The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
Later explainedSummary
For about two weeks in the late summer of 1944, a small Illinois town believed that a prowler was creeping to its windows at night and spraying a sweet-smelling gas into the bedrooms. Victims reported paralysis of the legs, nausea, and vomiting.
Around thirty reports were made. The state police came. The FBI was contacted. Armed men patrolled the streets.
No gas was ever found. No prowler was ever caught, or clearly seen, or physically evidenced in any way.
And the reports rose and fell precisely in step with the local newspaper, and stopped when the newspaper changed its mind.
What is documented
The first report. On the night of 31 August or 1 September 1944, Aline Kearney reported a sickly-sweet odour in her bedroom and a partial paralysis of her legs.
The newspaper. The Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette reported it prominently, and framed it as the work of an anaesthetic prowler.
The wave. Reports followed. Over roughly two weeks, on the order of twenty-five to thirty households reported the gas. The symptoms were consistent: a sweet or sickly smell, followed by nausea, weakness in the legs, and in some cases vomiting.
The response. Mattoon police investigated. The Illinois State Police were brought in. The FBI was contacted. Residents armed themselves and patrolled.
What was found. Nothing.
No gas. No canister. No sprayer. No chemical residue. No footprints that led anywhere. No coherent description of the prowler. Nothing was recovered from any of the houses, and no substance was ever identified.
The correlation. The number of reports tracked the newspaper's coverage. When the Journal-Gazette gave the story prominence, reports rose. When the paper's framing shifted, and it began to describe the affair as mass hysteria, the reports stopped.
They did not taper. They stopped.
The study. Donald M. Johnson published a field study of the episode in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1945, while the events were still fresh and the participants still available. It remains the primary analysis.
Leading explanations
Mass psychogenic illness, propagated by the newspaper. Established.
Johnson's finding is that the reports followed the coverage, and the symptoms reported are consistent with acute anxiety: nausea, weakness, a sensation of paralysis, and a heightened awareness of ordinary smells.
Mattoon in 1944 was a town under strain. It was the third year of the war. The men were away. The town was full of women alone in houses at night, and the newspaper had told them, in detail, that somebody was coming to their windows.
Industrial emissions. Mattoon had a diesel engine plant, and it has been suggested that a chemical release could account for some of the symptoms. It has never been established, no substance was ever identified, and it does not explain why the reports began with a newspaper story and ended with a newspaper story.
A real perpetrator. Advanced most fully by Scott Maruna in 2003, who argued for a specific individual, a locally resident chemistry student.
It is a minority view. It rests on no physical evidence, no confession, and no contemporaneous identification, and it has to explain the correlation with the press coverage, and does not.
What the popular version gets wrong
"There was a real gasser and the police covered it up." Two police forces and the FBI examined the town and found no substance, no equipment and no suspect. If there was a gasser, he left nothing anywhere, in thirty houses, over two weeks, while an armed and vigilant population was actively hunting him.
"The victims were lying." They were not. They reported nausea, weakness and a smell, and there is no reason to doubt that they experienced all three. Anxiety produces exactly those symptoms, and it produces them in people who are genuinely and reasonably frightened.
"Mass hysteria is a way of dismissing women." It is worth taking this seriously, because it is often true and it was said at the time. The registry's answer is that Johnson's finding does not rest on the credibility of the witnesses at all. It rests on the timing.
The reports began when the paper printed the story and stopped when the paper retracted the frame. No gas behaves like that. No prowler behaves like that. A newspaper does.
"It was never explained." It was explained in 1945, in a peer-reviewed journal, by a researcher who went to Mattoon and interviewed the people involved while they still remembered.
Current status
Later explained. The mechanism is documented, the study was contemporaneous, and the correlation with the press is the decisive evidence.
The registry files this record with AR-0092 and AR-0094, and the three make the archive's most uncomfortable point.
In Mattoon the newspaper created a prowler. In Seattle the newspaper created an epidemic of damage that had always been there. And in the case of The War of the Worlds, the newspapers created a panic that never happened at all, and then reported on it for eighty years.
In every one of them, the mechanism of transmission was the press, and in every one of them the press was reporting in good faith on something it had not checked.
Sources
- Johnson, D. M. (1945). "The 'Phantom Anesthetist' of Mattoon: A Field Study of Mass Hysteria." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 40(2), 175-186.
- Mattoon Police Department and Illinois State Police records, September 1944.
- Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette, coverage from 1 September 1944 onward.
- Bartholomew, R. E. and Victor, J. S., subsequent scholarship on the episode.
- Maruna, S. (2003). Argument for a specific perpetrator; a minority position.
Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.