The beings’ bodies were formed of pure dazzling radiance, white like the radiance of the sun, and much brighter than the yellow light or aura surrounding them. So dazzling was the radiance, like a halo, round their heads that we could not distinguish the countenances of the beings; we could only distinguish the general shape of their bodies; though their heads were very clearly outlined because this halo-like radiance, which was the brightest light about them, seemed to radiate from or rest upon the head of each being.
As we traveled on, a house intervened between us and the lights and we saw no more of them. It was the first time we had ever seen such phenomena, and in our hurry to get home we were not wise enough to stop and make further examination. But ever since that night I have frequently seen, both in Ireland and in England, similar lights with spiritual beings in them.”
Grinning Men and Mad Monks
In ‘Strange Creatures from Time and Space,’ author, investigator and Fortean extraordinaire, John Keel, collected several unusual accounts of an entity he called the ‘grinning man.’ On October 11th, 1966 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, during an active UFO flap period, two boys reportedly observed “the strangest guy we’ve ever seen.” They had been walking along Fourth Street and New Jersey Street that evening, near the turnpike, when they observed a six-foot-tall man dressed in shimmering green coveralls that reflected the street lights and a wide black belt around his waist. It was standing behind a fence and, apparently, watching a house across the street.
“I looked around and there he was, just standing there. He pivoted around and looked right at us, and then he grinned a big old grin,” one of the boys said. The man was around seven feet tall, according to the witnesses, very broad with a dark complexion and “little round eyes; real beady; set far apart.” They could not remember seeing any ears, nose or hair on the figure as it stood behind a fence and grinned at them. Frightened, they ran straight home. It was later rumored that a “tall, green man” had chased a resident down the street that same night.
In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966-67, while hundreds of citizens were living in fear of a frightening aerial nightmare-come-to-life called ‘Mothman,’ other residents were living in fear of a different sort of inhumanoid.
In the fall of 1966, the Lily family began to experience strange events around their home in the TNT area; the same location where Mothman was often seen; and wondered if it had suddenly become haunted. The poltergeist-like activity included odd noises and kitchen cabinet doors slamming by themselves at night. Mrs. Lily heard sounds “like a baby crying,” which is so often reported in hairy inhumanoid encounters. “It sounded so plain,” she said, “...I looked around the house even though I knew there was no baby here. It seemed to come from the living room; only a few feet away from me.”
Their grown daughter, who lived on the other side of Point Pleasant, began receiving strange phone calls. When she answered she heard a guttural, metallic-sounding voice speaking rapidly in an incomprehensible language. The calls came night after night, but only when she was alone. She complained to the phone company, who examined her lines but could not explain the calls.
Back home, her sixteen-year-old sister, Linda claimed that she had awoken one night and found a large figure looming over her bed. It was “...a big man. Very broad. I couldn’t see his face very well but I could see that he was grinning at me.” She also recalled that the man was wearing a checkered shirt.
In early March, the Lily’s began seeing low-flying luminous objects flying about but kept the sightings to themselves for several weeks. Automobiles began stalling out when near the Lily home. By mid-April word of the sightings had leaked out and swarms of automobiles visited Camp Conley Road in hopes of getting a glimpse for themselves. Few were reportedly disappointed. Among the countless witnesses were reporters, policemen and one Mason County Sheriff.
Another phantom in a checkered shirt appeared three years earlier in the home of Mr. George Glines in Pensacola, Florida. Glines was lying on his living room couch during a hurricane in 1963, with just a dim light on when he “...had the feeling that someone was in the room and looked up and saw a heavily built man about six feet tall wearing a plaid sports shirt. I got up and took a couple of steps toward him. As I did, it looked like he took a step backward and disappeared. I turned on the light and he was gone. I checked the doors, and they were all locked. I didn’t mention it until my son-in-law saw it because I didn’t want to upset my wife.”
His son-in-law, James Boone, disclosed that the apparition had appeared in his own bedroom in the same house. “I saw a large man,” he said, “a laboring type person, standing at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t see its face. When I started to get up, he went away.” The family began to hear unexplained footsteps in the house and knockings on the living room wall. They finally tore the wall completely out but found nothing. Then George, Jr., two years old, began to talk about his friend Puki. Puki was a big man, the toddler said, wearing a colorful shirt. He “...couldn’t see Puki’s face. It wasn’t clear.”
A few months later, the family home burned to the ground. “Puki doesn’t like the house all burned,” little George told his mother. “But he said he would come back when it was fixed up.” In Delaware County, New York, farmers reportedly chased a “giant, broad-shouldered grinning man with an unruly shock of silver hair.”
According to Keel, this entity was well over six feet tall and when pursued displayed remarkable agility, making impossible leaps across wide ditches and such. Eyewitnesses said the being had small eyes and a fixed grin. A similar curiosity, if not the same one, appeared repeatedly in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1966 to 1967.
One evening in the spring of 1966, an Air Force WAF returned to her ground-floor apartment on the edge of McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and heard a noise coming from her bedroom. When she went to investigate, she noticed that her window was wide open and, moreover, a pair of very pale hands with extremely long fingers was resting on the sill. It looked as if someone was about to climb into the house. She screamed and the hands withdrew.
