Published June 1953
The Madman of Mattoon
Women lived in fear of the phantom who seemed to haunt this Illinois townby Reed Millard
The police got a hint of the terror to come on the night of September 2nd, when they received a frantic call from a hysterical woman. "My friend--a man tried to kill her with poison gas!" she cried.
A squad car screamed to the scene and the victim of the strange attacked gasped out her story. She had been alone, her husband working on the night shift at a nearby factory. At about midnight she awakened "with a feeling I was being suffocated...The room was filled with a peculiar sickish odor like sweet smelling flowers. I tried to get up but my legs seemed paralyzed. Finally, I crawled to the telephone and called next door..."
Patiently the patrolman examined the window screen, which seemed to be properly in place. With equal care, he checked the doors, noting the fact that one was unlocked. He went outside and played his flashlight carefully on every part of the yard. There were no recently made depressions on the damp earth and grass.
Then he went back to talk to the still distraught woman. "Maybe," he suggested to the victim, "you just had a bad dream."
The woman shook her head. "I was gassed," she said positively. "I'm still sick."
"You didn't see anybody?" the patrolman persisted.
This time there was some hesitation before the admission, "No, but I know there was someone there."
His questioning getting him no place, the officer urged the woman to go back to bed.
The whole thing was puzzling, he had to admit, but he filed a routine report and dismissed it as the sort of zany happeneing that every policeman encounters.
The next day the telephone at police headquarters rang with calls reporting two similar incidents. And three nights later there came a call that again sent a patrol car racing along darkened streets. The policeman who rushed into the house found a hysterical woman, apparently partly paralyzed and violently ill. Her story checked exactly with the one reported earlier.
The harried police had no sooner finished their checkup of this curious repeat performance, when a third call sent them to another address. Again, they found a paralyzed woman who sobbed out the now familiar account.
Doubting the possibility of a strange marauder being abroad in this peaceful neighborhood, the police could only shrug their shoulders and put it down as a bizarre, but insignificant, episode. A search of the area in daylight turned up no clues, and the women, though no longer hysterical, could do no more than repeat their descriptions of the strange "sickish sweet" gas.
However, the police soon had reason to take a grimmer view of what had happened. Whoever--or whatever--was stalking the city was apparently hurrying swiftly through one section of town after another, making his weird attacks.
Alarmed, Chief C. E. Cole summoned the town's entire force of ten policemen to meet what was developing into an emergency. Yet, though a dozen women reported identical assaults, not a single helpful clue was turned up.
Chief Cole began to suspect, almost hope, that the women, often alone and jittery anyway, had smelled the fumes of chemicals from a nearby war plant.
Impossible, the manager snorted.
"There's no gas escaping. We've been operating for years; surely it would have been noticed before."
Doctors examining the victims also shook their heads at the explanation. Unquestionably, some of the women <I>had</I> been paralyzed.
The next night the Chief's theory took another blow--and the case got its first break. One terrified woman screamed over the telephone, "I saw him!"
When the squad car arrived, she calmed down enough to describe what had happened. An unfamiliar sound had awakened her, and in the shadowy outline of the window she had caught a glimpse of a dark figure. He seemed to be pumping something like an insecticide sprayer. Then she smelled the mysterious gas, and screamed.
The marauder turned and ran, but as he did, she saw that he was tall, thin, apparently dressed in black. He was, she was sure, wearing a black skull cap. The next night, police got another baffling clue. This time, the victim was drinking coffee with her husband when she happened to glance out the window. On the porch she saw a piece of white cloth with what appeared to be a red stain on it. She went out and picked it up.
Almost as if compelled to do so, she held it up to her nose, then staggered and screamed. Her husband rushed out to find her lying on the floor. She was rushed to a doctor, who reported that she appeared to be partially paralyzed.
Later, she told questioning police, "It was as if a charge of electricity ran through me. It burned--but I couldn't move."
Here at least was a tangible exhibit, the first actual object that might be connected with the macabre events. Perhaps the piece of cloth had been left here by the phantom, after he saturated it with the paralyzing chemical he used.
