Halifax Slasher

The Halifax Slasher was an incident of mass hysteria that occurred in the town of Halifax, England in November 1938 following a series of reported attacks on local people, mostly women.

The week long scare began after Mary Gledhill and Gertrude Watts claimed to have been attacked by a mysterious man with a mallet and “bright buckles” on his shoes. Five days later, Mary Sutcliffe reported an attack on herself. Reports of attacks by a ‘mysterious man’ with a knife or a razor continued, and the nickname “The Halifax Slasher” stuck. The situation became so serious the Scotland Yard was called in to assist the Halifax police. Vigilantes groups were set up on the streets, and several, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beat up; business in the city was all but shut down. Rewards for the capture of the attacker were promised; reports came of more attacks in nearby cities.

In the evening of November 29, Percy Waddington, who had reported an attack, admitted that he had inflicted the damage upon himself. Others soon had similar admissions, and the Yard investigation concluded there were no “Slasher” attacks. Five local people were subsequently charged with public mischief offenses and four were sent to prison.

2 December the Halifax Courier ran this story:

Carry on Halifax! The Slasher scare is over… The theory that a half-crazed, wild-eyed man has been wandering around, attacking helpless women in dark streets, is exploded… There never was, nor is there likely to be, any real danger to the general public. There is no doubt that following certain happenings public feeling has grown, and that many small incidents have been magnified in the public mind until a real state of alarm was caused. This assurance that there is no real cause for alarm, in short, no properly authenticated wholesale attacks by such a person as the bogy man known as the ‘Slasher’, should allay the public fear…