March 25, 2021 • 26 mins
As wartime fears peaked across the US during World War II, people throughout the nation were overwhelmed with fears of invading Nazis, secret biological weapons and more. For the residents of Mattoon, Illinois, these fears took a brief back seat to a new neighborhood menace -- a Mad Gasser who would sneak beside people's windows and pipe in a paralytic gas for reasons no one could understand. But who was this Mad Gasser? What on earth did this criminal want? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Today's episode is a gas?
But is it a mad gas? Well, I think that's
our starting question. I don't know, but let me take
a mad gasp for breath before I start talking about this,
because there's a lot to go over. I love the expression, Um,
(00:48):
it's a gas. Let's see what life's a gas. There's
a t Rex song laughs, a gas. Best annunciation of
the word gas, stretching it out to literally like four syllables. Um.
But yeah, we're talking about hysteria, We're talking about things
existing largely in the minds of the public and kind
of inventing foes that represent kind of your deepest, darkest fears. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:14):
And of course, as always, mad gas to have our
super producer Casey Pegram and our guest producer Andrew Howard
along with us on the ride today. If you're a
fan of hip hop, of course you know that people
can be gassed about something, which might mean excited, sometimes
(01:37):
with the connotation of being overly excited or maybe a
little more optimistic about an idea. This has nothing to
do with music, but it does have a lot to
do with public panic and the fear of crowds. Now,
this story may not be familiar to a lot of
(01:58):
people outside of Central Illinois, but if you are from
central Illinois, specifically the town of Mattune, then you are
probably familiar with the events that began in early September
nineteen four. Here's the headline, folks, there was a mysterious
(02:18):
figure in black who was, for some enigmatic reason spraying
paralyzing gas into the windows of people's homes. That's that's
a very specific odd flex slash crime. Uh. The newspapers, No,
they went overboard. Oh, I forgot to say, I'm ben.
(02:39):
The newspapers went overboard with the reporting of this, and
they kind of took it to the court of public opinion,
declaring that these attacks, these gassings, were the work of
what they called a mad gas er. And off air,
we talked about the idea of putting there's this very
(03:00):
specific move with reporting and publicity, sometimes with alarmist reporting,
to put the word mad in front of a verb
of something someone did, so like mad gasser. There would
also be the one you brought up earlier, role. Yeah,
like a mad bomber or perhaps a mad I don't know.
Once you start getting into slashing, that just you don't
(03:22):
need an extra word in front of that. You just
because you're a slasher. It's it's it's implied. I think
that you're a mad slasher. I do like the term
mad dash though, right, like I made a mad dash
for the bus or whatever. Um. But no, it's true, Ben,
And I was looking it up because the the idea
of of gassing or of a paralyzing gas, to me
(03:42):
makes me think of what would be considered a nerve
agent or nerve gas, which wasn't really discovered or invented
even really until I believe the late thirties, if I'm
not mistaken, Ben, And it would have been used during
World War Two. But would it have been in the
zeitgeist yet by this point, Ben, it seems like this
(04:02):
is very, very close to that whole discovery. Yeah, yeah,
because just a few years after the thirties, it would
have been incredibly unusual for someone to both know about
this stuff and have access to it. So, like, let's
(04:22):
say you have a career in the military, and some
specific aspects of the military, you could quite possibly be
very well aware of this stuff, but then knowing what
it is and how it works would not be the
same thing as being able to get your glove clad
hands on it and then and then properly fumigate somebody's
(04:44):
house with it totally. And the one we think of
even still today, saren gas was not discovered until nineteen
thirty nine. It's unclear to me, but I think I
I'm I'm leaning in your direction, Ben, that this wouldn't
have been something that would have been like discussed or
have wrecked paranoia about. But that's that's really interesting. But
that's really it's it's really interesting to consider where this
(05:06):
hysteria or this panic came from and when we'll get
right into that. Yeah, this is the thing. So just
a little further word about this. If this gas existed
and had the effects that it was described as having
in the papers of the time, then it would have
been an incapacitated agent, and those agents are Humanity is
(05:28):
known about the ability of some substances to like put
people in a stupor, or paralyze them, or put them
to sleep for a long time. The question is all
about the specifics. What is this gas? What happened? Why
did over twenty people claim that this mad gas or
(05:49):
sometimes known as the phantom anesthesis. Why why did over
twenty people feel like they were attacked by this person? Uh,
the FBI began investigating. Uh. Spoiler alert, fellow ridiculous historians.
The police never captured this gas or. So here's the thing.
(06:09):
Police never captured this gas or. Doctors medical experts who
examined the victims could not find anything wrong with them,
nor traces of chemicals in the bodies of these victims.
