I'm a local historian here in Illinois, and there's one case that's haunted me for years. I've spent countless hours going through newspaper archives, police reports, everything I could find. This happened in September of 1944, in Mattoon, a small town about forty-nine miles south of here. Population around eighteen thousand back then, you know, quiet place. And what happened there, well, let me tell you what the witnesses reported. So this all starts on the night of August 31st, 1944. A man named Albert Ross woke up in the early morning hours to this strange odor in his bedroom. He'd left the window open, it was late summer, hot. The smell hit him hard, made him violently ill. He started vomiting, felt weak all over. His wife tried to get up to check the kitchen stove, thought maybe it was a gas leak from the pilot light. But here's the thing, she couldn't move. Her legs were paralyzed. Just temporarily, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, but she was stuck in bed while this smell filled their house. Nobody paid much attention to it at first. People figured it was some kind of freak thing, maybe a bad reaction to something. But then it happened again.
September 1st, 1944. This is when things really kicked off. A young woman named Anna Kennedy was home with her three-year-old daughter and her sister Martha. Her husband Bert was out driving his taxi route, wouldn't be back until after midnight. Around eleven that night, Aline noticed this sickening sweet odor coming through her bedroom window. At first she thought it was flowers from outside, you know, honeysuckle or something. But the smell got stronger and stronger, and suddenly her legs went numb. She couldn't feel them at all. She started calling out for her sister, panicking. Martha rushed in and smelled it too, this overwhelming sweetness that wasn't quite right. She figured out it was coming from the open window and got it closed, aired the place out. When Bill Kennedy came home around half past midnight, he spotted someone lurking near their bedroom window. A tall figure dressed in dark clothing, wearing this tight-fitting cap. Bert chased after him but the guy was fast, disappeared into the night. paralysis symptom sounds terrifying - Gemma' The next morning, the local paper, the Daily Journal-Gazette, ran a headline. 'Anesthetic Prowler on Loose.' And that's when everyone in Mattoon started paying attention. That's when the fear really set in.
Over the next few days, more reports came flooding in. September 5th was when things got really intense. A couple named Charles and Barbara Collins came home around ten at night. They'd been out for the evening, and when they got to their front door, Beulah noticed something odd. There was this piece of white cloth sitting on their porch, right next to the screen door. Bigger than a handkerchief, just sitting there. Beulah picked it up and, I don't know why, maybe curiosity, she smelled it. And immediately, she said it felt like an electric shock went through her body. Her face started swelling up, burning sensation in her mouth and throat. She started vomiting right there on the porch. And then her legs, same thing as the others, partial paralysis. Carl had to help her inside. They found a skeleton key on the sidewalk too, looked well-used, and an almost empty tube of lipstick. The police took the cloth and analyzed it, but they couldn't find any chemicals on it. Nothing that explained what happened to Beulah. That same night, another woman, Mrs. Leonard Burrell, reported seeing a stranger break in through her bedroom window and try to gas her. By this point, the whole town was on edge.
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