The Halifax Slasher and the Deadly Power of Collective Fear

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November 1938, Halifax, England.

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For two weeks, an entire town believed they were being hunted by a razor-wielding maniac.

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Businesses shut down, mobs formed, and innocent man died.

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But here's what nobody saw coming.

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The attacker they were hunting was never real.

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This is the story of the Halifax slasher, and how fear became the deadliest weapon of all.

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[Music]

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So let's talk about what happens when an entire community just collectively decides to believe in a monster, not a metaphorical monster.

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An actual literal guy with a razor blade stalking the streets at night,

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except he probably wasn't even real, and the panic he caused killed someone anyway.

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November 1938, Halifax, England.

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A town in West Yorkshire that's about to experience what experts now call one of the most intense cases of mass hysteria and modern history.

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We're talking about two weeks where everything just falls apart.

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People stop going to work, businesses close, vigilante gangs roam the streets, and before it's over, a man named Michael MacIvin will take his own life because his co-workers suspect him of being the Halifax slasher.

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Here's the thing that makes this story so wild. The investigation would eventually conclude that the slasher was mostly fiction, a phantom, a collective nightmare that an entire town projected onto their foggy November streets.

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But the consequences? Those were brutally horrifyingly real.

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Let's set the scene. It's late November 1938, and Britain is holding its breath.

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The Munich Agreement had just been signed two months earlier, and everyone knows war is coming. There's this background hum of anxiety vibrating through the whole country.

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People are scared, they're on edge, waiting for something terrible to happen.

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Halifax itself is wrapped in that thick, dense fog that November brings. Add into this the atmosphere and fear of uncertainty, and someone introduces the perfect villain.

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A mysterious attacker leaping from the shadows with a razor blade, slashing at random.

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The town had a history with this kind of threat. Back in 1927, a man named James Leonard had been convicted of stalking and slashing the clothes of six women.

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He got six months in prison for it. That case lived in the community's memory, sitting there like kindling, waiting for a spark.

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November 16, 1938, two women, Mary Gletthill and Gertrude Watts report being attacked in Repondent by a man with a mallet or hammer.

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They describe him as wearing bright buckles on his shoes. This is the spark, but it's not quite the fire yet.

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The fire starts five days later. November 21, Mary Suckliff, 21 years old, is walking home from Macintosh Factory on Queens Road.

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A man steps out from under a street lamp. She raises her arm to block him. She gets a deep cut on her wrist that requires four stitches.

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This is the moment everything changes. This is the one attack that investigators would later look back at and potentially call genuine.

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And that's important because this injury, this verifiable wound requiring medical attention, gives the community and the media everything they need to justify the panic that's about to consume them.

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Three days after Mary Suckliff's attack, Clayton Aspenall gets attacked outside St. Andrew's Methodist Church.

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He's a Sunday school caretaker. He suffers wounds to his head and his hands. This attack happens just 300 yards from where Suckliff was injured.

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The Halifax Courier and Guardian newspaper names the attacker. They call them the Halifax Slasher. They offer a reward, first 10 pounds, then 25.

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And with that naming, with that reward, they transform scattered incidents into a narrative. They gave the fear a shape, a name, a story.

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The reward does something else too. It creates a financial incentive for people to claim they've been attacked.

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We're not talking about a little attention-seeking behavior here. We're talking about actual money dangling in front of people during tough economic times.

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Combined with the intense media coverage, it becomes a perfect recipe for false reports. Between November 25th and 28th, the reports multiply.

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Annie Cannon, Alice McDonald, Hilda Lodge, and then Mary Suckliff again.

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She reports a second attack on November 28th, this time on her doorstep while her mother is nearby.

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Police arrive within minutes. The circumstances are immediately suspicious. This second claim damages her credibility so bad that it helps fuel police suspicions that most of these are actually fabricated reports.

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The panic spreads beyond Halifax. Reports start coming in from Manchester, Bradford, Giggleswick, which I can't believe is a real place.

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The media amplification turned a local scare into a regional hysteria. By late November, similar reports are being dismissed in London. The fear has gone national.

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Halifax itself becomes paralyzed. Businesses start to shut down. People refuse to leave their homes after dark. The core functions of the town just stop.

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This is what happens when existential fear overrides everything else, when survival instincts kick in so hard that economic and social necessity become irrelevant.

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The police response is massive, but inadequate. They can't keep up. They can't control the situation. So vigilante groups form. Gangs of citizens roaming the streets looking for the slasher.

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The police have to deputize 80 more people to manage the search and try to curb the lawlessness. And because mobs don't do nuance, innocent people are targeted.

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Several men get beaten up based on nothing but suspicion and bad timing. Clifford Edwards shows up to help Hill to lodge after she reports her attack on November 28.

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The crowd immediately decides he's the slasher. A mob forms. They're chanting for his death. Police have to escort him home to prevent a lynching.

