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. Him.
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 Mettun a few of you? Is anyone from.
Mattoon any tunes out there? Really?
Okay, we'll try not to be mad at us because the show starts like this. Mattoon is in a kind of a triangle between Chicago to the north, Saint 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. Right, I'm sorry, but there are two things that Mattoon lays claim to. One, it calls itself the Begel Capital of the World because in nineteen eighty five, Lenders Begels opened a factory there.
That is it.
New York has no problem with this. Montreal has no problem with it.
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 Mattun 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 Mettune in nineteen forty four, and we're going to dive into that here tonight.
What it wouldn't be funny After reaction, they're like, oh my god, amazing. If you're like, so this is about Linderspagels and sponsored.
We'd like to thank Lenders.
You should google that other super interesting story though.
Chucks full of beans tonight.
Everybody bullow what beans it means?
You're like, I'm full of it?
Where I come from, I've never heard that. I thought that means we're party. No, I don't full of beans the musical fruit.
All of these kay.
I can tell No, of course not well, nevermind.
Yeah, keep moving on.
So we're gonna take you back in time and hop in the way back machine and go back to nineteen forty four when it took place. Ok, wow, wayback machine. This is the wayback machine. By the way, it's it's in the mind. So we're all there together. I suddenly just sound like a cult leader. So Matune in nineteen forty four was a pretty small town of about sixteen thousand. 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 nineteen forty four names tonight, like Bertha and Elmer and.
Hebrew Hebrew's my favorite, and Beulah.
And Urban, like great nineteen forties names that you just don't hear anymore unless you are like a super hipster and you name your kid Beulah. Yeah that's my great grandmother, I promise. It was surrounded by fields corn and soybean, 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.
When I was nineteen forty four, I bet it was both.
Yeah, a little bit from column May, a little bit from columb But long way of saying, if you lived in Mattoon, you probably were a farmer.
You may have worked on the railroad although livelong 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 nineteen forty four. A significant portion of its young men had left town and were off fighting the World War two 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 Mettune. It all started, depending on how you look at it, on the night of Friday, September first, at the home of mister and missus 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 Burt. She took his last name. Who cares about anything else? Well, we care, So we went to great links to find the first names of the women who were attacked. I'm a bit of a thank you. Chuck has more stamina than me. I'm a bit of a quitter. So I gave up with like three or four, laughed, and he's like, no, and we got it down to one. There's only one woman whose
first name. We couldn't find this whole thing.
Yeah, I couldn't find it. I've spent a lot of time on ancestry dot com and find a grave dot 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. Yeah, so what was her name?
Her name was Aileen missus Kearny'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 two overseas, and so that's why they let Martha use her first name temporarily.
Yeah.
Well, he was.
Very generous. So about eleven PM. In this house, Aileen retired to bed with her toddler daughter Dorothy at eleven PM. I can only imagine this 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 guardinia kind of smell. They 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 and in the room and was like, what the hell is that? Smelling through the window open and ran next door to Earl Robertson's house. No trouble finding his name, right, 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's kind of settled down for about an hour after that.
Yeah, so Alien's husband, the aforementioned Bert, is a cab driver. Was a cab driver, and he was driving around in nineteen forty four. 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 twelve thirty am,
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 tuke. 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 thirteen minutes later. Wow with a shower.
That's impressive and a tooth brush. Did you take a shower on the way?
I did. You just got to select uber shower.
You don't share those though, right now?
Yeah, they'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 ninety 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 micropiche big headline there, Bagel's Breakfast to the Future. They were trying to build up some buds, sure, forty years earlier.
So there was a sub sub headline too, missus Kearney and daughter first victims. 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 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 Matune Journal gazette was received by ninety seven percent of the town, which I thought was hysterical because even in nineteen forty four there were the three centers 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 though. Some people came forward. They'd read the story and were like, this happened to me too. There was one woman named missus Olive Brown who had suffered an attack a few months before, and the local softball commissioner too, Yeah, this is.
