The year is 1944 and World War II may be an entire ocean away, but for the people of Mattoon,
Illinois, fears of secret Nazi and Japanese saboteurs run high.
As an important industrial hub, they can hardly be blamed, after all German saboteurs had
been discovered in Florida just a few years earlier, and they had had a plan to carry
out major terror attacks against industrial communities across the US.
Late one summer night though, a woman wakes up to a sickly sweet smell in her bedroom.
To her horror she realizes that she can't move her legs, and as the odor intensifies
so does the paralysis.
As her husband comes home from work, he spots a tall stranger wearing dark clothes by the
bedroom window, who immediately flees upon being confronted.
When the community wakes up the next morning, reports of people's homes being gassed flood
the local police department, and a new panic grips the population.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show, today we're exploring the
mystery of the mad gasser of Mattoon.
In 1944 most people didn't have air conditioning, and with sweltering summer temperatures many
homes left their windows open to let air circulate in and out and help fight the oppressive heat.
On the night of August 31st, a couple woke up smelling something sweet in their bedroom,
and feeling groggy and a bit strange.
Despite the fact that Mattoon was an industrial center with many chemical plants in the area,
the couple were still freaked out as they'd never smelled anything so powerful, and as
the husband rose to his feet he began vomiting.
The wife, worried that she had inadvertently left the gas on, tried to rise up to go check
but discovered to her horror that she couldn't move her legs.
In a nearby house, a young child became extremely sickly in his bed, yet the mother was herself
too nauseous and ill to comfort him.
A few nights later, another woman smelled a sweet substance and felt herself being paralyzed
from the legs up.
Screaming in fear, her sister, who was staying with her, rushed to her aid.
Also noticing the odor, she determined that it was coming from the direction of the open
bedroom window.
The police was immediately contacted and inspected the area around the home, but discovered no
evidence of a prowler.
Later that night around midnight, her husband, a taxi driver, came home to discover a man
lurking by the bedroom window.
Despite rushing after the mysterious figure, the husband was unable to catch him, though
he did offer police a detailed description, describing the man as tall, dressed in dark
clothing, and wearing a tight fitting cap.
As more and more calls started pouring into the local police department, the press quickly
got wind of the story.
Reporters contacted eyewitnesses who all shared a similar description of a tall man dressed
in dark clothing.
In the mid 1930s a spat of gassing incidents had occurred in Virginia, and now people feared
that the “mad gasser” as he was known back then, had come to Mattoon.
As news of the attacks began to circulate, more and more individuals started coming forward,
relaying their own stories.
Two women even claimed that they too had woken up to a sweet smell and an inability to move
months ago, yet had not thought to report it until they saw headlines of the recent
gas attacks.
The women likely did not want to bring undue attention on themselves, or be blamed for
being hysterical.
In one of the two women's accounts though, their husband had also come home to see a
man lurking by a window, mirroring one of the first of the new gas attacks.
As hysteria and panic grew, the gas attacks increased in intensity.
Some nights three or four houses would all report having been gassed, one couple even
claimed to have come home to discover a white cloth on their porch.
When the woman smelled the cloth she immediately threw up, and when the couple searched their
house they found a skeleton key and a tube of lipstick- the mad gasser had apparently
entered their home and... made himself fancy?
As reports intensified, paranoia grew, and people began locking up their homes at night
and sleeping in shifts.
Bands of vigilantes began patrolling the town, keeping a sharp eye out for midnight gassers.
Police quickly began to change their tactics, and instead of looking for a gasser, they
instead tried to quell rumors and verify attacks.
Hospital examinations of victims found nothing wrong with any of them, though one of the
original victims did have prolonged difficulty breathing and pain in her chest.
With hospital examinations being made mandatory for any who reported a gas attack, the incidents
began, perhaps unsurprisingly, to decrease.
Then suddenly one night in mid September a report of three gas attacks came in.
Police, who were by this time confident they were looking for nothing more than a modern
boogeyman, declared that anybody who reported an attack but didn't submit to a full examination
would be arrested.
The reports of attacks suddenly stopped.
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon became an example of shared delusion brought on by paranoia,
stress, and rumor.
With fears of nazi agents everywhere, it is believed that the people of Mattoon had let
their imaginations get away with them, and the legend of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon even
made it into the novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
In the book one character describes the events, briefly convincing the heroes of the story
that they've become delusional and that no alien invasion was taking place.
Yet an alien invasion was in fact taking place, and perhaps, a mad gasser really did exist.
There's no doubt that some reports, maybe most, were fake, either purposefully hoaxed
by attention seekers or perhaps simple paranoia.
As an industrial town, Mattoon was prone to being awash with industrial fumes, and this
at a time when there existed no such thing as the environmental protection agency.
Environmental regulations at the time mostly consisted of: there's a lot of environment
so just keep pumping bad stuff into it, everything will work out in the end.
Given a population at war against a foe described as evil itself, it's no doubt that paranoia
had a lot to do with the mad gasser, yet just ten years earlier there had in fact been a
string of gassings in Virginia.
A book written by an author who researched the incident also insists that there was in
fact an actual gasser, though he did not carry out nearly as many attacks as the public would
end up reporting.
The book also claims that because most of the victims who reported being gassed were
women, claims of mass hysteria were easy to believe, and this served to silence many legitimate
victims.
Remember, this was also a time when women were made out of porcelain that was best seen
and never heard.
In the author's opinion, the mad gasser was a real live chemistry student who was well
known to be disliked and antisocial.
The hypothesis that a real gasser actually existed is supported by the fact that some
physical evidence was discovered, such as bootprints found on the dirt in front of windows
and tears discovered on window screens.
Yet after the announcement that anyone reporting an attack would be arrested unless they submitted
to a medical examination, there was one incident that was still reported by a Bertha Burch,
who claimed she saw a gasser who was a woman dressed as a man- this perhaps would go in
hand with the discovery of lipstick at one of the previous crime scenes.
Likely the mad gasser was a combination of mass hysteria and a small number of actual
physical attacks, though there exists a third and, in our opinion, equally valid theory
which the police shockingly failed to consider.
According to paranormal experts, the mad gasser was in actuality not a person at all- or at
least not a person who was a member of the human race.
That's because the mad gasser was in actuality an alien being, sent to this earth for the
purpose of... shooting smelly gas into people's homes?
Listen, aliens are probably so different from us that many scientists agree that we'd likely
have a hard time understanding their most basic motivations in comparison to our own,
so who's to say that an alien didn't have a perfectly good reason for crossing dozens
of light years just to shoot funny smelling gas at some sleeping ladies?
Sure, a civilization able to travel across the galaxy at speeds faster than light would
be unimaginably more technologically advanced than us, and could conquer our planet with
but a thought- but maybe shooting gas at sleeping women is how these aliens wage war.
How would you know, they're aliens!
Perhaps the mad gasser attacks of 1944 were but the opening shots of mankind's first interstellar
war, to which we say that humanity must answer this call to arms in our struggle to defend
our planet, our very species, from extinction.
So eat up your beans boys, because if the aliens want gas warfare, by God we'll give
it to them.