Talk:Mad Gasser of Mattoon

Mass hysteria
Please Please please, not the old "Mass Hysteria" excuse. the Skeptical Inquiror uses this to the Nth degree for just about everything and its wearing thin, very thin. Industry Pollution or an actual Criminal I will believe, but not Mass Hysteria. Magnum Serpentine 14:30, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Whether you chose to believe it or not isn't our concern. It's what the experts say and have always said, from the police at the time up to the present. Encyclopedias go by what the experts say, not what you want to believe. DreamGuy 18:56, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Charles Fort once had some remarkable comments to make about the very phenomena you describe; he referred to it as the "Proclamations of the Scientific Priesthood." Also, be aware of something: encyclopedias OFTEN go by what experts say, and encyclopedias are usually wrong because of it. They should go by what PEOPLE have said, experts and kooks and rational, open-minded people alike... If.  Sourced. --Chr.K. (talk) 12:49, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
 * You need to read and follow our WP:NPOV and WP:RS policies. We don;'t print what any old person off the street says just because we can source it to someone. That would make this site no better than some messageboard where anyone could put anything. We have standards. DreamGuy (talk) 19:59, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Actual Assailant paragraph
It should be clearer up front that Scott Maruna wrote a book on this subject. The information on Farley Llewellyn seems closer to slander than factual information. In every article I've read about the Mad Gasser, his name does come up - but I've never seen any documentation regarding him. 74.136.9.70 02:29, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Actual physical condition
Nowhere on the page do you discuss Hypnagogia, the actual physical condition that is described by the "victims" of the gasser. Most people experience this condition at least once in their lives and it is often brought on by sleep disruption, stress, and or being over-tired. E Warnke

But which is it?
I'm not sure what distinction this parenthetical hopes to make...:


 * The attacks (or "attacks," according to some observers) began on August 31, 1944.


 * (as of 16:56, 18 October 2006)

... so I'm deleting it. 75.22.27.213 20:58, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Copyright Violation
Large sections of this article appear to be near word for word copies of a chapter from Jerome Clark's Unexplained.

This needs sorting out as copyright violation need to be trodden on swiftly.

perfectblue 16:05, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm on it! Totnesmartin 19:56, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. Totnesmartin 21:32, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Table talk
That new table needs to be wider - there's a narrow column of text down the right hand side. It looks terrible! Totnesmartin 18:34, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * That's actually caused by your web browser, I've checked it in Firefox and it looks perfectly OK, it only looks as you describe when I view it in an older copy of Internet explorer.


 * I thought the page would depend on the page and not the make of browser. Shows how much I know about computers. Totnesmartin 16:50, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * It kinda does depend on the page. The problem is that different browsers interprit the code differently. The problem her I think was that there was an empty variable at the top of the table. Firefox interpreted this as being a value of 0 and said that everything was OK, but the version of IE that was being used didn't know quite how to cope with things and instead of closing the table and starting a new paragraph (which was what firefox does), it continued on and dragged the text up to meet the start of the table. I could have written the code differently, but I wasn't paying attention or something, when it looked right to me I left it. No harm done though as it's fixed now.


 * perfectblue 16:57, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll fix it to the oldest standard of IE that I have, but if that doesn't work for your version, I'm afraid that you'll have to edit it yourself.


