Normally I try to make episodes of Tales of True Crime what people in the radio business refer to as “evergreen,” which essentially means it will always be timely, whenever you listen to it, whether that’s the day it’s released or five years down the road. This time, I’m gonna make an exception because as the last few episodes have been under production, we’ve all been living through Coronavirus. Some of us, depending on our health and where we live, have been subject to self-isolation, quarantine, and even outright lockdown.
I personally live in a well-populated city, not too dense, but in a region that is sparsely populated overall. The numbers of sick and dying in the area where I live are slight compared to the number we’ve seen coming out of densely populated urban centers.
Even so, I’ve seen some things that we would consider comical if they weren’t borderline alarming.
What am I talking about?
Toilet paper.
Have you had a hard time finding toilet paper?
Honestly, I feel silly even saying it. Toilet paper? Really? How did this become the thing?
While Coronavirus is undoubtedly a deep issue that we all need to take seriously, you have to wonder whether panic has overtaken reason when it comes to stuff like toilet paper.
Last weekend, I went to the grocery store and found there was no toilet paper. I went to four more stores, no toilet paper. Since the Coronavirus panic began, I have personally been to the grocery store 8 or 10 times, and every single time, there was no toilet paper.
I started to ponder it… our grocery store is in the northern part of our city, and there are another dozen sizable grocery stores in other parts of town. Actually, there’s probably more than that, I’m just estimating. But our grocery store serves a pretty small fraction of the population in our city, and yet, there’s no toilet paper.
I thought, shouldn’t the supply eventually catch up with the demand? I mean, how much are people pooping? Are people just buying this stuff and then storing it on pallets in a storage locker they rented for just such an event? There is no way people are using this much.
I saw a meme the other day… June, 2056. It was a monumental moment. Rob opened the last package of toilet paper his parents bought in 2020.
People are hoarding toilet paper.
The truth is, we as people are easily influenced and manipulated. We don’t like to admit it, but we are. When we see a Facebook quiz pop up in our feed and the headline says “Only geniuses can pass this quiz” or “88 percent of 90s kids got this wrong,” a lot of us click on it, because we want to be geniuses; we want to be in the 12-percent of 90s kids that got it right.
Toilet paper is another example. Early on, one hysterical person buys an entire cartload of toilet paper. Other people see that happening, and they do the same. Before you know it, the shelves are empty and the grocery and discount stores have started rationing packages of toilet paper to one per customer per day. And really, that only stokes the fervor for TP and makes people want it more. What’s gonna happen to me? What if I can’t find any? If everybody else is buying it, I better get it too.
The behavior of one person can affect the behavior of another person. And sometimes when a group of people behave in a certain way, it becomes a snowball, rolling downhill.
In 1944, in Mattoon, Illinois, it started with a report of a crime.
Tales of True Crime, episode 19:
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, “Tiger King” and Outlandish True Crime
On Thursday, August 31, 1944, Mr. Urban Raef awoke in the middle of the night.
“There was a peculiar heavy odor in the bedroom and I at first thought it was gas. I asked my wife if she had left the gas stove turned on, but she hadn’t. We both had the same feeling of paralysis and were ill for approximately 2 and a half hours. Persons visiting us, who slept in another part of the house got none of the fumes and were not affected in any way.”
The Raefs are the first known victims of the prowler that would come to be known as the Mad Anesthetist, the Anesthetic Prowler, the Phantom Anesthetist, and eventually the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.
The following night, September 1st, a young mother in the neighborhood, not far from the Raef’s home, awoke to the sound of her young daughter coughing and found she too was paralyzed and unable to leave her bed.
However, the symptoms detailed by the Raefs, their unnamed neighbor, and another neighbor, Mrs. Charles Rider, were largely dismissed by the parties involved as an unexplained odor and not immediately reported in the media. Nobody had yet attributed the odors and the strange paralysis to a “prowler.”
There was, however, a fourth reported attack that night, and it would get plenty of attention.
On September 2nd, 1944, The Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette ran a story under the headline Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose with two subheadings: Mrs. Kearney and Daughter First Victims and Both Recover; Robber Fails to Get Into Home. The story, which I’ve lightly edited for clarity, would become the basis of much that came later.
A prowler who used some kind of anesthetic or gas to knock out his intended victims was on the loose in Mattoon Friday night.
