LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
01:01:10 Share

Hey, order up. Small Business Saturday is right around the corner. And so is that shop you've been meaning to check out. On November 30th, support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday. Founded by American Express.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Wayne Bryant. Jerry's not here, but all of these lovely people are here at the State Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wow. Thanks. Not bad for a Thursday. Not bad at all. Thank you guys for that. Feeling good.

We'll edit that part out. So tonight we're going to talk to you guys about a little town you may or may not have heard of. It's called Mattoon, Illinois. Has anyone ever heard of Mattoon? A few of you? Is anyone from Mattoon? Any Toonies out there? Really? Okay. Try not to be mad at us.

Because the show starts like this. Mattoon is in kind of a triangle between Chicago to the north, St. Louis to the south, Indianapolis to whatever's over here. And it's just far enough away from all of them to not really get any of their reflective interestingness. But there are two things that Mattoon lays claim to. One, it calls itself the bagel capital of the world.

Because in 1985, Lenders Bagels opened a factory there. That is it. New York has no problem with this. Montreal has no problem with this. Number two, Mattoon is world-renowned for having been terrorized by a mad gasser who went from house to house spraying residents with a noxious paralytic gas while they were tucked safely away in their homes.

Yeah. Right? Either that or the town of Mattoon went through one of the best documented cases of mass delusion that has ever happened. And the world's actually divided on what went down in Mattoon in 1944, and we're going to dive into that here tonight. What? LAUGHTER

Wouldn't it be funny after a reaction, they're like, oh my God, amazing. If you're like, so this is about Lenders Bagels and sponsored by Lenders Bagels. We'd like to thank Lenders Bagels. You should Google that other super interesting story, though. Chuck's full of beans tonight, everybody. Full of what?

Beans? What does that mean? It means you're like, I'm full of it. No. I've never heard that. I thought that meant you were farty. No. Full of beans? No. The musical fruit? I'm full of beans. Okay. I can tell. No, of course not. Well, never mind. Let's just keep moving on. So we're going to take you back in time and hop in the Wayback Machine and go back to 1944 when it took place.

Wayback Machine. This is the Wayback Machine, by the way. It's in the mind. So we're all there together.

I suddenly just sound like a cult leader. So, Mattoon in 1944 was a pretty small town of about 16,000. I think it's still a pretty small town, if I'm not mistaken. And it's populated back then with people with some great names. So, you're going to hear some 1944 names tonight, like Bertha and Elmer and Heber. Heber's my favorite. And Beulah and Urban. Like, great 1940s names that you just don't hear anymore unless...

you are like a super hipster and you named your kid Beulah. It was my great grandmother, I promise. It was surrounded by fields, corn and soybeans, so a lot of farming went on there. They did have a couple of railroad junctions that still went through the town, which was good because that also provided work.

And then there were a few factories. We looked up to see what was interesting, and there was a shoe company, the Brown Shoe Company there, which seemed pretty cool. Yeah, we couldn't get to the bottom of whether it was named after the owner or they just made brown shoes. Well, that's 1944. I bet it was both. Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. But, long way of saying, if you lived in Mattoon, you probably were a farmer, you may have worked on the railroad all the live long day, or you might have worked at one of those factories. It's what they call the pre-bagel era. That's right.

There's one other thing you need to know about Mattoon in 1944. A significant portion of its young men had left town and were off fighting World War II at the time. So it was an anxious place to be back then. And this whole thing that we're going to talk about tonight, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, it all started, depending on how you look at it, on the night of Friday, September 1st, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Burt Kearney.

And that is how they described women back then. They didn't use their first names because what else do you need to know? She's married to Bert. She took his last name. Who cares about anything else? Well, we care. So we went to great lengths to find the first names of the women who were attacked. I'm a bit of a quick... Thank you. Um...

Chuck has more stamina than me. I'm a bit of a quitter. So I gave up with like three or four left and he's like, no. And we got it down to one. There's only one woman whose first name we couldn't find in this whole thing. Yeah, couldn't find it. I've spent a lot of time on Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com.

Because sometimes, literally, the only way you could find out a woman's name is by standing over her grave and looking at her gravestone, which is very sad. But we got almost everyone. So what was her name? Her name was Aileen. Mrs. Kearney's first name was Aileen. And at the time, her sister, Martha Reedy, was staying with her because Martha's husband was off fighting in World War II overseas. And so that's why they let Martha use her first name temporarily while he was away. Very generous. Yeah.

So, about 11:00 p.m. in this house, Aileen retired to bed with her toddler daughter, Dorothy, at 11:00 p.m. I can only imagine it's because Dorothy had just gotten home from working at the factory that day.

And Aileen noticed a strange smell in the house, like a really sickeningly sweet gardenia kind of smell. It got stronger and stronger, and as the smell grew stronger, she noticed that she was losing-- I'm laughing, it's not funny-- losing power over her legs and arms. Like, it was paralyzing her. Her mouth and throat got really dry and were burning. Little Dorothy became ill. Don't worry, she would be okay.

And she called out for her sister because she was rightfully scared. Yeah, her sister ran in the room and was like, what the hell is that smell? And threw the window open and ran next door to Earl Robertson's house. No trouble finding his name. He was the next door neighbor and he ran over to see what was going on. And he went and searched the yard to see if he could find anything and he found absolutely nothing. They called the cops. The cops came out.

and they searched and they didn't find anything either. And everything just kind of settled down for about an hour after that. - Yeah, so Aileen's husband, the aforementioned Bert, is a cab driver, was a cab driver, and he was driving around in 1944 when you're a cab driver, there's no way to get in touch with anyone unless you stand on the corner and pretend like you need a ride.

No radios in the car or anything like that. And they finally got in touch with Bert about an hour and a half later. He rushes home at 1230 a.m. And this is very key. When he pulls in, an hour and a half later, after the cops have gone, he sees a tall, shadowy figure, tall, thin, athletic build in the backyard wearing what was described as a watch cap. I didn't know what that was, but it's just like a toboggan, like a beanie. I don't know which regionally you call it here.

