[UA] Would you like gas with those fries?...was Ears, nostrils, mouth, eyes . . . hm, needs one more hole . . .

[John C]

>
>Basically, sometime in the 40s the town of Matoon,
>Illinois, was suffering from a grip (a fistful?) of
>fear. People believed a strange fellow (described as
>somewhat inhuman, kind of like a troll, I think) was
>sneaking up to houses late at night, pumping in a
>sweet-smelling paralyzing gas via a tube through any
>open-windows. He mostly targeted single women. The
>police never found any evidence at all that he
>existed, but that didn't stop people from seeing him,
>and finding themselves paralyzed in the middle of the
>night. Eventually the whole thing was chalked up to
>mass hysteria. The Mad Gasser usually shows up in
>paranormal texts nowadays, usually in conjunction with
>Springheel Jack or the Jersey Devil.

Interstingly, several of the reports from Matoon identified the phantom 
gasser as a woman -- or at least someone in a dress, who left high-heeled 
shoe prints beneath a few windows.  And this ties into reports from another 
town, a few years earlier, which had suffered from similar attacks that had 
been blamed on a mysterious woman pumping gas into people's homes.

John Crimmins                     john1x at hotmail.com
     http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim/index.html
   "Yes, I am acquainted with Mr. DePalma," Dr. Hsu said.  "He was
my pupil years ago.  A young man not without talent, but slapdash,
and huckle-muckle in his worksmanship."
   "What did you say?" the mayor asked.
   "He's a jerk," Dr. Hsu Ting Feng said.
           -- Daniel Pinkwater, _The Hoboken Chicken Emergency_

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