LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon

Please enjoy our 2024 live show about the wild tale of the Madd Gasser of Mattoon. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:03Speaker 03

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Not bad for a Thursday.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Not bad at all. Thank you, guys, for that.

• 1:48Josh Clark?

  Feeling good.

• 1:51Josh Clark?

  We'll edit that part out.

• 1:54Josh Clark?

  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? Do you have any? Is anyone from Mattoon?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Any Toonies out there?

• 2:07Josh Clark?

  Really? Okay. Try not to be mad at us.

• 2:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:35Josh Clark?

  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. And that is it.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  New York has no problem with this. Montreal has no problem with this.

• 2:57Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Right?

• 3:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be funny after the reaction? They're like, "Oh, my God, amazing." If you're like, "So, this is about Lenders Bagels and sponsored by Lenders Bagels."

• 3:39Josh Clark?

  We'd like to thank Lenders Bagels.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  You should Google that other super interesting story, though.

• 3:45Josh Clark?

  Chuck's full of beans tonight, everybody.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Full of what?

• 3:49Josh Clark?

  Beans.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 3:51Josh Clark?

  It means you're like, "Meh, I'm full of it."

• 3:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I've never heard that. I thought that meant you were farty.

• 3:58Josh Clark?

  No, I don't think that.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Full of beans?

• 4:00Josh Clark?

  No.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  The musical fruit?

• 4:01Josh Clark?

  I'm full of beans.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Okay. I can tell.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  No, of course not. Well, never mind.

• 4:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, keep moving on.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  So, we're gonna take you back in time and hop in the Wayback Machine and go back to 1944, when it took place. Thank you. No. Wayback Machine. This is the Wayback Machine, by the way.

• 4:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It's in the mines, so we're all there together. I suddenly just sound like a cult leader.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  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 gonna hear some 1944 names tonight, like Bertha, and Elmer, and Heber.

• 4:50Josh Clark?

  Heber's my favorite.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And Beulah, and Urban. Like, great 1940's names that you just don't hear anymore unless you're like a super hipster and you named your kid Beulah.

• 5:00Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we couldn't get to the bottom of whether it was named after the owner, or they just made brown shoes.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Well, it's 1944, I bet it was both.

• 5:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  But, a 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.

• 5:49Josh Clark?

  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 the World War II at the time. So, it was an anxious place to be, back then. And this whole thing that we're gonna 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. Bert 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.

• 6:30Josh Clark?

  So we went to great lengths to find the first names of the women who were attacked. I'm a bit of a quitter, thank you.

• 6:42Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I 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?

• 7:10Josh Clark?

  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.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Very generous.

• 7:31Speaker 02

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

• 7:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:18Josh Clark?

  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, they searched and they didn't find anything either. And everything just kind of settled down for about an hour after that.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Aileen's husband, the aforementioned Bert, is a cab driver, was a cab driver, and he was driving around and 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 12:30 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 what regionally you call it here.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  What do you call it here? Beanie? Okay.

• 9:35Josh Clark?

  We'll go with beanie.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I didn't know if you were close enough to Canada, 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.

• 9:47Josh Clark?

  Did you really?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:49Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I woke up and I was here 13 minutes later.

• 9:53Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  With a shower.

• 9:57Josh Clark?

  That's impressive.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And a toothbrush.

• 9:59Josh Clark?

  Did you take a shower on the way?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I did. You just got to select Uber Shower.

• 10:05Josh Clark?

  You don't share those though, right?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:36Josh Clark?

  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 kinda 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.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other two headlines, we like to do our research, we went on the microfiche. Big headline there, Bagels: Breakfast to the Future? They were trying to build up some buzz.

• 11:17Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Forty years earlier.

• 11:19Josh Clark?

  Right. So there was a sub-headline, too. Mrs. Kearney and Daughter: First Victims. And so keep in mind, this one incident happened, this was 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.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think even speculated about what it might be. There was a lot of speculation early on, right?

• 11:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah. A lot.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Alright, 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.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  So this 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.

• 12:39Josh Clark?

  Right. And then, they weren't just sitting around, though, 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.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. This guy's name is Urban Rafe.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  What a 1944 name that is.

• 13:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  He and his wife Pauline, we got her name, said that they'd 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.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  She had not.

