Lore - Lore 231: Out of Breath

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Get access to premium, ad-free episodes, plus weekly bonus content, on Apple Podcasts and Patreon. Learn more here. ———————— Much of the history of folklore we have today involves a community driven to panic over unusual stories and experiences. But few moments in time illustrate that pattern so clearly as the events in one small Midwestern town.  Written and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with research by Cassandra de Alba and music by Chad Lawson. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.   ©2023 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Hey folks, Aaron here. Just a reminder that lore started publishing weekly episodes back in May, giving you more stories than ever before. And all of those episodes are completely free for you to listen to, funded and made possible by the advertisers in each episode. But not everyone likes ads, and some people just want to get right to the stories. So if you want to save listening time, skip those ads, or just find a more direct way to support the show, there's a great option available to you on Apple Podcasts and Patreon. On both platforms, lore premium subscribers get ad-free versions of all new episodes, but that's not all. Subscribers also get weekly bonus episodes called lore bites, also completely ad-free.

To unlock a whole new lore experience, head over to lorepodcast.com slash support, or click the support link in this episode's description. And now, on with the show. The people who received the invitation had to have felt special. I know I would, especially for an event at such a historic place as the Tower of London. Something to remember about the Tower of London is that many, many centuries ago, it was also a zoo. That started way back in 1235, when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II gave England's King Henry III three lions.

I imagine it was the 13th century equivalent of having a nice sports car in your garage or a closet full of exclusive designer shoes. Either way, Henry didn't complain. Over the years that followed, more and more exotic animals were added, including an elephant and a polar bear. Now as you might imagine, this was pretty exciting for the people of London, who came in droves to see these wild beasts for themselves. Generation after generation grew up thinking of the Tower of London as home to a whole manasurer of wild creatures, which is why an 1856 invitation to attend a special ceremony was so exciting.

They called it the annual ceremony of Washing the Lions, and as far as records tell us, it had been a draw for tourists as far back as 1698. The trouble was there was no ceremony of washing the lions. It had started as a prank a century and a half before these official looking invitations were sent out. And if you track down an image of the document online, you'll see one big clue. The date. April 1st. People really will believe anything, if there's enough buy-in from the rest of the community.

We are in some ways very much like Foxmolder of the X-Files, and that we want to believe. So when a story comes along, even if it tests the limits of our gullibility, there are always those who will fall for it, hook line and sinker. But what happens when there's overwhelming proof that this unbelievable thing is really happening? Does it become more truthful when people are injured and afraid? Well 80 years ago, one small Midwestern town experienced just that, and in the process, raised a whole lot of questions.

In the only way to find an answer, it seems, is to follow our nose. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. Nothing gets a community into a panic, like the news that a killer might walk among them. That's what everyone realized in late August of 1940 in a small community in Middle America. World War II was constantly on everyone's mind, but that anxiety was made all the more palpable thanks to a POW camp, Camp Ellis, about 100 miles away, that actually held German prisoners, and one of them, 29-year-old Wilhelm Ziegler, somehow escaped. That anxiety evolved into outright panic a few days later when, on August 30, someone

matching Ziegler's description was spotted at the local post office. He even had a German accent. Add to this a string of break-ins and robberies in the area, and you better believe that people were on high alerts in town. The very next day, things took a turn toward the weird. A local sheet metal worker named Urban Reef woke up in the middle of the night and felt odd. He later told the police that he felt nauseous, but when he tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, he discovered something even more frightening. He was paralyzed.

Instead, he called out for his wife who was asleep right beside him, hoping that she could help, but when she woke up, she too was paralyzed. No one else was in the room, but both of them reported one particular clue. The air in the room had a smell to it, like the overpowering scent of flowers or something sweet. An hour and a half later though, they felt fine. Atta Stavall is that someone else experienced the same thing that night elsewhere in town. All the way across town, a mother woke up to the sound of her daughter coughing, but when she tried to swing her legs out of bed, they wouldn't obey.

The following night, September 1 leading into the second, Aileen Kernie and her three-year-old daughter Dorothy both went to bed in the same room around 11pm, but noticed a smell when they got there. Aline later described it as sickening sweet, and it first assumed that it was the scent of flowers blowing into the room from outside the window. A moment later though, she felt her body go numb. She shouted for her sister Martha, who was visiting and staying in the next room over, to come and help.

