Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hey Hey, and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about the Mad Gasser of Me tune this week. We did. I kind of love this story. I mean, I don't love the idea of people being completely gripped by fear, but I do like that. It's just an interesting social examination of a lot of things. Right. It's obviously used, we said all the time, as like this is how mass hysteria works. But I also am really fascinated by how condensed this whole thing is. Like it was already like being questioned as a possible hoax just six days after it hit the paper, So it was a pretty short like burn time on that, which is something I think we think of as something that would be very modern and a sonociated with the speed with which information passes around in the digital age, But like that kind of thing could happen even in nineteen forty four. One thing we didn't talk about this in this that comes up a little bit, not a ton. It has shown up. I noticed in a few modern write ups that aren't necessarily like heavy on they feel like they're not very heavy on research. Is that part of the mass hysteria element is that so many of the incidents were reported by women. Oh yeah. But the other thing to consider there is that this was also happening during World War Two, when there were a lot of men not around and like, so of course just proportionately there would be more rimon, right right, right, And that in terms of a mass hysteria event, it does also start to make a lot more sense because it was a time that was just scary to live in, like the you know, we were in a world war, so I think people were probably just on edge. So that's kind of interesting. Here's another factoid. Mattune is no bigger than it was then. Oh yeah. It still hovers between seventeen and eighteen thousand residents as of I think twenty twenty two. I'm not sure I wrote the number and not the date that I looked at, but it was within the last two years. So still not a big town. About the same. And I do want to talk about Scott Maroon's book more because it is an interesting read and he lays out the case, as you know, his reasons for coming to those conclusions pretty clearly. I mean, he states, I don't remember if it was in the book or if it was in an interview, that he really truly believed that he that he thought Farley Llewellen wanted to blow up the entire town, and that was oh wow. And there was apparently an incident that happened several weeks before any of this started, where there was an explosion at Farley's lab that this author thinks was like the precursor of him developing whatever this toxic thing was, but there's no real knowledge about it. There's also the suggestion that as it started to hit the papers and people started to investigate this person, that his sisters may have helped him. But again all conjecture. We don't have real you know, there's no hard evidence. It's all kind of guesswork, which is I mean, I don't want to invalidate. That's an interesting theoretical road to go down, but I don't want any of our listeners to think, like, Aha, the sisters that's the answer. I don't know. I'm pretty dismissive of the paranormal silliness around it. I'm just like, there's no there's no mystery creature that's running around doing right right, it's either a random person or a mass hysteria of it. Boy, if I were the Atlas company, I'd be mad as hornets. Yeah, like a special I mean, I think anybody that's whether you are a single person or a huge conglomerate company. If you just woke up tomorrow and no one had ever talked to you but suddenly accuses you of like a pretty serious thing that has really led to a lot of fear and stress, wouldn't you be like nobody even said anything, what is it? Yes, like your inspector have not even been here, No one came here. You just kind of made this up. And there are people that just think that the police made that story up to try to get the heat off of them because people were criticizing their police work. Okay, who I mean, it's layers upon layers of maybe and perhaps, and we think this could be a motivation. This is why I don't think this is a Halloween episode. To me, this is not spooky. Stress certainly very frightening to think somebody could be doing something, But because there wasn't any you know, this is did not end with any serious consequences. In terms of like no and perished. Sure, worst thing is a person that reported having a burning sensation and may or may not have gone to the hospital for it. And because it all kind of came and went so fair and I as an example of how quickly this whole thing came and went, I randomly stumbled across a little write up in the paper. Okay, this all took place from or the reports. The primary reports in the paper were like from September second until like the thirteenth was the last day, because they were reporting that announcement by the police, and at that point no more attacks were happening attacks. I'm using air quotes. A week later, on September twentieth, there is a write up in the local paper that was doing all these reports noting that Urban Rafe, who was one of the people whose home was attacked, bowled a five oh seven for three games in the commercion already commercial and Catholic parish leagues. And there's no mention at all of like linked to the recent scare. Like there's no, it