 * perfectblue 18:41, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Fixed

perfectblue 19:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Question...
...this was, if anyone, obviously a human attacker, so wouldn't infobox Criminal make more sense? 68.39.174.238 19:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Ugh, no... it's not "obviously a human attacker" at all, in fact most reliable sources say no person was involved at all and that it was just hysteria. Framing it as if it were a real criminal would be highly POV-pushing and inaccurate. The template currently there also is misleading, but not as much as a criminal one would be. DreamGuy 18:54, 15 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, that solves that problem. 68.39.174.238 18:43, 20 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Agreed, there are rumors and speculation that a mentally unstable local man was behind it, but nothing was ever proved. This case has been used as a text-book example of mass hysteria for years. The attacker is most likely a phantom of the minds, not a real person. - perfectblue (talk) 20:04, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Matton1.png
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BetacommandBot (talk) 16:57, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Legendary creature
Does this article really qualify? The belief is that it was either a human or mass hysteria, neither of which are things I usually find in legendary creature categories.--24.255.171.220 (talk) 15:18, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Doesn't qualify, have removed. Thanks. DreamGuy (talk) 19:57, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Concerns about mentioning Scott Maruna's book
There's a pretty extensive section given to Scott Maruna's book and his theories. Based upon creation of Scott Maruna article and links being added to that article, it appears Maruna himself has probably editing this encyclopedia himself under one or more usernames, which would be a WP:COI. Whether that's the case or not, the publisher of Maruna's book is Swamp Gas Books, which turns out to be self-published. I don't think this meets Wikipedia criteria for reliable sources, as anyone off the street can create a book and publish it themselves. DreamGuy (talk) 19:56, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea if Maruna is working on this entry or not, but I did read his book a couple of years ago, and it's not bad. As far as the comment that it is self-published goes--I think the Mattoon part of the Gasser story is pretty old news and a publisher wouldn't be interested in something that old that took place in a small town. Plus--like many self-published books, it's short--kind of a monograph--and that limits its marketability. On the slander point--I don't know, I suppose that's an ethical question. I can only say that Maruna does his best to make his case. You can read it, and judge it to be a credible explanation, or you can judge it to be gossip or slander. At the very least, there are some details in the book that suggest what the mood of the place was like when these events occurred--including growing impatience and frustration with the restrictions associated with the war effort.

Refrigeration? and some other comments
Well, I can't put this in the article because it is certainly original research, but I am astonished that no-one has mentioned leaking refrigerants. It was so obvious to me: I read the Huffman account and instantly thought "this woman has been poisoned by a leaking fridge." This was a big problem back then, and before replacement by freons (beginning in the late 1930s, but not complete in poorer neighbourhoods until much later), it was frequently fatal as the onset of symptoms is so rapid that by the time you realise there is a problem, it is too late for you to reach an exit. (Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard actually spent many years working on the improvement of refrigeration technology after reading about an entire German family that was wiped out overnight by a refrigerator leak.)

In the late 1920s the General Electric "Monitor Top" had repositioned the refrigerator market from commercial users and a luxury product for the very rich, to a merely somewhat expensive appliance for the upper middle classes. By the end of the 1930s the price was plummeting and some 60% of US households had refrigerators.

The earliest domestic refrigerators used sulphur dioxide or ammonia as refrigerants. These are toxic gases with very powerful irritating odours that are not at all similar to the described "gas attacks". However some "second gen" fridges instead used (much safer, but still quite dangerous) chloromethane, while the popular Monitor Top usually used methyl formate. Both of these gases have sweet ethereal odours, and moderately narcotic properties when inhaled. Here's a list of symptoms of chloromethane inhalation, from our own article:

"Victims may feel drowsy, dizzy, or confused and have difficulty breathing (with gasping and choking), walking or speaking. At higher concentrations, paralysis, seizures, and coma may result."

Sound familiar? Methyl formate is very similar, but also later develops irritation to the eyes and mucous membranes, which may swell. And two symptoms that we didn't include in that list, but which are very much worth noting, are that mild intoxication by chloromethane also causes hallucinations, and any significant exposure may cause convulsive fits for weeks afterwards. Also some reports of chronic low level exposure PDF include both powerful visual and auditory hallucinations, and persecution fantasies. Let me make this clear: when you have been exposed to this material, you may see people who are not really there. You may hear them whispering outside the door or window. You may think that they are sneaking into your house at night to "get you" for ill-defined and nonsensical reasons. We're not talking about slight visual disturbances, we are talking about seeing, and hearing, and fearing, people who do not exist other than in your poor, poisoned brain.

