A Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena - Softcover

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Invisible Assailants
In May 1876 there was a panic in the streets of Nanking, China. Invisible demons were on the loose, snipping of people's pigtails. The citizens took to walking about with their hair clutched in their hands for safety. The terror spread to Shanghai and other towns, and then another panic developed. This time it was the "crushing mania", a fear of being crushed while sleeping. The rampage of these demons lasted for nearly three years. Other outbreaks have occurred since, and the phenomenon has a long history. According to De Groot's Religious Systems of China (1892), the first recorded outbreaks of the hair-snipping panic were under the Wei dynasty in 477 and 517 AD.
Newspaper reports of these panics in China raised many a smile at English breakfast tables, but these were wiped away when in December 1922 a similar scare broke out in London. Young ladies were being seized by a man who hacked off their hair and then disappeared "as if by magic", eluding the band of would-be gallants who came rushing to the rescue. We have heard psychological explanations for this and respect them on their own terms, but they do not account for the physical fact that people have suddenly and mysteriously been deprived of their hair in a public street in broad daylight.

Thefts of hair seem to feature in attacks of all kinds from poltergeists to UFO's. During the haunting of the Dagg family in Canada, as reported by the Brockville Daily Times (13 November 1899), one of the little girls "felt her long braid suddenly pulled; she cried out, and the family found it almost cut off, simply hanging by a few hairs. The same day the little boy said that something pulled his head all over. Immediately it was seen by his mother that chunks of his hair, also, had been cut off."

In The Other Side (1969) Bishop James Pike tells of the strange disturbances that followed his son's suicide. In one incident, a female assistant awoke one morning to find some of her hair singed off in a perfectly straight line. This was repeated again the next morning, and three weeks later one of the burned-off locks mysteriously appeared on a bedside table. An even stranger case can be found in the Religio-Philosophical Journal(4 October 1873). During a succession of poltergeist-type happenings at Menomonie, Wisconsin, a young girl was standing by her mother with no one else present when her hair was sheared off in chinks close to her scalp, vanishing as it was cut.

Wenow turn to a more shoking sort of violation, the symptom of which is the appearance of wounds, as if the victims had been stabbed or shot with invisible weapons. The New York Times(8 December 1931) printed a story by the captain of the German steamer Brechsee, which had put in at Horsens, Jutland, the day before. The captain had seen a man unaccountably wounded during a storm. Before his eyes a four-inch-long wound appeared on the man's head and he fell unconscious to the deck.

On 16 April 1922 a man was brought to Charing Cross Hospital in London with a stab wound on his neck. All he could say was that he had strolled into a turning of Coventry Street, received a wound and had fallen to the ground. A few hours later another man was brought to the hospital with the same wound and the same story; and later that day a third man was unaccountably wounded in the same turning off Coventry Street. The story was reported in The People(23 April 1922).