. Lawrence, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, St. John Philby and his son Kim, just to name a few. Many real-life painters are employed to paint the tarot card sets, including Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.
  • In Howard Chaykin's The Shadow miniseries, Lamont Cranston is made into an ambassador of Shangri-La, like others before him. Including Clark Gable and Veronica Lake.
  • Marvel's 2010 S.H.I.E.L.D. series has Leonardo da Vinci: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. In fact, all polymath geniuses, from Zhang Heng to Galileo to Isaac Newton, were agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Which was founded by Imhotep.
  • One Spawn comic showed Harry Houdini as a powerful sorcerer who uses his stage act to cover himself. He teaches the title character a few more tricks he can do with his hell-born powers. He even got a mini-series spin-off Daring Escapes and yes it is the same one as Spawn makes a cameo and the bust Spawn made is the MacGuffin. Houdini also figured prominently in a DC Elseworlds special, "Batman: The Devil's Workshop", where a 1920s Batman teamed up with Houdini to fight vampires. Other Elseworlds books had historical appearances; "Dark Allegiences"(1930s) featured a plot to assassinate both Hitler and Roosevelt, and install a fascist leader in the White House, who would ally the US with the Axis during WWII, while "Detective 27" also featured FDR and Babe Ruth (talk about your Bat-Man!)
  • In Stanley and His Monster, Ambrose Bierce appears as a card-carrying member of the Trenchcoat Brigade. (Literally. At one point he shows his membership card from the D.U.M.S.U. (Disreputable Urban Magicians and Sorcerers Union) to prove his identity.) Believed killed in 1914 while in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, Bierce in fact found himself on the run. Not from Mexican rebels but from the demons and devils of Hell. Bierce was forced to turn to the occult to protect himself from his pursuers. Over time, he has become quite skilled at it. Whether his youthful appearance after nearly 80 years is due to gaining some form of immortality, being cursed to never age, or some other effect is unrevealed. Bierce won’t talk about it.
  • Tales from the Bully Pulpit has Theodore Roosevelt stealing H. G. Wells's Time Machine and going on an adventure with the ghost of Thomas Edison.
  • In Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose every President we've had, including the then current one was a parody of Iron Man. Turns out it was Washington's Powered Armor that was wood, not his teeth.
  • The Thunderbolts committed Jack the Ripper's murders in order to stop evil witch ghosts from claiming mortal hosts.
  • The IDW Publishing Transformers comics:
    • Issue 3 of IDW's comic book prequel to Transformers (2007) establishes that scientists Robert Oppenheimer, William Hayward Pickering, Frederick Sanger and Jack Kilby were secretly working for the secret government organisation Sector Seven (as an Easter Egg, artist Don Figueroa added himself as another member). The movie includes other such information, but not as openly.
    • In Hearts of Steel, Mark Twain and John Henry supposedly fought Decepticons. Jules Verne also makes an appearance for a Historical In-Joke.
  • Also in Marvel, immortal monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone once went by "Captain Ahab" in the 19th century while on the hunt for a colossal whale-like monster; this fact bears the clear implication that he inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.
  • In The Umbrella Academy, Gustave Eiffel (designer of the Eiffel Tower) was apparently a Mad Scientist Zombie-Robot.
    Luther: And just as I expected? Zombie Robot Gustave Eiffel!
    Ben: Alive! After all these years—!!
  • Vertigo's The Unwritten shows that several authors of world history have been secret agents of a conspiracy or were troubled by said conspiracy in giving life to the things they wrote (literally), e.g. Kipling.
  • In DC comics history, more than a few of history's conquerors and despots were actually personae used by the millennia-old immortal villain Vandal Savage. At one point it was even suggested he was Cain, although that was later retconned to be that he'd taken the Mark of Cain at some point.
  • The basic premise of Void Indigo was that Mick Jagger was a resurrected alien prince out for incredibly violent revenge.
  • The Wicked + The Divine has implied that, in its universe, a number of equivalents of historical celebrities in our universe were Pantheon members. An early issue suggested that Lord Byron was an incarnation of Lucifer. Instead, the gods of each Pantheon take inspiration from influential figures of the era in which they appear. Just as the modern Lucifer isn’t actually David Bowie or Sakhmet isn’t Rihanna. In-universe, the historical figures still exist.
  • In the WildStorm universe, Napoleon was really an alien warlord named Lord Emp, and many other historical figures were actually one of four alien warlords.
    • The Backlash series reveals that Atlantis was a Kherubim colony.
  • Witchblade reveals Joan of Arc as one of the keepers of a mystical weapon (quite a few other historical warrior-women including Cleopatra and Mulan were wielders as well).
  • X-Men:
    • In the Marvel mini-series [[Colossus: Bloodlines]], it was revealed that Rasputin was an ally of Mister Sinister, as well as an ancestor of Piotr "/Colossus" Rasputin. Piotr is not proud of that fact.
    • Princess Diana almost became a member of the X-Men splinter group X-Statix, as depicted here.
    • In another X-Men related example, this one In-Universe, Exodus has kit-bashed his Christian faith and belief in mutant sanctity into belief that Jesus was a mutant. He also much prefers Hope Summers as a messiah because she's willing to shoot people. There's no confirmation of this either way (though it wouldn't be the weirdest thing to happen in the Marvel Universe), but Hope, along with pretty much everyone else, thinks he's completely nuts.
  • Zatanna: In The DCU, Leonardo da Vinci was a member of the magic-wielding Homo Magi sub-species, and the ancestor of John Zatara and his daughter Zatanna.