doesn't even come up at all. It's literally just like he had a great night bowling. And I'm like, all right, they kind of got over it pretty quicktly. Yeah, I also do want to talk about how much we mentioned it in the show, but it really really troubled me reading about the otherism of the Llewellyn family right like there really are It is very I mean, we did a very sanitized version of like how many things were attributed to them that might be like suspicious, and some of it is even just like weird commentary about like their personal appearance, like oh, those sisters were very heavy and they didn't their hair didn't look good, and it's like, ah, suspected criminals. Like I'm like, you, guys, Yeah, can't escapegoat an entire family because they even if they were super eccentric, like that doesn't you're making it up. I have strong feeling on this matter. Don't do that to people. Still, don't do it. You don't know, you don't know anyway, that's the mad guesser. But tude, Yeah, it's been on my list for a while and I finally was like, let's just pick. I was in a mood to pick through old newspapers, which happens sometimes, Yeah, because I love looking at old newspapers, but sometimes it's hard to find the time to piece stuff together. I was in the mood. It was on my list for a while also after hearing, so I don't know if it was after hearing the episode of the podcast The Memory Palace which is about this, which like did come out at the end of October, and I think was intended as kind of a Halloween episode. It's very eerie and it's if you're not familiar with The Memory Palace. These are like very short, almost poetic sort of snapshots of historic, beautiful elements. I love them a lot, and so it's like only five minutes or something long, and so I don't know if it was that or a different show. Like I heard about this, heard the basics of it somewhere and I had been like, maybe I could do a podcast on that, and then I think I poked at it briefly and was like, I don't know, and then moved on to something else and never thought about it again. I thought about it a lot. Now it's here. We talked about impressing child actors into working. So the takeaway is that all humans are garbage and they always happened. Yeah, I was, really, like I said in the episode, did not I sort of knew that anyone could be impressed it, and I knew that like there were a adult crafts people who would be pressed into service for whatever reason. I did not know that about the children's companies, and that it was just okay to press children into work as first chorus singers and then actors, but not really actors, but singers not acting though only singing. Was kind of how that went down this court complaint. I do often really enjoy reading something that was written in English a long time ago and has spellings that aren't standard today, and you know, word constructions that aren't standard today. This particular one, though, was just really fatiguing. It did not have the long s's that look like f's that you see in a lot of older documents. But all of the us were v's, oh, and all of the j's were i's, and all of the words were spelled differently than we usually spelled them today. And there was so so much of and the said so and so af we're said, and the said and just as we said, really long sentences, like it felt like the sentence was just going on, like it was all one sentence. It was. It was really hard, and I kept having to take little breaks. And then I was reading a paper that included some different documents that I started reading and I was like, man, how is this much? This is so much harder than the other one. And it dawned on me after a few words that it was because it had all of those same traits about different letters being print because of type setting, like different letters being used because of type, and also unusual spellings that aren't used to day. But also it was in French, and I was like, oh, right, this is why it's hard, because I'm also reading French, and it was in uh, straightforward enough French that I was actually able to pick my way through it, but then also write out underneath it the author of the paper had a translation, and I was like, oh, thank you. I think this extra tickles me on the heels of our Dictionary episodes, thinking about Webster trying to simplify all of the spellings of everything and mostly yeah, that being kind of awkward looking and confusing. Yeah, this one had a lot of more extra letters, more flourish, yes, lots of more double letters when we would not likely see them today, either in the United States or in England. Like there were some there are some things that are like spelling differences that continue until today. But this had a lot more beyond that. I was not totally aware of just how many of those large, round, three story open in the center theaters had been built. I knew that there was more than one, because there was a whole rivalry involved. But as I was sort of making the list and I got up to like five theaters that had been built by this point, and then there were some more that were built after it that we did not even talk about, I was like, oh, that's a little more theaters than I quite realized. Yeah, I mean that's what there was to do, right. It wasn't like you could, like we could go to the theater or a hockey game or stay home and watch television. Right, No, we