What do you call it here? Beanie? Okay. We'll go with beanie. I didn't know if you were close enough to Canada to call it a toque. Are you close to Canada? Where are we? I'm sorry. I woke up from a nap and came straight here, so... Did you really? Oh, yeah. Okay. I woke up and I was here...

13 minutes later. Wow. With a shower. That's impressive. And a toothbrush. Did you take a shower on the way? I did. You just got to select Uber Shower. You don't share those though, right? No.

Yeah, that'd be fun. So he saw this figure. He chased this prowler. The prowler runs away, gets away. They call the cops back out. The cops come back out. Of course, there's nothing there still. And that was about it. About 90 minutes after onset, Aileen was able to move her arms and legs. Little Dorothy was feeling fine the next morning, went off to the factory to work, and everything was okay. Yeah, and that was the end of that.

But the story continues. The next day, a guy from the local paper, the Mattoon Journal Gazette, his name was John Miller. He was one of their writers. He was an editor. He kind of did it all. He found out about this story and he investigated it. And that night's paper, Saturday's paper, had a huge headline across the front page. Took up six of the eight columns on page one. Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose.

Yeah. The other two headlines, we like to do our research. We went on the microfiche. Big headline there, bagels, breakfast of the future. They were trying to build up some buzz. Sure. 40 years earlier. So there's a sub headline too. Mrs. Kearney and daughter, first victims. Yes.

And so keep in mind, this one incident happened. This is the lone incident. As far as anyone knew, nothing else had happened, and yet they were described as the first victims of the anesthetic prowler that's now clearly on the loose. This is what the paper said to everybody the day after the attack. Yeah, and I think he even speculated about what it might be. There was a lot of speculation early on, right? Yeah, a lot. Yeah. All right, so you have to keep in mind the Mattoon Journal-Gazette was received by 97% of the town.

which I thought was hysterical because even in 1944 there were the three percenters who was like mainstream media, no. Better not throw that paper on my front porch.

But it was a little paper. It was almost like a church bulletin. It was very sweet. It was about six or eight pages long, typically. It did not publish on Sundays. Well, I guess it's not like a church bulletin. Or holidays. And this was Labor Day weekend. So the story runs on Saturday. Sunday followed, and then Labor Day Monday followed. So the story is lobbed out there about this mad gasser, first victims, and people are just sitting around waiting for news to roll in for two days. Right.

And then they weren't just sitting around. Some people came forward. They'd read the story and were like, this happened to me too. There was one woman named Mrs. Olive Brown who had suffered an attack a few months before. And the local softball commissioner too. Yeah. This guy's name is Urban Rafe Brown.

What a 1944 name that is. He and his wife Pauline, we got her name, said that they had experienced the same thing just one night before Aileen and little Dorothy. And I guess Urban thought it might be a gas leak. So even though he was literally paralyzed, he somehow asked his wife, woke her up and asked her if she had left the gas on. I'm not sure how that happened. She had not. Right.

So they noticed the smell after about 90 minutes it wore off, and they chalked it up to eating bad hot dogs. They were paralyzed for 90 minutes, and they just chalked it up to the hot dogs. You know that thing. You go to a Twins game, have a hot dog, from like the fifth inning on, you can't move. You're like, I can't do the seventh inning stretch. They thought it was that. We've all been there.

So there's another family. All these people are coming forward now from this Saturday's article. The family of Patrice Ryder and her kids, they were also ill. They were struck ill. She became kind of lightheaded. She found her kids vomiting, and Shirley said, oh, it must be the hot dogs. Right.

Tuesday was also the day we got our first physical evidence. There was one Beulah Cordes who came home on that night and found a piece of pink cloth that was not hers on her front porch. And she picked it up, she noticed it was moist, and she did what you do. She put it in her face and inhaled deeply. And what happened to her? She described it as like coming into contact with a strong electrical current.

By the way, she immediately regretted huffing this strange pink rag. Yeah. She said her knees went wobbly, and then it gets worse. Her lips cracked, her mouth went dry, they started to bleed, she began bleeding from her mouth, and again, she regretted huffing that pink rag basically right off the bat. For sure. The same night, about an hour later, there was a woman named Marjorie Burrell. She was stricken, but, and this is also key, in the same house, her 18-month-old son...

Fresh home from the factory. Completely unaffected. Right. So now it's clear. There's something weird going on. This wasn't just one incident. People are coming forward, and now they're also finding physical evidence of stuff, right? So the next night was Wednesday, September 5th, and there were four more attacks. One on Laura Junkin, the owner of the Big Four restaurant. From what we can tell, she was unaffiliated with any man.

There was another one about an hour later on Mrs. Viola Spangler. And then about an hour after that, 11-year-old Glenda Hendershot was attacked. And she was the daughter of a Mr. Hendershot. Right. A factory manager, by the way. Right.

She was, the little girl. Yeah, she was 11. Right. She smoked cigars. I don't think we mentioned, too, that the cops obviously took the evidence into hand, that pink cloth, and I guess managed to avoid the urge to breathe deeply into it. They're like, it's moist. It's moist, yeah. That's what you do. Let me see what that is. I mean, at the worst, it's cat urine. Yeah.

That would be pretty bad. It would be terrible. A snoot full of that. Yeah. Also, a 60-year-old man named Fred Goebel was stricken about an hour after that. And this is also key because this was the second spotting of an individual, another tall, thin prowler fleeing the scene. And we did the math. Fred Goebel was 60 in 1944, which would make him roughly 800 years old today. Right.

The Josh mask. I love it. It works out sometimes. All right, so by Thursday night in Mattoon, Illinois, it is on like Donkey Kong, even though that wasn't a thing. And the town were pretty scared. People were, you know, rightfully so. They were locking their doors. They were locking their windows, which is not something you really did back then.