    Fan Works 
  • In Avenger of Steel, when discussing how the Ancient One has a system for monitoring world leaders and influential figures to make sure that they're not possessed or magically influenced, and thus cannot be manipulated to cause wars or risk damaging the Sanctums by magical means, Clark reveals that apparently many of the crazier kings and emperors of antiquity were driven mad or possessed by magical beings, and that the Ancient One stepped up on surveillance due the existence of nuclear weapons and the like to ensure that they didn't do too much damage.
  • In AWE Arcadia Bay (Rogue_Demon), it's implied that the Chernobyl Disaster was an altered world event, either have been caused by or resulted in the creation of an Eldritch Abomination called The Monolith.
  • In Before The Dawn, the Oracle of Pythia was a vampire who is still alive in the present, with characters debating whether she actually has visions from the gods or just has a really strange ability.
  • Apparently, in The Best Seven Years, Lewis Carroll was a wizard. And so is Chuck Norris.
  • In Blood Sisters, it’s mentioned that one of Vincent van Gogh’s friends was a leanan sidhe, accounting for his artistic talent and his mental decline.
  • Invoked in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Stargate SG-1 crossover fic "Bridges"; when circumstances prompt the Scoobies to summon the vengeance demon responsible for oppressed constituencies to deal with Vice-President-Elect Robert Kinsey, D'Hoffryn reveals that the demon's current name is Norman, but he was originally Charles Guiteau, the man responsible for assassinating President James Garfield.
  • Child of the Storm:
    • A considerable amount of the devastation of Berlin towards the end of WWII was actually caused by a brutal duel between Doctor Strange and a godlike Grindelwald, empowered by multiple deals with devils.
    • The Winter Soldier assassinated JFK, and the Black Widow set up Oswald as a patsy, seducing Jack Ruby into killing him.
    • As per Harry Potter canon, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel were wizards and immortal alchemists, though they gave up the Philosopher's Stone. Unlike canon, however, they were scooped up by Nick Fury, who offered them the Infinity Formula in exchange for their service as SHIELD Agents.
    • Loki spent an undisclosed amount of time on Earth in the mid 20th century, during which he dated the future Queen Elizabeth II, and took a liking to J. R. R. Tolkien, and took him on a tour of the Nine Realms. Since Tolkien happened to be a talented Seer, it's repeatedly implied that he picked up on much more than he should have been able to, with Word of God implying that In-Universe his Legendarium is fiction based on fact - as shown in the third book when a time-travelling Harry is given the name 'Earendil' by a group of elves. He finds it rather amusing.
    • As in X-Men: First Class Professor X and Magneto brought a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis with the First Class of X-Men, which was actually a plot by the megalomaniacal Sebastian Shaw to start World War III. They were also aided in that by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter, and Namor was apparently involved in some capacity (it's unclear, but it apparently involved a tidal wave).
    • The sequel reveals in passing that Lady Jane Grey a.k.a. 'The Nine Days Queen' is a distant relative, via another branch of the family, to Lily Potter, Jean Grey, Maddie Pryor, and, of course, Harry.
    • The Phoenix and the Serpent reveals that the Lady Knight was Julie d'Aubigny in one of her many guises over the millennia, and notes it as one of her favourite aliases. Given that's she's acting as The Chanteuse at her Good-Guy Bar and promptly beats up a Scarab with nothing but an impossibly sharp sword, this isn't entirely surprising.
  • In chapter 17 of Crimson and Noire, Plagg confirms to Marinette that William Shakespeare was the previous Black Cat, while his wife Anne Hathaway was his Ladybug. Though given the dark tone Plagg had when mentioning her, it's clear they didn't have the same comradery compared to Lady Noir and Crimson Beetle. Word of God confirmed that Anne had distrusted the Black Cat as modern Paris does with Lady Noir.
  • In one episode of Children of Time, Nikola Tesla uses matter from Cardiff's temporal Rift to power a machine and tests it out on himself. Naturally, things go horribly right, and the machine technically provides longevity, but at the price of enormous psychic abilities, among other things.
  • crawlersout: Several historical figures are outright stated to be wizards, including two of America's founding fathers, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, the sitting President in the 1930s (presumably Franklin D. Roosevelt), Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, and Czech artist Alphonse Mucha. One of Tom's friends, Washy, is even a direct descendant of Washington, making him Pureblood royalty.
  • In Doctor Who and the Rambaldi Enigma, the Third Doctor and Sydney Bristow learn that Milo Rambaldi’s genius is due to him being linked to an alien life form.
  • In Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters, Murasaki Shikibu, Vlad Tepes, Elizabeth Bathory, Rasputin, and Joshua Norton were all members of the Ben Shui reincarnation cycle.
  • Halloween Unspectacular: It's revealed in the seventh edition's Story Arc that George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and J. Edgar Hoover were all members of PURITY. And they engineered the whole Watergate scandal in order to ruin Richard Nixon when he wouldn't play along with their plans.
  • In James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing, they reveal that the headmaster of the American version of Hogwarts (or one of several, it is not clear how many wizarding institutions America has) is Benjamin Franklin. Yeah, apparently the coolest Founding Father was also a wizard, and has a machine that has slowed his aging so much he's still alive.
  • If Wishes Were Ponies offers up that both William Shakespeare and Bram Stoker were actually Wizards, with the latter coining the term "Renfield" that Wizards' use to refer to humans mind-controlled by Vampires. It is also believed that Discord actually IS Poseidon in another form.
  • Miraculous City: Tomoe Gozen is revealed in the final battle to be a previous Dragon Miraculous user. During said battle, Kagami tells her mother Tomoe that for all her claims of honoring her namesake's path, the real Tomoe would be disgusted in her part of imprisoning her partner Lonng.
  • Nihonverse Pocketville has the Moon Queen, a lunar angel who helps Queen Ami and her sister Emi. It is revealed that she was in fact Queen Elizabeth II herself, who was apparently the Sixth Folklorist for the Queendom of Onmyou.
  • Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse):
    • It's briefly mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter.
    • Played With in A Game Of Cat And Cat. The Stephen Hawking of Kazuya's original reality was the genius programmer who created the Demon Summoning Program, but the Hawking in the world where the fic takes places is the same as the Real Life one. The characters are trying to figure out if the version of Stephen Hawking they know knows anything about demons by looking up his fields of study, which are different from the alternate universe ones, but nothing in particular pops out.
  • The Peace Not Promised mentions that Saint Nicholas was a wizard who "gained notoriety through his seasonal flaunting of the Statute of Secrecy." Snape reflects that the only real problem he created was the disappointment of children afterward, which is something Snape isn't too troubled by.
  • Professor Layton Vs Jack The Raper has the big reveal be that Jack The Raper is the princess of the Shinigami.
  • The fanfic Poisoned Blood offers several instances of famous (and infamous) historical figures being demigods.
    • Benjamin Franklin was a child of Hades who invented the lightning rod to protect people from his uncle Zeus's wrath.
    • Abraham Lincoln was another child of Hades, but unfortunately demigod historians have marked him as a child of Zeus, which bothers him immensely. As he told the trio that there were children of Zeus in the Civil War, but they were Confederate generals.
    • And in World War Two, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were sons of Hades and Poseidon while Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were sons of Zeus.
  • In Queen of All Oni, it's revealed through flashbacks that the famed samurai Minamoto Tametomo made a deal with the Oni for the power to defeat his family's enemies, and upon his death was transformed into an Oni himself, becoming Tarakudo.
  • It is fairly common on Sentinel fanfiction to speculate that this or that historical figure may have been a Sentinel or a Guide.
  • In the rebooted version of Supper Smash Bros: Mishonh From God, the reality-warping Kirby villain Marx takes the place of Karl Marx as the writer of the Communist Manifesto.
  • In Variant Strain, Grigoriy Rasputin is revealed to have been infected by the Hydra virus, which is why he was so hard to kill.
  • Chapter 36 of the Persona 4 fanfic Welcome to Tokyo implies that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Oda Nobunaga, Joan of Arc, and John F. Kennedy may have been Wild Cards, much like the main characters of the Persona games.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter claims fighting vampires was why the Civil War happened.
  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension claims that Orson Welles' radio version of The War of the Worlds was part of a cover-up of a real alien invasion.
  • According to Amazon Women on the Moon, Jack the Ripper was actually... the Loch Ness Monster!
  • Assassin's Creed: The main historical figure behind The Spanish Inquisition, Tomás de Torquemada, also happens to be a Templar seeking to eradicate the Assassins in Spain and trying to get his hands on an Apple of Eden, which is guarded by the last Sultan of Granada, Muhammad XII "Boadbdil".
  • Back to the Future suggests Chuck Berry invented rock and roll through a secondhand account from a time traveller from the future.
  • The Big Bad of Bordello of Blood apparently fed on Ivan the Terrible.
  • The Brothers Grimm portrays the eponymous brothers as traveling con-artists in French-occupied Germany, during the early 19th century. However, the brothers eventually encounter a genuine fairy tale curse which requires real courage instead of their usual bogus exorcisms.
  • Bubba Ho Tep posits that Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy (who has been turned into an African-American to disguise his identity) are secretly still alive in a Texas retirement home. Fighting mummies.
  • Invoked in-universe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When the returnees come home, one of the scientists notes that they haven't aged one bit even after being gone decades. He remarks that Einstein was right. Another scientist replies, "Einstein was probably one of them."
  • The lyrics to the Conehead Love song in the credits of Coneheads say "Eisenhower, Nixon, Truman. None of them were really human".
  • Death Becomes Her involves a secret society of the world's rich and famous who have been given an ancient elixir that gives them eternal life and youth. Their members are shown to include Greta Garbo, Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Andy Warhol, and Marilyn Monroe.
  • Dracula 2000 postulates that Dracula was Judas Iscariot, who was turned into a vampire when he hanged himself after betraying Jesus. It also explains that he fears silver because of the thirty pieces he was paid for the job, and crosses since they're a reminder for him of what he did.
  • Edge Of Sanity reveals that Jack the Ripper (played by Anthony Perkins, appropriately enough) was actually Edward Hyde.
  • Fright Night 2: New Blood: Gerri is strongly implied to be none other than Elizabeth Báthory.
  • Ambrose Bierce had a run-in with vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter.
  • Gentlemen Explorers reveals that The Brothers Grimm were actually Adventurer Archaeologists who used collecting fol stories as a cover for locating and acquiring the magical artifacts described in those stories to keep them out of the wrong hands.
  • In Highway to Hell, Satan says that many historical nasties like Attila the Hun and Hitler were his (implied to be adopted) sons. Royce was a disappointment, while Adam is the latest who will be sent to Earth when ready.
  • Kingsman: The Golden Circle suggests that Winston Churchill was a founding member of Kingsman.
    • The prequel film The King's Man reveals that King Edward V was a founding Kingsman, taking the codename "Bedivere". Meanwhile, it's shown that World War I was engineered by a secret society known as the Flock, composed of such notables as Rasputin, Lenin, Gavrilo Princip, Erik Jan Hanussen, and Mata Hari with Hitler joining in The Stinger's Sequel Hook.
  • Lisztomania, Franz Liszt used his music to stop Richard Wagner, the Antichrist who later becomes Frankenstein Hitler.
  • In The Man from Earth, the protagonist is immortal, and was the person history remembered as Jesus.
  • Men in Black does this multiple times. At one point in the movie there is a screen showing numerous people who are really aliens with most of them being celebrities, including Al Roker, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Spielberg (who produced the film; the film's director is also in the monitor), Newt Gingrich, and Danny DeVito. Later on, while listening to an 8-track tape of Elvis Presley songs, Agent J remarks that Elvis (as in, the popularity of his music) is dead, which prompts K to remark that "Elvis is not dead, he just went home", implying that Elvis is an alien who left the Earth. Also included: a Take That! at Dennis Rodman's expense.
  • Men in Black II has Michael Jackson begging Z to let him be an Agent. It also implies that Martha Stewart (or possibly her cat) is actually an evil alien overlord.
  • Men in Black 3 reveals that Andy Warhol was actually "Agent W" and that his identity as an artist was merely to attract aliens to monitor. He was also completely faking his persona and actually had his death faked by K by his request. In the beginning, one of the screens showing disguised aliens briefly shows Lady Gaga as well.
  • In The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Johann Sebastian Bach is stated to have been a Shadowhunter and wrote chords that repel demons into his music.
  • National Treasure depicts the founding fathers of America as the most recent safekeepers of a massive treasure trove. And the sequel does the same, proposing an alliance between Queen Victoria and the South, with assistance from Edouard de Laboulaye, in order to find funds for the Civil War via the 'real' El Dorado. Oh, and a secret book belonging to the President, detailing...''things'' about the government.
  • Netherbeast Incorporated reveals that President James Garfield was one of the titular netherbeasts.
  • In Paul, Paul's advanced knowledge appears to negate Christian beliefs, while his powers, including healing and resurrection, appear similar to those in the Biblical stories, implying extraterrestrial visitors utilized such abilities in the past, that were then recorded as miracles by witnesses, being the basis of the Biblical stories that became religious beliefs. Paul himself, working with the U.S. government, helped proliferate the notion of aliens in modern media in an effort to prepare humanity for a proper first contact. His most notable contributions include the character of Fox Mulder and ET's healing powers (though he was a bit iffy on having his finger glow).
  • In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Blackbeard is a voodoo sorcerer, and survived for many years past the battle that history records as his death.
  • A key plot point of The Prestige is the fact that Nikola Tesla was able to invent a device that created copies of whatever was put in it. He's also David Bowie, although that doesn't have anything to do with the plot (apart from being awesome).
  • In Prometheus, the opening scene shows around ten Engineers in robes, like a group of disciples talking to one figure. In an interview, Ridley Scott reveals an Engineer appeared in Earth's past and was crucified by humans, inspiring the myths of Jesus.
  • In The Raven (2012), Edgar Allan Poe is recruited by the police to solve a series of murders based on his stories.
  • The premise of Shadow of the Vampire is that Max Schrek, the actor playing Count Orlok in Nosferatu really was a vampire.
  • Stargate explains the great pyramids
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country:
    • General Chang claims that you haven't heard Shakespeare unless it's in the original Klingon. Shakespeare Was A Klingon Spy?
    • Spock uses the quote that "if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth." and attributes it to his ancestor but it's entirely vague if his ancestor is Sherlock Holmes or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  • Time After Time had H.G. Wells build a time machine and travel to the future in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who happened to have been a friend of his. He meets a woman there and brings her back to his time and marries her. His girlfriend makes a quip about becoming Susan B. Anthony although she probably wasn't being completely serious. The girlfriend's name was Amy Robbins. Historically, Wells' second wife's name was Amy Katherine Robbins.
  • Tomorrowland, in which Gustave Eiffel, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Jules Verne and Mark Twain established a Secret Circle of Secrets known as Plus Ultra at the 1889 Universal Exposition of Paris that found a way to enter another dimension, find an unlimited power source, and establish a technological/creative think tank called Tomorrowland. Later members would include Amelia Earhart, Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney himself, who used the area in his theme parks as equal parts cover story and a way to prepare people for the real Tomorrowland.
  • Transformers Film Series:
    • Transformers (2007) showed that five US presidents knew about Megatron and the Cube. Hoover Dam was constructed to hide and store the Cube.
    • In the sequel Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the Great Pyramids are a cover-up for an alien portal generator. In a more joking manner, according to the semi-senile Jetfire, his father was "The wheel! The first wheel!" And what did he turn into? "Nothing! But he did it with honor! Dignity, dammit!"
    • And in the third film Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the Moon to explore the ruins of a Cybertronian starship. Also, the stopping of both the American and Soviet space programs was engineered by the Decepticons so that the ship remains undiscovered. The Chernobyl disaster is also revealed to be the result of an experiment with a power cell from the same ship.
  • A Doorstop Baby, apparently delivered by alien spaceship, in the beginning of Todd Haynes' film Velvet Goldmine, is... Oscar Wilde. (It could make The Star-Child semi-autobiographic...)
  • Watchmen: In the opening credits it is vaguely implied that the Comedian may have killed Kennedy.
  • In Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled, the Djinn implies he once served Caligula.
  • The Wolfman (2010):
    • Years after failing to catch Jack the Ripper in London, Inspector Abberline was sent to the Moors to investigate a werewolf's killings and became a werewolf himself.
    • Max von Sydow's Deleted Role (still present in the director's cut) implies that the Beast of Gêvaudan (a legendary beast alleged to have terrorized the former province of Gêvaudan between 1764 and 1767) was a werewolf.
  • X-Men Film Series:
    • One comment in X-Men: The Last Stand has a student comment on the theory of evolution only for Professor X to reveal that the reason Charles Darwin learned about the theory is because Darwin was a mutant himself. (Actually, the student was commenting about a theory Einstein had that criticised ethics, with the Professor responding "Einstein wasn't a mutant. At least as far as we know".)
    • X-Men: First Class reveals that Professor X and Magneto brought a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was actually a plot by the megalomaniacal Sebastian Shaw to start World War III.
    • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Magneto is imprisoned because intelligence agencies believe he assassinated JFK, using his powers to curve the bullet. Magneto claims he was actually trying to save him, because Kennedy himself is a mutant. According to the writer, Magneto is telling the truth, and JFK's mutant power was probably some form of telepathy for persuasion.
    • Xmen Apocalypse posits that the biblical myths about the four horseman of the apocalypse comes from the mutant himself
  • Young Einstein, the most famous scientist in history was actually from Australia, created Rock and Roll, and dated Marie Curie.

    Literature 

By Author:

By Work:

