Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 2: Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant. Jerry's not here, but all
Speaker 2: of these lovely people are here at the State Theater
Speaker 2: in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Wow. Him.
Speaker 2: Not bad for a Thursday, Not bad at all. Thank
Speaker 2: you guys for that feeling good. We'll edit that part out,
Speaker 2: so tonight we're going to talk to you guys about
Speaker 2: a little town you may or may not have heard of.
Speaker 2: It's called Mattoon, Illinois. Has anyone ever heard of Mettun
Speaker 2: a few of you? Is anyone from.
Speaker 1: Mattoon any tunes out there? Really?
Speaker 2: Okay, we'll try not to be mad at us because
Speaker 2: the show starts like this. Mattoon is in a kind
Speaker 2: of a triangle between Chicago to the north, Saint Louis
Speaker 2: to the south, Indianapolis to whatever's over here, and it's
Speaker 2: just far enough away from all of them to not
Speaker 2: really get any of their reflective interestingness. Right, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: but there are two things that Mattoon lays claim to. One,
Speaker 2: it calls itself the Begel Capital of the World because
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty five, Lenders Begels opened a factory there.
Speaker 2: That is it.
Speaker 1: New York has no problem with this. Montreal has no
Speaker 1: problem with it.
Speaker 2: Number two, Mattoon is world renowned for having been terrorized
Speaker 2: by a mad gasser who went from house to house,
Speaker 2: spraying residents with a noxious paralytic gas while they were
Speaker 2: tucked safely away in their homes. Yeah right, Either that
Speaker 2: or the town of Mattun went through one of the
Speaker 2: best documented cases of mass delusion that has ever happened.
Speaker 2: And the world's actually divided on what went down in
Speaker 2: Mettune in nineteen forty four, and we're going to dive
Speaker 2: into that here tonight.
Speaker 1: What it wouldn't be funny After reaction, they're like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, amazing. If you're like, so this is about
Speaker 1: Linderspagels and sponsored.
Speaker 2: We'd like to thank Lenders.
Speaker 1: You should google that other super interesting story though.
Speaker 2: Chucks full of beans tonight.
Speaker 1: Everybody bullow what beans it means?
Speaker 2: You're like, I'm full of it?
Speaker 1: Where I come from, I've never heard that. I thought
Speaker 1: that means we're party. No, I don't full of beans
Speaker 1: the musical fruit.
Speaker 2: All of these kay.
Speaker 1: I can tell No, of course not well, nevermind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, keep moving on.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take you back in time and hop
Speaker 1: in the way back machine and go back to nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four when it took place. Ok, wow, wayback machine.
Speaker 1: This is the wayback machine. By the way, it's it's
Speaker 1: in the mind. So we're all there together. I suddenly
Speaker 1: just sound like a cult leader. So Matune in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four was a pretty small town of about sixteen thousand.
Speaker 1: I think it's still a pretty small town if I'm
Speaker 1: not mistaken. And it's populated back then with people with
Speaker 1: some great names. So you're gonna hear some nineteen forty
Speaker 1: four names tonight, like Bertha and Elmer and.
Speaker 2: Hebrew Hebrew's my favorite, and Beulah.
Speaker 1: And Urban, like great nineteen forties names that you just
Speaker 1: don't hear anymore unless you are like a super hipster
Speaker 1: and you name your kid Beulah. Yeah that's my great grandmother,
Speaker 1: I promise. It was surrounded by fields corn and soybean,
Speaker 1: so a lot of farming went on there. They did
Speaker 1: have a couple of railroad junctions that still went through
Speaker 1: the town, which was good because that also provided work.
Speaker 1: And then there were a few factories we looked up
Speaker 1: to see what was interesting, and there was a shoe company,
Speaker 1: the Brown Shoe Company there, which seemed pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we couldn't get to the bottom of whether it
Speaker 2: was named after the owner or they just made brown shoes.
Speaker 1: When I was nineteen forty four, I bet it was both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit from column May, a little bit
Speaker 2: from columb But long way of saying, if you lived
Speaker 2: in Mattoon, you probably were a farmer.
Speaker 1: You may have worked on the railroad although livelong day,
Speaker 1: or you might have worked at one of those factories.
Speaker 1: It's what they call the pre bagel era.
Speaker 2: That's right. There's one other thing you need to know
Speaker 2: about Mattoon in nineteen forty four. A significant portion of
Speaker 2: its young men had left town and were off fighting
Speaker 2: the World War two at the time, so it was
Speaker 2: an anxious place to be back then. And this whole
Speaker 2: thing that we're going to talk about tonight, the mad
Speaker 2: Gasser of Mettune. It all started, depending on how you
Speaker 2: look at it, on the night of Friday, September first,
Speaker 2: at the home of mister and missus Burt Kearney. And
Speaker 2: that is how they described women back then. They didn't
Speaker 2: use their first names. Because what else do you need
Speaker 2: to know? She's married to Burt. She took his last name.
Speaker 2: Who cares about anything else? Well, we care, So we
Speaker 2: went to great links to find the first names of
Speaker 2: the women who were attacked. I'm a bit of a
Speaker 2: thank you. Chuck has more stamina than me. I'm a
Speaker 2: bit of a quitter. So I gave up with like
Speaker 2: three or four, laughed, and he's like, no, and we
Speaker 2: got it down to one. There's only one woman whose
Speaker 2: first name. We couldn't find this whole thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't find it. I've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time on ancestry dot com and find a grave dot
Speaker 1: com because sometimes literally the only way you could find
Speaker 1: out a woman's name is by standing over her grave
Speaker 1: and looking at her gravestone, which is very sad. But
Speaker 1: we got almost everyone. Yeah, so what was her name?
Speaker 2: Her name was Aileen missus Kearny's first name was Aileen,
Speaker 2: and at the time, her sister, Martha Reedy was staying
Speaker 2: with her because Martha's husband was off fighting in World
Speaker 2: War two overseas, and so that's why they let Martha
Speaker 2: use her first name temporarily.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, he was.
Speaker 1: Very generous. So about eleven PM. In this house, Aileen
Speaker 1: retired to bed with her toddler daughter Dorothy at eleven PM.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine this because Dorothy had just gotten
Speaker 1: home from working at the factory that day, and Aileen
Speaker 1: noticed a strange smell in the house, like a really
Speaker 1: sickeningly sweet guardinia kind of smell. They got stronger and stronger,
Speaker 1: and as the smell grew stronger, she noticed that she
Speaker 1: was losing I'm laughing, it's not funny, losing power over
Speaker 1: her legs and arms, like it was paralyzing her. Her
Speaker 1: mouth and throat got really dry and were burning. Little
Speaker 1: Dorothy became ill. Don't worry, she would be okay, and
Speaker 1: she called out for her sister because she was rightfully scared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, her sister and in the room and was like,
Speaker 2: what the hell is that? Smelling through the window open
Speaker 2: and ran next door to Earl Robertson's house. No trouble
Speaker 2: finding his name, right, He was the next door neighbor,
Speaker 2: and he ran over to see what was going on.
Speaker 2: And he went and searched the yard to see if
Speaker 2: he could find anything, and he found absolutely nothing. They
Speaker 2: called the cops. The cops came out. They searched and
Speaker 2: they didn't find anything either, And everything's kind of settled
Speaker 2: down for about an hour after that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Alien's husband, the aforementioned Bert, is a cab driver.
