Over Christmas 1903 Todmorden was under a reign of terror, according to local and national press. For over two weeks at the end of December, a series of bizarre attacks by a strange new ‘bogey man’ created a sense of panic and alarm on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border. Just who was this bogey man, asked the Yorkshire Evening Post, and why couldn’t he be caught?[i]
I believe I may have the answer.
The Tod Shaker
In mid-December 1903 an unnamed young woman from Eastwood was going on an evening visit to her sister in Todmorden when she had her first, but not her last, encounter with the Tod Shaker.
As the woman walked along Byrom Street, a man sprang out from a dark corner, grasped her by the waist and shook her violently. The woman was unable to cry out, and the attacker vanished into the darkness just as suddenly as he had appeared.
The woman had barely recovered from her ordeal when sometime later the same evening she was attacked again in the same odd manner, and sought safety by hammering on the door of a nearby house.
She was able to give police a good description of the man who had accosted her, though unfortunately the press reports do not share this with us.[ii]
This woman was by no means the first victim of the Tod Shaker, and the attacks all followed the same pattern. The man would lurk motionless in a dark corner of the town waiting for a lone woman to pass. He would then leap out and grab her by the waist or by the arms and shake her, sometimes until she fell down.[iii]
The assaults were happening with great frequency. Some of the victims were even children on their way home from night school. Even women on their way to work in the morning were unsafe, with one woman grabbed and shaken on Woodlands Avenue before six in the morning.[iv]
The Reign of Terror
The creepy and seemingly senseless nature of the bizarre assaults sent Todmorden into a paroxysm of panic. The town was described as being under a ‘reign of terror’ by the press, with the locals suffering ‘great alarm’. Women were afraid to go out unaccompanied after dark, despite heightened police vigilance.
As well as the extra police patrols, gangs of young men roamed the streets hoping to catch the phantom shaker and no doubt dispense some rough justice should they do so. Despite an ‘exciting chase’, the Tod Shaker was too fast for them and would always disappear into one of the dark lanes or corners that he had sprung from.[v]
Who was he and why couldn’t he be caught?
The story of the Tod Shaker (as I have dubbed him) bears a certain similarity to the Halifax Slasher episode. In November 1938, it was thought that a razor blade wielding maniac was roaming the streets of Halifax before leaping out on his mostly female victims and viciously slashing them with a razor. Gangs of vigilantes roamed the street and innocent men had lucky escapes from enraged lynch mobs.
The razor attacks multiplied to such an extent that police speculated there may have been two or even more slashers at large in Halifax. Soon mad slashers began attacking women all round the country. However, it turned out that the victims had in fact inflicted their wounds on themselves and invented the stories of the maniac slasher. The Halifax Slasher was a remarkable episode of what might once have been called mass hysteria, though modern students of these bizarre episodes prefer to call them social panics.[vi] The term I prefer for the phenomenon is a Phantom Attacker.
And I suspect the Todmorden Shaker is an undiscovered phantom attacker panic. It has all the signs. As with the Halifax Slasher, the Tod Shaker’s attacks are seemingly random and don’t make sense as a sexual assault or a robbery. Phantom attackers always have an almost supernatural ability to appear as if from nowhere out of the shadows and then vanish into the night eluding all attempts to capture them.
The Tod Shaker attacks escalated and spread as rumours circulated, and people were afraid to go out at night, unless it was part of a vigilante patrol – another common feature of phantom attacker panics.
Despite the many supposed victims who got a good look at the Shaker, police patrols and vigilante bands, nobody was ever caught, and the attacks petered out and were forgotten as is often the case with imaginary assailant episodes.
The most likely explanation seems to me that the Tod Shaker did not exist. The stories of attacks were invented by the victims, perhaps to gain attention, or perhaps some were hearsay – none of the newspaper reports give specifics about the names of any of the victims, which also rings alarm bells. The Tod Shaker was frequently described by the press as a bogey man, and that is what he was.
But it certainly left Todmorden all shook up.
For more of phantom attacker panics, see here:
[i] ‘The “man” at Todmorden’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 23 December 1903, p.5
[ii] ‘Strange conduct at Todmorden’, Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1903, p.8
[iii] ‘The “man” at Todmorden’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 23 December 1903, p.5
[iv] ‘Strange conduct at Todmorden’, Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1903, p.8
[v] ‘The “man” at Todmorden’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 23 December 1903, p.5; Another bogey man’, Liverpool Daily Post, 25 December 1903, p.8;
[vi] Paul Weatherhead, Weird Calderdale: Strange and Horrible Local History, (Tom Bell Publishing: Hebden Bridge, 2023)
Paul Weatherhead 