The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: A Story Of Anxiety And Hysteria In America's Heartland

Like many places in the US in the summer of 1944, the minds of people in the quiet Illinois city of Mattoon were probably occupied by news of the war. The Allied forces had recently invaded southern France, and Paris itself had been liberated only days ago. So, the night of August 31^st was likely one of mixed anticipation of things to come. However, what did happen next was beyond anyone’s expectations and highlights a weird mystery from the American heartland's history – the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

It all started that night when Urban Raef awoke to a strange smell in his house. It made him feel sick and weak, eventually leading him to vomit. His wife attempted to find the source of the strange smell, but had no luck. Not far away, something similar was happening to a young mother who had been woken up by the sound of her daughter coughing. When the woman attempted to leave the bed, she found to her horror that she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed.

Then, on the following night, Aline Kearney smelled a “sickening, sweet odor” in her house, which quickly took away the feeling in her legs. Her panicked response drew the attention of her sister, who was staying with her. When her sister tried to find the source of the smell, she concluded that it was drifting in from the bedroom window. The police were called, but they did not find anything amiss. Not long after, however, Aline’s husband Bert came home to check on his wife and, as he approached the house, he saw an unidentified man wearing dark clothing and a strange tight-fitting cap. The man allegedly fled into the night before Bert could catch him.

The day after Aline’s experience, the town’s Daily Journal-Gazette referred to the incident as an “Anesthetic Prowler on Loose”, which set the fires of conspiracy burning among the minds of the local people. Over the next two weeks, the town was plagued by strange events associated with an unknown assailant who allegedly used some sort of noxious gas to terrorize households.

People reported the strange smell invading their homes at night, causing them to become paralyzed, or to feel sick or dizzy. On September 5^th, Beulah Cordes reported finding a piece of cloth on her porch. For some reason, she decided to smell it – as you do – and was apparently overcome by a feeling of electric impulses passing through her body. For the next two hours, she was sick. The police took the cloth for chemical analysis, but eventually found nothing on it to cause concern.

Then it gets even weirder. A local fortune teller, Edna James, apparently encountered an “ape-like man” with a “spray gun” who doused her with a gas that caused her limbs to go numb.

Mass panic spread through the community. Armed vigilante groups took to the streets to keep the people of Mattoon safe at night, and even the military was brought in to investigate the gas attacks. Lists of suspects were assembled, police investigations were launched, but no one was ever apprehended. Suspects varied from a cruel prankster, loose asylum inmates, to escaped German or Japanese prisoners of war.

Today, the story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon remains a popular “unsolved mystery”, but even at the time, the police believed that many of the reports they received were the result of hysteria. For their own efforts, the police issued a statement on September 12, 1944, saying that the gasser didn’t exist and that the chief cause was gas brought into town by wind blowing in from a local war plant.

It is unclear whether they were right, but locals still believe someone was responsible for the “attacks”. Others have chalked it up to aliens or secret government experiments, and so on. Generally speaking, the hysteria charge is the most likely outcome, as history records some spectacularly interesting displays of human imagination.