The Cult Dossier · No. 166 · Moral Panic / Mass Hysteria
The Mad Gasser and the Windshield Pitting Epidemic
The Phantom Anesthetist of Mattoon; the Seattle windshield pitting epidemic
1944 and 1954 · Mattoon, Illinois; Bellingham and Seattle, Washington
XVI. CONTAGION — SYMPTOMS THAT SPREAD WITHOUT A PATHOGEN
None.
Who led it
No leader. The two classic field studies are DONALD M. JOHNSON'S (1945) and NAHUM MEDALIA and OTTO LARSEN'S (1958).
What it worshipped and taught
Two different things that are often lumped together and should not be. MATTOON WAS A MASS PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS — people had real physical symptoms. SEATTLE WAS A COLLECTIVE DELUSION — nobody was ill at all; people simply looked at something they had never examined before and misread what they saw.
Who was in it
The residents of Mattoon; the Mattoon police, who found nothing; Donald M. Johnson; the drivers of Washington State; Medalia and Larsen.
How it ended, or where it stands
BOTH ENDED WITHIN WEEKS, and both ended the same way: when the reporting stopped, the phenomenon stopped.
The dead
—
Of note
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THESE TWO CASES IS THE MOST USEFUL THING IN THIS ERA, AND IT IS ROUTINELY COLLAPSED.
At Mattoon, PEOPLE WERE GENUINELY UNWELL. Vomiting is not a belief. Their symptoms were real, involuntary and medically observable; what was absent was the gas. At Seattle, NOBODY WAS ILL AND NOTHING HAD CHANGED except attention. One is an illness with no external cause. The other is a belief about the world with no illness at all.
SEATTLE IS ALSO THE CLEANEST DEMONSTRATION IN THIS DOSSIER OF SOMETHING THAT MATTERS EVERYWHERE ELSE IN IT: attention creates evidence. Once you are told to look, you find. The pits were real and had been accumulating for years. Every driver who inspected a windscreen found confirmation, and each confirmation justified the next inspection. COMPARE SPECTRAL EVIDENCE AT SALEM (165), AND COMPARE THE TUNNELS THAT WERE DUG FOR AND NEVER FOUND AT McMARTIN (152).
THE ROLE OF THE PRESS IN BOTH IS DOCUMENTED RATHER THAN ALLEGED. The case curves track the coverage. That is the closest thing this era has to a controlled variable, and it is why 169, where the medium changed, is a genuinely different problem.
At Mattoon, PEOPLE WERE GENUINELY UNWELL. Vomiting is not a belief. Their symptoms were real, involuntary and medically observable; what was absent was the gas. At Seattle, NOBODY WAS ILL AND NOTHING HAD CHANGED except attention. One is an illness with no external cause. The other is a belief about the world with no illness at all.
SEATTLE IS ALSO THE CLEANEST DEMONSTRATION IN THIS DOSSIER OF SOMETHING THAT MATTERS EVERYWHERE ELSE IN IT: attention creates evidence. Once you are told to look, you find. The pits were real and had been accumulating for years. Every driver who inspected a windscreen found confirmation, and each confirmation justified the next inspection. COMPARE SPECTRAL EVIDENCE AT SALEM (165), AND COMPARE THE TUNNELS THAT WERE DUG FOR AND NEVER FOUND AT McMARTIN (152).
THE ROLE OF THE PRESS IN BOTH IS DOCUMENTED RATHER THAN ALLEGED. The case curves track the coverage. That is the closest thing this era has to a controlled variable, and it is why 169, where the medium changed, is a genuinely different problem.
Its timeline
- 31 AUGUST – 1 SEPTEMBER 1944 MATTOON, ILLINOIS. URBAN RAEF reports a strange odour and nausea. The next night ALINE KEARNEY reports an odour followed by paralysis of her legs, and the local paper runs it as the first attack.
- SEPTEMBER 1944 OVER TWO DOZEN GASSING REPORTS in about two weeks, with many further sightings of a prowler. Symptoms include odd smells, nausea, vomiting, coughing and temporary leg paralysis. POLICE INVESTIGATE AND FIND NO GAS, NO DEVICE AND NO ASSAILANT. No one is ever identified.
- 12 SEPTEMBER 1944 THE POLICE CHIEF ANNOUNCES THERE HAD PROBABLY BEEN NO GAS ATTACKS AT ALL, blaming industrial odours and panic. The reports fall away. The local papers had run the story as fact from the start.
- 1945 DONALD M. JOHNSON publishes THE PHANTOM ANESTHETIST OF MATTOON: A FIELD STUDY OF MASS HYSTERIA in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. It becomes the textbook case.
- 23 MARCH 1954 SEATTLE. Newspapers carry reports of mysterious pitting damage to car windscreens in a city about 80 miles to the north. Over the following weeks the reports move south and thousands of vehicles are said to be affected.
- 14–17 APRIL 1954 The reports reach Seattle: more than 3,000 vehicles are said to be pitted. Blame falls on FALLOUT FROM PACIFIC HYDROGEN BOMB TESTING, then very recent news. On the night of 15 April THE MAYOR ASKS PRESIDENT EISENHOWER FOR HELP. By 17 April the reports have stopped.
- 1958 MEDALIA AND LARSEN, of the University of Washington, publish their study in the AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW: the pitting was ordinary road damage that had always been there. WHAT WAS NEW WAS THAT PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT THEIR WINDSCREENS INSTEAD OF THROUGH THEM.