Speaker 1: Was a cab driver, and he was driving around in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four. When you're a cab driver, there's no
Speaker 1: way to get in touch with anyone unless you stand
Speaker 1: on the corner and pretend like you need a ride.
Speaker 1: No radios in the car or anything like that. And
Speaker 1: they finally got in touch with Bert about an hour
Speaker 1: and a half later. He rushes home at twelve thirty am,
Speaker 1: and this is very key. When he pulls in an
Speaker 1: hour and a half later, after the cops have gone,
Speaker 1: he sees a tall, shadowy figure, tall, thin, athletic build
Speaker 1: in the backyard, wearing what was described as a watch cap.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what that was, but it's just like
Speaker 1: a toboggan, like a beanie. I don't know which regionally
Speaker 1: you call it here? What do you call it here? Beanie? Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll go with Beanie. I didn't know if you were
Speaker 1: close enough to Canada to call it a tuke. Are
Speaker 1: you close to Canada? Where are we? I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: woke up from a nap and came straight here.
Speaker 2: So did you really?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I woke up and I was here thirteen
Speaker 1: minutes later. Wow with a shower.
Speaker 2: That's impressive and a tooth brush. Did you take a
Speaker 2: shower on the way?
Speaker 1: I did. You just got to select uber shower.
Speaker 2: You don't share those though, right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they'd be fun. So he saw this figure, He
Speaker 1: chased this prowler. The prowler runs away, gets away. They
Speaker 1: call the cops, back out, the cops come back out.
Speaker 1: Of course, there's nothing there still, And that was about it.
Speaker 1: About ninety minutes after onset, Aileen was able to move
Speaker 1: her arms and legs. Little Dorothy was feeling fine. The
Speaker 1: next morning, went off to the factory to work and
Speaker 1: everything was okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that was the end of that. But the
Speaker 2: story continues. The next day, a guy from the local paper,
Speaker 2: the Mattoon Journal Gazette. His name was John Miller. He
Speaker 2: was one of their writers, He was an editor. He
Speaker 2: kind of did it all. He found out about this
Speaker 2: story and he investigated it, and that night's paper, Saturday's
Speaker 2: paper had a huge headline across the front page, took
Speaker 2: up six of the eight columns on page one anesthetic
Speaker 2: prowler on the loose.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The other two headlines we like to do our research.
Speaker 1: We went on the micropiche big headline there, Bagel's Breakfast
Speaker 1: to the Future. They were trying to build up some buds, sure,
Speaker 1: forty years earlier.
Speaker 2: So there was a sub sub headline too, missus Kearney
Speaker 2: and daughter first victims. And so keep in mind, this
Speaker 2: one incident happened. This is the lone incident as far
Speaker 2: as anyone knew, nothing else had happened. And yet they
Speaker 2: were described as the first victims of the anesthetic prowler
Speaker 2: that's now clearly on the loose. This is what the
Speaker 2: paper said to everybody the day after the attack.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think even speculated about what it might be.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of speculation early on, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So you have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: the Matune Journal gazette was received by ninety seven percent
Speaker 1: of the town, which I thought was hysterical because even
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty four there were the three centers who
Speaker 1: was like mainstream media, no better not throw that paper
Speaker 1: on my front porch. But it was a little paper.
Speaker 1: It was almost like a church bulletin. It was very sweet.
Speaker 1: It was about six or eight pages long. Typically it
Speaker 1: did not publish on Sundays. Well, I guess it's not
Speaker 1: like a church bulletin or holidays, and this was Labor
Speaker 1: Day weekend, so the story runs on Saturday, Sunday followed,
Speaker 1: and then Labor Day Monday followed. So the story is
Speaker 1: lobbed out there about this mad gasser. First victims, and
Speaker 1: people are just sitting around waiting for news to roll
Speaker 1: in for two.
Speaker 2: Days, right, And then they weren't just sitting around though.
Speaker 2: Some people came forward. They'd read the story and were like,
Speaker 2: this happened to me too. There was one woman named
Speaker 2: missus Olive Brown who had suffered an attack a few
Speaker 2: months before, and the local softball commissioner too, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 1: This guy's name is Urban Raife what in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: four name? That is? He and his wife Pauline we
Speaker 1: got her name, said that they experienced the same thing
Speaker 1: just one night before Aileen and little Dorothy. And I
Speaker 1: guess Urban thought it might be a gas leak. So
Speaker 1: even though he was literally paralyzed, he somehow asked his wife,
Speaker 1: woke her up and asked her if she had left
Speaker 1: the gas on. I'm not sure how that happened. She
Speaker 1: had not right, so they noticed the smell. After about
Speaker 1: ninety minutes, it wore off and they chopped it up
Speaker 1: to eating bad hot dogs.
Speaker 2: They were paralyzed for ninety minutes, and they just chalked
Speaker 2: it up.
Speaker 1: To the hot dogs, you know that, saying, Yodo Twins game,
Speaker 1: have a hot dog from like the fifth inning on.
Speaker 1: You can't move.
Speaker 2: They're like, I can't do the seventh inning stretch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they thought it was that. We've all been there.
Speaker 2: So there's another family. All these people are coming forward
Speaker 2: now from the Saturday's article, the family of Patrice Ryder
Speaker 2: and her kids. They were also ill. They were struck ill.
Speaker 2: She became kind of lightheaded. She found her kids vomiting,
Speaker 2: and Shirley said, oh, it must be the hot dogs.
Speaker 1: Tuesday was also the day we got our first physical evidence.
Speaker 1: There was one Beula Cordis, who came home on that
Speaker 1: night and found a piece of pink cloth that was
Speaker 1: not hers on her front porch, and she picked it up.
Speaker 1: She noticed it was moist, and she did what you do.
Speaker 1: She put it in her face and inhaled deeply. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what happened to her.
Speaker 2: She described as like coming into contact with a strong
Speaker 2: electrical current. By the way, she immediately regretted, huffing, this
Speaker 2: is a strange pink rag. Yeah, she said. Her knees
Speaker 2: went wildly, and then it gets worse. Her lips cracked,
Speaker 2: her mouth went dry, they started to bleed. She began
Speaker 2: bleeding from her mouth, and again she regretted, huffing that
Speaker 2: pinkregg basically right off the bat for sure.
Speaker 1: The same night, about an hour later, there was a
Speaker 1: woman named Marjorie Burrell. She was stricken, but and this
Speaker 1: is also key, in the same house her eighteen month
Speaker 1: old son, fresh known from the factory, completely unaffected.
Speaker 2: Right, So now it's clear there's something weird going on.
Speaker 2: This wasn't just one incident. People are coming forward and
Speaker 2: now they're also finding physical evidence of stuff. Right. So
Speaker 2: the next night, it was Wednesday, September fifth, and there
Speaker 2: were four more attacks, One on Laura Jenkin, the owner
Speaker 2: of the Big Four restaurant. From what we can tell,
Speaker 2: she was unaffiliated with any man. There was another one
Speaker 2: about an hour later on missus Viola Spangler, and then
Speaker 2: about an hour after that, eleven year old Glenda Hendershot
Speaker 2: was attacked and she was the daughter of a mister Hendershot.
Speaker 1: Right factory manager by the.
Speaker 2: Way, she was the little girl.
Speaker 1: Yeah, eleven.
Speaker 2: Almost cigars.
