Something Lurks

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Story 1.

The Monster of Moorback.

Throughout the summer of 1988, American military personnel stationed on the European mainland were excited about the possibility of the Cold War coming to a close.

But at one West German airbase, the conflict still had one last terrifying incident to inflict upon the hapless defenders.

Join us as we relate a close encounter with the Monster of Moorbach.

Despite the best efforts of their superiors, it was proving increasingly difficult to suppress the growing sense of elation amongst the rank and file of the 50th Tactical Fighter Wing.

And whilst by day the airmen of the various fighter squadrons operating out of Han Air Force Base continued to maintain their fleet of F-16 interceptors, their behavior during nighttime hours was becoming progressively undisciplined.

The Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, was continuing to make very public efforts to increase the level of democracy within his government.

Alongside this, rumors swirled that the coming Summer Olympic Games, which were due to take place in South Korea, would be the first time that both the USA and USSR would compete internationally in nearly a decade.

Such optimistic tidings had naturally resulted in higher spirits among the servicemen and women as they socialised away from their base.

The number of incidents involving drunken personnel had increased significantly, and it seemed like there was now an unending stream of disgraced airmen being escorted back to the facility by an ever more weary section of security officers.

One evening, as a group of particularly boisterous flight technicians were being driven back to the station, they demanded that their driver stop so that they could answer a call of nature.

The bus which was carrying them promptly came to a halt just outside the village of Venegarat, where several of the passengers disembarked in order to relieve themselves.

Having wandered a short distance down the road away from their transport, the intoxicated airmen stumbled across a simple stone shrine, situated not far inside the tree line.

Inside, the bemused Americans found a number of candles which appeared to have recently burned out, leaving the small monument unlit.

Rather than relighting them, the men instead mocked the odd-looking structure and then continued on their way.

As the bus pulled off again in order to resume its journey, its passengers had no way of knowing that they would ultimately be to blame for one of the most inexplicable and mysterious incidents to befall an American military unit during the Cold War.

By allowing the flames to remain extinguished within the Venegarat Shrine, they had unwittingly unleashed a terrifying force, which they could not possibly comprehend.

At approximately 12.15am that same night, The guard room at Han Air Force Base received a report of a disturbance, emanating from a wooded area located not far from the base's pyramid of fencing.

One of the security teams patrolling nearby had overheard what appeared to be a shrill screaming coming from in amongst the trees, followed by the sounds of someone apparently moving around in the foliage.

A secondary patrol was immediately dispatched, and two teams made their way outside the perimeter fence and into the trees beyond.

The men had not travelled far when they came across a grisly sight.

Lying out in the open clearing were the bodies of three horrifically mutilated deer.

By the light of their torches, the airmen could see that each animal had its throat torn open and had sustained severe gaping injuries to their torsos.

When the servicemen moved in for a closer inspection, it became clear that someone or something had been rummaging around the innards of the dead animals.

Pools of blood and exposed entrails around the wounds, as well as patches of trampled grass heading away from the remains, suggested that their attacker had feasted upon the internal organs of its victims before making good its escape.

Assuming that the hapless creatures had died at the hands of either boars or wild dogs, the decision was made to place a phone call into the local forestry commission so that one of their staff could come and remove the bodies.

Once this request had been passed along back at the base, the duty officer had then settled back into his seat, preparing himself for another uneventful evening.

But it was at this point that the base's radio network suddenly exploded into life.

Out in the forest, the two patrols had been on the verge of returning to the airbase when they had heard a low and throaty growl coming from some nearby bushes.

As one of the men went over to investigate, A huge figure had exploded from the undergrowth, bellowing forth a guttural roar.

Dropping his torch in fright, the airmen had immediately made off, quickly followed by his compatriots.

Upon their return to the base, the two security teams were asked what they had encountered, replying that they thought they had been attacked by a bear.

Their superior was indignant, pointing out that it had been a century since the last Eurasian bear had been seen in the country.

