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Oh the ghost is here
It's a crook in a suit
The ghost is here
He's protecting some loot
The ghost is here
Oh give him the boot
He's fake!
—Skycycle, "The Ghost Is Here"
The characters investigate a site with reported paranormal activity. By the end of the episode, they discover that the supposed supernatural activity is nothing but an elaborate hoax taking advantage of local lore to frighten off the curious from discovering and interfering with their main criminal activity.
In the old days, this apparently really worked. Smugglers could scare away intruders by dressing as ghosts. Nowadays, however, this would be a really stupid ploy, as many real life haunted houses and areas of paranormal activity are tourist attractions. The criminals wouldn't be able to move for New Agers, UFOlogists, people from shows like Myth Busters, James Randi fans, and other rubberneckers.
The commonest subversion is for all — or some — of it to prove Real After All or at least of uncertain origin. Indeed, the investigators may discover the truth and haul the instigators off to jail, and the audience alone gets to see the unambiguous and real apparition.
One of the major exceptions to Skepticism Failure. See also Monster Protection Racket, where the monsters are real but they're being set up. The Inversion of a Scooby Doo Hoax is Mistaken For An Imposter. For the good counterpart, see Scarecrow Solution.
Examples:
Because the existence of a Scooby Doo Hoax tends to remain secret from the audience until the ending and belie earlier assumptions, mere presence on this list can be considered a spoiler.
Anime and Manga
- This occurs in one story arc in Telepathy Shoujo Ran.
- An episode of Kirby did this. The real surprise was that in the end, in addition to the kids playing pranks, there was an actual ghost. It was a mostly harmless one, though.
- At least one episode of Detective Conan / Case Closed did this. The protagonists receive a letter from a dead man and investigate a series of murders framed on his ghost. In the end, it turned out to be his son who was supposedly killed along with him, posing as a woman, seeking revenge for the death of his father.
- A number of other episodes of Conan did it, too. Since the series is set in a strictly rational world, any invocation of the supernatural can be assumed to be a Scooby Doo Hoax. (That doesn't stop normally-stalwart Action Girl Ran from cowering whenever she suspects she may be up against ghosts, however.)
Comic Books
- In Usagi Yojimbo, the hero comes to a tavern that borders a haunted woods. Once there, Usagi is forced to take a dare to explore the woods for an item there. In the woods, Usagi has a terrifying experience facing many of the monsters he has faced before and slashes out wildly. However, that reveals they are all elaborate puppets and he catches the puppeteers in this hoax. However, when he learns that the hoax, which is basically harmless, is helping their poor village prosper, he agrees to play along while allowed to get the quest object to win his wager.
- The original purpose of the comic-book character Dr. Thirteen in DC Comics was to travel to supernatural sightings and debunk them. When he was integrated with the rest of the characters in a shared universe, this naturally led to some problems as the supernatural does exist in The DCU. This was largely "solved" by making Dr. Thirteen a Flat Earth Atheist Butt Monkey.
- In the Donald Duck comic "The Old Castle's Secret," the ghost of Sir Quackly McDuck turns out to be a jewel thief using "invisibility spray." Carl Barks commented that he wanted to do a "Haunted Castle" story but at that time including "real" supernatural events such as ghosts in a Disney comic was strictly taboo.
- Another Carl Barks example comes from the story "Terror of the River", where Donald and his nephews investigate a giant serpent-monster terrorizing a waterway. The "monster" turns out a realistic inflatable model controlled by a guy in a submarine. As opposed to some of the other examples on this page, the perp had no ulterior motive-he was just a Jerk Ass who liked scaring people for the heck of it.
- Less notable Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories have done this over and over again in various forms. An inverted version where the heroes scare away the villains from something being protected is about as common. The twist where some of it is shown to be real after all appears frequently in both versions. One story-within-a-story, written by Goofy, was a parody; in the end, the answer to how the villain was able to create the appearance of all those supernatural monsters is explained by saying that, well, he was a magician, and magicians do all kinds of tricks we can't explain, so why should the story do that?
- The Golden Age Captain America, strangely enough, was written (at least in most stories available in reprints) as a non-supernatural horror comic. It was thus full of this sort of hoax (sometimes with fake supernatural creatures that are real murderers) as well as monsters created by science, ordinary killers with horror themes, etc.
Film
- The movie Volver: The whole population of a superstitious village is convinced that the spirit of a woman who died in a fire has come back to take care of her sister in her old age. When the sister dies, the ghost moves in with her daughter. It turns out that she never died in the first place; she burned the house where her husband and his lover were sleeping to the ground, and the lover's charred body was thought to be hers. She pretended to be a ghost to escape a murder investigation.
