fear and loathing
monster panics of the 1930s
The year of 1938 was a jittery one. In Europe, Germany had risen from its defeat two decades before and under Nazi rule had found a new and arrogant military pride; Chamberlain’s attempts notwithstanding, Hitler’s armies had begun to march and occupied the Sudetenland on 1 October. A month later, Jews in Germany and Austria would suffer an omen of what was to come during the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, with over 1,000 synagogues burned and hundreds of Jews killed. The reports by foreign journalists in Germany horrified the world.
In America, far away from these rising tensions, as part of a Hallowe’en series, the Columbia Broadcasting radio network aired ‘War of the Worlds’ on 30 October, directed and narrated by a then relatively unknown Orson Welles. It received mixed reviews; 1 and, as legend has it, it caused a mass panic because listeners didn’t really understand that Welles’s Martian invasion radio-play was fiction (see FT199:42-47). Other panics followed. Later that year, rumours of a vampire who had murdered a young girl in El Paso, New Mexico, surfaced around neighbouring Juarez, just over the Mexican border. An El Paso schoolteacher reported to the police that her pupils were greatly upset. When the incident was investigated, the blame was laid at the door of another radio-play called ‘The Vampire’ that had been broadcast recently. 2
But the year had begun with a series of interlocking monster scares that specifically targeted the Afro-American communities in several states. In January and February 1938, an epidemic of monsters, as one newspaper put it, terrorised the Afro-American communities in the towns of Mobile, Alabama, Pensacola and Panama City, Florida and Rock Hill, South Carolina.
It began in Mobile, where in the last three weeks of January stories had started to emerge that a monster was roaming the alleys of the northern part of town. Descriptions varied. Some said it was “half man and half wolf”; others claimed it was like a dog but left tracks like those of a lion; and there were those who swore that the strange creature bore “a ring of white, phosphorescent hair” around its neck and had scales like a dinosaur. 3 In the fear and confusion, the number and variety of the stories grew. One Henry Johnson emptied his gun at the monster, but the bullets just bounced off the creature’s back, he claimed. What he had seen, albeit in the darkness of night, was 6ft (1.8m) long, woolly and larger than a police dog. He further said it had a broad head and a ring of white fur, about 6in (15cm) wide, around its neck. The female residents of the area believed the monster to be the ghost of a woman who was killed by her unfaithful husband. There were those who thought the ‘thing’ might be a madman, and another wild story was told about a hunter who trailed the monster into the nearby swamp but returned, speechless with fright and without his hunting dogs. 4
The situation in Mobile had become quite alarming, since residents of the areas where the monster had reportedly been seen armed themselves to the teeth with pistols, shotguns, knives and razors. When RL Johnson claimed to see the monster one night and started firing at it, it signalled the beginning of a barrage of gunshots from other residents, shooting at anything that moved. “Guns roared throughout last night as the frantic negroes chased elusive ‘things’ up and down the Marmotte street district”, one newspaper commented. It further remarked that, although the white populace of town was “amused” by the scare, it also complained of black servants worn out by sleepless nights caused by the monster rumours. 5 A man named Walker claimed to have been bitten by the creature, a terrible thing that, according to him, was “eight feet [2.4m] long, looks like a seal and jumps like a kangaroo”. 6 Meanwhile, police and reporters tried to substantiate the rumours, but, as one newspaper admitted, without success. The “Monster of Marmotte Street” – so-called because of the area where it had been seen – was reported widely across the US. Others named it the “Frankenstein of Fisher’s Alley”, after another street it was said to stalk, but in the end, the protean terror that might have stepped from a Hollywood horror film suffered an ignominious end.
On a cold February night when the streets were blanketed by a grey fog, local fireman Charles Ardoyno looked in his yard to see his collie fighting with something he couldn’t make out. He asked his wife to alert Jeanie Sullivan, who had a gun. When Sullivan arrived, a well-aimed shot from his rifle blasted the head off the creature. The monster, it turned out, was a large otter: “It measured about four feet [1.2m] in length and had much the appearance of a huge rat. The feet are armed with huge claws
A story was told about a hunter who trailed the monster into the nearby swamp but returned speechless with fright and without his hunting dogs
and the animal was compact and muscular.” 7 When the news spread, some 200 people visited Ardoyno’s house. That signalled the end of the infamous Monster of Marmotte Street, although the local newspaper noted that: “How the animal made its way into the south part of town or where it came from puzzled the authorities. The otter, a fur-bearing, meateating aquatic animal, is rarely seen and is never found far from swamps and creeks.” 8 But it left a legacy. A week before the Mobile monster was shot, two Afro-American men in Rock Hill, South Carolina, told police there that “a fierce, furcovered animal accosted them on a lonely, dimly-lit street…” Another reported that the beast had attacked him and “ripped off his clothing before he managed to escape its awful clutch. Police, who were without a theory as to the identity of the weird animal, also received a report that the African Udilacus had killed a large calf on the edge of this South Carolina town and eaten away much of the carcass.” 9
Reports of the ‘Udilacus’ spread terror among the AfroAmerican residents of Rock Hill, and from the newspaper accounts we get the impression that this monster was something other than just an ordinary animal. Constable Carl Hovis, for instance, “reported he saw the shambling beast in a dark back alley and shot at it twice but failed to bring it down. Sam Watts, negro, said he was chased through a wooded area by the ‘varmint’ which made grunting noises”.