This guy's name is Urban Raife what in nineteen forty four name? That is? He and his wife Pauline we got her name, said that they 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 ninety minutes, it wore off and they chopped it up to eating bad hot dogs.
They were paralyzed for ninety minutes, and they just chalked it up.
To the hot dogs, you know that, saying, Yodo Twins game, have a hot dog from like the fifth inning on. You can't move.
They're like, I can't do the seventh inning stretch.
Yeah, they thought it was that. We've all been there.
So there's another family. All these people are coming forward now from the 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.
Tuesday was also the day we got our first physical evidence. There was one Beula Cordis, 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. Yeah, and what happened to her.
She described as like coming into contact with a strong electrical current. By the way, she immediately regretted, huffing, this is a strange pink rag. Yeah, she said. Her knees went wildly, 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 pinkregg 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 eighteen month old son, fresh known 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, it was Wednesday, September fifth, and there were four more attacks, One on Laura Jenkin, 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 missus Viola Spangler, and then about an hour after that, eleven year old Glenda Hendershot was attacked and she was the daughter of a mister Hendershot.
Right factory manager by the.
Way, she was the little girl.
Yeah, eleven.
Almost cigars.
I don't think we mentioned too that the cops took hold obviously took the evidence into hand at pink cloth, and I guess it managed to avoid the urge to breathe deeply into it because it's it's moist. Yeah, that's what you do. Let me see what that is. I mean, at the worst, it's a cat urine.
That would be pretty bad.
It'd be terrible, a snoop.
Full of that.
Yeah. Also, a sixty 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 Goebels was sixty and nineteen forty four, which would make him roughly eight hundred years old today.
The Josh math. 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 and Nestetist strikes again with an exclamation point this time. So there is pulling out all the stops.
That's right, if you're curious. The other headline bagels colon like an unsweetened donut. 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 three percent. I think I need to point that out. They start roaming the town like you know,
the vigilantes, like there were quasi deputy. 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 gut in their trucks and did their thing.
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 Mettun, was quoted in the paper as saying that he wouldn't walk across his own backyard at night for ten thousand dollars. Yeah, that's the guy in charge.
Yeah, you know, as we do. We did our financial conversion because we love those. You knew it would feature a financial money conversion, so we went to our TRUSTe west Egg calculator and that would be one hundred and seventy six, three hundred and six dollars per day. So he's not helping matters that would walk through any backyards for that kind of day, for sure.
So they also issued a PSA to citizen 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 Mattsom Police Department wasn't certainly not for a spiking crime. So politically the police force was in disarray. You had Thomas Wright, the guy wh 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 ce 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 right and some loyal to Chief Coal. And that's not a good thing when you only have ten 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 twenty cops only had ten. And as a result of this, over the previous months there was you know, sort of a spike and 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 and crime for a Mattoon. I don't think it's anything you know, to worry about like today's big cities. Sure, but for Mattoon. It was a spike and 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.
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 A 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, well where are we
supposed to go? And that's how they got police out.
Yeah, it's not the best way to run the police force. And then even worse, the vigilantes from the anti Theft Association. They figured out that if they hung around city Hall and when the cops peeled off, they were going to a call, so that any theft association would tear off after him, ostensibly with bluegrass music playing them on. 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 movie? What a weird way to say that. The states that two investigators one Richard Piper and Francis with an I Barry from the Illinois Bureau of Crime, Identification and Investigation. Yeah, it's a little where it doesn't even spell anything, it spells ye. 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 pink cloth from Bula 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.
Yeah, 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 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're 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 released this as the episode. Okay, so if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back.
By stoff with the jowshhh, stop your sure. Okay, we're back everybody. So, I'm not sure if you remember where we were when we left off and had fifteen minutes of ads. Things are a little out of hand in Mattoon, so again like a movie, a profile of the gaser emerges from one of these state investigators from the from what 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, 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 ten people say you, 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 missed their husbands.
Right, And there actually was a case of that. This is the one woman whose first name we could not find, Missus Fitzpatrick. We're sorry, Missus 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 four hundred 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 his stanza, you're just crawling over little kids, and hey, maybe your husband's full of beans. So that's a good calls 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.