Assuming that his men had simply misidentified what they had witnessed due to darkness and their nerves, he began to make inquiries as to whether any of the base's canine units had been out in the area at the same time.

When it was confirmed that they hadn't, the officer requested that one be dispatched to the guardhouse, so that it could accompany the two security teams as they made their way back into the forest.

One of the base's dog handlers duly arrived with his German shepherd, and then followed the patrol back to the point near the perimeter fence, where they had entered the adjoining woodland.

As they moved just inside the tree line, the dog suddenly began to act erratically, whining and pulling violently at its lead, refusing to go any further.

Several attempts were made to pull the dog forwards, but it point blank refused, eventually leading its handler and the two security teams back onto the base and quickly retreating to its kennels.

Suddenly, sirens began to ring out and men began to pile out of buildings, heading for their muster points.

A vehicle patrol further along the fence line from the guard room had caught sight of a figure moving around by one of the munitions lockers.

They had immediately chased after the intruder, only for it to make off at speed.

disappearing in and out of the shadows around the buildings it was moving between.

For the next 20 minutes, ground teams and jeeps continued to pursue the intruder in and around the base, none seeming to be able to get close enough to identify it.

Some of the men reported that they had followed the figure into a dead end, only to find it had disappeared despite being surrounded by high walls or fencing on all sides.

Further efforts had been made to deploy canine units, but the handlers reported that they had been unable to coax any of of the animals from the safety of their kennels.

Eventually, the decision was made to cut the power to the base's external lighting, and for night vision goggles to be distributed amongst the men hunting for this mysterious interloper.

The patrols were lined up at one end of the base and then fanned out into a line, pushing the intruder back towards the fence line.

The officer in command of the maneuver was conscious of the fact that his men were on edge and carrying live ammunition, but saw little alternative to ending the situation.

The men lying in wait at the fence could hear the sounds of yelling and shouting getting progressively louder, as the patrols hunting the stranger drew ever closer to them.

And then, suddenly, a dark shape sprang from the shadows.

In a heartbeat, it had passed right by them.

pitching itself up and over the nine-foot metal fence that the men had been standing next to.

The sergeant in charge of the team had then used his night vision goggles to scan the trees for any sign of the fleeing figure, and the blood in his veins suddenly turned ice cold.

Standing bolt upright on its hind legs was what appeared to be a huge wolf-like entity.

This creature stared back at him for what seemed like an eternity before emitting a loud howl and then fleeing back into the trees.

As daylight approached, further searches of the adjoining woodland were unsuccessful in locating the intruder, other than to find broken branches and trampled grass where it had apparently made good its escape.

When the forest ranger who had been called for finally arrived, he was ultimately unable to identify what had killed the three deer.

When asked if it may have been a wolf, He agreed that the injuries were consistent with such an attack, but he was keen to point out that that wolves usually killed their prey from shock, with a lightning quick attack.

This usually resulted in little to no blood loss, and the animals would then begin to feast upon their quarry from the hindquarters up, rather than with such overt savagery.

When the bodies of the deer had been recovered, the airmen returned to the airfield to discuss the night's events.

Nothing of significance had been captured on the poor quality CCTV covering the base, save for groups of airmen running around haphazardly and brandishing their weapons.

Alcohol and drug screening tests were also carried out on the personnel involved, all of which subsequently came back negative.

A detailed report of the incident was duly submitted, though the testimony of the only sergeant who had sighted the intruder was heavily sanitised.

No reference was made to its lupine appearance, and it was only in the coming days and weeks that rumours of links between the incident and the shrine that the technicians had encountered that evening finally came to light.

Beyond being one of 18 other settlements that form the Greater Morbach Municipality, the town of Venegarat has left little footprint in the history of the Rhineland.

Prior to the formation of the United States Air Base and Munitions Facility there in the aftermath of World War II, the most notable story to come from the region is that of a Napoleonic infantryman named Thomas Schwitzer.

In the aftermath of the failed attempt to take Moscow, many of Napoleon's vanquished soldiers fled his army, returning to the safety of their home nations.