  • Scholastic's The 39 Clues claims that every single influential person in the world is a member of the Ancient Conspiracy family, the Cahills. And that they're all part of four branches reminiscent of Harry Potter. Well, not every single influential person in the world. Anyone born before the 16th century is out, for starters, and while the Cahills try to get people to marry into the family, it doesn't always work; Rembrandt is a canonical example.
  • The title premise of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
  • In Animorphs the alien Elfangor-Sirnial-Shamtul has taken on a human form to live among humans. Because his species is centuries ahead of humanity, it was easy for him to work as a computer programmer. He founded a company that was very successful, and keeps mentioning his friends Steve and Bill. Most likely are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
  • Thomas Wheeler's The Arcanum is about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Harry Houdini, and Marie Laveu are all members of a secret organization that protects the world from the occult.
  • Area 51: A ton of historical figures were actually aliens in disguise, such as King Arthur and Jack the Ripper. Others were their minions or enemies in a secret war.
  • According to The Autobiography of Santa Claus, King Arthur, Attila the Hun, and various other famous historical figures did not actually die, they decided to join in with old Saint Nick and the gang and gained immortality. Amelia Earhart even staged her own "mysterious disappearance" instead of finishing her flight around the world so that she could head up to the North Pole.
  • In the Legions of Fire Trilogy (commonly known as the "Centauri Trilogy"), part of Babylon 5's Expanded Universe, it is mentioned that there was a Drakh who once inhabited Earth—named Drak'hul.
  • In Kim Newman's Bad Dreams Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and Ayn Rand are all pawns of a vampire. In Something More Than Night, which is kind of a prequel to Bad Dreams, Raymond Chandler had a run-in with a female vampire of the same kind, who was the inspiration for all the femmes fatale in his novels, and some of Boris Karloff's horror movies are based on real events he personally witnessed.
  • Songs of Earth and Power: Numerous historical figures turn out to be gifted at magic. Artists, in particular, as they are prone of suffusing all sorts of magical effects into their masterpieces.
  • Information on the webpage for The Big One and its sequels indicates that certain figures helping run the United States in that Alternate History are extremely long-lived (but not immortal) mutants. Two of the women have been around since 1250 BCE, and one of the men, Parmenio, was a general for Alexander the Great. Hannibal, Scheherazade and William Shakespeare are also among the mutants.
  • Black House features a demon named Mr. Munshun, who is possessing a grotesque child Serial Killer and cannibal named Charles Burnside. Much later in the story, Munshun is also revealed to be responsible for the likes of Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Fritz Haarmann, among many, many others.
  • In Tanya Huff's Blood Books series, vampire Henry Fitzroy is the Henry Fitzroy, illegitimate son of Henry VIII.
  • In Walter Jon Williams' The Boolean Gate, Nikola Tesla's inventions are the result of his occasional possession by an alien machine intelligence seeking to create a worldwide AI. He is prevented in this when his friend Mark Twain figures it out (Tesla himself is unaware of where his inspirations come from) and discredits him among his potential backers.
  • Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well On Ganymede has the title musician as the pawn of the Illuminati. Or aliens. Or Atlanteans. Or all three.
  • In a Callahan's Crosstime Saloon story, Spider Robinson has an alien reveal that he was Hitler, among other historical people. Later in the Callahan's books, Nikola Tesla became a recurring character, having been made immortal by Lady Callahan and cured of his various phobias so that his scientific genius could aid Jake Stonebender and his friends in saving the world.
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series has throwaway lines that many figurespeople were demigods: George Washington (his mother was Athena), Harry Houdini (who successfully traveled to the Underworld and back), Underground Railroad operator Harriet Tubman (daughter of Hermes), Secretary of State William H. Seward (son of Hebe), Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and Union General William Tecumseh Sherman (a son of Ares), etc.
    • One of the key plot points in the series is that the three chief gods (Zeus, Poseidon and Hades) aren't supposed to father any more demigods — in no small part because their recent offspring included almost every major player in World War II. The Son of Neptune later has Hazel note that Hades/Pluto bears a very strong resemblance to Adolf Hitler (though Word of God is that he was not a demigod).
  • Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick's The Cassandra Project reveals that Jesus was actually a messenger sent by an alien race to humankind.
  • In Children of the Lamp, it is stated that Harry Houdini was a djinn, possibly of the same tribe as the heroes.
  • James A. Owen's The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica is a series in which the main characters, John, Jack, and Charles are the protectors of an Atlas of a magical realm where all myths are true. John, Jack and Charles actually are: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Oh, and H. G. Wells was their mentor.
    • Jack accidentally kills Nemo, Jules Verne is running The Plan, Jamie Barrie is Peter Pan's greatest enemy after Captain Hook, also known as Mordred, Mordred and Merlin are brothers, their father was Odysseus, who was six generations removed from Deucalion son of Prometheus, their mother was Calypso, Arthur is the son of Merlin and married to a descendant of the Jesus (the Holy Grail), an alternate version of Charles burned down the Library at Alexandria, Mark Twain had an agent (Hank Morgan) at the tournament where Arthur became the High King and Hank's banner was a Cubs pennant, which apparently used to mean Triumph over Adversity, but now better represents Impossible Quests and Lost Causes, Jack is the Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk, the Pandora are a group of three witches, Mordred was the good guy until the fire of Alexandria and Merlin was the bad guy, "Aragorn" is a corruption of "Argo", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were rogue Caretakers, Houdini had a pair of wardrobes that formed a passage between them and those were the inspiration for the wardrobe into Narnia, the Red Dragon ship was originally the Argo, the Yellow Dragon is the Nautilus, Pythagoras built Archimedes, a clockwork owl, Alexander the Great was descendant of the Argonauts, Verne was an apprentice of Twain, Caliburn (better known now as Excalibur) was the sword of Aeneas (a hero of The Trojan War and one of the possible ancestors of the guy who founded London), etc. These books are full of nothing but plot and this trope. Any genius in history was a Caretaker. Oh, and Da Vinci wasn't a genius, he was just a plagiarist. All of his sketches and paintings were originally by Bacon. The Mona Lisa was smiling because Bacon was doing something rather obscene while he painted her.
    • Actually, not everyone was a Caretaker. It's revealed in Book 4 that several of the villains are the brilliant guys that were never given the proper chance to be Caretakers, and the fifth book in the series reveals that there's another society made of people that aren't Caretakers that includes Benjamin Franklin. Oh, and villains include John Dee and Nikola Tesla.
  • According to Kage Baker's The Company Novels, William Randolph Hearst should have been a miscarried fetus before he was saved (very creatively) by a Company doctor. He later ends up an immortal and plays My Grandson, Myself.
  • A recurring joke throughout John Hodgman's Complete World Knowledge trilogy. There are too many of instances to fully list here. Just go out and buy the book.
  • The book and film Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind reveal gameshow host Chuck Barris's past as a hitman working for the CIA. This is probably fictional - though Barris insists otherwise.
  • Constance Verity Trilogy:
    • Not only is Al Capone still alive, but he's a vampire that rules over a city underneath Chicago.
    • There are hundreds of instances where the prophecy of the "Great Engine" was relayed to prophets and seers throughout the years in one form or another. Such examples include: a chapter cut from later editions of Little Women that Louisa May Alcott wrote while high on opium, a papyrus written by the Pharaoh Ptah relaying a message from the gods, a recording of Thomas Edison fortelling doom when played backwards, a machine that writes only "Chaos" (having been designed by Euclid, improved upon by Isaac Newton and built by Charles Babbage), and a journal detailing the final words of Helen Keller.
    • Benjamin Franklin was "America's greatest sorcerer", having written a book on magical theory that Connie keeps (a first edition, no less) in her personal library.
    • Author and Mathematician Ada Lovelace was the last known person to see The Engine in person.
  • In Laura Anne Gilman's Cosa Nostradamus universe the founder of the system of modern magic and, to a large extent, of modern magical society is Benjamin Franklin.
  • In Austin Grossman's Crooked both the Declaration of Independence and key parts of the Constitution hold mystical power which have been used by many, though not all, Presidents including Washington, Lincoln, Taft, Eisenhower and Nixon. Also several Russian Premiers have been the vessels of Eldritch Abominations.
  • In Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was possessed by the ghost of an alien bent on destroying mankind, and left coded messages in his poetry. In addition, the work of Johann Sebastian Bach was actually produced by hyper-advanced extra-terrestrials observing all the natural phenomena on earth and translating them into music. This all led, eventually, to the title character being the 'mysterious wanderer' who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan".
  • The Divine Comedy: Three prominent Genoans are portrayed in the Inferno as traitors of such magnitude that their souls were immediately damned to Hell, while their historical lives after that point were carried out by demons who had taken their bodies.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • In The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, the protagonist (Davis) contacts a man who has invented a time machine. It is blatantly implied that the only person ever to have used the machine (an engineer who would have found himself marooned in a time too backward to make use of his advanced technical knowledge) was Leonardo da Vinci.
  • Implied in the Dora Wilk Series: Miron admits that he once published his poetry under a false surname and after many years discovered that he became a classical English poet, but he refuses to say which surname he used, as he claims that if Dora ever found out, he'd never hear the end of it.
  • The Trope Maker is probably Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which an obscure 14th Century nobleman is made into the most famous vampire in history. Also makes this trope Older Than Radio.
  • In Dacre Stoker's Dracula the Un-Dead, Jack the Ripper is revealed to be... Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
  • In Dracula Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss, Bram Stoker and a time-traveling scientist from the modern day fight vampires. This was actually a sequel to Aldiss' earlier novel Frankenstein Unbound, in which the same time-traveling scientist encounters Doctor Frankenstein and his monster in the late 1800s, along with Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. He even ends up having an affair with Mary.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • According to the author, several historical figures have been Knights of the Cross at one point in their lives. Knights are men or women who take up a Sword of the Cross, one of three holy swords — each of which contains a Nail that pierced Jesus Christ to the Cross — and which each represents either Faith, Hope, or Love. It should be noted that one does not need to be a Christian to be a Knight; merely being a genuinely good person who represents the ideals of that Swordnote  is "enough" for God. Neither does being a Knight mean a lifetime commitment. Some Knights take the Sword for one mission and put it down.
      • George Washington, during his time fighting in the French and Indian War, became a Knight of the Cross holding Esperacchius/Durendal, the Sword of Hope.
      • Saladin and Joan of Arc are also stated to have been Knights of the Cross at one point. Their blades have yet to be mentioned.
    • Some characters have dealings with The Fair Folk as well.
      • invoked Serial killers Gilles de Rais (the toned-down inspiration behind Bluebeard), Fritz Haarmann (a.k.a. Butcher of Hanover), John Haigh (a.k.a. Acid Bath Murderer), and Andrei Chikatilo (a.k.a. The Rostov Ripper) were all Winter Knights, a.k.a. the personal hitman to Queen Mab and the other Winter Queens. Additionally, Word of God has stated that Horatio Nelson was one of the previous Summer Knights (the Winter Knight's counterpart among the Summer Court), as was The Duke of Wellington one of the previous Winter Knights.
      • A famous but unnamed Austrian composer who died young is the father to Mab's twin daughters Maeve and Sarissa.
      • invoked Word of God has also said the famous French statesman Cardinal Richeliu made deals with Winter Queen Mab, and his imprisonment in Mab's garden in Proven Guilty in the form of a robin is because he "had to pay the piper at some point". Vlad Tepesh is also the founder of the Black Court of Vampires, and he also apparently made a deal with Mab at some point. Meanwhile, his father Vlad Drakul is a Humanoid Abomination from outside conventional reality who is so powerful that his fiefdom is recognized as its own supernatural country (admittedly a small one, but stil).
    • The short story "A Fistful of Warlocks" reveals that the famous lawman of Dodge City, Wyatt Earp, was also a Venator (as was his friend Doc Holliday).
    • Small Favor reveals that most of the ancient Oracles at Delphi were actually previous hosts of the Archive, and their "prophecies" were actually them using their vast knowledge to reason what the most likely future to happen was.
    • According to The Paranet Papers, Manco Cápac wasn't just a powerful wizard that went against the White Council's directives about not "meddling with mortal affairs"; he went and founded the Inca Empire in Cusco around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and ruled it for forty years by proclaiming himself the son of the sun god Inti and the moon goddess Mama Quilla.
    • Peace Talks reveals that Beowulf is one of the names of Vadderung/Odin, who fought one of the Forest People named Grendel.
  • Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain:
  • In the first Empire from the Ashes book, mutineers FROM SPAAAAAACE have been manipulating human civilization from the very beginning, and Hitler himself is singled out as being one of them. Evidently his enhanced body (strong enough to wield Gatling guns akimbo) is how he survived the attempted bomb assassination.
  • The Enchanted Files: More like "was at least half Elvish", actually, in Diary of a Mad Brownie / Cursed. Angus remarks in his diary at one point that William Shakespeare is actually of Enchanted stock (Angus personally thinks he's part Elf), and the general belief in the Enchanted Realm is that he was half human at most.
  • In Laura Whitcomb's The Fetch, Rasputin is a cover identity being used by a supernatural being. Only Anastasia sees him as he truly is.
  • Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson has Galileo visited by time travelers who show him how life is doing on the colonies of the Galilean Moons.
  • In Amber Benson's The Ghosts of Albion series, the mystical Protectors of Albion are aided by the ghosts of Lord Byron, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Queen Boudicea, the last of whom was killed by a demon.
  • Jamie Simons' children's book series Goners revolves around a group of time-traveling aliens trying to find out which historical figures were alien spies and bringing them home.
  • In Patrick Graham's The Gospel of Evil, the Knight Templars were actually Satanists who knew the Cosmic Horror Story our universe is.
  • Harry Potter'
    • In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, famed 14th century scholar Nicholas Flamel (whose fame as an alchemist is itself an example of this trope: The real Flamel was a scribe and there's no record of him dabbling in alchemy) is both a wizard and still alive, having successfully created the titular Philosopher's Stone to attain immortality. He also dies shortly after the events of the book after he and his wife Perenelle agree to destroy the stone so it can't be misused. Notably, the later books shy away from this trope, at least when it comes to explicit mentions.
    • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince starts by showing that the Minister of Magic typically reveals himself to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and gives them regular updates about the state of the Ministry of Magic and the wizarding world. While the Prime Minister in question remains nameless and does not allude to any specific real life politician, this means that for an untold amount of time, every UK Prime Minister has been in on the existence of magic and wizards and has cooperated with the Ministry of Magic.
    • The expanded universe also provides a few examples.
      • Famed Scottish rugby player Angus Buchanan is revealed on Pottermore to have been a Squib (someone born to a wizarding family but with no magical powers to speak of), who was kicked out of his home when this fact was discovered. He ended up becoming a famous professional rugby player in the Muggle world and an activist for equal rights in the Wizarding world, making him one of the few people in the series to attain fame in both worlds.
      • For an animal example, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them reveals that dodos never went extinct—they were actually magical birds called "Diricawls" who have powers of teleportation. This ability allowed them to hide from Muggles when they realized they were being hunted. Apparently, the Ministry of Magic decided not to allow Muggles to become aware that the Diricawls still exist, as the belief that they had hunted them all to extinction led to them becoming more environmentally conscious.
      • The notes on Beedle the Bard's Babbity Rabbity mention that Henry the VI, King of England, had a white rabbit which he called his advisor, which may or may not had been a French Animagus that escaped execution for being a witch. Either that or he was as insane as muggles believed he was.
  • In the novels Heretic and Prophecy Giordano Bruno is a spy working for Lord Walsingham, head of Elizabeth I's secret service.
  • The Hexer von Salem stories by German author Wolfgang Hohlbein, being grounded in his take on the Cthulhu Mythos, quite naturally have Howard P. Lovecraft himself as an important supporting character with actual if only occasionally used time travel powers who helps the main protagonist Robert Craven deal with the assorted horrors as best he can, especially early in the series. He's also a former high-ranking member of the actual (modern-day, which here means late 19th century) Knights Templar, who'd still like a word with him about quitting on them... — The series in general isn't at all shy about dragging famous historical or fictional characters into its plot, but Lovecraft is probably the most straightforward and prominent example of the trope.
  • Hex Hall: Lord Byron turns up as a vampire.
  • In The Historian, the titular character is a vampirized Vlad the Impaler. Against the norm, Vlad explicitly isn't Dracula (as in reality, the novel is just loosely inspired by him), and instead of becoming a vampire the usual way, he became so through some medieval magic supposed to confer immortality note . The title refers to Vlad's hobby since becoming a vampire. He created an immense library in his makeshift resting place with thousands upon thousands of books. Features to note are his first editions of Thomas Aquinias and one of the original Gutenburg printing presses.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The short story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" has a younger Zaphod Beeblebrox investigating a wrecked ship said to carry the most dangerous cargo ever conceived by man, capable of wreaking havoc on all society with no chance of being stopped should it leak. The twist of the story is that the "cargo" is a faulty group of "Designer People"—faulty in the sense that they have no faults at all, they are utterly perfect people, and as such are capable of charming anyone into letting them wreak all the havoc they could ever wish. They were meant to be jettisoned into a black hole, but one managed to make it through an escape pod that ended up on Earth. Based on the clues provided and time of release, this is heavily implied (and later stated explicit) to be then-US President Ronald Reagan, of whom author Douglas Adams was an outspoken critic.
