5th Duke of Cleveland Hoax - Visits To Stillwater Area High School

Visits To Stillwater Area High School

The 22 year-old Gardner allegedly visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times, telling students he was 17-year-old Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland and expressing an interest in enrolling in the high school. Assuming an English accent, Gardner reportedly insisted on being called "your Grace", claimed he was 27th in line for the British throne and that he was friends with Prince Harry.

Student journalists with the monthly Pony Express student newspaper became suspicious when he reportedly misspelled the name of the castle he claimed to live in. Their subsequent investigation included a call to the British consulate in Chicago and scouring the internet, both confirming that the Dukedom of Cleveland does not currently exist, having been extinct since 1891. The students then found an entry about "Caspian James Crichton Stuart IV" on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia that had been marked for deletion and were able to derive from the deletion discussion Gardner's real name. Students subsequently found that in 2002 he had been convicted of 4th-degree criminal sexual conduct, a conviction for coercing a 14-year-old girl to have sex.

The school's principal indicated that no problems had been noted resulting from Gardner's visits and that staff members had supervised Gardner's visits to the school.

Read more about this topic:  5th Duke Of Cleveland Hoax

Famous quotes containing the words high school, visits, area, high and/or school:

    Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. It’s exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. “I ain’t what I ought to be. I ain’t what I’m going to be, but I’m not what I was.”
    Stella Chess (20th century)

    The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.
    David Hume (1711–1776)

    The problem for the King is just how strict
    The lack of liberty, the squeeze of the law
    And discipline should be in school and state....
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)