- The 5th Friday The13th movie is a semi example. The killer turns out not to really be Jason, but a copycat. Although it is one serial killer imitating another, he is pretending to have come back from the dead, even though the genuine Jason wasn't supernatural by this point and was in fact genuinely deceased (he would become the indestructible zombie we all know in the next film).
- Parodied in one of the endings of Wayne's World
- Captain Clegg is about a circle of rumrunners, led by Peter Cushing, who use this to try to scare away or distract the law.
- Trick R Treat: As part of a Deadly Prank, a group of kids pretend to be undead children. Then the real undead kids come and kill them. There's also the vampire, who isn't really a vampire at all, but just a regular Serial Killer.
Literature
- Raphael Sabatini's 1907 short story The Plague of Ghosts.
- Washington Irving's 1819 short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow strongly implies that Brom Bones eliminates Ichabod Crane as a rival for his lover's hand by dressing up as the Headless Horsemen and scaring him out of town.
- Literary example: Most of the Leaphorn/Chee mysteries by Tony Hillerman, with the supernatural elements in this case coming from the myths of the Navajo or other Native American tribes of the American Southwest.
- The Phantom Of The Opera
- Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, being a parody of The Phantom Of The Opera, had one member of Ankh-Morpork's Opera House dressing as "The Ghost", terrorizing and even killing members of the cast in order to hide his embezzlement. At the same time, there was an actual "Ghost" roaming the opera house who gave nighttime lessons to promising singers and left rose stems scented with rose oil to reward exceptional performances.
- Who also was a member of the opera house.
- Note that the Opera Ghost almost never pretends to be actually a ghost. He's perfectly happy to be a guy in a mask...
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, includes a similar plot twist. The story came out in 1902, making this Older Than Radio.
- The Simon Ark short stories by Edward D. Hoch.
- In the James Bond novel Live And Let Die, Mr. Big cultivates an air of voodoo around himself to deter investigation into his operations.
- Virtually every single instalment in the Austrian Knickerbockerbande youth crime fiction series, to the point where the reader would know from the start that the supposed haunting was fake, and the main interest was in finding out how the hoax worked.
Live Action TV
- An episode of Torchwood focuses on the investigation of a man-eating creature that turns out to be a perfectly human family of cannibals, using legend to discourage a direct confrontation.
- The cannibals don't pretend they're aliens or monsters, and rather than keep people away they leave a corpse laying out in the woods and even steal the SUV just to lure Torchwood into their village. They're only ruse is having family members in the police force so the disappearences aren't investigated.
- Many episodes of Banacek featured apparently supernatural events, debunked by the title character in the climax.
- Ditto, in the short-lived series, Blackes Magic.
- Ditto, in the also short-lived Probe.
- Reversed in The X Files, where it's almost always really a supernatural occurrence, but at least once it was criminals playing dress-up to distract people from their actual crimes.
- Either Inverted of Subverted trope in an episode of Psych. The monster is attempting to attract people to his "haunted" camp.
- The actions of the protagonist in that show aren't far from this trope, in that he feigns Psychic Powers to solve crimes.
- There's also an episode where Shawn and Gus are investigating a supposedly haunted house and the perpetrator of the Scooby Doo Hoax turns out to be Shawn himself.
- There was yet another episode when a local legend about a suicidal sorority girl was played with for revenge.
- The Doctor Who serial "The Rescue", where the 'alien monster' terrorising the shipwrecked colonists turns out to be one of the colonists in disguise.
- The Pushing Daisies episode "Girth" does this rather more violently, with people being killed, apparently by a ghost. It turns out to be someone who is very much alive.
- In the episode of Supernatural called "The Benders", Dean and Sam investigate an area with a high number of missing persons and the townspeople and viewers are made to believe that the culprit is some kind of supernatural monster. Turns out it's just a family who likes to snatch people and hunt them.
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- In the White Wolf RPG Changeling The Lost, there is an odd case of this. The genuinely supernatural Changelings of the Scarecrow Ministry have a tendency to create elaborate Scooby Doo hoaxes to keep people away from truly dangerous beings such as True Fae, werewolves and Spirits (either through fear of the hoax or through being attracted to it rather than the real monsters). Of course, sometimes they go a bit too far, and become the things they impersonate.
Webcomics
- Kate Beaton's comics have, in a couple of recent strips, featured "Mystery Solving Teens", which parody the entire genre. Having been enlightened to a mystery in the area, the teens go off and smoke for a while, then Ass Pull a name or group who was pulling the Scooby Doo Hoax for the benefit of the person begging their help.
Western Animation
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