  • The Western Galactic Empire presumes (but does not prove) this of Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Jesus, in Robert Zubrin's The Holy Land.
  • In The House of Night, a lot of historical figures as well as current famous people are said to be vampyres, including Shakespeare and Cleopatra VII, just to name a few.
  • On a slightly larger scale, in the Humanx Commonwealth series, it is revealed that a entire astronomical phenomenon known as the Great Attractor was constructed by the Precursors as a superweapon.
  • The Illuminatus! trilogy did this with a large number of real and fictional characters; John Dillinger as a set of quintuplet Zen masters, Jesus as the world's first Bingo caller, Billy Graham as the Devil, and the Beatles as anarcho-capitalist prophets, among many others. Perhaps most notably, Marilyn Monroe was trained to become an avatar of Eris (although her identity is only implied).
  • In Charles Stross's The Laundry Files, Alan Turing discovered a way to use mathematics to do magic, which was immediately covered up by the government by killing Turing.
  • The Lensman novels reveal that many historical tyrants, including Nero and Adolf Hitler, were all guises adopted by a single alien spy - Gharlane of Eddore. A variant occurs when the protagonists ask the Arisians if they interfered with human history in a similar fashion. While no great human leaders were actually Arisians, the character of Bergenholm (a fictional scientist from earlier in the book who developed a truly efficient FTL drive) was in fact one of their agents - for their Gambit Roulette to work, they needed humans to get proper FTL now. Bergenholm may not be real, but the impact on the characters was similar.
  • In The List of Seven by Mark Frost, a young Arthur Conan Doyle gets swept up in a conspiracy against the British Government, working alongside a mysterious investigator named Jack Sparks. This adventure would inspire him to create Sherlock Holmes.
  • Frank Beddor's The Looking-Glass Wars. Alice Liddell, according to the book series, is NOT who Lewis Carroll made us think she was. She was really Princess Alyss Heart, the daughter of the King and Queen of Wonderland who was exiled to the real world after her Aunt Redd staged a coup that killed her family.
  • Tom Holland's novel Lord of the Dead reveals that Lord Byron was a vampire. Mad, bad and dangerous to know indeed.
  • Though the main character of The Madness Season was not historically significant, his father was an employee of the Library of Alexandria and his mother was worshipped in ancient times as a goddess (though we aren't told which goddess she may have been).
  • In the Magic Ex Libris series, Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press to promote a kind of magic where you pull things out of books. He's also immortal thanks to creating the Holy Grail with this power. There's also Juan Ponce de Leon being a powerful Sorcerer who made himself immortal via the Fountain of Youth. Oh, and Bruce Lee has been turned into a vampire.
  • According to Quentin's studies in The Magicians, several historical figures popularly associated with the supernatural are revealed to have actually been magicians, including Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon, Nostradamus, John Dee, and Isaac Newton. However, they were only of modest ability at best, and poorly regarded within the magical community for trying to go public.
  • In The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar, it is outright stated that protagonist Yuuto Suou is the likely source of Norse mythology, as the world Yggdrasil is supposedly around 1500 B.C., Yuuto's name translates to Surtr in Norse, and several of his more high-profile battles match Norse oral lore quite well...
  • The Lewis Padgett short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" sees a scientist millions of years in the future sending two boxes of educational toys into the past. One of the boxes ends up in the major setting of the story—a small family's home in 1942 England. Scott and Emma, the family's children, begin to play with the toys and, thanks to their futuristic influence, gradually develop strange intelligences far beyond normal human capacity. The latter part of the story sees them trying to construct some sort of machine from the toys, but they can't complete or activate it. That gap is explained when, during a flashback, we see that the second box of toys ended up in the hands of an unnamed English girl in the late nineteenth century. She's unable to be fully influenced by the playthings due to her slightly higher age, but they still "talk" to her by telling her seemingly nonsensical stories and poetry. One day, she recites a few lines of one of those poems to a man who promises to write the whole thing, word for word, in the book he's writing based on her (supposedly) imaginary tales. She happily calls him "Uncle Charles," revealing that she's none other than Alice Liddell. The verse she's repeating is "Jabberwocky", and the apparently made-up words are actually an equation key to finish and power the time-space travel device. The story ends with Scott and Emma using "Jabberwocky" to complete their machine and vanish to parts unknown.
  • The Missing series, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, involves a future where rich families pay a corporation to go back in time and kidnap certain famous children (usually famous missing children, such as Anastasia and Charles Lindbergh Jr.), while they are babies. The children are then taken back to the future for these families to raise as their own. Except the ones that accidentally end up in our time.
  • In Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, it's stated that Jeffrey Dahmer was a wight.
  • The Mortal Instruments shows several examples.
    • The Seelie Queen once met Thomas the Rhymer. She lured him into the fairy kingdom. And after releasing him, he mentioned her in his ballads.
    • The founder of the vampires was Vlad. The real Count Dracula was also the first vampire.
    • Magnus Bane keeps claiming that he met famous people. However, one does not know how much of it is the truth and how much of it was invented.
      • A flashback shows, however, that he at least met Marie-Antoinette, and wanted to help her escape.
    • In Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy we learn that Jack the Ripper , a serial killer who killed several women, was actually a demon child.
  • In Marie Brennan's Never Come Midnight Elizabeth I became queen due to a bargain with the local Fae queen who was also instrumental in foiling the Grand Armada.
  • The background of Newshound reveals that Theodore Roosevelt was secretly a werewolf.
  • In A Night in the Lonesome October, Jack the Ripper is a member of a group seeking to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. Nobody knows who he really is, and there are rumors that he's something strange even by the standards of his colleagues, including one that he's the immortal Cain.
  • In the Night Watch (Series) books, the mythological Tibetan hero Gesar is head of the Moscow Night Watch. Joan of Arc was a weak dark witch. Thomas the Rhymer is head of the Edinburgh Night Watch, and was also an ancestor of Mikhail Lermontov. Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin is a Dark Other and a prophet. Other examples include:
    • Certain historical figures (especially authors) are revealed to have either been Others (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce), uninitiated Others (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov, Stephen King), or influenced by Others (e.g. William Blake, William Shakespeare).
    • Bruce Lee is alive and well. There was a crisis in Hong Kong in 1973, and he was recalled to active duty in the Night Watch, requiring the Watch to fake his death. His Twilight form is a small dragon.
    • Also, Alexander the Great is still alive and well, and is the one who secretly runs the European Bureau of Inquisition.
    • Edgar Allan Poe was an uninitiated Other whose works were influenced by the Twilight. It's speculated that his death was the result of him accidentally stepping into the Twilight and staying there too long, resulting in hypoglycemia (which humans attributed to alcoholism).
    • H. P. Lovecraft was a low-level Dark Other, who lived the life of a recluse but somehow entered Twilight in his sleep, inspiring the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! reveals that the various Eldritch Abominations of the Cthulhu Mythos were actually members of alien species who visited Earth incognito. One Nyarlathotepian befriended H. P. Lovecraft and told him stories about these beings, which inspired Lovecraft to create the Mythos.
  • In the novel One Foot In The Grave the protagonist half-vampire encounters and enters into an uneasy team-up with the vampire that unintentionally transformed him into his partially converted state: Vlad Tepes aka Dracula. Vlad relates the atrocities he had to commit to protect his tiny kingdom from being conquered and his recent abandoning leadership of the vampire enclave in NYC (enclaves being scattered locations where vampires and other supernatural creatures attempt to live in secret and relative peace with human society and lead by a vampire lord with greater powers than the standard) in order to lead a more trouble-free life (didn't quite work out that way for him).
  • Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Mysteries have Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Sherard fighting crime together. It's just as awesome as it sounds.
  • The Parasol Protectorate is set on an alternate Earth where several historical figures were supernaturals.
    • The vampire potentate for the first part of the series is Lord Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I.
    • It's mentioned that Boudicca was an Alpha werewolf.
    • More spoilery, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra was a metanatural.
  • In the universe of Alan Goldsher's Paul Is Undead, The Beatles exist—but George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney are zombies and Ringo Starr is a ninja. The book is even subtitled The British Zombie Invasion.
  • In Bruce Sterling's novella Pirate Utopia, Harry Houdini is a spy for the American government using his act as cover, H. P. Lovecraft is his publicist and Robert E. Howard his teenage sidekick.
  • The President's Vampire series:
    • Johann Konrad, the real-life basis for Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein, was a real Necromancer, dark wizard and all-around Mad Doctor, who perfected his Elixir of Youth, and has been using it to live for centuries and continue his obscene work.
    • Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, bound Cade to the service of the President, by order of Andrew Johnson.
    • Elliot Ness was a member of the task force that Cade led in destroying Innsmouth.
    • Osama bin Laden was an agent of the Shadow Company, who Cade killed in Tora Bora (his survival and later "real" death both being faked by the government for political reasons). Oh, and he was an early test subject of the Snakehead virus, so he wasn't human anymore when Cade killed him.
    • John Wilkes Booth was a patsy of the Order, who faked his own death in 1865 and went into hiding, until the guilt caught up with him decades later and he started drunkenly announcing the truth. So Cade hunted him down and killed him.
    • Jack the Ripper was a "starchild" created by Aleister Crowley, in the same sort of ritual that later created the Boogeyman.
    • Every Serial Killer in the 20th century has either been a host of the Boogeyman, or a member of the cult worshiping it.
  • In Elizabeth Bear's The Promethean Age novels, Christopher Marlowe, who may actually have been a secret agent, is taken into Faerie by Morgana after his "death". His place as a spy is taken by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Eventually he sells himself to the devil and becomes a warlock. The three of them along with others contend with the Promethean Society, a secret society of sorcerers whose ranks include the Earls of Essex, Southampton and Oxford (The latter of whom is one of the popular candidates for the role of the man who "really" wrote Shakespeare's plays. In here he does cowrite some of Shakespeare's earlier works but his "help" is more of a hindrance.)
  • In James P. Hogan's The Proteus Project, Winston Churchill, Edmund Teller and Albert Einstein, among others, work with time travelers to ensure a Nazi defeat (in the travelers' timeline they won).
  • The Radix: Carl Jung was a leader of a cult that searched for the Radix, a miraculous plant that belonged to Jesus Christ.
  • Red Moon Rising (Moore): Several celebrities are either vampyres or, rarely, werewolves, in additional to the normal humans. They often have different names than in our timeline, such as vampyre rockstar David-bo E.
  • In Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, the Klan was born from an order of white supremacist wizards, and The Birth of a Nation (1915) was not just racist propaganda, but a spell that not only stoked racism higher (in Real Life, the film is indeed credited with the creation of the second KKK), but also turned most Klan members—including people who joined afterwards—into Eldritch Abominations. The main character and her friends are part of a secret group that fights these creatures. The And the Adventure Continues ending has Maryse's otherworldly patrons telling her about a writer in Providence, RI touched by the same beings, obviously meant to be H.P. Lovecraft.
  • In Sacré Bleu Vincent van Gogh doesn't commit suicide; he's murdered by a millennia old shaman who works with the Muse of Painting. Other painters involved, past and present, with the duo are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Pierre-August Renoir, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Georges Seurat and Joseph Turner. The shaman, named The Colorman, is hinted to be the inspiration for Quasimodo. Later a drunken Lautrec gives his version of things to an equally drunken Oscar Wilde and it becomes the seed from which The Picture of Dorian Gray grows.
  • In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, a surprising number of historical figures are still alive today, having gained immortality by various means. The entire human cast of the series except the two main characters consists of these immortals.
  • In Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the narrator and his comrades imply that V.F.D. dates back to Ancient Greece, that Martin Luther King, Edith Wharton, and Thomas Malthus were involved with it — although Malthus was on the evil side of the schism — and that Shakespeare may be alive. However, these may be the result of revisionism in accordance with V.F.D.'s own views.
  • In Shadow's Bend H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith learn that the Cthulhu Mythos is real and get involved.
  • Sigma Force and The Order of the Sanguines, both by James Rollins, use this trope repeatedly. Marco Polo, Thomas Jefferson, Rasputin the Mad Monk, and even Jesus have been featured as part of some kind of Ancient Conspiracy or other.
  • The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries have Bubba Elvis, vamped a little too late, leaving him simple. Either that or he's putting on an act. Later she meets the undead Tsarevitch Alexei Romanov, saved by the vampire who had been donating his blood to fight his hemophilia.
  • In The Stand, Randall Flagg claims to have been Cinque/Donald DeFreeze, one of the key figures in the Patty Hearst case and leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
  • Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker series has a subtle variant, since it takes place in an Alternate History version of 19th century America where folk magic and supernatural "knacks" are accepted parts of everyday life. Among other tidbits, Napoléon Bonaparte's military career is made possible because he has a knack that makes people trust and obey him, William Blake becomes a great poet because he has a knack for prophetic visions, and Tenskwatawa becomes a revered Shawnee leader because he's a genuinely powerful prophet and Earth wizard.
  • Dan Simmons' The Terror adds a supernatural arctic menace to the doomed Franklin Expedition, which allows a lone survivor, Crozier. His Carrion Comfort blames many tragedies of the 20th century, such as Nazi atrocities and the assassination of John Lennon, on a lethal competition between sociopathic human mind-controllers.
  • This is one of the many theories surrounding the identity of Jack the Ripper in Time Scout. It's surprisingly credible.
  • Touch the Dark has the Consul Cleopatra, not Shakespeare himself, but Christopher Marlowe, Raph the Renaissance artist Raphael, and Rasputin (which explains why he was so hard to kill).
  • This happened with Harry Houdini in what has to be the most awesome historical crossover ever, the short story "Under the Pyramids" by H. P. Lovecraft. Houdini goes on vacation, crosses paths with a sinister cult and winds up facing down the Eldritch Abominations of ancient Egypt. While he doesn't exactly emerge victorious, he does end up in far better shape than the typical Lovecraft hero. Now if somebody would just make a video game about Harry Houdini versus the Old Ones...
  • In Unholy Night (by the same author as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), the three wise men who visited Jesus Christ on the night of his birth are shown to be three ruthless thieves on the run from King Herod. Two of them, Melchyor and Gaspar, become the two thieves who are crucified alongside Jesus, while the third, Balthazar, is later shown to be the one who burned down Rome.
  • Another famous vampire; in Christopher Golden's Vampire Odyssey trilogy, one of the main protagonist vampires is Buffalo Bill Cody.
  • In the book Vampyres of Hollywood and its sequel, Love Bites, many Old Hollywood film stars and producers such as Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, etc. are actually vampires who used their abilities to mesmerize audiences on film. Many of them are actually responsible for popularizing false myths about vampires being vulnerable to garlic and holy symbols by depicting vampires that way in films so humans would underestimate them. Many of these old film stars faked their deaths and are trying to get back into the film business without being recognized as their old selves. Since the books were written by Adrienne Barbeau, they give a very detailed portrayal of Hollywood and the film industry from an insider's perspective, as well as a very detailed "what-if" scenario that shows Hollywood as being created and run by vampires from the beginning. There are a lot of humorous throwaway lines about various celebrities, such as a brief description of Joan Crawford as an out-of-control werewolf.
  • War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is a collection of short stories revealing the involvement of many other historical figures (such as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson and Henry James) with the invasion described in The War of the Worlds.
  • Bentley Little's short story "The Washingtonians", which depicts George Washington as a murderous cannibal.
  • In Gabriel King's The Wild Road (and its sequel, The Golden Cat), The Alchemist (the series' Big Bad) was actually Isaac Newton. Although this was never explicitly stated, enough hints were dropped to make it indisputably obvious. Including his surname being NEWTON, and his THEORY ON GRAVITY.
  • According to Rebecca Young from Woodwalkers, various gods like Zeus, Hera, Anubis, Thoth or Sekhmet were actually shapeshifters who just posed as gods.
  • In A Wrinkle in Time we learn that Jesus, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Einstein, Bach, Gandhi, and Euclid were all fighters in the interplanetary battle against the Dark Thing. They were presumably normal humans though, who found out about the fight in similar ways to the protagonists. Though one interpretation of the quote is that everyone is in the war unwittingly: and their actions either help the Dark Thing or help fight against it. But the protagonists have good reasons for not really caring about the details, so they are never revealed.
  • In the novel Yellow Blue Tibia, Stalin is revealed to have been an alien invader (on the grounds that no human could ever do what he did; c.f. We Didn't Start the Führer).
  • In the backstory of Lost Time many figures from history are mentioned as being Christeners in nature or who once worked with people like the Gray Forum as allies who upkept The Masquerade.
    • Zvi Aharoni was actually a member of the Gray Forum's High Court, a Christener, and was actually born in Spain some time before 1492 when the Jews were expelled from the country. His exploits in taking down escaped Nazis after the war were during a time he took a momentary leave of absence from the High Court in order to not get them involved with mundane politics.
    • Aleister Crowley was a member of the villainous Red Council, a group of Christeners who wish to enforce their magical will on the world, rather than be among the mundanes (non-powered humans).
    • Jack Fiddler was a Wendigo working with his fellow were-beasts, but pretended to be fully human to dupe others until he was killed by the Gray Forum in a mission Blake participated in.
    • Sam Houston gifted the Gray Forum with Corpus Christi as their new headquarters thanks to their aid in an unspecified event during the Texas Revolution.
    • H. B. D. Woodcock was also a member of the High Court noted for his proficiency with plants, a Historical In-Joke, as the real man was an amateur botanist.