Having fallen in with a group of Russian deserters, Schwitzer had made his way back to his homeland in the Elsace.

But as he and his fellow fugitives had passed through the region of Morbach, any semblance of normality had quickly left their group.

Half-starved and driven mad by the horrors they had witnessed, the desperate soldiers had occupied a local farmhouse, killing the occupants.

As the wife of the family had lay dying, she had cursed Schwitzer, condemning him to roam the land as a monster whenever there was a full moon.

Ignoring this proclamation, the soldier had murdered the woman, but soon found an uncontrollable change taking hold of him.

As his journey home continued, Schwitzer became more and more unhinged.

His levels of violence and depravity began to shock the men traveling with him, and he was soon left alone to roam the countryside.

Rumours began to persist of a savage beast killing cattle and livestock whenever there was a full moon.

Eventually, a group of local farmers located and confronted the fugitive, killing him near the village of Venegarat.

Prior to his murder, it was alleged that the soldier had forced himself upon a number of local women, fathering several children.

Fearing that these unfortunate souls would be afflicted by the same curse which had destroyed Schwitzer, the villagers constructed a simple stone shrine near their home, ensuring that a candle was always burning within it.

As long as the shrine remained lit, the curse could not be realized.

The legend of the Venegarat werewolf by no means stands alone in German folklore.

Throughout the nation's past, numerous stories can be found of inhabitants who have uncovered the ability to transform themselves into a murderous beast.

In many of these cases, this was achieved by wearing a belt or cloak made from the pelt of a predatory animal.

The most celebrated of these tales is that of the Bedborg Beast, which transpired in 1582.

Amidst the horrors of the Black Death, the authorities began investigating a series of mysterious cattle mutilations.

When these incidents escalated to the slaying of local residents, the army began to delve deeper into the mystery, detaining a prominent businessman named Peter Stubber.

Under interrogation, The unrepentant Stubber confessed to the murder of 13 children and two pregnant women.

He told his captors that he had been able to turn into a nightmarish wolf-like beast in order to carry out the killings using a belt that had been handed to him by the devil himself.

His subsequent execution by church officials would prove more savage than any of his crimes, as he was dismembered with an axe and then burned at the stake as he bled to death.

With this in mind, are we to believe believe that on a quiet summer's evening during the late 1980s, the United States Air Force found itself under siege from a mythical monster?

That despite being in possession of the most up-to-date technology of their day, they could not capture an individual who was running rampant across their facility, having been afflicted by an ancient curse.

As ever, the argument is presented by skeptics that young soldiers, stationed in an unfamiliar environment and far away from their friends and family, can experience a range of overwhelming emotions.

These feelings, when combined with the fear caused by an ongoing and protracted conflict, along with the tension of a nighttime setting, can naturally lead to those involved to imagine things that have not taken place.

That said, Occurrences such as the Moorbach Monster are intriguingly common throughout the history of America's armed forces.

We have already examined the the Rendlesham Forest incident, and in future episodes, we will document and explore the various monsters and cryptids that servicemen reported encountering during the Vietnam War.

So, if you are to glean anything from this tale, it's to take the time to educate yourself on the customs and practices of any environment you may find yourself in, because you never know when the sins of the past may suddenly decide to pay an unexpected visit to the present.

Story 2 The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

As the Second World War raged back and forth across the front lines of far-flung lands, The residents of a small town in rural Illinois would find themselves fighting their own battle for survival against a sinister and mysterious enemy.

This week we ask, who was the Mad Gasser of Matoon?

On account of her husband working as a local taxi driver, It wasn't unusual for Aileen Carney to be alone of an evening, with only her two young daughters for company.

However, on the night of Friday the 1st of September 1944, she had felt sufficiently vulnerable to have asked her sister to come and stay with her.

One of the reasons for Aileen's nagging feeling of apprehension was that there was a significant amount of money on the premises, as she had cashed a cheque at the town's bank earlier that day.

The house was single-storey, and with all the windows needing to be kept open to counter the stifling heat, the possibility that someone in the small town might have known of the transaction had persistently gnawed at her.