Is your spine yet tingling with that oh-my-goodness-that's-it feeling?! Now don't get me wrong; I'm not seeking to identify the material involved solely through analysis of its symptoms, which is a frequent path of error. There are scores of closely related, small polarised alkyl molecules with very similar odour, volatility and CNS depressive properties. However, these two particular materials have all those properties and were commonly responsible for accidental household poisonings in that era because they were widely used in refrigerators, which sometimes leaked. On the basis of Ockham's razor, that has to push them to the top of the list. It seems extremely likely that at least some, if not all, of the non-hysterical reports in at least the 1930s outbreak, and probably both outbreaks, can be attributed to a known defect in a new commercial product which had just started to become common in households at precisely this time. I am astonished that no-one has mentioned this previously.

By the way, if this hypothesis is correct for both sets of incidents, I would expect Botetourt to be middle class or prosperous rural in the 1930s (hence non-users of first generation domestic fridges, but early adopters of second generation methyl chloride and methyl formate fridges), and Mattoon to be relatively economically depressed in the mid-1940s (hence late adopters of the newer, safer freon refrigerators.) Is there any information about the wealth of any of these victims, or specific information as to whether or not they owned a refrigerator? If so, does anyone know what type it was?

While I'm at it, I'd like to make a couple of other comments on the article:
 * 1) Maybe it's just my fevered brain, but did anyone else notice the weird alliteration? In Haymakertown we have the Huffmans (father's first name Cal), Hendersons and no less than Homer Hylton; later the Hartsells were added, although they weren't in Haymakertown. Then in Cloverdale we have Campbells, Crawfords (father's first name Howard) and Clarence Hall, then the "attacker" moved on to Carvin's Cove before returning to Cloverdale to molest Chester. Chester's surname was actually Snyder, and we also had the Stanleys, the Scaggs, and Schafer. Curiously, 2 of the heads of household have the exact same initials -- composed of both the "special" letters that were also the initials of their towns -- while a third has the same initials reversed. I realise this is probably just pareidolia, but boy, what are the odds? Out of the dozens of claimed victims, just 5 fail to fit this pattern, and those five all fit a very similar pattern: both of the 2 in Troutville have surnames starting with the same letter (K), and 2 of the 3 in Carvin's Cove have surnames starting with R. The third Carvinite has the exact same initials as one of the others, but reversed, so it is his Christian name that starts with R.
 * 2) "The Gasser had also been described as carrying a flit gun, ..." The only supporting evidence for this claim is the 1944 Time article, which is highly sarcastic in tone and doesn't pretend to be quoting anyone in the obviously satirical section that makes this "claim". Is there any evidence that any purported witness actually said this? If not, it should be changed to "Satirical descriptions of the "Mad Gasser" phenomenon depicted him (or her) with a flit gun."
 * 3) In the table labelled "attacks", many of the tabulated events are in fact not attacks, and even considered as "incidents" some seem completely extraneous. Someone saw a suspicious car? Well, so what? Is there any aspect of this incident which leads us to believe it was in any way related?
 * 4) Chester Snyder is listed as a victim but there is also a note which says there was no victim nor any actual attack in this, erm, attack?
 * 5) The Hartsell report is highly speculative. How do we know for what purpose the "barricade" was constructed? As there was only one barricade mentioned, did the church and rectory really only have one exit? Why do we even call it an "attack" when no-one was attacked?
 * 6) The "barricade" should be given far more coverage, since if that is really what it was, and if it can be demonstrated to be related, it is by far the most substantial piece of evidence of malicious human involvement. In fact I would go so far as to say that this "barricade" is the only piece of evidence of malice that cannot be immediately dismissed. All other evidence could be either coincidence, or the results of psychiatric disturbances (possibly caused by exposure to an unknown chemical or biological agent from an unknown but possibly accidental source.) Furthermore, unlike every other incident scene, where objective evidence is remarkably sparse, the construction of the "barricade" should be just dripping with objective physical evidence. As such if anyone has access to a detailed source I think we could devote at least a paragraph to the barricade.
 * 7) It is curious that many of the 1933-4 incidents occurred closely around Christmastide, and two were also associated with the church. However sticking to the refrigerator hypothesis, we might also notice that Christmas is the time when refrigerators are most heavily overloaded.
