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Syracuse Sunday Standard
New York, USA
18 November 1888

A STRANGE CASE
The Arrest of a Man in New York who Believes Himself in London

New York, Nov. 17.
A well dressed Englishman with a full black beard approached Policeman Ripple of the Nineteenth precinct tonight and asked where he was. Being informed, he asked, "London?" "No, New York," replied the policeman. The man looked bewildered and after asking the question over several times said that at his last recollection he was in Cheapside, London. "I must have been insane," he declared. The strange individual readily consented to being taken to the station house. Standing before the desk he appeared perfectly rational and expressed his inability to realize that he was not in London.

"I came to my senses a few minutes ago," said he to the sergeant, "when I heard a voice saying: 'There goes the Whitechapel murderer,' and I imagined everybody was looking at me." The Sergeant deemed it advisable to detain the man, at which the latter made no objection. He gave the name of Henry Johnson and said that he was 37 years old, and that his home was in West London. He said he believed he had been in a trance. Soon after being consigned to a cell the man began shouting loudly and the doorman found him lying on the cell floor struggling about. He attacked the doorman when the latter entered his cell and an ambulance which was summoned conveyed the strange prisoner to Bellevue Hospital. The police found in the Englishman's pockets portraits taken by a London photographer of two young ladies and a third one was that of an old lady. There was also a lock of gray hair and a letter addressed to a Lizzie McKay of London.


Related pages:
  Henry Johnson
       Press Reports: Syracuse Standard - 18 November 1888 

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