No, that isn't a name for a resident of the small Illinois town with bowel problems and a penchant for curry. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon - also known by the equally colourful aliases of "Anaesthetic Prowler", Friz, the "Phantom Anaesthetist", "the "Mad Gasser of Roanoke", or simply the "Mad Gasser" - was an individual or series of individuals purported to be behind a series of gas attacks on residents of Mattoon, Illinois and Roanoke, Virginia over the thirties and forties. Purportedly because not only was nobody ever caught or charged with the gassings, but it's debatable if the gassings themselves ever happened in the first place. It's our old friend mass hysteria again! There are a load of contemporaneous reports of people being attacked by the Mad Gasser - people being awoken by strange odours that made them ill or even paralysed, with some accompanied by a swiftly escaping tall man in a top hat, like bad guys in Tim Burton films look - and the FBI became involved as more people claimed to have fallen victim to him, some even saying they caught him climbing in their window to give them a dose of poisonous gas. After a while the reports died down, in part due to the amount of false alarms the police had to deal with from anxious residents of the towns who had been put on edge by all the news stories and rumours about the Mad Gasser. The police announced how many false alarms they received, and suddenly people stopped reporting attacks at all. So what happened? It's possible that there was an actual guy going around and gassing people, but nobody knows for sure. Others posit that it was toxic waste or pollution seeping its way into people's homes, phenomenons which weren't all that well-known at the time, leading instead to people - often woozy from the dose of gas they'd inhaled - to invent a story about an attacker instead. The most common explanation is that, whilst there may have been some attacks, the rest of the reports - and symptoms people suffered - were nothing more than psychological, a mass hysteria as a result of the media circus surrounding the story. And obviously there's some people who reckon it was an alien. It wasn't an alien.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