Mrs. Bert Kearney and her three-year old daughter, Dorothy Ellen, were victims of the anesthetic Friday night as they slept in their bed at their home, 1408 Marshall Avenue. Both had recovered today, although Mrs. Kearney said that her mouth and throat remained parched and her lips burned from whatever was used by the prowler who was unsuccessful in getting into the house.
Mrs Kearney gave the following statement:
“It was shortly after 11 o’clock Friday night when I went to bed, taking with me my daughter, Dorothy. My sister, Martha Reedy was in the living room of the home and my daughter Carol, 2, and Mrs. Reedy’s son, Roger, 2, were in another part of the house.”
“I first noticed a sickening, sweet odor in the bedroom, but at the time thought that it might be from 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 for Martha. She came into the bedroom, to which the door had been closed, and asked me what was the matter. I told her of the sensation I had, but I was unable then to move from the bed.”
“Mrs. Reedy at once noticed the odor which seemed to come in an open window. She summoned a next-door neighbor, Mrs Earl P. Robertson, 1412 Marshall Avenue, who called police.”
The Daily Journal Gazette story says Mrs. Robertson went to the Kearney home and searched the yard and neighborhood but found nothing, and when the police arrived, they found little to go on. Later, the first eyewitness report of the alleged perpetrator would surface. From the Journal Gazette:
The prowler returned to the house about 12:30 [am], and was seen at the bedroom window again by Mr. Kearney, a taxicab driver, as he came home after word had been sent to him concerning the earlier events.
Mr. Kearney said that as he arrived in front of the house, he saw a man at the window. He gave chase but the prowler escaped. The prowler was tall, dressed in dark clothing and wore a tight fitting cap, Mr. Kearney said.
Police were called a second time, but another more thorough search of the neighborhood also was fruitless.
Mrs. Kearney said that she recovered the use of her legs and arms completely within 30 minutes after the paralysis had set in. Her daughter, Dorothy became ill from the odor, but had recovered this morning.
Opinions differed as to the type of anesthetic used. However, because of its odor, it was believed to have been chloroform or ether, or a combination of both. The ingredients could h ave been sprayed into the room in a fine mist and if used at a distance not too far from the sleepers would have proved effective, it was said. Both chloroform and ether would have accounted for the parched throat and mouth burns of Mrs. Kearney, as well as the sickness which her daughter suffered afterward.
Mrs. Kearney and Mrs. Reedy had considerable sums of money at the house and said that they had counted it shortly before Mrs. Kearney went to bed. They could have been seen counting the money from the street, they said.
After the prowler was discovered at the house the second time, Mrs. Kearney, Mrs. Reedy, and their children were taken to the home of a relative in another part of the city to spend the night.
It was only after Mrs. Kearney’s story of intrusion and paralysis, and her husband’s eyewitness report of a prowler at the window, that the previous encounters by the Raef’s, Mrs. Rider and the third unnamed young woman, became public.
In fact, upon hearing the stories in the media, a new, ahem, “victim” came forward. Mrs. Olive Brown reported she had a similar experience several months earlier in which she had experienced a strange odor in her bedroom and also partial temporary paralysis. When asked why she hadn’t said anything earlier, Mrs. Brown said she didn’t speak up because the tale seemed so fantastic.
At any rate, fantastic or not, September 5th would bring a slew of reports that would leave no question some of the residents of Mattoon believed they were being stalked by a prowler, a tall man in a skull cap, who had discovered some method of incapacitating his victims with gas.
Mrs. Beulah Cordes arrived home with her husband, Carl, about 10:15 pm and found a neatly-folded white cloth lying on her front porch with a damp substance in the middle. Mrs. Cordes picked up the cloth and sniffed it. She staggered and shouted “That went right to my toes!” Her husband had to help her into the house and she felt ill for about two hours. Newspaper accounts reported she had weakness in the legs, her mouth and throat were burned from the fumes she inhaled, her lips were swollen and cracked, and she had trouble speaking and swallowing.
Police discovered a skeleton key on the porch where Mrs. Cordes found the cloth and some believed a burglar, intent on using the key to access the Cordes home, may have attempted to gas the family dog while they were out before getting frightened off by something or someone. The cloth itself was sent to the State Police crime lab in Springfield but chemical expert John Sutter found nothing on the cloth. He concluded if there had been anything on the cloth, it had evaporated.
