March 30, 2021 • 45 mins
As the small town of Mattoon captured national attention during the reign of the Mad Gasser, the investigation took a turn. Authorities were baffled by the deluge of reports -- and their inability to find any physical evidence other than a soiled rag at a doorstep. As researchers and historians looked back on the events, they became increasingly convinced the was a different culprit behind the panic... and though the story was a gas, they were certain there had never been a real Mad Gasser in the first place. Learn more in the second part of this two part episode.
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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. This is the second part
of our two part episode on the Mad Gasser of
the two So, with the blessing of our super producer,
Casey Pegraham, we'll get right into it. We have a
(00:50):
few days following that initial kind of rash of reporting
um in the local paper, a Mr. Carl Cords and
Mrs Bulah Chords coming back to their home them and
around ten o'clock at night, and they discovered on their
porch a small piece of white cloth that was just
sitting there next to the screen door. Uh, and Mrs Cords,
(01:11):
like you do, I guess, uh picked it up and
sniffed it. I don't know about that, I will. Yeah,
that's that's an odd thing to do. They live in
a nicer town than we do, probably guess. So maybe
there was an odor coming off of it or something
and it was intrigued her. But yeah, she apparently took
(01:32):
a big, old deep huff of that thing and instantly
became violently ill. She began to swell up, and hives,
you know, covered her face and and she had burning
sensation and her mouth and throat and started violently vomiting,
like we've seen, very similar effects to some of these
other reports we've seen. She goes weak in the knees,
(01:53):
full paralysis of the legs soon um follow that, and
she describes it later it was a feeling of realysis,
she said. My husband had to help me into the house,
and soon my lips were swollen and the roof of
my mouth and my throat burned. I began to spit blood,
and my husband called a physician. It was more than
two hours before I began to feel normal again, and
(02:16):
the police came and they took the cloth, and they
also searched the home and they did find a skeleton
key and an empty tube of lipstick on the porch
as well, so they figured that the prowler was trying
to break in using that skeleton key. I'm sure most
people know what skeleton key is, Like I guess before
(02:37):
the days of more machined kind of locks and keys
where it was very specific to each lock, you would
have a skeleton key that was just like a basic
key that would just trigger the mechanism of most key.
And again maybe there were Ben, you might be able
to answer this, Um, maybe they were specifically tooled to
(02:57):
a set of locks in a home, But to me,
it feels like it was more rudimentary than that. Yeah,
it can be difficult. So skeleton keys have been around
for a while, and some would be specific to a house, right,
just like that single house has a skeleton key. But
I was also wondering about this detail, like how many
(03:19):
locks smiths were in Matune at the time, Like how
many people would have professionally worked with locks. Was this
a key that maybe they had like left under their
mat and forgotten about, you know, because we don't know
much about that key, and we don't know much about
this lipstick, but we do know, you know, crazy. We'll
(03:41):
get into some theories here, but we do know that
there is one thing that happens with these kind of
panics and crimes. Copycats entered the chat. So it is
possible that somebody else tried to do something like this
with a very different m O. Because up to now,
the mad gasser has ever attempted to enter through a door.
(04:02):
They've been at windows, right, and you don't need a
skeleton key for a window. Uh. They also haven't left
anything else behind, So if this was the mad Gaser
not a copycat, they were interrupted and a later examination
of the cloth found no chemicals on it that could
cause miscords this specific type of distress. But later that
(04:26):
night someone else reports an attempted gassing. Mrs Leonard Burrow
said that a stranger broke into her bedroom window and
then tried to gas her as well. So we've got
so far. Like, if we're the police, let's do law
and order, Mattoon. So we're on the case. This is
(04:48):
a huge break in our case, possibly because it's the
first time we found physical evidence. However, things continue to
escalate from September six through the teeth. Yes, that's right.
On September the sixth, after the News broke the story
on the cords, there were seven, no less than seven
(05:10):
more attacks reported, and that included one that supposedly involved
or allegedly involved the sighting of the mad gass or
the prowler, the man in black um. And yeah, like
I said that, we like we said from the start,
already a lot of anxiety in the air because of
the war. Um. And now you know you have these
(05:31):
escalating reports of some lunatic running rampant around their small town,
just gassing people Willie and or Nilly, and the FBI
gets called in from Springfield, which isn't too far from Mattoon,
to give the local cops a hand with the investigation.
So in September seven, even though there were no attacks reported,
(05:54):
this phantom anistetis made the news. And here here's the
basic kind of takeaway from the from the report, mattuns
mad and the statists apparently took a respite from his
maniacal four as Thursday night, the papers said, terrified citizens
are inclined to hold their breath and wonder when and
(06:15):
where he might strike next. Good lord, let's let's also
pivot the story a little bit to the responsibility of
the press, shall we. Yeah, that's the issue, and it's
an important one because they realized the paper was going
gangbusters as long as it had a story that was
somehow about the mad gas er in in somewhere in
(06:38):
the folds, right, and so they decided to report that
there was no report, and uh still try to ratchet
up the tension by pointing out that people were scared,
attempting to make the more scared. And when we go
to the idea of responsibility of papers. We're not just
talking about the matun Journal gives that anymore. We're also
(07:01):
talking about the papers in Chicago, right that are popular
in this town, but they're they're known as national publications.
So within a few days you would be able to
read multiple reports and speculative pieces about the gas or
from any number of papers. Time Magazine even reported on
(07:23):
this and they said they got a little they styled
on it, and I like the way they wrote this.
It moves through the night as nimbly and secretly as
a cat squirting a sweetish gas through bedroom windows, which
is very like Macavity. You know, I'm sorry, his sweetish
gas a sweet I mean it made me think of
(07:46):
Swedish gas, like like like manufactured by the Swedes. That
is very funny. Secretly, You're right, Macavity. It's very jellical,
no question about it. And of course this just this
kind of you can't buy this kind of a story,
you know, you can't. Uh. And the imagery it's just
it's absolutely gonzo. Um. So back in the tune, you
(08:08):
had the police chief, I'm presuming his last name was
Wiggins put the entire force a ten man force, by
the way, which is ridiculously understaffed seeming. But not one
of them could find any evidence of the actual prowler.
So the state police gets called in, got another associated headline,
(08:29):
state hunts gas madman. That's a tricky one. I almost
wanted to say mad gas man um the war two uh,
and the Army's the army is called in the Chemical
Warfare Service tried to figure out what the gas might
be bent. Do we have any reports of what was
on that cloth? I'm sorry if I if I missed that.
(08:52):
We do not, So we we know that they may
have found a couple of things, but because it's literally
a you know, a dirty cloth on the round, but
they didn't find anything that could do any of the
stuff described by by the neighbors or the victims over
in Matune. Responding to all the people around the nation
(09:15):
who are writing in with their own kind of armchair
investigative opinions, here the police chief and and his forces
are just it's kind of like the second act of
a law and order episode where now they have to
fight the public opinion, all the people saying like, why
don't you do anything? Up and coming politicians making Hay
like you know, I would hold the police chief accountable.
(09:39):
The attacks continue to rise and the police decide that
they're going to have to do something different. So they
stopped looking for this wild and crazy guy who is
somehow managing to attack multiple homes but as a never
clearly seen by vigilantes who are currently patrolling the town
(10:01):
every night, and be never leaves evidence. So instead they say,
we're going to put in a workflow where we verify
these attacks. Hospital examinations of some of the folks who
have come forward have found nothing wrong with them. Zip, zero, zilch, nada,
and the incident started to decrease a little bit, but
(10:26):
there was this breaking point for the police and one
night three reports came in and so police then announced, look,
you can report it an attack. You should report an
attack if you encounter one, but when you report it,
you need to submit to a full medical examination. If
(10:47):
you reported an attack and you don't agree to let
a doctor examine you, then we are going to arrest you,
which is crazy because they have been like inundated with
what they considered false reports, which led to their follow
up statement on the twelfth where they said, quote, the
entire incident was likely the result of explainable occurrences exacerbated
(11:12):
by public fears and a sign of the anxiety felt
by women while local men were on war service. So
the misogyny is there. Basically, what they're saying is like, oh,
these women focus so emotional, that's really what's happening. And
you know, I think we can all agree that's that's
(11:33):
a dumb thing to say, at least the second part.