Yeah, and the town paper wasn't helping things either. On Thursday's paper, there was another headline, another six columns of eight columns, mad anesthetist strikes again with an exclamation point this time. So they're just pulling out all the stops. That's right. If you're curious, the other headline, bagels, colon, like an unsweetened donut? Yeah.

So another thing started happening on Thursday, which is these gentlemen and their sons in the town, the Anti-Theft Association, got their guns, got some makeshift weapons. These are those 3%.

I think I need to point that out. They start roaming the town like, you know, the vigilantes. Like, they were quasi-deputized. I think they were supposed to, you know, like the cops would get help from them for cattle wrestling and like chicken thieving and stuff like that. But they knew this was a big deal, so they grabbed their guns and got in their trucks and did their thing. Yes. Yes.

So after only a couple of newspaper reports, the course of a few days, the town of Mattoon is really high strung. The police commissioner, the guy in charge of all of the police for Mattoon, was quoted in the paper as saying that he wouldn't walk across his own backyard at night for $10,000. Yeah. That's the guy in charge. Yeah. You know, as we do, we did our financial conversion because we love those. Mm-hmm.

You knew it would feature a financial money conversion. So we went to our trusty West Egg calculator and that would be $176,306 per day. So he's not helping matters. I would walk through any backyard for that kind of dough. For sure.

So they also issued a PSA to citizens which said, hey, if you're going to shoot somebody looking through your window, take care because there's these vigilantes out wandering around looking through your window. So we don't want you guys shooting one another. Yeah, no good.

So this was sort of a busy time for the cops, obviously, right? Because they didn't usually get calls like this, right? No, and they weren't set up for crime. The Mattoon Police Department wasn't. Certainly not for a spiking crime. So politically, the police force was in disarray. You had Thomas Wright, the guy who wouldn't walk through his own backyard, the police commissioner. Ostensibly, he's in charge. He's

calling the shots but they also had a police chief his name was c.e cole and he seems to have been totally comfortable undermining thomas wright's authority at every turn and to make matters worse the police force was split down the middle with some loyal to thomas wright and some loyal to chief cole and that's not a good thing when you only have 10 people on your police force

Yeah, and that was about half of what they should have had. They were understaffed. They should have had around 20 cops. Only had 10. And as a result of this, over the previous months, there was sort of a spike in crime that didn't have anything to do with this, like robberies and stuff like that. There were army checks rolling in. A lot of the young men were off fighting, like we said. Everyone knew that. So there was a spike in crime for Mattoon. I don't think it's anything to worry about like today's big cities. Sure. But for Mattoon, it was a spike in crime. Right.

So the understaffed, resource-strapped, Mattoon Police Department took to ignoring and covering up crimes that it didn't have the resources to investigate. LAUGHTER

That's right. The cops are hard at work. They're freaking out a little bit. They started working, you know, double shifts because they were down half of what they should have been. Like we said, they also didn't have two-way radios in the car yet. They did exist, but they couldn't afford that kind of thing in such a small department. So...

When calls came in, they came into City Hall, and there had to be a cop there with a car that said, well, where are we supposed to go? And that's how they got police out. Yeah. It's not the best way to run a police force. And then even worse, the vigilantes from the Anti-Theft Association, they figured out that if they hung around City Hall and one of the cops peeled off, they were going to a call. So the Anti-Theft Association would tear off after them, ostensibly with bluegrass music playing them on. Right.

And eventually the police department was like, we're going to arrest you if you keep following us to calls to shoot whoever's there. So things are getting a little crazy, just like a movie would happen. Or I guess what would happen to a movie? What a weird way to say that. This dates two investigators, one Richard Piper and Francis with an I, Barry, from the Illinois Bureau of Crime Identification and Investigation. Ibkey? Yeah. It's a little weird. It doesn't even spell anything.

It spells Ibti. Yeah, good point. So they arrived on Thursday, and that was when these vigilantes had kind of hit the streets. Things are getting a little crazy. They take...

of that paint cloth from Beulah Cordes, again, managing, I think it probably was harmless by this point, but they didn't press it into their face, thankfully, because they're real pros. And then the FBI also showed up, supposedly just to observe, but there were a couple of feds there. Yep.

And so Mattoon's small police force ended up being supplemented eventually with some state patrol officers. The police force ended up being doubled. And even better, the state patrol officers brought two-way radios with them, which the Mattoon Police Department was very happy about. Can you imagine what that was like? Yeah. So now they didn't have to just hang around City Hall all the time, and they could coordinate out in the field. It was like a whole new day, basically. They were like, we're like real cops now. Yeah. So...

I feel like this is going pretty well. You guys too? Yeah, okay. Okay, well then that means we have to put a message break in right about here in case we release this as the episode, okay? That's right. So if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles Stuff you should

Hey, come on in. Small Business Saturday is right around the corner. And so is that shop you've been meaning to check out. On November 30th, support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday, founded by American Express. Pick up a new outfit, a handmade gift, some vintage vinyl, maybe even some local tea. Thanks so much. See you soon. Shop on Small Business Saturday, November 30th. That's the powerful backing of American Express. ♪

Toyota's been building for generations, from pioneering hybrid technology to redefining the standards of safety and efficiency. Toyota's always innovating, always making progress. That's right. And with Toyota's legendary lineup of reliable cars in stock at your local Toyota dealer, you can experience the legacy firsthand.

Yep, so check out the unparalleled performance of the new 25 Camry with style, efficiency, and available tech to get you anywhere. Or test drive a capable and affordable Corolla equipped with everything you need to stay cool and connected. And get this, both Camry and Corolla are available with all-wheel drive, giving you the control to go beyond.

Quality, reliability, efficiency. That's the legacy of Toyota. Visit BuyAToyota.com, the official website for deals, to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. ♪ music playing ♪

Black Friday is coming. And for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys, well, there's something for them this year too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails, each in under 30 seconds at the push of a button.