• 13:24Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  So, they noticed this smell after about 90 minutes it wore off, and they chalked it up to eating bad hot dogs.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  They were paralyzed for 90 minutes and they just chalked it up to the hot dogs.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  You know that thing. You go to a Twins game, have a hot dog. From like the fifth inning on, you can't move.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  You're like, "I can't do the seventh inning stretch."

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. They thought it was that. We've all been there.

• 13:56Josh Clark?

  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 kinda lightheaded. She found her kids vomiting and Shirley said, "Oh, must be the hot dogs."

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Tuesday was also the day we got our first physical evidence. There was one Buell Acortis 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.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  She put it in her face and inhaled deeply.

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And what happened to her?

• 14:42Josh Clark?

  She described as like coming into contact with a strong electrical current. By the way, she immediately regretted huffing this strange pink rag.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:20Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:46Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Right. A factory manager, by the way.

• 16:00Josh Clark?

  She was, the little girl.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was 11.

• 16:04Josh Clark?

  She smoked cigars and...

• 16:05Speaker 02

  I don't think we mentioned too, that the cops took hold, obviously took the evidence into hand, that pink cloth, and I guess managed to avoid the urge to breathe deeply into it.

• 16:18Josh Clark?

  They're like, "It's moist."

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It's moist, yeah. That's what you do. Let me see what that is.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I mean, at the worst, it's a cat urine.

• 16:30Josh Clark?

  That would be pretty bad.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  It would be terrible.

• 16:32Josh Clark?

  A snoop full of that?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, a 60-year-old man named Fred Goble 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.

• 16:47Josh Clark?

  And we did the math. Fred Goble's was 60 in 1944, which would make him roughly 800 years old today.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  The Josh math. I love it.

• 17:00Josh Clark?

  It works out sometimes.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:16Josh Clark?

  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.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  That's right. If you're curious, the other headline, "Bagels, colon, like an unsweetened donut?"

• 17:40Speaker 02

  So, another thing started happening on Thursday, which is, um, these gentlemen and their sons in the town, uh, the Anti-Thief Association, got their guns, got some makeshift weapons. These are those 3 percent. 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, uh, like, the cops would get help from them for cattle rustling 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.

• 18:13Josh Clark?

  Yes. So, after only a couple of newspaper reports, the course of a few days, the town of Mattoon is really high-strung. Uh, 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.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:33Josh Clark?

  That's the guy in charge.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, as we do, we did our, uh, financial conversion, because we love those. You knew it would feature a financial money conversion. So, we went to our trusty WestEd calculator, and that would be $176,306 a day. So, he's not helping matters. That would walk through any backyard for that kind of dope.

• 18:55Josh Clark?

  For sure. So, they also issued a PSA to, uh, citizens, which said, "Hey, uh, if you're gonna 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."

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no good. So, uh, I, uh, this was sort of a busy time for the, the cops, obviously, right? Because they didn't usually get calls like this, right?

• 19:22Josh Clark?

  No, and they weren't set up for crime. The Mattoon Police Department wasn't. Certainly not for a spike in 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.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  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, you know, sort of a spike in crime that didn't have anything to do with this. Like robberies and stuff like that.

• 20:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  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, you know, to worry about, like today's big cities.

• 20:28Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  But for Mattoon, it was a spike in crime.

• 20:30Josh Clark?

  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.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. It's not the best way to run a police force. And then even worse, the vigilantes from the Anti-Thief Association, they figured out that if they hung around City Hall, and when the cops peeled off, they were going to a call. So the Anti-Thief Association would tear off after them, ostensibly with bluegrass music playing them on. And eventually, the police department was like, "We're gonna arrest you if you keep following us to calls to shoot whoever's there."

• 21:39Speaker 02

  So things are getting a little crazy, just like a movie would happen. Or I guess what would happen in a movie. What a weird way to say that.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  This states it, two investigators, one Richard Piper and Francis with an I, Barry, from the Illinois Bureau of Crime Identification and Investigation.

• 21:58Josh Clark?

  Ibkey?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  It's a little weird. It doesn't even spell anything.

• 22:03Josh Clark?

  It spells "I'm key."

