Paul is Dead

Naturally, we have no choice but to begin in the most obvious place, with not only one of the most famous conspiracies of The Beatles but also, indeed, all of the time. ‘Paul is Dead’ is the notorious rumour that McCartney did not live to see out the band’s tenure and instead was killed in a car crash in 1966, being secretly replaced to continue living the starry life we have lapped up ever since.

Most people know about Paul is Dead primarily through the use of an unconventional musical technique that only seemed to fuel it. The Beatles’ prolific use of backmasking in the album Revolver served to fan the flames, with reversed messages in ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘I’m So Tired’ allegedly revealing the lines “Turn me on, dead man” and “Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him”.

Since then, the conspiracists have never quite been certain whether the real McCartney is in the land of the living. It’s one of those things that no matter what anyone says or does, people are never going to stop casting it up, so you may as well buy into the fun side of it while you can. Macca himself indulged, giving a nod to fans in the crafty title of his 1993 concert album Paul is Live. But who exactly do people think has stood in for him all these years?

Billy Shears

That would be Billy Shears, which fans have variously claimed is the name of McCartney’s replacement. They also flaunted the idea of it being an orphan from Edinburgh named William Campbell, whom The Beatles trained up to look and sound exactly like Macca, but the Shears pseudonym has fared better over the mystery of time.

The Billy Shears persona was brought to the attention of the Beatlemania masses in Sgt Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band, where the elusive figure appears as a character. This sent the rumour mill into overdrive, with the claim emerging that, to all intents and purposes, this was McCartney trying to communicate messages in The Beatles’ songs from beyond the grave.

But just stop and take a beat because there really is a much more logical explanation to all of this. Instead of Billy Shears being the McCartney imposter subbed in by MI5 to avoid the international trauma of revealing his death to fans – yes, that’s really what they thought – the character was simply the persona Starr adopted along with all the other Fab Four as part of the concept of Sgt Pepper. As we say, there’s really no other explanation than the whole world being out of their minds.

President Nixon placed spies on Lennon

We can all be mistaken for the illusion that presidents and other world rulers are far removed in a bubble from the outside world, and when it comes to the intersection of politics and culture, it seems rare that the two should ever meet. But in this instance, the bizarre tale of Richard Nixon’s obsession with Lennon turned out to be more fact than fantasy.

It was 1972, at the height of President Nixon’s second administration, and Lennon was simultaneously in the full flow of his anti-war campaign regarding the US involvement in Vietnam. But it was fair to say that Nixon took umbrage to this, and prior to ordering the singer’s deportation from the country, apparently had government spies placed on him to assess the supposed communist threat he posed.

But this, as an outlier to much of the other contents of this list, did actually end up being true, as in previously secret files released in 2007, it was revealed that Nixon’s minions were tasked with tracking Lennon’s every move for over a year throughout the ‘70s. You can maybe suppose over time that the effects of following a rock legend around would rub off, however, as eventually the spies began turning into music critics and writing notes on his shows. We’d better watch our jobs.

Macca invented the selfie and the photobomb

This one is less of a conspiracy than it is just a blatant untruth spouted by Macca himself, but it’s one of the more light-hearted examples from The Beatles rumour mill, so it bears being included. In 2013, McCartney hilariously tried to boast the claim that it was he who had originally begun the social media staples of the selfie and the photobomb long before the concept of posting on the grid ever became a thing.

He tried to assert on American TV that he was the first person to ever take a selfie, but offering no real evidence to back that up, the lie soon fell flat. The tradition of selfies, of sorts, dates back as far as 1900 – and as much as he’s been kicking around a while, he isn’t quite at that geriatric stage of life, especially when he’s meant to have been dead since 1966, remember?

However, McCartney’s slightly strange stories didn’t stop there, as he also alleged that an old photo of him and Harrison appearing in the background of two fans’ shot was the first example of photobombing. OK, then. It’s pretty clear that this is more of a natural coincidence than a phenomenon that Macca himself created, but to be fair, he’s famous enough that we can let him think what he wants.

John Lennon sold his soul to the devil

But back in the real world, for the time being, the spirits were evidently not set to align for Lennon. Over the years, biographers and theorists, too many and mad to count, have made outlandish claims about the quartet both as individuals and collectively, but one of the most bizarre claims in light of Lennon’s murder was that he had actually sold his soul to the devil.

The story went that, in his younger days, Lennon had been so desperate and clamouring to feel the luxuries of fame that he completed a little transaction with the forces that be to make him a bigger star than Elvis Presley. Well, you can certainly say he got what he asked for on that one. Yet what also apparently came with this dark arts deal was a much more sinisterly befitting devilish fate than even the King of Rock and Roll had suffered himself.

They claimed the price Lennon paid for mixing with these unknown forces came in his death on December 8th, 1980, when he happened to be killed in the same location where the classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby was set some 12 years prior. Apparently, this predetermined Lennon’s demise along with his bewitched soul, but it’s clear this is a rumour that needs a hell of a lot of dispelling.

Lennon and the number nine

Above all, however, by the way these stories shape up, it seems that not only was Lennon a sonic superstar but also the subject of an absolute field day for conspiracists the world over, as he just kept reeling them in. Next up was his admittedly unnerving connection to the number nine, tracking back over a life long before mania took hold and permeating his kinship to other worlds.

