Anomalous zone

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

added30 August 2026

In September 1944 residents of Mattoon, Illinois, began reporting the same thing to police: a sweetish smell in the house, nausea, numbness in the legs, a paralysing weakness. Around two dozen cases were logged in a fortnight. Police, the FBI and chemists found no substance, no traces and no man. The standard explanation is a wartime episode of mass psychogenic illness amplified by the local paper; the alternative points at emissions from a nearby plant. Neither is proven, and the case is a textbook fixture in social psychology.

Getting thereDirections Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

39.48428, -88.37733

Mattoon Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Mad Gasser of Mattoon — Wikipedia

Nearest on the map

Folklore

Cahokia

The largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico: at its height around 1100 it held perhaps twenty thousand people, more than London at the time. Monks Mound has a larger base than the Great Pyramid. Mound 72 contained a burial with over fifty young women laid out in rows, almost certainly sacrificed. By 1350 the city was empty, for no clear reason, and it has never been explained.

172 km away

Cryptid

Louisiana, Missouri: the Summer of Momo

In the summer of 1972 this town on the Mississippi went through a genuine panic: children said they saw a black hairy figure over six feet tall at the edge of the woods holding a dead dog, and the stench was such that one of their mothers smelled it from indoors. Enough reports came in within a week that the sheriff organised search parties, and the papers named the thing Momo, for Missouri Monster.

231 km away

Ghost sighting

Resurrection Mary

America's best-known vanishing hitchhiker. Since the 1930s drivers on Archer Avenue outside Chicago have told the same story: a fair-haired girl in a white ball gown asks for a lift, says nothing the whole way, and disappears from the car opposite the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. Attempts have been made to attach the story to several real girls who died young, and none of the versions fits the details. The vanishing-passenger plot is older than the motor car — it is known from tales of horse-drawn carriages — but the Chicago version is fixed to one road and one gate.

256 km away

More: Anomalous zone

Anomalous zone

Bermuda Triangle

A region of the western Atlantic between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, associated with unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft since the mid-20th century.

+21

Anomalous zone

The Valley of Death in Kamchatka

A narrow hollow at the foot of Kikhpinych in the Kronotsky reserve, discovered in 1975: dead animals and birds are found on its floor regularly, and people who linger there become dizzy and weak. The answer was found almost at once and turned out to be chemical — hydrogen sulphide and other gases seep from fissures and pool in the hollow in still weather. The valley is still lethal and closed to visitors, and the name stuck long before the explanation did.

Anomalous zone

The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga

A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.