Indian rope trick
A tale of a rope that rises into the sky and a boy who climbs it, famous in the West and never reliably witnessed.
Also: rope trick, Hindu rope trick, Wilkie hoax
In the story, a street performer throws up a rope which stays rigid, a boy climbs it and vanishes, and sometimes returns. The tale is often called Indian, but its earliest detailed written source, the traveller Ibn Battuta's account of a performance before a governor in China in the fourteenth century, did not place it in India. In 1890 the Chicago Daily Tribune printed a vivid report that its editor later admitted was a hoax. The Magic Circle in London in the 1930s investigated and found no eyewitness, and magicians have said that no one has performed it outdoors as described. Indian street magicians, who have a long and skilled tradition of their own, have often been unfairly judged by the legend.