The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

Fortean Phenomena?
Or Mass Hysteria?

Mattoon, Illinois, is today a town of almost 17,000 people in east-central Illinois. Over a period of about two weeks in early September, 1944, it was the site of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, also known as the Phantom Anesthetist and the Anesthetic Prowler.

The purported Mad Gasser was a tall dark being who sprayed a mysterious gas into victims' homes in the middle of the night. The victims reported that they smelled a strange, sweet odor and immediately were struck by paralysis of the legs, nausea, and vomiting.

The local newspaper ran articles about the reported attacks, describing them as part of a developing situation. That, unsurprisingly, led to further reports and local panic. Two competing local militia groups began roaming the town at night, to the alarm of law enforcement who were vastly outnumbered despite having called in ten state police officers and two FBI agents.

The episode was one of the 20th century's outstanding examples of mass hysteria, occurring after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 and shortly before the summer 1947 "flying disc panic" of which the Roswell Incident is only one prominent event within a multi-week sequence of supposed sightings.

"There's more than one mad man in Mattoon. There's 15,000 of them. What we've got here is mass hysteria."

September 1, 1944 — The Mad Gasser Appears

Aline and Bert Kearney lived at 1408 Marshall Avenue in Mattoon, five blocks south of Broadway. On the evening of Friday, September 1, Bert was at work, driving his taxi around Mattoon. Aline's sister, Martha Reedy, was staying at the Kearneys' house while her husband was away in World War II. Also in the house were the Kearney's daughters Dorothy Ellen, three years old, and Carol, two, and Martha's son, Roger, also two years old.

Around 11 PM, Aline had gone to bed. Three-year-old daughter Dorothy Ellen was sleeping in the same bed. The other two children and Martha were in other rooms, Martha was sitting in the living room.

Aline reported that she suddenly smelled a sickeningly sweet odor that made her sick. Her legs and lower body were paralyzed, she was unable to move.

She screamed for her sister Martha, who burst into the bedroom. Martha said that she also smelled a sweet odor entering from the window.

Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette picture:
"MRS. BERT KEARNEY soothes daughter, Dorothy, 4, a victim of mysterious Mattoon malady blamed on a 'gas madman' and which has struck terror through the thriving central Illinois city. Another daughter, Carol, 2, watches."

Martha contacted the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Earl Robertson, who called the police. Meanwhile her husband searched the yards of the two houses and looked through the neighborhood for signs of a prowler.

The police quickly arrived and searched around the Kearney house. They saw no signs of an intruder inside or around the house.

Before long, word reached Bert Kearney and he rushed home. He arrived there around 12:30 AM, after the police had finished their search and left. Bert said that he saw a prowler at one of the bedroom windows. He described the prowler as a tall man in dark clothing and a dark tight-fitting cap. The Kearneys called the police, who returned and searched again, still finding nothing.

The next day's issue of the Daily Journal-Gazette carried the story the next day with a six-column headline:
"ANESTHETIC PROWLER" ON THE LOOSE
with two sub-heads:
MRS. KEARNEY AND DAUGHTER FIRST VICTIMS
BOTH RECOVER: ROBBER FAILS TO GET INTO HOME

The story described how Aline and Dorothy Ellen had smelled a sickly sweet odor and suddenly suffered lightheadedness, paralysis, and vomiting, recovering within thirty minutes with lingering burning sensations on their lips and throat. It also described Bert Kearney's sighting of a prowler.

Over the next two weeks, the police received further reports of a prowler spraying paralyzing gas into people's homes. A few of the reports were of incidents that had happened before the Kearney's episode. The series of reports paralleled and embellished upon the original. The Daily Journal-Gazette continued covering the growing story, which began to be picked up by newspapers in Champaign, Springfield, and Chicago, and the national news magazines Time and Newsweek. By September 13, police had reports of at least three dozen victims of the Mad Gasser. It was two weeks of paranoia, paralysis, and vomiting.

Arrival in Mattoon

Well, all this showed that I needed to check out Mattoon!

The population had been 15,827 at the 1940 census, it peaked around 19,700 people in the early 1970s, and by 2020 it was back to 16,870. It's in the midwestern U.S., so there are vacant spaces downtown and vape shops and tattoo and body-piercing parlors seem over-represented in the local economy.

Hubbartt's Downtown Diner is a busy establishment along Broadway Avenue. I would return there shortly, but first I would explore the downtown area.