could go to the theater toil in the fields. Yeah, I know it's not that simple. Please please don't anybody think that. I think all the people did was toil in fields. Now we're gonna get some kind of call out threat. But yeah. I also I kept thinking about Tilney, the Master of the Rebels, who is often depicted as kind of a tyrant in terms of the theater, and it kept reminding me of the movie Shakespeare in Love, which I know has mixed reviews. I personally super enjoy it. I have a very specific anger about it, but that's okay. Are you gonna tell me I have a double specific anger about it. I should say, okay, one, I mean before I say any of this. Judy dench untouchable and perfection, okay, And her costume is always exquisite. There were some weird costume things in some parts. But my big beef was that, of course, Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress that year, and it should have been Kate Blanchett for Elizabeth, which to me was the far superior film. Sure. I mean that movie is like knock my socks off? Good. Yeah. Yeah, So Shakespeare in Love, I was like, really, fluff got awarded when it's not all fluff. I know it was very hard. Many people love it, but for me it was it felt like a travesty. I know, award shows are you know whatever, but yeah they are. Those are both movies that I saw in the theater by myself when they came out. Oh god, but yeah, Eliz. There's a moment in Shakespeare in Love where Tilney, the Master of the Rebels is trying to shut down the performance, and Judy Dench is Queen Elizabeth barks his name in a way that causes the whole room to freeze, and I just it do just that just kept ringing in my head while I was working. Yeah, she's quite spectacular. Yes, yes, anyway, I'm glad to have had a thing that was not nineteenth century New England. And the thing that's absolutely beckoning me for the the next thing to work on is again nineteenth century New England. I'm like, come on, I just brain. I just said. I just said we were going to do some stuff that was not that. But I was on a walk over the weekend and I found a historical marker that called to me. So there you go. We'll see, we'll see, I actually do. We're going to have Unearthed soon. Unearthed just what's being worked on next. Maybe by the time I'm done with working on Unearthed, my mind will have rested on something else that it's really excited about for an episode, because those episodes are the best ones, the ones that our minds are the most excited about. Oh yeah, for sure. So happy Friday again. Whatever some of your plates this weekend. I hope it's great. We'll be back with the Saturday Classic tomorrow, but with a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hey Hey, and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about the Mad Gasser of Me tune this week. We did. I kind of love this story. I mean, I don't love the idea of people being completely gripped by fear, but I do like that. It's just an interesting social examination of a lot of things. Right. It's obviously used, we said all the time, as like this is how mass hysteria works. But I also am really fascinated by how condensed this whole thing is. Like it was already like being questioned as a possible hoax just six days after it hit the paper, So it was a pretty short like burn time on that, which is something I think we think of as something that would be very modern and a sonociated with the speed with which information passes around in the digital age, But like that kind of thing could happen even in nineteen forty four. One thing we didn't talk about this in this that comes up a little bit, not a ton. It has shown up. I noticed in a few modern write ups that aren't necessarily like heavy on they feel like they're not very heavy on research. Is that part of the mass hysteria element is that so many of the incidents were reported by women. Oh yeah. But the other thing to consider there is that this was also happening during World War Two, when there were a lot of men not around and like, so of course just proportionately there would be more rimon, right right, right, And that in terms of a mass hysteria event, it does also start to make a lot more sense because it was a time that was just scary to live in, like the you know, we were in a world war, so I think people were probably just on edge. So that's kind of interesting. Here's another factoid. Mattune is no bigger than it was then. Oh yeah. It still hovers between seventeen and eighteen thousand residents as of I think twenty twenty two. I'm not sure I wrote the number and not the date that I looked at, but it was within the last two years. So still not a big town. About the same. And I do want to talk about Scott Maroon's book more because it is an interesting read and he lays out the case, as you know, his reasons for coming to those conclusions pretty clearly. I mean, he states, I don't remember if it was in the book or if it was in an interview, that he really truly believed that he that he thought Farley Llewellen wanted to blow up the entire town, and that was oh wow. And there was apparently an incident that happened several weeks before any of this started, where there was an explosion at Farley's lab that this author thinks was like the precursor of him developing whatever this toxic thing was, but there's no real knowledge about it. There's also the