Martha, for her part, could still walk, but she certainly noticed the smell when she entered the room. Maybe an hour and a half later, Alien's husband Bert, who worked as a taxi driver in town, was informed by the police that his wife had called them, so he rushed home. When he arrived, he claimed to see a dark figure standing outside one of the windows of his house. Bert described the shape as tall and dark, with some sort of hats over their head. Bert shouted and ran after the figure, but whoever or whatever it was, they escaped. Back home, Aileen claimed that the gas left her lips, mouth,

and throat, parched and burned, as if they'd been exposed to a fire or something acidic. And that might be enough excitement for one night, but it was far from over for others in town. A mile away, George Ryder came home from work to find his wife crying and their kids in a panic. They had smelled an unusual scent in the house, and it had made her feel light-headed. And remember, they had no idea what had just happened at the Kernie's house across town.

Another mother who lived near the writers later told the reporter that she had woken up that night to an odd, sickly, sweet smell that left her feeling numb and caused her kids to vomit. She was the first, as far as I can tell, to call the person behind these attacks the anesthetic prowler. On the 5th of September, the police followed a number of leads to a location they believed to be the hideout of this prowler, but found absolutely nothing there. Later that night, around 10pm, a woman named Bula Cords and her husband came home after a night out and found an odd crumpled up piece of white fabric on their front porch.

Bula lifted the cloth up and smelled it. And honestly, I don't know why anyone would do that, home after a night out and found an odd crumpled up piece of white fabric on their front porch. Bula lifted the cloth up and smelled it. And honestly, I don't know why anyone would do that, but she obviously felt compelled to, and instantly felt something that she described like an electric current shoot down her body, followed by numbness. A moment later, her lips and mouth were swollen and inflamed. The police collected the fabric and sent it off to the state crime bureau to be tested, while the paper in town published news of the encounter.

And if the local community wasn't already at the edge of panic thanks to the ongoing cloud of World War II and the escaped German prisoner, the paper's headline was sure to get them there. It referred to a lean and Dorothy Kerny as the first victims, sending a powerful, if maybe unintentional message. These were violent attacks, and they were only the first of many to come. And it turns out, they were right. The anesthetic prowler wouldn't be the only name the people of the community would use to refer to the mysterious attacker. The will encounter more of these epitats as we continue.

But over time, this figure would take on the very name of the town it happened in, in the history books, Mattoon, Illinois. It's not a big town, and it never has been, maybe 16,000 people in 1944, and about the same today. It's about 10 minutes away from Eastern Illinois University, my alma mater, in fact, and situated nicely on Interstate 57 in the southern part of the state, about an hour south of Champagne. But on September 6th of 1944, they were still trying to figure out what this unknown attacker

was even doing. By then, papers all over the state were covering the story, even as far north as Chicago. And I've got to tell you, these papers weren't helping the people of Mattoon. They were fanning the flames of panic, stoking them into a blaze. Headlines kept using words like victims that conjured up dead bodies in the overactive imaginations of many, and they often delivered a lack of hope. The Chicago Tribune even had one headline that said, Mattoon fiends, fails two more with poison gas. How do you not freak out after reading something like that? Naturally, the public panic caused officials to step forward to try and calm their fears.

The mayor of town, a former physician named E.E. Richardson, suggested that it was mustard gas based on the symptoms. Military experts weighed in with theories of their own, too, but none of it helped to ease the anxiety of the people who were afraid. And then, more attacks arrived. On the night of September 6th, one Mrs. Spangler reported an odd gas that left her throat parched and her body paralyzed. Elsewhere, a young girl named Glenda Hendershot made similar claims, and was so sick that she missed school the next day. And just after midnight, Laura Junkin reported noticing a gas that smelled like something heavenly yet sickening, she said.

The principal of a local school, Francis Smith, and her sister Maxine, told the police that the proler had visited their house not once, but twice, both times noticing a smoke-like gas being forced into their home, and the now universal scent that came with it, of something overly sweet. One woman, Edna James, even claimed to see the man responsible right inside her own kitchen, although she described him more like an ape with a spray gun. Edna, by the way, worked as Mattoon's only fortune teller, so of all the victims. I guess I would have expected her to see the attack coming, but she was genuinely surprised.

