What happened
Mattoon is a railroad and manufacturing town in east-central Illinois. On the night of August 31 a resident named Urban Raef woke feeling ill and asked his wife whether she had left the gas stove on; she found she could barely move. The couple did not report it at the time. Around midnight on September 1, Aline Kearney, home with her young daughter while her husband was out at work, noticed a sickly sweet smell drifting through the bedroom window and then lost feeling in her legs. When Bert Kearney came home in the small hours he saw a tall man in dark clothes standing by the window, who ran off before he could be caught.
The Daily Journal-Gazette put the Kearney story on its front page under the headline ‘Anesthetic Prowler on Loose,’ and reports multiplied. Over the following twelve nights more than two dozen households told police of a strange odor followed by nausea, vomiting, dizziness, dry mouth or temporary weakness in the legs, and several people described a fleeing figure. On September 5 Carl and Beulah Cordes found a white cloth on their porch; when Mrs. Cordes sniffed it she became sick within minutes. The cloth was sent for analysis and nothing was found on it that could have caused her symptoms. Headlines escalated from ‘Mad Anesthetist Strikes Again’ on September 7 to ‘Mad Gasser Adds Six Victims’ on September 9. Armed men patrolled the streets, and the police warned them to go home.
The investigation
The Mattoon police were joined by Illinois state investigators and, as the story spread nationally, by the FBI. No gas canister, spray device, chemical residue or credible suspect was ever found, and no victim suffered lasting harm. On September 12 Police Chief C. E. Cole announced that the calls were a mistake: he suggested that shifting night winds had carried fumes from the town’s war-production plants through open windows, and that the rest was imagination. City commissioner Thomas V. Wright allowed that there might have been one real prankster but said most of the reports were hysteria. The paper’s own tone turned on September 10 with ‘Many Prowler Reports; Few Real,’ and by September 13 the headline read ‘Gas Calls at Vanishing Point.’ The episode ended as abruptly as it had begun.
In 1945 Donald M. Johnson, then an undergraduate, published a field study of the case in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He interviewed victims, examined the police log and the newspaper coverage, and concluded that the hypothesis of hysteria fit the evidence without remainder: the reports came disproportionately from women, the symptoms matched anxiety rather than any known toxic gas, and the rise and fall of reports tracked the rise and fall of press attention. The paper became a standard citation in the study of mass psychogenic illness.
The explanations
The mass-hysteria explanation has held up as the account of the wave as a whole, and it was refined in 2004 by Robert Bartholomew and Jeffrey Victor, who treated Mattoon as a collective anxiety attack in a town full of wartime fear about chemical weapons and sabotage. It has also been criticized. In 1994 Willy Smith argued in Skeptic that Johnson had too easily dismissed the earliest cases, which were reported before anyone had read about a gasser, and that the pattern of a sudden end under police pressure fits a flesh-and-blood prankster as well as it fits fear. Later writers have put forward named local suspects, but nothing documentary supports any of them.
Mattoon was not the first town to be visited. On the night of December 22, 1933, the family of Cal Huffman in Botetourt County, Virginia, was sickened three times by fumes that filled their house; a daughter collapsed and had to be revived by a doctor, and a woman’s shoe print was found beneath a window. Over the next seven weeks dozens of households across the county and in nearby Roanoke reported the same thing. Men stood guard with shotguns, the county offered a $500 reward, the state legislature rushed through a bill against releasing noxious gas, and the Roanoke Times ran daily updates. A sweet-smelling liquid found in the snow was analyzed as a harmless insecticide, several scares were traced to coal stoves and car exhaust, and by February the newspaper was running an editorial titled ‘Roanoke Has No Gasser.’ Reports stopped after February 11, 1934, and no one was arrested. The parallels, including an unidentified odor, fleeing figures and an ending without an arrest, are why the two cases are usually studied together.
Where it stands
The surviving evidence consists of police records, the Journal-Gazette’s day-by-day coverage, Johnson’s interviews and one cloth that tested clean. That is enough to say the sickness and the fear were genuine and that no gas was ever identified, and not enough to say whether anybody was actually prowling the yards of Mattoon in the first week of September 1944. The case is best described as a documented outbreak of contagious fear that may have been sparked by a real intruder who was never found.