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The first week of September, 1944 was an anxious time, as World War II was still raging and the Germans were getting desperate. The Allies had just liberated France, and people believed the Nazis might resort to just about anything to retain their grip on Europe and defeat the Americans… terrorize the heartland with gas attacks, for example. Fal l had not yet set-in and the still warm weather had most sleeping with their windows open.
Just before midnight on September 7th, Frances Smith, principal of a local grade school, and her sister Maxine, smelled the sweet, sickly odor of gas which some had likened to the smell of gardenias, and felt an incapacitating paralysis as they lay in bed. Later, after midnight, another wave of gas penetrated their room through the open window. They reported they could see the gas on this occasion, a bluish vapor, and they could hear a buzzing sound, which they believed to be coming from some type of gas gun.
The Smith sisters would eventually claim to have been gassed on four different occasions. And with each attack reported in Mattoon, the Mad Gasser’s tactics seemed to change in seemingly inexplicable ways.
A taxi driver reported driving through a mysterious cloud of gas, stopped to phone the police, but by the time they arrived the gas ha d dissipated. A crowd of 70 people, including two Chicago reporters who were in town to cover the story, had reportedly been affected.
Skeptics asked questions and believers had answers.
“How can the gasser be unaffected by the gas if it incapacitates the victims?” some would ask. The answer that made the claims plausible was that the attacker used a flit gun, a kind of hand-pumped insecticide sprayer that a gardener or exterminator might use. The gasser would cut a slit in a window screen and inject the gas into a room with the flit gun, thereby escaping the effects himself.
“What kind of gas has these effects on a person?” others would ask, and the answer was not forthcoming. Experts could not point to any gas that would cause the symptoms reported and work in the manner alleged. What kind of gas could be sprayed in a small quantity through a bedroom window and paralyze the people within, only to dissipate without a trace in a short period of time and without lasting effects on the victim? What chemical, applied to a handkerchief-sized cloth and left on the Cordes family’s porch in the open air for an indeterminate length of time, could cause weakness in the legs, chemical burns and swollen lips from a single sniff, then disappear without a trace before it could be analyzed by a crime lab technician?
There were several cases in which adult victims claimed to be affected by the prowler’s poison gas, but infants and children in the same room suffered no ill-effects whatsoever. How could that happen?
Theories were proposed and quickly shot down.
The Chief of Police speculated the smell of gas could likely be fumes from the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company which had been blown around town.
The State’s Attorney, William Kidwell, disagreed.
“That is simply ridiculous. People working in the plant haven’t been affected. Neither have people living within 75 feet of it. I still think there were some authentic gas cases which were the work of a prankster or someone with a more sinister motive.”
Some contended someone may have stolen chemicals from the plant and used them to wage terror on Mattoon, or that they had leaked or in some other way managed to affect the residents of Mattoon. The allegations were quickly debunked by the plant manager.
“We have to live with the conditions in our plant and we would be the first to notice and be affected by any fumes. In four years, not one person has been made ill at the gas plant by any fumes.”
The more questions went unanswered, the more skeptical people became, law enforcement included, but they investigated nonetheless. At one point, there were reportedly four suspects, two people with mental health issues and the other two considered amateur chemists. Multiple prowlers were reported in parts of Mattoon and the police questioned a number of them without result.
In hindsight, you could argue things got downright dangerous in Mattoon during those first two weeks of September. Police presence had doubled, and citizen patrols roamed the streets, watching for anything suspicious, ready to pounce on the first evildoer who showed his face.
It was only when law enforcement and the media began to express their skepticism publicly that the true nature of the Mad Gasser case started to become clear.
An editorial by the Journal Gazette newspaper apologized to their readers for irresponsible, sensationalist reporting by two contemporary newspapers in Chicago, and pointed out that one of the papers had tried to create a mystery by reporting gas intended to be used for civil defense demonstrations had disappeared. In reality, the gas was harmless and had been disposed of.
Reports of attacks by the anesthetist were initially taken seriously, but as the number of calls to police ramped up, stories of the ridiculous began to leak out.
The Mattoon Journal Gazette reported a woman woke her husband near midnight “and in trembling terror told him that someone was at the bedroom window, probably getting ready to spray them with the weird gas. The husband stealthily left the house and slipped through the darkness outside to try and catch the phantom chemist. As he approached the window, two demon-like eyes shone out and confronted him in the darkness. A cat was crawling up the screen.”