    Music 
  • The They Might Be Giants song "Ballad of Davy Crockett in Outer Space", performed to the tune of the original Davy Crockett song. "Messin' around with the fabric of time / He knows who's guilty before there's even a crime. / Davy Davy Crockett, the buckskin astronaut / Davy Davy Crockett, there's more than we were taught."
  • The closing lines of the song "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" by Warren Zevon tell the audience that Patty Hearst was armed with the submachine gun that once belonged to the titular undead mercenary.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Safe Havens: Leonardo da Vinci, in his childhood, is a time traveler and also traveled to space with his family and friends in modern times. He's also Samantha and Dave's grandson.

    Podcasts 
  • In The Adventure Zone: Amnesty, Tommy Wiseau is a Sylvan exile. A mummy, to be exact.
  • The Magnus Archives has several:
    • Wilfred Owen encountered the Slaughter in WWI and it apparently provided him the inspiration for his war poems.
    • Robert Smirke was apparently heavily involved with the supernatural and his buildings are noted as reacting to it in unique ways. He also catalogued all of the Powers.
    • Joseph Grimaldi and Wolfgang von Kempelen were servants of the Stranger.
    • Edmond Halley (yes, THAT Halley) was not only a servant of the Dark, but his body also served as the first host of the entity that later called itself Maxwell Rayner).
    • Geoffrey Chaucer is a more vague case; one Artifact of Doom is a book called The Bone Turner's Tale, which is written as if it were part of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The incomplete nature of the collection is mentioned, and a character muses that Chaucer's begging for forgiveness at the end of the book for writing it may not be as sarcastic as it is usually interpreted to be, but unlike the names mentioned above, Chaucer and his potential connection to the Powers isn't examined in any detail, and so it remains ambiguous if The Bone Turner's Tale was written by him or some third party later on.
  • In the Sick Sad World episode "The Aliens Made Me Do It", a murderer claimed that many big name political figures were secretly aliens. Martin Luther King Jr. was listed among them.