Speaker 1: I don't think we mentioned too that the cops took
Speaker 1: hold obviously took the evidence into hand at pink cloth,
Speaker 1: and I guess it managed to avoid the urge to
Speaker 1: breathe deeply into it because it's it's moist. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what you do. Let me see what that is. I mean,
Speaker 1: at the worst, it's a cat urine.
Speaker 2: That would be pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It'd be terrible, a snoop.
Speaker 2: Full of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, a sixty year old man named Fred Goebel
Speaker 1: was stricken about an hour after that. And this is
Speaker 1: also key because this was the second spotting of an individual,
Speaker 1: another tall, thin prowler fleeing the scene.
Speaker 2: And we did the math. Fred Goebels was sixty and
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, which would make him roughly eight hundred
Speaker 2: years old today.
Speaker 1: The Josh math. I love it.
Speaker 2: It works out sometimes.
Speaker 1: All right. So by Thursday night in Mattoon, Illinois, it
Speaker 1: is on like Donkey Kong, even though that wasn't a thing,
Speaker 1: and the town were pretty scared. People were you know, rightfully.
Speaker 1: So they were locking their doors, they were locking their windows,
Speaker 1: which is not something you really did back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the town paper wasn't helping things either. On
Speaker 2: Thursday's paper, there was another headline, another six columns of
Speaker 2: eight columns, Mad and Nestetist strikes again with an exclamation
Speaker 2: point this time. So there is pulling out all the stops.
Speaker 1: That's right, if you're curious. The other headline bagels colon
Speaker 1: like an unsweetened donut. So another thing started happening on Thursday,
Speaker 1: which is these gentlemen and their sons in the town,
Speaker 1: the Anti Theft Association, got their guns, got some makeshift weapons.
Speaker 1: These are those three percent. I think I need to
Speaker 1: point that out. They start roaming the town like you know,
Speaker 1: the vigilantes, like there were quasi deputy. I think they
Speaker 1: were supposed to, you know, like the cops would get
Speaker 1: help from them for cattle wrestling and like chicken thieving
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. But they knew this was a
Speaker 1: big deal, so they grabbed their guns and gut in
Speaker 1: their trucks and did their thing.
Speaker 2: Yes, so after only a couple of newspaper reports the
Speaker 2: course of a few days, the town of Mattoon is
Speaker 2: really high strung. The police commissioner, the guy in charge
Speaker 2: of all of the police for Mettun, was quoted in
Speaker 2: the paper as saying that he wouldn't walk across his
Speaker 2: own backyard at night for ten thousand dollars. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: the guy in charge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, as we do. We did our financial
Speaker 1: conversion because we love those. You knew it would feature
Speaker 1: a financial money conversion, so we went to our TRUSTe
Speaker 1: west Egg calculator and that would be one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy six, three hundred and six dollars per day. So
Speaker 1: he's not helping matters that would walk through any backyards
Speaker 1: for that kind of day, for sure.
Speaker 2: So they also issued a PSA to citizen which said, hey,
Speaker 2: if you're going to shoot somebody looking through your window,
Speaker 2: take care because there's these vigilantes out wandering around looking
Speaker 2: through your window. So we don't want you guys shooting
Speaker 2: one another.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, good. So this was sort of a busy
Speaker 1: time for the cops obviously, right, because they didn't usually
Speaker 1: get calls like this, right.
Speaker 2: No, and they weren't set up for crime. The Mattsom
Speaker 2: Police Department wasn't certainly not for a spiking crime. So
Speaker 2: politically the police force was in disarray. You had Thomas Wright,
Speaker 2: the guy wh wouldn't walk through his own backyard, the
Speaker 2: police commissioner. Ostensibly he's in charge, he's calling the shots.
Speaker 2: But they also had a police chief. His name was
Speaker 2: ce Cole, and he seems to have been totally comfortable
Speaker 2: undermining Thomas Wright's authority at every turn. And to make
Speaker 2: matters worse, the police force was split down the middle,
Speaker 2: with some loyal to Thomas right and some loyal to
Speaker 2: Chief Coal. And that's not a good thing when you
Speaker 2: only have ten people on your police force.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was about half of what they should
Speaker 1: have had. They were understaffed. They should have had around
Speaker 1: twenty cops only had ten. And as a result of this,
Speaker 1: over the previous months there was you know, sort of
Speaker 1: a spike and crime that didn't have anything to do
Speaker 1: with this, like robberies and stuff like that. There were
Speaker 1: army checks rolling in. A lot of the young men
Speaker 1: were off fighting. Like we said, everyone knew that. So
Speaker 1: there was a spike and crime for a Mattoon. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's anything you know, to worry about like
Speaker 1: today's big cities. Sure, but for Mattoon. It was a
Speaker 1: spike and crime right.
Speaker 2: So the understaffed, resource strapped Mattoon police department took to
Speaker 2: ignoring and covering up crimes that it didn't have the
Speaker 2: resources to investigate.
Speaker 1: That's right. The cops are hard at work. They're freaking
Speaker 1: out a little bit. They started working, you know, double
Speaker 1: shifts because they were down half of what they should
Speaker 1: have been. Like we said, they also didn't have two
Speaker 1: A radios in the car. Yet they did exist, but
Speaker 1: they couldn't afford that kind of thing in such a
Speaker 1: small department. So when calls came in, they came into
Speaker 1: city Hall and there had to be a cop there
Speaker 1: with a car that said, well, well where are we
Speaker 1: supposed to go? And that's how they got police out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not the best way to run the police force.
Speaker 2: And then even worse, the vigilantes from the anti Theft Association.
Speaker 2: They figured out that if they hung around city Hall
Speaker 2: and when the cops peeled off, they were going to
Speaker 2: a call, so that any theft association would tear off
Speaker 2: after him, ostensibly with bluegrass music playing them on. And
Speaker 2: eventually the police department was like, we're going to arrest
Speaker 2: you if you keep following us to calls to shoot
Speaker 2: whoever's there.
Speaker 1: So things are getting a little crazy, just like a
Speaker 1: movie would happen, or I guess what would happen to movie?
Speaker 1: What a weird way to say that. The states that
Speaker 1: two investigators one Richard Piper and Francis with an I
Speaker 1: Barry from the Illinois Bureau of Crime, Identification and Investigation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little where it doesn't even spell anything, it
Speaker 1: spells ye. So yeah, good point. So they arrived on Thursday,
Speaker 1: and that was when these vigilantes had kind of hit
Speaker 1: the streets. Things are getting a little crazy. They take
Speaker 1: possession of that pink cloth from Bula Cordis again managing.
Speaker 1: I think it probably was harmless by this point, but
Speaker 1: they didn't press it into their face, thankfully, because they're
Speaker 1: real pros. And then the FBI also showed up, supposedly
Speaker 1: just to observe, but there were a couple of Feds there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so Mattoon's small police force ended up being
Speaker 2: supplemented eventually with some state patrol officers. The police force
Speaker 2: ended up being doubled, and even better, the state patrol
Speaker 2: officers brought two way radios with them, which the police department.
Speaker 1: Was very happy about Can you imagine what that was like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so now they didn't have to just hang around
Speaker 2: city Hall all the time, and they could coordinate out
Speaker 2: in the field. It was like a whole new day.
Speaker 1: Basically, They're like, we're like real cops now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I feel like this is going pretty well.