And police also couldn't find traces of the chemicals in
the residences or the structures that the gas er was
alleged to attack. The person also didn't leave footprints. So
(06:35):
what sparked the panic? And it is a panic, it's
it's actually it's something called mass hysteria, which is very real,
absolutely mass hysteria. And the thing that really gets interesting
is how, you know, I brought up the idea of
nerve agents, and I think that there's a real nice
clue in that headline or that that other nickname the
phantom anisthetist. The idea of this could have been the
(06:56):
work of a different substance, not a nerve agent at all,
but more or of like a laughing gas situation that
people would have been aware of that you used to
put people under during surgery, and that you know, it
had had been around for a long time and was
commonly used like in dental procedures and and uh and
the like UM or something heavier that might have been
used during you know, more invasive surgery. But the thing
(07:18):
that's fascinating is the behavior of of some of these
individuals that claim to have been drugged in this way.
And we also have like a precedent kind of for
this kind of mass hysteria. We have reported it recently
in fact, or at least what we you know, conjectured
to be that been on stuff. They don't want you
to know where. I believe it was in India, there
(07:39):
were cases of young children seeing um apparitions of some
kind or demons or you know, possession type things. And uh,
there is film that we actually saw of of these uh,
these kids kind of in the state of this trance
like state kind of screaming as though they're having a
waking nightmare. That's obviously a very upsetting example. UM. We
(07:59):
have a slightly more funny but then it gets to
be upsetting. Example from France in July of fIF eighteen,
where we had people dancing uncontrollably in the streets like
this song, you know, dancing in the street. I think
that's what David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Fabulous video, but
it escalates this kind of mania or hysteria. Tends to
(08:23):
be catchy, like the song also dancing in the streets,
which I probably won't be able to get in my
head for the rest of the week. These numbers of
people started to balloon, from thirty to several hundred individuals
dancing in the streets. And and some of them actually died. Uh,
not from some kind of poisoning or some kind of
substance or any kind of thing like that. It was
literally just from over exhaustion, like that scene in The
(08:46):
Midsummer where you dance so hard that you just pass out.
Only these folks actually died. Yeah, you can die from exhaustion,
it's true. And uh, the Screaming Girls of Malaysia is
that stuff they don't want you to know. Episode I
believe well worth a listen. Look there there are multiple
cases of what people would later describe as mass hysterians.
(09:10):
Some of them sound a little silly, you know, with
the benefit of retrospect, when you're thinking, Wow, was there
really a problem with nuns in France meowing like cats?
How is that contagious? You know? What is the Mount
Pleasant Mississippi hexing? The question today is is this a
case of this mass hysteria. To answer that, we have
(09:33):
to go to the beginning. Mattuna is a pretty small city.
It's about forty nine fifty miles south of Champagne is
the crow Flies, population around eighteen thousand. If we fast
forward to the end of August, it's hot town. Summer
(09:56):
in the city, you know what I mean, people have
their windows open at night because they want to let
in that cool evening breeze. But in nineteen forty four,
summer is a little bit different. Instead of having their
windows open all the way typically the way they usually
would write, with just some gauzy curtains between them and
the outside world, people only open their windows a crack
(10:19):
because so many of the men of the town were
away fighting a World War two, and there was this
kind of um, this undercurrent of fear, and this was
common in most of the United States at the time.
Even if you were a civilian, you were told you
were part of the fight. You needed to be on
(10:39):
the alert. You needed to keep your mouth shut about
possible military movements and keep your eyes open for any
suss activity. Everybody was on the edge of a figurative knife.
And so on August thirty one, a couple is asleep
in their house. They wake up, they smell something that
(11:00):
they described as sweet, and then they say, as soon
as we smelled this, we began feeling strange. Understandably, this
freaked him out, absolutely, And I think it is key
how on edge people would have been, you know, for
fear of a larger attack, perhaps, right, And it's interesting
(11:20):
how you know. I think it's key that the folks
were so on edge, perhaps for fear of a larger
attack or a bombing rate of some kind. Who knows,
you know, it's all very sketchy territory. Even though the
war is not on us soil. Who knows what could happen.
So i'm I'm I'm with them in that headspace. But
(11:41):
you're right, that sweet smell kind of wafting in through
the window we had Mrs rafe Um she got out
of bed thinking that maybe it was a gas leak
or that the pilot light was out, and she found
herself to be paralyzed or at least her legs at
this point, and her husband, Mr. Rafe, was afflicted similarly.
(12:02):
He was weak, he felt nausea overtake him, and he
immediately began to vomit violently. That's no fun um and
he without keeping getting out of bed. Uh So, Yeah,
we had other reports from neighbors that a young mother
was awakened by her daughter coughing violently, and then when
(12:24):
she checked on her daughter, she found that she had
been paralyzed, wasn't able to get out of bed. And
apparently neither of those families reported these happenings right away,
and maybe it wasn't until another attack on September one.
Folks felt maybe something was up. What happened on the
ninth of September one, nineteen ben Yeah, they that's a
(12:47):
really important point. They did eventually report this, but after
some amount of time had passed. And this this is
going to be a crucial detail. Later September for Eileen
Kearney goes to bed that evening, she's not feeling super great.
(13:10):
Her sister had helped her count some money that she
had gotten from a Czechi cashed earlier. But Kearney had
left her windows open at her house, so anyone who
walked by could have seen her and her sister counting
out the scratch. Why was she concerned, Well, she had reason.