    Roleplay 
  • In Fate/Nuovo Guerra, it was said that Archimedes was actually a magus, and the legend about him using mirrors to burn a Roman fleet was actually a heat beam spell that he created, the Heliocaminus.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The d20 Modern supplement Menace Manual lists a number of organizations, both fictional and real, for use in games. One of the organizations is the Final Church,note  a satanic cult. The entry states that Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazis were members, and the Holocaust was actually a human sacrifice of vast proportions.
  • Deadlands has some of these, including Abraham Lincoln (Harrowed following his assassination), Jefferson Davis (killed and replaced by a shapeshifter), and Edmond Hoyle (whose Book of Games is the coded grimoire of the hucksters).
  • Delta Green has some examples:
    • The semi-historical Yellow Emperor of China, also known as the Yellow Dragon, may refer to some antediluvian immanentisation of a Great Old One.
    • The Genyosha is based on the real-life Black Ocean Society, a Japanese secret society based on ultranationalism. In Delta Green they are an occultist organization that acts as the Japanese Empire's unofficial Ghostapo and had some encounters with Delta Green during WW2.
    • The historical Skoptsi were a underground heretical Christian sect in the Russian Empire which preached self-castration in order to prevent sexual lust, having as many as 100,000 members in the early 20th century, but disappearing after heavy persecution from both Imperial and Soviet governments. In Delta Green, however, they are still active and actually worship Shub-Niggurath.
  • If this goes on for too long, you'd end up with something like Diana, Warrior Princess.
  • In the Freedom City setting's Atlas of Earth Prime, it's revealed that the more ... unusual ... edicts from Turkmenistan president Saparmurat Niyazov were the result of him being possessed by a prankster spirit.
  • The GURPS Who's Who sourcebooks cover realistic stats, personality, and recommended campaign usage of 104 historical figures. Also included is a "What if?" section for every person, suggesting possible deviations from accepted history. Some of the more fantastic suggestions that other works on this page haven't covered include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart being assassinated for encoding Illuminati secrets in his music and Mata Hari being a time traveling grad student studying Europe before and during WW1 with a Snowball Lie alias.
  • Masque of the Red Death:
    • A somewhat meta example: In the spin-off from the Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft campaign setting, we get an alternate Earth stalked by the usual cast of supernatural villains, Dracula etc. etc. Also the fictional James Moriarty is real, and for some reason a rakshasa.
    • A Dragon article on using the Historic Sourcebooks to set a Red Death game prior to the 19th century was all over this. Heroic qabalists included Plotinus of Alexandra, Hypatia, Galileo, possibly Leonardo da Vinci, and Queen Christina of Sweden, with at least Hypatia and Christina having magic abilities. Monsters included doppelgangers in the Paetorian Guard (including Cassius Chaerea), Ganelon from The Song of Roland who is actually a pit fiend, and Cardinal Richlieu who is actually a lich. William Shakespeare gained his inspiration by being fey-touched and Nostradamus was empowered by the Red Death.
  • Nephilim. This French role-playing game's whole background was solely designed to allow game-masters to rewrite history and incorporate it in their scenarios in any way they liked. They give you a basic backstory about the world; then you are supposed to study your region's various historical details to build up various conspiracy theories. Even if that's not your thing, the way they rewrote the entire history is absolutely overwhelming; evil secret societies trying to take over the world galore! Then they explain very seriously to you that the myth of modern Santa Claus was solely created to put the actual Saint Claus back into the collective imagination, in order to liberate him from the parallel dimension he had been put into a millennium before. And don't get me started on Joan of Arc, Atlantis, or the Dinosaurs... This game just defines the trope and has exploited it further than everything else.
  • The New World of Darkness mostly scraps the idea of supernatural string-pullers. Mostly.
    • Genius: The Transgression, being a fan-made game, can get away with it. Only three of the world's great inventors were Geniuses: Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, and Enrico Fermi. Of them, the latter two were part of the Genius status quo while Leonardo rebelled against it. Notable in being justified, however, as Tesla in particular fits the mad science nature of Geniuses to a tee.
      • Genius also downplays it, as it notes that most famous scientists couldn't be Inspired; the reason they became famous was that they were able to explain their ideas and integrate them with normal science— something incredibly difficult for the Inspired, who mostly work with Magic Powered Pseudo Science.
      • Genius also firmly defies this trope with everyone involved in the Manhattan Project. The Peerage and the Lemurians observed that one very carefully to make sure there was no Inspiration involved in it whatsoever, because absolutely no one wanted to find out what Havoc does to nuclear weapons.
    • The Halifax Explosion was caused by a battle between Pentacle Mages and a Church Militant branch of the Seers of the Throne, and Task Force VALKYRIE first came into existence when they hired the actor who'd stand in for Lincoln during the infamous night at the theater... to cover up for some thing having already eaten the president.
    • Vlad Dracul became a vampire, founding his own covenant, the Ordo Dracul.
    • The "person from Porlock" who stopped Coleridge from finishing Kubla Khan was actually a Promethean who sensed Coleridge was inspired by a qashmal and felt it necessary to disrupt its plans. A Promethean also caused The Tunguska Event by trying to summon one of said qashmallim, despite the Knights of St. George's best efforts to stop him.
    • Demon: The Descent has Seattle's real life Mother Damnable as a Cover assumed by a demon— if off in one of Seattle's splinter timelines. The writers even included a sidebar saying that normally they wouldn't do this, but they couldn't resist writing a figure named "Mother Damnable" into a game about demons.
    • In Hunter: The Vigil, the writeup of Ashwood Abbey implies that Prince Albert was a member. The Abbey also recruited Jack the Ripper, but then hunted him down themselves when his continued murder of prostitutes threatened to expose them.
  • Nobilis 2nd ed. offers Isaac Newton as the Power of Motion and Johann Sebastian Bach as the former Power of the Fugue.
    • 3e's "A Diary of Deceivers" mentions that Ronald Reagan and several of his staffers were killed and resurrected by an Excrucian Deceiver.
  • The Old World of Darkness used this all the time. Most every sourcebook includes at least one historical figure, and typically more than one, though not always a highly well-known one.
    • For just a few examples from Vampire: Helen of Troy and Menelaus fought over Chicago for years. Louis Pasteur was Embraced and, in one early adventure of dubious canon, actually managed to devise a cure for fresh Embraces. Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of the earliest Gangrel, Embraced to serve as a steward of nature. John Dee was Embraced into the Tremere, whereas Aleister Crowley was Embraced into the Malkavians, mainly to troll the Tremere.
    • Averted with one historical group: Nazis. After a few missteps (including Heinrich Himmler as a vampire in Berlin by Night) in First Edition, the creators came to believe that painting World War II as the product of supernatural influence would remove some of the banal horror from it and "cheapen" the events of the war, as well as be somewhat awkward since there are still people alive who were affected by the war. As a result, all horrific events within the past 100 years had been deemed off limits to writers. This rule was swiftly invoked following 9/11, when all sorts of crazy supernatural whodunnits started to pop up in "explanation."
    • The basic rulebook in Vampire: The Masquerade features a historical account of Vampire society through the ages, with annotations from a powerful Sabbat member. When World War II is addressed, in an interesting use of the "avoid awkwardness" rule, said Sabbat member muses upon how the Camarilla always tends to underestimate the capacity of humans to perpetrate great evils upon themselves, and that with the Kindred's loss of humanity a certain flavor of evil seems to have been lost as well.
    • The fifth edition Camarilla sourcebook was slated to include a chapter that, after editing was done messing with it, ended up claiming the modern persecution of gay people in Chechnya was a vampire feeding plot, not as in-character conspiracy speculation as had originally been intended, but as objective in-setting fact. Heavy backlash from the audience and a literal international incident involving a pissed-off Chechen government caused the owners of the company, Paradox Interactive, to come down on this like a hammer and cut the chapter entirely.
    • Wraith: The Oblivion plays with this; being about ghosts, it can have various historical figures continue on in the Underworld without rewriting their established histories. The 2nd ed corebook even has in-character writings on the history of Stygia from Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Dante Alighieri. That said, historical importance is no guarantee of post-mortem importance. As with Vampire, above, it does address the Holocaust, but only in the context of what happened to the victims' souls after their deaths; the atrocities themselves were completely free of supernatural influence and the book that covers the Holocaust explicitly overrides anything that says otherwise, like the aforementioned "Himmler the vampire" idea from Berlin by Night.
    • Hunter: The Reckoning is an aversion, with the imbued first showing up around 1999 (the year of the game's release), and none of them being well-known. There're theories about historical antecedents, but nothing solid.
    • One interesting twist: Rasputin. Several sourcebooks claim him as a supernatural, but each time a different sort of supernatural, suggesting... what? Canon Discontinuity? That the World of Darkness is built on multiple non-exclusive truths? Lampshading the authors' own practices? That Rasputin is a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot? The Malkavian source book has the insane clan claiming him as one of its members, and his slumbering place in Asia Minor being responsible for the turmoil in Russia and the Middle-East. Probably lampshades the tendency of all clans to claim a greater influence on human history than they actually have. The latest 'official' suggestion as of Beckett's Jyhad Diary is that for some reason, there are multiple Rasputins extant across the supernatural realms, who see themselves as "brothers".
  • In Pathfinder, Grigori Rasputin was in fact the estranged son of Baba Yaga, living on Earth while his mother is on Golarion. The players can fight him in Rasputin Must Die! of the Reign of Winter adventure path. Also, he's the real father of Anastasia, who was resurrected after her death. In Second Edition, she has in fact left Earth to become the queen of the nation of Irrisen.
    • Additionally, Nikola Tesla was an extremely talented wizard whose notes included the blueprints for a machine that could warp dimensions.
  • One of the more infamous bandit leaders in Rifts Texas goes by the name of Sundance. As in "Butch Cassidy and the Kid". A freak time warp during that whole thing in Bolivia put him several centuries into the future.
    • Rifts: England revealed that Merlin is an evil immortal being that had been trying to take over the world when he was helping out King Arthur.
  • There's a Savage Worlds setting entitled "The Day After Ragnarok," in which much of the Western Hemisphere has been destroyed in the aftermath of the Nazis' plan to summon Jormungand, which was successful until an American plane flew through the World Serpent's pupil and detonated a nuclear bomb in his skull.
  • The Shadowrun game-setting was rife with this for a while, back when the writers were stuffing it with historical ties to Earthdawn. Figures such as Elizabeth I and (yet again) Leonardo da Vinci were revealed to have been immortal elves, left over from the Fourth World and killing time while awaiting the next Awakening of magic.
  • The small-press RPG Shattered Dreams claimed that Hitler wasn't initially evil, but was driven mad by Vacyge who'd invaded his nightmares.
  • In Unknown Armies, any number of celebrities past and present are listed as Avatars (people who channel archetypes to gain god-like powers). This list includes Joe McCarthy as The Demagogue, Amelia Earhart as The Flying Woman, and Neil Armstrong as The Pilgrim, amongst others. Albeit that the book states that it's possible to channel an Archetype unknowingly to a minor extent, so most of these historical figures weren't part of the Occult Underground and just lived their lives in a way that happened to correspond with an Archetype. On the other hand, the book also notes that most people suspect that Hitler was deliberately channeling the Demagogue to achieve his success.
    • In addition, a school of magic called Iconomancy allows its practitioners to channel the famous dead. Curiously, you can't channel Jim Morrison. One wonders why...
      • Because the only person that can channel Jim Morrison is Morrison himself, who is currently living in Los Angeles.
  • Warhammer 40,000's major background character, the Emperor, is an immortal, incredibly powerful psyker who adopted various guises as he subtly guided mankind's evolution— it's known that he was Saint George. It was only when subtlety failed that he stepped out of the shadows and emerged as the founder of the Imperium.
  • In Witch Girls Adventures, Gilgamesh was not only genuinely the superhuman that The Epic of Gilgamesh paints him as, but was the only son of the first witch, Lilith (not the Lilith, but almost certainly the inspiration for her in the game world); progenitor of a race of immortal superhumans which included King Arthur; and the father of Zephyr. Compared to that, the other examples are downright mundane: Vlad Dracula is actually an evil vampire and was a major player in the now-secret supernatural portion of World War II, and Lovecraft (not referred to by name, but described in terms that leave little doubt) was an acolyte of a race of Eldritch Abominations— the book only briefly covers his involvement and doesn't make it clear whether he outright worshipped them, or just formed a belief system that integrated his knowledge of them.

    Theatre 
  • From the musical 1776: When John Adams complains about the difficulties he and other pro-freedom delegates at the Second Continental Congress are facing, Benjamin Franklin assures him that "the history books will sort it out." Adams has this to say:
    John Adams: [Ben] Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them — Franklin, Washington, and the horse — conducted the whole revolution by themselves.
    Ben Franklin: ...I like it.
    • This is almost written word for word in one of Adams' letters. (The scriptwriter added the horse.) Adams is talking about what later people will tell. It's probably safe to say Ben Franklin could not actually conjure generals on their horses.
    • The whole point of this musical was arguably to present a "realistic" version of this trope. Creators Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone wanted to deconstruct the popular myth of the Founding Fathers as near-deific, perfect figures who formed a unified body determined to free the United States from English rule, instead presenting them as a flawed, argumentative, very human group of men split by infighting and contrasting goals at the Second Continental Congress.
  • Michael Jackson: ONE presents the late musician as an embodiment of magic and wonder to the point that its misfit protagonists gain magical abilities when they find and use his iconic wardrobe pieces. An enforced example because this Cirque du Soleil show is co-produced by Jackson's estate.