Aside from various instances where it cropped up in his music career, for starters, Lennon was born on October 9th, died at the Dakota building on New York’s Ninth Avenue, lived out his Liverpool childhood at 9 Newcastle Road, and most of all, was in The Beatles for nine years. This uncanny chain of coincidence was not lost on Lennon either, as the number kept revealing itself throughout the course of his sonic canon – though some of them were obviously conscious.

The album Revolver is the most pertinent example with the aforementioned song ‘Revolution 9’, but there’s also Let it Be’s ‘One After 909’ and his solo ‘#9 Dream’. Whether this became a mark of luck or a curse too terrifying to break was unclear, but the rest of The Beatles evidently felt the need to honour the tradition through the release of their digital remasters on September 9th, 2009 – in other words, 09-09-09.

All of them died and were replaced by body doubles

It seems Beatles fans were the protégés of the Grim Reaper because they really wouldn’t let the idea of death go. But instead of this conspiracy just firing for Macca in the jugular, they decided to take aim at all of them, claiming that all four members were dead and had been replaced by body doubles.

Billy Shears was really getting put to work on this gig, wasn’t he? The suggestion was, much like the Paul is Dead theory, that the Fab Four were somewhere in the heavens above, sending subliminal messages to fans about their real fate through lyrics on songs and artwork on albums. As it turns out, there’s one particularly iconic cover that we could have all been taking for granted as the key to the supposed ‘truth’.

Ever been one of the millions to walk that famous zebra crossing to replicate the artwork of Abbey Road? Well, according to hearsay, you could actually be emulating a funeral procession for the Fab Four that the body doubles were allegedly depicting. There’s something to stop you in your tracks. But look a bit closer, and the rabbit hole only continues to deepen. That car in the background has the registration plate ‘28IF’, which is apparently meant to indicate the very age Lennon would have been if he had lived to see the album’s release. Trippy.

Being visited by Lennon during the Anthology project

The summation of all these years of incessant rumour, and in particular Lennon’s otherworldly connections, was a truly stirring spiritual experience for the surviving trio following their main man’s death. It came during the recording for the 1995 Anthology 1 project, where an appearance from Lennon in the ether set the wheels in motion.

With the blessing of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, the remaining Beatles recorded around Lennon’s backdated original demos for ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. It was undeniably an emotionally strenuous process for McCartney, Starr, and Harrison, but in the end, a sign appeared that confirmed to them that Lennon was never far from view.

After the songs had been recorded, the remaining three underwent a photo shoot in preparation for promotion, at which point a white peacock inexplicably turned up, with Macca exclaiming, “‘That’s John!’ Spooky, eh? It was like John was hanging around. We felt that all the way through the recording.” With the help of spirits near and far, the stars aligned to show that Lennon always had the backs of his comrades – spanning over a career of mania and conspiracy and downright bedlam, what The Beatles boiled down to was just four Liverpudlian lads with a dream to make it big.

The Fab Four sacrificed children

Again, sticking with the satanic theme – will it ever end? – we reach the simply mind-bending suggestion that The Beatles themselves were the devil incarnate and used to sacrifice children as a side hustle to top the charts all over the world. Because why wouldn’t you, after all?

According to crowds of cult followers, this theory is made plausible by images which allegedly depict The Beatles making Masonic symbols, indicating their kinship to the dark side. Amongst a slew of other impossible statements, it’s also claimed that the band were formed by the British government as a means of mass international control of global affairs, dating back to the 1700s in the days of aristocracy.

Hopefully, it goes without saying that this one can be firmly and resoundingly put to bed. But it just goes to show the true terrifying effects of fame—what we might consider to be a life of champagne and roses really does have its alarming drawbacks, such as having wild, unfounded allegations levelled at you. It’s a crazy world we live in.

‘Helter Skelter’ and the Manson murders

Returning back to the notion that the Fab Four were the root of all evil, this was manifested in a truly much more chilling sense than could ever have been imagined when the conspiracists first set up shop. As it transpires, The Beatles have an indirect role to play in one of the most prolific and bloody historical events ever, a shackle weighted so firmly on their backs that it will never leave, despite how much they want it to.

This came about from the declaration by heinous cult murder leader Charles Manson that The Beatles directed him towards a life of slaughter through those infamous subliminal messages in their lyrics, especially in the song ‘Helter Skelter’. “Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the ‘Paul is dead’ thing or who figured out that the initials to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ were LSD and concluded I was writing about acid,” Lennon later reasoned, but it still doesn’t measure the petrifying state of Manson’s psyche.

The ringleader contended that ‘Helter Skelter’, among other tunes like ‘Piggies’ and ‘Blackbird’ were a surreptitious invitation to incite a race war and, growing increasingly impatient for the bloodshed to kick off, Manson decided to take matters into his own hands and brutally end the lives of Sharon Tate and Leno LaBianca among a multitude of others. Above all else, the impact of a swirling frenzy of conspiracy built up to a dizzying speed at that moment, blasting through The Beatles’ door like a tornado.