The Illinois Criminal Investigation Laboratory rushed down a chemical expert, Richard T. Piper. After studying and analyzing the cloth, he decided that it might have been soaked with a substance called chloropicrin, but he wasn't sure. However, Piper had to admit that he was mystified, for if chloropicrin was involved, it did not seem that this would explain the paralyzing effect of the rag. FBI experts expressed similar bewilderment.
Meanwhile terror stalked Mattoon, for the weird attacks on women increased. In a single night, 7 calls came in. The town's policemen, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, were given no rest. The Department was deluged with calls from citizens demanding protection. Reporters swarmed in from news services and big Chicago dailies.
Soon, angry, worried citizens acted to take the law into their own hands. Cars filled with men carrying shotguns began to prowl the streets. Neighbors organized their own vigilante squads to patrol groups of houses.
When frantic businessmen planned a mass meeting to discuss the thing that was happening to their town, Thomas Wright, police commissioner, gave them warning.
"If this goes on any longer," he said flatly, "somebody is going to get killed--and it won't be from gas. The people here are losing all control of themselves. They're getting hysterical. I wouldn't walk through anybody's back yard right now for $10,000."
Admitting that the local police were indeed at their wit's end, Commissioner Wright sent out an SOS to the state police. They took the affair as seriously as did the excited citizenry, for into Mattoon they rushed eight squad cars and a mobile radio unit.
Carefully Captain Harry Curtis, in charge of the contingent, planned a shrewd deployment so that one of his cars could arrive at any point in the city in a matter of seconds. Each was in touch with the others by two-way radio; if need be, all could converge on a single point almost instantly.
But Captain Curtis had other plans which he was not talking about, except to Mattoon police and a few citizens who would be needed to carry them out. One of them was Dr. B. Raymond Cole, who was ready at Memorial Methodist Hospital.
Tensely the officers waited for autumn darkness to fall. At 10 o'clock, the first call came. A frantic woman was crying the familiar words. "Help...help...I've been gassed...the madman..."
Smoothly the call went out to the nearest patrol car. Thirty seconds later it was in front of the house, where stern-faced state patrolmen rushed inside.
Picking up the hysterical woman, they raced to the hospital, where Dr. Cole stood waiting. He immediately examined the victim.
His report was an amazing one. "There is nothing wrong with her. Pulse normal. No temperature. No mouth burns. No indications of paralysis. I advise taking her back to her home."
She had hardly left the hospital when news of another attack reached the police. It occurred in a strange place--in a downtown theater. There, a woman suddenly screamed and collapsed on the floor. Officers entering the theater had to fight their way through a milling crowd of excited patrons.
This new victim was hurried into the hospital. Again Dr. Cole made the same quick appraisal, "Nothing wrong with her."
Through the evening, more of the frantic calls came in. Each time the frightened victim was examined, and each time the doctor's verdict was the same.
Finally, the calls stopped. The telephones at police headquarters would never ring again with a report of an assault by the phantom.
Who was the madman of Mattoon? The answer is as fantastic as it is simple. There never had been a madman who sprayed a strange gas at unsuspecting victims. He was a phantom that lurked only in the human mind.
Hysteria, pure and simple, had driven a town to the verge of civic insanity, with who knows what explosive consequences had not the authorities suspected and uncovered the true culprit--an almost unbelievably swift network along which spread the fearful rumor. Nothing more than this grapevine, combined with the impact of unreasoning fear on suggestible minds, had created the incredible affair.
Fortunately, the police guessed correctly that rushing victims to the hospital would provide sobering news, to be quickly spread on this fear-born communications system, jolting the potentially hysterical back to the senses.
Let no one scoff at the mad thing that happened in Mattoon. For it was a form of the same kind of crazy panic that sent people streaming out of big cities on the night of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast. It is a form of mass hysteria that psychologists warn could be a sinister tool for any enemy nation, fiendishly clever at using rumor and hysteria as a weapon.
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