    Video Games 
  • 1917 - The Alien Invasion DX reveals that the aliens who invaded earth has been observing humanity for a long time. For instance, Jesus Christ was an alien emissary.
  • In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa is found alive and trapped in an extremely aged shell of a body, kept alive by magic. An optional side-quest allows you to rescue him, and is required to be done for the 'good ending'. Johann Weyer is a character that's mentioned and heard, but never met in person, he's implied to have been a pupil of Agrippa.
  • Assassin's Creed gets a ton of mileage out of showing how nearly every historical figure was secretly a Templar, a group dedicated to controlling humanity from behind the scenes, or an Assassin, the opposing group who believes humans should be free to live however they want, or were somehow affiliated with the two groups. Most evil people were secretly Templars and most good people were secretly Assassins, but sometimes the games like to throw in a surprise.
  • Castlevania: Bloodlines plays with the story of the original Dracula novel, stating that Quincy Morris had a son, John Morris, and that the family was related to the Belmonts. The Castlevania series also does this with non-fictional characters. Aside from Dracula himself, Elizabeth Bathory (translated as "Bartley") is an antagonist in Castlevania: Bloodlines, and happens to be a different character from Carmilla. Gilles de Rais is The Dragon in the Nintendo 64 games, and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness casts the Count of St. Germain as a Trickster Mentor.
  • In Clive Barker's Jericho, many famous conquering leaders attempted to harness the power of the Firstborn under Al-Khalid. Of a more specific example, Aleister Crowley is said to have worked with the OSS.
  • Kane, leader of the Brotherhood of Nod in the Command & Conquer series, turns out to have a long and storied history. His most fanatical followers, the Black Hand, are implied to be the same Black Hand that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, and fittingly his main Temple of Nod is erected in Sarajevo. He makes an appearance in the Soviet campaign of Command & Conquer: Red Alert, acting as Stalin's adviser even while furthering Nod's interests. He claims to be the biblical Cain, and indeed in Command & Conquer: Renegade the Temple of Nod in Cairo features Abel's sarcophagus in a catacomb beneath it. When the alien Scrin arrive in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars they're surprised to see him, and Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight confirms that Kane is in fact an immortal alien that just happens to look human, who has been manipulating human history in his efforts to leave Earth.
  • The ending of The Conduit reveals that President John Adams is actually an alien mastermind who helped create the United States for his own purposes. The ending of Conduit 2 has George Washington and Abraham Lincoln alive and well and ready to help fight the upcoming alien invasion.
  • Near the end of the game Destroy All Humans! 2, it is revealed that Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev were either influenced by the Blisk, crablike aliens from Mars, or were themselves Blisk in disguise. It's also implied that the Blisk also mated with humans thousands of years ago, and that perhaps the Russians are the descendants of those matings.
  • Eternal Sonata's main character is Frederic Francois Chopin. Yes, the famous pianist and composer. The whole game's set in the fever-induced deathbed dreams of Chopin himself...
  • Fate Series: Since this series is about summoning historical and mythological beings to fight each other, this would be necessary.
    • Fate/stay night:
      • King Arthur was actually born a girl named Arturia — her gender was disguised from her subjects by Merlin.
      • Gilgamesh has an Ancient Indian spaceship in Fate/Zero.
      • Angra Mainyu, on the other hand, turns out to be a completely random person who his fellow villagers decided to blame for all their problems. When he was summoned, he proved incapable of standing against a real Servant and was killed, but the Literal Genie of the Grail interpreted his existence as a wish for there to be some ultimate evil, and corrupted itself in an attempt to grant it.
    • Fate/Apocrypha: Subverted with Shakespeare. Despite being summoned as a Caster, in life he was exactly what history recorded him as: An excellent writer, but nothing more. He had no knowledge of magic or connection to that world. He is famous enough that he still qualifies as a Heroic Spirit, and the Grail gave him a large power boost when he was summoned. He is by far the weakest Servant and spends most of the War recording the events as a story, but he is at least theoretically capable of fighting another Servant.
    • Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star: It is revealed that Altera was an alien superweapon sent to destroy human civilization long ago. She was defeated, but her remains transformed into a human girl. The Huns took her in and raised her to be their leader, a Historical Gender Flip of Attila the Hun.
    • Fate/Grand Order:
      • Mordred claims in an offhand comment that the Picts were in fact aliens.
      • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a member of a magical bloodline destined to become vessels for a Demon Pillar. Mozart himself avoided this fate through either his love for Marie Antoinette or his dedication to music.
      • In proper human history, Francis Drake reached Atlantis and stopped Poseidon from flooding the world. Her defeat of the Sea God earned her the true Holy Grail. There are also rumors that she took the place of her companion, Queen Elizabeth I.
      • The Queen of Sheba was part djinn and commanded a number of them.
      • The Romanov royal family were a family of mages who controlled a demon known as Viy, with Anastasia being the last in their line to form a contract just before her death.
      • Yu Miaoyi/Consort Yu was a True Ancestor who faked her death and survived to the present day. Her spouse Xiang Yu was an automaton created from the remains of Nezha.
      • Murasaki Shikibu was a practicing onmyoji who occasionally got dragged into misadventures with Abe-no-Seimei.
      • Subverted with H.P. Lovecraft. The Outer Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos are indeed real, but according to the Demon God Pillar Raum, Lovecraft had no knowledge of or connection to them, nor did he create them through his writing. Instead, he just managed to describe an existing eldritch pantheon in his stories out of sheer coincidence.
  • The plot of the 2nd Gabriel Knight. Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria was seduced by a charismatic male werewolf (Which actually indicates nothing about Ludwig's sexual preference; Even the Guys Want Him, and the same werewolf, it is all-but-explicitly-stated, seduces the otherwise straight Gabe), and that Ludwig and Richard Wagner had worked together to create an opera which, when performed under the acoustic conditions specially engineered into Neuschwanstein Castle, would trigger a werewolf's transformation involuntarily. Ludwig's purported "madness" was a cover for lycanthropy.
  • The not-well-known Hercs Adventure for the PS1 reveals that Hades (the Big Bad) was... A giant robot piloted by aliens.
  • Interstate '76 avoids this trope, but the sequel Interstate 82 plays it straight. The game's Big Bad is Ronald Reagan and his Dragon is John Hinckley Jr. After Taurus shoots the former, the latter is set up to take the fall.
  • In-universe example in The Journeyman Project series. Elliot Sinclair, inventor of time travel, is eventually revealed to be a 3000-year-old Atlantean guardian of a piece of Precursor technology entrusted to his people, and his distrust of Cyrollans is due to their role in the Atlantean genocide.
  • Live A Live:
    • In the Twilight of Edo chapter, Sakamoto Ryoma, together with shinobi sent to rescue him, fought clockwork robots, ghosts (including Historical Domain Characters), and a Black Magic-wielding daimyo who turned himself into a frog/snake demon.
    • In the Wild West chapter, the sole surviving horse of Custor's 7th Cavalry (named Comanche) has been turned into a violent outlaw by hateful ghosts of the slain cavalry members.
  • The Neverwinter Nights module "The Bastard of Kosigan" has an ancient civilization of primordial hyper-advanced humans playing god (or more specifically angels (the 'control' faction, led by Gabriel) and demons (the 'free will' faction, led by Elisa Than (geddit? Elisa Than? Satan?))) to use humans as proxies in their constant war with each other. Among other things, Jesus was sponsored by the demons (the apostles John (who you get to meet) and Judas were immortals, the rest were normal humans and actually believed it all), Gabriel did appear to Muhammad in a dream, the demons set off the barbarian invasions to destroy the corrupt Roman Empire the angels had set up, and the angels created Catholicism to use Jesus' message against those who sent him in the first place.
  • Seen in the arcade game, Ninja Commando. Thanks to the villain, Spider escaping to the past using his Time Machine, when you caught up with him you realize Spider had screwed with history so much that Tutankhamun is a Killer Robot Pharaoh, Lu Bu is a weredragon, and Oda Nobunaga a giant cyborg swordsman.
  • Though it's probably lost on anyone not familiar to Japanese history, Ōkami suggests and eventually confirms that historical figure Minamoto no Yoshitsune is a 200+ year old Moon-born celestial. For those wondering when Yoshitsune was ever shown or even mentioned in the game, just remember that his childhood nickname was Ushiwaka.
  • In the Persona series, Igor mentions that Carl Jung, father of the Jungian psychology the series is based around, happened to be a Persona user.
  • Similar to the Phantom Thief Jeanne example above, the PSP game Jeanne d'Arc has Jeanne as a magical girl fighting an invasion of demons spearheaded by a demonically possessed King Henry and the Duke of Bedford, who used to be a demon-battling hero himself. Although this may not qualify, as it doesn't seem to take place in our 15th Century Europe.
  • Rasputin the Mad Monk appears as this in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army - as a lecherous android devil summoner sent from an apocalyptic future to destroy an alternate timeline which should never have come into existence, with evil Matryoshkas and mysterious dimensional warping powers!
  • Saints Row:
  • The series Shadow Hearts is full of varying degrees of this, from H. P. Lovecraft being able to summon monsters, to Mata Hari being pulled into a quest to save the world from evil sorcerers.
  • Star Trek Online's blogs detailing the Temporal Crisis of Season 11 onward continue the mention of Jack the Ripper being an alien by saying that he was actually one that possessed people. It got caught up in fights between Temporal Agents and the Na'khul.
  • In Team Fortress 2, it is revealed that there have been several generations of predecessors to the mercenaries we all know and love, and that the first generation was an... interesting bunch. For instance, the original ensemble included Billy the Kid (Scout), Stonewall Jackson (Soldier), Abraham Lincoln (Pyro), Nikola Tesla (Engineer), John Henry (Heavy), Alfred Nobel (Demoman), Sigmund Freud (Medic), Fu Manchu (Spy) and Davy Crockett (Sniper). Abraham Lincoln also invented stairs, before he was assassinated by John "Tower of Hats" Booth.
    • The rocket launcher, the two-story house, America and the stage play were all invented by Shakespearicles, 'the strongest writer who ever lived.'
    • George Washington's greatest regret was not being permanently invisible. The Cloak and Dagger lets the Spy do just that.
  • In the Tomb Raider series, King Arthur was a real figure and the Excalibur was an ancient superweapon that granted him much power.
  • Touhou Project:
    • Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night says that there was a war between Earth and the Moon sparked by the Apollo 11 lunar landingnote , with Neil Armstrong specifically getting name-dropped. Moon Rabbit Reisen Udongein Inaba fled to Earth to get away from said war, and it's strongly implied that the Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by Reisen's future mentor Eirin Yagokoro shooting the oxygen tank with an arrow.
    • Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires features Toyosatomimi no Miko, a.k.a. Prince Shoutoku, except that spreading Buddhism across Japan was only used to control the people, while "he" secretly pursued immortality through Taoism. Oh, and "he" was actually a girl.
  • Various famous explorers and historical figures in Uncharted are revealed to have discovered famous hidden cities, searched for (and found) supposedly lost forever artifacts and treasure hordes, as well as belonged to the infamous secret societies of their day.
  • In Vampyr, the famous 12th Century knight Sir William Marshall is revealed to have been an vampire, the oldest one in Britain who served as sire and mentor for London's Council of Vampires. Furthermore at the end of the game, Jonathan's sire (who is heavily implied to have been Merlin) states that King Arthur was also a vampire warrior himself. An annoyed Jonathan then rhetorically asks if Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Alfred the Great, Francis Drake, Thomas More and Guy Fawkes were vampires too. His sire replies that at least one of them was.

    Visual Novels 
  • From Dies Irae there are a fair number of historical people that are made into extremely powerful warriors. Perhaps most notably the infamous man behind the Holocaust, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, is the stories main Big Bad and possesses powers so immense that he is a candidate for ascending to godhood.
  • The Shinsengumi were an interesting enough group on their own, but in Hakuouki they're secretly used by the shogunate as a testbed for a mysterious elixir which turns those who take it into nigh-unkillable but unstable and bloodthirsty superhumans. In addition to adding intrigue and a degree of uncertainty to the Foregone Conclusion, this also provides a convenient device to allow characters like Keisuke Sannan, Heisuke Toudou, and Souji Okita to remain involved in the plot well beyond the points at which their real-life counterparts died.
  • In Monster Prom, 400-year-old vampire Liam de Lioncourt mentions that the Roman Emperor Caligula was a vampire who later became Jack the Ripper, and that Virginia Woolf was a demon.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja implies that the Michael Jackson we all know and love(?) is a phony, and that the real (read: Thriller era) Wacko Jacko lives on a secret Moon base, run by Dracula. And his flatmates include Paul McCartney, Tupac Shakur, Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, and Bruce Lee. Though, given the nature of the comic, fantastic scenarios like this are standard operating procedure. Plus jet pack Jefferson.
  • In Casey and Andy, Grover Cleveland's wife is Satan. Not a euphemism.
  • In Dracula The Unconquered, it's revealed early on that "The Black Death" was actually a euphemism for Dracula himself, and the millions of deaths were caused by vampires rampaging across Europe.
  • Dresden Codak has some interesting theories about notable scientists/psychologists/etc. One of the more notable examples suggests that Niels Bohr was a cat, and thusly, by Schroedinger's principles, is immortal, so long as he remains unobserved.
  • Fake News Rumble has Dick Cheney - Evil Alien Overlord.
  • Hilariously subverted in Fans! when, after a time-travel-based encounter with robots and supernatural/alien life forms, H. G. Wells remarks that he wanted to write about things that weren't real and utterly fails to write his books. Even more hilariously, this leads to an Alternate Universe where he instead draws on the real life Kavorka Man aspect of his personality (helped along by one of the fans deciding it would be a good idea to sleep with him) and becomes a romance novelist instead.
  • Homestuck: Colonel Sassacrenote  raised young Nanna Egbert and was killed by a baby pistol-wielding Grandpa Harley. Oh, and Betty Crocker, instead of being a brand image, is actually a ruthless alien empress.
    • Andrew Hussie would release some concepts for the series that he later declared non-canon, further messing with history. Among other things: Albert Einstein, Lou Costello, and Adolf Hitler were raised as assassins by the aforementioned Betty Crocker, with most of their successes arranged by Skainet; Hitler and Einstein had a relationship that ended in a very nasty breakup, causing him to channel his feelings into the Third Reich while Einstein took the opposing side to avoid him; Costello was kept around as essentially a sex slave before he bailed. Oh, and Calamity Jane was an alien stranded on earth that got into a fight with the Condesce. Is it any wonder he never went through with this?
  • Jesus Christ In The Name Of The Gun is about Jesus getting fed up with God's "let's watch and see what happens" attitude towards all this suffering going on down on earth, so he kick-starts the Second Coming a little early so that he can go out in the middle of World War II and fuck up some Nazi shit. Ernest Hemingway comes along to give him a hand, and he needs it, because Hitler is a werewolf. Ethan Nicolle drew it.
  • In MoringMark - TOH Comics, it's eventually revealed that Amelia Earhart's mysterious disappearance was actually a result of her ending up in the Demon Realm, where she would go on to be an ancestor of the Blight Family.
    Luz: I knew it!
  • Spinnerette revealed that Benjamin Franklin travelled forwards in time to the desk of Adolf Hitler, where an assassin from the future promptly arrived to kill Hitler, but Franklin, not knowing the implications of the action, stops him and is accidentally pulled into a sort of time travel warp-tunnel. The assassin drops him in the year 2002 and continues on his merry way. Because he hadn't discovered electricity (required for time travel) yet, he's effectively immortal and invincible (e.g.: it is impossible to land a blow or shot on him) until he gets back, in order to prevent a time paradox. Presumably, no one realized what had happened until he showed up in 2002.
  • In Unwinder's Tall Comics, Barbecue Sauce writes "Tesla fics", in which various heroes from history and fiction are revealed to actually be an immortal Nikola Tesla in disguise. Supposedly, Tesla fics are popular enough to have entire websites devoted to them.
  • The entire Dungeons & Dragons game in The Word Weary is based off of this idea- the characters play D&D characters in a version of the 1917 Russian Revolution in which Rasputin is a high-level cleric, the Tsar is a white dragon (and the Tsaritsa is a half-dragon) and most of the Tsar's supporters are Hobgoblins.

