A rumor that circulated online in a video during the summer of 2025 claimed a vacuum cleaner salesman, Silas Reid, killed 107 women in 11 minutes in 1942.
For example, on June 27, a manager of the Inspector Crimes Facebook page posted a video (archived) with a text caption reading, "107 Women. One Man. One Day." The clip, receiving over 720,000 views, also displayed, "This man hated women and took the lives of [hundreds] at once." The same video posted (archived) on the page's affiliated Instagram account, Inspector Story (@inspectorstory), also received over 1 million views.
The clip's narrator told the story as follows:
This man took the lives of over 100 women in a single day. In 1942, in the city of Wilmington, Delaware, there was a man named Silas Reid. He worked selling vacuum cleaners door to door, and was known as the clean one for being extremely polite and tidy. But Silas harbored a deep hatred that no one knew about. He believed that women were corrupting the world, blaming them for all his personal failures, his job loss, his divorce and even the death of his own mother. His ex-wife, Lunatique, had left him for another man, and that was when he decided to cleanse the city of women.
On July 16, 1952, there was a women's convention at the Sycamore Hotel with nearly 300 women gathered for a charity event. Silas, wearing his usual salesman uniform, entered unnoticed, carrying what looked like his usual vacuum cleaner. But this time, it wasn't a vacuum. It was a homemade gas dispersal unit built with parts from old wartime equipment. He locked all the exits and activated the device. It took eleven minutes for the gas to fill the entire ballroom. 107 women died.
By the time authorities arrived, Silas was gone. It took two years before they finally found him.
But here's the strangest part: Silas was sent to an asylum instead of prison. After 15 years of institutionalization, he was declared cured and released.
However, searches of Newspapers.com — a newspaper-archives website hosting more than 1 billion pages from over 29,100 historical newspapers — found no record of a vacuum cleaner salesman named "Silas Reid" or Silas Reed" killing over 100 women at a hotel. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo also located no credible information to confirm the story. Those searches also failed to locate any record of a Sycamore Hotel ever existing in Wilmington, Delaware.
The story's mistaken mention of both 1942 and 1952, as well as the name "Lunatique" — similar to the word "lunatic" — served as extra hints of the story's fictional nature.
Rather, this tale showcased not just a fabricated story but also fake images a user generated with artificial-intelligence (AI) tools. Signs of AI in the video included the somewhat blurry and shiny appearance of people, as well as several images displaying letters that did not properly form real words. The bio for the Inspector Crimes Facebook page read, "AI-Inspirational Crafted Stories. AI-driven Experiences. Having Fun with AI. #AICreation." The Inspector Story Instagram account featured a similar disclaimer, which read, "AI-Inspired Stories." The Instagram page's bio also promoted an audio-only, AI-generated podcast — including a short episode for the "Silas Reid" story.
In an email to Snopes, a manager of the Inspector-named Facebook and Instagram accounts confirmed, "Yeah, that story's totally fictional. I just made my own version after seeing some stuff online. It's not based on real events or a real person." The user also reported combining AI tools and editing software to create the video.
Earlier video from Nigeria-run Facebook page
One of the oldest videos (archived) showcasing the story, if not the original, appeared on a Facebook profile named STORY TIME on May 18. That clip — a different one than the video shared one month later by the Inspector Crimes and Inspector Story accounts — received over 554,000 views. The profile's "page transparency" tab displayed Nigeria as the lone page manager's location of residence.
Via Messenger, we contacted the manager of the STORY TIME Facebook profile to ask about the origins of the fictional story, and to inquire about the tools used to make the video. We will update this story if we receive further information.
Other users shared the fabricated story on Instagram (archived), TikTok (archived) and YouTube (archived).
For further reading, a previous fact-check article — also about a video featuring AI-generated elements — examined a story claiming a cargo ship located a couple, Mark and Jennifer Patterson, who vanished 25 years earlier during a sailing trip from Florida to the Bahamas, in 1999.