About 9 p.m., during the evening of May 16, 1913, a large crowd suddenly gathered at the corner of King William street and James street, where, as a Spectator reporter on the scene noted, each man, woman and child “stared into each other’s face, each wondering what the rest of the throng was looking at.”
The cause of the gathering was the sound of an ear-splitting shriek, which came from the direction of the Lister building.
A young man, obviously in high spirits, had lifted the window of one of the windows of the large building, and screamed as loudly as possible. The scream, which the Spectator man observed as being “a war whoop,” was “the signal for a small army to run for the corner.”
When Police Constable Emerson arrived at the scene and saw the quickly gathering crowd, he immediately put in a call from a street police call box to No. 3 police station which was located just a few blocks east of the intersection.
Within minutes, Deputy Chief Whatley and a squad of policemen arrived the street opposite the Lister Chambers black with gaping citizens.
After screaming out the window, the young man had ducked back into the room before anyone could see him. Fearing that the building might be searched by the police, the partygoers in that room quickly vacated the premises. The screamer along with his friends simply mingled with the large crowd.
For awhile the crowd on James street north continued to stand around wondering if anything further would happen.
Then one of the “partying” young men said to another, in a loud stage whisper. “he’s dead alright. That bullet went right through his lung. I think we had better make our getaway. I felt his pulse before we came out, and he was dead. Must have been killed instantly.”
The other young men replied, also in a tone loud enough to attract the attention of eavesdroppers in the vicinity, “Well, it was clearly a case of self-defense. He hit me with an iron bar and I shot him on the spur of the moment.”
Many people in the crowd overheard the conversation and one of them tipped off the police on scene.
Just before the constables could make their way through the crowd to make arrests, the young men hopped into the back seat of a friend’s automobile, which then roared off towards the north at what the Spectator man observed as being “at a hurricane clip.”
Several people broke away from the crowd, attempting to catch up with the fleeing young men, believing that two murderers were making an escape.
However, after all the rooms of the immense Lister building were searched, no murder scene, or even evidence of any violence, could be found.
In the end, both the police and the gathered crowd were victims of a foolish practical joke.
Later, the police were able to discover the identities of the pranksters, but did not take any specific action. Instead, a warning was placed in all three Hamilton daily newspapers that any further incidents of that sort would be dealt with severely.
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