 * 8) Against the refrigerator hypothesis, it might be asked why so many fridges would fail in such a small area over such a short period. Simple answer: bad batch. It is well known that product defects tend to fall in batches rather than randomly, that is why QA does batch sampling. And it is also quite usual for batches to stay together through the distribution network, so that many people in town who bought a fridge within the previous year or so would probably get one from the same batch.
 * 9) At least three of the 1933-4 incidents occurred whilst the occupants were not home, and due to the strong odour they did not enter and were either unaffected, or but little affected. This doesn't make a lot of sense if the incidents were deliberate attacks by someone who understood the properties of the material he or she was using. It makes perfect sense that 3 of 14 incidents should occur in unoccupied premises if the timings were in fact random, or possibly affected by a semi-random delay after meal times.
 * 10) In 1933, there were not a lot of synthetic insecticides available to choose from. Most insecticides were plant based materials (e.g pyrethrum), and with the main exception of nicotine based materials, they were not sufficiently toxic to humans for a low dose spray to have such dramatic symptoms. There were a number of inorganic chemical insecticides available that were much more toxic -- arsenicals, mainly -- but their toxic effects on humans are far too slow acting to explain any of these attacks, their acute poisoning symptoms are gastric rather than neurological, and they leave easily detected forensic traces (the Marsh test, which had been a forensic standard for over ninety years by that time, can detect as little as 20 micrograms.) Hence it is close to impossible that insecticides were used in the 1930s incidents. Carbon tetrachloride was not strictly an insecticide, but it was sometimes used as a fumigant, it does have a sweet etheral odour, and its symptoms are also broadly similar to the other symptoms listed above. Furthermore, due to its widespread use in fire extinguishers it was readily available to the public. If these incidents were deliberate attacks by a malicious person, carbon tetrachloride would be a plausible material. However, it was used for so many things in the 1930s that I would expect one or more victims to recognise the odour. The odour, by the way, is very similar to perchloroethylene, which is the odour of dry-cleaners' shops; sweet and ethereal, but none of the flowery, fruity note that some victims reported.
 * "1,1,2,2-, tetrachloroethane, an ingredient used in the manufacture of insecticide" seems to be a strange attempt to keep up the weird insecticide link-in. Fact is, many things are "used in" the production of other materials, without necessarily having anything to do with them. Electricity, for example, is "used in" the production of nearly everything, but it would be absurd to describe an electrocution victim as being killed by something "used in" the production of environmentalist literature. 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane is a useful solvent, so we can't rule out that it might perhaps have been "used in" production of some insecticide. However, it is not and never was a precursor (ingredient) for the production of any insecticide. The only chemicals routinely manufactured from 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane as a raw material, are other solvents. Thus this statement is at best misleading and probably completely false.
 * 1) The modus operandi is surprisingly varied. Sometimes a solitary man is seen, sometimes a woman, sometimes a group of men. In most cases the stealthy attacker left little or no physical trace, in others he stopped in a conspicuous location to do some carpentry. In most cases, the victim is exposed to airborne gas without any assailant entering the house, and in several cases the gassing occurs while no-one is even home. Yet in some cases, the madman climbs through a window and sprays gas directly onto his victim (who, although not yet gassed, does not act to defend herself?) In one case the toxic material is not sprayed at all, but supplied soaked into a rag (where chemists are subsequntly unable to detect it.) In criminalistics, the difference between an attacker who confronts his victims, versus one who attacks by stealth, is profound. Most criminalists would not hesitate to say that if the "stealth" attacks were caused by a human agency at all then it was probably a different person to the one who entered houses. Another explanation for the wide differences in descriptions is, of course, that these are descriptions of many unrelated incidents tied together only by the imagination of a frightened and poisoned mind.