Speaker 2: You guys too, Yeah, okay, okay, Well then that means
Speaker 2: we have to put a message break in right about
Speaker 2: here in case we released this as the episode. Okay,
Speaker 2: so if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: By stoff with the jowshhh, stop your sure. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: back everybody. So, I'm not sure if you remember where
Speaker 1: we were when we left off and had fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: of ads. Things are a little out of hand in Mattoon,
Speaker 1: so again like a movie, a profile of the gaser
Speaker 1: emerges from one of these state investigators from the from
Speaker 1: what that suggested that he, of course it wasn't a
Speaker 1: woman doing this, He was mentally imbalanced, intelligent, possibly brilliant,
Speaker 1: and then said the man is a nut got decidedly
Speaker 1: less forensic. I guess at that point.
Speaker 2: I could see somebody reading the paper and being like, yeah,
Speaker 2: sounds about right. So they also figured that the mad
Speaker 2: gasser was probably a well trained chemist. They assumed that
Speaker 2: either he was creating known paralyzing or noxious chemicals like
Speaker 2: chloroform or chloropicrin, which is also known as vomit gas,
Speaker 2: or he had created his own paralytic agent that he
Speaker 2: had designed himself.
Speaker 1: I heard ten people say you, yeah, that's correct. So
Speaker 1: in general, though, like, despite all this going on, the
Speaker 1: cops didn't seem like super super concerned about the crimes.
Speaker 1: I think they were worried about the perception of them.
Speaker 1: But Chief Cole said it was basically a case of nerves.
Speaker 1: So he's the first one to kind of plant that
Speaker 1: seed that it might just be a bunch of hysterical
Speaker 1: women in town who missed their husbands.
Speaker 2: Right, And there actually was a case of that. This
Speaker 2: is the one woman whose first name we could not find,
Speaker 2: Missus Fitzpatrick. We're sorry, Missus Fitzpatrick. And she was at
Speaker 2: one of the movie theaters watching a movie when she
Speaker 2: smelled something and shouted that she'd been gassed and caused
Speaker 2: a stampede of the other four hundred people out of
Speaker 2: the movie theater. So she was taken to the hospital
Speaker 2: and examined, and she was found not to have been gassed,
Speaker 2: and she was sedated forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you imagine being in a theater I've.
Speaker 2: Been gassed, you pull a his stanza, you're just crawling
Speaker 2: over little kids, and hey, maybe your husband's full of beans.
Speaker 2: So that's a good calls three stars. I give it seven?
Speaker 1: How many stars? Oh wow? Okay, never mind, I don't
Speaker 1: want to know what you think.
Speaker 2: Seven stars.
Speaker 1: I'll take it. The police chief, also, Chief Cole, tried
Speaker 1: to pin it on carbon tetrachloride fumes from the local
Speaker 1: Imperial I'm sorry, the Atlas Imperial diesel engine company. They
Speaker 1: were not too fond of this theory, obviously as a company,
Speaker 1: and so they had a press conference, well press conference
Speaker 1: they talked to like the one person that had, you know,
Speaker 1: ran the newspaper and said, you know what, the comps
Speaker 1: didn't even bother to come by here and check on anything.
Speaker 1: And you look around, all these kids working here are
Speaker 1: just fine. Nobody is bleeding from the mouth today and
Speaker 1: everything's good. And not only that, but we hired a
Speaker 1: PhD Health Apartment inspector to come by and they said
Speaker 1: that was impossible for any carbon tetrichloride vapors to escape
Speaker 1: the plant in any amount of concentration that would even
Speaker 1: closely approximate a toxic condition, and everybody in the town
Speaker 1: went defensive much.
Speaker 2: And Chief Coal was quoted as saying whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that day, Friday, September eighth, the Journal Gazette finally
Speaker 2: took off the gloves and wrote an editorial escathing one
Speaker 2: that just raked Chief Coal across the coals, as it were,
Speaker 2: that was unintentional. I'm sorry for that, four stars, And
Speaker 2: it's from the editorial that we found out that the
Speaker 2: Matoum Police Department liked to cover up crimes that it
Speaker 2: couldn't investigate. So they definitely put it on the chief
Speaker 2: for not taking this seriously. From the outset.
Speaker 1: If this gets released as a live episode, we don't
Speaker 1: release the opening bit. That's only for y'all. Is everyone
Speaker 1: going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about with
Speaker 1: these stars? Never think about that stuff, and I don't care.
Speaker 2: No, it's just our secret.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, did you do that bark yet?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back everyone.
Speaker 2: I think they can do.
Speaker 1: So. The cops weren't completely blowing this off, obviously, they
Speaker 1: had an obligation. They did look into about thirty people
Speaker 1: by the end of the case total, and that what
Speaker 1: they did was they examined records of like the State
Speaker 1: Mental hospital to see like if anyone had escaped that
Speaker 1: might fit the profile and terrorizes the town with a
Speaker 1: paralytic noxious gas.
Speaker 2: Turned out no, nothing, and word began to spread about this.
Speaker 2: So first it started being published in the Chicago papers,
Speaker 2: the Saint Louis papers, and then it literally started to
Speaker 2: spread around the world, and the press just descended on
Speaker 2: the town, and the story actually made its way around
Speaker 2: the world, and the Metoon journal Gazez ran a story.
Speaker 2: This is confusing, but bear with me. They ran a
Speaker 2: story about the story being read about by Mettune residents
Speaker 2: fighting World War two as far away as Papua and
Speaker 2: New Guinea, and the soldier fighting in Papua and New
Speaker 2: Guinea was quoted as saying, what the heck and heck
Speaker 2: is going on back there?
Speaker 1: So at one point one of the Chicago papers printed
Speaker 1: an off record statement by Chief I'm sorry, not Chief Coal,
Speaker 1: but Commissioner write that said that they had zeroed in
Speaker 1: on a suspect, a mad scientist, and they quickly denied
Speaker 1: this and said no, no, no, we're looking for four people actually,
Speaker 1: two home chemists and two crackpots.
Speaker 2: That's a quote. It is a quote. So on Sunday,
Speaker 2: September tenth, this thing's been going on for about ten days, roughly,
Speaker 2: Chief Cole announced that he had an idea, a new policy.
Speaker 2: If you call in a mad gaser, call, if you
Speaker 2: called them a tomb police department and said I've been
Speaker 2: attacked by the mad gasser, the cops would come. They
Speaker 2: would show up, and they would give you a choice.
Speaker 2: You could either go to the hospital with them and
Speaker 2: get examined to see if you happen gased, or you
Speaker 2: could refuse to go to the hospital and spend a
Speaker 2: night in jail. This was the choice that you were
Speaker 2: given if you called the police for help, right, And
Speaker 2: it's even worse than it sounds on its face. Back then,
Speaker 2: if you wanted to see if somebody had been exposed
Speaker 2: to a chemical, you had to sample the stomach contents,
Speaker 2: their stomach contents. So either you chose a night in
Speaker 2: jail or taking the hospital, have a tube jam down
Speaker 2: your throat and some poor nurse like priming it just
Speaker 2: to get it going. Come on, yeah, it just goes
Speaker 2: on like that until it ends badly.
Speaker 1: Oh man, oh it happened to it.
Speaker 2: Just be projectile vomit right back on. The person with
Speaker 2: the tube down their throats.
Speaker 1: Stop saying the word a.
Speaker 2: Circle of life.
Speaker 1: Basically, you know, we follow the two maxims of live performance,
Speaker 1: say moist and vomit in the same vomit no less
Speaker 1: like thirty minute fear.
