The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County

Friday, 22 December 1933. About 10 p.m. Mrs. Cal Huffman noticed a "gassy" smell in her house in Botetourt County, Virginia, and felt nauseated. She went to bed. Her husband stayed up, hoping to catch an intruder. Half an hour later the smell returned and filled the house. Cal Huffman called the police. Officer O. D. Lemon arrived around midnight and found nothing unusual.

He had only just left when it came a third time. About 1 a.m. Eight members of the family and their guest, Ashby Henderson, were affected. Nausea. Headache. Swollen faces. Mouths and throats tightening. Alice Huffman, aged 20, was hit hardest. Her throat closed until she stopped breathing. Dr. S. F. Driver of Troutville revived her with artificial respiration. She seemed to recover, then relapsed and was described as "seriously ill."

Mr. Huffman and another occupant thought they saw a man running away. Near the window where the gas was thought to have entered, a woman's high-heel print was found in the Haymakertown dirt.

Days later it was the Hall family at Cloverdale, home from church about 9 p.m. The fumes tasted sweet, with "a trace of formaldehyde." At Troutville, A. L. Kelly and his mother were gassed while a man and a woman in a 1933 Chevrolet drove back and forth outside. In January a lodger named Mrs. Moore heard a shade rustle and muffled voices, then smelled gas. "Mrs. Moore grabbed her baby and ran out to give the alarm, but not until experiencing a marked feeling of numbness."

People began to shoot back. At Carvin's Cove a Reedy son fired a shotgun at a man running across a field. Near Cloverdale, Chester Snyder fired at a man in a field after his dog barked. At Colon Siding, Frank Guy shot at about four men near the woods. The last Botetourt case came on 3 February 1934. Seven people and the family dog fell ill in the A. P. Scaggs home.

Families in remote areas slept at neighbours' houses. Armed men were "reported patrolling roads at late hours of the night or sitting on their doorsteps guns in their hands." One officer warned that "some innocent person passing a house or calling upon a neighbor may be wounded or killed through nervousness."

The Board of Supervisors offered a $500 reward. The Virginia General Assembly passed a law against releasing tear gas, mustard gas, phosgene "and other noxious or nauseating gases" in homes or public gatherings. In February the scare reached Roanoke. Nineteen police calls. Then, after 11 February, nothing.

Sheriff L. T. Mundy called himself a "Doubting Thomas" unless he was gassed himself. Constable C. E. Williamson traced one case to fly-killing fluid tossed into a kitchen as a joke. In Roanoke, police traced fumes to a coal stove, a passing car and burning rubber, and called the gasser a "product of overwrought imaginations." An oily liquid collected from the snow proved harmless, most likely an insecticide like household fly spray. A Roanoke Times editorial declared "Roanoke Has No Gasser."

Not everyone agreed. Dr. Driver believed some attacks were real. A physician identified chlorine in the Kinzie case at Troutville. And Williamson said of the Scaggs family: "No amount of imagination in the world would make people as ill as the Skaggs are."

In 1999 Robert E. Bartholomew and S. Wessely described the affair as epidemic hysteria in the Southern Medical Journal, a scare fed by fears of pollution and chemical warfare. In 2017 William B. Van Huss re-read the period sources and concluded the case may never be fully explained. Van Huss even suggests the gasser may have resurfaced in another state years later. Ten years on, in 1944, a mad gasser terrified Mattoon, Illinois.