Free Wild Talents by Charles Fort

dress. This was found, in the barn, cut down to fit one of the children. Eggs rose from tables, teacups leaped, and a pan of soft soap wandered from room to room. One of the children, a boy, aged six, was thought to be playing tricks, because phenomena centered around him. Nobody lambasted him until he confessed, but he was tied in a chair—teacups as lively as ever.
    There was the usual openness. No midnight mysteries of a haunted house. Sightseers were arriving in such numbers that there was no room in the house for them. Several hundred of them lounged outside, sitting on fences or leaning against anything that would hold them up, ready for a dash into the house, at any announcement of doings.
    “One day one of the children, named Rena, was standing close to Mrs. Lynch. Her hair was sheared off, close to her scalp, and vanished.”
    There have been single instances, and there have been hair-clipping scares that were attributed to “mass psychology.” Also I have noted cases in which girls were accused of having cut off their own hair, hoping to take up some newspaper space. My only reason for doubt is the satisfactory endings of these accounts, with statements that the girls had confessed.
    There were accounts in the London newspapers, of Dec. 2 and 10, 1922, of a scare in places east and west of London. In a street, in Uxbridge, Middlesex, a woman found that her braid had been cut off. She had been aware of no such operation, but remembered that, in a crowd, her hat had been pushed over her eyes. According to the stories, women were terrorized by “a vanishing man.” “Disappeared as if by magic.” It is an uncatchable again, a defiant fellow, operating openly, as if confident that he could not be caught. Note that these are not ghost stories. They are stories of human beings, who seemed to have ghostly qualities, or powers. Dorris Whiting, aged seventeen, approaching her home, in the village of Orpington, saw a man, leaning on the gate. As she was passing him, he grabbed her, and cut off her hair. The girl screamed, and her father and brother ran to her. They searched, but the clipper was unfindable. A maid, employed by Mrs. Glanfield of Crofton Hall, Orpington, was pounced upon by a man, who hacked off a handful of her hair. He vanished. There was excitement in Orpington, at the end of a bus route. A girl exclaimed that much of her hair had been cut off. Merely this does not seem mysterious; it seems that a deft fellow could have done this without being seen by the other passengers. But other girls were saying whatever girls say when they discover that their hair has been cut off. At Enfield, a girl named Brand, employed as a typist at the Constitutional Club, was near the clubhouse, one morning, about eight o’clock, when a man grabbed her and cut off her hair. “No trace of him was found, though the search was taken up a minute after the outrage.”
    I have noted occurrences in London, which look as if there was a desire, not generally for hair, or for anybody’s hair, but for the hair, and then more hair, of one victim. See the Kensington (London) Express, Aug. 23, 1907. Twice a girl’s hair had been clipped. In a London street, she felt a clip, the third time. The girl accused a man. He was arrested and was arraigned at the Mansion House. Neither the girl nor anybody else had seen him as a clipper, but he had “walked sharply away,” and when accused had run. Nothing was said of either scissors or hair in any quantity found in his possession. The hair that had been cut off was not found. But “there was some hair on his jacket,” and he was found guilty and was fined.
    I have record of another case of “mass psychology.” It is my expression that the description “mass psychology” does partly apply to it, just as would “horizontal ineptitude,” or “metacarpal iridescence,” or any other idea, or combination of ideas, apply, to some degree, to anything. In an existence of the hyphen, it is