Cemetery Theme Park. Imagine it for a second. Manicured lawns. Perfect flowers. Necro-Disneyland. Six Flags with 21-gun salute. New Orleans -- only cleaner.

A Cemetery Theme Park called the Final Curtain. Because death is boring, and who needs a cortege when you can hire a parade?

But remember this: There is nothing more powerful than a great story. Not even the truth.

The Final Curtain story may already sound familiar. Maybe you read about it in the Los Angeles Times or the Boston Herald. Perhaps you heard about it on NPR, or a morning show on your local radio station. It's even possible that you saw something about it on a Fox television affiliate.

It doesn't really matter where you actually heard about the Final Curtain. Most of the stories -- dozens of separate pieces -- were pretty much the same. They were all wrong. Deathly wrong.

The Final Curtain, the news organizations reported, was the name of a chain of theme-park cemeteries being built by a New Jersey company called Investors Real Estate Development. The business model was a bit complicated (the Final Curtain was supposedly a private corporation, but some sites would be given away), but the central idea wasn't. The hook: to give artists a chance to design their own grave sites.

In proper forward-thinking art-speak, the Final Curtain Web page called these burials "site-specific works of passage." The company was seeking -- and had accepted -- proposals in anticipation of its first park in New York. Illustrator Nick Gaetano proposed a hot-blue neon sign reading "Nick is Dead." An artist and writer named Julia Solis wanted her body fat to be rendered to fuel an eternal flame. A woman named Kim Markegard had submitted plans for a jukebox and a 10-foot by 10-foot parquet floor so that her friends and family could dance on her grave.

There was more. The Final Curtain would make money by charging guests admission and cleaning up on concessions. There were timeshare plans and vacation packages, galleries and museums, Dante's Grill and the Heaven's Gate Cafe. If it sounds ridiculous, consider a few other cultural realities: "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?", cloned pets, impeachment.

Now, imagine that you're a journalist. You want to cover this story. You can't lose with a story about Cemetery Theme Parks. Your editor is impressed. The jokes write themselves. The headlines alone ...

It's almost too good to be true.

Unfortunately, that was the problem.

The Final Curtain turns out to be an elaborate media hoax cooked up by Joey Skaggs, a 45-year-old trickster in New York who's made a career of fooling the media and calling it art for nearly 35 years. Skaggs has appeared on CNN and "Good Morning America" as a drill sergeant with the Fat Squad, a fake disciplinarian diet program; WABC did an Emmy-nominated investigative segment on his Cat House for Dogs, a place to get your pooch laid.

Skaggs refuses to reveal how much of his own money he spent on his latest prank; he makes a living selling paintings and sculpture and occasionally teaching.

This is a great story.

Next page | Meet Joey Skaggs
1, 2, 3

Illustration by Katherine Streeter/Salon.com