At this point, at least 19 people claimed to be victims of the mad gasser, and I probably don't have to tell you that the general public wasn't handling this situation all too well. In fact, a good amount of gaslighting, if you'll pardon the pun, started up, with experts and officials claiming that there was actually no attacker at all. What did they think was happening? Well one guy said it was all the fault of people reading too many comic books. Another said that people were just smelling something in their house or yard like spoiled milk, ragweed, or clover.

Although expecting all 19 of these people to somehow have the same household item laying around seems pretty weak. Officials who still believe that there was a human being behind the attacks went looking for nurses with access to chemicals and high school students who were taking chemistry class. And the general public? Well they weren't handling it very well. Bands of young men began prowling the streets at night, some of them armed with weapons

looking for the culprit, and most folks were leaving their porch lights on throughout the night, hoping that it would act as a deterrent. Then, on the evening of September 8th, a girl was reading beside a window around 11pm when movement out in the darkness caught her eye. She turned to see a man on her front porch, mostly hidden by the shadows, but she was absolutely certain she could tell what he was doing, removing the storm glass out of the window. In a heartbeat, the glass was out, and the figure pressed something to the screen that emitted

a long stream of smoke into the house. The girl panicked, called the police, and retreated deeper into the house, but when they arrived, she was too frightened to put words together. She couldn't give the police the description that they desperately needed. The attacks continued. The same night the mad gasser removed that window. They also visited the home of Mrs. Russell Bailey, where four people were left feeling nauseous as well as suffering dry and burn mouths and throats.

Lucy Stevens and her nephew Jimmy Hardin were also caught in a gas attack with paralysis and mouth and throat issues, and Mary and Kevin Fitzpatrick both claimed to be gassed in their kitchen, although the police only believed Kevin's story. Somehow, even though she was in the same room at the same time, Mary was only suffering from acute anxiety. Honestly though, so were a lot of other people. By September 10th, an FBI agent had arrived in town,

which had to have ushered in a mixture of increased fear and sudden relief. Yes, help had arrived, but they only needed the help because things had gotten so bad. The final reported attack took place the next day, on September 11th. A 54 year old woman named Bertha Bench reported seeing the gasser outside her bedroom window

that night from where they shot that same smoke into her house. Why people weren't closing their windows at night? I have no idea. Oddly, her description of the gasser was different from all the other reports. Her gasser, she claimed, had been a woman wearing men's clothing.

And when she was well enough the next morning to go outside with her son and investigate, they claimed they found markings in the soil by the window that could only have been caused by high-heeled shoes. If you're interested in numbers, Bertha was the 35th person to report a gas attack in the 12 days since it had all started. It had sent Mattoon into a panic so intense that the police chief had to issue a statement in the paper asking people to stay indoors, to stop gathering into vigilante mobs, and

to put away their guns. Then if they spotted anyone following police to a crime scene, curious locals or thirsty press, they would arrest them. So what were the results of all that police activity? Well they managed to narrow it down to four suspects, described as two amateur chemists and two crackpots. None of them however were charged with anything. And remember that mysterious white fabric

that Bula cords had found and sniffed? The authorities weren't able to find traces of anything on it. No gas residue, no chemicals, nothing. The effects on the community, though, were deep. A number of mothers packed their kids up in cars and left town to get away from the danger. One man, a 58-year-old guy named Hyrum Weaver, was patrolling his daughter's workplace

to keep her safe when he fell and shattered his hip. And worst of all, a 7 year old boy named Buddy French was admitted to the hospital after he and a friend mixed vinegar and rubbing alcohol while playing gasman, and he got shot in the eye by some of the chemicals. You know, totally normal stuff for kids to do on a cool autumn day, right? By September 15th, the only story about the mad gasser was on page 6 of the local paper. After that, anything printed was just editorial stuff debating the truth behind the stories.