Speaker 4: You're a little mustard on it all right, so uh,
Speaker 4: Almost immediately the calls started dropping off because people were like,
Speaker 4: I know, this sound very fun.
Speaker 1: The last recorded attack came on September eleventh, which was
Speaker 1: a Monday night at the home of one Bertha Bentz,
Speaker 1: not Beulah, but a Bertha. This was and this one
Speaker 1: isn't very key as well. This was a third time
Speaker 1: a prowler was spotted, but Minneapolis St. Paul. This was
Speaker 1: not a tall, slim, athletic figure. This was a short,
Speaker 1: stout figure.
Speaker 2: Heavy set, you might say.
Speaker 1: Heavy set, you might say. And there was a slashed
Speaker 1: window where this prowler was spotted window screen. Can't slash
Speaker 1: a window. And beneath that slash window screen an impression
Speaker 1: in the dirt below of a woman's high heel, Yes and.
Speaker 2: Not today's sexy high heels. These are nineteen forty four
Speaker 2: steel toe work high heels, basically old brown shoe factory.
Speaker 2: They were definitely brown, for sure.
Speaker 1: Every high heel needs a steel toe. So what happened
Speaker 1: after that?
Speaker 2: So as the calls started to drop off the state
Speaker 2: patrol they went home, they took their two way radios
Speaker 2: with them. Man, the tune cups are like, yeah, so sweet.
Speaker 2: For a couple of weeks, and the Journal Gazette too,
Speaker 2: it started to kind of clam up on the whole thing.
Speaker 2: It printed fewer and fewer articles about it. And it's
Speaker 2: not like the Journal Gazette was actually hurting for column
Speaker 2: space at the time. We read a lot of the
Speaker 2: journal gazettes from this era just to kind of get
Speaker 2: the story straight. And one of the articles we found
Speaker 2: on page one around this time was a report that
Speaker 2: the local bus company had examined a proposed extension to
Speaker 2: one of their lines the previous week and they planned
Speaker 2: to do it again next week. That was a page
Speaker 2: one article.
Speaker 1: That was it and more bagel follow ups of course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So after September fifteenth, only a few other mentions of
Speaker 1: the whole thing appeared in the paper at all. The
Speaker 1: most notable was an editorial on September twentieth where nearby Decatur, Illinois.
Speaker 1: The only way to described this is a bit of
Speaker 1: a newspaper flame war between these two small towns, a
Speaker 1: real Springfield Shelbyville type of situation. Sure, yeah, you're gonna
Speaker 1: I mean me or you you? Okay? Oh wait, it
Speaker 1: does say Chuck Colin speak. Now what is that we're doing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: That's tight we are. So they got into a bit
Speaker 1: of a flame war, started writing editorials, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of making fun of one another. Decatur was making fun
Speaker 1: of Mattoon. Mattoon would make fun. We would get very defensive, obviously, yeah,
Speaker 1: and say, you know what this article overlooks then indisputable
Speaker 1: fact that there was a mad gasser at large at first,
Speaker 1: and that a failure by the police here to take
Speaker 1: care of the case seriously at the outset allowed the
Speaker 1: mass hit hysteria that followed to overrun any investigation. And
Speaker 1: also the odor probably came from Decatur.
Speaker 2: That's not a joke.
Speaker 1: No, you stink, you stink.
Speaker 2: That was how they wrapped up the editorial. And then
Speaker 2: after that the journal who's at the town's voice is
Speaker 2: pretty much clammed up on the matter. And in the end,
Speaker 2: how many attacks were there, Chuck.
Speaker 1: I think there were twenty four different attacks that effected
Speaker 1: between thirty six to over one hundred if you count
Speaker 1: when seventy of those three percenters and their pickup trucks
Speaker 1: said I smell something, So I don't like to count that.
Speaker 1: So I think about twenty eight people ish were affected.
Speaker 2: Okay, And so the town just kind of moved on, shaken,
Speaker 2: weirded out. No one died though, no no one died,
Speaker 2: no one was injured long term, miraculously, but it had
Speaker 2: a serious impact on the town, and it continued on.
Speaker 2: The story continued on because shortly after the whole thing ended,
Speaker 2: a young student, a probably eighteen nineteen year old from
Speaker 2: the University of Illinois named Donald Johnson, showed up in
Speaker 2: town and he was there to document this as a
Speaker 2: case of mass illusion, which he clearly thought it was.
Speaker 2: The thing was. The town by this time had been
Speaker 2: made a butt of international jokes like Time Newsweek, people
Speaker 2: just teeing off on a tune like you guys really
Speaker 2: went crazy, and we think that's hilarious. Basically, so the
Speaker 2: people who are the victims of the Matt Guesser had
Speaker 2: learned to just keep quiet about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there were a lot of skeptics in town
Speaker 1: on obviously, including still Chief Coal. The attacks dropped off
Speaker 1: pretty sharply, and he was quoted as summing up summing
Speaker 1: it up by saying it was a mistake from beginning
Speaker 1: to end. I don't even know what that means, like
Speaker 1: a mistake, Yeah, that it happened, or that they took
Speaker 1: part and investigating, I don't even know what that well.
Speaker 2: Chief Cole was known for his very cryptic quotes his
Speaker 2: Sphinx liked.
Speaker 1: So when Johnson showed up to study the victims, he
Speaker 1: was able to get like hard information from them firsthand
Speaker 1: about like the actual gassing. But he's doing a psychological
Speaker 1: research paper, so he needs data about who they are,
Speaker 1: their level of schooling, and their socioeconomic level, and he's
Speaker 1: got to have all the like personal data and they
Speaker 1: no one would give that up. So he devised his
Speaker 1: own system.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, he came up with a really clever workaround.
Speaker 2: There was something called the ABC Socioeconomic Skill that had
Speaker 2: been created for broadcasters, but confusingly not specifically ABC. It
Speaker 2: was like ABC, like the alphabet that you sing, and
Speaker 2: it was a socioeconomic skill where you don't go to
Speaker 2: the people who you're categorizing, you just go learn stuff
Speaker 2: about them, like by looking at census records and things
Speaker 2: like that. So Donald Johnson came up with his own
Speaker 2: and it was like this. It was based on the
Speaker 2: victim's level of schooling, their age, their sex, And we
Speaker 2: ran across a really interesting little known fact. This is
Speaker 2: the first time in history someone answered yes please when
Speaker 2: they were asked their sex by a surveyor and then
Speaker 2: their occupation and income.
Speaker 1: And that person was my father in law. Let's cut
Speaker 1: that part out, Jerry, all right, just in case. So, ah,
Speaker 1: that's a great joke. What are you talking about? He
Speaker 1: sounds just like that, by the way. So for occupation,
Speaker 1: he looked at the census records. He looked at the
Speaker 1: nineteen forty census, which was the closest one kind of
Speaker 1: gleaned what he could. But back then they had really
Speaker 1: broad labels for CENSUSI since I censuses.
Speaker 2: Since I I like that, Since I all right.
Speaker 1: I just made that up. I can say that now
Speaker 1: because I'm a whole human being without a big hole
Speaker 1: in the front of my mouth. I did this show
Speaker 1: earlier and the yeah you're clapping because I have all
Speaker 1: my teeth. Earlier in the year, it was like, and
Speaker 1: this this is sen It was not good.
Speaker 2: Your dental word just got a round of a plug.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: That's pretty neat.
Speaker 1: I have to tell doctor Presley.
Speaker 2: I was like, is that the one who swears?
