The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: The Phantom Who Poisoned a Town — or Didn't

2026-06-28 · Strange Mass Events · 7 min read

On the night of 1 September 1944, a young housewife in Mattoon, Illinois named Aline Kearney lay in bed with her small daughter while her husband Bert worked his shift driving a taxi. The war was a year from its end, and this quiet railroad town in the flat farm country of central Illinois had felt it mainly through ration books and casualty telegrams. Then Aline noticed a smell. It was sweet, sickly and unfamiliar, seeping in as if through the open bedroom window, and within moments her legs grew heavy and a dryness burned in her mouth and throat. She called out to her sister, who alerted the neighbors and telephoned the police. When Bert came home in the early hours and rounded the house, he later said he glimpsed a man at the window who turned and ran into the dark. The next afternoon the local Daily Journal-Gazette put the story on its front page under a headline about an anesthetic prowler loose in Mattoon.

Over the following two weeks the reports multiplied. More than two dozen households came forward, and the accounts were strikingly similar: a strange sweet odor near a window, then sudden nausea, dizziness, a pounding heart, a burning in the mouth, and a weakness or partial paralysis of the legs. The symptoms lifted within an hour or so and left no lasting mark. Most of those who reported an attack were women, many of them home alone at night while their husbands worked or served. Doctors who examined the affected found nothing that required treatment beyond rest.

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