Visitors to Cypress Hills Frightened by a Strange Figure. Brooklyn, New York, August 25, 1884. Visitors at Cypress Hills Cemetery and residents in Glendale, East Williamsburg and Fresh Pond, a little town just outside the limits of Brooklyn, have been greatly excited recently by occasional glimpse of a man who is said to frequent the woods in the neighborhood and who roams about in an exceedingly scan costume composed solely of oak leaves.
Efforts have been made to capture the strange individual, but so far they have proven unavailing. The man was last seen on Tuesday evening when Mrs. Robert McKenzie, of No. 208 Twenty-first Street, South Brooklyn, was attracted by a succession of screams and beheld a feeble old woman endeavoring to escape from the strange man. When the aged lady reached Mrs. McKenzie’s side, she said that while sitting at her lot in the cemetery the nude figure approached her by a leaping movement, and made the most frightful grimaces and gesticulated wildly.
The woman gave her name as Mrs. Banfield, of No. 116 Java Street, Greenpoint. Mrs. McKenzie, when she saw the man, brandished a pruning knife over her head and threatened to kill him if he approached any nearer. With a maniacal smile the wild man, as he is called, ran away, shouting some unintelligible gibberish. Supt. John T. Runcle, of the cemetery, says that frequent complaints have been made about disorderly person being seen in the back part of the cemetery. He discredited the wild man story, but stated that very strange stories were always to be heard concerning weird inhabitants of graveyards.
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