And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any Cocktail Maker or Cocktail Maker Bundle when you spend $400 or more. So, if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad...

Get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar-quality cosmopolitans, martinis, Manhattans, and more. All in just 30 seconds. All for a hundred off. Amazing toys aren't just for kids. Get a hundred off a cocktail maker when you spend 400 through Cyber Monday. Visit bartesian.com slash cocktail. That's B-A-R-T-E-S-I-A-N dot com slash cocktail. Okay, we're back, everybody.

So, I'm not sure if you remember where we were when we left off and had 15 minutes of ads. Things are a little out of hand in Mattoon. So, again, like a movie, a profile of the gasser emerges from one of these state investigators from the... From what? Ipki'i? Ipki'i. That suggested that he... Of course, it wasn't a woman doing this. He was mentally imbalanced, intelligent, possibly brilliant...

And then said, "The man is a nut." Got decidedly less forensic, I guess, at that point. I could see somebody reading the paper and being like, "Yeah, probably." Sounds about right. So they also figured that the Mad Gasser was probably a well-trained chemist. They assumed that either he was creating known paralyzing or noxious chemicals like chloroform, or chloropicrin, which is also known as vomit gas.

Or he had created his own paralytic agent that he had designed himself. I heard 10 people say, ew. Yeah. That's correct. So in general, though, like despite all this going on, the cops didn't seem like super, super concerned about the crimes. I think they were worried about the perception of them. But Chief Cole...

said it was basically a case of nerves. So he's the first one to kind of plant that seed that it might just be a bunch of hysterical women in town who miss their husbands. Right.

And there actually was a case of that. This is the one woman whose first name we could not find, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. We're sorry, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. And she was at one of the movie theaters watching a movie when she smelled something and shouted that she'd been gassed and caused a stampede of the other 400 people out of the movie theater. So she was taken to the hospital and examined, and she was found not to have been gassed, and she was sedated forever. Yeah.

Can you imagine being in a theater? I've been gassed. You pull a Costanza, you're just crawling over little kids. Hey, maybe your husband's full of beans. So... That's a good callback. Two stars? Three stars? I give it seven. How many stars? Oh, wow. Okay, never mind. I don't want to know what you think. Seven stars. Seven stars. I'll take it.

The police chief also, Chief Cole, tried to pin it on carbon tetrachloride fumes from the local Imperial, I'm sorry, the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company. They were not too fond of this theory, obviously, as a company. And so they had a press conference. Well, press conference. They talked to, like, the one person that ran the newspaper. Yeah.

And said, you know what? The cops didn't even bother to come by here and check on anything. And you look around, all these kids working here are just fine. Nobody is...

Bleeding from the mouth today and everything's good. And not only that, but we hired a PhD health department inspector to come by and they said that it was impossible for any carbon tetrachloride vapors to escape the plant in any amount of concentration that would even closely approximate a toxic condition. And everybody in the town went, defensive much? And Chief Cole was quoted as saying, whatever. Yeah.

So that day, Friday, September 8th, the Journal Gazette finally took off the gloves and wrote an editorial, a scathing one, that just raked Chief Cole across the coals, as it were. That was unintentional. I'm sorry for that. Four stars. And it's from that editorial that we found out that the Mattoon Police Department liked to cover up crimes that it couldn't investigate. So they definitely put it on the chief for not taking this seriously from the outset.

If this gets released as a live episode, we don't release the opening bit. That's only for y'all. Is everyone going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about with these stars? I never think about that stuff. And I don't care. No. It's just our secret. Oh, okay. Did you do that part yet? We're back, everyone.

So, the cops weren't completely blowing this off, obviously. They had an obligation. They did look into about 30 people by the end of the case total, and

And what they did was they examined records of the state mental hospital to see if anyone had escaped that might fit the profile and terrorize a town with a paralytic noxious gas. Turned out, no. Nothing. And word began to spread about this. So first it started being published in the Chicago papers, the St. Louis papers, and then it literally started to spread around the world, and the press just descended on the town. And the story actually made its way around the world

And the Mattoon Journal Gazette ran a story, this is confusing but bear with me, they ran a story about the story being read about by Mattoon residents fighting World War II as far away as Papua New Guinea. And the soldier fighting in Papua New Guinea was quoted as saying, "What the heck and heck is going on back there?"

So, at one point, one of the Chicago papers printed an off-record statement by Chief, I'm sorry, not Chief Cole, but Commissioner Wright, that said that they had zeroed in on a suspect, a mad scientist, and they quickly denied this and said, no, no, no, we're looking for four people, actually, two home chemists and two crackpots. That's a quote. It is a quote.

So on Sunday, September 10th, this thing's been going on for about 10 days roughly. Chief Cole announced that he had an idea, a new policy. If you called in a Mad Gasser call, if you called the Mattoon Police Department and said, I've been attacked by the Mad Gasser, the cops would come, they would show up, and they would give you a choice. You could either go to the hospital with them and get examined to see if you have been gassed, or you could refuse to go to the hospital and spend a night in jail.

This was the choice that you were given if you called the police for help, right? And it's even worse than it sounds on its face. Back then, if you wanted to see if somebody had been exposed to a chemical, you had to sample their stomach contents. So either you chose a night in jail or take them to the hospital and have a tube jammed down your throat and some poor nurse priming it just to get it going.

Come on. Yeah. Not good. It just goes on like that until it ends badly. Oh, man. Oh, it happened again. Oh, God. It'd just be projectile vomit right back in the person with the tube down their throat's face. Stop saying that word. It'd be a circle of life, basically.

You know, we follow the two maxims of live performance, say moist and vomit. Projectile vomit, no less. Like a 30-minute period. Put a little mustard on it. All right, so...