• 22:05Speaker 02

  So, 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 possession of that paint cloth from Beulah Cordis 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.

• 22:33Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Can you imagine what that was like?

• 22:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  They were like, "We're like real cops now."

• 22:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, I feel like this is going pretty well.

• 23:07Josh Clark?

  You guys, too?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 23:09Josh Clark?

  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?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 23:17Josh Clark?

  So, if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back.

• 23:38Josh Clark?

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• 25:55Speaker 02

  Okay, we're back, everybody.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  So I'm not sure if you remember where we were when we left off and had 15 minutes of ads.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  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?

• 26:23Josh Clark?

  Uh, Ibki?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Ibki.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  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."

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Got decidedly less forensic, I guess, at that point.

• 26:44Josh Clark?

  I could see somebody reading the paper and being like, "Yeah, probably."

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Sounds about right.

• 26:49Josh Clark?

  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.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  I heard 10 people say, "Ew."

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:36Josh Clark?

  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, they, she was taken to the hospital and examined, and she was found not to have been gassed, and she was sedated forever.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Imagine being in a theater. I've been gassed!

• 28:15Josh Clark?

  You pull a Kestan, so you're just crawling over little kids.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Hey, maybe your husband's full of beans!

• 28:23Speaker 02

  So...

• 28:26Josh Clark?

  That's a good callback.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Two stars, three stars?

• 28:28Josh Clark?

  I give it seven.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  How many stars? Oh wow, okay, never mind, I don't want to know what you think. Seven stars.

• 28:34Josh Clark?

  Seven stars.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  I'll take it. Uh, the police chief also, uh, Chief Cole tried to pin it on, um, carbon tetra chloride 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, a press conference, they talked to like, the one person that had, you know, ran the newspaper. 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, uh, to come by, and they said that it was impossible for any carbon tetra chloride vapors to escape the

• 29:20Speaker 02

  plant in any amount of concentration that would even closely approximate a toxic condition. And everybody in the town went, "Defensive much?"

• 29:30Josh Clark?

  And Chief Cole was quoted as saying, "Whatever."

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:34Josh Clark?

  So, uh, 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.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Four stars.

• 29:49Josh Clark?

  And it's from that editorial that we, uh, 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, uh, seriously from the outset.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:18Josh Clark?

  No. It's just our secret.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Did you do that part yet? Uh, no. Okay.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  We're back, everyone.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  So, the cops weren't completely blowing this off, obviously. They had an obligation. They did look into about thirty people by the end of the case, total. And what they did was they examined records of like the state mental hospital to see if anyone had escaped that might fit the profile and terrorize the town with a paralytic. Not just gas.

• 30:56Josh Clark?

  Turned out, no.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 30:58Josh Clark?

  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 WWII as far away as Papua New Guinea. And the soldier fighting in Papua New Guinea was quoted as saying, "What the heck in heck is going on back there?"

• 31:36Speaker 02

  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."

• 31:55Josh Clark?

  That's a quote. It is a quote.

• 32:02Josh Clark?

  So, on Sunday, September 10th, this thing's been going on for about ten 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 had been gassed, or you could refuse to go to the hospital and spend the night in jail. This was the choice that you were given if you called the police for help, right?

• 32:37Josh Clark?

  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, 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, like priming it, just to get it going.

• 33:06Josh Clark?

  Come on.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Not good.

• 33:08Josh Clark?

  It just goes on like that until it ends badly.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Oh, it happened again. Oh, God.

• 33:17Josh Clark?

  It'd just be projectile vomit right back in the person with the tube down their throat's face.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Stop saying that word.

• 33:24Josh Clark?

  A circle of life, basically.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  You know, we follow the two maxims of live performance, say moist and vomit.

• 33:33Josh Clark?

  Projectile vomit, no less.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Like 30-minute period.

• 33:36Josh Clark?

  Put a little mustard on it.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  All right, so, uh...

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Almost immediately, the calls 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 Benz. 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.

• 34:10Josh Clark?

  Heavyset, you might say.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Heavyset, you might say. And there was a slashed window where this prowler was spotted. Windows screen, can't slash a window.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  And beneath that slashed window screen, an impression in the dirt below of a woman's high heel.

• 34:29Josh Clark?