Mattoon and the Railroads

The town of Mattoon was established and grew rapidly in the 1850s when two railroads were building new lines that would cross there. The north-south line, which was the Illinois Central Railroad back then, still runs through Mattoon. The station, now used by Amtrak, is on Broadway.

By the 1880s, the Illinois Central Railroad ran from Chicago south to New Orleans, with other routes running west through Iowa and southeast to Louisville. Here is a small section of an 1892 map of the Illinois Central Railroad.

The Canadian National Railway purchased the Illinois Central in 1998.

Amtrak operates three daily trains through Mattoon on the CN line. The Saluki and Illini run between Chicago and Carbondale, four stops south of Mattoon. The City of New Orleans runs between Chicago and New Orleans.

During my visit their schedules were:

The station is open through the day for passengers waiting on trains.

The railroad office off the waiting area has a wide range of technologies — from a fan and adding machines from the 1940s to a push-button phone from the 1980s.

There's a large mural across the station parking lot.

A block to the east and across Broadway is the 2009 mural Civility. It depicts Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who had one of their debates nearby. Lincoln stayed at the Essex Hotel, shown at the far right.

Hot moist air was moving north from the Gulf of Mexico. The humidity was further increased by corn sweat, the result of evapotranspiration in which corn, soybeans, and other crops release moisture as the temperature increases.

The temperature was at 98 °F or 37 °C during my visit to Mattoon, with a heat index of 110–115 °F or 43–46 °C. The dew point was above 80 °F or 27 °C, at which point the combined heat and humidity is moving from oppressive to dangerous. You sweat heavily, but it doesn't cool your body because the sweat doesn't evaporate. You lose water and become even hotter.

I had ventured into the edge of the purple "Extreme" area on that day's National Weather Service HeatRisk map. I needed to go into an air-conditioned diner and have a bagel.

"Bagel Capital of the World"

"Go to Mattoon," they said. "Mattoon is 'The Bagel Capital of the World'," they said.

Harry Lender was a baker who immigrated from Chełm in southeastern Poland to the U.S. in 1927. He initially worked in a bagel bakery in Passaic, New Jersey. In 1929 he purchased his own bakery on Oak Street in New Haven, Connecticut, and arranged for his family to travel to the U.S. and join him.

Lender's Bagels were the first packaged bagels sold in supermarkets, and the company also developed the first frozen bagels. Lender's eventually became the world's largest bagel producer as the family spread bagel awareness inland from the New York area. Murray Lender got the family's bagels into the movie The Odd Couple in one of the first movie product placement deals for anything other than cigarettes. He appeared on The Tonight Show, and created oval-shaped bagels that President Lyndon Johnson was photographed eating in the Oval Office within the White House. Then Lender's went through several corporate purchases:

Bimbo has a plant on the northwest corner of Mattoon, and the city has an annual bagel festival. But the festival seems to be a celebration of local factory employment and not the food item itself. You can find bagels in Mattoon, but they aren't the local specialty.

I asked for a plain bagel with cream cheese.

I ate my bagel, drank coffee, and reviewed my notes so far.

I asked the waitress if she knew about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Nope, no idea.

What about the former site of the Essex Hotel, the prominent local landmark where Lincoln stayed before one of his debates with Douglas, depicted on the mural across the street? No.

I also asked the cashier as I was paying on my way out. She also had no idea.

Or maybe it was all part of the conspiracy, let the curious outsider believe that no one knows about it? No, that's probably not it either.

The whole trip kept in mind my favorite scene from The X-Files. Scully has once again become exasperated with Mulder's careful consideration of a wild local legend. She's disappointed in Mulder for being highly intelligent but believing every crackpot story that comes in. But Mulder corrects her, explaining that he doesn't believe this particular one. However, what fascinates him, and what perhaps is crucial to their investigation, is that the local people do believe it.

I appreciate that as an approach to investigating weird phenomena. But in this case I think that the local people simply didn't know about it. In the case of the diner employees, they hadn't read a sign in the park across the street describing local history. I asked everyone I encountered, but only one person all day had even heard about it and they weren't even in or from Mattoon. A guy in a shop in Charleston, ten miles away, recited the claim that there really was a series of paralyzing gas episodes, all caused by a chemical leak from a nearby factory.

Investigating the Attacks

Fortified with a bagel and coffee, and rehydrated with multiple glasses of water, I went back out into the heat.