Speaker 1: No? No, no, that wasn't my dentist. That was a
Speaker 1: listener that wrote in. Yeah, it was great, Denis. But
Speaker 1: Dennis that drops f bombs while you're in the chair
Speaker 1: kind of my kind of guy.
Speaker 2: That would make me uncomfortable. Really, yeah, it'd be like,
Speaker 2: do your job. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know that
Speaker 2: there's children here and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you never hear us? Guy? Are their kids here?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Right there?
Speaker 2: And she does not look happy with me. I'm sorry, dear,
Speaker 2: just waving Hi.
Speaker 1: How old are you ten?
Speaker 2: Ten?
Speaker 1: You've heard that word? If you haven't, I'm gonna call
Speaker 1: child Services and report your parents. Ten so cute? Uh?
Speaker 1: Oh man, that threw me. My daughter's nine. She knows
Speaker 1: that word. Where are we okay? So for income? He based,
Speaker 1: Oh no, we're talking about the SINSI It was a
Speaker 1: little vague back in those days. Right, that's where it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they had they had labels like a laborer comma,
Speaker 2: except farm. But the good thing for Donald Johnson was,
Speaker 2: in my tune, if you didn't work on a farm,
Speaker 2: you worked in a factory, or you worked on the railroad.
Speaker 2: That was it. The big challenge was age because you
Speaker 2: couldn't really tell from their occupation whether they were like
Speaker 2: eight or right, So he relied on what he wrote
Speaker 2: in the paper acquaintances of the victims. That's how we
Speaker 2: found out their level of schooling and their age. And
Speaker 2: what we gleaned from that is he asked the cops
Speaker 2: who investigated it, because the Matomb Police Department was very
Speaker 2: very cooperative with Donald Johnson in his paper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally anything that was a great distraction for them, right,
Speaker 1: Like sure paper great for income. He based it on
Speaker 1: And this is actually the only part of the ABC
Speaker 1: scale that I thought was like pretty smart. He would
Speaker 1: go to their house and he would look around because
Speaker 1: it was nineteen forty four for like household conveniences or
Speaker 1: luxuries at the time, which could really tell you a
Speaker 1: lot about your income as a household, which at the
Speaker 1: time was electricity in the house, a mechanical refrigerator, a telephone,
Speaker 1: and a radio.
Speaker 2: Yes, And so he took all this, mixed it all together,
Speaker 2: shook it up in a bag. Little fairy dust, pixie.
Speaker 1: Dust, don't forget salt pepper.
Speaker 2: He threw a moist pink rag in, massed it all together,
Speaker 2: and he came up with four not a BC, ABC D.
Speaker 2: He's a bit of a show off. And he found
Speaker 2: that all of the victims fell within BC or D.
Speaker 2: There were no a's, and they were almost all C
Speaker 2: or D. And when you kind of pull everything out
Speaker 2: of that, it means that they were almost all women
Speaker 2: ninety three percent, and most of them were between the
Speaker 2: ages of twenty and twenty nine. And compared to the
Speaker 2: population of the town as a whole, the victims of
Speaker 2: the mad Gasser, they were more likely to be females
Speaker 2: in their twenties with below average education, below average income,
Speaker 2: which is exactly back in the day the kind of
Speaker 2: person you thought would be very suggestible to something like
Speaker 2: mass hysteria.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's not us talking everybody, right, nineteen forty
Speaker 1: four people. So inian Johnson concluded that it was entirely psychogenic.
Speaker 1: That's a quote that was birth from a case of
Speaker 1: nerves experienced by a link Kearney to begin with, which
Speaker 1: resulted in that first call to the police that ended
Speaker 1: up in that night's blotter, spotted by the reporter from
Speaker 1: the Journal Gazette the next day, who concocted out of
Speaker 1: thin air this idea that there was an anesthetic prowler
Speaker 1: on the loose, which you know, ninety seven percent of
Speaker 1: the town is reading this thing. So the German fear spreads.
Speaker 1: I forgot where I was with my fingers and set
Speaker 1: off other case of nerves which were attributed to that
Speaker 1: same prowler, further supporting the existence of the prowler, which
Speaker 1: may or may not have been a thing, which produced
Speaker 1: even more cases. So it was like what you call
Speaker 1: that thing.
Speaker 2: Like getting stomach contents in your face and them projectile
Speaker 2: vomiting back in a person's stomach. You remember, yeah, that thing.
Speaker 1: But he got published, right, he got published.
Speaker 2: Everybody, remember this is an eighteen nineteen year old kid
Speaker 2: who showed up to Talent to document a case of
Speaker 2: mass illusion, and it was published in the January nineteenth
Speaker 2: forty five issue of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
Speaker 2: a very well respected peer reviewed journal. Little Donald Johnson
Speaker 2: got his paper.
Speaker 1: Published, Little Donald Johnson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and when it was published, the whole thing, the
Speaker 2: entire case of the mad gas or metun became irrevocably
Speaker 2: a case of massisteria. That's what science said. It was masssterian.
Speaker 2: As time went on and Johnson's paper became cited, it
Speaker 2: became a circle of sorts and it became a textbook
Speaker 2: case of mass hysteria. Nice job, thanks, should we?
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like this is going pretty good story.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, there's one more line I forgot. Oh wait,
Speaker 2: but decades on, it's far from clear whether it was
Speaker 2: a case of mass hysteria. And that explains what Chuck's
Speaker 2: about to say.
Speaker 1: I think he's still going pretty good. You guys, We
Speaker 1: have to take another ad break in cases gets released,
Speaker 1: so we'll be right back Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: Stoffing the jawshon? Should stoff your Okay? So we're going
Speaker 2: to give both cases. We're going to lay both cases out,
Speaker 2: the case for massissaria and the case against massteria, meaning
Speaker 2: that there was an actual mad gasser. And we're going
Speaker 2: to start with the case four mass hysteria. And there
Speaker 2: were a lot of factors present in Matune in September
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty four, that could help support the idea
Speaker 2: that this was just a case of massissaria, not the
Speaker 2: least of a lot of the men in town were
Speaker 2: off fighting the war, and so the people in town
Speaker 2: had caused to feel anxiety and worry about their loved
Speaker 2: ones every hour of every day during this time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And as a cherry on top of
Speaker 1: all that, on August twenty ninth, like right before this happened,
Speaker 1: newspaper headlines nearby told the story of a Nazipow, like
Speaker 1: a real Nazpow, not those fake ones that they you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know why I said that a Nazpow had
Speaker 1: escaped from prison from an army base where he was
Speaker 1: being held about one hundred and fifty miles from Mattoon.
Speaker 1: No one tried to pin it on this, but it
Speaker 1: just sort of lent itself to the air of paranoida.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. You can also make a pretty good case
Speaker 2: that the Journal Gazette played a prominent role in this
Speaker 2: whole thing, because remember the very first headline said that
Speaker 2: there was an anesthetic prowler on the loops. Just said it,
Speaker 2: And whether the anesthetic prowler was real or not. Now,
Speaker 2: the concept at least was real, was in reality. And
Speaker 2: then also the idea of saying that Aileen and Dorothy
Speaker 2: were the first victims makes it sound like that there's
Speaker 2: going to be more. What was the anesthetic prowler being
Speaker 2: on the loose and all?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. This is also a time when people
Speaker 1: worried about you know, like Saren gas and Mustard gas.
Speaker 1: It was just a period of our history where gassing
Speaker 1: was in the air.