 * 2) What was the alleged attacker's motive? Clearly not robbery or sexual assault, since several victims were paralysed but neither robbed nor assaulted. It is therefore claimed that the attacker was mentally deranged, but this does not fit well with claims of having at least one and up to 4 accomplices -- especially after newspaper reports made clear how seriously ill some victims became. We may decide to dismiss those reports of accomplices, but they are no more doubtful than many others. The revenge notive is also somewhat dubious. When the dose cannot be carefully monitored, the effects of exposure to a toxic gas are simply too unpredictable: one person might well get a slight cough, while another even further away -- an innocent bystander, say -- collapses and dies. Worse, spraying a room with any but the tiniest dose of gas is liable to affect all occupants, some of whom may be completely unknown to the attacker. If these were deliberate attacks, and revenge was the motive then either the gasser was in a homicidal rage and intended to kill indiscriminately (in which case, he botched it a dozen times in a row and then mysteriously gave up forever rather than try something different), or he intended merely to frighten and discomfort his enemies (in which case, he played a very dangerous game that came within a whisker of murdering deliberate victims and innocent bystanders alike.) So in either case, if this was revenge based, we should not look for a skilled chemist, but someone with a weak understanding of toxicology.
 * 3) If it be claimed that the two series of incidents be related, the insanity and revenge motives look even weaker. Dangerous psychotics do not, as a rule, spontaneously and voluntarily give up on their attacks for ten years and then start again. Thus if insanity was the motive, then we should look for a Betacortan who was incarcerated between 1934 and 1944. On the other hand, if revenge was the motive, it seem impossible to believe that a person who had so many enemies in Virginia in 1934, should come across another concentrated cluster in Illinois 10 years later. It would make more sense if robbery was the motive: a person who turned to robbery in desperate financial straits in 1934, might re-use the same successful method years later when he next fell on hard times. But we can absolutely rule out robbery because nothing was taken from the scene of any incident.
 * 4) Another thing to consider is expense. If chloromethane or something similar was used, then in the quantities required, multiplied by the number of incidents presumed to be real, these materials are not cheap. They are not astronomically expensive, but the perpetrator must have either had access to steal the material, or else been comfortably well off to spend a fair chunk of money on his weird hobby.
 * 5) One of the supposed links between the two sets of incidents is the occurrence of female footprints. Now for a start, this is very weak stuff as there is more than one woman in the world! But in any case, our article says nothing about female footprints in the 1933-4 incidents, even though it apparently occurred in snowy weather when tracking is a cinch. If this "fact" is the critical link, then the incident in which it occurred must be described. On the other hand, in the 1944 incidents there is nothing to indicate how reliable the footprint evidence was. Anyone can recognise a footprint in soft soil in a garden bed, but unless it has rained recently it takes an expert to tell how old the print is; if it was made a week previously then it probably has nothing to do with the case. -- 203.20.101.203 (talk) 02:06, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Why Virginia?
Why are the Virginia attacks in this article? They were so separated by time and space. Do the reliable sources indicate any connection? Ntsimp (talk) 14:40, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

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Rewrites and Expansion
This article is incomplete and requires rewrites of its information. Some portions of information are unsourced and need to be given proper citations for its information. Portions of the article are ambiguously detailed and need to be expanded in more detail than what it currently has. The Theories section is poorly written and is missing important citations for some of its information. It needs to be rewritten and expanded, with proper citations given for its information. There was also another theory that the Mad Gasser was actually a paranormal entity which is mentioned in the article on Spring-Heeled Jack and this theory needs to be added to the article (with proper citations). The appearances section also should be renamed Description and placed in a more appropriate spot in the article. This article is coming along well, it just needs to have more work done to it in order for it to be classified as GA of FA status.--Paleface Jack (talk) 16:35, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

The section and resulting subsections on the purported attacks need to be rewritten and reorganized as it seems to be missing some information and some information is stated repeatedly.--Paleface Jack (talk) 17:30, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

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