  And not today's sexy high heels. These are 1944 steel-toe work high heels, basically.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Old Brown Shoe Factory high heels.

• 34:38Josh Clark?

  They were definitely brown, for sure.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Every high heel needs a steel toe.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  So what happened after that?

• 34:47Josh Clark?

  So as the calls started to drop off, the State Patrol, they went home, they took their two-way radios with them.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 34:54Josh Clark?

  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 planned to do it again next week. That was a page-one article.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  That was it. And more bagel follow-ups, of course.

• 35:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. You gonna, I mean, me or you?

• 36:06Josh Clark?

  You.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, wait, it does say Chuck colon, speak now.

• 36:10Josh Clark?

  With feelings.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  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, you know, kind of making fun of one another. Decatur was making fun of Mattoon. Mattoon would make fun, would get very defensive, obviously.

• 36:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  And say, "You know what? This article overlooks the indisputable fact that there was a madgasser 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 to follow to overrun any investigation, and also, the odor probably came from Decatur."

• 36:47Josh Clark?

  That's not a joke.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  No, you stink. You stink.

• 36:51Josh Clark?

  That was how they wrapped up the editorial. And then after that, the Journal Gazette, the town's voice was pretty much clammed up on the matter. And in the end, how many attacks were there, Chuck?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:20Josh Clark?

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

• 37:26Speaker 02

  No one died, though.

• 37:27Josh Clark?

  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 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 gassar had learned to just keep quiet about it.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  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?

• 38:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  That it happened, or that they took part and investigated? I don't even know what that means.

• 38:33Josh Clark?

  Well, Chief Cole was known for his very cryptic quotes. He was sphinx-like.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  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 gotta have all the like personal data, and they, no one would give that up, so he devised his own system, right?

• 39:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he came up with a really clever workaround. There was something called the ABC Socioeconomics 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 socioeconomics 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 victims' 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

• 39:44Josh Clark?

  "yes, please" when they were asked their sex by a surveyor. And then their occupation and income.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  And that person was my father-in-law. Let's cut that part out, Jerry.

• 39:58Josh Clark?

  Alright.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Just in case. So, eh, 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, kinda gleaned what he could, but back then they had really broad labels for sensisai? Sensai? Sensusis?

• 40:20Josh Clark?

  Sensai, I like that.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Sensai? Alright, I just made that up. I can say that now, 'cause I'm a whole human being without a big hole in the front of my mouth. I did this show earlier in the, yeah, you're clapping 'cause I have all my teeth. Earlier in the year, it was like, anisissis? Synsisis? It was not good.

• 40:39Josh Clark?

  Your dental work just got a round of applause.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I know.

• 40:44Josh Clark?

  That's pretty neat.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  I'll have to tell Dr. Presley.

• 40:48Josh Clark?

  Is that the one who swears?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  No, no, no, that wasn't my dentist. That was a listener that wrote in.

• 40:54Josh Clark?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a great dentist. A dentist that drops F-bombs while you're in the chair. My kinda guy.

• 40:59Josh Clark?

  That would make me uncomfortable.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Really?

• 41:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah. It'd be like, "Do your [bleep] job."

• 41:06Josh Clark?

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know that there's children here and I'm sorry.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  No, no. You never hear us. Are there kids here?

• 41:15Josh Clark?

  Yes. There's one right there. And she does not look happy with me. I'm sorry, dear.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Just waving hi. How old are you? Ten?

• 41:25Josh Clark?

  Ten, alright, alright.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  You've heard that word.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  If you haven't, I'm gonna call Child Services and report your parents.

• 41:39Josh Clark?

  Ten?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  So cute.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Oh man, that threw me. My daughter's nine. She knows that word.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Where are we? Okay, so for income, he based... Oh, no, no, we're talking about the Sensai. It was a little vague back in those days, right? That's where I was.

• 41:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so they had, um, they had labels like, uh, laborer, comma, except farm.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:05Josh Clark?

  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, the big challenge was age. You couldn't really tell from their occupation whether they were like eight or...

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:20Josh Clark?

  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 and his paper.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Anything that was a great distraction for them.

• 42:40Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Like, sure, paper, great. For income, he based it on, and this was actually the only part of the ABC scale that I 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, uh, electricity in the house, a mechanical refrigerator, a telephone and a radio.