Nothing new was ever reported again. For years, the events in Mattoon would be seen as mass hysteria. A 1945 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology described the events as a mental epidemic and entirely psychogenic. Translation? Everyone had made it up. Of course, other more wild theories have been put forward. Some think that it was all the work of aliens. Others accused the government and the military of testing new weapons of war on a small-man western town,

and then denying all involvement. There was even a massive PR battle between the authorities and a nearby Atlas Imperial diesel engine plant. Some people believe that gases from the plants were being blown by the wind across the city and pointed their finger at a chemical called tetra chloride. The trouble was, that was only ever used in fire extinguishers in the factory. A chemical that they did use daily, though, was called trichlorethylene, but it was odorless,

and it never caused paralysis. For years, that's what the conversation about the mad gasor of Matune has looked like. Alternating between claims of mass hysteria and government conspiracies, it's one of those mysteries that has left a lot of people wondering what the truth really is. Although at least one person thinks that they've nailed down the weapon used by the Gasser. Back in 2002, a chemistry teacher named Scott Maruna published a book called The Mad Gasser of Mattoon dispelling the hysteria and pointed to another theory. In his mind, no other gas fits the descriptions better than nitromethane. It has a sickly sweet scent, it can cause numbness and partial paralysis, and most intriguing of all, it has a shelf life that fits nicely around the 12 days of the reported attacks.

Once Nitro Methane is created, it seems. It's usable for only a short period of time. 16 Days Look, I know that the story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon isn't your typical historical folklore story come to life. It feels too modern, and lacks a monster, or someone wielding dark magical powers. I get that, but it also represents folklore in its most pure and unaltered state. From high above, the madgaster ticks all of the boxes. We have a community that felt unsafe, and some unusual activity they could all point at

and blame for that anxiety. The armed mobs, the rumors and whispers, and even the stories of outside powers singling them out and attacking them, all of that could just as easily be describing a 16th century witchcraft panic or a village looking for a vampire. In Natune, wasn't the first place to feel targeted by a mysterious gasser. For three months in 1933, a community in Virginia went through a similar experience. Each night, people reported being overcome by a gas

inside their homes. Lots of people spotted a mysterious prowler, and in the end, it was all chalked up to mass hysteria. In January of 1944, just a few months before the events in Mattoon, the town of Coatsville in Pennsylvania had the same trouble. In fact, three people died from those attacks, where the gas was described as smelling sweet.

And in December of 1961, the annual Christmas program at Brookhaven Baptist Church in Texas was brought to a halt when all 100 of the people in the building smelled a sickening sweet gas. 12 of them passed out and among the symptoms were things like nausea, headaches, and vomiting. No one died, but no solid cause was ever nailed down either. But the truth at the center of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon's story might actually be found

a lot closer to home. One of our sources for this episode was a former reporter named Bob Samson, who worked as a reporter in nearby Decatur in the 1970s. And according to him, pretty much everyone in town believed that they knew who the mad gasmer really was. His name they say was Farley Luellen. His family was well known around town as the owners of a local grocery store, and his dad was known for his generosity,

giving funds to all sorts of causes over the years. But Farley was a slightly more tragic story. It seems he had gone off to college over a decade prior, just up the highway at the University of Illinois in Champaign. At first, he settled in really well and was deeply passionate about his chemistry studies, but severe mental health troubles forced him to leave school and return home. Since then, he had been living in a trailer behind the family grocery store, or at least he had been up until a trailer behind the family grocery store, or at least

he had been up until a short time before the mad gasser attacks began. It seems his trailer had become a home-brew version of the chemistry lab he had been forced to leave behind when he dropped out of college. One night in late August of 1944, whatever he was working on in there caused an explosion, almost destroying the trailer, but perhaps not everything was lost. Because if he did manage to manufacture some nitro-methane gas, its expiration date would have been around the 11th of September, possibly explaining why the attack stopped after that. There's just one other problem.

Farley Luell and they say was admitted to a mental health facility in mid-September of 1944. Farley Luelland, they say, was admitted to a mental health facility in mid-September of 1944, leaving the final attack on September 11th, unexplainable. Unless that is, I tell you that Farley had two sisters who were deeply loyal and wanted to protect him, which perfectly fits the description of that final attacker. A woman dressed in a man's clothes. Communities are a fragile organism. They often balance on the edge of a knife, ready to tip in one direction or another. And no matter the reason, a true real-life attacker or just the panicked whispers of an anxious town, the results can often be devastating.