A quick glance at the local newspaper that morning had done little to alleviate Aileen's worries.

In addition to an increase in reported prowler incidents in the area of late, the Mattoon police were also currently engaged in the search for a German prisoner of war who had escaped from an internment camp in nearby Peoria.

But for now, there was little more she could do, other than hope that Burt Carney came home from work a little earlier.

As she lay in bed comforting one of the girls, the nervous housewife thought she noticed a slight movement outside the open bedroom window, but when she took a closer look, there was nothing to be seen.

A few minutes later, however, she realised that the air in the room suddenly hung thick with a sickly sweet and overpowering odour.

As she hauled herself up off the the bed, Aileen realized that she had lost all feeling in her legs, sending her crashing to the floor.

On the bed above her, three-year-old Dorothy was sobbing, asking her mother why she too wasn't able to move her arms or legs.

Their combined screams eventually drew the attention of Aileen's sister, Martha, who immediately ran to their neighbours to summon help.

At the same time, as Aileen's husband pulled onto the driveway of the Kearney premises, he was horrified to see a dark silhouette unexpectedly illuminated by his headlights, apparently leaning in through their open bedroom window.

The figure was tall and thin, holding a long metal implement of some kind, and wearing an odd facial apparatus.

With a cry of anger, Bert leapt from his vehicle and ran at the masked intruder, who immediately fled down a nearby alleyway.

When he returned to the house a few minutes later, the bewildered taxi driver found police officers and ambulance men already in attendance, desperately trying to calm the distressed female occupants of the address.

Within hours of the incident, the local press had already coined a nickname for this mysterious attacker, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

Prior to the horrifying events that were to unfold there in the autumn of 1944, the town of Matoon's only other claims to fame were that it had served as a staging post for General Ulysses S.

Grant during the American Civil War, and that President Abraham Lincoln had once rested there en route to a nearby political debate.

Nestled in central Illinois at the point where two major railway lines converged, by the outbreak of World War II, the town was largely inhabited by workers from the local agriculture and petrochemical industries.

The shadowy attacker first struck without warning on the evening of Thursday, the 31st of August, pumping an unknown substance into the bedroom of the Rafe family at an address in Grant Avenue.

Mrs.

Rafe awoke to find her husband collapsed on the bedroom floor, vomiting uncontrollably.

As she clambered out of bed to assist him, she too then fell to the floor, completely paralyzed.

It would be an hour before either of the traumatised couple could call for the authorities, who found nothing out of the ordinary at the house when they finally arrived.

Since neither party involved sustained any lasting ill effects, the matter was attributed to a localised gas leak until the police switchboard suddenly burst into life the following evening.

Shortly after Burt Carney had lost sight of the intruder, there was a further incident reported in nearby Prairie Avenue.

Mrs.

Ryder awoke to hear her children crying and vomiting in the next room.

before becoming overpowered by a sweet-smelling mist that had drifted into her bedroom through an open open window.

Whilst officers were en route to her address, they were informed a third incident of a similar nature had also now been reported.

A few days later, on the evening of the 5th of September, Mrs.

Leonard Burrell called the police in a panic, claiming that she had just disturbed the nightmarish figure wearing a mask of some kind trying to clamber into her house through a bedroom window.

But as the attending officers had arrived, they were suddenly faced with an equally bizarre incident that was unfolding at a neighbouring premises.

Directly across the road from the Borough residence, which was also situated on North 21st Street, the Cordas family had been awoken by the family dog barking at the front door.

Already on edge with what was apparently now taking place in his town at night, Carl Cordas armed himself.

and immediately hurried to see what was happening.

When he opened the front door, he found that the external screen cover had been jimmied open, and he briefly caught sight of a dark figure fleeing off down the road.

On joining her husband on the porch, Beulah Cordus noticed discarded on the floor what appeared to be a metallic lipstick holder and a small white cloth.