Almost immediately the call started dropping off because people were like, "That doesn't sound very fun." The last recorded attack came on September 11th, which was a Monday night at the home of one Bertha Bentz. Not Beulah, but a Bertha. This was, and this one is very key as well, this was the third time a prowler was spotted. But, Minneapolis St. Paul. This was not a tall, slim, athletic figure. This was a short, stout figure.

Heavy set, you might say. Heavy set, you might say. And there was a slashed window where this prowler was spotted. Window screen. Can't slash a window. And beneath that slashed window screen, an impression in the dirt below of a woman's high heel. And not today's sexy high heels. These are 1944 steel-toe work high heels, basically. Old brown shoe factory high heels. They were definitely brown, for sure. Every high heel needs a steel toe. LAUGHTER

So what happened after that? So as the calls started to drop off, the state patrol, they went home. They took their two-way radios with them. Oh, man. The Mattoon cops were like, no. It was so sweet for a couple of weeks. And the Journal Gazette, too, it started to kind of clam up on the whole thing. It printed fewer and fewer articles about it.

And it's not like the Journal Gazette was actually hurting for column space at the time. We read a lot of the Journal Gazette from this era, just to kind of get the story straight. And one of the articles we found on page one around this time was a report that the local bus company had examined a proposed extension to one of their lines the previous week, and they plan to do it again next week. That was a page one article. That was it.

And more bagel follow-ups, of course. Yeah. So after September 15th, only a few other mentions of the whole thing appeared in the paper at all. The most notable was an editorial on September 20th, where nearby Decatur, Illinois, the only way to describe this is a bit of a newspaper flame war between these two small towns, a real Springfield, Shelbyville type of situation. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, me or you? You. Okay. Oh, wait. It does say Chuck, colon, speak now. That's how we do this, right? That's how tight we are. So they got into a bit of a flame war, started writing editorials, kind of making fun of one another. Decatur was making fun of Mattoon.

Mattoon would make fun, would get very defensive obviously, and say, you know what, this article overlooks the indisputable fact that there was a Mad Gasser at large at first, and that a failure by the police here to take care of the case seriously at the outset allowed the mass hysteria that followed to overrun any investigation, and also, the odor probably came from Decatur. That's not a joke. No, you stink. You stink. That was how they wrapped up the editorial.

And then after that, the Journal Gazette, the town's voice, just pretty much clammed up on the matter. And in the end, how many attacks were there, Chuck? I think there were 24 different attacks that affected between 36 to over 100, if you count when 70 of those three percenters in their pickup trucks said, I smell something. So I don't like to count that. So I think about 28 people-ish were affected. Okay.

And so the town just kind of moved on, shaken, weirded out.

No one died though. No, no one died. No one was injured long term miraculously, but it had a serious impact on the town. And it continued on, the story continued on, because shortly after the whole thing ended, a young student, probably 18, 19 year old from the University of Illinois named Donald Johnson showed up in town. And he was there to document this as a case of mass delusion, which he clearly thought it was.

The thing was, the town by this time had been made a butt of international jokes like Time, Newsweek, people just teeing off on Mattoon. Like, you guys really went crazy, and we think that's hilarious, basically. So the people who were the victims of the Mad Gasser had learned to just keep quiet about it.

Yeah, so there were a lot of skeptics in town, obviously, including, still, Chief Cole. The attacks dropped off pretty sharply, and he was quoted as summing it up by saying, it was a mistake from beginning to end. I don't even know what that means. Like, a mistake? Yeah. That it happened, or that they took part in the investigation? I don't even know what that means. Well, Chief Cole was known for his very cryptic quotes. Yeah.

He was Sphinx-like. So when Johnson showed up to study the victims, he was able to get, like, hard information from them firsthand about, like, the actual gassing. But he's doing a psychological research paper, so he needs data about, like, who they are, their level of schooling, and their socioeconomic level, and he's got to have all the, like,

personal data, and no one would give that up. So he devised his own system, right? Yeah, he came up with a really clever workaround. There was something called the ABC Socioeconomic Scale that had been created for broadcasters, but confusingly, not specifically ABC. It was like ABC...

like the alphabet that you sing. And it was a socioeconomic scale where you don't go to the people who you're categorizing, you just go learn stuff about them, like by looking at census records and things like that. So Donald Johnson came up with his own

And it was like this. It was based on the victim's level of schooling, their age, their sex, and we ran across a really interesting little known fact. This is the first time in history someone answered, "Yes, please," when they were asked their sex by a surveyor. And then their occupation and income. And that person was my father-in-law.

Let's cut that part out, Jerry. All right. Just in case. So, that's a great joke. What are you talking about? He sounds just like that, by the way. So for occupation, he looked at the census records. He looked at the 1940 census, which was the closest one, kind of gleaned what he could. But back then, they had really broad labels for censuses. I like that. All right. I just made that up. I can say that now because I'm a whole human being without a big hole in the front of my mouth.

I did this show earlier in the year. You're clapping because I have all my teeth. Earlier in the year, it was like, anesthesis, synthesis. It was not good. Your dental work just got a round of applause. I know. That's pretty neat. I'll have to tell Dr. Presley. Is that the one who swears? No, no, no. That wasn't my dentist. That was a listener that wrote in. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, it was a great dentist. The dentist that drops F-bombs while you're in the chair.

My kind of guy. That would make me uncomfortable. Really? Yeah. I'd be like, do your f***ing job. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I know that there's children here and I'm sorry. Oh, no. You never hear a scut. Are there kids here? Yes. There's one right there. And she does not look happy with me. I'm sorry, dear. Just waving hi. How old are you? Ten? Ten. You've heard that word.

If you haven't, I'm gonna call child services and report your parents. Ten. So cute. Oh man, that threw me. My daughter's nine. She knows that word.

