Airing Out the Mystery of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon
06.12.2023 - 23:13
/ atlasobscura.com
It began on September 1, 1944, in the sleepy community of Mattoon, Illinois, at the home of Aline Kearney and her three-year-old daughter, Dorothy Ellen. Her husband was away, serving in the Navy, and Aline’s sister Martha was staying with her. That evening, Aline noticed a “sickening, sweet odor,” though Martha didn’t report smelling anything unusual. Abruptly, Aline’s legs seemed to become paralyzed, and she felt a tightness and a dryness in her throat.
Alarmed, Martha called her husband Burt; when he arrived, he saw a man outside, lurking near a bedroom window. He was tall, wearing dark clothes and a tight-fitting cap. Burt gave chase but was unable to catch him. Aline Kearney’s paralysis, meanwhile, resolved itself within 30 minutes. But this was only the beginning.
The next day, the town’s Daily Journal-Gazette published an article: “Anesthetic Prowler on Loose,” which detailed the Kearney household’s story. Soon other stories began to emerge. Orbon Raef and his wife came forward and reported that the night before the Kearney attack, they’d both been asleep when they were awoken by a strange smell in their bedroom, after which they were paralyzed for almost 90 minutes.
Another woman, Olive Brown, claimed to have been attacked months earlier, with similar symptoms. The wife of George Rider reported an attack the same night as the Kearney incident: She had been up, drinking “several pots of coffee,” when she heard a noise like a “plop,” followed by a strange smell that made her hands and legs tingle and left her feeling dizzy, like she was floating. Another person, unnamed, reported a sickening, sweet smell that caused her children to vomit.
Things grew stranger. A few days later, on September 5, a woman named Beulah Cordes found a small cloth on her front porch. Realizing it was still damp, she picked it up and sniffed it. The smell overwhelmed her—she staggered a few steps, and then screamed. “It was a feeling of paralysis,” she reported, describing it like an electric shock. She was sick for the next two hours, but when the cloth was subjected to chemical analysis, no chemical traces were found. A local fortune teller named Edna James smelled a strange odor in the boarding house she ran and went to investigate; she would later claim to have encountered an “ape-like man with long arms reaching out, holding a spray gun,” who doused her three clouds of gas that caused her arms and legs to go numb.
As the panic in Mattoon continued to grow, the Army brought in chemical weapon experts. The best hypothesis they had was that the chemical agent might have been chloropicrin, a poisonous gas with a sweet odor used for exterminating rodents. But no traces of this gas were ever found, and the reported