The Mad Gasser of Mattoon (also known as “The Anesthetic Prowler”, “The Mad Anesthetist”, and “The Phantom Anesthetist”, “The Mad Gasser of Roanoke”, or simply “Mad Gasser”) was the name given to the person or people believed to be responsible for a series of apparent gas attacks that occurred in Botetourt County, Virginia, during the early 1930s, and in Mattoon, Illinois, during the mid-1940s.
Whether the attacks were anything more than a case of mass hysteria, if the individual reports were connected, and the ultimate explanation for the events all remain debated.
Most contemporary descriptions of the Mad Gasser are based on the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Kearney of 1408 Marshall Avenue, the victims of the first Mattoon case to be reported by the media. They described the gasser as being a tall, thin man dressed in dark clothing and wearing a tight-fitting cap. Another report, made some weeks later, described the gasser as being a female dressed as a man. The Gasser had also been described as carrying a flit gun, an agricultural tool for spraying pesticide, which he purportedly used to expel the gas
Almost two weeks after the Mattoon attacks began, the local Commissioner of Public Health, Thomas V. Wright, announced that there had undoubtedly been a number of gassing incidents, but that many instances were likely due to hysteria: residents hearing of alarming events, and then panicking when confronted by an out-of-place odor or a shadow at the window; Wright stated:
- “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.”
On September 12, local Chief of Police C. E. Cole took Wright’s hypothesis a step further, announcing that there had likely been no gas attacks at all, and that the reported incidents had probably been triggered by chemicals carried on the wind from nearby industrial facilities and then exacerbated by public panic.
Wright and Cole’s diagnosis was given further validity in 1945 when the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology published “The ‘phantom anesthetist’ of Mattoon: a field study of mass hysteria” by Donald M. Johnson, which documented the Mattoon incident as a case study in mass hysteria. In 1959, his opinion was seconded by psychologist J P Chaplin, and went on to form the basis for several subsequent studies of the phenomena of mass hysteria.
Most of the physical symptoms recorded during the Botetourt and Mattoon incidents (including choking, swelling of mucus membranes, and weakness/temporary paralysis) have all been suggested symptoms of hysteria.
Bletchley Park 