In 1944 the inhabitants of Mattoon, Illinois began reporting a series of at pltempted nighttime home invasions in which the invader used some kind of gas, sprayed through their windows, to immobilize them.
It became a huge story. Numerous calls came in to the police. Parties of armed men roamed the streets, on the watch for the "Mad Gasser" plaguing the town.
People were hysterical!
Literally!
It is now widely thought that there was no Mad Gasser and that the whole things was a case of mass hysteria (initially started, I personally suspect, by a case of sleep paralysis).
A similar sequence of events happened in 1933-34 in Virginia.
WIKIPEDIA HAS A WRITE-UP ON BOTH.
They're both fascinating oddities in American history.
And maybe not just American.
And maybe not just history.
Turns out that there are reports from Italy–AND France–AND Spain–of thieves using sleeping gas to immobilize their victims before invading their homes.
Is there any more reality to these than the Mad Gasser of Mattoon?
For now it's an unsolved mystery, but . . .
BTW, it strikes me that this if there are such criminals, they're doing something *very* dangerous. Giving someone the right dose of anesthetic is tricky, and doing so by filling a large space with gas is even trickier–as the Russians found out a few years ago when they tried to use anesthetizing gas on a bunch of Chechnyan terrorists who had taken over a building. It's not like on the 1960s Batman show where you can spray someone with a bit of pink-colored smoke (which they don't even have to inhale) and have them go harmlessly to sleep until you use "Bat Wake" on them.
Would there be any means to repel the gas?
I was seriously warned by local friends that when traveling on trains throughout Central and Eastern Europe not to fall asleep in your room, because thieves would spray gas, which put you to sleep, into the room and rob you blind.
In that forensics history of 1920’s and 1930’s New York, The Poisoner’s Handbook, they mention that it was fairly common (during the days when ether and chloroform was easy to get) for thieves to invade homes, gas the inhabitants, tie them up, and then steal them blind. Many people died when the thieves got the proportions wrong and people’s breathing was depressed, or when people were gagged and then threw up, or when the thieves uncharitably failed to open the windows as they left. A lot of kids and women were killed this way, and occasionally people faked this sort of happening in order to kill their nearest and dearest, IIRC.
So if it’s mass hysteria, it was based on legitimate crime history.
Weird…
I have had on a few occasions sleep paralysis, which indeed can be somewhat scary if you do not know what is going on… some people even panic and experience pain.
Sleep paralysis can be indeed annoying, since you are awake and you cannot move, but the few times it occurred to me I never thought it was due to some sleeping gas. Also after it occurred to the first time I did some research and found out all about sleep paralysis.
In my little research I also found pout that in yesteryear sleep paralysis was associated with a particular type of demon, the incubus (or the female counter part the succubus), demons that would paralyze and mate with their victims in their sleep… it was thought that sleep paralysis came from the power of these demons.
The English counterpart of the incubus/succubus is the myth of the ‘Old Hag’, which would do the same.
So…. Sleep paralysis indeed can spark quite some ‘experiences’, especially since a person is not fully awake and is often gripped by fear.
Perhaps the ‘gassers’ are the modern counterpart of the incubus or old hag…
I think the idea that truly criminals are using some kind of ‘sleeping gas’ is quite unplausible, for the reason Jimmy also mentioned…
Look up the term, gaslighting.
A real-life case like this was in the news recently: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087711,00.html
In the old days, the general technique was to knock on the door and stick a chloroformed cloth in the face of whoever answered.
That’s not safe, either. 1 in a thousand people would die of chloroform even in a controlled surgical situation — apparently just some kind of special susceptability.
But generally, criminals didn’t use gases for the safety of the victims; it was so they themselves didn’t have to fight or risk themselves. When it came right down to it, they’d already chosen their own welfare over that of their victims’. So a few deaths here and there just meant you should wear gloves and not get caught by the police.
Very funny, Chicken. Are you gaslighting us? 🙂 Gaslighting means psychologically manipulatng someone with tricks (such as dimming the gaslights but denying that it’s happening), to control another person by convincing her that she is crazy (it’s usually a her). It didn’t involve Mad-Gasser style gassing, but it was a pretty good movie in 1944, anyhow.
The Mad Gasser wikipedia article linked to an article on mass hysteria, which linked to a Skeptical Inquirer article on the subject, that mentioned many outbreaks among the religious, and then the classic: the panic that fell upon listeners to Orson Welles’ Halloween 1938 radio broadcast in which Martians attack Earth…with poison gas….
Also I thought I read once that the term “mass hysteria” was invented by skeptics to explain the apparitions at Fatima. Wikipedia and the Skeptical Inquirer article conveniently neglect to mention the origin of the term. Hmmm…. Anyone have a link to that word origin?
Jimmy, I nominate this one, along with the chupacabra articles, for the Fun Stuff category of your permaposts. Or maybe you need a new category: Eerie Stuff. 🙂