Is “Paul is Dead” Dead?: Unpacking One Of Pop Culture’s Most Enduring Conspiracy Theories

Life magazine cover, November 7, 1969

Post Author- Erik Wells

After the Beatles split up in 1970, each member of the Fab Four found continued success as a solo artist, but perhaps none has had a more prolific career than Paul McCartney. Twenty-seven number one albums, twelve Grammys from forty-seven nominations, collaborations with legendary artists in genres ranging from soul to country to house music, a screenplay credit on the infamous film flop Give My Regards to Broad Street, and a closing performance at the SNL 50th Anniversary Special that made this hard-hearted writer shed a single tear. When you look at it all written out, it almost makes you wonder how one man could accomplish so much in his lifetime. Well, according to some people…  he didn’t.

In late 1966, the Beatles were squirreled away in the EMI Recording Studios, charting a new sound and beginning to write what would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. The postponement of that winter’s scheduled tours, combined with a general retreat from the public eye, led to speculation amongst fans that McCartney had fallen ill, or worse, was leaving the band. These whispers remained just that, until early 1967, when rumors spread throughout London that McCartney had died in a car crash the previous November. Or if that one hadn’t killed him, then another accident on January 9, 1967 had finished the job.

The latter accident actually did happen, but McCartney’s Mini Cooper was being driven by Mohammed Chtaibi, the personal assistant of McCartney’s gallery owner friend Robert Hugh Fraser. McCartney, Fraser, and Mick Jagger had all crowded into Jagger’s small car for a weekend trip to Keith Richards’ Sussex estate, and Chtaibi had offered to meet them there with the Mini Cooper, before ultimately getting into a non-fatal accident when another car clipped him. McCartney’s car was a one-of-a-kind model designed especially for him (with oversized tires, an undersized steering wheel, smoke-tinted glass, and a wet bar), which made the identity of the driver a foregone conclusion in secondhand gossip. By February, the rumor had been admonished by the publishers of the Beatles Monthly fan magazine and by May, McCartney himself had squashed it in an interview promoting Sgt. Pepper’s.

All was quiet on the conspiracy front until September 1969, when an Iowan college student named Tim Harper wrote an article titled Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead in his university paper. With that innocuous act, the stories passed down as oral tradition and were etched into the written record. A few days later, a caller presented the article to Detroit radio personality Russ Gibb on the air, and Gibb promptly devoted the rest of his show to debating the theory. Within weeks, stations in 38 states had picked up the story and soon it was worldwide.

The Abbey Road cover art, said to contain evidence of Paul's death

By this point, it had been almost three years since the initial supposed car crash, so the question remained: just who exactly had been singing on all those tracks and appearing on those album covers? The most popular candidate: a young orphan named William Shepard, alias “Billy Shears”, who had won a Paul McCartney lookalike contest just weeks before the accident. The three surviving Beatles supposedly took him in as a ward and trained him to impersonate Paul in order to protect the fans from heartbreak. The only problem: there was no record of a man by either name competing in said contest because there was no record of such a contest ever taking place.

On a 1964 American tour, concert promoters had hired four decoys to distract fans while the Beatles snuck in and out of performance venues and hotels. New embellishments clung to the anecdote on each leg of the tour, and some fans started claiming that the band had cut out the middle man entirely and sent these decoys out to play entire shows in the cities they could not be bothered with. From there, it’s just a short jump to suggest that one of these decoys had been drafted to play Paul full time, possibly with some additional undercover training by MI5.

In one version of the story, the Beatles and their entourage had somehow held a full funeral service for Paul without any fans or paparazzi catching on. George’s eulogy became the Magical Mystery Tour track “Blue Jay Way,” while the procession was recaptured as the cover image for Abbey Road (note the fact that Paul is the only barefoot Beatle on the cover. In many cultures, the dead are buried sans shoes). “Blue Jay Way” was not the only Magical Mystery Tour track alleged to contain evidence of this cover-up. Lennon, who had little patience for people scouring his lyrics for deeper meanings, sang on the deliberately confusing “Glass Onion” that “the walrus was Paul,” a reference to “I Am the Walrus,” itself a famously perplexing tune. On “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Lennon could allegedly be heard whispering “I buried Paul.” At least until a 1996 re-release confirmed that he was actually saying “Cranberry sauce.” But by then, the conspiracy had been dissipated for decades. 

In a November 1969 cover interview for LIFE, McCartney acknowledged that he had participated in less press over the past couple years, but he denounced the “bloody stupid” leap people had taken in assuming his death. He explained, “I was switched on for ten years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days.” And with that, “Paul is dead” was dead. Mostly.

Fringe groups of conspiracy theorists still occasionally insist that they have new evidence to bring to light, but the original propagators have largely disavowed their role in the craze. Tim Harper offered up a possible explanation for why his article spread so far beyond its intended audience: “A lot of us, because of Vietnam and the so-called Establishment, were ready, willing and able to believe just about any sort of conspiracy.” In the half-century since, celebrity death-related conspiracies have become increasingly common, although usually they insist that a thought-to-be-dead icon is actually still alive, rather than the other way around. In 2009, TIME Magazine declared the “Paul is Dead” phenomenon to be one of the world’s “top ten most enduring conspiracy theories.” Take that, chemtrails!

Read more!

Meacham, Jon. “Separating Fact from Fiction: Paul Is Dead.” Time.com, 21 June 2012, content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0. Accessed 22 Oct. 2025.

Yoakum, Jim. “The Man Who Killed Paul McCartney .” Gadfly, May 2000. Accessed 22 Oct. 2025.