Originally published in Pearson's Weekly (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) vol.1 #39 (14 Apr 1891).
About three years ago an extraordinary panic seized the inhabitants of Naples. "They are carrying off the children!" was the cry of horror and dismay that ran like wildfire among the poorer and more ignorant quarters of the great crowded Mediterranean city. Whence or how arose the dread—no less real and terrible because it was groundless—was not discovered, and probably never will be, for the unhappy Neapolitan parents do not ever seem to have thought of asking where the story came from.
All they knew, and all they cared to know, was that everyone said that kidnappers of children were abroad, and that they must look to their little ones if they wanted to save them. Mothers, we are told, shut up their children in the houses, and the doors of the schools were beset with crowds of weeping women in an agony of terror lest their children should have been stolen from them. In spite of all that the press and the authorities could say to the contrary, the belief in the kidnapping was entertained by thousands.
Yet, as in most such cases, there appears to have been nothing whatever to account for the panic of the distracted parents. In a great city, as in a great army, there are, of course, always a certain number of persons who disappear unaccounted for; but there seems to have been no increase Of casualties of this sort in Naples in August, 1888, sufficient to account for the sudden frenzy which seized upon the population.
In Asia, and particularly in India, where men lie thick together, and where the shuddering mysteries of a religion, weird, cruel, and fantastic in its grosser forms, hold, hold complete sovereignty over the mind, such panics and delusions are not only common, but assume the most extraordinary forms.
Not many years ago the inhabitants of Calcutta and the country round were thrown into a convulsion of dismay by the rumour that the Government required the bodies of a thousand children with which to lay the foundations of the piers for a great bridge over the Hooghly, and were going to seize the boys and girls of the people.
The Bengalese had never seen the British do such things; they had never, we may suppose, heard it rumoured that it was their custom; and yet suddenly this great horror arose among them, and could only be appeased when they found that in reality no such sacrifice took place. Strangely enough, the notion that if a bridge is to stand, a human sacrifice is required at its foundation, is worldwide. Indeed, the belief that men are sometimes built up in bridges has even been known in modern Britain.
One of the earlier volumes of The Illustrated London News contains an account of a most curious circumstance which took place with regard to Lord Leigh's park near Coventry. A bridge was being built over a stream or a piece of a lake in the park, and the rumour somehow spread to the neighbouring town that before the great heavy coping-stone of one of the piers was put on, a mason had been decoyed into the hollow, and that then the flat stone had been let down upon him.
So firmly was the report credited, and so widely did it spread, that a mob collected in Coventry, proceeded to the park, and would not be satisfied tall the stone had been removed and the delusion thus dispelled. That, however, was more than forty years ago, and Board schools have perhaps put beyond the range of possibility the chance of such an occurrence taking place again. Still, the fact remains that not only, in some curious, dumb, instinctive way, did the legend that a human being must be buried alive in a new bridge linger on, but that it could suddenly and without warning—a number of other bridges must have been built that same year near Coventry—cause a panic-delusion of the strongest kind.