Where are we? Okay. So for income, he based... Oh, no, no, no. We were talking about the sensei. It was a little vague back in those days, right? That's where I was. Yeah. So they had labels like laborer, except farm. Yeah. But the good thing for Donald Johnson was in Mattoon, if you didn't work on a farm, you worked in a factory or you worked on the railroad. That was it. The big challenge was age.

because you couldn't really tell from their occupation whether they were like eight or right so he relied on what he wrote in the paper uh acquaintances of the victims that's how he found out their level of schooling and their age and what we gleaned from that is he asked the cops who investigated it because the mattoon police department was very very cooperative with donald johnson in his paper yeah totally anything that was a great distraction for them right like sure paper great

For income he based it on and this is actually the only part of the ABC scale that thought was like pretty smart He would go to their house and he would look around because it was 1944 For like household conveniences or luxuries at the time which could really tell you a lot about your your income as a household Which at the time was electricity in the house a mechanical refrigerator a telephone and a radio Yes, and so he took all this mixed it all together shook it up in a bag and

Little fairy dust, little pixie dust. Don't forget salt and pepper. He threw a moist pink rag in, mashed it all together, and he came up with four. Not A, B, C. A, B, C, D. He's a bit of a show-off.

And he found that all of the victims fell within B, C, or D. There were no A's, and they were almost all C or D. And when you kind of pull everything out of that, it means that they were almost all women, 93%, and most of them were between the ages of 20 and 29. And compared to the population of the town as a whole, the victims of the Mad Gasser...

They were more likely to be females in their 20s with below average education and below average income, which is exactly, back in the day, the kind of person you thought would be very suggestible to something like mass hysteria. That's right. It's not us talking, everybody. Right.

1944 people. So, in the end, Johnson concluded that it was entirely psychogenic, that's a quote, that was birthed from a case of nerves experienced by Aileen Kearney to begin with, which resulted in that first call to the police that ended up in that night's blotter, spotted by the reporter from the Journal Gazette the next day, who concocted out of thin air this idea that there was an anesthetic prowler on the loose. Sure.

which, you know, 97% of the town is reading this thing. So the germ of fear spreads. I forgot where I was with my fingers. It set off other case of nerves, which were attributed to that same prowler, further supporting the existence of the prowler, which may or may not have been a thing, which produced even more cases. So it was like, what do you call that thing? Like getting stomach contents in your face and then projectile vomiting back in the person's stomach. Yeah, you remember. Yeah.

That thing. But he got published, right? He got published, everybody. Remember, this is an 18, 19-year-old kid who showed up to town to document a case of mass delusion. And it was published in the January 1945 issue of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, a very well-respected peer-reviewed journal.

Little Donald Johnson got his paper published. Little Donald Johnson. Yeah, and when it was published, the whole thing, the entire case of the Mad Gasser Mattoon became irrevocably a case of mass hysteria. That's what science said. It was mass hysteria, and as time went on, and Johnson's paper became cited, it became a circle of sorts, and it became a textbook case of mass hysteria.

Nice job. Thanks. Should we, I mean, I feel like this is going pretty good still, right? Oh, wait, there's one more line I forgot. Oh, wait. But decades on, it's far from clear whether it was a case of mass hysteria. And that explains what Chuck's about to say. I think it's still going pretty good, you guys. We have to take another ad break in case this gets released. So we'll be right back, Minneapolis. Stuff with Joshua and Chuck.

Hey, come on in. Small Business Saturday is right around the corner. And so was that shop you've been meaning to check out. On November 30th, support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday, founded by American Express. Pick up a new outfit, a handmade gift, some vintage vinyl, maybe even some local tea. Thanks so much. See you soon.

Shop on Small Business Saturday, November 30th. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Toyota's been building for generations. From pioneering hybrid technology to redefining the standards of safety and efficiency, Toyota's always innovating, always making progress. That's right, and with Toyota's legendary lineup of reliable cars in stock at your local Toyota dealer, you can experience the legacy firsthand.

Yep, so check out the unparalleled performance of the new 25 Camry with style, efficiency, and available tech to get you anywhere. Or test drive a capable and affordable Corolla equipped with everything you need to stay cool and connected. And get this, both Camry and Corolla are available with all-wheel drive, giving you the control to go beyond.

Quality, reliability, efficiency. That's the legacy of Toyota. Visit BuyAToyota.com, the official website for deals, to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. ♪ music playing ♪

Black Friday is coming, and for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys, well, there's something for them this year too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails, each in under 30 seconds at the push of a button.

And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any Cocktail Maker or Cocktail Maker Bundle when you spend $400 or more. So, if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad...

Get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar-quality cosmopolitans, martinis, Manhattans, and more. All in just 30 seconds. All for a hundred off. Amazing toys aren't just for kids. Get a hundred off a cocktail maker when you spend 400 through Cyber Monday. Visit bartesian.com slash cocktail. That's B-A-R-T-E-S-I-A-N dot com slash cocktail.

Okay, so we're going to give both cases, we're going to lay both cases out. The case for mass hysteria and the case against mass hysteria, meaning that there was an actual mad gasser. And we're going to start with the case for mass hysteria.

And there were a lot of factors present in Mattoon in September of 1944 that could help support the idea that this was just a case of mass hysteria. Not the least of which, a lot of the men in town were off fighting the war. And so the people in town had cause to feel anxiety and worry about their loved ones

every hour of every day during this time. Yeah, for sure. And as a cherry on top of all that, on August 29th, like right before this happened, newspaper headlines nearby told the story of a Nazi POW, like a real Nazi POW, not those fake ones that they, you know...

I don't know why I said that. A Nazi POW had escaped from prison from an army base where he was being held about 150 miles from Mattoon. No one tried to pin it on this, but it just sort of lent itself to the air of paranoia. Yeah, exactly. You can also make a pretty good case that the Journal Gazette played a prominent role in this whole thing. Because remember the very first headline said that there was an anesthetic prowler on the loose. Just said it.