Marshall Avenue runs east-west, parallel to and five blocks south of Broadway. So, cross Broadway and walk five blocks south, then turn left and it's two blocks to #1408, the Kearney home in 1944.

A prowler would have to be quite tall to look in or spray gas through the ground floor windows.

This is where the Mad Gasser of Mattoon began!

But it's a very quiet neighborhood today.

Further Attacks

After the first Mad Gasser story appeared in the Daily Journal-Gazette, Mr. and Mrs. Urban Raef went to the police with their report of an identical attack at their home on Grant Avenue overnight on August 30-31, two nights before the Kearney incident. The Raefs said that they had been awakened by a sweet odor that rendered them paralyzed and vomiting, unable to get out of their bed to see if the kitchen stove's pilot light had gone out and they were being poisoned by its gas.

Like the Kearneys, the Raefs had someone staying overnight in their home. At both houses, the guests noticed nothing.

The Raefs reported being paralyzed for an hour and a half, three times as long as Aline Kearney.

Then another pre-Kearney report came in from a young mother living close to the Raefs. Later the same night as the Raefs' paralytic vomiting, she had heard her daughter coughing but was paralyzed and unable to go check on her.

Two other households reported that they had also been attacked by gas on the night of September 1, the same as the Kearneys.

On September 5, Carl and Beulah Cordes returned to their home on North 21st Street around 10 PM. They noticed a piece of white cloth, similar to a man's handkerchief, on their front porch next to the screen door. Beulah picked it up and smelled it, and immediately became violently ill. She described the effect as "a sensation similar to coming in contact with a strong electric current" racing down her body. Her face and lips immediately swelled, her mouth and throat burned, she began spitting blood and vomiting as she began to experience partial paralysis of her legs. She reported that her paralysis lasted "more than two hours". Most new victims found ways to make their attack worse than any that came before.

They called for the police, who found a worn skeleton key and a large mostly-used tube of lipstick on the sidewalk next to the porch. That evidence along with the supposedly anesthetizing cloth were taken away for analysis.

By now the local law enforcement had asked both the Illinois State Police and the FBI for assistance. The state police sent ten state police officers in five patrol cars. The FBI sent two agents with chemical analysis backgrounds. However, they could find no suspicious chemical residue on the cloth or the other items from the Cordes porch.

That same night there was a second incident eight blocks away on North 13th Street. Mrs. Leonard Burrell reported that an intruder had entered through her bedroom window and attempted to gas her.

Purported gas attacks continued, scattered all around town. Any small tear noticed in a window screen would be reported to police as obvious signs of attempted break-ins. Any disturbance in a lawn was interpreted as footprints of the Mad Gasser. Vaguely seen prowlers were described as carrying a Flit gun or similar hand-pumped device for spraying liquid insecticide.

From Blue Velvet — Jeffery Beaumont finishes spraying Dorothy Valens' apartment for bugs, which has allowed him to take her spare key.

From Naked Lunch — William Lee spraying for cockroaches in the early 1940s, based on the short story "Exterminator".

Flit was the brand name for a mineral-oil-based insecticide developed in 1923. They sold the liquid insecticide along with an atomizing sprayer called a Flit gun. From the late 1940s into the early 1950s, Flit contained 5% DDT.

The studio did not have the rights to show the Flit logo, so it was obscured by hand-painting the frames in the 1930 Marx Brothers film. However, Flit used this appearance in its print advertising, making this an example of in-film advertising long before Lender's bagels appeared in The Odd Couple.

From Animal Crackers — Harpo Marx spraying Groucho with an actual Flit gun.

The police had seen no sign of a prowler or attempted break-in, so people decided that they needed to take over. Groups of armed citizens began roaming through Mattoon in the evenings. A second armed group, fifty or so farmers who had formed the "Anti-Theft Association", also started patrolling the town. People who stayed at home kept their lights on and loaded their guns. A woman loading a shotgun which belonged to her husband, who was away in military service, blew a hole through the wall of their kitchen.

Law enforcement was justifiably worried. Somehow the in-town militia and the farmers' militia managed to both roam through the town for several nights without one group surprising the other and triggering a gun battle.

Some of the self-appointed protectors, further dissatisfied with the inability of the police to capture the Mad Gasser, began chasing after the police each time they were called to yet another purported sighting.

So, What Really Happened?

It was much more like the Marx Brothers than the X-Files.

Today's Mattoon Police headquarters is on Wabash Avenue at South 17th Street. The Mattoon policemen of 1944 were skeptical from the beginning, when they had been called to the Kearney home twice around midnight while finding no signs of any prowler.