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Fred Baldwin gets attacked by drunk vigilantes on November 27. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong face and the wrong crowd.

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Michael McEven is 46 years old. He struggles with mental health issues. When his coworkers at work start publicly suspecting him of being the Halifax slasher, the pressure becomes unbearable.

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Michael McEven dies by aspirin overdose. Suicide. He becomes the only definitive fatality of the entire slasher scare.

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Think about that for a second. The phantom attacker killed nobody. The panic killed Michael. The rumor, the suspicion, the mass paranoia took a vulnerable man and pushed him over the edge.

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This is the real cost of mass hysteria. A fictional crime led to a real death. By November 29, the situation is so out of control that Scotland Yard sends two detectives. The comparison to Jack the Ripper gets made.

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That's how serious this has become. That's how completely local authorities have lost control.

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The key to breaking this case comes from Percy Waddington. He reported being attacked on November 25 and he claimed he tore a tab from under his attacker's coat sleeve during the assault.

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The tab is found near the old earth rugby ground in Ellen. Investigators trace the raincoat. It belonged to Waddington himself.

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Confronted with the evidence, Waddington confesses on November 29. He did it to himself. The victim was the perpetrator. This one confession breaks everything open.

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Hilda Lodge, whose claim led to the mob targeting of Clifford Edwards, admits to police that she told the newspaper a lot of lies.

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One woman confesses that she sliced her own arm after a fight with her boyfriend because she'd heard about the slasher and saw an opportunity.

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A 15-year-old girl in Donkaster admits that she faked an attack after reading the reports.

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Nine people confess to cutting or injuring themselves. By December 2, the Halifax Courier publishes a complete retraction.

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The paper that amplified the panic now declares it over. The slasher doesn't exist. There never was any real danger to the general public.

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The forensic assessment is brutal in its clarity. Out of 21 reported incidents, only one was tentatively believed to be genuine.

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Mary Suckliff's first attack, that initial cut that started everything. Seven were self-inflicted wounds.

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Eight were attributed to accidents or causes that had nothing to do with any attacker. Five were complete fabrications. The police spent 269 hours on this investigation.

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112 officers. The financial cost was approximately 7,500 pounds in today's money. That's the measurable cost.

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The immeasurable cost. Michael McEvans' life. The trauma of mob violence. The breakdown of community trust. The beaten men who were presumed guilty.

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Two weeks where an entire town stopped functioning. Five people get charged with public mischief. Four go to prison.

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Hilda Lodge gets four weeks. Beatrice Sorel gets four weeks. Winnie McCall and Leslie Nichols also serve time. The sentences are relatively light because the court acknowledges the hysteria. But they serve their purpose.

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The legal system restores order by replacing the phantom with actual identifiable perpetrators.

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Here's what keeps this story interesting decades later. That first attack on Mary Suckliff.

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Police believed it might have been real. It happened before the media frenzy truly ignited. Before the onslaught of Hoaxes.

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Was there actually one genuine attacker whose single crime got so expertly copied and masked by the avalanche of fraud that his existence got erased by the Hoaxes?

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Did the panic he accidentally triggered actually protect him by making his crime impossible to investigate? That's the theory that makes this case unique among the phantom killer stories.

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Usually we're trying to prove something happened. Here we're trying to figure out if something real got buried under a mountain of fake.

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The Halifax slasher case is studied now as textbook mass sociogenic illness. It shows exactly how pre-existing anxiety gets externalized onto a single figure when amplified by sensational media coverage.

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The town had the 1927 slasher case sitting in their collective memory. They had the stress of impending war. They had the fog and the darkness and the economic uncertainty.

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All they needed was one injury, one verifiable wound, and the fear had permission to explode.

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The media gave it a shape and a name. The reward gave it motivation. The vigilantes gave it power. And Michael McEven paid the ultimate price.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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Quickly, let's get to an email from one of you that listens. Hey, Joe, my husband is always baffled at how I can listen to murder stories while folding laundry like it's like jazz.

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I told him I'm not weird. I'm just a true crime person. Do people in your life ever give you that you're talking about murder too casually look or have they learned to roll with it by now?

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Holly from Charleston. Holly, I tell you, I don't know. Honestly, if they're freaked out by it, they don't tell me every now and then I can't help it because of how my brain works.

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But if something triggers some kind of knowledge that I know about murder scene or a criminal or some kind of true crime situation, I just say it.

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And I don't think about what I say before I say it as you have been able to hear on this podcast at times. And if it freaks people out, I don't know about it.

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I can't tell you my son who is in college, I've been doing this podcast for five or six years now and he he's he's hot and cold on it.

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Sometimes he will message me different story ideas that he thinks I should cover. And then other times he just pretends that I don't do this that I don't know anything about true crime.

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And this whole world doesn't exist. So he goes back and forth. So who even knows?

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Alright, that's going to do it. Thank you for the email and thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder. I'll see you next time.