(13:31):
Her husband was working the late shift, and the newspapers
at the time, which were making a mistake about it,
folks thriving on this culture fear. They had said the
police were looking for a Nazi who had escaped a
pow camp near Peoria, Illinois. And then there was also
an ongoing concern about prowlers peeping tom's they have been
(13:55):
called at other times. So it's around eleven PM. She
goes to bed. She had a three year old daughter.
She takes her daughter with her, and then not too
long as History of Yesterday dot com reports, it not
too long after eleven PM, Kearney notices a sickly sweet
odor in her bedroom. It sounds familiar, but unlike the races.
(14:18):
She ignores the smell and she's like, I got the
window open. Maybe it's some flowers, right, Maybe I'm just
smelling flowers and I'm not too familiar with it. But
she noticed the smell started becoming stronger, more apparent, and
then she, like the folks from the other day, began
to lose feeling, specifically in her legs. She called for
(14:40):
her sister, Martha, who was staying overnight as well, saying Martha,
come help me. Martha ran next door to the Robinson's.
Those are their neighbors, and their neighbors summoned the police. Mr.
Robinson and law enforcement search around the house and the yard,
and they find nothing amiss. They don't experience any paralytic
(15:03):
effects or anything like that. Whatever happened, if gas it
was must have dissipated between the time Kearney became paralyzed
and the time her neighbors arrived. And then finally her
husband gets home. Burt Burt Kearney comes home from driving
a taxi. It's like midnight thirty, you know, it's it's
getting into the wee hours, and he says something interesting.
(15:27):
He thinks he saw someone. Specifically, he thought he saw
a tall man in dark clothes with a tight fitting
cap lurking at the bedroom window, and he took off
after this guy, but the guy got away, So the
police are called a second time and for a second time,
(15:50):
they don't find anything. Nothing amiss, no footprints, nothing and disarray,
certainly not some unidentified, dark clad, super sketchy stranger. About
thirty minutes later, Ms Kearney could walk again. Her paralysis
is gone, but her daughter is still feeling these ill
effects until the next morning. And that next morning Ms
(16:15):
Kearney when she talks to the papers about this, she says,
her mouth and threw remained really dry like cot mouth,
and her lips she felt were burned by this gas. Yeah,
very specific results that people are talking about, but thankfully
the worst of these symptoms. The paralysis seemed to have
(16:35):
subsided after about a half hour, but her daughter was
feeling very under the weather until the next morning. Um So,
the next day Mrs Kearney went to the newspaper told
them about her mouth and throat and parched lips and
then the burning sensation and all of these things, including
(16:56):
this idea that there was some kind of prowler, and
you know, it was referring to this gas as though
this was like a sure thing. She knows this is
what happened. Um So, of course, like they do, the
media took this and ran with it, you know. Um So,
On September two, this became front page news in the
(17:18):
Mattoon Journal Gazette, admittedly paper with relatively small circulation, but
the front page read the following headline, anesthetic prowler on loose. Wow.
I mean, come on, talk about whipping up a panic, right,
like a small town like that, the idea of a
very specific kind of almost fetishized prowler that is going
(17:42):
around and maybe not murdering people, but you know, doing
trying meaning to do them harm. And yeah, and then
there's another article that said Mrs Kearney and daughter first victims. Uh.
And there was no evidence outside of the hearsay um
that was provided by Mrs Kearney and and her daughter.
They had no evidence to back this up. There was
(18:02):
no police report associated with the existence of this prowler.
And yet they're reporting on this individual as though they
are the real deal. And so in the minds of people,
of course, it did becomes the real deal. And and
the paper benefited from this. If it bleeds, it leads,
or if it gases, it passes. Uh. Mattune Journal Gazette
saw a nent bump in subscribership. There's a big deal
(18:27):
in a small town. That's like nearly subscribership of eighteen
thousand people. That's a serious boost. And it's uh, it
only a crude momentum because a few days after that,
the reefs come forward and they say, you know, we also,
(18:48):
we in our our neighbor encountered the exact same thing
you're describing. And picture the person at the Mattune Journal Gazette,
the editor in chief, saying, dang, we missed the headline.
We could make an even more spectacular headline or sensationalist headline,
I should say again. They also, despite the fact that
(19:09):
they described some of the same things almost as if
they had read the paper with a ninety seven percent
subscription rate, they also did not have anything in the
way of evidence fingerprints, footprints, etcetera. So there is a
great question here, and it's something explored in multiple sources.