A short time later the Air Police searched the area and pursued a prowler; a very tall man, they said, with his sweater pulled up over his head. A few years earlier this same woman, while staying at a motel in New Mexico, had awoken one night to find a giant cowled figure standing over her bed, wearing a monk’s robe.
It extended one arm above her, she said, and she had reached out to touch it. The second that her fingers made contact with the arm the entire inhumanoid crumbled and disappeared. “It felt powdery, like ashes,” she said.
One evening in late July 1967, motorists near Caterham, England were startled by a group of eight figures wearing thick black cowls. Witnesses reported that the curious men departed by “running and leaping across the road. Their actions were silent and most odd.”
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
In ‘Mysterious America,’ world-famous Fortean author, Loren Coleman, takes a rousing look at some of America’s less well known Inhumanoids, including the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Illinois, a distinctly mysterious entity who caused quite a stir at the time of his appearances. Like many of his sinister cousins, the Mad Gasser ventured into our world but briefly, going about his mysterious business with all too apparent impunity, before disappearing
back into the twilight zone from which he came.
Even though an entire town was on the lookout for him, the gasser was never caught. He continued on with his maledictions against human beings; gaseous attacks that often left the victims temporarily paralyzed or violently ill; until he was done. Unlike many of his inhumanoid kin who appear sporadically throughout the world for many years, even centuries, the ‘Gasser’ chose a single small mid-western town and, once his reign of terror had run its course, never appeared again.
The incidents began during the early morning hours of August 31st, 1944. A Mattoon resident had awakened feeling very ill. He got out of bed and shakily made his way into
the bathroom where he got sick. Then he roused his wife and asked her if she’d left the gas on. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but I’ll check.” To her complete bewilderment, when she tried to get up out of bed she found that she was paralyzed. Shortly afterwards, a housewife in another part of town had a similar experience. She had awoken to the sound of her young daughter coughing and, when she got up, she found that, strangely, she could barely walk.
The next evening at about 11:00 p.m., Mrs. Bert Kearney, while sleeping in the bedroom she shared with her three-year-old daughter, Dorothy, was stirred from slumber by a peculiar smell. “I first noticed a sickening sweet odor in the bedroom,” she later told a local reporter, “but at the time I thought it might be from flowers outside the window. But the odor grew stronger and I began to feel a paralysis of my legs and lower body. I got frightened and screamed.”
Aroused neighbors then came to Mrs. Kearney’s aid. They searched the yards of the entire neighborhood but found no one and the strange smell had, by now, drifted away. The police were also called, and they undertook a similarly fruitless search of the area. They took a statement then left the woman and her daughter alone.
2100 Moultre Avenue, Mattoon. This house was attacked three times by the ‘Mad Gasser.’
At about 12:30 that night, as Mr. Kearney was returning home from work, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a man standing at one of the windows. “He was tall,” Kearney said, “dressed in dark clothing and wearing a tight-fitting cap.” We have heard this description before. It sounds, word for word, just like the descriptions given of the infamous ‘Springheeled Jack,’ without the cape. In any event, the entity had fled at Kearney’s approach. Kearney pursued the ‘man’ but was unable to catch him. The next day his wife complained of having burned lips and a parched mouth and throat.
Soon, the Mattoon Journal-Gazette had entered the picture. They handled the story sensationally; calling the Kearneys the “first victims of the fiendish prowler whom they dubbed the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon.” The article seemed to imply that there would be other victims. And indeed, there would.
For the next fourteen days, residents of Mattoon would be visited by the sinister entity many times. By September 5th, Mattoon police had received four more reports of “gas attacks” with all the victims claiming to have noticed a “sickly sweet odor” before becoming nauseated and partially paralyzed for thirty to ninety minutes. According to news accounts, on the afternoon of the September 5th police “checked what they thought might be a hideout for the anesthetic prowler but found nothing to bear out the theory.”
“However, later that same evening a woman named Mrs. Beulah Cordes presented to the police the first concrete physical evidence of the gasser’s existence. When she and her husband, Carl, had returned home that evening at about 10:30 she had discovered a white cloth on the front porch. She picked it up, noticing that it was wet. Curious as to what the cloth had been soaked in, she brought it up to her nose and smelled it.
“When I inhaled the fumes from the cloth,” she later said, “I had a sensation similar to coming into contact with a strong electric current. The feeling raced down my body to my feet and then seemed to settle in my knees. It was a feeling of paralysis.” She suddenly felt sick and vomited. Minutes later her lips and face swelled and burned, her mouth began to bleed and she became unable to speak. The condition lasted for two hours and then was gone.
Police later found a skeleton key and an empty lipstick tube on the porch where Mrs. Cordes had found the cloth. From the items left behind police surmised that the couple had surprised the prowler while he was attempting to break into their home. That same night another housewife heard someone at her bedroom window, but before she could act, gas had seeped into the room and rendered her partially paralyzed for several minutes.
