The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

On the evening of September 5, 1944, Beulah Cordes found a cloth balled up on her porch in Mattoon, Illinois; when she picked it up and smelled it, her lips swelled and her mouth and throat began burning.

A skeleton key and a tube of lipstick, neither belonging to the household, were found on the Cordes porch alongside the cloth. No connection between the three objects has ever been established.

The earliest dated incident on record was reported by Urban Raef and his wife on the night of August 31–September 1, 1944 — a sweet smell in their bedroom, nausea, and partial paralysis — though it did not become public until after later incidents.

On September 1, 1944, Aline Kearney reported a sweet odor filling her bedroom, numbness in her legs, and her young daughter affected; her husband Bert reported seeing a man outside the window. The Mattoon Journal Gazette ran the story on its front page.

Donald M. Johnson's 1945 academic field study of the case — published by a University of Illinois researcher and still the foundational scholarly treatment — identified the Kearney story's front-page placement as the case's "index" event and interpreted the episode overall as an outbreak of mass hysteria.

Reports of gas attacks accelerated through the first two weeks of September 1944, drew sustained Journal Gazette coverage, and prompted the involvement of Illinois State Police and FBI agents.

Mattoon's Commissioner of Public Health, Thomas V. Wright, stated publicly and on the record: "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."

On September 12, 1944, Police Chief C. E. Cole publicly floated an industrial explanation — carbon tetrachloride or trichloroethylene, possibly drifting from a nearby diesel engine plant. The plant denied the theory, and reports declined sharply within days of Cole's public statement.

On September 18, 1944, Time magazine ran a national feature on the case under the title "The Mad Anesthetist," spreading the story well beyond Illinois.

No suspect was ever arrested or formally charged in connection with the case. Eighty-two years later, it remains officially unsolved.

Mass hysteria vs. a real physical attacker. Johnson's 1945 study, and later researchers such as Robert Bartholomew, read the case as a textbook example of press-amplified collective hysteria. That reading has never fully accounted for the Cordes incident's documented chemical burns and the physical objects recovered at the scene.

Total number of reported incidents. Estimates range from the low twenties to as many as three dozen reported "attacks" over the two-week period, and the full list of who reported what on the night of September 6 has never been consistently reconciled across sources.

The industrial-gas theory. Chief Cole's proposed explanation — solvent fumes drifting from a nearby diesel engine plant — was publicly denied by the plant and was never proven, though some accounts credit it with coinciding with the sharp decline in reports that followed.

The Farley Llewellyn theory. A self-published 2003 book named a local man, Farley Llewellyn, as a possible source for at least the earliest incidents, citing his chemistry background and a home laboratory reportedly damaged by an explosion around this time. Wikipedia's own editors have flagged this section's sourcing as unreliable, and no other source corroborates the theory.

A September 11, 1944 report described a suspect who did not match the "tall man" description established by the Kearney account — described instead as short and heavyset, wearing women's shoes. The witness account was never corroborated and no named suspect has ever been tied to it.

A report from a Mrs. Leonard Burrell, describing a prowler who attempted to gas her, is one of the more solidly cited reports outside the Kearney and Cordes cases — but still rests on a single contemporaneous account.

One of the last reports on record, from a Bertha Burch, described a "woman dressed as a man" — a description that had drifted considerably from the original "tall man" template by the case's final days.

State's Attorney William Kidwell later attributed the panic to hysteria "fueled by a Journal Gazette reporter with a vivid imagination." No source reviewed for this episode identifies who that reporter, or the story's editor or publisher, actually was.

Urban Raef's brother was reportedly killed at Normandy in the months before the Raef household's own incident — a detail that appears in some secondary accounts of the case's wartime context but is not independently corroborated across multiple contemporaneous sources.