suggestion that as it started to hit the papers and people started to investigate this person, that his sisters may have helped him. But again all conjecture. We don't have real you know, there's no hard evidence. It's all kind of guesswork, which is I mean, I don't want to invalidate. That's an interesting theoretical road to go down, but I don't want any of our listeners to think, like, Aha, the sisters that's the answer. I don't know. I'm pretty dismissive of the paranormal silliness around it. I'm just like, there's no there's no mystery creature that's running around doing right right, it's either a random person or a mass hysteria of it. Boy, if I were the Atlas company, I'd be mad as hornets. Yeah, like a special I mean, I think anybody that's whether you are a single person or a huge conglomerate company. If you just woke up tomorrow and no one had ever talked to you but suddenly accuses you of like a pretty serious thing that has really led to a lot of fear and stress, wouldn't you be like nobody even said anything, what is it? Yes, like your inspector have not even been here, No one came here. You just kind of made this up. And there are people that just think that the police made that story up to try to get the heat off of them because people were criticizing their police work. Okay, who I mean, it's layers upon layers of maybe and perhaps, and we think this could be a motivation. This is why I don't think this is a Halloween episode. To me, this is not spooky. Stress certainly very frightening to think somebody could be doing something, But because there wasn't any you know, this is did not end with any serious consequences. In terms of like no and perished. Sure, worst thing is a person that reported having a burning sensation and may or may not have gone to the hospital for it. And because it all kind of came and went so fair and I as an example of how quickly this whole thing came and went, I randomly stumbled across a little write up in the paper. Okay, this all took place from or the reports. The primary reports in the paper were like from September second until like the thirteenth was the last day, because they were reporting that announcement by the police, and at that point no more attacks were happening attacks. I'm using air quotes. A week later, on September twentieth, there is a write up in the local paper that was doing all these reports noting that Urban Rafe, who was one of the people whose home was attacked, bowled a five oh seven for three games in the commercion already commercial and Catholic parish leagues. And there's no mention at all of like linked to the recent scare. Like there's no, it doesn't even come up at all. It's literally just like he had a great night bowling. And I'm like, all right, they kind of got over it pretty quicktly. Yeah, I also do want to talk about how much we mentioned it in the show, but it really really troubled me reading about the otherism of the Llewellyn family right like there really are It is very I mean, we did a very sanitized version of like how many things were attributed to them that might be like suspicious, and some of it is even just like weird commentary about like their personal appearance, like oh, those sisters were very heavy and they didn't their hair didn't look good, and it's like, ah, suspected criminals. Like I'm like, you, guys, Yeah, can't escapegoat an entire family because they even if they were super eccentric, like that doesn't you're making it up. I have strong feeling on this matter. Don't do that to people. Still, don't do it. You don't know, you don't know anyway, that's the mad guesser. But tude, Yeah, it's been on my list for a while and I finally was like, let's just pick. I was in a mood to pick through old newspapers, which happens sometimes, Yeah, because I love looking at old newspapers, but sometimes it's hard to find the time to piece stuff together. I was in the mood. It was on my list for a while also after hearing, so I don't know if it was after hearing the episode of the podcast The Memory Palace which is about this, which like did come out at the end of October, and I think was intended as kind of a Halloween episode. It's very eerie and it's if you're not familiar with The Memory Palace. These are like very short, almost poetic sort of snapshots of historic, beautiful elements. I love them a lot, and so it's like only five minutes or something long, and so I don't know if it was that or a different show. Like I heard about this, heard the basics of it somewhere and I had been like, maybe I could do a podcast on that, and then I think I poked at it briefly and was like, I don't know, and then moved on to something else and never thought about it again. I thought about it a lot. Now it's here. We talked about impressing child actors into working. So the takeaway is that all humans are garbage and they always happened. Yeah, I was, really, like I said in the episode, did not I sort of knew that anyone could be impressed it, and I knew that like there were a adult crafts people who would be pressed into service for whatever reason. I did not know that about the children's companies, and that it was just okay to press children into work as first chorus singers and then actors, but not really actors, but singers not acting though only singing. Was kind of how that went down this court complaint. I