THE GREAT WAR GHOST HOAX
It was the most remarkable prison break in history: in 1918, as World War I raged on seemingly without end, two young British officers escaped from a remote Turkish prison camp… by means of a Ouija board.
Yet that scheme – a meticulously conceived, rigorously engineered confidence game, worked for more than a year on their Ottoman captors – was precisely the method by which our real-life heroes, Elias Henry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill, broke out of Yozgad, an isolated prisoner of war camp high in the mountains of Anatolia.
Their plot seemed born of a fever dream. Using a handmade Ouija board, Jones and Hill would ensnare their captors in an elaborate piece of participatory theatre entailing candlelit séances, magical illusions and a hunt for buried gold, with clues seemingly planted by ghosts. If all went according to plan, Yozgad’s commandant, an iron-fisted Ottoman army officer, would gleefully conduct Jones and Hill along their escape route, and the Ottoman government would pay their travel expenses. If their con was discovered, it would mean a bullet in the back for each of them.
Jones and Hill’s hoax – one of the only known examples of a con game being used for good instead of ill – also required them to feign mental illness, stage a double suicide attempt that came perilously close to turning real, and endure six months
