This resort town, which manages to keep in the public eye even after the artists leave for warmer clime in the Fall, has a new What-Is-It in the form of a hooded figure which prowls the streets at night.
--The Boston Globe, October 24, 1939.
Halloween, 1939, loomed in the distance, but the fear had already taken hold of the trick-or-treating set. Children claimed a monster appeared at night, typically around the dunes. The tall, swift-moving figure in black growled and screamed and buzzed and then disappeared into the darkness. The adults dismissed the stories, at first. Then an adult had an encounter: one Maria Costa, walking home in the evening. Near town hall, an impossibly tall figure appeared in a hood and flowing cape or robe. It had flaming eyes and silver ears. It shrieked. She ran.
People in a nearby eatery came to her aid, but found no trace of the apparition.
Other encounters would follow.
Locals gave it many names: the Provincetown Phantom. The Blot.1 The Devil of the Dunes. The Black Flash.
Provincetown, Massachusetts had its own local monster.
Police, initially skeptical, began investigating in earnest due to the sheer number of reports. Given the time of year, people immediately suspected a hoax. A Boston Globe article from the time reports that the locals "say the Flash will go away by itself after Oct. 31." Still, the figure demonstrated some apparently paranormal powers, moving between distant points at a speed that seemed humanly impossible. Reports from opposite ends of town would occur within minutes of each other. At least one local woman found it peering into her window. It disappeared when she screamed.
In 1939, people around the world had reason to be jumpy.
The story received press beyond Provincetown. It had been a year since Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds scare, and only a few months since a sea monster had washed up on the Provincetown beach. The former has entered pop culture; the latter turned out to be the decaying corpse of a large basking shark.
Online sources and campfire tales claim appearances for the the Black Flash before and after 1939-- a family in 1945! Reappearances in the 1970s!-- but these can neither be substantiated nor meaningfully connected to the Flash. It is possible the original bred imitators. Urban legend and the (re)interpreting of odd experiences as Black Flash encounters could have filled in the rest. Several of these latter-day retellings graft details from stories of Springheeled Jack, a British boogeyman of the 1830s, onto existing Black Flash lore. Theo Paijmans, a researcher who devoted some time to the original documents surrounding the case, finds no reliable evidence for any encounters outside of October of '39. In any event, by Halloween, Provincetown Police Chief Anthony Tarvers revealed that he had solved the case.
He described a prank involving four high-spirited, athletic youth. The stronger of a pair would support the other on his shoulders. They would put on the costume, which included some kind of flowing coat/robe that covered both of them. The person on top wore a sifter or colander as a hat beneath the hood, part of the disguise which explains the silver ears and the reflective flashing of the eyes. Each pair would then appear in different parts of town. Tarvers declined to identify the perpetrators, in order to spare the families' embarrassment. It's a perfectly plausible explanation, though we have only the Chief's word and Occam's Razor to support it.
The phantom did receive a kind of creepy coda, however. On October 31, 1939, a young child took first prize-- an entire dollar-- in the local costume contest. He came dressed, of course, as the Black Flash.
1. The figure resembles more than a little Mickey Mouse's adversary, the Phantom Blot, who first appeared the previous Spring in the newspaper strip.
"Black Flash in Old Provincetown says 'Booh,' and Are Folks Scared!" The Boston Globe. October 24, 1939. 9.
Steve Desroches. "The Black Flash... The Legend Lives On." Provincetown Magazine, October 16, 2011. https://provincetownmagazine.com/index.php/2011/10/16/the-black-flash-the-legend-lives-on/.
"Fall Brings Out the Black Flash. Hard Winter Certain As Cabin Fever Stories Start." The Provincetown Advocate, October, 26, 1939: 1.
James Heflin. "The Uncanny Valley: Jumpin' Black Flash, A Cape Cod Boogeyman." The Valley Advocate, May 27, 2015.
Peter Muise. "The Black Flash of Provincetown: Horror or Hoax?" New England Folklore, June 21, 2017. http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-black-flash-of-provincetown-hoax-or.html.
Theo Paijmans. "The Black Flash of Cape Cod: true heir of Spring-heeled Jack." The Anomalist #13, 2007.