Shining a light into the often-overlooked work of obituarists

A welcome light has been shone on the often-overlooked work of obituarists in the RTÉ series Obituary. If you haven’t seen it, the television show is about a self-starting journalist who provides her own assignments by enthusiastically killing people.

The character, played by Siobhán Cullen, likes to write the obituaries in advance before dispatching the subjects to their grisly fate. Of course, writing advance obituaries is not only the preserve of murderous journalists. It’s standard practice to prepare obituaries on major figures so that they can be quickly updated and rolled out within hours of the death announcement.

It’s not something the media likes to shout about, so imagine the red faces when Radio France Internationale accidentally published about 100 advance obituaries three years ago. It was updating its system when it released the obituaries and inadvertently killed off luminaries such as Queen Elizabeth, Clint Eastwood, Pelé and Jimmy Carter. It also prematurely announced the death of French businessman Bernie Tapie, who must have been seriously questioning his mortality as it was the third time his death was announced.

In this fast-moving news cycle, there’s always a risk that you might prematurely report the death of a famous person. But how can you guard against the chance that a person might fake their own death? Meet Alan Abel, the US hoaxer who did just that and fooled the New York Times into publishing his obituary in 1980.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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At that stage, Abel had enjoyed a long career tricking the media into believing his wild escapades. One hoax involved running a fictional candidate for the US presidency - twice. He and his wife Jeanne created Yetta Bronstein, a Jewish housewife from the Bronx. She promised a mink coat in every closet if she got elected and pledged to put truth serum in the US Senate’s drinking fountain. Abel struck gold with his catchy slogan, “Vote for Yetta and things will get betta”. But despite a lot of media coverage things never got betta for Yetta as both campaigns tanked.

Abel’s first major hoax came in 1959 when he established the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals to campaign for the clothing of all animals taller than four inches or longer than six. “A nude horse is a rude horse” was one of its slogans and to highlight this, he led a picket of the White House to demand that First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy protect the modesty of the First Horse. Unsuspecting members of the public sent large donations to help the cause - an astonishing $40,000 cheque in one case - but he returned them to avoid being charged with fraud.

Word of the society even travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to Inishmore island. In 1966, Eibhlín Ní Bhriain wrote an article in this column, under the pen name Candida, about her encounter with a fisherman on the island. They were looking at pigs when he noted with a grin that there was “some organisation wanting to put clothes on animals”.

She wondered if Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht had put the idea of dressing animals into Abel’s head. In it, Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa’s grandfather hears that the government is paying £2 for every English-speaking child in the area. Bónapárt is the only child in the house but the inspector coming to see the children is short-sighted, so a litter of piglets is dressed in suits of grey wool. When the inspector arrives, the earthy smell emanating from the house ensures he goes no further than the front door. And when he peers into the house, the poor light conspires to convince him that there are 12 young children in there.

It sounds like the sort of hoax that Alan Abel would have appreciated. But back to his fake death, which he organised with a military precision, according to the New York Times. A dozen accomplices backed up the story that he had suffered a fatal heart attack while location scouting in Utah for a horror movie. The movie title was Who’s Going to Bite Your Neck, Dear, When All of My Teeth Are Gone? Of course it was.

A fake funeral director collected his belongings, and the New York Times was notified by his grieving widow. Another friend posed as an undertaker to answer fact-checking calls from the media. The obituary was published on January 2nd, 1980, followed by his gleeful press conference the next day.

He died, for real, in 2018. His second New York Times obituary carried the headline: Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94. The obituary noted that the death had been additionally confirmed by the hospice and funeral home.

Well, you can never be too sure.