On September 11, Thomas V. Wright, Commissioner of Public Health, said:

There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists and has made a number of attacks. But many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria. Fear of the gas man is entirely out of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas he is spraying. The whole town is sick with hysteria.

C. Eugene Cole, Mattoon's chief of police, had not had a peaceful night for two weeks, and by September 13 he had thoroughly lost his patience:

I'm tired of being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night every night. There's more than one mad man in Mattoon. There's 15,000 of them. What we've got here is mass hysteria. Some woman feels faint. She tells her neighbor about it. Embroidering it. That neighbor tells another neighbor. Then another. Then you've got people thinking they're being gassed all over the place. Today was the final straw.

As for that "final straw", earlier that day a woman watching a movie at the Mattoon theater had suddenly jumped up from her seat, screaming that she smelled gas. "It's him! He sprayed me!", she shouted, before collapsing.

No one around her had noticed anything at all. She was transported from the movie theater to the hospital. Doctors found no sign of chemical exposure and recorded the episode as "a fit of nerves".

The Time Theater on Broadway Avenue in Mattoon.

This wasn't the first diagnosis of a fit of "nerves" in Mattoon. A sighting of "demon-like eyes" at a woman's bedroom window had turned out to be a cat.

Immediately after the first reported incident, there had been wide speculation that the chemical must have been either ether or chloroform, because that's how criminal characters in movies knocked out their victims.

Diethyl ether, (CH₃CH₂)₂O, formerly used as a general anesthetic.

Chloroform or trichloromethane, CHCl₃, used as a general anesthetic into the 1930s.

But no, there were never any traces of ether or chloroform detected at any reported attack scene.

Then there was speculation that the gas was either carbon tetrachloride or trichloroethylene, and either the Mad Gasser had a sprayer loaded with one or both, or there had been a leak at a nearby factory. However, Atlas-Imperial, owner of the factory in question, said that the only carbon tetrachloride at the factory was contained within fire extinguishers. And, any trichloroethylene leak that could cause problems in town would have had an enormously worse effect on their staff within the factory, but they had had no problems. And, neither CCl₄ nor C₂HCl₃ was detected at any reported attack site.

Carbon tetrachloride, CCl₄, also known as tetrachloromethane.

Trichloroethylene, C₂HCl₃, a volatile industrial degreasing solvent.

None of the thirty-some victims reported any eye irritation. However, all of the chemicals speculated to be involved would cause significant eye irritation if they were present in concentrations able to paralyze victims.

Mattoon's mayor, E. E. Richardson, was a physician. He had said at the beginning that ether or chloroform probably weren't involved, because they wouldn't be practical for attack by spraying from a distance. If you pay attention to the movies, the perpetrators always hold a chemical-soaked cloth over the victim's mouth and nose. He also pointed out the complete lack of eye irritation.

The police chief diagnosed the town as containing 15,000 maniacs on September 13th. There were no more Mad Gasser reports to the police after that day.

People in Mattoon were stressed out with the U.S. approaching its fourth year of involvement in World War II. Everyone was aware of the war, most residents had family or friends in the military. Unlike today's connected world, men in military service in Europe or the Pacific were largely cut off, with only very occasional and long-delayed letters back and forth.

Around the time of the initial Mad Gasser event, a German prisoner of war had escaped from a POW camp near Peoria, about 120 miles to the northwest, and authorities were searching for him in and around Mattoon. He was captured the next day in a bar in another city. Urban Raef's brother had been killed in a battle in France in late June. The distant war was a constant worry in Mattoon.

December 8, 1941, issue of Mattoon's Daily Journal-Gazette, next to the local history museum within the train station.

Poison gas was a major concern. Gas had been used in World War I, killing 90,000 people and injuring over a million. So far, it had not been used in the Second World War. However, the Allies had landed in Normandy in early June. By the first of September it clearly was not an easy march to Berlin and Germany's surrender. However, the Allies were advancing toward German territory. So, there was concern that German commanders might resort to gas attacks out of desperation.

Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton University, interviewed people about their experiences and beliefs concerning Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast of October 30, 1938. In studies he published in 1940 and 1947, he found that 20% of the subjects believed that the announcer was describing actual events but was misinterpreting what he saw, and the supposed "Martians" were actually members of a German poison gas raid. That was in 1938, a year before the war started in Europe and three years before the U.S. became directly involved. By 1944 a German poison gas raid would have seemed plausible. On August 30, just before these supposed attacks began, in the town of Charleston just ten miles to the east, the Daily Courier carried a United Press story about how Germany was very likely either preparing to use poison gas or developing a new mystery weapon.

