Photo Credit https://hakaimagazine.com/

You are in mid-1800s Britain. Queen Victoria is on the throne, rail transportation has revolutionized the island nation, and you purchase a copy of a newspaper, “The Days Doings,” with a headlining story about the shocking appearance of a sea monster off the coast of Ireland, complete with an invigorating woodcut illustration of the beast surfacing near the rocky coastline. Noble-looking men in suits point at the creature in horror, and elegant women with parasols scramble away from it in panic. This headline is not a one-time event; stories like it are a recurring theme for this time of year. 

In fact, it is so recurring that this news period has been dubbed “silly season,” a time when outlandish stories about monsters, hauntings, and freak accidents dominate the press circuit. These newspaper tales are whispered across dinner tables and gossiped about in coffee houses, tea salons, and pubs by a public that devours them with a feverish appetite so profound it has become an annual tradition looked forward to. Victorians simply could not get enough of these stories, and the newspapers that sold to them were more than happy to feed their hunger. 

But why was this “silly season” a phenomenon, and how is it relevant today? Late summer meant holiday time for those who held seats in the British Parliament’s House of Commons. From late July to the end of August, Parliamentary recess went into full swing, promising an escape from the city grime and a spell in the sun for those officials in that elected body. For the newspaper companies, it meant a lull in “hard news” that would see sales drop and finances shrink. To today’s news consumers, the idea of a reputable newspaper publishing an article on sea monster sightings during a slow news period would seem to be an almost laughable notion, but is the core concept of silly season truly that hard to place into our own time? 

During a congressional recess for Easter in April of 1989, an April Fool’s Day hoax about the Space Needle in Seattle collapsing aired on KING-TV and sparked widespread panic that overloaded 911 lines. In late July of 2009, a British news story about “killer Siberian chipmunks” digging up crack cocaine and attacking people in London garnered widespread attention and coincided with the beginning of the Parliamentary summer recess. More recently, the “Florida Man” phenomenon had a reemergence just before Congress took its annual recess in August of 2023, with a story about a Florida man who was charged with stripping, attacking a nurse, and flooding an emergency room. Finally, on August 1 this year, an AP story about a tractor trailer crashing and spilling hot dogs all over I-83 in Pennsylvania coincided with the beginning of Congress’s August recess which commenced a week later. Silly Season is very much a continuing fixture of journalism, and the desire to fill summer’s quiet with the strange and unusual hasn’t sunk back into the depths with the sea monsters of yore.