The rest of it, the idea that there are public
fears that are kind of getting in a feedback loop
and growing out of hand. That makes total sense. But
either way, right after this announcement on the twelfth, the
number of attacks and reports of attacks drops precipitously. The
(11:55):
very last report comes on someone says they gas or
was a woman dressed as a man, and I've found
their footprints beneath the window for some reason, they were
wearing high heels. By this time, the number of self
reported victims totaled around or was it thirty three according
to the newspapers, And when the attacks stopped, or when
(12:18):
people stopped reporting these attacks, no suspects were ever named,
no charges were ever filed. So our question now ridiculous. Historians,
what the heck happened? Was there even really a mad gasser?
Was there really a mad gasser? And not? And we're
not trying to gaslight anybody here. I had to, I
(12:40):
had to do it. But yeah, probably not. It's entirely
likely that there was no mad gas or that this
was a combination of that paranoia, that anxiety brought on
by the war conflict, um, and just kind of an
escalating case of mass hysteria like we talked about at
(13:03):
the top of the show. But also there are some
pretty amazing theories, some ranging from absolutely absurd and over
the top to some pretty plausible, and we are now
going to go through some of those. My personal favorite,
that we won't even put in the numbered list would
be the idea of some sort of extraterrestrial visitor that
(13:27):
was spraying people with nerve agents and using them for
experiments or something with some sort of secret, you know,
nefarious agenda. Uh. Perhaps this was some kind of inventor
or some sort of you know, mad scientists that was
testing out his creations on the unsuspecting public or yeah,
(13:49):
or up the government, you know, as when when in doubt,
blame the government, um, because you know, surely the FBI
and the police and the state police were all in cahoots,
you know. But here's the thing, then, none of this
is that crazy actually, because again we've talked about MK Ultra,
and we know that the CIA absolutely did experiments on
(14:12):
the public um through this guy named George Why. If
you want to hear more about that, check out the
show Operation Midnight Climax that I had the privilege of
of hosting and narrating um. But yeah, they they actually
would reach out when people were reporting being dosed with
LSD by the CIA. They didn't know it was the CIA.
They went to report this guy George White, who was
an agent of the CIA. The police had already been
(14:35):
reached out to by the CIA and told to bury
the reports. So that this is not outside of the
realm of possibility of the government angle. But we've got
some much more plausible and realistic potential scenarios based on
the environment. Literally. Yeah, I'd like to go back to
the government part. Because people also know that the US
has a long history. Even back in the forties, people
(14:57):
were aware to some degree that the US has a
long history of human experimentation, not just Tuskegee, Uh, not
just dim k ultra. But but like also things in St. Louis,
chemical spraying of entire populations, this stuff definitely happens, uh.
And keep in mind that around this time there are
(15:17):
also secret towns like Oak Ridge, which is just up
the way from some of my relatives in modern day Tennessee. Yeah,
so I can understand that fear absolutely. These other theories though,
are as, as we said, more a little more plausible. First,
Mattoons Police Chief ce Coal when they issue that statement
(15:42):
we mentioned on September twelve, they say that this could
be industrial pollution. There is an Atlas diesel engine company
that's not too far away and it creates large quantities
of what's known as carbon tetrachlori gas. Us. He says,
this gas is the only thing that we can find
(16:03):
that would explain these reported cases paralysis and illness. And
then he says, you know, it could be carried through
the town. It could have left some stains on that
cloth or that rag that were found on the home,
and explain why it didn't have any like why I
had a smell, but why it didn't have any chemicals
that on later investigation could have been found to be
(16:26):
an incapacitating agents. And he said, you know, maybe the
mad gasser is just a figment of the collective imagination.
And he described the entire cases quote a mistake from
beginning to end. So imagine you work at that let's
diesel plant. Are you gonna take this No, You're gonna
send your spokesperson out to deny the allegations and say
(16:49):
that you only use that specific gas in your fire extinguishers.
And if there are any other gases that are used there,
they obviously caused no ill effects. Because we have a
ton of people working here. How come they don't ever
lose the use of their limbs? How come they don't
ever have a sickly sweet smell and then violent vomiting
and maybe even more importantly, one of the best parts
(17:11):
of their argument, how come this gas has never caused
problems in the city before? And so this, this theory, though,
still has as missing pieces. It's got a lot of
missing pieces, one of which is like the means of transmission. Right,
Let's say, if this gas is a byproduct of some
industrial process, like how is it how is it not
(17:33):
affecting everybody? And or on a much larger scale, if
it's just being pumped out into the air people are breathing. Um,
why is it like being more targeted. How does this
relate to the rag, you know, the piece of cloth
that that doesn't really add up. It really doesn't make
a whole lot of sense unless it was polluting water
(17:53):
or something that was like easily a source a vector
you know, for people receiving this substance into their bodies,
you know, and large enough doses that it would actually
affect people. Um. You know, we we've covered on stuff
that I want you to know, bend tons of industrial
pollution situations. And usually when it really starts to affect
the population, it starts to affect like the livestock starts
(18:16):
to affect you know, people on mass and it's usually
because of seeping into the groundwater, right, Yeah, it's usually
something that doesn't target a specific house, like lead contamination,
for instance, gets everybody who's exposed to the lead through
as you said, often water source. That's one of the
biggest holes with theory number one. It didn't explain and
(18:39):
this is the official explanation, but it didn't explain how
so many people reported seeing the same figure they saw
they saw the same individual and described it the same way,
even when they were talking about different witnesses, and people
would say I saw someone running, even if they didn't
(19:00):
have any idea that a gas attack quote unquote had
taken place. And this leads us to theory number two,
an actual individual, like there was an actual person somehow.
BE very interested to hear your thoughts on this one, folks.
(19:23):
Like we said, there are a couple of paranormal theories
about this, like, hey, it's kind of a cryptod or
hey it's an extraterrestrial or an extra dimensional entity of
some sort. But this goes back to a guy's work
I really enjoy mentioned them in an earlier Stuff They
Want You to Know episode on Don Decker is a
(19:45):
history teacher named Robert Bartholomew who was based in New
Zealand for a time, and he says there's no proof
that there was some gas or in Virginia. Who later
I don't know, through a dartboard at his US map
and yeah, and pick central Illinois. But there is one person,
(20:05):
a native of of the area named Scott Marona, who
is a high school chemistry teacher and the author of
a book called The Mad Gaster of Matune. He says
not only did the mad gas really exist, but he
thinks he knows who it was, a guy named Farley
lou well Yeah. It sounds about right, sounds like an
(20:27):
absolute psychopath. I'm just kidding. You can't really judge a
book by its cover or a psychopath by his name.
Farley Llewellen was something of an outcast. He's the son
of a grocer um and he was believed by uh
Scott Marona to have been the mad gas or. Marona
wrote a book in two thousand three about the events
(20:51):
um where he claimed that lleu Ellen wanted revenge on
Mattune as a whole because they had ostracized him for
being a was certainly tracks in terms of like the
attitudes of the time in a you know, kind of
rural Midwestern town like that most of the town believed
(21:11):
that Farley was going insane, Marona wrote in the book,
And that Matune was kind of, you know, like a
real gossip mill kind of town. Uh. And there was
a lot of insinuating that the man's sexual preference was
the cause of his quote diminishing insanity. Um. Yeah, so
(21:33):
like extra extra extra, uh, you know, just reductive thinking
and and and and highly offensive and enough. I'm sure
it wouldn't you know, make anyone feel very isolated and um,
you know, just demonized in that way. Uh So I
can understand the anger there, but what you do with
that anger is is the thing. So Maroona actually came
(21:58):
to the conclusion that Allen was the most likely candidate
because he felt that one of the descriptions of the
suspect in one of those many pieces that were written
about at the time matched Llewellen, and so he's he
thought he was the guy because Dullen was was a
bit distinct. He was a tall, lanky, thin man um
(22:22):
who matched one of these supposed eyewitness accounts um outside
of the Kearney home. In fact, Um he had graduated
from the University of Illinois as well with a ding
ding ding chemistry degree and had himself a bit of
a home lab laboratory type set up. Which is nothing
(22:43):
wrong with that, but that is that could be considered
circumstantial evidence. It's like, it's the thing that on Law
and Order and matun would make you look into the
case a little more. But other chemists, professional chemists are
pretty skeptical that someone working at home even a mad
genius could create a gas that would be a stable
(23:05):
enough to make someone sick, but be also fleeting enough
something that would dissipate quickly enough too not leave any traces.
