The Mystery of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon Illinois: A Madman on the Loose or a Case of Midwest Mass Hysteria in 1944?

 On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor.

He rises out of his bed to investigate but instantly becomes nauseous and weak in the knees.  He drops to the floor of his bedroom and starts to retch and vomit.  His wife, fearing that she may have accidentally left the stove on after cooking dinner only a few hours before, attempts to get up out of bed to go to the kitchen, but she finds that she is paralyzed from the neck down and unable to get up out of the bed at all.  While her husband vomits on the floor Mrs. Reef feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on her chest and she is forced to lay there inert and completely immobile.

Only a few hours later in the early morning of September 1, 1944, and only a few blocks away from where Mr. and Mrs Reef suffered their own bout of sickness and paralysis, a young mother whose husband is away serving with the army in Europe, is awakened by the sound of her two year old daughter in a fit of uncontrollable coughing.  She desperately wants to get up and run to her daughter’s aid in the adjoining bedroom--but just like Mrs. Reef a few hours earlier and a few doors down--the young mother too finds herself paralyzed from the head down and unable to move from her bed.

Eventually, when the symptoms do wear off and the victims are finally able to move--all of them apparently unharmed--they promptly report the strange incidents, the paralysis and the smell of noxious gas, to the local Mattoon Police Department.  Though there are no lasting injuries caused to anyone on the night of August 31 to September 1, 1944--the two week long reign of terror by what the newspapers will dub “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon” has begun.

Downtown Mattoon ca. 1944

From the very beginning, as reports begin to flood into local police, no one in Mattoon, an industrial town in central Illinois of approximately 15,000 people, doubts the existence of a nighttime attacker, or attackers, being responsible for the random bouts of sickness and the putrid odor of gas that seems to linger around homes in the middle of the night at random.

Interestingly, splashed across the front page of the Daily Journal Gazette, Mattoon’s own local paper, less than forty-eight hours after the first  attack on Mr. and Mrs. Reef is the Headline: “Mr. and Mrs. Kearney First Victims: Both Recover; Robber Fails to Get Into Home”.  This headline, coming less than a day after the first reported attacks of the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon” implies that the reporters somehow knew that there would be many more victims to come, and that robbery is the motivation behind the gas attacks and strange symptoms.

The attack reported on the night of the second, the one that headlined the frontpage of the Daily Journal Gazette was the first, but by no means the last report, in which the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon” was actually sighted by one of his so-called victims.  The reports of the gasser’s appearance were enough to give any local nightmares.

Mrs. Kearney in her eyewitness account stated, “I first noticed a sweet sickening odor in the bedroom, but at the time thought that it might be from the flowers outside the window.  However, the odor grew stronger and I began to feel a paralysis of my legs and lower body…I grew frightened and screamed.”  According to Aline Kearney the odor, paralysis and screaming occurred around 11 o’clock at night, but as the article in the newspaper reported, it would appear that the perpetrator returned to check on his victims and the effects of his anesthetic gas.

The article goes on to report in its entirety: “The prowler returned to the house at around 12:30 o’clock and was seen at the bedroom window again by Mr. Kearney, who is a taxicab driver and had returned home after word had been sent to him of the earlier events.

Mr. Kearney said that as he arrived at the front of the house he saw a man in the window.  He gave chase but the perpetrator escaped.  The prowler was tall, dressed in black clothing and wore a tight fitting cap, Mr. Kearney said.”  And with this image, provided by the local Mattoon, Illinois newspaper, of a thin man, dressed all in black wearing a skull cap and stalking the local neighborhood, the Legend of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon entered the town’s consciousness forever.

Article in Daily Journal Gazette

As could be expected, the newspaper went on to report that the police did a thorough search of the entire neighborhood, but that no signs of a prowler, or any scent of gas was detected.  However, it didn’t matter.   After those reports of the Mad Gasser’s attacks on the nights of September 1 and 2, 1944--and as word of mouth spread across the tight-knit industrial midwest town of Mattoon, Illinois from person to person--a sense of near panic and mass hysteria set in.

However, after the initial reports that took place over Labor Day weekend 1944, for a few days at least, it appeared as if the so-called “Mad Gasser” had vanished into the ether--pun intended--until on September 5, 1944 a most unusual incident occurred.

That night--after going out to dinner--Mattoon residents Beulah and Carl Cordes noticed a white cloth wrapped around the doorknob on their home’s front door.  Without thinking Beulah Cordes grabbed the cloth and held it close to her nose.  Within seconds she was completely paralyzed and bleeding from the mouth.  With his wife near comatose and bleeding outside on the sidewalk, Carl Cordes immediately contacted police, who arrived on the scene within seconds.  Once there the police discovered a skeleton key and a tube of lipstick in the street--leading many to believe that perhaps the perpetrator was a woman--and though Beulah Cordes would fully recover from the incident--the fearful nature of her injuries caused hysteria and chatter of the “Mad Gasser” in Mattoon to metamorphosize into flat out panic.