And whether the anesthetic prowler was real or not, now the concept at least was real, was in reality. And then also the idea of saying that Aileen and Dorothy were the first victims makes it sound like that there's going to be more, what with the anesthetic prowler being on the loose and all. Yeah, for sure. This is also a time when people worried about

you know, like sarin gas and mustard gas. It was just a period of our history where gassing was in the air. Boo, boo, boo. You get negative four stars for that. Wow. Okay. Okay, friend. I love you, but that was terrible. Okay. I don't like puns. No, no, no. Don't compliment sandwich me. You're great. I love you. Terrible joke. And you also look good tonight. Yeah.

That's how you do it. Oh, hello, miss. You like tubby old guys? Emily would think that's hysterical, by the way. I know. Just to be clear. Oh, man, I got thrown because she hit on me.

Oh, here's the other thing. No motive ever emerged, and no one was ever, like, thank goodness, no one was ever robbed or assaulted or anything like that. It was just these random, sporadic gassings, and that is a decidedly weird thing to happen. Yeah. And then the gas itself provided evidence in that it provided no evidence whatsoever. No chemical was ever isolated from the pink cloth. In a lot of cases, the gas dissipated so quickly, somebody running in to help didn't detect it at all.

And don't forget, there was at least one case where somebody was affected by the gas, but somebody else in the same room was not. That's unusual behavior for a noxious gas. Yeah. So not a lot of physical evidence is happening at this point. It was also pretty peculiar. That word. It's getting late, everybody. It was also peculiar. It was strange. It was strange.

Porky pig. That was good. Pequilip, pequilip, pequilip. Strange. The whole thing ended when the police announced they were going to start sticking the tube down the throat, right? Yeah. Either go to jail or be medically assaulted.

So as Donald Johnson put it in his paper, which again, he said this was all just a case of mass hysteria. He said the facts seemed to evaporate as rapidly as the agent that produced them. He was a real bastard. No one like Donald Johnson, if you haven't picked up on that. He was like... Yeah, real self-satisfied. And he looked around...

Nobody was there because no one wanted to be around him. So the thing about this is, though, yes, you can make a pretty good case that it was just mass hysteria. There's a lot of good circumstantial evidence. But you can look at that same evidence in different ways. And no matter how you present the whole thing, there's still some stuff left on the table to be explained. And so here we present the case against mass hysteria, the concept, the idea that there actually was a mad gasser.

What a setup. You're a real pro. Thanks. Sure. I've been doing it for a while.

So, though there was not a lot of physical evidence, there was a little bit. You can't discount that. You had that moist pink cloth that everyone could not help but put in their face. People did bleed from their lips and mouth. Like, children vomited. Like, all that stuff really did happen. There was that slashed window screen. There was that high-heeled steel-toed boot footprint. Yeah.

in the dirt. So even though there wasn't a lot of stuff, and I don't think we said, they did test the rag, obviously, but by the time they got it, I think it was like a few days later, you know, back in those days, there was nothing that they could, like, isolate from the rag. Yeah, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything on it. If things sat around for three days, it's possible it just totally evaporated.

And then Chief Cole's policy, yes, it did bring an abrupt end to the whole thing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it was because the Mad Gasser was just totally made up. It can also just have been like a huge widespread loss of faith in the police.

And in fact, there were 232 calls to the police of any kind in September of 1944, the month that the town of Mattoon was supposedly in the grips of a textbook case of mass hysteria. And that was well below the average of 300. So it's possible people just stopped calling the cops no matter what was happening to them.

Yeah, the cops also had a motive for just wanting this to go away. Like we said, they had a penchant for covering up crimes. Did you like that? I did. Penchant.

Covering up crimes or, you know, kind of burying crimes. This let them off the hook because they had nothing, basically. So it totally let them off the hook. And we know that they were comfortable in covering up crimes from the Journal Gazette. So it wasn't too far fetched. Yeah. And then let's talk about Donald Johnson's paper, shall we? It turns out he cherry picked data like a mofo. Yeah.

He essentially excluded all of the men, almost all the men. He excluded all the children victims and just focused almost exclusively on the women victims, which sets things up pretty nice when you're trying to prove a case of female mass hysteria. That makeshift ABC socioeconomic scale, it was inspired, true, but it would not pass peer review today because it's egregiously fabricating data.

And the fact that he concluded the entire event was psychogenic is pretty rich because he couldn't get a single victim to submit to a psychological panel or test or question. Yeah. So he's kind of full of it, I'd say. Yeah. There is one little, and to me this is sort of the biggest one, if you're making this case, which is despite all of these cases that happened, I think, what, there was over 30 of them or 20-something, right?

None of them overlapped, like, geographically or time-wise. Like, if this town had been in the grips of mass hysteria, there would have been a call saying, I've been gassed, and five minutes later on the other side of town, at some point during this 10 days, somebody would have made it geographically and physically impossible because they're all freaking out and calling the cops. But every single incident could be explained, like...

Geographically speaking, someone could have gone from one place to another in the amount of time that it occurred. - Curious piece of data. - Curious. - So we probably should have said this at the outset, this is an unsolved mystery, we're not gonna solve it here tonight, sorry for that. If you were expecting that, sorry.

No one knows who the Mad Gasser of Mattoon was, seriously. But there was a guy, is a guy, named Scott Maruna, who was a high school chemistry professor, and he grew up in Charleston, about 12 miles away from Mattoon. And he decided to go to Mattoon a few years back and talk to some of the locals, and he put together a book about the subject. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, yeah, dispelling the hysteria. Very nice, everybody. Yeah.

And he interviewed a bunch of residents who lived through the whole thing. It's amazing to have 2,000 people scream colon at you. Yeah. Totally uncoached, unprompted. Yeah. Never felt so much power. Sorry, go ahead. You were overwhelmed by the colon? I really was. It's full of beans. Is that three? Yeah. Okay, perfect. It worked. Oh, come on.

