Chicago Herald-American, Sept 20

Mattoon's Phantom 'Suggestive Fear'

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 20 -- No gas maniac, no noxious, paralyzing vapor, but rather paralyzing fear, rising to the surface from the deep-rooted insecurity of one woman and spread through a community by the power of suggestion--that's the scientific explanation of Mattoon's two week's reign of terror as given by Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, Chicago psychiatrist, after a thorough investigation involving the psychoanalysis of the entire city.
If the epidemic of fear was spread only by suggestion, how does the doctor account for the attack reported by Mrs. Beatrice Ryder?
The doctor's own investigation showed that all the excitement was touched off by the experience of Mrs. Bert Kearney, first victim of the phantom prowler.

HEARD NO GOSSIP

How then does he explain the fact that Mrs. Ryder suffered a similar attack the same evening well before anybody had any idea that a sinister sadist was loose in the city? As Mrs. Ryder said when she saw Dr. Hulbert:
"This couldn't have been imagination because I'd heard no gossip nor read anything in the newspapers." To anyone but a psychiatrist, this might seem unanswerable. But to a man trained in the foibles and tricks of the human mind, it is much less convincing than it seems, though none-the-less interesting.
So far as the doctor is concerned, Mrs. Ryder's is simply a case of retrospective rationalization.

DID NOT CALL POLICE

Though today she is a very frightened woman, believing as she does that the "prowler" will return to "finish the job", she was NOT frightened at the time the supposed attack occurred. This is evidenced, not only by her conduct on the evening in question, but by the fact that she did not call the police. Here, in brief, is Mrs. Ryder's account:
On the evening of Sept. 1, she was alone with her two small children, Ann, 5, and Joe, 2, who were asleep in the middle bedroom. Her husband, George, a postal clerk, was at work.
Like Mrs. Kearney, she too happened to have an unusual sum of money in the house that night--the proceeds of her husband's pay check. She was apprehensive about it, enough so to notice unusual noises--but, unlike Mrs. Kearney, not in a state of actual fear.

DOOR, WINDOWS CLOSED

Her uneasiness may have been enough to bring on a digestive upset. At any rate, she had one. After drinking "several pots" of coffee and taking a dose of medicine, her distress increased until finally, as she said, she "popped her cookies."
Notice that even then, the gas man did not appear.
After this incident, she went into the bedroom where the children were to lie down. Both door and windows had been closed because the baby had a cold. No sooner had she got into bed than she heard a strange noise--a kind of "plop"--noticed a strange odor and experienced a strange "floating" sensation accompanied by numbness of the legs and fingers.

BABY STARTED COUGHING

Then the baby started coughing and after the fashion of all mothers, Mrs. Ryder ignored her own malaise in taking care of the child. She carried to the kitchen where she rubbed camphorated oil on its chest. Was this, then, an attack by Mattoon's gas-spraying phantom? Mrs. Ryder firmly believes it was. Here is the doctor's answer:
"Yes, she believes it NOW and as a consequence is still in terror. But she didn't believe it THEN. It was only later, after she had heard of the supposed attack on Mrs. Kearney, that such a possibility entered her head."
After the main outlines of a fearsome picture had been supplied by others, it was all-too-easy to go back, weave in retrospective details and make them fit. Easy to take the circumstances of her own illness and its symptoms, add to them a strange noise and the smell of a stuffy roof and come up with the answer Mattoon as a whole was giving in those days to every untoward happening. The vicious prowler and his vapor explained everything--even things that didn't need explanation.
Continuing his analysis of the "case of the simultaneous attack," Dr. Hulbert said:
"This woman was not at all hysterical. On the other hand, her conduct was very ordered. She did not fly into a panic and call the neighbors or the police. The sensations of floating and numbness are not unusual following a vomiting attack, and when her child began coughing they were not so severe as to prevent her from taking care of it.
"If the next day Mrs. Ryder hadn't heard about the gas man, she would have remembered the night of Sept. 1 just as one of those times when everything seems to go wrong." -- Wednesday, September 20, page 5