Then while the sort of situation that took place in Mattoon back in 1944 is unusual, it's far from unique. In fact, just a few years before, a community on the East Coast experienced their own form of mysterious attacker, and the story has become a legend they will never forget. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. It started like so many scary stories seem to, in October. The year was 1939, and the waters of the Atlantic were losing their summer warmth as they washed over the shores of Cape Cod. The first report came from a group of schoolkids who were playing near the ocean. According to them, they spotted something large and black hiding behind one of the dunes

and some rocks. They didn't approach it though, probably because of how unusual this thing looked. It was tall, much taller than a normal adult, and covered entirely in black clothing. Whatever it was, its eyes seemed to shimmer within an earthly light, and covered entirely in black clothing. Whatever it was, its eyes seemed to shimmer within an earthly light, and they even noted that there were odd silver horns on top of its head. Now, stories like this are easy to dismiss when they come from a bunch of kids. Toss in some language about overactive imaginations and will have all the ingredients necessary to cook up something totally dismissable, except, well, other

people started seeing things as well. Now one thing to remember is that the location for these odd sightings, Provin's Town, Massachusetts, is at the very tip of the curly arm that is Cape Cod. It's out there, isolated, surrounded by ocean and sand. I'd have to imagine that made people a bit more anxious than others might be, but maybe I'm just projecting. It was a local woman named Mary Costa who spotted the thing next. She said that she had been walking down the streets and was passing town hall when something large and black jumped out of the bushes. Her description seemed to line

up nicely with the one given by those kids, too. Dressed all in black, glowing eyes, and very, very tall, maybe 8 feet or more. The creature quickly slipped away, but it would be seen again. More witnesses spotted it out on the dunes alongside the ocean, while others ran into it in town. Many of the witnesses claimed that the thing, whatever it was, had the unnatural ability to leap away, jumping over high obstacles like fences and even buildings. Others said that it moved too fast to be human, or even natural.

And while descriptions like this make me instantly think of the London Monster known as Spring Hill Jack, this was a century later and an ocean away. So folks in the area gave it all sorts of new titles, the province town phantom, the devil of the dunes, the black flash, and my favorite, the blot, maybe because it resembled a dark ink spot, I guess. Personally, I love the logic they tried to apply to this thing. One person in the local paper claimed that whoever it was, it managed to jump so high because it had chair springs tied to the bottoms of its feet. But if that's the case, you would think the papers would have been filled with stories

of people who sat down a bit too hard and found themselves flying toward the ceiling, something I have never heard of before. One sighting was more frightening than many of the others. The phantom appeared in front of one man and seemed ready to attack him. The man, maybe feeling braver than most, took a swing at the creature, aiming a punch as high as he could, but the phantom reportedly caught the man's fist in its oversized palm and then squeezed until the man collapsed in pain. And all the while, it laughed at him.

There were three house fires in town that month, all of which were blamed on the double of the dunes, and more witnesses came out of the woodwork too. The one man, Captain Finneas Blackstrap, told the local paper, �I'm damned certain I saw him. We've had the black flash here every fourth year since I was a boy, and then he added, sure he can move fast, but he never does no one know harm.� As you'd expect, the police got involved, but they never found what they were looking for, although that might be because they weren't really looking too hard.

The police chief was actually quoted as saying that the black flash was nothing more than just a couple of teenagers, one on the shoulders of the other, wearing a long black coat with a flower sifter on their face for a mask, like some sort of Scooby-Doo villain, I guess. If we can believe the legends, sightings of this mysterious creature actually predate 1939, with stories blaming it for other house fires a few years earlier. And despite the attention and panic, those reports continued into the 1940s. In November of 1945, for example, it said that the monster was cornered in a local school yard, but when the police arrived and approached it, it turned and jumped over a 10-foot high fence. A month later, it appeared outside a house where four kids were playing one evening.

When it tried to get inside, one of the boys had the bright idea to take a bucket of water upstairs and dump it on the creature from above. They say the black flash was never seen again, but if I'm honest, I'm not ready to close the book on the Provincetown Phantom, because it seems that wherever people go, they'll always find a reason to work themselves up into a panic, and I'd rather that reason be a supernatural monster than a neighbor with some gas.

than a neighbor with some gas. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. Information about all of that's

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