The Serpent Slayer of Chehalis
A man wanders into town wearing a top hat to battle a monster he believes is terrorizing the rail lines.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Israel Hainville, an insane person, was tried here yesterday and ordered committed to the asylum. Hainville is one of the oddest characters that has drifted this way for a long time. He is a native of Quebec. He walked into town yesterday morning, barefooted, carrying a cane and wearing a plug hat. He went to the telegraph office and sent a message to a bank in Montreal demanding that $10,000 of the $30,000 deposited there for him by the Queen of England be forwarded here at once. When the officers gathered him in, he said he had left his home in Canada at midnight because he had been directed to come to the Coast and slay a monster serpent that was traveling from San Francisco to Mount St. Helens, and was foraging on brick blocks and railroad trains that happened to be in its path.
“He had been directed to come to the Coast and slay a monster serpent that was traveling from San Francisco to Mount St. Helens.”
Hainville’s vivid hallucinations about serpents destroying local infrastructure are a quintessential example of early mental health crisis reporting, which often leaned into 'eccentric' tropes. Today, we recognize these as manifestations of serious mental health needs, handled with institutionalization that was, at the time, the only systemic response available.
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