After the night of September 5, 1944 armed posses of vigilantes--local citizens who had become disappointed with the investigations thus far conducted by police--began to roam the streets of Mattoon in the middle of the night looking for the person, or persons, that the newspapers had dubbed “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon” or “The Anesthetic Prowler”.

Citizens of Mattoon Hunt for the Gasser 1944

In fact, the local paper the Daily Journal Gazette began to openly criticize the Mattoon Police Department on its editorial page.  On the 8th of September, three days after the attack on Beulah Cordes, the Gazette ran an editorial that stated, “We suppose it is natural for the pride of policemen to be stung a bit when a crime is committed…for this reason there has been a tendency in Mattoon police circles recently to conceal from the public the fact that certain crimes have been committed.”

What “certain crimes” exactly were being hidden from the public was never mentioned by any of the editors at the Daily Journal Gazette and it should, rightfully be noted, that the Mattoon, Illinois Police Department did everything within its power to try and apprehend the perpetrator, or at least determine the source of the mysterious noxious gas attacks, even going so far as to appeal to the Governor of Illinois for help from the state police in conducting their investigation.

All told, from August 31, 1944 until September 10--over a span of about two weeks--no less than twenty people in Mattoon reported having been victims of the Mad Gasser and the Police Department, with its resources absolutely stretched to breaking,  over that same two week time frame fielded dozens more phone calls each night--all reports of a thin prowler dressed all in black and wearing a tight-fitting cap--some saying with a gasmask on and some without--creeping through sidestreets and people’s backyards in the town.

Eventually, five squads of Illinois State Police--about 30 additional officers--were dispatched to Mattoon to patrol the streets of the town each night in search of the elusive Mad Gasser.  It should be noted that Mattoon is a town no bigger than ten miles square.  No one was ever apprehended in conjunction with the gas attacks and no concrete proof of the Mad Gasser’s existence was ever discovered.

All gas attacks, and sightings of the Mad Gasser, abruptly ended in the town of Mattoon after the night of September 10, 1944.

The Mattoon Police Chief, a man named C.E. Cole, wishing to clear his department’s name and reputation for not apprehending a suspect, released a statement near the end of September 1944 that said, “We have found that large quantities of carbon tetrachloride are used in the war work done at the Atlas Diesel Engine Company Plant and that it has an odor that could be carried to all parts of the city as the wind shifts.”

Not able to find a suspect, and with few leads or evidence to go on, law enforcement by the end of September 1944 had concluded that the Gas Attacks were all the result of explainable causes, industrial gasses used in the nearby production of war materiel.

However, when the Atlas Diesel Engine Company released its own statement to refute what Police Chief Cole had said, stating that no law enforcement official had ever visited their production facility and that none of their workers had ever been made sick, or even become nauseous, as a result of carbon tetrachloride fumes--the citizens of Mattoon were once again up in arms and desperate to apprehend a culprit.  The Police Department officially retracted its earlier statements after pressure from both the citizenry of Mattoon and the Atlas Diesel Engine Company whose work was vital to the war effort at the time, and who employed hundreds of people from the surrounding communities, forced the investigation to be reopened. 

But, as the panic over the Mad Gasser subsided, and as time passed and all reports of his (or her) existence ceased, some began to wonder if the Mad Gasser had even been real at all.  Perhaps, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Illinois, had been nothing more than a case of wartime mass hysteria brought on by the over-zealous imagination of local newspaper reporters from the Daily Journal Gazette who, not being able to report on the Second World War as it unfolded on the battlefield, had manufactured a story at home--unconsciously or unwittingly--to keep the public’s attention engaged and sell more newspapers in the process?

According to the Daily Journal Gazette--absolutely not!--The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was most certainly real and the only reason that a suspect was never caught was because, “Our police failed to take the case seriously enough…and when they finally did…outside interference made their investigations unsuccessful.”

Maybe so, but eventually, with citizens of Illinois still clamoring for the arrest of a suspect in the Mad Gasser attacks even over a year after the incident, and after the end of the Second World War, the Illinois State Attorney General William Kidwell was forced to declare that the case of the Mad Gasser had been due to, “A wave of mass hysteria fueled by a Journal Gazette reporter with a vivid imagination.”

Word of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Illinois even in the midst of World War Two--the largest conflict in human history--spread around the world and debate raged as to whether the attacks were the result of some madman on the loose spraying people with a paralyzing anesthetic or if the whole thing was simply made up and the result of mass hysteria and over active imaginations.  The whole truth will probably never be known, but one thing is for certain---whatever, or whoever the Mad Gasser was--the incident definitely put the town of Mattoon, Illinois, on the map back in the late summer and early fall of 1944.

To learn more about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon check out this retrospective article from the Washington Post from 2021:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/10/30/mad-gasser-mattoon-illinois-mystery/