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What you don’t see is the most terrifying

by Jack Neely

The last fall that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, the world was at war, and Knoxville survived in a state of uneasiness that bordered on terror. That Halloween, in the dark, they paraded under shaky streetlights in weird costumes, wearing capes and masks, as if they didn’t want the invisible threats of 1918 to find them.

Politicians claimed the war was almost over, but the Germans were still killing American sons by the dozens in Belgium and France. Newpapers were still filling up with news of local boys dead and maimed. Word was that even McGhee Tyson was dead, lost in an aeroplane crash over the North Sea.

Home was hardly safer. Exhausted doctors hoped that the influenza epidemic, which had infected about 9,000 Knoxvillians in the last few months—and had killed about 130 in Knoxville alone—was losing its grip on the city, too. Still, by Halloween Knoxville was seeing more than 100 new cases every day. In downtown theaters, evangelists warned of the Spanish flu’s parallels to the end-time plagues of prophecy.

Some signs didn’t make as much sense. After heavy rains, the river was almost 19 feet above the low-water mark; river people were evacuating their shacks. Hundreds of pumpkins, stolen from upstream farms, swirled toward town.

On the darker north side of town, there was a stranger menace afoot. One that caused parents to keep their children securely inside, behind locked doors, even on a children’s holiday like Halloween night.

Some may have taken the trolley downtown to put off worrying about it. The city health department’s unpopular ban on public gatherings was in force. But ordinances only go so far. And anyway, it was Halloween.

By dark on October 31, 1918, thousands of revelers were downtown in “masks and gaudy attire,” pumpkin heads, witch’s hats, spectral sheets, wigs, robes, parading the streets. Everyone wore masks, as if for protection.

Things often got out of control on Halloween night, and things did again. Strictly against city ordinances, mobs of boys blew off fireworks right on Gay Street, “torpedoes and cannon firecrackers.” Someone fired a revolver into the window of a woman on Marble Alley, the inhabited alley between Central and State Street, narrowly missing her head. Teenagers wrecked a playground on West Clinch in Fort Sanders. Revelers smashed up a grocery at Broadway, the little shop right next to Old Gray Cemetery.

Downtown, people were only barely under control. “The police held the crowds back when they became rough in many points on Gay Street,” reported the Knoxville Journal & Tribune, but it was impracticable for all the disorder to be suppressed.... Gay Street took on a Mardi Gras appearance for hours.”

It was quieter in the suburbs, but they had their own concerns, especially on the stylish north side. Just beyond Knoxville’s city limits, Fountain City was the old Victorian-era resort once famous for its grand hotel, fresh springs, and climate of temperance. Accessible from Knoxville by streetcar, it had transformed into a quiet suburban residential community, the sort of place where you didn’t expect to be awakened by drunken shouts and gunfire, as was more typical in Knoxville. That fall, it wasn’t quiet enough; the people of Fountain City were wondering whether they’d ever get used to waking up to the sound of their pets dying violently outside their windows. In recent weeks, a dozen dogs and several calves had been killed and eaten in their yards. Who, or what, was responsible for the carnage was unknown.

Frederick C. Reep was an executive for a small produce wholesaler on Central, the C.W. Henderson Co. A couple of his sons worked for the same company. The headquarters of C.W. Henderson was right on Central near Jackson. It had once been the most dangerous part of town, but Reep chose to live in the quiet Smithwood area. The Reeps owned a large collie who spent the nights sleeping in the yard outside their house.

One night when Mr. Reep was out of town, his wife and daughter heard the sounds of their dog growling and fighting with something in the yard. Perhaps because it sounded so horrible the women didn’t go out to check. It sounded at first as if the dog was putting up a good fight. But, as the newspaper reported, “gradually, the sounds of the dog died away.”

The next morning, the Reeps found “the head and hide” of their collie in a pond on their property. The spine was apparently intact, because they observed its back had been broken in two places, and there were two large holes in the dog’s head. The rest of its body appeared to have been eaten.

The newspaper remarked on this familiar M.O.: “In each instance, the animal has broken the back of its victim and eaten the body, leaving only the head and hide.”

There were few other clues. The monster’s region was observed to be roughly from Whittle Springs to Sharp’s Gap. A few had heard the beast; no one had actually seen it.

In the crime-scene dust, investigators found paw prints: much larger than any dog’s, but perhaps feline. Some speculated that it might be a panther or mountain lion, but in the end, no one knew for certain. The newspaper headlines referred to it as the STRANGE BEAST or the NIGHT PROWLER.

Downtown, the nervous Halloween night revelry carried on well into the evening. In his Gay Street office, the Journal & Tribune reporter put the final touches on his story: “All efforts to capture or kill the mysterious night prowler have proven futile.”

An alien observing Knoxville over the next few days through the Armistice might have assumed it was all part of the same celebration: people reveling in the streets under grotesque decorations, hanging and burning European royalty in effigy. At Staub’s a wrestler known as the Masked Marvel took on all comers, including Nick Moontzouras, the Greek Demon.

We may never have bagged the Night Prowler. But eventually, we stopped talking about it. Sometimes it’s the only thing to do.

October 28, 2004 • Vol 14, No. 44 © 2004 Metro Pulse