• 43:06Josh Clark?

  Yes. And so he took all this, mixed it all together, shook it up in a bag, little fairy dust, little pixie dust, uh...

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Don't forget salt and pepper.

• 43:17Josh Clark?

  He threw a moist pink rag in.

• 43:21Josh Clark?

  Mashed it all together and he came up with four, not A, B, C, A, B, C, D.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:26Josh Clark?

  He was a bit of a show off. And he found that all of the victims fell within B, C, or D. There were no As 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 twenties with below-average education, 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.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  That's right. It's not us talking, everybody.

• 44:09Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  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."

• 44:34Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  So it was like, what you call that thing?

• 44:54Josh Clark?

  Like getting stomach contents in your face and then projectile vomiting back in the person's stomach. Yeah, you remember.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that thing. But he got published, right?

• 45:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Little Donald Johnson.

• 45:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And when it was published, the whole thing, the entire case of the Mad Gasser metune, 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.

• 45:47Josh Clark?

  And it became a textbook case of mass hysteria.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Nice job.

• 45:53Josh Clark?

  Thanks.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Should we? I mean, I feel like this is going pretty good still, right?

• 45:58Josh Clark?

  Oh, wait, there's one more line I forgot.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Oh, wait.

• 46:01Josh Clark?

  But decades on, it's far from clear whether it was a case of mass hysteria.

• 46:10Josh Clark?

  And that explains what Chuck's about to say.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Uh, 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.

• 46:41Josh Clark?

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• 46:51Speaker 04

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• 47:04Josh Clark?

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• 47:20Speaker 04

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• 47:44Josh Clark?

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• 48:02Speaker 02

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• 48:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, plus, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you can give luxury-quality pieces without the luxury price tag.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com, where you can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was stuff you should know. It's the best way to support the show.

• 48:59Josh Clark?

  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.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:51Josh Clark?

  You get negative four stars for that.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Wow, okay. Okay, friend.

• 50:58Josh Clark?

  I love you, but that was terrible.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 51:01Josh Clark?

  I don't like puns.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no, don't compliment sandwich me.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  You're great, I love you, terrible joke, and you also look good tonight.

• 51:11Josh Clark?

  That's how you do it.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Oh, hello, miss.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  You like tubby old guys?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Emily would think that's hysterical, by the way.

• 51:24Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Just to be clear. Oh, man, I got thrown because she hit on me.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Oh, here's the other thing. No motive ever emerged, and no one was ever, like, thank goodness, no one has ever robbed or assaulted or anything like that. It was just these random sporadic gassings, and that is a decidedly weird thing to happen.

• 51:48Josh Clark?

  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.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Not a lot of, uh, that's good. Not a lot of, uh, physical evidence is happening, uh, at this point. It was also pretty peculiar, uh, geez, that word.

• 52:28Josh Clark?

  It's getting late, everybody.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  It was also peculiar, it was strange.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Porky Pig.

• 52:35Josh Clark?

  That was good.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Peculiar, peculiar, peculiar, strange. The, the whole thing ended, uh, when the police announced they were gonna start, uh, sticking the tube down the throat, right?

• 52:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, either go to jail or be medically assaulted.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:51Josh Clark?

  So, as Donald Johnson put it in his paper, which again, he, he said this was all just a case of mass hysteria, he said, "The facts seem to evaporate as rapidly as the agent that produced them."

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 53:03Josh Clark?

  He was a real bastard.

• 53:06Josh Clark?

  No one liked Donald Johnson, if you haven't picked up on that.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  He was like, "Tch, tch, tch, tch, tch."

• 53:11Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm, yeah. Real self-satisfied.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  And he looked around, nobody was there, 'cause no one wanted to be around.

• 53:20Josh Clark?

  So, the thing about this is, though, um, 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.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Man, what a setup. You're a real pro.

• 53:47Josh Clark?

  Thanks.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 53:48Josh Clark?

  I've been doing it for a while.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  So, uh, though there was not a lot of physical evidence, there was a little bit. Uh, 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, uh, children vomited, like, all that stuff really did happen. Um, there was that slashed window screen, there was that, uh, high-heeled steel-toed boot footprint in the dirt. So, even though there wasn't a lot of stuff, and I don't think we said, they, they did test the rag, um, 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.