And this leads our guy Bartholomew to say the following
hard line here, ma'am. Anyone who examines all of the
evidence and still thinks there was a real mad Gasser
(23:26):
is living in fantasy land. The evidence for mass hysteria
is overwhelming. It is a textbook case. The Mad Gasser
outbreak was a media creation from start to finish and
has nothing whatsoever to do with the paranormal. And that
brings us to our third and final theory, mass hysteria. Noel,
(23:48):
Before we get into this, I do want to, uh,
I do want to point out that hysteria itself has
its etymological origins in some in some stuff that I
don't think any of us listening really agree with the
idea that there is some kind of fundamental emotional instability
in people who identify as women categorically untrue. Luckily now,
(24:12):
and you know, whenever we're saying hysteria, we're talking about
the modern definition exaggerated, uncontrolled emotional excitement among a given
group of people. Think, I think that's definitely become more
the way that it's used, but it's still you see
it thrown around as a as a sexist kind of term,
(24:33):
like oh, you're hysterical, things like that. Um, but yeah,
not cool, and that is not what we're talking about
at all. There's no gender involved in this, one way
or the other. So the local commissioner of Public Health,
Thomas the Right, he was pretty solid on this particular
concept um. He believed that mass hysteria was to blame
(24:57):
for these outbreaks. He said the following, There's no doubt
that a mass maniac exists and has made a number
of attacks, but many of the reported attacks are nothing
more than hysteria for the gas man is entirely out
of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas.
He is spraying the whole town is sick with hystarry. Okay,
that's interesting. So he's saying there's a person a person,
(25:20):
but that the attacks are much more innocuous than than
has been reported or that people have made it out
to be. Was that was that your takeaway? There been?
So yeah, he's saying there might be some kind of
dude running around. There might be a rando weirdo, but
the he's saying that they're not causing your as much
(25:44):
damage as they are, you know, portrayed to be causing
or perceived to be causing. And then we have to
talk about the timing. The public concern about this story
lasted a little less than two weeks until or Labor
Day nine. The reason it was not completely forgotten we
(26:06):
owe that primarily to a guy named Donald Johnson. He
was a University of Illinois psychology student who a few
weeks after the incident visited Matune himself. In n he
published a study of this case and in outfit called
the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, And you can
(26:30):
read citations of his research in tons of textbooks as
a classic study of mass hysteria, which will go into
a book recommendation I have at the very end of
today's episode. So Johnson goes on to become a professor, right,
and he says, the case of this mad gasser was psychogenic.
It began, he said, with one person's imagination. MS. Kearney
(26:53):
in particular, he said, an exciting, uncritical story appeared in
the evening paper as the news spread, other people reported
similar symptoms, more exciting stories, like even more exciting stories
were written, and so the affair snowballed. He's not the
one who said, like more exciting stories that was That
was me. So according to this our real culprit here,
(27:16):
if you believe Professor Johnson is the newspaper of the day,
they had the power to influence not just public opinion,
but public health. He thinks that without the press coverage here,
the epidemic of hysteria, as he describes it would not
have broken out. And this comes to us from the
Washington Post because the only other medium of mass communication
(27:38):
for local news was word of mouth at this time.
A word of mouth was too slow to create a
mass outbreak, and it was also considered less reliable than
the paper. But that's why we have the phrase the
paper of note. If the press prints it, it becomes
in a way true. So Johnson, who allied up almost
(28:01):
thirty police reports, uh, and that you know, the newspapers
noted about thirty three people coming forward. He notes that
all these police reports got reported in the media pretty
much one time, like one day after the next. So
this kind of added some high octane fuel here. So
(28:27):
now we have perhaps in the crowd today some our
fellow ridiculous historians are saying, Hey, you jerks, I'm from
a tune. We're not a bunch of crazy people who
are scared of gas coming through our windows. You guys
are being unfair. Well, there are extenuating circumstances that we
(28:48):
feel should be considered. We're gonna go to belt mag
dot com for help with some of these, right, So
there's a lot of Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here.
Man and I made the bad dumb dad joke about lighting,
but that really is a lot of what's coming on here.
I think, Ben, you and I have discussed this in
the past. But where the origin of the term gas
lighting comes from. It being a psychological form of manipulating
(29:13):
people into thinking that they're the ones that are insane
um And it comes from a play Uh where a
character named Jack Manningham um manipulates his wife Bella into
believing that she is the one that's like losing it. Um.
So it's it's a term that gets thrown around a
lot today. And ironically this story has to do with
(29:35):
gas but not connected. But it very much is a
thing that's happening here because it happens at night. Also true,
but it very much is a thing that is happening
because you have these folks that are like convinced they've
been attacked or they've been victimized in some way, and
then you have authorities kind of saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, no,
you're you made it all up. It's your delusional. This
(29:58):
became such a part of this trope that it actually
made an appearance in the novel The Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, where a character is described or a legend
within the lore of the book them Tune maniac Um.
He makes an appearance in this this book The Invasion
of the Body Standards, which of course went on to
be made into several films. Um and one character describes
(30:22):
this legend uh and convinces the heroes of the story
that they have become delusional. So because you know, sure
there were some reports of this being real, but that
it was almost surely completely false. Um. So yeah, it's
like it's easy to get caught up in that, and
and then you start to feel crazy and it can
almost like escalate your fears because gas lighting is not
(30:46):
meant to calm people down or make them feel like, oh,
you're right, I was just blowing things out of proportion.
The idea is to take something they know to be
true in their heart of hearts, or at least fully
believe it, and then convincing them that they are having
some sort of you know, uh, hallucination or mental breakdown.
Like my favorite example of that in an argument someone
(31:09):
says you're gaslighting me, and they say, I'm not what
what is gas lighting? That's just the thing you made
up just now, you're crazy. That's that's like the best
dumbest explanation of gas lighting. But also these fears, again,
they're coming from a very reasonable place. If you look
at the context of the world at this time September,
(31:31):
Are you kidding me? World War two is you know,
we know now in that World War two is winding down.
But people in the US are wondering if those rumors
about some sort of quote unquote hail Mary secret weapon
are actually true. You know what I mean? There were
reports that were domestic papers of the time that would say,
(31:54):
you know, Nazi Germany has these mystery weapons. They're gonna
turn the tide of the war. They may deploy like
massively dangerous biological weapons, biological agents. And this is a
town where a lot of young men, Like this is
a rural Midwestern town, so a lot of young men
(32:16):
have been sent directly to the front lines. And that
means news of the war is everywhere. It's in the
front of people's minds. And you think about the fear
of poison gas. Of course people would have known about
some sort of poison gas. You killed a ton of
people in World War One, and international efforts in the
(32:37):
interwar years between World War One and World War Two,
there were a lot of efforts to ban chemical weapons
and they all failed totally. Yeah, you would have if
you lived there during this time, you would have known.
You would have possibly personally known someone who came home
from World War One with all kinds of injuries and
burns from chemical warfare right then. And I feel like
(32:59):
a dumb dumb from my questioning of this at the
top of the show. I was speaking more in terms
of nerve agents and like, you know, saren gas, which
wouldn't have been discovered until a time where maybe that
particular one wasn't as known by you know, people in
in these small world towns. But mustard gas and the
effects of its use in World War two would have
absolutely been known. And these, um, these discussions about banning
(33:21):
chemical warfare. So I was talking about a little bit
of a different thing. But you know, mustard gas that
just kills you dead, right, I mean that doesn't like
paralyze you, or what's supposed to deal with like nerve
gas versus mustard gas. They're they all just kind of
are meant to to kill you, right. Well, mustard gas.
The weird thing is it's tech it's a chemical warfare agent,
but it's not technically a gas. Uh. It can form
(33:45):
these large blisters on your skin and on your lungs.
So it's an uncool way to go. But in the
minds of like to the point about nerve agents versus
you know, incapacitating agents versus like mustard assis, et cetera,
to the mind of the average person living in the
(34:06):
in these towns and across the country at this time,
these are all kind of the same amorphous, terrifying thing.
