It's 1975, and you're browsing the latest issue of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. You run across an article about Lillian Virginia Mountweazel and read about her beautiful photographs of rural American mailboxes and her sudden death in an explosion while working for Combustibles magazine. How sad.
Except that none of this actually happened, and Ms. Mountweazel never existed. The encyclopedia made her up to catch copyright infringers trying to steal their data and use it for their own. The unsuspecting theives would copy everything, including the story about fictious Lillian. And that would give the encyclopedia legal proof that their material was copied.
It may sound like a strange practice, inserting fairy tales into factual reference books, but it used to be normal practice, and readers many times would not have even realized it. I wonder how many of these "ghosts" are still floating around out there?
When you think about it, who's to say all of this stuff isn't real? I mean, we base most of our knowledge of existence on old writings by dead authors and history books that have been sculpted individually to our needs. Real doesn't really matter anymore.
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