• 54:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything on it. Thing sat around for three days, it's possible, it just totally evaporated.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 54:34Josh Clark?

  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.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  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. You feel like that?

• 55:21Josh Clark?

  I did.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Pinchant. 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 back.

• 55:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and then let's talk about Donald Johnson's paper, shall we? It turns out he cherry picked data like a mofo. 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.

• 56:12Josh Clark?

  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.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:23Josh Clark?

  So he's kind of full of it, I'd say.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 57:05Josh Clark?

  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...

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 57:18Josh Clark?

  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. Colon! Yeah. Dispelling the hysteria. Very nice, everybody.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Man.

• 57:48Josh Clark?

  And he interviewed a bunch of residents who lived through the whole thing.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  It's amazing to have 2,000 people scream "colon" at you.

• 57:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Totally uncoached, unprompted.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Never felt so much power. Sorry, go ahead.

• 58:05Josh Clark?

  You were overwhelmed by the colon?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  I really was. Hmm. It's full of beans. Is that three? Okay, perfect.

• 58:14Josh Clark?

  Work.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 58:19Josh Clark?

  Yes. Please clap, as Jeb Bush said. So, Maruna doesn't think it was hysteria at all, does he?

• 58:29Speaker 02

  No. In fact, Maruna names an individual.

• 58:33Josh Clark?

  Oh, man. You guys are the best.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  This is... This is probably gonna be the one, you guys.

• 58:41Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 58:50Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:53Josh Clark?

  No, it's gonna be released.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 58:55Josh Clark?

  That did it right there. That just pushed it right over the line.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:21Josh Clark?

  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.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 59:50Josh Clark?

  So he was kind of considered a weird outsider, essentially, by the town.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  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 people didn't have a lot of money and gifts to children and stuff like that. So he was a beloved individual.

• 1:00:17Josh Clark?

  He was a real chuck type.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Aw, come on. You kidding me? Those are my gifts. That didn't go over well. Cut that part, Jerry.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  I had them in the palm of my hand.

• 1:00:30Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  It was ruined. Yeah, I know.

• 1:00:33Josh Clark?

  I saw it. I was here.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  So we're back, everybody, and...

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  They were a beloved family. Everybody loved these people, so they overlooked their weird son.

• 1:00:47Josh Clark?

  Yes, and Scott Maruna 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.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, though, with nitromethane is it's known more as an exploding thing than a, like, 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.

• 1:01:58Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  That's right. Go ahead.

• 1:02:33Josh Clark?

  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 attacks 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.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:03:13Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  And they were not able to verify a lot of the claims. There was a lot of speculation going on. This whole idea that, like, 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

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  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, like, records from the state hospital. Like, did his parents have them sent away? And we couldn't even, like, find that, unfortunately, because they just don't keep records like that.

• 1:04:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  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, so...

• 1:04:29Josh Clark?

  Or because they kept trying to blow up their neighbors.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. I'm trying to go to bat a little bit for Farley Llewellyn, but it seems like he might have been the guy.

• 1:04:38Josh Clark?

  It's possible. But again, we don't know. No one knows, and neither do you now.

• 1:04:46Josh Clark?

  So, there's a lot to read on the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. 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 Mattoon, which Chuck bought.

• 1:05:11Josh Clark?

  You want to describe it, Chuck?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Sure. For those people that can't see this tiny, tiny thing that I'm holding.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Went on eBay. It is green. It is, does not look anything like Farley Llewellyn, I should point out. It's a monster and has like lobster pincers and these, 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.

• 1:05:38Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  But again, I don't see Farley Llewellyn when I look at this.

• 1:05:43Josh Clark?

  And Matchbox Toy, on their evilness scale, gave the Mad Gasser an 80 out of 100. And Matchbox Toy's evilness scale is at least as legitimate as Donald Johnson's ABC Socioeconomics scale.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:05:59Josh Clark?

  And that is the Mad Gasser.

• 1:06:06Josh Clark?

  Thank you very much.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Thanks, everybody.

• 1:06:10Josh Clark?

  Thank you.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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• 1:07:07Speaker 05

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• 1:07:43Speaker 00

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