(19:31):
And the question is this, to what extent where the
local papers involved in the making of the mad gas
or beyond just the reporting of the events. It's true
that they did not print anything about these attacks until
several days into September, and at that point, by that point,
(19:51):
multiple people, as we've shown, have already come to law
enforcement with complaints of attacks using gas, and ethically, it
would have been their job to talk about it. And
if the entire incident was just sort of a symptom
of the fear that was gripping so many people in
the US and Illinois at this time, then the truth
(20:14):
of the matter is that town gossip and chit chat
and argy bargele would have already have fired up the
populace well before they saw these headlines. So Anesthetic Prowler
is actually a little, um, I guess, a little less
sensationalistic than they could have gone. Oh, I mean, well,
(20:35):
if you compared to mad Gaster, to me, it sounds
like the newtered version, or like the more polite version
Anesthetic Prowler versus Mad Gaster. I think Anesthetic Prowler is
probably the more diplomatic of the two, right sure, yeah, yeah,
although I love when people dropped phantom into stuff. Phantom
is like mad as well. The papers did some digging
(20:56):
and they found that about a decade ago in Virginia
there have been reports of another rash of gassing incidents,
no arrest, no fatalities. So the papers revived this story
and they said, this is where the mad Gaster comes in.
And they said, Hey, maybe that mad gasser who never
got caught in Virginia came out here to Central Illinois.
(21:18):
And then when they reported that something that we've talked
about in the past on other shows began to happen.
More and more people began coming forward and claimed that
they had a story. Just like if there's a report
of a famous person disappearing or a report of a
criminal on the loose, multiple people will claim they have
(21:39):
seen this person. And the thing is they're not necessarily lying.
They believe what they're saying. And so, yeah, we have
to be careful when we think about all the other
people who came forward to other women said that something
like this had happened to them, not in August, but
a few months earlier, and they just didn't think about
reporting it until as they saw all the newspaper, Which
(22:01):
what is the logic there, Like if you got gassed,
if you felt like you got gassed and you were paralyzed,
even just for an hour, you you would tell like
you would at least text me and Casey absolutely, yeah,
I mean, and I'm not not trying to make this
overly heavy, but it's not even the same as say,
(22:21):
being a victim of sexual assault or being a victim
of molestation by like a relative or something like that.
That makes sense that people would bury that and not
talk about it, because there's a personal shame element involved,
all kinds of psychological angles as to why people would
would hide that, Whereas maybe I don't know who, who
am I to say? Maybe this has a maybe there's
(22:41):
a cross over there somewhere, maybe someone feels, if they've
been victimized in any way, that there's a point of
shame there. But I agree with you completely been if
I had been gassed, or felt that I had been gassed,
I absolutely would say something. I don't see any reason
why I would why I would hide that or be
embarrassed by it. You know, it's the age of ubiquitous
information and uh NonStop continual communication online. So I imagine
(23:08):
if something like this happened today, even in the same town,
there would be some kids on TikTok who would be
on the case within three minutes. But the this you
make a good point. You know that there may be
some kind of shame, some kind of compelling shame, that
prevented people from reporting this, or they may have had
(23:28):
some personal circumstances that kind of disincentivize them from interacting
with the police, but it continues, the incidents multiply. Another
person comes forward and says, I was coming back to
my house. I saw a sketchy dude and black. He
was lurking by the window, and he ran away when
(23:51):
I tried to approach him. And then sometimes three or
four houses would report these specific types of gas attacks
on a single night. So the windows which were open
or crack are now shut, and people began sleeping in shifts.
Let's go to there's one attack we know a lot about,
(24:11):
or the one that seems the most elaborate. Let's see
what's going on there. September five, ninety four. This is
a hell of a couple of weeks for the people
of the two It's true. And I want to point
out something that we talked about off the air, the
name Mattoon. When I first saw that and researching this,
I assumed it was in like, you know, India or something.
It's just a very unusual name that doesn't necessarily sound
(24:33):
like it would be an Illinois. I love it. It's
it's it's a really cool, cool name and fun to
say and it's it's happened again. Folks, we have had
such a gas of a time. Uh, please don't call
us ourselves gas bags. But this is becoming a two
part episode. No, did you ever hear the phrase gas
bag before? I'm not making that up right, that's a
(24:55):
real no. No, that's funny you say that, Ben. I
was going to mention it earlier on um it's a
popper into my head gas bag and b But I
think it's like basically the equivalent of like being a
wind bag, or you know someone that's full of crap
and then just talks a lot of smack. Well, hopefully,
hopefully if we talks back, we're not We're not full
of crap, and we are going to return in our
(25:17):
very next episode with some more explorations of the mad
gas are including, perhaps most importantly, some theories about how
this strange event could have come to unfold. Can't wait
to hear your thoughts on these. In the meantime, Please
let us know what you think about this. You can
(25:39):
find us online. We're on Facebook. We like to recommend
ridiculous historians. You can also find us as individuals. That's right.
You can find me on Instagram. Where I am at
how Now Noel Brown, and you can find me on
Instagram at Ben Bowlen, where occasionally I post embarrassing childhood
photos that my mother or keep sending me for some reason.
(26:02):
You can also find me on Twitter, app and Bull
and h s W. Thanks as always to our super
producer Casey Pegraham and our guest producer Andrew Howard, and
a huge thanks to Gabe Luzier for bringing this, uh,
this amazing topic to our attention and for being innocent,
all around swell guy, who we will absolutely have back
on the show soon. Christopher Hasci yodas here in spirit,
Jonathan Trick on the Quister, and Alex Williams, who composed
(26:24):
our theme. I can't wait for Part two. Man, this
gets into some really interesting stuff, wouldn't you say? I
would say, And we'll see you then, Folks. For more
(26:49):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Today's episode is a gas?