Another woman whose husband was away, at war, took out his shotgun for protection, loaded it, and as she cocked it, accidentally blew a hole in the kitchen wall.
A young man, with his affections directed at a young female acquaintance, rapped on the door of her home and asked “May I leave my skull cap and spray gun here for awhile?” After he repeated the joke one too many times for the comfort of the young lady, the police briefly detained him, then sent him on his way.
Reports of gas attacks in Mattoon numbered roughly 31 in the first two weeks of September and the stories had attracted nationwide, even global attention.
The police had had enough.
The San Bernardino County Sun reported Police Commissioner Thomas V. Wright was tired of being awakened “because some hysterical woman thinks she’s been gassed,” he was quoted as saying.
Can you imagine a Police Commissioner saying something like that today?
Commissioner Wright went on.
“There’s more than one mad man in Mattoon, there’s 15,000 of them. What we’ve got here is mass hysteria. Some wom an feels faint and tells her neighbor about it, embroidering it a bit, you know how women are. The neighbor tells her neighbor and the first thing you know we’ve got women thinking they’re being gassed all over the place.”
It should be noted, there were two eyewitness sightings of the alleged prowler, both by men, and several of the reported victims were also men.
Perhaps the final straw for the media and the authorities was the report from Mrs. Caroline Burwell who, in the midst of a crowded movie theater, reported she felt as if someone had poured something down her back. Upon investigation, police discovered the sensation was caused by linament oil which she herself had applied to her back.
Wright said:
“Today we have the final straw. A woman gets gassed in the middle of the Mattoon theater. No one else smells anything. But all of a sudden this woman screams ‘I’m gassed!’ We rush her to the hospital. ‘Nerves’ said the doctor. But I call it mass hysteria.”
It was clear there were at least some people who were a little high-strung and reporting gas attacks where none had occurred.
“They call me up all hours. I need some sleep.”
#####
The Phantom Anesthetist. The Anesthetic Prowler. The Gardenia Gasser. Whatever a person chose to call him, he was soon seen as a figment of the imagination. When the media headlines began to take a skeptical slant, and those in positions of authority voiced the same, reports about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon disappeared virtually overnight. Dissipated into the night air, like the gas he allegedly employed.
Nobody wanted to be laughed at.
Undoubtedly, there are still some who believe the Mad Gasser was an actual person who committed an actual crime. Some have suggested the early attacks were authentic, staged by some twisted individual, but later made a laughing stock with false reports by those who wanted to be included in the phenomenon. But lest we be too hard on the residents of Mattoon, it doesn’t hurt to recognize that Mass Hysteria is a phenomenon that’s been known to science for centuries. There are many well-known examples.
- The dancing manias of the middle ages, where people danced at length, sometimes by the thousands, for unknown reasons.
- The so-called demonic possessions in convents between the 15th and 19th centuries during which nuns would exhibit motor dysfunction, including one case in which dozens began to meow like cats.
- A case from Victorian-era England, very similar to the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, was the legend of Spring Heeled Jack, a reported supernatural entity who had lengthy claws, could leap great distances, and shoot blue fire from his mouth.
It might be tempting for you to say, “Well this silliness is all interesting, but it’s antiquated thinking. These days, we know better.” You could say it, but you would be wrong. It still happens in the modern era.
In 1954, people in the Seattle area suffered a mass delusion when they started noticing previously unseen pits in their windshields and attributed them to a number of different causes, including some kind of mass vandalism spree or nuclear testing.
In 1962, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, in which 3 girls at a Japanese school began to laugh uncontrollably and the phenomenon spread to 94 students and eventually, an entire village.
The Satanic Panic of the early 1980s has been attributed to mass hysteria.
In 1988, The US Navy evacuated 600 sailors from a barracks in San Diego and sent more than 100 of them to the hospital with breathing difficulties. No apparent cause was determined, and some attribute the case to mass hysteria.
In 2006 the “Strawberries with Sugar” virus spread through a Portugese school, in which students mimicked the symptoms seen in students on an episode of the Strawberries with Sugar TV show.
Still more recently, in 2018, Emirates Flight 203 from Dubai to New York reported 106 of 521 passengers severely sick during the 14 hour flight, with coughing, sneezing, fever and vomiting. The CDC met and quarantined the plane in New York and doctors later determined a few of the passengers were sick from common illnesses like the common cold or the flu, and others convinced themselves that they too were sick.
