Don't poke the rhino: Part 2
The 1874 newspaper story that unleashed mayhem in Central Park
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Release Date: September 2, 2025
A bold audacity
Copies of the November 9, 1874 issue of the New York Daily Herald flew off newsstands. The front page article, “Awful Calamity”, told the harrowing first-hand account of a Herald reporter who happened to be in the city’s Central Park menagerie at the exact moment when the animals escaped, and readers across New York City were desperate for details.
While hundreds of thousands of copies of the paper were purchased, few people read the entire article, a behemoth of writing that stretched across six columns and came in at over 10,000 words.
If they had, they would have learned the entire thing was “a pure fabrication…a huge hoax, a wild romance, or whatever other epithet of utter untrustworthiness our readers may choose to apply to it.” 1
But because they hadn’t, the streets and avenues around Central Park were filled with armed vigilantes intent on tracking down and killing the big cats and other man-eating beasts preying on their families and neighbors. Women and children hid quaking behind locked gates and closed curtains. Schools and businesses refused to open their doors.
And panic and fear unnecessarily gripped the city.
Competing newspapers were among the first to condemn the Herald for perpetuating such a thoughtless and dangerous hoax.
As a hoax, the game has been well played – the names of various citizens who had suffered being appended to give an air of vraisemblance to the narrative. The cat is let out of the bag in the last ten lines of the lengthy article, but copies of the Herald containing it are selling by hundreds of thousands.
The bold audacity of the invention has staggered and distracted many, and we put it to the editor and to all right thinking persons whether it be creditable or reputable for a journal enjoying its prestige and position deliberately to go into the sensation business in this paltry manner and palm off a lie – for we cannot call it by a milder name – on the community.
Frankly and without circumlocution, we consider it an outrage on the public, and indignantly protest against such wicked tomfoolery in all its contemptible phases. 2
Soon others joined in the chorus, some even calling for a Grand Jury indictment to be brought against James Gordon Bennett, the Herald’s lightening rod publisher. No charges were ever filed, however. 3
Because the Herald never officially addressed the hoax or the outrage in print, questions persisted as to who was actually behind the piece, and what he’d been thinking.
Click on the link below to download a PDF of the complete text of Awful Calamity.
The man behind the beasts
In June of 1893, nearly 20 years after the appearance of the Central Park menagerie hoax in the pages of the Herald, Thomas Bernard (T. B.) Connery, who had been the paper’s managing editor in 1874, sat down and penned what he called “a true history of the extraordinary imposition” for Harper’s Weekly.
T. B. traced the origins of the infamous hoax to an ordinary walk through Central Park’s menagerie.
One day I reached the spot just as the attendants were about to transfer a leopard from an animal-carriage to a cage, and I stopped to watch a proceeding I had never until then beheld. Through carelessness, I suppose, the operation was bungled, and, to my horror, I saw the animal slip between the carriage and the cage. I stood rooted to the spot, expecting that the next move would be a spring for freedom by the leopard. There were hundreds of people all about, and that leopard, if he so minded, would have had no trouble about a fine morning meal.
Although the attendants quickly manhandled the leopard back inside its cage, T. B. couldn’t shake the thought of what might have been. Hundreds of children and their nurses gathered at the cages every day. What if, next time, the animal succeeded?
“The possible results from a future possible accident, the carnage among the innocents, the consternation of the whole city over the unexpected appearance of Mr. Leopard here, there, and everywhere about the town, rose before my imagination, and by the time I reached [the] corner of Ann Street and Broadway, my mind was full of it.”
At first, T. B. considered writing a scolding editorial. But he quickly dismissed the idea. The public would forget, the keepers would relapse, and danger would remain. That night in bed, another thought came to him: he would create “ a harmless little hoax, with just enough semblance of reality to give a salutary warning.”
He quickly scribbled the basic outline of what he called the “wild-beast hoax” on a sheet of paper, and the next morning handed it to Harry O’Connor, a Herald reporter with a vivid imagination and track record of writing attention-grabbing humor pieces.
But later when Harry turned in the draft, it wasn’t what T. B. had envisioned: the young reporter had given away the gag in the first few paragraphs, and spoiled the fun.
“I then committed the task to Mr. Clarke, and in a few days he had elaborated the little skeleton of a plan I gave him into the full page of ghastly and lifelike pictures as it was finally published in the Herald. If there is any credit due to the writer of “the most successful and beastly [hoax] since the memorable moon hoax”, it belongs to genial Joe Clarke.”
In the Harper’s Weekly piece, T.B. admitted he was blindsided by the public’s visceral and outsized reaction to the hoax.
“I saw only the laugh which the publication of such a tremendous hoax would produce. To my shame, be it confessed, I was utterly blind to the serious side of the hoax.”
His vision cleared up almost immediately after the story hit the streets, and in an unexpected place: his own home.
T.B.’s young daughter ran to him in alarm, wanting to know if he’d read the dreadful news. She and her sisters were being kept home from school by their mother who was necessarily concerned about the escaped animals. Even the family’s servants were too afraid to leave the house or run errands, and “every face was pale.”
The barbershop where T. B. went to get his morning shave was buzzing with news of the calamity, as well, and every corner he passed was occupied by eager newsboys waving papers and shouting, “‘Extry Heralds’, ‘Escape of the wild beasts’, ‘Great loss of life,’ and other startling catch-cries.”
Both horrified and amazed at the reaction his “harmless little hoax” had generated, T.B. rushed to the Herald office and quickly stopped the presses.
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Although there were lingering calls for the head of the person or persons responsible for the hoax, there were no real or lasting consequences.
T. B. ‘s greatest fear, “that some supersensitive and nervous people might have been frightened to death,” never came to pass. He continued to serve as Managing Editor at the Herald for another decade, retiring on his own terms in 1884.
The Herald didn’t lose any subscribers, and its publisher, Mr. Bennett, took the hullabaloo in stride, telling T. B., “The fun of it all is my friends don’t believe such a serious man as you originated the hoax. They all blame me for it.”
Which everyone did, until T. B. finally set the record straight on one of the greatest — or perhaps the worst — newspaper hoaxes in American history.
More than 130 years later, the jury is still out.
Copyright 2025 Lori Olson White
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End Notes
1 “Awful Calamity. The Wild Animals Broken Loose from Central Park. Terrible Scenes of Mutilation. A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death. Savage Brutes at Large. Awful Combats Between the Beasts and the Citizens. The Killed and Wounded. General Duryee’s Magnificent Police Tactics. Bravery and Panic. How the Catastrophe was Brought About – Affrighting Incidents. Proclamation by the Mayor. Governor Dix Shoots the Bengal Tiger in the Streets. Consternation in the City”, The New York Daily Herald, November 9, 1874, P.3.
2 “An Onerous Sell”, The Brooklyn Daily Times, Brooklyn, NY, November 9, 1874, P.2.
3 “The Herald’s Scare: Effort to Indict James Gordon Bennett”, The Buffalo Daily Republic, Buffalo, NY, November 11, 1874, P. 4.
What an extraordinary story, Lori. It is striking how little has changed, the speed at which fear spreads and how easily sensational reporting can override careful thought. I was particularly fascinated by the detail that Connery’s own family were among those terrified by the hoax, a reminder that even well-intentioned “warnings” can spiral out of control. Thank you for bringing this piece of forgotten media history to life.
I consider myself Lori's personal spell checker, having now caught two minor spelling errors in her previous work. I confess I was bested in this case, assuming the word vraisemblance was a doozy of a spelling mistake only to find it is in fact a real word. Also, this work proves conclusively that the origins of the fake media trace back to at least 1874.