It's a really good point, just the specter of the
idea of chemical attack, you know what I mean. Uh,
And and and this just a really good point. Then
the idea of their being this kind of hail Mary
after the closing bell kind of attack. Um, that actually
(34:29):
absolutely would have been something that would have been on
people's minds in the same way that during the Cold
War people would have been, you know, duck and cover
and all that, and terrified of potential nuclear holocaust that
could have just come at the drop of a bomb.
And people were waiting for that terrible shoe to fall,
because folks are still worried about a physical invasion of
(34:52):
the United States, even if you're in what would be
considered the heartland. And also people noticed that no one
had used is in gas yet in World War Two.
It was produced during that time, and plans were drawn
up to use it, but it hadn't been deployed by
either side. And if you want to see how fearful
this is, you can just read, not the headlines, not
(35:15):
the features of the journal gazette at this time, look
at the ads. On August twenty, a few days before
all this stuff starts going down, and the paper ran
this ad promoting what we're called invasion bonds. And if
you look at if you look at the copy, what
you see is there's a picture of the grim Reaper,
and he's got his hands wrapped around a broadsword instead
(35:37):
of a scythe, which is interesting choice, I guess, and
it says, and then another voice going like by your
invasion wall bonds today, So like people are being sold
stuff through fear, they're being primed to move in the
context of that emotion. So of course you're going to
(36:01):
be nervous in general, like their baseline anxiety. Can you
imagine how high it must have been. You already might
already have a relative right and who's across the sea,
and you don't know what's going to happen to them.
So there was this heightened awareness and people were already
on their guard. Miscarney in particular was probably also very
(36:23):
well aware of the reports of this escaped German prisoner.
People were expecting for something terrible to happen, right, They
were so ready for it in their heads, and they
were anticipating it so much that in a way, there's
this argument that they just started believing it was already happening. Yeah, Unsent,
(36:44):
it makes sense. And I would be pretty terrified too, Ben,
I don't know about you, how do you think you
would feel living in this climate? Well, in a way,
and this is something I think a lot of our
our listeners were thinking about as well during this two
part episode. In a way, we did live through something
like this, did we not? Because we were relatively young
(37:08):
when the events of September eleventh occurred, and and we
can have people around the country, especially in larger cities
or metro areas, had a very real fear that their structures,
or people or their entire city would also be targeted.
And I think a lot of this happens because you
(37:32):
don't know when you're in the middle of history. You
don't have the benefit of the textbook, you know what
I mean. Can't You can't like skip the chapter seven
nine six and go okay, okay, I'll be fine. No,
you can't. Hindsight is in fact, and another another comparison
(37:53):
I think might be to living through what we've lived
through with COVID nineteen and and not knowing, um, when
the other shoe was going to drop or you know,
whether this was some sort of attack or whether this
was some sort of like unprecedented plague that was going
to kill us all uh, and just I think you know,
the kind of wait and see kind of um approach
(38:16):
can really lead to some wild speculation, especially when you're
you know, hold up in your house and have something
to do. But like doom scroll on the internet. True, Yeah,
we have to wonder how again, how the uh, the
internet would have affected this situation of the mad gas
or so. The Washington Post has another theory about what
(38:38):
specifically triggered the attack. Here, mattun returned to its normal
um it's relative obscurity, and people still talk about the
mad gas or incidents today, you know, the same way
every like so many towns have kind of a local
legend or a crazy event, uh and the mad gas
(39:00):
her is the the event of Mattoon. But some folks
at the Post did a little bit of detective work,
and they said, even though Mrs Kearney never really went
on record talking about what sparked her initial report of
the sweet smelling gas, the Post speculates this all speculation
(39:23):
that because she was an avid reader and spent her
evenings reading that on the night of the attack, they
conclude that she was reading one popular book of the era,
My Life in Hard Times by James Thurber. It's pretty
good book. In that book, she would have met one
of Thurber's more infamous characters. Sarah Chouff Uh. Sarah Choff
(39:45):
is a woman who quote never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a
tube to avert this calamity, for she was in greater
dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods. Shows
piled or money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat
stack just outside our bedroom, with a note reading this
(40:06):
is all I have. Please take it and do not
use your chloroform, as this is all I have. That's
pretty on the nose, right, Yeah, now that's that's wild.
Is there a name for this affliction, Ben, we should
coin one. If not, it's very specific, like chlorophire. Well
that's good, that's good. Uh. Well it's not our it's
(40:28):
not our best work. Maybe, but this this has been
a wild ride. And as we draw to the conclusion
of our two part episode, I did one recommend one book,
and I know it's one that you and I are
both fans of. Your knowal it is Outbreak with an
exclamation mark. Let me say that again. Outbreak. The Encyclopedia
(40:51):
of extraordinary social behavior. This is a reference work with
tons and tons and tons of real life examples outbreaks
of hysteria throughout human civilization. It's well worth the read.
Uh it's uh, it's weird, but do check it out.
And if you are familiar with this book, please let
(41:11):
us know which historical examples of hysteria outbreaks most fascinate you.
And why was that the dancing plate Noel mentioned earlier?
So the more modern screaming Girls of Malaysia Salem which trials.
Perhaps there are tons of choices out there and they're
probably I'm sure there's several knowl that you and I
have yet to hear of. Indeed, Uh, And I do
(41:33):
want to point out to as a couple of fun
little bits of trivia here. Do you remember the the toys?
I think it was probably from when we were kids
where they kept going on for a while. Uh. Monster
in my pocket. Yeah, they're they're like muscle men but
painted right. Yeah, they're like weird little painted like army
muscle wrestler guys, but you know, creepy spooky monsters. So
(41:58):
one of them from series full or uh and they
came out in two thousand six that would have been
a little later. I swear I remember this from when
I was a little kid, though, so it must be
the kind of thing where that Yeah, so series one
would have begun in ninety surely, yes, that tracks I
definitely remember this. Um. I don't know that I had
(42:18):
any but popular line of toys, because it continued well
into the two thousand's and one of the two thousand
six editions had a little creature by the name of
the Mad Gaster of Mattun, who is a green, multi
armed monster appears to have snakes coming off his body
(42:38):
as well wearing some very odd brown kind of boot
looking things, and and and uh on a creepy gas mask.
Um so, yeah, apparently, let's see, there was a line
associated with all of these things that must have come
with a trading card or something, and his in particular,
says the mysterious Many Act. The Mad Gasser haunts the night,
(43:02):
releasing a strong, nauseating and paralyzing gas into the homes
of his innocent victims as they sleep. He's never been
identified or clearly seen. The only proof he exists is
a trail of blue vapor and poisonous fumes. Don't inhale
and you know what, Also, I'm glad we're bringing up
this fact at the end. Also we should shout out
(43:24):
not just not just monster my pocket musclemn but Matun
doesn't need to have its identity reduced to the place
where the mad Gasser was working. It is also, according
to the residents of Matune, the bagel capital of the world.
So we're ending on a more positive note as we
get into lunchtime hours here self proclaimed bagel capital of
(43:44):
the world. I don't know that there's any official designation there,
and I'm sure there are. Bagels are great, but you know,
it's kind of like world's best cup of coffee, you know,
at a diner, which I love those claims. Like if
I'm on a road trip and I see something, especially
even as we at least specific, if it's like I'm
driving somewhere I see world's fourth largest frying pan, then
(44:05):
I'm gonna go I'm gonna go in there, and I'm
not gonna you know, I'm not gonna compare it in
a bad way to the third largest frying pan. I
love roadside attractions. What about giant at aarondeck chairs? How
do you feel about those? I'm I'm on board with him.
It makes me feel very much like Tom Petty and
that one video you know where he's like doing a
mad Hatter Alice in Wonderland thing. Do you remember that one?
(44:28):
Are you kidding? Don't come around here no more? The
cake at the end of the eater. It's terrifying, really
creepy video. He's got a big chair, That's what I remember. Yeah,
I love those. But yeah, if you want to go
to Mattuns Bagel Fest third week of July, you can
learn more about it. Just put it into your search
engine of choice. It has the world's largest bagel breakfast
(44:50):
with the consumption of more than sixty thousand bagels, and
to date at bagel Fest, no reports of mad gassing.
Thank thank god. I don't know if they want that
in the headline, but there you have it. Uh. Thank
you so much to our super producer Casey Pegram, our
guest producer Andrew Howard. Thanks to research or extraordinaire Gabe Louisier,
(45:14):
Jonathan strick on the Quister, Christopher Hacids here in Spirit,
Alex Williams, who composed our theme, and You've been, You've been.