Mass Panic, Conversion Disorder, and Mass Psychogenic Illness

You can't really diagnose hysteria, that would be an attempt to prove a negative. Instead, you must work through all probable causes, slowly eliminating them one at a time. Meanwhile anyone who has already reported being the victim of a Mad Gasser or similar will become more and more dedicated to their claim. The longer the mystery lingers, the sillier they would look if it were debunked, and so the more personally invested they become in their original story.

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon is quite literally a textbook case of mass delusion and panic. A 1945 journal article documented the case in a study of mass hysteria, and was the basis for several further studies. That led to the Mattoon case becoming a standard topic in psychology textbooks.

Psychologists and psychiatrists now use the term conversion disorder to refer to what used to be lumped under the vague term "hysteria". It applies when a patient has neurological symptoms, such as paralysis or seizures, with no apparent organic cause but instead brought on by some psychological trigger.

A mass psychogenic illness involves the rapid spread of similar symptoms through a population with no infectious agent involved. It's a specific conversion disorder rapidly spreading through the population. It spreads through communication and psychology, not any chemical or infectious organism.

Mass psychogenic illnesses aren't new. They were common across Europe in the Middle Ages, with dancing manias sometimes continuing for weeks. They occurred frequently in convents — all the women at one convent barked like dogs, at another they bleated like sheep, and at another they all meowed like cats, meowing together every day starting at a certain time and continuing for hours.

Many of the mass psychogenic events observed in the 20th century were triggered by smelling an odor or hearing others discuss an odor, and many of them occurred within a factory or school where rumors could spread rapidly within an isolated group.

Some analysts concluded that the Gulf War Syndrome reported by veterans of the 1990–1991 Gulf War had a psychogenic aspect. Then the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs issued a major report in 2008 stating that it is a distinct physical condition caused by exposure to toxic materials and is not psychological in nature. The debate over its precise nature continues.

Just a few days before my visit to Mattoon, the FBI released a redacted report that the mysterious collection of ailments suffered by U.S. diplomatic staff and known as Havana syndrome probably was not the result of hostile electromagnetic actions by the host countries but instead were the result of "social contagion".

Other Mass Panics

A mass psychogenic illness is quite impressive, as it involves neurological symptoms in its victims. Mass panics or other clusters of misinformation or disinformation are more common.

The War of the Worlds broadcast went out live over the Columbia Broadcasting System network of radio stations on the evening of October 30, 1938. People heard it across the country during that one evening. The mass panic was created during the broadcast itself. It was an early demonstration of how electronic communication, AM radio broadcasts at 530–1600 kHz in this case, can accelerate the spread of a panic.

The Roswell incident was a small part of a two-and-a-half-week "flying disc" panic that spread across the U.S. in the summer of 1947, during a geopolitically tense period.

The idea of "flying discs" from other worlds spread through newspaper wire services and radio broadcast networks. That craze began with the first sighting on June 24th, 1947, when a private pilot saw a group of nine mysterious objects flying past Mount Rainier, near Seattle. Soon after July 10th, it was over.

In the middle of all this, on July 8th, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had debris from the crash of a flying saucer. The Army immediately issued a retraction, and the incident disappeared into the background noise of all the sightings and purported telepathy and hysteria and prophecies that were already raging.

Amazon B000BOH986

The so-called "Roswell incident" remained an obscure and rather fringe topic until The X-Files came on the air in 1993.

Earlier, there had been the mystery airships reported across the U.S. during late 1896 and early 1897. Many of these were intentionally false newspaper stories based on dime novels, but the series of newspaper stories led to a widespread belief that there was some truth "out there" regarding mysterious airship activity.

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S. involved letters containing anthrax spores that were sent to news media and two U.S. Senators. There was a broad panic, with many people falsely believing they had been exposed to anthrax or another biological weapon. Anthrax is not a very effective method for causing mass casualties, but over 2,300 anthrax false alarms were reported to authorities during the first two weeks of October, 2001.

In an ironic coincidence, the initial suspect for the anthrax attacks was the bioweapons expert Steven Hatfill, who had graduated from the Mattoon high school. The FBI raided his home multiple times and closely surveilled him for over two years.