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 had, you know, ran the newspaper and said, you know what, the comps 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 Apartment inspector to come by and they said that was impossible for any carbon tetrichloride 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 Coal was quoted as saying whatever.
Yeah.
So that day, Friday, September eighth, the Journal Gazette finally took off the gloves and wrote an editorial escathing one that just raked Chief Coal across the coals, as it were, that was unintentional. I'm sorry for that, four stars, And it's from the editorial that we found out that the Matoum 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? Never think about that stuff, and I don't care.
No, it's just our secret.
Oh okay, did you do that bark yet?
No?
Okay, we're back everyone.
I think they can do.
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 that what they did was they examined records of like the State Mental hospital to see like if anyone had escaped that might fit the profile and terrorizes the 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 Saint 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 Metoon journal Gazez ran a story.
This is confusing, but bear with me. They ran a story about the story being read about by Mettune residents fighting World War two as far away as Papua and New Guinea, and the soldier fighting in Papua and 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 Coal, but Commissioner write 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 tenth, this thing's been going on for about ten days, roughly, Chief Cole announced that he had an idea, a new policy. If you call in a mad gaser, call, if you called them a tomb 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 happen gased, 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 the stomach contents,
their stomach contents. So either you chose a night in jail or taking the hospital, have a tube jam down your throat and some poor nurse like priming it just to get it going. Come on, yeah, it just goes on like that until it ends badly.
Oh man, oh it happened to it.
Just be projectile vomit right back on. The person with the tube down their throats.
Stop saying the word a.
Circle of life.
Basically, you know, we follow the two maxims of live performance, say moist and vomit in the same vomit no less like thirty minute fear.
You're a little mustard on it all right, so uh, Almost immediately the calls started dropping off because people were like, I know, this sound very fun.
The last recorded attack came on September eleventh, which was a Monday night at the home of one Bertha Bentz, not Beulah, but a Bertha. This was and this one isn't very key as well. This was a 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 slash window screen an impression in the dirt below of a woman's high heel, Yes and.
Not today's sexy high heels. These are nineteen forty four steel toe work high heels, basically old brown shoe factory. They were definitely brown, for sure.
Every high heel needs a steel toe. 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. Man, the tune cups are like, yeah, 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 gazettes 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.
That was it and more bagel follow ups of course. Yeah, So after September fifteenth, only a few other mentions of the whole thing appeared in the paper at all. The most notable was an editorial on September twentieth where nearby Decatur, Illinois. The only way to described this is a bit of a newspaper flame war between these two small towns, a real Springfield Shelbyville type of situation. Sure, yeah, you're gonna I mean me or you you? Okay? Oh wait, it
does say Chuck Colin speak. Now what is that we're doing?
Right?
That's 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. We would get very defensive, obviously, yeah, and say, you know what this article overlooks then 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 hit 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 who's at the town's voice is pretty much clammed up on the matter. And in the end, how many attacks were there, Chuck.
I think there were twenty four different attacks that effected between thirty six to over one hundred if you count when seventy of those three percenters and their pickup trucks said I smell something, So I don't like to count that. So I think about twenty eight 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, a probably eighteen nineteen 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 illusion, 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 a tune like you guys really went crazy, and we think that's hilarious. Basically, so the people who are the victims of the Matt Guesser had learned to just keep quiet about it.
Yeah, so there were a lot of skeptics in town on obviously, including still Chief Coal. The attacks dropped off pretty sharply, and he was quoted as summing up 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 and investigating, I don't even know what that well.
Chief Cole was known for his very cryptic quotes his Sphinx liked.
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 who they are, their level of schooling, and their socioeconomic level, and he's got to have all the like personal data and they 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 Skill 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 skill 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, ah, 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 nineteen forty census, which was the closest one kind of gleaned what he could. But back then they had really broad labels for CENSUSI since I censuses.