do often really enjoy reading something that was written in English a long time ago and has spellings that aren't standard today, and you know, word constructions that aren't standard today. This particular one, though, was just really fatiguing. It did not have the long s's that look like f's that you see in a lot of older documents. But all of the us were v's, oh, and all of the j's were i's, and all of the words were spelled differently than we usually spelled them today. And there was so so much of and the said so and so af we're said, and the said and just as we said, really long sentences, like it felt like the sentence was just going on, like it was all one sentence. It was. It was really hard, and I kept having to take little breaks. And then I was reading a paper that included some different documents that I started reading and I was like, man, how is this much? This is so much harder than the other one. And it dawned on me after a few words that it was because it had all of those same traits about different letters being print because of type setting, like different letters being used because of type, and also unusual spellings that aren't used to day. But also it was in French, and I was like, oh, right, this is why it's hard, because I'm also reading French, and it was in uh, straightforward enough French that I was actually able to pick my way through it, but then also write out underneath it the author of the paper had a translation, and I was like, oh, thank you. I think this extra tickles me on the heels of our Dictionary episodes, thinking about Webster trying to simplify all of the spellings of everything and mostly yeah, that being kind of awkward looking and confusing. Yeah, this one had a lot of more extra letters, more flourish, yes, lots of more double letters when we would not likely see them today, either in the United States or in England. Like there were some there are some things that are like spelling differences that continue until today. But this had a lot more beyond that. I was not totally aware of just how many of those large, round, three story open in the center theaters had been built. I knew that there was more than one, because there was a whole rivalry involved. But as I was sort of making the list and I got up to like five theaters that had been built by this point, and then there were some more that were built after it that we did not even talk about, I was like, oh, that's a little more theaters than I quite realized. Yeah, I mean that's what there was to do, right. It wasn't like you could, like we could go to the theater or a hockey game or stay home and watch television. Right, No, we could go to the theater toil in the fields. Yeah, I know it's not that simple. Please please don't anybody think that. I think all the people did was toil in fields. Now we're gonna get some kind of call out threat. But yeah. I also I kept thinking about Tilney, the Master of the Rebels, who is often depicted as kind of a tyrant in terms of the theater, and it kept reminding me of the movie Shakespeare in Love, which I know has mixed reviews. I personally super enjoy it. I have a very specific anger about it, but that's okay. Are you gonna tell me I have a double specific anger about it. I should say, okay, one, I mean before I say any of this. Judy dench untouchable and perfection, okay, And her costume is always exquisite. There were some weird costume things in some parts. But my big beef was that, of course, Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress that year, and it should have been Kate Blanchett for Elizabeth, which to me was the far superior film. Sure. I mean that movie is like knock my socks off? Good. Yeah. Yeah, So Shakespeare in Love, I was like, really, fluff got awarded when it's not all fluff. I know it was very hard. Many people love it, but for me it was it felt like a travesty. I know, award shows are you know whatever, but yeah they are. Those are both movies that I saw in the theater by myself when they came out. Oh god, but yeah, Eliz. There's a moment in Shakespeare in Love where Tilney, the Master of the Rebels is trying to shut down the performance, and Judy Dench is Queen Elizabeth barks his name in a way that causes the whole room to freeze, and I just it do just that just kept ringing in my head while I was working. Yeah, she's quite spectacular. Yes, yes, anyway, I'm glad to have had a thing that was not nineteenth century New England. And the thing that's absolutely beckoning me for the the next thing to work on is again nineteenth century New England. I'm like, come on, I just brain. I just said. I just said we were going to do some stuff that was not that. But I was on a walk over the weekend and I found a historical marker that called to me. So there you go. We'll see, we'll see, I actually do. We're going to have Unearthed soon. Unearthed just what's being worked on next. Maybe by the time I'm done with working on Unearthed, my mind will have rested on something else that it's really excited about for an episode, because those episodes are the best ones, the ones that our minds are the most excited about. Oh yeah, for sure. So happy Friday again. Whatever some of your plates this weekend. I hope it's great. We'll be back with the Saturday Classic tomorrow, but with a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.