It was always you. I knew it was you, and
I'm glad it was you. What a gas, but a gas.
We'll see next time, folks. For more podcasts for My
(45:52):
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. This is the second part
of our two part episode on the Mad Gasser of
the two So, with the blessing of our super producer,
Casey Pegraham, we'll get right into it. We have a
(00:50):
few days following that initial kind of rash of reporting
um in the local paper, a Mr. Carl Cords and
Mrs Bulah Chords coming back to their home them and
around ten o'clock at night, and they discovered on their
porch a small piece of white cloth that was just
sitting there next to the screen door. Uh, and Mrs Cords,
(01:11):
like you do, I guess, uh picked it up and
sniffed it. I don't know about that, I will. Yeah,
that's that's an odd thing to do. They live in
a nicer town than we do, probably guess. So maybe
there was an odor coming off of it or something
and it was intrigued her. But yeah, she apparently took
(01:32):
a big, old deep huff of that thing and instantly
became violently ill. She began to swell up, and hives,
you know, covered her face and and she had burning
sensation and her mouth and throat and started violently vomiting,
like we've seen, very similar effects to some of these
other reports we've seen. She goes weak in the knees,
(01:53):
full paralysis of the legs soon um follow that, and
she describes it later it was a feeling of realysis,
she said. My husband had to help me into the house,
and soon my lips were swollen and the roof of
my mouth and my throat burned. I began to spit blood,
and my husband called a physician. It was more than
two hours before I began to feel normal again, and
(02:16):
the police came and they took the cloth, and they
also searched the home and they did find a skeleton
key and an empty tube of lipstick on the porch
as well, so they figured that the prowler was trying
to break in using that skeleton key. I'm sure most
people know what skeleton key is, Like I guess before
(02:37):
the days of more machined kind of locks and keys
where it was very specific to each lock, you would
have a skeleton key that was just like a basic
key that would just trigger the mechanism of most key.
And again maybe there were Ben, you might be able
to answer this, Um, maybe they were specifically tooled to
(02:57):
a set of locks in a home, But to me,
it feels like it was more rudimentary than that. Yeah,
it can be difficult. So skeleton keys have been around
for a while, and some would be specific to a house, right,
just like that single house has a skeleton key. But
I was also wondering about this detail, like how many
(03:19):
locks smiths were in Matune at the time, Like how
many people would have professionally worked with locks. Was this
a key that maybe they had like left under their
mat and forgotten about, you know, because we don't know
much about that key, and we don't know much about
this lipstick, but we do know, you know, crazy. We'll
(03:41):
get into some theories here, but we do know that
there is one thing that happens with these kind of
panics and crimes. Copycats entered the chat. So it is
possible that somebody else tried to do something like this
with a very different m O. Because up to now,
the mad gasser has ever attempted to enter through a door.
(04:02):
They've been at windows, right, and you don't need a
skeleton key for a window. Uh. They also haven't left
anything else behind, So if this was the mad Gaser
not a copycat, they were interrupted and a later examination
of the cloth found no chemicals on it that could
cause miscords this specific type of distress. But later that
(04:26):
night someone else reports an attempted gassing. Mrs Leonard Burrow
said that a stranger broke into her bedroom window and
then tried to gas her as well. So we've got
so far. Like, if we're the police, let's do law
and order, Mattoon. So we're on the case. This is
(04:48):
a huge break in our case, possibly because it's the
first time we found physical evidence. However, things continue to
escalate from September six through the teeth. Yes, that's right.
On September the sixth, after the News broke the story
on the cords, there were seven, no less than seven
(05:10):
more attacks reported, and that included one that supposedly involved
or allegedly involved the sighting of the mad gass or
the prowler, the man in black um. And yeah, like
I said that, we like we said from the start,
already a lot of anxiety in the air because of
the war. Um. And now you know you have these
(05:31):
escalating reports of some lunatic running rampant around their small town,
just gassing people Willie and or Nilly, and the FBI
gets called in from Springfield, which isn't too far from Mattoon,
to give the local cops a hand with the investigation.
So in September seven, even though there were no attacks reported,
(05:54):
this phantom anistetis made the news. And here here's the
basic kind of takeaway from the from the report, mattuns
mad and the statists apparently took a respite from his
maniacal four as Thursday night, the papers said, terrified citizens
are inclined to hold their breath and wonder when and
(06:15):
where he might strike next. Good lord, let's let's also
pivot the story a little bit to the responsibility of
the press, shall we. Yeah, that's the issue, and it's
an important one because they realized the paper was going
gangbusters as long as it had a story that was
somehow about the mad gas er in in somewhere in
(06:38):
the folds, right, and so they decided to report that
there was no report, and uh still try to ratchet
up the tension by pointing out that people were scared,
attempting to make the more scared. And when we go
to the idea of responsibility of papers. We're not just
talking about the matun Journal gives that anymore. We're also
(07:01):
talking about the papers in Chicago, right that are popular
in this town, but they're they're known as national publications.
So within a few days you would be able to
read multiple reports and speculative pieces about the gas or
from any number of papers. Time Magazine even reported on
(07:23):
this and they said they got a little they styled
on it, and I like the way they wrote this.
It moves through the night as nimbly and secretly as
a cat squirting a sweetish gas through bedroom windows, which
is very like Macavity. You know, I'm sorry, his sweetish
gas a sweet I mean it made me think of
(07:46):
Swedish gas, like like like manufactured by the Swedes. That
is very funny. Secretly, You're right, Macavity. It's very jellical,
no question about it. And of course this just this
kind of you can't buy this kind of a story,
you know, you can't. Uh. And the imagery it's just
it's absolutely gonzo. Um. So back in the tune, you
(08:08):
had the police chief, I'm presuming his last name was
Wiggins put the entire force a ten man force, by
the way, which is ridiculously understaffed seeming. But not one
of them could find any evidence of the actual prowler.
So the state police gets called in, got another associated headline,
(08:29):
state hunts gas madman. That's a tricky one. I almost
wanted to say mad gas man um the war two uh,
and the Army's the army is called in the Chemical
Warfare Service tried to figure out what the gas might
be bent. Do we have any reports of what was
on that cloth? I'm sorry if I if I missed that.
(08:52):
We do not, So we we know that they may
have found a couple of things, but because it's literally
a you know, a dirty cloth on the round, but
they didn't find anything that could do any of the
stuff described by by the neighbors or the victims over
in Matune. Responding to all the people around the nation
(09:15):
who are writing in with their own kind of armchair
investigative opinions, here the police chief and and his forces
are just it's kind of like the second act of
a law and order episode where now they have to
fight the public opinion, all the people saying like, why
don't you do anything? Up and coming politicians making Hay
like you know, I would hold the police chief accountable.
(09:39):
The attacks continue to rise and the police decide that
they're going to have to do something different. So they
stopped looking for this wild and crazy guy who is
somehow managing to attack multiple homes but as a never
clearly seen by vigilantes who are currently patrolling the town
(10:01):
every night, and be never leaves evidence. So instead they say,
we're going to put in a workflow where we verify
these attacks. Hospital examinations of some of the folks who
have come forward have found nothing wrong with them. Zip, zero, zilch, nada,
and the incident started to decrease a little bit, but
(10:26):
there was this breaking point for the police and one
night three reports came in and so police then announced, look,
you can report it an attack. You should report an
attack if you encounter one, but when you report it,
you need to submit to a full medical examination. If
(10:47):
you reported an attack and you don't agree to let
a doctor examine you, then we are going to arrest you,
which is crazy because they have been like inundated with
what they considered false reports, which led to their follow
up statement on the twelfth where they said, quote, the
entire incident was likely the result of explainable occurrences exacerbated
(11:12):
by public fears and a sign of the anxiety felt
by women while local men were on war service. So
the misogyny is there. Basically, what they're saying is like, oh,
these women focus so emotional, that's really what's happening. And
you know, I think we can all agree that's that's
(11:33):
a dumb thing to say, at least the second part.