Since I I like that, Since I 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 and the yeah you're clapping because I have all my teeth. Earlier in the year, it was like, and this this is sen It was not good.
Your dental word just got a round of a plug.
I know.
That's pretty neat.
I have to tell doctor Presley.
I was like, is that the one who swears?
No? No, no, that wasn't my dentist. That was a listener that wrote in. Yeah, it was great, Denis. But Dennis that drops f bombs while you're in the chair kind of my kind of guy.
That would make me uncomfortable. Really, yeah, it'd be like, do your job. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know that there's children here and I'm sorry.
Oh no, you never hear us? Guy? Are their kids here?
Yes?
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? Uh? Oh man, that threw me. My daughter's nine. She knows that word. Where are we okay? So for income? He based, Oh no, we're talking about the SINSI It was a little vague back in those days. Right, that's where it was.
Yeah, so they had they had labels like a laborer comma, except farm. But the good thing for Donald Johnson was, in my tune, 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 acquaintances of the victims. That's how we
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 Matomb 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 I thought was like pretty smart. He would go to their house and he would look around because it was nineteen forty four for like household conveniences or luxuries at the time, which could really tell you a lot about 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. Little fairy dust, pixie.
Dust, don't forget salt pepper.
He threw a moist pink rag in, massed it all together, and he came up with four not a BC, ABC D. He's a bit of a show off. And he found that all of the victims fell within BC 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 ninety three percent, and most of them were between the
ages of twenty and twenty nine. 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.
That's right, it's not us talking everybody, right, nineteen forty four people. So inian Johnson concluded that it was entirely psychogenic.
That's a quote that was birth from a case of nerves experienced by a link 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, which you know, ninety seven percent of the town is reading this thing. So the German fear spreads.
I forgot where I was with my fingers and 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 you call that thing.
Like getting stomach contents in your face and them projectile vomiting back in a person's stomach. You remember, yeah, that thing.
But he got published, right, he got published.
Everybody, remember this is an eighteen nineteen year old kid who showed up to Talent to document a case of mass illusion, and it was published in the January nineteenth forty five 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 gas or metun became irrevocably a case of massisteria. That's what science said. It was masssterian. 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 story.
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 he's still going pretty good. You guys, We have to take another ad break in cases gets released, so we'll be right back Minneapolis.
Stoffing the jawshon? Should stoff your Okay? So we're going to give both cases. We're going to lay both cases out, the case for massissaria and the case against massteria, meaning that there was an actual mad gasser. And we're going
to start with the case four mass hysteria. And there were a lot of factors present in Matune in September of nineteen forty four, that could help support the idea that this was just a case of massissaria, not the least of a lot of the men in town were off fighting the war, and so the people in town had caused 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 twenty ninth, like right before this happened, newspaper headlines nearby told the story of a Nazipow, like a real Nazpow, not those fake ones that they you know, I don't know why I said that a Nazpow had escaped from prison from an army base where he was being held about one hundred and fifty miles from Mattoon. No one tried to pin it on this, but it just sort of lent itself to the air of paranoida.
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 loops. 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 was the anesthetic prowler being on the loose and all?
Yeah, for sure. This is also a time when people worried about you know, like Saren gas and Mustard gas. It was just a period of our history where gassing was in the air.
You get negative four stars.
Wow, okay, okay, friend.
I love you, but that was terrible. Okay, don't like counts?
No, no, no, don't don't compliment sandwich me great, I love you. Terrible joke. And you also look good tonight.
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 just to be clear. Uh 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 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.
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 into help didn't detect it at all. 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 uh, that's good. Not a lot of physical evidence is happening at this point. It was also a pretty peculiar.
That word it's getting pad everybody.
It was also a peculiar. It was strange, porky big, It was good pequila, piguila, pequilo. Strange that the whole thing ended when the police announced they were gonna start sticking the tube down the throat.
Right, Yeah, either go to jail or be medically assaulted.
Right.
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 fact 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.
So the thing about this is, though, yes, you can make a pretty good case that it was just Massstari's a lot of good, circum substantial 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 Massssaria, the concept, the idea that there actually was a mad gasser man.