But is it a mad gas? Well, I think that's
our starting question. I don't know, but let me take
a mad gasp for breath before I start talking about this,
because there's a lot to go over. I love the expression, Um,
(00:48):
it's a gas. Let's see what life's a gas. There's
a t Rex song laughs, a gas. Best annunciation of
the word gas, stretching it out to literally like four syllables. Um.
But yeah, we're talking about hysteria, We're talking about things
existing largely in the minds of the public and kind
of inventing foes that represent kind of your deepest, darkest fears. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:14):
And of course, as always, mad gas to have our
super producer Casey Pegram and our guest producer Andrew Howard
along with us on the ride today. If you're a
fan of hip hop, of course you know that people
can be gassed about something, which might mean excited, sometimes
(01:37):
with the connotation of being overly excited or maybe a
little more optimistic about an idea. This has nothing to
do with music, but it does have a lot to
do with public panic and the fear of crowds. Now,
this story may not be familiar to a lot of
(01:58):
people outside of Central Illinois, but if you are from
central Illinois, specifically the town of Mattune, then you are
probably familiar with the events that began in early September
nineteen four. Here's the headline, folks, there was a mysterious
(02:18):
figure in black who was, for some enigmatic reason spraying
paralyzing gas into the windows of people's homes. That's that's
a very specific odd flex slash crime. Uh. The newspapers, No,
they went overboard. Oh, I forgot to say, I'm ben.
(02:39):
The newspapers went overboard with the reporting of this, and
they kind of took it to the court of public opinion,
declaring that these attacks, these gassings, were the work of
what they called a mad gas er. And off air,
we talked about the idea of putting there's this very
(03:00):
specific move with reporting and publicity, sometimes with alarmist reporting,
to put the word mad in front of a verb
of something someone did, so like mad gasser. There would
also be the one you brought up earlier, role. Yeah,
like a mad bomber or perhaps a mad I don't know.
Once you start getting into slashing, that just you don't
(03:22):
need an extra word in front of that. You just
because you're a slasher. It's it's it's implied. I think
that you're a mad slasher. I do like the term
mad dash though, right, like I made a mad dash
for the bus or whatever. Um. But no, it's true, Ben,
And I was looking it up because the the idea
of of gassing or of a paralyzing gas, to me
(03:42):
makes me think of what would be considered a nerve
agent or nerve gas, which wasn't really discovered or invented
even really until I believe the late thirties, if I'm
not mistaken, Ben, And it would have been used during
World War Two. But would it have been in the
zeitgeist yet by this point, Ben, it seems like this
(04:02):
is very, very close to that whole discovery. Yeah, yeah,
because just a few years after the thirties, it would
have been incredibly unusual for someone to both know about
this stuff and have access to it. So, like, let's
(04:22):
say you have a career in the military, and some
specific aspects of the military, you could quite possibly be
very well aware of this stuff, but then knowing what
it is and how it works would not be the
same thing as being able to get your glove clad
hands on it and then and then properly fumigate somebody's
(04:44):
house with it totally. And the one we think of
even still today, saren gas was not discovered until nineteen
thirty nine. It's unclear to me, but I think I
I'm I'm leaning in your direction, Ben, that this wouldn't
have been something that would have been like discussed or
have wrecked paranoia about. But that's that's really interesting. But
that's really it's it's really interesting to consider where this
(05:06):
hysteria or this panic came from and when we'll get
right into that. Yeah, this is the thing. So just
a little further word about this. If this gas existed
and had the effects that it was described as having
in the papers of the time, then it would have
been an incapacitated agent, and those agents are Humanity is
(05:28):
known about the ability of some substances to like put
people in a stupor, or paralyze them, or put them
to sleep for a long time. The question is all
about the specifics. What is this gas? What happened? Why
did over twenty people claim that this mad gas or
(05:49):
sometimes known as the phantom anesthesis. Why why did over
twenty people feel like they were attacked by this person? Uh,
the FBI began investigating. Uh. Spoiler alert, fellow ridiculous historians.
The police never captured this gas or. So here's the thing.
(06:09):
Police never captured this gas or. Doctors medical experts who
examined the victims could not find anything wrong with them,
nor traces of chemicals in the bodies of these victims.
And police also couldn't find traces of the chemicals in
the residences or the structures that the gas er was
alleged to attack. The person also didn't leave footprints. So
(06:35):
what sparked the panic? And it is a panic, it's
it's actually it's something called mass hysteria, which is very real,
absolutely mass hysteria. And the thing that really gets interesting
is how, you know, I brought up the idea of
nerve agents, and I think that there's a real nice
clue in that headline or that that other nickname the
phantom anisthetist. The idea of this could have been the
(06:56):
work of a different substance, not a nerve agent at all,
but more or of like a laughing gas situation that
people would have been aware of that you used to
put people under during surgery, and that you know, it
had had been around for a long time and was
commonly used like in dental procedures and and uh and
the like UM or something heavier that might have been
used during you know, more invasive surgery. But the thing
(07:18):
that's fascinating is the behavior of of some of these
individuals that claim to have been drugged in this way.
