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"Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time."
The Merchant of Venice |
In 1944, Mattoon, Illinois was a small railroad and farming town with a population of around 16,000. During a two week period in the late summer of that year, something occurred there that would forever earn Mattoon a place in the pages of paranormal literature. While the episode has been completely written off by many as a classic case of mass hysteria and was surely fueled by sesationalistic local press coverage, there are elements to the case, most notably in the form of physical evidence, which would seem to defy such an evaluation. Here is the story. Judge for yourself.
Pass on the Gas
It all began on the night of August 30. A Mattoon resident awoke in the small hours of the morning feeling quite ill. With extreme difficulty he made his way to the bathroom, where he vomited. He speculated that his wife may have left the gas on and asked her about it. She replied that she doubted it, but would get up to double check. When she attempted to do so, she found herself paralyzed.
At approximately the same time, in another part of town, a mother awoke to the sounds of her young daughter choking in the next room. When the woman attempted to get up to investigate, she too found herself barely able to move.
The following evening, the first clue as to what was causing these late night bouts of nausea and/or paralysis began to enigmatically emerge. On that night at about 11:00, Mrs. Bert Kearney awoke to find her bedroom filled with a "sickening sweet" odor that rapidly grew stronger. She soon realized that she could not move her lower body. Frightened, she screamed, bringing neighbors to her rescue. A thorough search of her house and surrounding areas produced nothing. A subsequent search by the police yielded similar results.
However, the evening's bizarre events were not over for the Kearney household. At 12:30 a.m., Bert Kearney returned home from work to find a tall stranger "dressed in dark clothing and wearing a tight-fitting cap" standing at the bedroom window. (Keep in mind that at this point Kearney was unaware of his wife's earlier experience.) Kearney gave chase, but the "phantom" easily outran him.
The next morning, Mrs. Kearney's lips were burned, her mouth and throat unbearably dry.
The Yellow Pages
At this point the local newspaper, the Mattoon Journal-Gazette, began reporting, in a highly sensationalistic fashion, the "mad gasser" incidents. It is primarily because of the dubious journalism of the Journal-Gazette that many have since written off the entire episode. While the newspaper's tabloid approach to the story most likely did result in a number of purely hysterical reports, there are a handful of cases that occurred after the Journal-Gazette got involved that are worth examining.
On the evening of September 5, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Cordes returned home at about 10:30 and entered the house through the back door. Mrs. Cordes went to unlock the front door and upon doing so she discovered a piece of damp white cloth on the front porch. Unfortunately, she brought the cloth up to her face, took a whiff, and was rewarded with "a sensation similar to coming in contact with a strong electrical current. The feeling raced down [her] body to [her] feet and then seemed to settle in [her] knees. It was a feeling of paralysis." Mrs Cordes vomited immediately and within minutes her face and lips were swollen and burning. Shortly thereafter her mouth began to bleed and soon she was entirely unable to speak. As serious as her symptoms were, they completely disappeared within two hours.
When police arrived to investigate they found a skeleton key and what appeared to be an empty lipstick tube on the front porch. They took the cloth Mrs. Cordes had found and sent it to the University of Illinois for analysis and later to the State Crime Bureau. Both organizations were unable to determine what substance the cloth had contained.
Over the next few days there were several more incidents, all of them following more or less the same pattern: The victim would be awakened either by a sound outside their bedroom window or by the odor of the gas itself. The sound was usually reported as a peculiar buzzing, which many took to be from the gasser's spraying equipment. (However, on at least one occasion the victim was aroused by the sound of someone trying to break the window. It should also be noted that on more than one occasion victim's window screens were actually cut.) In several instances the gas was seen as a bluish vapor. Symptoms brought on by the gas included those previously mentioned, their duration varying between thirty minutes and two hours. The gas never left any residue.
There were also several sightings of the gasser, all of which (except for the final sighting which varied in a slight but significant manner) corroborated the description given by Bert Kearney; a tall thin man wearing dark clothing and a tight-fitting cap. On several occasions this entity was chased and each time managed to escape his pursuers.
Soon vigilante groups were roaming the streets of Mattoon at night in large numbers. Still the attacks continued, a fact which seems to speak to either the hysterical or the truly paranormal nature of the phenomenon.
The final attack occurred on the night of September 13 at the home of Mrs. Bertha Bench. On that evening Mrs. Bench was surprised to see a "woman dressed in man's clothing" spraying gas into her bedroom window. The following morning she and her son discovered high-heeled footprints in the soft ground beneath the window.
Classical Gas
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the "Mad Gasser of Mattoon" episode is that, as bizarre as the case was, it was not a singular event. In fact, the Mattoon incident was preceeded by a good ten years by a strikingly similar set of events in Botetourt (BOT-a-TOT) County, Virginia. During a two week period in December 1933/ January 1934 Botetourt suffered a rash of gassings (one house was gassed three separate times in one night!) which brought on the same symptoms that later became familiar to the residents of Mattoon; headache, nausea, temporary paralysis, etc.
The most interesting aspect of the Botetourt gassings with regard to the Mattoon gassings is in some of the evidence left by the gasser(s). This evidence came in the form of a woman's footprints found at several of the gassing sites. In one instance, a yellowish patch of sweet-smelling oily residue was found next to a set of women's footprints in the snow outside of a window of a house that had been gassed. From the window, the footprints led to a barn in the near distance. Eerily, there were no tracks leading away from the barn.
The legacy of the Mattoon and Botetourt gassings is a heap of unanswered questions. Were the gassings a product of mass hysteria? Possibly. Were they the work of psychopaths? Perhaps. Were they the doings of interdimensional beings? Maybe. Perhaps the only thing we can know for sure about these incidents is that we will never know anything for sure about them. Their mystery springs deliciously eternal.