The Chicago Herald-American
Alienist Declares Mattoon Attacks 'Fear Contagion'
BY EFFIE ALLEYMATTOON, Ill. Sept. 18 -- What caused Mattoon's reign of terror?
When hysteria sweeps a large number of people there may be other forces at work than fear, according to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist, who for the first time in history is psychoanalyzing an entire community and diagnosing its illness. The most important of these, Dr. Hulbert says, is SUGGESTIBILITY--that is, the accepting by one person of the ideas and emotions of another. Now take the case of Mrs. Carl Cordes of 921 N. 21st st., who was overcome when she picked up a cloth on her front porch on the evening of Sept. 5 four days after the phantom gas-sprayer had first made his appearance in Mattoon. Like all the other victims, Mrs. Cordes answered the doctor's questions readily, described her symptoms in detail and told all the circumstances of the attack. She began by saying:
"I know I'm a very nervous person. I haven't been well in some time, but I know I didn't imagine this. It was real. I'm sure of that." The cloth, which was clean, lay on the front porch neatly folded when she first saw it. Thinking that one of the neighbors had wrapped something in it and placed it there, she picked it up. Surprised at finding it empty and noticing a round wet-looking splotch in the center, she involuntarily put it to her nose and smelled. She was over come. She said:
"It went through me like an electric shock. My legs got numb to the knees, my mouth was like it had been scalded with a hot cup of coffee and my nose and throat were awfully sore for two days afterwards.
"No, it didn't bother my eyes." This gave the doctor the clue he needed and after thanking Mrs. Cordes, we left. Gas? The doctor answered:
"No--couldn't have been. Remember the eyes. They couldn't have escaped a volatile, poisonous gas." What then? Mrs. Cordes is a nice woman. A sincere woman, pleasant to deal with. She wouldn't have made this up?
The answer is, of course, that she didn't make it up.
UNCONSCIOUS VICTIM
She was a victim of suggestibility. Unconsciously, she accepted the ideas and emotions of others. She had heard about the gas man. Indeed, he and his depredations were on every one's tongue. Suggestibility is heightened during times of unusual strain. It is especially marked, Dr. Hulbert says, in two groups of people--those not in a sturdy state of health and those whose mental makeup predisposes them to dread: the type of persons who might think "Wouldn't it be dreadful if that gas man came here" and thus launch themselves on a whole train of imaginings as to the dire results of such a visitation. But does suggestibility account for the very real illnesses, pains and bodily discomforts these people suffered? Again the doctor answers yes--suggestibility plus certain rather mysterious tricks that mind and body can perform under stress. Dr. Hulbert explains:"At times when anxiety tension becomes too great, it is converted into bodily symptoms and the anxiety is thereby relieved. It's a good thing, too, because it helps people to live through some pretty tough spots. It may result in an increase, decrease or distortion of any function of the body. "Remember that fear--you can call it whatever you want, anxiety, worry, insecurity--is at the bottom of all this business. "People tell us they were sick at the stomach, nauseated, vomiting. That was a conversion under stress accompanied by increase of function. Their legs were numb or paralyzed, or so weak as to cause them to stagger--a decrease of function. Some reported heavy beating of their hearts--another increase. Some light-headedness or dizziness--decrease again. "Notice, that no two reported an identical series of symptoms. Similar, yes, but not exactly the same. That is significant, too--"
IT WASN'T GAS
The doctor broke and we put in:"But, they really were sick, weren't they?"
Whereupon the doctor exploded:
"Of course they were sick "They smelled things, too--our houses are always full of odors and they are coming in from outside all the time. But they weren't smelling poison gas and they weren't sick from it. That is the point." -- Monday, September 18, page 1, 2
(Further details of psychoanalysis of Mattoon gas hysteria in tomorrow's Chicago Herald-American.)
Credulity Seat of Mattoon's Terror
BY EFFIE ALLEYMATTOON, Ill. Sept. 19 -- Theme song of panic is "I believe!"
