In 1971, the magazine Man, Myth and Magic reported sightings of the ghost of an eighteenth-century vicar on the docks of Wapping in east London (Smyth [anonymously] 1971). The article quoted several witnesses to a sinister vicar whose ghostliness was revealed by his tendency to suddenly disappear. Historically, there had been a local vicar who ran a boarding house where the unfortunate tenants were murdered.
Except there wasn’t. In fact, the vicar of Ratcliff Wharf was a hoax generated by Frank Smyth as an experiment, as he revealed in the London’s Sunday Times 1 several years later (which was also broadcast by the BBC in a program called A Leap in the Dark on February 18, 1977). But by then, the hoax had apparently become local folklore and generated actual reports of a ghost in Wapping.