Speaker 2: You get negative four stars.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, okay, friend.
Speaker 2: I love you, but that was terrible. Okay, don't like counts?
Speaker 1: No, no, no, don't don't compliment sandwich me great, I love you.
Speaker 1: Terrible joke. And you also look good tonight.
Speaker 2: That's how you do it.
Speaker 1: Oh, hello, miss you like Tubby Old guys Emily would
Speaker 1: think that's hysterical, by the way, I know, just just
Speaker 1: to be clear. Uh oh, man, I got thrown because
Speaker 1: she hit on me. Oh here's the other thing. No
Speaker 1: motive ever emerged, and no one was ever like, thank goodness,
Speaker 1: no one has ever robbed or assaulted or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It was just these random, sporadic gassings, and that is
Speaker 1: a decidedly weird thing to happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then the gas itself provided evidence in that
Speaker 2: it provided no evidence whatsoever. No chemical was ever isolated
Speaker 2: from the pink cloth. In a lot of cases, the
Speaker 2: gas dissipated so quickly somebody running into help didn't detect
Speaker 2: it at all. Don't forget. There was at least one
Speaker 2: case where somebody was affected by the gas, but somebody
Speaker 2: else in the same room was not. That's unusual behavior
Speaker 2: for a noxious gas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So not a lot of uh, that's good. Not
Speaker 1: a lot of physical evidence is happening at this point.
Speaker 1: It was also a pretty peculiar.
Speaker 2: That word it's getting pad everybody.
Speaker 1: It was also a peculiar. It was strange, porky big,
Speaker 1: It was good pequila, piguila, pequilo. Strange that the whole
Speaker 1: thing ended when the police announced they were gonna start
Speaker 1: sticking the tube down the throat.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, either go to jail or be medically assaulted.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So, as Donald Johnson put it in his paper, which
Speaker 2: again he said, this was all just a case of
Speaker 2: mass hysteria, he said the fact seemed to evaporate as
Speaker 2: rapidly as the agent that produced them. He was a
Speaker 2: real bastard. No one like Donald Johnson, if you haven't
Speaker 2: picked up on that, he was like, yeah, real self satisfied.
Speaker 1: And he looked around. Nobody was there because no one
Speaker 1: wanted to be.
Speaker 2: So the thing about this is, though, yes, you can
Speaker 2: make a pretty good case that it was just Massstari's
Speaker 2: a lot of good, circum substantial evidence, but you can
Speaker 2: look at that same evidence in different ways, and no
Speaker 2: matter how you present the whole thing, there's still some
Speaker 2: stuff left on the table to be explained. And so
Speaker 2: here we present the case against Massssaria, the concept, the
Speaker 2: idea that there actually was a mad gasser man.
Speaker 1: What a setup.
Speaker 2: You're a real pro, thanks, sure, I've been doing it
Speaker 2: for a while.
Speaker 1: So though there was not a lot of physical evidence,
Speaker 1: there was a little bit. You can't discount that you
Speaker 1: had that moistpink cloth that everyone could not help but
Speaker 1: put in their face. People did bleed from their lips
Speaker 1: and mouth like children vomited, like all that stuff really
Speaker 1: did happen. There was that slashed window screen, There was
Speaker 1: that high heeled steel toed boot footprint in the dirt.
Speaker 1: So even though there wasn't a lot of stuff, and
Speaker 1: I don't think we said they did test the rag obviously,
Speaker 1: but by the time they got it, I think it
Speaker 1: was like a few days later. You know, back in
Speaker 1: those days, there was nothing that they could like isolate
Speaker 1: from the rack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything on and
Speaker 2: things sat around for three days. It's possible it just
Speaker 2: totally evaporated, for sure, and then cheap Coles policy. Yes,
Speaker 2: it did bring an abrupt end to the whole thing,
Speaker 2: but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was because the
Speaker 2: mad Gasser was just totally made up. It can also
Speaker 2: have been like a huge widespread loss of faith in
Speaker 2: the police. And in fact, there were two hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty two calls to the police of any kind in
Speaker 2: September of nineteen forty four, the month that the town
Speaker 2: of Mettune was supposedly in the grips of a text
Speaker 2: bookcase of mass hysteria, and that was well below the
Speaker 2: average of three hundred. So it's possible people just stopped
Speaker 2: calling the cops no matter what was happening to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the cops also had a motive for just wanting
Speaker 1: this to go away. Like we said, they had a
Speaker 1: pinchonk for covering up crimes, asything like that I did
Speaker 1: pinch in covering up crimes or you know, kind of crimes.
Speaker 1: This let them off the hook because they had nothing basically,
Speaker 1: so it totally let them off the hook. And we
Speaker 1: know that they were comfortable in covering up crimes from
Speaker 1: the Journal gazette, so it wasn't too far batch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then let's talk about Donald Johns's paper, shall we.
Speaker 2: It turns out he cherry picked data like a mofo.
Speaker 2: He essentially excluded all of the men, almost all the men.
Speaker 2: He excluded all the children victims, and just focused almost
Speaker 2: exclusively on the women victims, which sets things up pretty
Speaker 2: nice when you're trying to prove a case of female
Speaker 2: mass hysteria that makeshift ABC socioeconomic scale. It was inspired, true,
Speaker 2: but it would not pass peer of you today because
Speaker 2: it's egregiously fabricating data. And the fact that he concluded
Speaker 2: the entire event with psychogenic is pretty rich because he
Speaker 2: couldn't get a single victim to submit to a psychological
Speaker 2: panel or test or question. Yeah, so he's kind of
Speaker 2: full of it.
Speaker 1: I'd say, Yeah, there is one little and to me,
Speaker 1: this is sort of the biggest one. If you're making
Speaker 1: this case, which is despite all of these cases that happened,
Speaker 1: I think what there was over thirty of them or
Speaker 1: twenty something. None of them overlapped like geographically or time wise,
Speaker 1: Like if this town had been in the grips of
Speaker 1: mass hysteria, there would have been a call saying I've
Speaker 1: been gassed, and five minutes later on the other side
Speaker 1: of town. At some point during this ten days, somebody
Speaker 1: would have made it geographically and physically impossible because they're
Speaker 1: all freaking out and calling the cops. But every single
Speaker 1: incident could be explained, like geographically speaking, someone could have
Speaker 1: gone from one place to another in the amount of
Speaker 1: time that had occurred.
Speaker 2: Curious piece of data.
Speaker 1: Curious.
Speaker 2: So we probably should have said this at the outset,
Speaker 2: this is an unsolved mystery. We're not going to solve
Speaker 2: it here tonight. Be sorry for that if you were
Speaker 2: expecting that.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 2: Sorry. No one knows who the matt Gasser Mettune was. Seriously,
Speaker 2: but there was a guy is a guy named Scott
Speaker 2: Marona who was a high school chemistry professor, and he
Speaker 2: grew up in Charleston, about twelve miles away from Mattoon,
Speaker 2: and he decided to go to Mattoon a few years
Speaker 2: back and talked to some of the locals, and he
Speaker 2: put together a book about the subject, The Mad Gasser
Speaker 2: of Mattoon. Yeah, dispelling the hysteria. Very nice everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And he interviewed a bunch of residents who lived through
Speaker 2: the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Amazing to have two thousand people scream colon at you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally uncoached, unprompted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, never felt so much power.
Speaker 2: Sorry, go ahead, you were overwhelmed by the colon.