The rest of it, the idea that there are public
fears that are kind of getting in a feedback loop
and growing out of hand. That makes total sense. But
either way, right after this announcement on the twelfth, the
number of attacks and reports of attacks drops precipitously. The
(11:55):
very last report comes on someone says they gas or
was a woman dressed as a man, and I've found
their footprints beneath the window for some reason, they were
wearing high heels. By this time, the number of self
reported victims totaled around or was it thirty three according
to the newspapers, And when the attacks stopped, or when
(12:18):
people stopped reporting these attacks, no suspects were ever named,
no charges were ever filed. So our question now ridiculous. Historians,
what the heck happened? Was there even really a mad gasser?
Was there really a mad gasser? And not? And we're
not trying to gaslight anybody here. I had to, I
(12:40):
had to do it. But yeah, probably not. It's entirely
likely that there was no mad gas or that this
was a combination of that paranoia, that anxiety brought on
by the war conflict, um, and just kind of an
escalating case of mass hysteria like we talked about at
(13:03):
the top of the show. But also there are some
pretty amazing theories, some ranging from absolutely absurd and over
the top to some pretty plausible, and we are now
going to go through some of those. My personal favorite,
that we won't even put in the numbered list would
be the idea of some sort of extraterrestrial visitor that
(13:27):
was spraying people with nerve agents and using them for
experiments or something with some sort of secret, you know,
nefarious agenda. Uh. Perhaps this was some kind of inventor
or some sort of you know, mad scientists that was
testing out his creations on the unsuspecting public or yeah,
(13:49):
or up the government, you know, as when when in doubt,
blame the government, um, because you know, surely the FBI
and the police and the state police were all in cahoots,
you know. But here's the thing, then, none of this
is that crazy actually, because again we've talked about MK Ultra,
and we know that the CIA absolutely did experiments on
(14:12):
the public um through this guy named George Why. If
you want to hear more about that, check out the
show Operation Midnight Climax that I had the privilege of
of hosting and narrating um. But yeah, they they actually
would reach out when people were reporting being dosed with
LSD by the CIA. They didn't know it was the CIA.
They went to report this guy George White, who was
an agent of the CIA. The police had already been
(14:35):
reached out to by the CIA and told to bury
the reports. So that this is not outside of the
realm of possibility of the government angle. But we've got
some much more plausible and realistic potential scenarios based on
the environment. Literally. Yeah, I'd like to go back to
the government part. Because people also know that the US
has a long history. Even back in the forties, people
(14:57):
were aware to some degree that the US has a
long history of human experimentation, not just Tuskegee, Uh, not
just dim k ultra. But but like also things in St. Louis,
chemical spraying of entire populations, this stuff definitely happens, uh.
And keep in mind that around this time there are
(15:17):
also secret towns like Oak Ridge, which is just up
the way from some of my relatives in modern day Tennessee. Yeah,
so I can understand that fear absolutely. These other theories though,
are as, as we said, more a little more plausible. First,
Mattoons Police Chief ce Coal when they issue that statement
(15:42):
we mentioned on September twelve, they say that this could
be industrial pollution. There is an Atlas diesel engine company
that's not too far away and it creates large quantities
of what's known as carbon tetrachlori gas. Us. He says,
this gas is the only thing that we can find
(16:03):
that would explain these reported cases paralysis and illness. And
then he says, you know, it could be carried through
the town. It could have left some stains on that
cloth or that rag that were found on the home,
and explain why it didn't have any like why I
had a smell, but why it didn't have any chemicals
that on later investigation could have been found to be
(16:26):
an incapacitating agents. And he said, you know, maybe the
mad gasser is just a figment of the collective imagination.
And he described the entire cases quote a mistake from
beginning to end. So imagine you work at that let's
diesel plant. Are you gonna take this No, You're gonna
send your spokesperson out to deny the allegations and say
(16:49):
that you only use that specific gas in your fire extinguishers.
And if there are any other gases that are used there,
they obviously caused no ill effects. Because we have a
ton of people working here. How come they don't ever
lose the use of their limbs? How come they don't
ever have a sickly sweet smell and then violent vomiting
and maybe even more importantly, one of the best parts
(17:11):
of their argument, how come this gas has never caused
problems in the city before? And so this, this theory, though,
still has as missing pieces. It's got a lot of
missing pieces, one of which is like the means of transmission. Right,
Let's say, if this gas is a byproduct of some
industrial process, like how is it how is it not
(17:33):
affecting everybody? And or on a much larger scale, if
it's just being pumped out into the air people are breathing. Um,
why is it like being more targeted. How does this
relate to the rag, you know, the piece of cloth
that that doesn't really add up. It really doesn't make
a whole lot of sense unless it was polluting water
(17:53):
or something that was like easily a source a vector
you know, for people receiving this substance into their bodies,
you know, and large enough doses that it would actually
affect people. Um. You know, we we've covered on stuff
that I want you to know, bend tons of industrial
pollution situations. And usually when it really starts to affect
the population, it starts to affect like the livestock starts
(18:16):
to affect you know, people on mass and it's usually
because of seeping into the groundwater, right, Yeah, it's usually
something that doesn't target a specific house, like lead contamination,
for instance, gets everybody who's exposed to the lead through
as you said, often water source. That's one of the
biggest holes with theory number one. It didn't explain and
(18:39):
this is the official explanation, but it didn't explain how
so many people reported seeing the same figure they saw
they saw the same individual and described it the same way,
even when they were talking about different witnesses, and people
would say I saw someone running, even if they didn't
(19:00):
have any idea that a gas attack quote unquote had
taken place. And this leads us to theory number two,
an actual individual, like there was an actual person somehow.
BE very interested to hear your thoughts on this one, folks.
(19:23):
Like we said, there are a couple of paranormal theories
about this, like, hey, it's kind of a cryptod or
hey it's an extraterrestrial or an extra dimensional entity of
some sort. But this goes back to a guy's work
I really enjoy mentioned them in an earlier Stuff They
Want You to Know episode on Don Decker is a
(19:45):
history teacher named Robert Bartholomew who was based in New
Zealand for a time, and he says there's no proof
that there was some gas or in Virginia. Who later
I don't know, through a dartboard at his US map
and yeah, and pick central Illinois. But there is one person,
(20:05):
a native of of the area named Scott Marona, who
is a high school chemistry teacher and the author of
a book called The Mad Gaster of Matune. He says
not only did the mad gas really exist, but he
thinks he knows who it was, a guy named Farley
lou well Yeah. It sounds about right, sounds like an
(20:27):
absolute psychopath. I'm just kidding. You can't really judge a
book by its cover or a psychopath by his name.
Farley Llewellen was something of an outcast. He's the son
of a grocer um and he was believed by uh
Scott Marona to have been the mad gas or. Marona
wrote a book in two thousand three about the events
(20:51):
um where he claimed that lleu Ellen wanted revenge on
Mattune as a whole because they had ostracized him for
being a was certainly tracks in terms of like the
attitudes of the time in a you know, kind of
rural Midwestern town like that most of the town believed
(21:11):
that Farley was going insane, Marona wrote in the book,
And that Matune was kind of, you know, like a
real gossip mill kind of town. Uh. And there was
a lot of insinuating that the man's sexual preference was
the cause of his quote diminishing insanity. Um. Yeah, so
(21:33):
like extra extra extra, uh, you know, just reductive thinking
and and and and highly offensive and enough. I'm sure
it wouldn't you know, make anyone feel very isolated and um,
you know, just demonized in that way. Uh So I
can understand the anger there, but what you do with
that anger is is the thing. So Maroona actually came
(21:58):
to the conclusion that Allen was the most likely candidate
because he felt that one of the descriptions of the
suspect in one of those many pieces that were written
about at the time matched Llewellen, and so he's he
thought he was the guy because Dullen was was a
bit distinct. He was a tall, lanky, thin man um
(22:22):
who matched one of these supposed eyewitness accounts um outside
of the Kearney home. In fact, Um he had graduated
from the University of Illinois as well with a ding
ding ding chemistry degree and had himself a bit of
a home lab laboratory type set up. Which is nothing
(22:43):
wrong with that, but that is that could be considered
circumstantial evidence. It's like, it's the thing that on Law
and Order and matun would make you look into the
case a little more. But other chemists, professional chemists are
pretty skeptical that someone working at home even a mad
genius could create a gas that would be a stable
(23:05):
enough to make someone sick, but be also fleeting enough
something that would dissipate quickly enough too not leave any traces.
