# A 'mad gasser' prowled Mattoon, Illinois in 1944

**Verdict: Contradicted.** No attacker, gas, or device was ever found. Police, chemists, and later peer-reviewed research all point to the same conclusion: a genuine, well-documented outbreak of mass psychogenic illness, amplified by sensational local news coverage.

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: World War II era · First circulated: 1944 · Believed by: a two-week town-wide panic in 1944; a minor true-crime staple since
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/mad-gasser-of-mattoon

## Summary
For about two weeks in late summer 1944, the small city of Mattoon, Illinois believed a prowler was spraying a sweet-smelling paralyzing gas through open windows at night. Police, chemists, and a landmark field study found no gasser, no gas, and no device: only a textbook case of mass psychogenic illness, fed by a sensational local newspaper.

## The claim
That a real individual, the 'mad gasser' or 'phantom anesthetist' of Mattoon, broke into homes or approached open windows at night and sprayed residents with an unidentified gas that caused nausea, dizziness, leg weakness, and dry mouth, and that this attacker was never caught.

## Origin and timeline
- 1933–34: A similar 'anesthetic prowler' scare grips Botetourt County, Virginia, with reported gas attacks, armed citizen patrols, and no attacker ever identified, a direct precedent for what happens in Mattoon a decade later.
- 1944-08-31: Urban Raef reports a sickly-sweet smell in his Mattoon home followed by nausea and leg weakness, though the case is only connected to the panic in hindsight.
- 1944-09-01: Aline Kearney reports a sweet odor and paralysis in her legs; her husband Bert Kearney later says he saw a tall man in dark clothing at the bedroom window. The Mattoon Journal-Gazette runs the story on its front page, and the case becomes the panic's first widely publicized 'attack.'
- 1944-09-05: Mattoon City Commissioner Thomas V. Wright publicly floats the term 'mass hysteria' even as reports keep climbing, and armed citizen patrols begin watching the streets at night.
- 1944-09-09: The Journal-Gazette reports the 'mad gasser' has added six more victims in a single day, near the peak of both reports and local fear.
- 1944-09-11: The same newspaper reverses course, publishing 'Many Prowler Reports; Few Real' after police find no evidence behind most calls.
- 1944-09-12: Mattoon police publicly attribute the wave to a combination of mass anxiety and mundane causes (spilled solvents, factory odors, imagination) rather than a real gasser. New reports fall off sharply within days.
- 1945: University of Illinois psychologist Donald M. Johnson publishes the first scholarly field study of the episode, concluding it was a case of mass hysteria driven by rumor, suggestion, and newspaper coverage.
- 2004: Sociologists Robert E. Bartholomew and Jeffrey S. Victor reexamine the case with additional interview material, refining Johnson's diagnosis into a broader theory of 'collective anxiety attacks' triggered by a shared threat rumor.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Dozens of ordinary people reported nearly identical symptoms: this could not simply be imagined.
  Evidence: The symptoms were real and the fear was real; no one disputes that people genuinely felt nauseated, dizzy, and weak. But identical, script-like symptom clusters are exactly what mass psychogenic illness produces: once a specific set of symptoms is described in the news, later 'victims' unconsciously reproduce that same script.
- Claim: A named witness, Bert Kearney, said he saw a tall man at the window and chased him.
  Evidence: This is the single most concrete sighting in the case, and it deserves to be taken seriously as a sincere report. But no footprint, physical trace, or corroborating witness was ever recovered from that chase, and police who canvassed the area that night and afterward found nothing to substantiate it.
- Claim: Police investigated for two weeks and could not rule out a real attacker.
  Evidence: Police investigated intensively (patrols, suspect interviews, and chemical testing of a recovered cloth) and by September 12, 1944, the chief and city officials publicly concluded there was no gasser. No device, residue, or chemical capable of the reported effects was ever identified.
- Claim: This had happened before, in Virginia a decade earlier, so there is a real pattern of gas attacks.
  Evidence: The 1933–34 Botetourt County 'anesthetic prowler' scare is a real precedent, but it too ended without an identified attacker, and a local chemist attributed the residue found there to a common household insecticide. It is better read as an earlier instance of the same social phenomenon, not proof of a recurring criminal.

## Why people believe it
- A frightening, specific news story (sweet gas, paralyzed legs, a prowler at the window) gives an ambiguous bodily sensation (nausea, dizziness, anxiety) an external, nameable cause, which is often easier to accept than 'I am anxious.'
- Wartime Mattoon was already primed for fear: young men were overseas, the news was full of danger, and a local paper's sensational front-page coverage gave residents a shared script to fit their own symptoms into.
- Once neighbors, and then reporters from wire services nationwide, treated the gasser as real, disbelief carried a social cost: it was easier to report a plausible symptom than to be the one person who doubted a frightened community.

## Open questions
- Whether any of the earliest reports (Urban Raef's on August 31, or the Kearney household's on September 1, both before the Journal-Gazette had published a word about a gasser) involved a genuine, if mundane, chemical trigger rather than suggestion alone is not fully settled. Mattoon's own police chief floated wind-blown industrial solvent fumes from the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company as a partial explanation, and the plant's rebuttal (a recent state safety inspection, only five gallons of carbon tetrachloride on hand) is persuasive but not a documented impossibility; no air sample or chemical test from that first week has survived for anyone to check.
- Whether Farley Llewellyn, the University of Illinois-trained chemist Scott Maruna named as the real gasser in 2003, deliberately caused any single reported incident cannot be closed with certainty by the surviving record. No physical evidence, purchase record, or eyewitness has ever tied him to a specific attack, and mainstream researchers, including Robert Bartholomew, have rejected the theory outright, but proving a negative about one named, long-dead individual, more than eighty years after the fact and without surviving forensic material, is not something the historical record can do with total finality either.

## Sources
- The 'Phantom Anesthetist' of Mattoon: A Field Study of Mass Hysteria, Donald M. Johnson, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 40(2) (1945): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1945-02613-001
- A Social-Psychological Theory of Collective Anxiety Attacks: The 'Mad Gasser' Reexamined, Robert E. Bartholomew & Jeffrey S. Victor, The Sociological Quarterly, 45(2), 229–248 (2004): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2004.tb00011.x
- Occupational Mass Psychogenic Illness: A Transcultural Perspective, Robert E. Bartholomew & François Sirois, Transcultural Psychiatry, 37(4) (2000): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/136346150003700402
- Contemporaneous reporting on the 'anesthetic prowler,' Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette, September 1944 (cited as an artifact of the panic, not as evidence of a real attacker), Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette (1944): https://www.eiu.edu/localite/gasserbiblio.php
- Mad Gassers of Virginia & Illinois (the 1933–34 Botetourt County precedent), Legends of America: https://www.legendsofamerica.com/mad-gassers/
- Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon
- The Mattoon Mad Gasser: Looking Back At A Textbook Case Of Mass Hysteria, Belt Magazine: https://beltmag.com/the-mattoon-mad-gasser-looking-back-at-a-textbook-case-of-mass-hysteria/
- The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria, Scott Maruna, Swamp Gas Book Co. (2003): https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon.html?id=fXcIr-JZ6VAC

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