And we also have like a precedent kind of for
this kind of mass hysteria. We have reported it recently
in fact, or at least what we you know, conjectured
to be that been on stuff. They don't want you
to know where. I believe it was in India, there
(07:39):
were cases of young children seeing um apparitions of some
kind or demons or you know, possession type things. And uh,
there is film that we actually saw of of these uh,
these kids kind of in the state of this trance
like state kind of screaming as though they're having a
waking nightmare. That's obviously a very upsetting example. UM. We
(07:59):
have a slightly more funny but then it gets to
be upsetting. Example from France in July of fIF eighteen,
where we had people dancing uncontrollably in the streets like
this song, you know, dancing in the street. I think
that's what David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Fabulous video, but
it escalates this kind of mania or hysteria. Tends to
(08:23):
be catchy, like the song also dancing in the streets,
which I probably won't be able to get in my
head for the rest of the week. These numbers of
people started to balloon, from thirty to several hundred individuals
dancing in the streets. And and some of them actually died. Uh,
not from some kind of poisoning or some kind of
substance or any kind of thing like that. It was
literally just from over exhaustion, like that scene in The
(08:46):
Midsummer where you dance so hard that you just pass out.
Only these folks actually died. Yeah, you can die from exhaustion,
it's true. And uh, the Screaming Girls of Malaysia is
that stuff they don't want you to know. Episode I
believe well worth a listen. Look there there are multiple
cases of what people would later describe as mass hysterians.
(09:10):
Some of them sound a little silly, you know, with
the benefit of retrospect, when you're thinking, Wow, was there
really a problem with nuns in France meowing like cats?
How is that contagious? You know? What is the Mount
Pleasant Mississippi hexing? The question today is is this a
case of this mass hysteria. To answer that, we have
(09:33):
to go to the beginning. Mattuna is a pretty small city.
It's about forty nine fifty miles south of Champagne is
the crow Flies, population around eighteen thousand. If we fast
forward to the end of August, it's hot town. Summer
(09:56):
in the city, you know what I mean, people have
their windows open at night because they want to let
in that cool evening breeze. But in nineteen forty four,
summer is a little bit different. Instead of having their
windows open all the way typically the way they usually
would write, with just some gauzy curtains between them and
the outside world, people only open their windows a crack
(10:19):
because so many of the men of the town were
away fighting a World War two, and there was this
kind of um, this undercurrent of fear, and this was
common in most of the United States at the time.
Even if you were a civilian, you were told you
were part of the fight. You needed to be on
(10:39):
the alert. You needed to keep your mouth shut about
possible military movements and keep your eyes open for any
suss activity. Everybody was on the edge of a figurative knife.
And so on August thirty one, a couple is asleep
in their house. They wake up, they smell something that
(11:00):
they described as sweet, and then they say, as soon
as we smelled this, we began feeling strange. Understandably, this
freaked him out, absolutely, And I think it is key
how on edge people would have been, you know, for
fear of a larger attack, perhaps, right, And it's interesting
(11:20):
how you know. I think it's key that the folks
were so on edge, perhaps for fear of a larger
attack or a bombing rate of some kind. Who knows,
you know, it's all very sketchy territory. Even though the
war is not on us soil. Who knows what could happen.
So i'm I'm I'm with them in that headspace. But
(11:41):
you're right, that sweet smell kind of wafting in through
the window we had Mrs rafe Um she got out
of bed thinking that maybe it was a gas leak
or that the pilot light was out, and she found
herself to be paralyzed or at least her legs at
this point, and her husband, Mr. Rafe, was afflicted similarly.
(12:02):
He was weak, he felt nausea overtake him, and he
immediately began to vomit violently. That's no fun um and
he without keeping getting out of bed. Uh So, Yeah,
we had other reports from neighbors that a young mother
was awakened by her daughter coughing violently, and then when
(12:24):
she checked on her daughter, she found that she had
been paralyzed, wasn't able to get out of bed. And
apparently neither of those families reported these happenings right away,
and maybe it wasn't until another attack on September one.
Folks felt maybe something was up. What happened on the
ninth of September one, nineteen ben Yeah, they that's a
(12:47):
really important point. They did eventually report this, but after
some amount of time had passed. And this this is
going to be a crucial detail. Later September for Eileen
Kearney goes to bed that evening, she's not feeling super great.
(13:10):
Her sister had helped her count some money that she
had gotten from a Czechi cashed earlier. But Kearney had
left her windows open at her house, so anyone who
walked by could have seen her and her sister counting
out the scratch. Why was she concerned, Well, she had reason.