Speaker 1: It really was full of beans. Is that three?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: First, oh yes, please clap as Jeb Bush said. So
Speaker 2: Maruna doesn't think it was hysteria at all, does he?
Speaker 1: No. In fact, Marna names an individual. Oh man, you
Speaker 1: guys are the best. This is this is probably gonna
Speaker 1: be the one you guys.
Speaker 3: Okay, Oh yeah, it's kind of really right there.
Speaker 2: That just pushed it right over the line.
Speaker 1: He names an individual, a local man named Farley Llewellen,
Speaker 1: a trained chemist and the college dropout from the University
Speaker 1: of Illinois who built a professional chemistry lab on his parents'
Speaker 1: property that blew up about a week before this all happened.
Speaker 1: And he was tall and had a slim, athletic build.
Speaker 2: Yes, so Scott Maroona found from talking to the local
Speaker 2: that people considered Farley llewell and strange. John Miller, the
Speaker 2: guy from the Journal Gazette who wrote about all this stuff,
Speaker 2: he later said that Farley Llewellen had been picked up
Speaker 2: once as a peeping tom. He was known to drink ruinously,
Speaker 2: and he was thought to have been gay in a
Speaker 2: time in a town where you just weren't that. So
Speaker 2: he was kind of considered a weird outsider essentially by
Speaker 2: the town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And everyone tolerated this in the town
Speaker 1: because he came from a prominent family. His family owned
Speaker 1: back when individuals own grocery stores and it wasn't just
Speaker 1: some monolith corporation. His dad was a grocer and a
Speaker 1: very beloved grocer who would do really genuinely great things
Speaker 1: like take food by Christmas if people didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of money, and gifts to children and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So he was a beloved individual.
Speaker 2: He was a real chuck type.
Speaker 1: Come on kidding me, those are my gifts that didn't
Speaker 1: go over well? Cut that part Adam in the palm
Speaker 1: in my hand. I know it's ruined. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I saw what I was here, So we're back everybody.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they were a belovedge family. Everybody loved these people,
Speaker 1: so they overlooked their weird son.
Speaker 2: Yes, and Scott Marina actually even names the gas that
Speaker 2: he thinks it is nitromethane, and it actually checks pretty
Speaker 2: much all the boxes for the symptoms that were reported
Speaker 2: by victims of the mad Gasser. Nitromethane produces limb weakness, cough, drowsiness, headache, nausea,
Speaker 2: sore throat, vomiting. Do not take nitromethane if you're pregnant
Speaker 2: or planning or become pregnant. Do not take nitromethane if
Speaker 2: you're allergic to nitromethane. And it also counts for the
Speaker 2: sickeningly sweet smell because nitromethane is described as unpleasant comma fruity.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing though, with nitro methane is it's known
Speaker 1: more as an exploding thing than a paralyzing thing. So
Speaker 1: the leap that Marna took was that, Hey, I think
Speaker 1: that this guy was trying to blow people up. I
Speaker 1: think he didn't fit in because he was a gay,
Speaker 1: smart chemistry loaner in this town. In nineteen forty four,
Speaker 1: where you couldn't be that, and so he took revenge
Speaker 1: on the town by trying to blow them up one
Speaker 1: bedroom at a time.
Speaker 2: So there's a couple of things wrong with Farley Llewellyn
Speaker 2: being the mad gasser. The first one is he seems
Speaker 2: to have been the mad scientist that Thomas Wright was
Speaker 2: quoted as saying the police had zeroed in on, and
Speaker 2: tangentially to that, we know that the mad scientists the
Speaker 2: police were watching was under twenty four hour surveillance and
Speaker 2: that during that time other mad gaser attacks had happened,
Speaker 2: which makes it hard for it to and Farley Llewellen.
Speaker 2: But Scott Marna has an answer for this, that's right.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: He says that the first three attacks were Farley and
Speaker 2: that after not being able to blow any of his
Speaker 2: neighbors up, he just gave up. He was a bit
Speaker 2: of a quitter apparently, and that later texts either were
Speaker 2: actual cases of mass hysteria or suggestibility, or Farley's two
Speaker 2: older sisters, who were described as short and have you said,
Speaker 2: actually carried out more crimes to cover up for their
Speaker 2: little brother, which is sweet in a psychotic kind of way. Right.
Speaker 1: The second problem in that Marina's book, he got a
Speaker 1: lot of his information, basically all of it by talking
Speaker 1: with townspeople. And this is many, many years later, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were not able to verify a lot of
Speaker 1: the claims. There's a lot of speculation going on this
Speaker 1: whole idea that like, he was gay, so he was
Speaker 1: an outcast, and so he wanted revenge on the town
Speaker 1: and wanted to kill people by blowing them up, and
Speaker 1: then they stopped happening because his grosser families. That sounds
Speaker 1: so strange. His family had the kind of money to
Speaker 1: send him away to the state hospital, where he was
Speaker 1: never heard from again, and that's why the gassing stop.
Speaker 1: And this is problematic for a bunch of reasons, obviously
Speaker 1: through today's lens, because local saying he was weird and strange.
Speaker 1: It could have been that he was just just a
Speaker 1: regular gay guy who was into chemistry and maybe sort
Speaker 1: of a brainiac and was doing his thing like doing
Speaker 1: chemistry in the basement. It's kind of coded in a
Speaker 1: big way. It's also possible that he could have been
Speaker 1: the mad gasser. We don't know, but there was so
Speaker 1: much speculation going on. We tried to find records from
Speaker 1: the state hospital, like did his parents have them have
Speaker 1: them sent away? And we couldn't even like find that unfortunately,
Speaker 1: because they just don't keep records like that. It's also
Speaker 1: a time in history where a prominent family with some
Speaker 1: money could have your child's in a way just because
Speaker 1: they were gay so.
Speaker 2: Or because they kept trying to blow up their neighbors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying to go to bad a little bit
Speaker 1: for Farley Llewellen, but it seems like he might have
Speaker 1: been the guy.
Speaker 2: It's possible, but again we don't know. No one knows,
Speaker 2: and neither do you now. So there's a lot to
Speaker 2: read on the Mad gas ermatune. Even though it's kind
Speaker 2: of an obscure case. There's a lot of rabbit holes
Speaker 2: you can go down, and if you really get into
Speaker 2: it like we did, you can go on to eBay
Speaker 2: and buy one of Matchbox Toys Monster in my Pocket
Speaker 2: series I think four figures. The Mad Gaser a metune
Speaker 2: which Chuck bought. Do you want to describe it, Chuck?
Speaker 1: Sure? For those people that can't see this tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: thing that I'm holding, I went on eBay. It is green,
Speaker 1: it is does not look anything like Farley Leewellen. I
Speaker 1: should point out it's a monster and has like lobster
Speaker 1: pincers and these a gas tank with an orange gas mask,
Speaker 1: and also these strange tentacles coming off of his back.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. I love having this little fella. Sure,
Speaker 1: but again I don't see Farley Lewellen when I look at.
Speaker 2: This, and Matchbox Toy on their evilness scale gave the
Speaker 2: Mad Gaser an eighty out of one hundred, and Matchbox
Speaker 2: Toy's evilness scale is at least as legitimate as Donald
Speaker 2: Johnson's ABC socioeconomic Scale.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: That is the Mad Gasser of Mad too.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Thanks everybody, Thanks you.
Speaker 2: Thanks due.
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