To be clear, I’m using the term Mass Hysteria in the same way Commissioner Wright of Mattoon used it, from the layperson’s perspective. There are those schooled in psychology who would explain to you that mass hysteria, conversion disorder, folie a deux, and hysterical contagion are all different, distinct things. I’ll leave those distinctions for them to explain because I think you get my point. Mass hysteria, also known as Mass Psychogenic Illness, is a real thing.
So, how about you toilet paper hoarders leave some for the rest of us, huh?
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It’s not very often I break out of storytelling mode on Tales of True Crime, but with all of us inside, playing board games and bingeing on streaming media, it just wouldn’t be right to let this time pass without talking about the absolute phenomenon that’s been sweeping the globe.
I’m talking about Netflix’ 7-episode series “”Tiger King”.”
The series was written and directed by Eric Goode, a New York entrepreneur and conservationist who reportedly once dated Naomi Campbell, and Rebecca Chaiklin who has been producing and directing documentaries since the turn of the millennium.
There’s little I can say about “”Tiger King”” that can do it justice until you’ve watched it. If you’ve seen the previous Netflix true crime documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight,” you have some idea of how outlandish “Tiger King” is.
To summarize briefly, “Tiger King” features three primary characters. Joseph Schreibvogel Maldonado Passage, also known as Joe Exotic, the narcissistic gay proprietor of a roadside zoo/big cat attraction who also happens to be married to two straight men, Carole Baskin, Joe Exotic’s sworn enemy, and operator of a big cat rescue operation, who may or may not have killed her first husband and fed him to her rescued big cats, and the operator of another roadside zoo/big cat attraction who may or may not be a polygamist cult leader, married to three women.
“Tiger King” features murder for hire, a one-armed lesbian zoo keeper (guess how she lost the arm… there’s video), drugs, a tragic suicide (there’s also video), potential connections to organized crime, and moral quandaries by the bushel. It will make you feel dirty, but I found it to be entertaining all the way through.
On a side note, if you saw the aforementioned “Abducted in Plain Sight” you might be interested to know, I did a poll on Twitter recently and asked the question “Which true crime doc is more outlandish?” With 146 votes “Abducted in Plain Sight” edged-out “Tiger King” 54 percent to 46 percent.
If you’re a fan of true crime and you haven’t seen either of them, check ‘em out. And buckle up.
If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And lock your doors, because Carole Baskin is still out there. I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
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For transcripts, sources, credits and some occasional cat pictures, follow me on Twitter at TrueCrimeTroy. I occasionally do some giveaways there, too, so hit that button and follow me right now.
[credits]
Additonal voices by Jon B-C and Katelyn of the EatCrime podcast
Image voice by Bonnie Amistadi
Feature image Vasadi Photography via Pexels.com
[music]
Music by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com. Creative Commons license via FilmMusic.io
- Tempting Secrets by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5005-tempting-secrets
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Marty Gots A Plan by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4992-marty-gots-a-plan
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Vanishing by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4578-vanishing
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Limit 70 by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5710-limit-70
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Additional Music used via Extended License
[sources]
- Bartholomew, Robert E. “Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns, and Head Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion”
- Clarke, Jerome. Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena
- Maruna, Scott. “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria”
- Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette, September 2, 1944. “Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose”
- Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette, September 5, 1944. “‘Anesthetic Prowler’ Covers City”
- Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette, September 7, 1944. “‘Mad Anesthetist’ Strikes Again”
- Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette, September 11, 1944. “Anesthesia and Anathema”
- Mattoon Daily Journal Gazette, September 12, 1944. “Sidelights of Mad Gasser’s Strange Case”
- Sacramento Bee, September 7, 1944. “Panic Grips Illinois Town as ‘Mad Gasser’ Attacks More Victims”
- San Bernardino County Sun, September 12, 1944. “Mad Gasser of Mattoon Causes Police Trouble”
- St. Louis Star and Times, Sept 13, 1944. “Mattoon Argues Over Denial the Prowler Exists”
- Taylor, Troy. “The Mad Gasser of Virginia and & Mattoon, Illinois.” Ghosts of the Prairie.
- Taylor, Troy. Into the Shadows.
- Taylor, Troy. http://www.prairieghosts.com/gasser.html (offline)
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