And this leads our guy Bartholomew to say the following
hard line here, ma'am. Anyone who examines all of the
evidence and still thinks there was a real mad Gasser
(23:26):
is living in fantasy land. The evidence for mass hysteria
is overwhelming. It is a textbook case. The Mad Gasser
outbreak was a media creation from start to finish and
has nothing whatsoever to do with the paranormal. And that
brings us to our third and final theory, mass hysteria. Noel,
(23:48):
Before we get into this, I do want to, uh,
I do want to point out that hysteria itself has
its etymological origins in some in some stuff that I
don't think any of us listening really agree with the
idea that there is some kind of fundamental emotional instability
in people who identify as women categorically untrue. Luckily now,
(24:12):
and you know, whenever we're saying hysteria, we're talking about
the modern definition exaggerated, uncontrolled emotional excitement among a given
group of people. Think, I think that's definitely become more
the way that it's used, but it's still you see
it thrown around as a as a sexist kind of term,
(24:33):
like oh, you're hysterical, things like that. Um, but yeah,
not cool, and that is not what we're talking about
at all. There's no gender involved in this, one way
or the other. So the local commissioner of Public Health,
Thomas the Right, he was pretty solid on this particular
concept um. He believed that mass hysteria was to blame
(24:57):
for these outbreaks. He said the following, There's no doubt
that a mass maniac exists and has made a number
of attacks, but many of the reported attacks are nothing
more than hysteria for the gas man is entirely out
of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas.
He is spraying the whole town is sick with hystarry. Okay,
that's interesting. So he's saying there's a person a person,
(25:20):
but that the attacks are much more innocuous than than
has been reported or that people have made it out
to be. Was that was that your takeaway? There been?
So yeah, he's saying there might be some kind of
dude running around. There might be a rando weirdo, but
the he's saying that they're not causing your as much
(25:44):
damage as they are, you know, portrayed to be causing
or perceived to be causing. And then we have to
talk about the timing. The public concern about this story
lasted a little less than two weeks until or Labor
Day nine. The reason it was not completely forgotten we
(26:06):
owe that primarily to a guy named Donald Johnson. He
was a University of Illinois psychology student who a few
weeks after the incident visited Matune himself. In n he
published a study of this case and in outfit called
the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, And you can
(26:30):
read citations of his research in tons of textbooks as
a classic study of mass hysteria, which will go into
a book recommendation I have at the very end of
today's episode. So Johnson goes on to become a professor, right,
and he says, the case of this mad gasser was psychogenic.
It began, he said, with one person's imagination. MS. Kearney
(26:53):
in particular, he said, an exciting, uncritical story appeared in
the evening paper as the news spread, other people reported
similar symptoms, more exciting stories, like even more exciting stories
were written, and so the affair snowballed. He's not the
one who said, like more exciting stories that was That
was me. So according to this our real culprit here,
(27:16):
if you believe Professor Johnson is the newspaper of the day,
they had the power to influence not just public opinion,
but public health. He thinks that without the press coverage here,
the epidemic of hysteria, as he describes it would not
have broken out. And this comes to us from the
Washington Post because the only other medium of mass communication
(27:38):
for local news was word of mouth at this time.
A word of mouth was too slow to create a
mass outbreak, and it was also considered less reliable than
the paper. But that's why we have the phrase the
paper of note. If the press prints it, it becomes
in a way true. So Johnson, who allied up almost
(28:01):
thirty police reports, uh, and that you know, the newspapers
noted about thirty three people coming forward. He notes that
all these police reports got reported in the media pretty
much one time, like one day after the next. So
this kind of added some high octane fuel here. So
(28:27):
now we have perhaps in the crowd today some our
fellow ridiculous historians are saying, Hey, you jerks, I'm from
a tune. We're not a bunch of crazy people who
are scared of gas coming through our windows. You guys
are being unfair. Well, there are extenuating circumstances that we
(28:48):
feel should be considered. We're gonna go to belt mag
dot com for help with some of these, right, So
there's a lot of Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here.
Man and I made the bad dumb dad joke about lighting,
but that really is a lot of what's coming on here.
I think, Ben, you and I have discussed this in
the past. But where the origin of the term gas
lighting comes from. It being a psychological form of manipulating
(29:13):
people into thinking that they're the ones that are insane
um And it comes from a play Uh where a
character named Jack Manningham um manipulates his wife Bella into
believing that she is the one that's like losing it. Um.
So it's it's a term that gets thrown around a
lot today. And ironically this story has to do with
(29:35):
gas but not connected. But it very much is a
thing that's happening here because it happens at night. Also true,
but it very much is a thing that is happening
because you have these folks that are like convinced they've
been attacked or they've been victimized in some way, and
then you have authorities kind of saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, no,
you're you made it all up. It's your delusional. This
(29:58):
became such a part of this trope that it actually
made an appearance in the novel The Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, where a character is described or a legend
within the lore of the book them Tune maniac Um.
He makes an appearance in this this book The Invasion
of the Body Standards, which of course went on to
be made into several films. Um and one character describes
(30:22):
this legend uh and convinces the heroes of the story
that they have become delusional. So because you know, sure
there were some reports of this being real, but that
it was almost surely completely false. Um. So yeah, it's
like it's easy to get caught up in that, and
and then you start to feel crazy and it can
almost like escalate your fears because gas lighting is not
(30:46):
meant to calm people down or make them feel like, oh,
you're right, I was just blowing things out of proportion.
The idea is to take something they know to be
true in their heart of hearts, or at least fully
believe it, and then convincing them that they are having
some sort of you know, uh, hallucination or mental breakdown.
Like my favorite example of that in an argument someone
(31:09):
says you're gaslighting me, and they say, I'm not what
what is gas lighting? That's just the thing you made
up just now, you're crazy. That's that's like the best
dumbest explanation of gas lighting. But also these fears, again,
they're coming from a very reasonable place. If you look
at the context of the world at this time September,
(31:31):
Are you kidding me? World War two is you know,
we know now in that World War two is winding down.
But people in the US are wondering if those rumors
about some sort of quote unquote hail Mary secret weapon
are actually true. You know what I mean? There were
reports that were domestic papers of the time that would say,
(31:54):
you know, Nazi Germany has these mystery weapons. They're gonna
turn the tide of the war. They may deploy like
massively dangerous biological weapons, biological agents. And this is a
town where a lot of young men, Like this is
a rural Midwestern town, so a lot of young men
(32:16):
have been sent directly to the front lines. And that
means news of the war is everywhere. It's in the
front of people's minds. And you think about the fear
of poison gas. Of course people would have known about
some sort of poison gas. You killed a ton of
people in World War One, and international efforts in the
(32:37):
interwar years between World War One and World War Two,
there were a lot of efforts to ban chemical weapons
and they all failed totally. Yeah, you would have if
you lived there during this time, you would have known.
You would have possibly personally known someone who came home
from World War One with all kinds of injuries and
burns from chemical warfare right then. And I feel like
(32:59):
a dumb dumb from my questioning of this at the
top of the show. I was speaking more in terms
of nerve agents and like, you know, saren gas, which
wouldn't have been discovered until a time where maybe that
particular one wasn't as known by you know, people in
in these small world towns. But mustard gas and the
effects of its use in World War two would have
absolutely been known. And these, um, these discussions about banning
(33:21):
chemical warfare. So I was talking about a little bit
of a different thing. But you know, mustard gas that
just kills you dead, right, I mean that doesn't like
paralyze you, or what's supposed to deal with like nerve
gas versus mustard gas. They're they all just kind of
are meant to to kill you, right. Well, mustard gas.
The weird thing is it's tech it's a chemical warfare agent,
but it's not technically a gas. Uh. It can form
(33:45):
these large blisters on your skin and on your lungs.
So it's an uncool way to go. But in the
minds of like to the point about nerve agents versus
you know, incapacitating agents versus like mustard assis, et cetera,
to the mind of the average person living in the
(34:06):
in these towns and across the country at this time,
these are all kind of the same amorphous, terrifying thing.
It's a really good point, just the specter of the
idea of chemical attack, you know what I mean. Uh,
And and and this just a really good point. Then
the idea of their being this kind of hail Mary
after the closing bell kind of attack. Um, that actually
(34:29):
absolutely would have been something that would have been on
people's minds in the same way that during the Cold
War people would have been, you know, duck and cover
and all that, and terrified of potential nuclear holocaust that
could have just come at the drop of a bomb.