(13:31):
Her husband was working the late shift, and the newspapers
at the time, which were making a mistake about it,
folks thriving on this culture fear. They had said the
police were looking for a Nazi who had escaped a
pow camp near Peoria, Illinois. And then there was also
an ongoing concern about prowlers peeping tom's they have been
(13:55):
called at other times. So it's around eleven PM. She
goes to bed. She had a three year old daughter.
She takes her daughter with her, and then not too
long as History of Yesterday dot com reports, it not
too long after eleven PM, Kearney notices a sickly sweet
odor in her bedroom. It sounds familiar, but unlike the races.
(14:18):
She ignores the smell and she's like, I got the
window open. Maybe it's some flowers, right, Maybe I'm just
smelling flowers and I'm not too familiar with it. But
she noticed the smell started becoming stronger, more apparent, and
then she, like the folks from the other day, began
to lose feeling, specifically in her legs. She called for
(14:40):
her sister, Martha, who was staying overnight as well, saying Martha,
come help me. Martha ran next door to the Robinson's.
Those are their neighbors, and their neighbors summoned the police. Mr.
Robinson and law enforcement search around the house and the yard,
and they find nothing amiss. They don't experience any paralytic
(15:03):
effects or anything like that. Whatever happened, if gas it
was must have dissipated between the time Kearney became paralyzed
and the time her neighbors arrived. And then finally her
husband gets home. Burt Burt Kearney comes home from driving
a taxi. It's like midnight thirty, you know, it's it's
getting into the wee hours, and he says something interesting.
(15:27):
He thinks he saw someone. Specifically, he thought he saw
a tall man in dark clothes with a tight fitting
cap lurking at the bedroom window, and he took off
after this guy, but the guy got away, So the
police are called a second time and for a second time,
(15:50):
they don't find anything. Nothing amiss, no footprints, nothing and disarray,
certainly not some unidentified, dark clad, super sketchy stranger. About
thirty minutes later, Ms Kearney could walk again. Her paralysis
is gone, but her daughter is still feeling these ill
effects until the next morning. And that next morning Ms
(16:15):
Kearney when she talks to the papers about this, she says,
her mouth and threw remained really dry like cot mouth,
and her lips she felt were burned by this gas. Yeah,
very specific results that people are talking about, but thankfully
the worst of these symptoms. The paralysis seemed to have
(16:35):
subsided after about a half hour, but her daughter was
feeling very under the weather until the next morning. Um So,
the next day Mrs Kearney went to the newspaper told
them about her mouth and throat and parched lips and
then the burning sensation and all of these things, including
(16:56):
this idea that there was some kind of prowler, and
you know, it was referring to this gas as though
this was like a sure thing. She knows this is
what happened. Um So, of course, like they do, the
media took this and ran with it, you know. Um So,
On September two, this became front page news in the
(17:18):
Mattoon Journal Gazette, admittedly paper with relatively small circulation, but
the front page read the following headline, anesthetic prowler on loose. Wow.
I mean, come on, talk about whipping up a panic, right,
like a small town like that, the idea of a
very specific kind of almost fetishized prowler that is going
(17:42):
around and maybe not murdering people, but you know, doing
trying meaning to do them harm. And yeah, and then
there's another article that said Mrs Kearney and daughter first victims. Uh.
And there was no evidence outside of the hearsay um
that was provided by Mrs Kearney and and her daughter.
They had no evidence to back this up. There was
(18:02):
no police report associated with the existence of this prowler.
And yet they're reporting on this individual as though they
are the real deal. And so in the minds of people,
of course, it did becomes the real deal. And and
the paper benefited from this. If it bleeds, it leads,
or if it gases, it passes. Uh. Mattune Journal Gazette
saw a nent bump in subscribership. There's a big deal
(18:27):
in a small town. That's like nearly subscribership of eighteen
thousand people. That's a serious boost. And it's uh, it
only a crude momentum because a few days after that,
the reefs come forward and they say, you know, we also,
(18:48):
we in our our neighbor encountered the exact same thing
you're describing. And picture the person at the Mattune Journal Gazette,
the editor in chief, saying, dang, we missed the headline.
We could make an even more spectacular headline or sensationalist headline,
I should say again. They also, despite the fact that
(19:09):
they described some of the same things almost as if
they had read the paper with a ninety seven percent
subscription rate, they also did not have anything in the
way of evidence fingerprints, footprints, etcetera. So there is a
great question here, and it's something explored in multiple sources.
(19:31):
And the question is this, to what extent where the
local papers involved in the making of the mad gas
or beyond just the reporting of the events. It's true
that they did not print anything about these attacks until
several days into September, and at that point, by that point,
(19:51):
multiple people, as we've shown, have already come to law
enforcement with complaints of attacks using gas, and ethically, it
would have been their job to talk about it. And
if the entire incident was just sort of a symptom
of the fear that was gripping so many people in
the US and Illinois at this time, then the truth
(20:14):
of the matter is that town gossip and chit chat
and argy bargele would have already have fired up the
populace well before they saw these headlines. So Anesthetic Prowler
is actually a little, um, I guess, a little less
sensationalistic than they could have gone. Oh, I mean, well,
(20:35):
if you compared to mad Gaster, to me, it sounds
like the newtered version, or like the more polite version
Anesthetic Prowler versus Mad Gaster. I think Anesthetic Prowler is
probably the more diplomatic of the two, right sure, yeah, yeah,
although I love when people dropped phantom into stuff. Phantom
is like mad as well. The papers did some digging
(20:56):
and they found that about a decade ago in Virginia
there have been reports of another rash of gassing incidents,
no arrest, no fatalities. So the papers revived this story
and they said, this is where the mad Gaster comes in.