Hatfill's false statements about his military service in the U.S. and Rhodesia, and his disputed claims of a Ph.D. from Rhodes University and a post-doctoral fellowship and three master's degrees from Oxford did not help his case. His tales of having been a medic with the Rhodesian Special Forces sounded like something from an ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune, while his claims of a Ph.D., multiple master's degrees, and Oxford post-doc simply didn't hold up under examination.

Hatfill filed lawsuits against the U.S. Government and various media outlets. The courts threw out the cases against the media, but the Government settled its lawsuit in 2008 with a $5.8 million payment. By then the government was in the process of filing criminal charges for the anthrax attacks against another biowarfare scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who immediately committed suicide by acetaminophen overdose.

Or Maybe a Local Villain?

Mattoon author Scott Maruna, a high school chemistry teacher, wrote a 106-page book titled The Mad Gasser of Mattoon. In it, he first assembled a lurid collection of details suggesting that a prominent local figure was behind the attacks, and then discarded that.

Maruna makes a case for Farley Llewellyn being the Mad Gasser, and a figure almost on the level of Batman's antagonists. The son of a prominent and respected local grocery store owner, Farley attended the University of Illinois at Champaign where he studied chemistry. He returned to Mattoon, lived at his parents' house, and became more introverted, maintaining a chemistry lab in the cellar until it blew up in some mishap.

The father was respected while Farley was the town outcast, or at least he saw himself that way, or at least Maruna felt that Farley saw himself that way. Maruna wrote that the citizens of Mattoon had ostracized Farley for being homosexual. The Mattoon gossip mill was insinuating that Farley's sexual preference was causing his "diminishing sanity". And so, Farley had chemical skills and a grudge and he wanted to exact revenge upon Mattoon. Get him a Penguin outfit, immediately!

But then Maruna came to the same conclusion eventually reached by everyone else who isn't pursuing some ghost-hunting cryptid-investigating grift:

• It wasn't the phantom gasser from a similar 1933–1934 series of purported gassing attacks in Botetourt County, Virginia.
• It wasn't Bigfoot or a chupacabra or Mothman or other crazed monster.
• It wasn't extraterrestrials.
• It wasn't a Nazi poison gas team inserted hundreds of miles inland.
• It wasn't an escapee from a state mental hospital, one of the first things that the Illinois State Police had checked.
• It wasn't a chemical leak that magically had no effect within the factory but caused several cases of paralysis and vomiting miles away in town.
• It wasn't even the town's ostracized suspected homosexual.

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was the result of sensational newspaper coverage acting on human nature within a community stressed out by World War II.

Look at the wording associated with the initial story in the Daily Journal-Gazette. First, the "prowler" is described as on the loose, implying that this is the start of some series of events.
"ANESTHETIC PROWLER" ON THE LOOSE
Then we hear about the first victims, leading the reader to expect an ongoing series of victims.
MRS. KEARNEY AND DAUGHTER FIRST VICTIMS
Finally, out of nowhere, we're told that this must have involved a robber attempting to enter the house.
BOTH RECOVER: ROBBER FAILS TO GET INTO HOME
However, this first reported case did not involve anyone trying to enter the house, there was only Bert Kearney's claim that he thought he saw a tall black-clad prowler outside the house.

More Local History

A park along Broadway, across from Hubbartt's and the train station, has a series of historic placards. One of them mentions the Mad Gasser. The diner staff doesn't read the placards in the park across the street.

I was surprised to see that Duane Purvis was from Mattoon. He played football at Purdue University, where nowadays he's best known for having preferred a heavy layer of peanut butter on his hamburger. "The Duane Purvis" is a specialty burger still available at a diner in West Lafayette.

A small park at the intersection of Broadway and North 19th Street, which is U.S. Highway 45, has another placard about local history.

Despite its location, Mattoon has been and remains a center of support for the Confederacy. The "Northwest Conspiracy" praised by the sign was militarily useless and gathered no intelligence. It was purely terrorism, using arson, looting, and rape against civilian populations.

The praise for the Confederacy correlated with all the Trump flags around town. Then I later learned that Mattoon graduate Steven Hatfill had taken a role within Trump's Presidential administration, promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19 infection. Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug found to have harmful side effects but no benefits regarding COVID-19. This was during the period that Trump was publicly speculating that perhaps people could avoid COVID-19 by inserting ultraviolet lamps up their rectums or injecting bleach into their bloodstreams.

