Have you ever felt suffocated sitting in the comfy environ of your house? While sitting, have you felt nauseated or complained of some uncontrollable force that gripped your breathing system. Such was the feeling of a number of people living in Mattoon who were otherwise uncomfortable staying in their own home.
In Mattoon, Illinois in the early 1930s, reports started rising when a man or a woman was deliberately spraying poisonous gasses into people’s homes via the windows. In some cases, he/she build some crude barricades to keep the victims inside. The barricade thing may be inexplicable but people in the thirties were the ones to be trusted and apparently didn’t go out to investigate when they heard the sound of sawing and hammering right outside their front doors.
Soon, the victims complained of nausea and sore throats and sometimes would catch a glimpse of something moving outside in the distance. The town was gripped with panic, terrified that the villain would attack again with his arsenal of quite harmless chemicals.
Finally an official inquiry was started to probe further into the matter and to solve it completely. They gathered eye witness reports and wound up with descriptions of the perpetrator as a tall, short, male, female, fat, thin, human, ghost, Nazi, dinosaur that sounded like the whole spectrum of life past and present on planet earth.
Two week after it all started that Thomas Wright, the commissioner of public health came and said: “There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists and has made a number of attacks. But many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria. Fear of the gas man is entirely out of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas he is spraying. The whole town is sick with hysteria.”
It is believed that due to the inability of many officials to solve the case, they referred to it as case of gas maniac.
The town police chief came out and said there was actually no gasser as thought. People were freaking out because they heard a noise, checked the window, and smelled something funny. Not unusual seeing as how their town was filled with the factories and the town itself was constantly fooded in chemical fumes.
After the reassuring statements from Wright and the chief of police, the public decided maybe it was time to calm down. But it didn’t last there. There were countless more reports that were seen but none of them ever confrmed.
One can say that there may have been an actual gasser at some point, one of the books pointed to a local medical student who could have carried out the few actual attacks that led to the sudden mass hysteria.
