Last week, I was looking through a set of “Myth or Real” trading cards on archive.org. It featured bigfoot, mothman, and many of the popular cryptids, but there were also 2 cards on a mysterious character called the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. The cards looked cool, and I had never heard of this chap before, so I decided to do a little research.

So in 1944, the small town of Mattoon was terrorized by a weirdo with a cannister of gas. He was running around town spraying this stuff into people’s homes, making them cough, puke and pass out. Nobody died or suffered any lasting problems because of these attacks, but the residents of Mattoon were spooked. Many of the men in town were away, fighting in the second world war, and most of the Gasser’s victims were women. Rumours went around that Gasser was a large, warty ape with a gas gun. The source of this rather fantastic element to the story was added by the town’s local psychic. It was later hypothesized that the Gasser was able to evade police because he had teleportation device.

Over the course of 2 weeks, there were more than 20 attacks. While it is likely that some people did experience something out of the ordinary, it seems probable that the local media’s sensational coverage of the story riled the town’s populace up to an extent that people were looking for something to cough over. After two weeks with little to no progress on the case, local police said that any further victims wishing to report a gas attack would have to submit to medical testing to verify their story. This almost immediately put an end to the reports, and the entire case was soon written off as an example of mass hysteria. There was no Mad Gasser. It was all just the imaginings of some hysterical, lonely women.

Or was it?

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria – Scott Maruna

In this 2003 book, the author, Scott Maruna, a chemistry teacher, argues that the hullaballoo around the Mad Gasser was not a case of mass hysteria. There actually was a mad person running around spraying gas into people’s windows. His name was Farley, and he was a closeted homosexual. He was an amateur chemist and apparently ended up in a mental asylum shortly after the gas attacks. His father was an influential person in Mattoon, and so it’s possible everything was covered up.

I have no way of knowing whether Maruna’s claims are true or not, but the book is well written and there’s nothing in here that seems like a huge stretch. Enough time has gone by now that we will never know for certain, but it may well have been Farley. It makes sense to me that a real creep started the panic in Mattoon and that the media blew it way out of proportion resulting in a town-wide state of panic. The claims that the Gasser was a transdimensional alien ape with a ray gun are certainly appealing, but maybe a little unlikely.

Maruna’s book is short (just over 100 pages), and I read it in one sitting. It seems like a fairly complete account of the Mad Gasser phenomenon, and aside from a few recently self-published attempts, there doesn’t seem to be any other books about the topic. Give this a read if you’re interested in the case. Physical copies are pretty hard to come by, but there’s a copy up on archive.org if you need it.