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.
[3] Vigilante groups were set up on the streets, and several people, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beaten up; business in the town was all but shut down.
[1] The panic spread so much that vigilante gangs were roaming the streets of the town and after Hilda Lodge was 'attacked', Clifford Edwards, a local man who had gone to help, was later accused of being the slasher himself.
The theory that a half-crazed, wild-eyed man has been wandering around, attacking helpless women in dark streets, is exploded...
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...[3] Halifax had suffered from slasher attacks before, when in 1927, James Leonard was convicted of stalking and slashing the clothes of six women in the town.