I believe this, I believe that. I believe the neighbors, the children, total strangers. I believe anything anybody wants to tell me. This will to believe, according to Dr. Harold S. Hulbert, psychiatrist investigating the case of Mattoon's phantom gas man, is not only the hallmark of mass hysteria, but also the chief means by which the infection of fear is spread through a community.
ADD NEW DETAILS
One believes and tells another. This other passes on the story--and the infection--to one or two or maybe three and each new believer unwittingly adds new details. When Mattoon's scare first started nobody saw or even thought they saw the "mad anesthetist". At first, he moved about his work unseen, virtually unheard. Then here and there people appeared who had heard a hissing noise as of a spray gun. By the time the phantom got around to paying a stealthy visit to the home of Mrs. Bertha Bence at 2605 Champaign av., not only the clump of his approaching feet could be heard, but also the whirring noise of his "gas machine" in action. Dr. Hulbert's interview with Mrs. Bence was enlightening. Still upset by her experience, Mrs. Bence first told the doctor that she isn't well and then added:"I just can't stand all this excitement. And then I'm worried about my oldest boy. That's his picture there--he's overseas and I haven't heard from him since July."
Had she made any inquiries about him?
"Oh, yes. I've been to the fortune-teller. She says he's in the hospital. She says I mustn't worry too much. I can't stand it."
And now about the gas attack.
HEARD FUNNY NOISE
Well, she had gone to bed in the front room. All at once, she heard a funny noise like a machine whirring and the room began to fill with gas. Believing she was "passing out", she screamed and her three boys came running and helped her out on the porch. "We stayed out there till 4 o'clock in the morning. I was afraid to come back. That stuff would kill you. Junior said if he had got another whiff of it, he would have died. He has asthma. He'd have died if he'd smelled that stuff another minute."When the police came, could they smell it, too?
"No, I don't know why, but they couldn't. It's funny though. My neighbor could and she didn't get here till after they had gone. But she could smell it--plain. And a boy who had been to five other places could. He said it smelled just the same. Just exactly the same.
"Junior chased the fellow that night but he couldn't catch him. The next day, though, we found four little holes in the earth under the window where he had set up his machine." Why would the gas man want to attack her?
"Well, sir, that's something I just can't figure out. It couldn't have been money. We haven't got any. Everybody knows that. I guess it's sabotage--or an escaped German. And I'm afraid he'll be back." There was terror in her voice as she said it. Why the trail of sabotage should have led to her neat little home or why a fleeing Nazi should take time to indulge in such risky practices were things Mrs. Bence just hadn't thought about. There, said the doctor afterwards, you have the picture of the whys and wherefores of community terror. A woman so honest and well-meaning herself, she is completely uncritical of others or what they tell her. Deeply troubled, far from rugged, a woman of this type, according to Dr. Hulbert, is a typical example of the basically insecure and hence, the highly suggestible person--ripe to become a victim of terror at the slightest stimulus. A prey of constant fears, she seeks reassurance, even in the visions of a fortune-teller, who would "tell more for a dollar" as Mrs. Bence so frankly said than for the 50 cents she had to spare.
WARTS ON FACE
And yet, one wonders. For the climax of that credulity which serves so well to keep alive and to spread community hysteria was reached in the story told police by that very fortune teller, Mrs. Edna James, the only prop on which Mrs. Bence in her anxiety had to lean. Mrs. James maintained she had not only smelled the sickening perfume-like gas, but saw its sprayer, crouched "ape-like" with his spray-gun in his hands staring at her with evil, yellow eyes. The light was faint, she said, but it was enough to reveal an ugly face made more repulsive by the presence of warts! -- Tuesday, September 19, page 5Mattoon's Phantom 'Suggestive Fear'
BY EFFIE ALLEYMATTOON, 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
Mattoon Terror Like Salem Witch Hunt
BY EFFIE ALLEYMATTOON, 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.
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