Chicago Herald-American, Sept 21

Mattoon Terror Like Salem Witch Hunt

BY EFFIE ALLEY
MATTOON, Ill. Sept. 21 -- Mattoon's gas phantom can boast a long and 100 per cent American ancestry, dating back to the witch hunts of colonial days.
According to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist, who has just completed an investigation of Mattoon's epidemic of mass hysteria, the same forces which created the recent terror here have at one time or another manifested themselves in nearly every American community, sometimes with tragic, sometimes with comic results.
All of which is just the doctor's way of saying that Americans are a suggestible people, quick to take up a fad or a fetish. He wants it made clear that while it lasted Mattoon's terror of the supposed gas-sprayer was a fad.

COULD BE GRAVE

Though fads of this kind are harmless enough, the same emotional forces which give rise to them may, when centered on a different object, create ugly and even grim situations. Take, for example, the earliest manifestations of this kind in America--the Salem, Mass., witch hunts.
It all began with two hysterical girls who accused a hunchback woman of having bewitched them and exhibited self-inflicted blisters and swellings to prove it.
A lot of people paid off their secret hatreds on the witches.
The people of Rensselaer, Ind., in the year of our Lord, 1939, didn't, of course, believe in witches. But they did believe in lions, after farmers in the vicinity had reported mysterious killings of farm animals.

POSSES ORGANIZED

Dozens of armed posses were organized, expert big-game hunters called in, lions were seen here, there and everywhere in Jasper County. After a month's excitement, the big lion hunt came to a humiliating end with the killing of two dogs whose prints proved to be identical with tracks supposed to have been made by the marauding lions. As for police who have such a situation to deal with, Dr. Hulbert believes that they couldn't do better than follow the example of Mattoon's Police Commissioner Thomas V. Wright. When he gave every individual reporting an attack a choice of an immediate medical examination or a night in jail, the attacks ceased as if by magic.
As the antidote for fear is trust, Dr. Hulbert points out that in any similar situation every effort should be made to build up the faith of the people in constituted authority.
They should be assured and reassured that if there is a culprit at large, the police, using ordinary police methods, will soon have him under lock and key. And that, according to Dr. Hulbert, who is a criminologist as well as a psychiatrist, isn't just baloney. -- Thursday, September 21, page 5