    Web Original 
  • Beatrix Released by Shaenon Garrity portrays Beatrix Potter as a Reluctant Mad Scientist who creates Uplifted Animals and was inadvertently responsible for the Tay Bridge Disaster.
  • According to the Elias Material New Age website, the being Elias is the essence of the simultaneous focuses known as Ludwig van Beethoven, Lord Byron, Don José, Gandalf, explorer Vasco da Gama, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seymour Guado, Homer, Laozi, God-Emperor Leto Atreides II, Sir Palamedes, Salome, William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, Italian artist Francesco Squarcione, Oscar Wilde, and Knar of Tüle, a planet outside of the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • The Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency: Several parts in the history section mention that certain figures whether fought vampires or were vampires. Jesus cured a vampire in Capernaun, the Romans fought the vampire lord Qadrilla, there were vampire pirates and Jack the Ripper was a vampire. Zombies also have historical stories including a “Deadstock” concert, a Chernobyl-like disaster in the USSR and a ploy from Cuba to send zombies to the US.
  • Inglip was once Henry VI, King of England. After the cult that arose following his death faded, it seems the late king... changed.
  • New Vindicators features an immortal Isaac Newton as a recurring character, as an Esper (normal person with psionic powers) able to listen to spirits who drank an elixir to make him immortal. He's also a genius even beyond his real world self, having built sophisticated androids, and is part of the world's Illuminati along other immortal types. Ambrosius Aurelianus, a real life historic Romano-British warlord, is also the mythical King Arthur and his time's own Aurelius-which is to say, master mage.
  • In The Salvation War Dante's Inferno is an accurate portrayal of Hell based on visions sent to him by demons.
  • According to the SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-1084 is the grave of Ambrose Bierce, who cursed the town that had killed him and slew all but one of its citizens.
    • SCP-1447-2 is Steve Jobs, who apparently went to Tibet in 1985 and created his own Tulpa. Meanwhile, another Steve Jobs replaced him in public.
    • Mountaineer George Mallory was killed on Mt. Everest by a frostbite-causing monster, one that later spared Lincoln Hall. It's also heavily implied to be responsible for at least half of all recorded deaths for climbing Everest.
    • Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was apparently a talking lion.
    • Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs would have become a world-conquering monster were it not for the intervention of the Foundation (which included going back in time to invent the game of basketball and cause Hurricane Hugo).
    • SCP-2264 heavily implies that "The Hanged King's Tragedy" was written by Christopher Marlowe.
    • George Washington, or at least the one we're most familiar with, is a powerful robot.
    • Nikola Tesla not only successfully built his planned Death Ray, but it worked a little TOO well, resulting in SCP-2700, a ticking time-bomb that will bring about the end of the universe as we know it in 2234. He finished the plans with the help of a universe-hopping traveler, who promptly sabotaged it to destroy our universe, viewing humans as flawed compared to their own.
    • SCP-3477 is a collection of 34 men all claiming to be Harold Holt, former Prime Minister of Australia who supposedly died at sea in December 1967, all of whom have become biologically immortal in different ways.
    • According to SCP-3822, Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire was an amateur Sarkicist who used genetic engineering to make sure the Habsburgs would always have "pure blood" despite their inbreeding. It worked...very well.
    • SCP-3817 is an immortal clone of Felix Mendelssohn with very extensive self-inflicted injuries. He maintains that his injuries are not out of suicidal intent, but rather so he could use his suffering to create musical masterpieces, just like the great composers before him.
    • SCP-3872 is William Henry Seward, U.S. Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln. He was made immortal through "forbidden molasses-based alchemy" in 1857, and has gone more than a little crazy both from his immortality and from being left alone in an abandoned ASCI containment facility. Part of this insanity takes the form of an irrational hatred of molasses and rum.
    • Al Gore was coerced to run for the presidency in 2000 by Garber Gore, the alien parasite embedded in the back of his skull. Additionally, George W. Bush died in 1998 and was immediately replaced by Dr. Jack Bright in order to keep up appearances.
  • Syera of Springhole strongly discourages to have important figures in human history be or have business with secret supernatural entities or concepts, as it takes away credit from humans to do such things and assumes normal humans are incapable of doing these things without the help of the supernatural or aliens.
  • Tech Infantry, due to its early history as an expansion pack for the Old World of Darkness, kept much of that backstory about people like Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison being rival mages. Modred, a recurring Big Bad, also qualifies.
  • In the Whateley Universe, H. P. Lovecraft was writing stories that were largely accurate, because he had psychic powers.

    Web Videos 
  • Inverted in "Bible Time" by TomSka - Jesus is implied to be an ordinary man, and all the supernatural parts of the bible are the result of Tom travelling back in time to demand the book be made more interesting.
  • In Jerma985's "Jerma Rumble", Benjamin Franklin used a time-travelling machine solely to compete in the Jerma Rumble so that he can beat Jerma's ass.
  • In lonelygirl15, Aleister Crowley was a founding member of a secret society which aimed to gain eternal life by draining the blood of the legendary descendants of the Egyptian goddess Hathor. That's actually probably the most likely thing mentioned on this page.
  • It's mentioned in The Out Crowd that David Bowie is an interdimentional traveler.
  • George Washington "had a pocket full of horses, fucked the shit out of bears, threw a knife into heaven, and could kill with a stare!"
  • JFK was a telepathic, zebra healing, flying robot.

    Western Animation 
  • Agent Elvis: As its teaser shows, the series will follow Elvis Presley as he moonlights as a government secret agent.
  • American Dad!: Mary Todd Lincoln invented peanut butter. It wasn't George Washington Carver, that's for sure.
  • Back at the Barnyard: "Weird Al" Yankovic is a horse.
  • One episode of Black Dynamite reveals that Michael Jackson of The Jackson 5 was really a half-human half-alien hybrid from the planet Mamasaymamasamamakusa and that his "white" look towards the end of his life was actually his real alien appearance all along!
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Prehysterical Pet sees the Rangers encounter a small, rodent sized stegosaurus who turns out to be a hyper-intelligent alien. He reveals that several million years ago, his people sent a colony ship to Earth and he's been sent to find out what happened to them. The Rangers discover that exposure to Earth's atmosphere and vegetation caused the colonists to grow to humongous size, but also destroyed their intelligence, turning them into the lumbering mega-fauna we know as dinosaurs.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door reveals astronauts never landed on the Moon, they just thought they did. The KND hacked the transmission and sent them to a fake Moon so the adults wouldn't find out about their Moonbase. Also, according to a tie-in comic, the Great Wall of China was built to be the world's biggest water slide.
  • A few episodes of The Fairly OddParents! use this trope.
    • One episode sees Timmy shrinking down to enter Cosmo and Wanda's goldfish-bowl castle, where he discovers what he thinks is a "Hall of Fame" for their favorite godchildren. It turns out that they're actually the worst godkids they ever had, magically sealed inside paintings to keep them from causing any more harm. The most evil of them is a little girl who caused World War I (and, by extension, World War II and the Cold War) by wishing for Cosmo and Wanda to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand!
    • "Beach Bummed" has Cosmo and Wanda lose their wands on the beach. While they're digging, Cosmo comes across "a guy with a big collar and peanut butter and banana sandwich!", who promptly asks the fairy not to tell anyone about his "secret underground rock 'n roll beach kingdom." Exactly how the King vanished into said kingdom is never explained.
  • Family Guy:
    • Lou Gehrig created the disease bearing his name to take over the world.
    • Charles Lindbergh accidentally flushed away his son when he was teaching him how to use the toilet, then got rid of Amelia Earhart because she had seen too much.
    • Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are only two of many characters Fred Savage invented and dressed up as to continue his love of acting. This one's justified; Fred Savage wanted fame.
  • Futurama does this a couple times.
    • A What If episode shows that if Fry had not been frozen, a universe-destroying Temporal Paradox would happen (because Fry's life is a Stable Time Loop that would not happen if he wasn't frozen). When the universe starts breaking down, he meets then-Vice President Al Gore. Gore leads the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, whose sole duty it is to prevent disruptions in the space-time continuum... and cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. The group includes Gore, Stephen Hawking, Nichelle Nichols, Gary Gygax, and Deep Blue the chess-playing supercomputer.
    • "The Duh-Vinci Code" reveals that Leonardo da Vinci is still alive because he's from a race of long-lived Human Aliens and actually the dumbest person on his home planet, coming to Earth as he'd be far smarter in comparison.
  • There was a real Macbeth, although he wasn't quite the power thirsty regicidal dude depicted by William Shakespeare. In Gargoyles, though, Macbeth is a Highlander-style Immortal, still alive today thanks to an immortality pact. Word of God states that he and Shakespeare were drinking buddies, and that he was amused by the play named for him.
    • In the Halloween special of the Dynamite comic continuation, Nashville (who spent most of his early life time-travelling with his parents and likely came by the knowledge firsthand) claims that the pirate Blackbeard was not a human, but rather a particularly nasty gargoyle.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • The founder of the titular Gravity Falls, according to the episode "Irrational Treasure", was Sir Lord Quentin Trembley III, the 8th & 1/2 president of the USA. He was the most ridiculous president of the US, and was kicked out of office and erased from the history books. His term was replaced by William Henry Harrison (the official 9th and thus why Trembley was 8th & 1/2), and the government claimed some waste shoveling village idiot was the founder of Gravity Falls. Also in the same episode, the following are mentioned, both in gags and on on-screen text:
    • In "The Stanchurian Candidate", it's mentioned that Ronald Reagan was mind controlled by his "masters" using a high-tech tie made by Ford Pines. He thinks nothing of it.
  • The Little Mermaid: The Series has Hans Christian Andersen venture deep into the depths of the sea to verify the existence of Ariel's own species. Andersen's encounter with the mermaid then inspired him to write her story, by which the show's narrator tells the audience to go to the nearest library and find HCA's stories.
  • Men in Black: The Series states that Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and Raffi were human mecha powered by the tiny, peace-loving Arquellians. Presumably, they haven't dabbled in Earth politics for quite a while.
  • In Miraculous Ladybug, several historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Saint George and the Marquis de La Fayette are mentioned to have been past Miraculous holders.
  • The Real Ghostbusters: Alexandre Gustave Eiffel is discovered to be a 19th-century ghost hunter, and the prominent French landmark which bears his name turns out to be a primitive ecto-containment system.
  • Rick and Morty has a few examples, most notably Albert Einstein, who pretty much was his real life self, except for the part where he's inspired to write his famous Theory of Relativity out of spite for the Time Police who beat him up because they mistook him for Rick ("I VILL mess vith time!"), and Ice-T, who's apparently an alien from a planet where everyone's an elemental letter, who was banished for not caring about anything.
  • A classic Rocky and Bullwinkle arc involved the Kerwood Derby, a hat that made its wearer the smartest person in the world. Supposedly Einstein was wearing the Kerwood Derby when he developed his Theory of Relativity, and Archimedes wore the derby in his bathtub when he discovered his theory of water displacement (or at least remembered where he left the soap). According to the narrator, it was worn by Alexander the Great when he conquered the world, by Philip of Macedonia when he conquered the world, and by Elvis Presley when he...well, you get the idea.
  • The Simpsons had an episode where Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and King George banded together to hunt for an ancient ruby and created the Revolutionary War as a cover-up for their search.
  • South Park:
    • While investigating how he's able to appear at so many different gigs seemingly all at once, Craig and Clyde discover that Slash is really a mythological character based on the Dutch legend of Vunter Slaush. Turns out it was just one of their parents that actually played at Cartman's party.
      Cartman: "But then, who was the guitar player for Guns N' Roses?"
      Clyde: "One of our parents!"
  • Promotional material for the 2003 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles detailing the history of the Utroms confirms that one of them took on the identity of Abraham Lincoln.
  • An episode of The Tick features several major historical figures transported through time to the present. When the historical figures are all captured and tied up by the bad guys, George Washington Carver (who is among them) utters the immortal words, "If only I could get my hands on those peanuts!" He eventually does, and turns them into weapons of mass destruction.
  • Time Squad is all about secret historical weirdness, Hand Waved by history becoming "unstable" as it "ages". This apparently leads to stuff like Ludwig van Beethoven becoming a professional wrestler, Eli Whitney inventing flesh-eating robots instead of the cotton gin, and Albert Einstein giving up his work as a physicist to take on the identity of a boisterous, wacky used-car salesman.
  • The Venture Bros. suggests that Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, Eugene Sandow & Nikola Tesla (along with Fantomas and Dr Venture's ancestor) were members of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-esque Guild that was meant to safeguard and research an artifact made by the greatest minds of the past (from Archimedes to Leonardo). The fracturing of this guild would give birth to the Guild Of Calamitous Intent (a name coined by Wilde), which would become a Weird Trade Union for Supervillains.
    • This gets a little weird when Tesla joins forces with the Avon Ladies to fight the rest of them, despite the fact that Tesla and Twain were real-life Heterosexual Life-Partners.
    • Two of the Guild's highest ranking members are implied to be Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, with the plane crash that supposedly killed them both being a coverup. There is also Guild's leader, The Sovereign, who is a shapeshifter that everyone knows as David Bowie. Except it's not literally him, since it's later revealed that The Sovereign is actually an anonymous shapeshifter impersonating Bowie, who is apparently a good friend of his. It's also rumored in-universe that said shapeshifter's true form is either "the creature on the cover of Diamond Dogs" or the "woman beside Bowie on the cover of Pin Ups".
  • Young Justice: Just as with his comics counterpart, Vandal Savage has taken on many roles and identities over his fifty thousand years of life, including several real-world historical figures. Specifically confirmed on-screen are Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan, the latter role in which he successfully forestalled an invasion of Earth by Apokolips.

 
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Andy Warhol was a MIB agent

It's revealed that famed counterculture artist Andy Warhol was an agent of the Men in Black.

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