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Overview and Evidence[]
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon is a term used to refer to an as-of-yet unidentified individual (sometimes hypothesized to be a group of individuals) responsible for a series of attacks that plagued the town of Mattoon, Illinois over the span of two weeks in the late summer and early autumn of 1944. Often concluded to have been a case of mass hysteria, the case of the Mad Gasser has gone down as one of the most bizarre of all such cases in history.
Physical descriptions of the alleged assailant are rare due to the somewhat-indirect nature of their attacks, but those few who claimed to have gotten a look at the perpetrator usually reported a tall man with a lithe frame, although some reports depicted the gasser as a woman. Witnesses never reported an estimated age for the man, making identifying him much more difficult, but he was almost always described as wearing a tight-fitting black suit and a black cap. True to the entity's name, his modus operandi involved spraying some sort of noxious gas into the houses of his victims, often via a flit gun. The gas allegedly sprayed by the man was never identified in terms of its chemical makeup, but its symptoms reportedly included nausea, vomiting, burning sensations in the throat, and oftentimes paralysis or fainting.
Actual physical evidence for the gasser's existence was lacking, to say the least. Evidence consisted almost entirely of personal testimony from those who managed to get a quick glimpse of the gasser as he would flee the scene of the crime. One exception involves a scrap of white cloth the size of a handkerchief sitting on the front porch of Carl and Beulah Cordes, which was found after the attack. Upon smelling the cloth, Beulah experiencing a shocking sensation and facial swelling in addition to the normal vomiting. Alongside the cloth was a skeleton key that appeared to be well-worn.[1]
The general consensus on the issue is that the craze was due to mass hysteria.[2] This opinion is usually divided into two more specific suggestions, one stating that all of the cases were due to hysteria and one stating that the first few were real but the rest were simply the result of paranoia. Some suggested that the gassings were real but that they were instead caused by leakage from a local Atlas-Imperial industrial plant, but this was debunked. Of course, some have gone further and suggested that the gasser was an extraterrestrial or interdimensional being, but such a hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
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