Police reported the mysterious monster had a particular aversion to dogs: “Two were found dead, apparently from strangulation, and a dozen were reported bitten, beaten and scratched in the Willow Brook section of town”. 10 The monster seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and its end was equally puzzling: “The African Udilacus’, supposedly strange animal that attacked dogs and frightened men, today mysteriously disappeared and negroes reported the ‘thing’ had gone to visit the ‘monster of Marmotte Street’ which frightened the coloured section of Mobile, Ala.
“Others who claimed to know all about the Udilacus, but did not know where or how the name originated, said the Rock Hill monster had gone into hibernation for 10 years for it only appears once in a decade”. 11
Meanwhile in Pensacola, Florida, rumours had it that “Mobile’s terrible, night stalking monster” had descended on the town in forms variously reported as “a gorilla to a goon”. Motorcycle officers George White and CA Green pieced together a more elaborate description of the creature. They found out that it had “a head like a panther, a body like a gorilla, six legs, hands that drag the ground and it stands about four feet [1.2m] high. It leaves tracks like a huge grizzly bear and makes a noise like a foghorn. It is liable to attack from a storm sewer, from a rooftop or merely come sailing at its victim from the top of a tree”. Nobody, though, could be found who had actually seen the monster for himself: “You can hear reports of dozens who have seen it – but try and find one of them,” the local newspaper dryly observed, christening the monster the ‘Goon of Guillemard Street’ anyway. The Pensacola police stated that the scare was traceable to “a warning given some small offender who had haplessly come under the law’s heavy arm the other day. If he didn’t mend his ways, he was warned, the Mobile monster was coming over here and get him.” 12
Not to be outdone, the Florida town of Panama City became acquainted with a monster described as “10ft 7in (3.23m) in his shocking feet and his body moves a quarter of a block before his hands begin to follow. And what hands! He gives one the impression of having an octipus (sic) at the end of each wrist…” The monster was introduced in the local newspaper by newspaperman Bill Pinney, who also coined the name ‘Harold the Horrible’. “That’s what we’ll call him”, Pinney wrote in his tongue-in-cheek account filled with over-the-top deeds attributed to the monster. 13
Although Pinney may have meant it as a joke, it was at the expense of the Afro-American communities who had already been suffering from a prolonged history of psychological warfare, going back to the dark days of the Ku Klux Klan and Night Riders, a terrible threat that had not gone away. In August 1938 for instance, Afro-American citizens of the Florida community of Lakeland confronted the Klan during one of their white-hooded marches on Florida Avenue. 14
Pinney had aimed his Creepypasta style creation at the Afro-Americans who lived in Shinetown, the black community of Panama City. Judging from Pinney’s hasty, if sarcastic, retraction three days later, they had become very upset:
“Harold the Horrible was hooey. Really there warn’t nothing to it. Not that a lot of people thought there was but this is in hope those who thought there was that there is not, has not been and will not be any ‘monsker’.
“Just how many people believed that any monster would visit Shinetown is not known. But it evidently was those who cannot read and who heard only from those who can.
“It really all started with fantastic stories in Mobile’s Harlem, where someone had seen an animal. In Pensacola it was born in a city courtroom, where the presiding judge threatened something about having the Mobile ‘monster’ come to Pensacola to quiet things in the negro sections.
“We can’t think of anything either of those port cities have that Panama City hasn’t so we just decided to supply Shinetown with a ‘monsker’.
“Little did we realise that cooks of long good-standing would not show up for work or that the night spots of the local black belt would report a business ‘recession’.
“The whole thing was in good clean fun and we hope we are right when we say there isn’t any monster. At least we hope we don’t meet any going home one of these foggy nights.
“Careful investigation has shown there was no truth in the report the ‘monster’ visited Chipley and left half the body of a man on a stump in the woods near there after eating only part of his victim… So with the passing of Harold we hope this here ‘monsker’ foolishment is at an end”. 15
Perhaps it was; there’s no further mention in the newspapers, but it is interesting to note that a monster scare that had started in Mobile, migrated to other AfroAmerican communities, even across state lines, reinforced by suggestions circulated by the predominantly white newspapers and a scare tactic by a Pensacola judge. Alabama’s Monster of Marmotte Street, Florida’s Goon of Guillemard Street and Harold the Horrible, and even South Carolina’s African Udilacus, may have been nothing more than a lost otter and a few forerunners of Creepypasta – but the fact that these otherwise harmless stories could grow into fullblown social panics is a clear indicator of the racial tensions that plagued a Divided States of America on the brink of WWII.