Yes, please clap, as Jeb Bush said. So, Maruna doesn't think it was hysteria at all, does he? No. In fact, Maruna names an individual. Oh, man. You guys are the best. This is probably going to be the one, you guys. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it's going to be released. That did it right there. That just pushed it right over the line.

He names an individual, a local man named Farley Llewellyn, a trained chemist and college dropout from the University of Illinois who built a professional chemistry lab on his parents' property that blew up about a week before this all happened. And he was tall and had a slim athletic build. Yes.

So Scott Maruna found from talking to the locals that people considered Farley Llewellyn strange. John Miller, the guy from the Journal Gazette who wrote about all this stuff, he later said that Farley Llewellyn had been picked up once as a peeping Tom. He was known to drink ruinously and he was thought to have been gay in a time and a town where you just weren't that.

So he was kind of considered a weird outsider, essentially, by the town. Yeah, for sure. And everyone tolerated this in the town because he came from a prominent family. His family owned, back when individuals owned grocery stores and it wasn't just some monolith corporation, his dad was a grocer and a very beloved grocer who would do really genuinely great things like take food by at Christmas if needed.

people didn't have a lot of money and gifts to children and stuff like that. So he was a beloved individual. He was a real Chuck type. Oh, come on. Are you kidding me? Those are my gifts. That didn't go over well. Cut that part, Jerry. I had them in the palm of my hand. I know. It was ruined. Yeah, I know. I saw it. I was here. So we're back, everybody. And...

They were a beloved family. Everybody loved these people, so they overlooked their weird son. Yes. And Scott Marino actually even names the gas that he thinks it is, nitromethane. And it actually checks pretty much all the boxes for the symptoms that were reported by victims of the Mad Gasser.

Nitromethane produces limb weakness, cough, drowsiness, headache, nausea, sore throat, vomiting. Do not take nitromethane if you're pregnant or planning to become pregnant. Do not take nitromethane if you're allergic to nitromethane. And it also accounts for the sickeningly sweet smell because nitromethane is described as unpleasant, comma, fruity.

Here's the thing, though, with nitromethane is it's known more as an exploding thing than a paralyzing thing. So the leap that Maruna took was that, hey, I think that this guy was trying to blow people up. I think he didn't fit in because he was a gay, smart chemistry loner in this town in 1944 where you couldn't be that. And so he took revenge on the town by trying to blow them up one bedroom at a time.

So there's a couple of things wrong with Farley Llewellyn being the mad gasser. The first one is he seems to have been the mad scientist that Thomas Wright was quoted as saying the police had zeroed in on. And tangentially to that...

We know that the mad scientist the police were watching was under 24-hour surveillance and that during that time other mad gasser attacks had happened, which makes it hard for it to have been Farley Llewellyn. But Scott Maruna has an answer for this. That's right. Go ahead. He says that the first three attacks were Farley and that after not being able to blow any of his neighbors up, he just gave up. He was a bit of a quitter apparently.

And that later texts either were actual cases of mass hysteria or suggestibility, or Farley's two older sisters, who were described as short and heavy set, actually carried out more crimes to cover up for their little brother, which is sweet in a psychotic kind of way. Right.

The second problem in Maruna's book, he got a lot of his information, basically all of it, by talking with townspeople. And this is many, many years later, right? Right, yeah. And they were not able to verify a lot of the claims. There was a lot of speculation going on. This whole idea that he was gay, so he was an outcast. And so he wanted revenge on the town and wanted to kill people by blowing them up.

And then they stopped happening because his grosser families, that sounds so strange, his family had the kind of money to send him away to the state hospital where he was never heard from again, and that's why the gassing stopped.

And this is problematic for a bunch of reasons, obviously through today's lens, because locals saying he was weird and strange. It could have been that he was just a regular gay guy who was into chemistry and maybe sort of a brainiac.

and was doing his thing like doing chemistry in the basement. It's kind of coded in a big way. It's also possible that he could have been the Mad Gasser. We don't know, but there was so much speculation going on. We tried to find records from the state hospital, like did his parents have them sent away? And we couldn't even find that, unfortunately, because they just don't keep records like that. It's also a time in history where a

prominent family with some money could have your child sent away just because they were gay. Or because they kept trying to blow up their neighbors. I'm trying to go to bat a little bit for Farley Llewellyn, but it seems like he might have been the guy. It's possible. But again, we don't know. No one knows, and neither do you now. So,

So there's a lot to read on the Mad Gasser of Metoon, even though it's kind of an obscure case. There's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down. And if you really get into it like we did, you can go onto eBay and buy one of Matchbox Toys' Monster in My Pocket series, I think four figures, the Mad Gasser of Metoon, which Chuck bought. Yes.

You want to describe it, Chuck? Sure. For those people that can't see this tiny, tiny thing that I'm holding. I went on eBay. It is green. It does not look anything like Farley Llewellyn, I should point out. It's a monster and has like lobster pincers and a gas tank with an orange gas mask and also these strange tentacles coming off of his back.

It's pretty cool. I love having this little fella sure, but again, I don't see Farley Llewellyn when I look at this And Matchbox Toy on their evilness scale gave the Mad Gasser an 80 out of 100 and Matchbox Toys evilness scale is at least as legitimate as Donald Johnson's ABC socioeconomics scale That is the Mad Gasser of Mattoon Thank you very much. Thanks everybody

Thank you. Thank you. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent, being there day and night, and building a plan for tomorrow, today.

Finding the right news podcast can feel like dating. It seems promising until you start listening. When you hit play on Post Reports, you'll get fascinating conversations and sometimes a little fun too.

I'm Martine Powers. And I'm Elahe Azadi. Martine and I are the hosts of Post Reports. The show comes out every weekday from The Washington Post. You can follow and listen to Post Reports wherever you get your podcasts. It'll be a match, I promise. Wouldn't it be nice if getting what you wanted didn't take so much work?

So you can skip the endless scroll and get right to the good stuff.