MASKED ‘TERROR’ STORY

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1935, Page 4

MASKED ‘TERROR’ STORY

PATEA PEOPLE ALARMED

WILD RUMOURS WITHOUT TRUTH.

TALES OF NOCTURNAL ATTACKS.

YOUNG IMAGINATION’S FIGMENT?

Stories of nocturnal attacks on women by a masked man, whose prominent teeth bared in a vicious snarl have struck terror into his victims, who fainted or fled in terror, have been circulating at Patea. The stories, amplified by repetition, have succeeded in occasioning considerable alarm among women and children, but there is apparently, no truth in them.

Many children are said to have been afraid to leave the school grounds, and many women have kept rigidly to their homes after dark or have insisted on being accompanied through the darker and more unfrequented parts of their journeys. The nocturnal prowler has been described as wearing a mask and possessing prominent teeth, the many and varied descriptions being unanimous on the matter of the teeth. Despite the convincing note of many of the stories in which several well known women have been named there is no apparent foundation to the rumours. No report has been made to the police of any attack, molestation or interference. One woman was alarmed at the sudden appearance of a man ona vacant section adjoining her home across which her clothes’ lines were hung. While she was recovering clothes after dark the man’s appearance, caused her to hurry back to the house. This incident was not reported to the police, so apparently nothing sinister in the man’s movements was noted. A flicker of light and a rasping sound in the temporarily unoccupied house of a prominent business man attracted the attention of a small boy whose eyes and ears were alert for the whereabouts of the man in the mask. Men were posted at front and rear of the premises'and the police investigated, revealing that the light came from a carefully banked up fire which awaited the owner’s re?turn and the rasping noise from the lonely parrot who shaipened his beak on the food tin and the bars of his cage. The alarm reached its climax when it was freely rumoured that three detectives had come to assist Constable Kelly in a hunt for the masked man. This was untrue. It was even said that they had made an arrest. The whole affair has apparently sprung from the imaginations of children. The Patea school pupils were warned after the Hastings murder not to loiter on the way home and it is believed that the stories had their birth in that.