Police were at a loss to explain what was going on regarding the elusive gasser. Who was he? What was his purpose? What kind of gas was he spraying into people’s homes and why? All was a mystery. Police Chief E. C. Cole ordered all ten members of his police force on twenty- four-hour alert and Thomas V. Wright, City Commissioner of Public Health, appealed to the State Department of Public Safety for more investigators. Mrs. Cordes mysterious cloth was passed on to chemists at the University of Illinois for analysis.
“This is one of the strangest cases I have ever encountered in many years of police work,” Richard T. Piper, crime specialist with the State Department of Public Safety, later told reporters. The mystifying attacks were completely random, with no obvious motive aside from rendering the victims immobile. The gasser had not actually robbed or harmed anyone. Still, public alarm was mounting, due in part at least, to the Gazette’s lurid handling of the attacks, which turned the eyes of the entire nation to this once quiet little town.
On Wednesday night, September 6th, the gasser struck three more times. At 10:00 p.m. a woman smelled a sickly-sweet odor, felt a peculiar dryness in her throat and lips, and felt nauseous. Another local woman had a similar experience just after midnight, and a man named Fred Goble told a similar story which, he said, happened about 1:00 a.m. One of Goble’s neighbors had seen a “tall man” fleeing from his house.
The Decatur Herald, September 8th, 1944:
“Twelve persons last week have been visited by the nocturnal prowler who shoots an unidentified chemical into bed chambers through open windows. Cases have been reported in all sections of Mattoon.
Victims report that the first symptom is an electric shock, which passes completely through the body. Later nausea develops, followed by partial paralysis. They also suffer burned mouths and throats and their faces become swollen.
Mattoon police advanced a theory yesterday that the marauder was a young person experimenting with a chemistry set. Mayor E. E. Richardson said he planned to call a meeting of the city council to authorize a reward for the capture of the prowler if he is not found soon.”
Two more victims fell prey to the gasser that night including an 11-year-old girl who was found unconscious in her bedroom. On Thursday night police took phone calls from three people who claimed they had seen strange men in their neighborhoods. One of the callers was a Mrs. Mac Williams, who reported that around midnight a tall, dark man had attempted to force open her door. Thankfully, her screams had driven the would be home invader away.
Friday’s Journal-Gazette stated:
“Mattoon’s ‘Mad Anesthetist’ apparently took a respite from his maniacal forays Thursday night, and while many terror-stricken people were somewhat relieved, they were inclined to hold their breath and wonder when and where he might strike again.”
It soon became painfully clear to the residents of Mattoon that the authorities were helpless to stop the invader, so, many of them decided to do it themselves. They took to the streets, armed with rifles and shotguns, looking for suspects. The police were the recipients of considerable public abuse for their failure to stop the attacks.
On Saturday, a mass protest rally was being planned by local businessmen to put further pressure on the police, who were simply doing the best they could, under impossible circumstances, to deal with this most peculiar inhumanoid.
Coleman’s writes:
“That night the gasser resumed his attacks, hitting first the residence of Mrs. Violet Driskell. Mrs. Driskell and her daughter Romaona, 11, awoke late in the evening to the sounds of someone trying to remove the storm sash from their bedroom window. They dashed outside to the porch to call for help, but fumes overcame Romona and she vomited. At the same moment, her mother sighted a man sprinting away. Shortly afterwards, at 1:45 a.m., the prowler sprayed gas through a partly-open window into a bedroom where Mrs. Russell Bailey, Katherine Tuzzo, and Mrs. Genevieve Haskell and her seven-year-old son lay sleeping. Elsewhere, Miss Frances Smith, principal of the Columbian Grade School, and her sister Maxine, sniffed the mysterious gas and fell ill.”
According to the Journal-Gazette; “The first infiltration of gas caught them in their beds. Gasping
and choking they awoke and soon felt partial paralysis grip their legs and arms. Later, while awake, the other attacks came and they saw a thin, blue, smoke-like vapor spreading throughout the room. Just before the gas with its flower-like odor came pouring into the room they heard a strange ‘buzzing’ sound outside the house and expressed belief that the sound was made by the madman’s spraying apparatus’ in operation.”
By now the town was reeling in fear. Making matters worse was the fact that most of the town’s able-bodied male population was off fighting a war. A wave of hysteria was sweeping over the desperate housewives of Mattoon, left alone to fend for home and children, the likes of which had not been seen by female populations since the Spring-heeled Jack scare in England over a century earlier.
State authorities managed to talk organizers of the protest into cancelling their rally, saying that it could only add to the hysteria and make matters worse. They promised to bring in more police to work the case. Two FBI agents from Springfield had already slipped quietly into town. Their main priority was identifying the type of gas used in the attacks so that it could be traced to its source. Mrs. Cordes’ cloth had been of no help. The analysis had turned up nothing.
There was no shortage of theories as to the origins of the culprit, however. Some thought that he was an escaped lunatic, but authorities checked with nearby mental institutions, asking for information on recently released patients, and nothing further was heard of it. Police Commissioner Wright thought it might be an “eccentric inventor” type, testing a new weapon on the locals. One man even thought it might be an “ape-man;” “an interesting theory,” Coleman notes, “in view of the tradition and history of anthropoid and Bigfoot-type reports in central and southern Illinois.”
The Inhumanoids Page 23