And they said, Hey, maybe that mad gasser who never
got caught in Virginia came out here to Central Illinois.
(21:18):
And then when they reported that something that we've talked
about in the past on other shows began to happen.
More and more people began coming forward and claimed that
they had a story. Just like if there's a report
of a famous person disappearing or a report of a
criminal on the loose, multiple people will claim they have
(21:39):
seen this person. And the thing is they're not necessarily lying.
They believe what they're saying. And so, yeah, we have
to be careful when we think about all the other
people who came forward to other women said that something
like this had happened to them, not in August, but
a few months earlier, and they just didn't think about
reporting it until as they saw all the newspaper, Which
(22:01):
what is the logic there, Like if you got gassed,
if you felt like you got gassed and you were paralyzed,
even just for an hour, you you would tell like
you would at least text me and Casey absolutely, yeah,
I mean, and I'm not not trying to make this
overly heavy, but it's not even the same as say,
(22:21):
being a victim of sexual assault or being a victim
of molestation by like a relative or something like that.
That makes sense that people would bury that and not
talk about it, because there's a personal shame element involved,
all kinds of psychological angles as to why people would
would hide that, Whereas maybe I don't know who, who
am I to say? Maybe this has a maybe there's
(22:41):
a cross over there somewhere, maybe someone feels, if they've
been victimized in any way, that there's a point of
shame there. But I agree with you completely been if
I had been gassed, or felt that I had been gassed,
I absolutely would say something. I don't see any reason
why I would why I would hide that or be
embarrassed by it. You know, it's the age of ubiquitous
information and uh NonStop continual communication online. So I imagine
(23:08):
if something like this happened today, even in the same town,
there would be some kids on TikTok who would be
on the case within three minutes. But the this you
make a good point. You know that there may be
some kind of shame, some kind of compelling shame, that
prevented people from reporting this, or they may have had
(23:28):
some personal circumstances that kind of disincentivize them from interacting
with the police, but it continues, the incidents multiply. Another
person comes forward and says, I was coming back to
my house. I saw a sketchy dude and black. He
was lurking by the window, and he ran away when
(23:51):
I tried to approach him. And then sometimes three or
four houses would report these specific types of gas attacks
on a single night. So the windows which were open
or crack are now shut, and people began sleeping in shifts.
Let's go to there's one attack we know a lot about,
(24:11):
or the one that seems the most elaborate. Let's see
what's going on there. September five, ninety four. This is
a hell of a couple of weeks for the people
of the two It's true. And I want to point
out something that we talked about off the air, the
name Mattoon. When I first saw that and researching this,
I assumed it was in like, you know, India or something.
It's just a very unusual name that doesn't necessarily sound
(24:33):
like it would be an Illinois. I love it. It's
it's it's a really cool, cool name and fun to
say and it's it's happened again. Folks, we have had
such a gas of a time. Uh, please don't call
us ourselves gas bags. But this is becoming a two
part episode. No, did you ever hear the phrase gas
bag before? I'm not making that up right, that's a
(24:55):
real no. No, that's funny you say that, Ben. I
was going to mention it earlier on um it's a
popper into my head gas bag and b But I
think it's like basically the equivalent of like being a
wind bag, or you know someone that's full of crap
and then just talks a lot of smack. Well, hopefully,
hopefully if we talks back, we're not We're not full
of crap, and we are going to return in our
(25:17):
very next episode with some more explorations of the mad
gas are including, perhaps most importantly, some theories about how
this strange event could have come to unfold. Can't wait
to hear your thoughts on these. In the meantime, Please
let us know what you think about this. You can
(25:39):
find us online. We're on Facebook. We like to recommend
ridiculous historians. You can also find us as individuals. That's right.
You can find me on Instagram. Where I am at
how Now Noel Brown, and you can find me on
Instagram at Ben Bowlen, where occasionally I post embarrassing childhood
photos that my mother or keep sending me for some reason.
(26:02):
You can also find me on Twitter, app and Bull
and h s W. Thanks as always to our super
producer Casey Pegraham and our guest producer Andrew Howard, and
a huge thanks to Gabe Luzier for bringing this, uh,
this amazing topic to our attention and for being innocent,
all around swell guy, who we will absolutely have back
on the show soon. Christopher Hasci yodas here in spirit,
Jonathan Trick on the Quister, and Alex Williams, who composed
(26:24):
our theme. I can't wait for Part two. Man, this
gets into some really interesting stuff, wouldn't you say? I
would say, And we'll see you then, Folks. For more
(26:49):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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