We first see Boo introduced in chapter 1. Boo is described as a "malevolent phantom". To the children, he was the creepy guy on the street that everyone avoided. Tales start to circulate around the misunderstood Boo. "People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions." The inequality showed to Boo Radley was based on assumptions and projections. The people of Maycomb never tried to understand him and therefore, because he was misunderstood, he was treated inequitably. We see this later on with the treatment of Tom Robinson, another one of the novel's "Mockingbirds".
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