And people were waiting for that terrible shoe to fall,
because folks are still worried about a physical invasion of
(34:52):
the United States, even if you're in what would be
considered the heartland. And also people noticed that no one
had used is in gas yet in World War Two.
It was produced during that time, and plans were drawn
up to use it, but it hadn't been deployed by
either side. And if you want to see how fearful
this is, you can just read, not the headlines, not
(35:15):
the features of the journal gazette at this time, look
at the ads. On August twenty, a few days before
all this stuff starts going down, and the paper ran
this ad promoting what we're called invasion bonds. And if
you look at if you look at the copy, what
you see is there's a picture of the grim Reaper,
and he's got his hands wrapped around a broadsword instead
(35:37):
of a scythe, which is interesting choice, I guess, and
it says, and then another voice going like by your
invasion wall bonds today, So like people are being sold
stuff through fear, they're being primed to move in the
context of that emotion. So of course you're going to
(36:01):
be nervous in general, like their baseline anxiety. Can you
imagine how high it must have been. You already might
already have a relative right and who's across the sea,
and you don't know what's going to happen to them.
So there was this heightened awareness and people were already
on their guard. Miscarney in particular was probably also very
(36:23):
well aware of the reports of this escaped German prisoner.
People were expecting for something terrible to happen, right, They
were so ready for it in their heads, and they
were anticipating it so much that in a way, there's
this argument that they just started believing it was already happening. Yeah, Unsent,
(36:44):
it makes sense. And I would be pretty terrified too, Ben,
I don't know about you, how do you think you
would feel living in this climate? Well, in a way,
and this is something I think a lot of our
our listeners were thinking about as well during this two
part episode. In a way, we did live through something
like this, did we not? Because we were relatively young
(37:08):
when the events of September eleventh occurred, and and we
can have people around the country, especially in larger cities
or metro areas, had a very real fear that their structures,
or people or their entire city would also be targeted.
And I think a lot of this happens because you
(37:32):
don't know when you're in the middle of history. You
don't have the benefit of the textbook, you know what
I mean. Can't You can't like skip the chapter seven
nine six and go okay, okay, I'll be fine. No,
you can't. Hindsight is in fact, and another another comparison
(37:53):
I think might be to living through what we've lived
through with COVID nineteen and and not knowing, um, when
the other shoe was going to drop or you know,
whether this was some sort of attack or whether this
was some sort of like unprecedented plague that was going
to kill us all uh, and just I think you know,
the kind of wait and see kind of um approach
(38:16):
can really lead to some wild speculation, especially when you're
you know, hold up in your house and have something
to do. But like doom scroll on the internet. True, Yeah,
we have to wonder how again, how the uh, the
internet would have affected this situation of the mad gas
or so. The Washington Post has another theory about what
(38:38):
specifically triggered the attack. Here, mattun returned to its normal
um it's relative obscurity, and people still talk about the
mad gas or incidents today, you know, the same way
every like so many towns have kind of a local
legend or a crazy event, uh and the mad gas
(39:00):
her is the the event of Mattoon. But some folks
at the Post did a little bit of detective work,
and they said, even though Mrs Kearney never really went
on record talking about what sparked her initial report of
the sweet smelling gas, the Post speculates this all speculation
(39:23):
that because she was an avid reader and spent her
evenings reading that on the night of the attack, they
conclude that she was reading one popular book of the era,
My Life in Hard Times by James Thurber. It's pretty
good book. In that book, she would have met one
of Thurber's more infamous characters. Sarah Chouff Uh. Sarah Choff
(39:45):
is a woman who quote never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a
tube to avert this calamity, for she was in greater
dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods. Shows
piled or money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat
stack just outside our bedroom, with a note reading this
(40:06):
is all I have. Please take it and do not
use your chloroform, as this is all I have. That's
pretty on the nose, right, Yeah, now that's that's wild.
Is there a name for this affliction, Ben, we should
coin one. If not, it's very specific, like chlorophire. Well
that's good, that's good. Uh. Well it's not our it's
(40:28):
not our best work. Maybe, but this this has been
a wild ride. And as we draw to the conclusion
of our two part episode, I did one recommend one book,
and I know it's one that you and I are
both fans of. Your knowal it is Outbreak with an
exclamation mark. Let me say that again. Outbreak. The Encyclopedia
(40:51):
of extraordinary social behavior. This is a reference work with
tons and tons and tons of real life examples outbreaks
of hysteria throughout human civilization. It's well worth the read.
Uh it's uh, it's weird, but do check it out.
And if you are familiar with this book, please let
(41:11):
us know which historical examples of hysteria outbreaks most fascinate you.
And why was that the dancing plate Noel mentioned earlier?
So the more modern screaming Girls of Malaysia Salem which trials.
Perhaps there are tons of choices out there and they're
probably I'm sure there's several knowl that you and I
have yet to hear of. Indeed, Uh, And I do
(41:33):
want to point out to as a couple of fun
little bits of trivia here. Do you remember the the toys?
I think it was probably from when we were kids
where they kept going on for a while. Uh. Monster
in my pocket. Yeah, they're they're like muscle men but
painted right. Yeah, they're like weird little painted like army
muscle wrestler guys, but you know, creepy spooky monsters. So
(41:58):
one of them from series full or uh and they
came out in two thousand six that would have been
a little later. I swear I remember this from when
I was a little kid, though, so it must be
the kind of thing where that Yeah, so series one
would have begun in ninety surely, yes, that tracks I
definitely remember this. Um. I don't know that I had
(42:18):
any but popular line of toys, because it continued well
into the two thousand's and one of the two thousand
six editions had a little creature by the name of
the Mad Gaster of Mattun, who is a green, multi
armed monster appears to have snakes coming off his body
(42:38):
as well wearing some very odd brown kind of boot
looking things, and and and uh on a creepy gas mask.
Um so, yeah, apparently, let's see, there was a line
associated with all of these things that must have come
with a trading card or something, and his in particular,
says the mysterious Many Act. The Mad Gasser haunts the night,
(43:02):
releasing a strong, nauseating and paralyzing gas into the homes
of his innocent victims as they sleep. He's never been
identified or clearly seen. The only proof he exists is
a trail of blue vapor and poisonous fumes. Don't inhale
and you know what, Also, I'm glad we're bringing up
this fact at the end. Also we should shout out
(43:24):
not just not just monster my pocket musclemn but Matun
doesn't need to have its identity reduced to the place
where the mad Gasser was working. It is also, according
to the residents of Matune, the bagel capital of the world.
So we're ending on a more positive note as we
get into lunchtime hours here self proclaimed bagel capital of
(43:44):
the world. I don't know that there's any official designation there,
and I'm sure there are. Bagels are great, but you know,
it's kind of like world's best cup of coffee, you know,
at a diner, which I love those claims. Like if
I'm on a road trip and I see something, especially
even as we at least specific, if it's like I'm
driving somewhere I see world's fourth largest frying pan, then
(44:05):
I'm gonna go I'm gonna go in there, and I'm
not gonna you know, I'm not gonna compare it in
a bad way to the third largest frying pan. I
love roadside attractions. What about giant at aarondeck chairs? How
do you feel about those? I'm I'm on board with him.
It makes me feel very much like Tom Petty and
that one video you know where he's like doing a
mad Hatter Alice in Wonderland thing. Do you remember that one?
(44:28):
Are you kidding? Don't come around here no more? The
cake at the end of the eater. It's terrifying, really
creepy video. He's got a big chair, That's what I remember. Yeah,
I love those. But yeah, if you want to go
to Mattuns Bagel Fest third week of July, you can
learn more about it. Just put it into your search
engine of choice. It has the world's largest bagel breakfast
(44:50):
with the consumption of more than sixty thousand bagels, and
to date at bagel Fest, no reports of mad gassing.
Thank thank god. I don't know if they want that
in the headline, but there you have it. Uh. Thank
you so much to our super producer Casey Pegram, our
guest producer Andrew Howard. Thanks to research or extraordinaire Gabe Louisier,
(45:14):
Jonathan strick on the Quister, Christopher Hacids here in Spirit,
Alex Williams, who composed our theme, and You've been, You've been.
It was always you. I knew it was you, and
I'm glad it was you. What a gas, but a gas.
We'll see next time, folks. For more podcasts for My
(45:52):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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