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 moistpink 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 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 rack.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything on and things sat around for three days. It's possible it just totally evaporated, for sure, and then cheap Coles 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 have been like a huge widespread loss of faith in
the police. And in fact, there were two hundred and thirty two calls to the police of any kind in September of nineteen forty four, the month that the town of Mettune was supposedly in the grips of a text bookcase of mass hysteria, and that was well below the average of three hundred. 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 pinchonk for covering up crimes, asything like that I did pinch in covering up crimes or you know, kind of 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 batch.
Yeah, and then let's talk about Donald Johns'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 of you today because
it's egregiously fabricating data. And the fact that he concluded the entire event with 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 thirty of them or twenty 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 ten 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 had occurred.
Curious piece of data.
Curious.
So we probably should have said this at the outset, this is an unsolved mystery. We're not going to solve it here tonight. Be sorry for that if you were expecting that.
Sorry.
Sorry. No one knows who the matt Gasser Mettune was. Seriously, but there was a guy is a guy named Scott Marona who was a high school chemistry professor, and he grew up in Charleston, about twelve miles away from Mattoon, and he decided to go to Mattoon a few years back and talked 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.
Amazing to have two thousand people scream colon at you.
Yeah, totally uncoached, unprompted.
Yeah, never felt so much power.
Sorry, go ahead, you were overwhelmed by the colon.
It really was full of beans. Is that three?
Yeah?
Okay?
First, oh yes, please clap as Jeb Bush said. So Maruna doesn't think it was hysteria at all, does he?
No. In fact, Marna names an individual. Oh man, you guys are the best. This is this is probably gonna be the one you guys.
Okay, Oh yeah, it's kind of really right there.
That just pushed it right over the line.
He names an individual, a local man named Farley Llewellen, a trained chemist and the 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 Maroona found from talking to the local that people considered Farley llewell and strange. John Miller, the guy from the Journal Gazette who wrote about all this stuff, he later said that Farley Llewellen 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 in 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 own 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 Christmas if 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.
Come on kidding me, those are my gifts that didn't go over well? Cut that part Adam in the palm in my hand. I know it's ruined. Yeah, I know, I saw what I was here, So we're back everybody. And yeah, they were a belovedge family. Everybody loved these people, so they overlooked their weird son.
Yes, and Scott Marina 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 or become pregnant. Do not take nitromethane if
you're allergic to nitromethane. And it also counts for the sickeningly sweet smell because nitromethane is described as unpleasant comma fruity.
Here's the thing though, with nitro methane is it's known more as an exploding thing than a paralyzing thing. So the leap that Marna 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 loaner in this town. In nineteen forty four, 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 scientists the police were watching was under twenty four hour surveillance and that during that time other mad gaser attacks had happened, which makes it hard for it to and Farley Llewellen. But Scott Marna has an answer for this, that's right.
It is.
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 have you said, 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 that Marina'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, Yeah, and they were not able to verify a lot of the claims. There's 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 stop. And this is problematic for a bunch of reasons, obviously through today's lens, because local saying he was weird and strange. It could have been that he was just 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 have them sent away? And we couldn't even like 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's in a way just because they were gay so.
Or because they kept trying to blow up their neighbors.
Yeah, I'm trying to go to bad a little bit for Farley Llewellen, 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 there's a lot to read on the Mad gas ermatune. 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 on to eBay and buy one of Matchbox Toys Monster in my Pocket series I think four figures. The Mad Gaser a metune which Chuck bought. Do 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 is does not look anything like Farley Leewellen. 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. Sure, but again I don't see Farley Lewellen when I look at.
This, and Matchbox Toy on their evilness scale gave the Mad Gaser an eighty out of one hundred, and Matchbox Toy's evilness scale is at least as legitimate as Donald Johnson's ABC socioeconomic Scale.
That's right.
That is the Mad Gasser of Mad too.
Thank you very much, Thanks everybody, Thanks you.
Thanks due.
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