1944, a gasser attacked residents in a small town in Illinois

On the night of August 31, 1944, in Mattoon, a small town in Illinois, USA, a lady woke up saying she smelled a sweet odor, her body was paralyzed, and she couldn't move her legs. She said there was someone outside the window.

The next day, the local newspaper ran a story: "The Mad Gasser is at work in Mattoon." Over the following week, more than twenty households in town reported that someone had sprayed gas into their homes at night, causing dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. Some said they saw a tall man in a hat running outside the window; others said it was a woman.

Police patrolled everywhere, residents kept guns in their homes, and no one dared to sleep at night. State police and the FBI both came. World War II was still going on then, and people feared enemy gas attacks.

The result? No one was caught. The police found no evidence of any spraying, and air samples turned up nothing. The FBI sent some physical evidence to the lab, but no gas was found.

Later, psychologists analyzed the newspapers from that time and discovered that more "victims" appeared only after the earliest reports, and some people only felt "unwell" after reading the newspaper for the first time. A scholar named Johnson wrote a paper in 1945 calling it a "mass hysteria."

World War II was still underway, and people were on edge. In mid-September, the police chief told the media that the whole thing was imagined by the townspeople; after that, the newspapers stopped reporting it, and the incidents stopped happening.

Whether the "gasser" actually existed can no longer be proven today. Some in town say maybe one or two cases were real—someone actually broke in through a window, frightened people smelled something, and then the story grew and grew.

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