At the same time, people were also reading further right-wing content on social media, claiming that they could avoid COVID-19 by eating veterinary de-worming medications containing ivermectin. A drug intended to get rid of intestinal parasites will be both a harsh irritant and a powerful laxative, and people were buying a drug formulated for horses. People in red MAGA hats were collapsing in supermarket aisles with sudden onslaughts of explosive diarrhea, the Brown Badge of Courage for those who don't trust mainstream medicine.

And so, mass hysteria continues. Just think, in 1944 the Mattoon mass hysteria was running at full speed within 24 hours without the use of Facebook or Youtube.

Microwave Relay Tower

The Wisconsin glaciation of 75,000–11,000 years ago extended to a short distance south of Mattoon. It's interesting to a geologist, but there isn't much to see above ground. The terrain goes from completely flat to the north, to very flat but with a little variation here and there to the south.

The weight of the end of the glacier adjacent to an area without glacier cracked the underlying bedrock. Traveling south, this is the beginning of Illinois' oil country. Pumpjacks are visible in fields to the south of Mattoon.

I didn't get to see an impressive bluff at the glacial terminal moraine, as there is north of Bloomington, Indiana, but I did see some electrical engineering history. A microwave relay tower that still has four pyramidal horn antennas stands along U.S. 45 near its intersection with I-57, a short distance south of Mattoon.

The last picture above shows that a light green waveguide extends down from the bottom of the horn at the right rear. Waveguides beneath the other three only run as far as the X-shaped walkway near the top of the tower.

By the late 1960s Bell Telephone's TD-2 and TD-3 relay network was carrying much of the long distance telephony and almost all the television distribution in the U.S. The TD-2 and TD-3 used links at 6 and 10 GHz.

Then, very rapidly in the early 1990s, fibre optic lines replaced the microwave networks. The microwave links were quickly abandoned. Many of the towers remained standing, renting space for other antennas.

The waveguide from the right rear horn extends all the way down the tower to where it would have turned 90° and run along an overhead cable tray into the building. But there are no cables running from the building to the tower.

Lincoln Cabin Historic Site

It's Illinois, "the Land of Lincoln", so of course there are nearby Abraham Lincoln connections. Drive about ten miles east to Charleston and then about six miles south and you'll find a cabin where Lincolns father and stepmother lived.

Like most of the "Lincoln log cabin" sites in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, this is a site-of with a 20th century reconstruction. But as Lincoln cabins go, it's much more realistic than most of them.

Abraham's father, Thomas, was born in 1778 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. His family migrated west into Kentucky in 1782.

Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks in 1806, and Abraham was born in 1809.

Tremetone, the main constituent of the toxic compound tremetol.

Nancy died of milk sickness in 1818. That's a type of poisoning caused by drinking milk from cows that have eaten white snakeroot, which contains tremetol.

The next year, Thomas returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnston. He knew her from childhood, and she was recently widowed.

The blended family moved to Coles Country, Illinois, in 1831, and Abraham struck out on his own. Thomas and Sarah moved around to three different farms in Coles County, buying property here in 1840. Thomas Lincoln lived here until his death in 1851, and Abraham continued to return to visit his stepmother from time to time until his last visit here in 1861.

A display in the visitor's center has a section titled (spoiler alert!) "The Ill-fated Original Lincoln Cabin":

Then the Essex County Herald of Guildhall, Vermont, published an article on 18 October 1907 stating that Mrs Russell Sage had purchased Lincoln's cabin for $25,000, planning that it be "placed in a glass case and thus preserved forever." Either that was a different Lincoln cabin, or it's further cabin sales shenanigans, or some combination of both.

The Civilian Conservation Corps built a barracks here in 1935. The commander was an Army officer, the men were WWI veterans, and a National Park Service project superintendent supervised the project. They built a replica of the original cabin, and constructed the nearby 500-acre Fox Ridge State Park.

Here's the reconstructed barn.

Passing through that on your way from the visitors' center takes you to the north or back side of the reconstructed Lincoln cabin.

From the front you see that it replicates how the original was two structures pushed together.

The west half contains a bedroom with a storage loft above it.

The east half contains a kitchen with a sleeping loft above it where some of Abraham's siblings and stepsiblings slept.

The docent explained that the well is the original Lincoln family well, and stone foundations of the fireplaces remained. There were several pictures of the exterior and interior. All that allowed for accurate reconstruction.

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