The cloth was soaking wet, apparently saturated with an unknown chemical of some kind.

and when Beulah had knelt to inspect it, she had immediately suffered a violent reaction.

Carl began to cry out in terror as his wife slumped to the ground, her face visibly swollen as she vomited an unyielding mixture of bile and blood.

Once an ambulance had arrived to treat the stricken Mrs.

Cordis, the attending police officers spread out to conduct an extensive search of the area around the household.

Lying in the grass a short distance from the door, A small metallic item was located, which was later identified as a well-worn skeleton key.

The following night, a further six attacks were reported, mainly focused again on residences located in the North Street area.

At approximately 1am,

Robert Daniels was awoken by the sound of metallic scraping coming from somewhere nearby outside his address.

When he looked out of his bedroom window, He saw a tall slender figure holding an unidentified metallic implement, leaning in through the window of the house next door.

In the time it took Daniels to make his way outside, the stranger had vanished, and when he looked in through the open window, he cried out in horror.

His neighbour, 60-year-old Fred Goebel, was lying on the floor in the middle of his kitchen, coughing and choking uncontrollably.

It would be a further two hours before the effects of this attack subsided, with Goebel having no memory of what had transpired.

The next evening, the attacker targeted the home address of Miss Francine Smith, the principal of the local grade school.

She and her sister Maxine reported having heard a strange buzzing noise on each occasion before a thin blue vapor suddenly wafted into the room.

They lay in their beds paralyzed and helpless whilst the attacker returned, staring at them for a protracted period through the window.

before finally disappearing into the night.

By now, the town was in the grip of hysteria, with the police unable to locate the offender and groups of armed citizens having taken to patrolling the streets at night.

Their actions did little to deter the perpetrator, who would go on to carry out a total of 25 separate attacks over a two-week period.

As FBI agents from the nearby Springfield office finally arrived in the town on the night of September the 13th, the last recorded incident took place.

A frantic phone call for assistance was received that evening from a housewife named Bertha Birch.

When officers arrived, she described how she had heard movement in her son's bedroom and had subsequently gone to investigate.

When she entered, she discovered him lying unconscious on the floor and a mysterious figure in the act of clambering out of his bedroom window.

One intriguing feature about this incident is that the witness involved described the attacker as distinctly feminine in appearance, but dressed as a man.

The subsequent police report would ultimately validate this somewhat unexpected development, when the investigating officers found what appeared to be high-heeled footprints in the wet mud of the flowerbeds below the window.

But a more troubling facet of Mrs.

Birch's description provides vital evidence that the attacks in Illinois were far from the first time that the mad gasser had plied his, or her, terrifying trade.

One of the most distinctive features about the Mattoon case, which has continued to invite speculation over the decades, is the apparent lack of motive for the offender's actions.

The gas that was used never affected the victims for longer than a two-hour period, and left no noticeable side effects.

The attacker also made no effort to harm or interfere with their victims in any way once they had been incapacitated, seeming to rule out any violent intent.

Nothing was stolen or destroyed, and the gasser rarely even entered the building he or she targeted, choosing instead to lean inside, if circumstance dictated, via insecure doors and windows.

Whatever the desired goal may have been for these attacks, They were markedly different to others which had taken place in Florida's Lake County during the latter half of 1935, where an unknown offender had used a flick gun filled with medical anesthesia to assist in the execution of a series of domestic burglaries.

The Mattoon attacks do, however, bear more than a passing resemblance to a series of bizarre incidents which occurred across rural Virginia during the festive period of 1933.

In total, 13 separate households reported to the authorities that they had been subjected to attacks from mysterious assailants, apparently in possession of gas-producing equipment.

The bulk of these occurrences took place in Botatoruk County, and unlike the Mattoon attacks, the intruders were often disturbed or chased away before incapacitating anybody in the households they targeted.

It is clear from the police reports that there were multiple offenders involved, with between two and four shadowy figures seen running away from each premises.

There are clear and obvious differences in these incidents compared to those which took place in Illinois, with the offenders using a motor vehicle to flee the scene, and on occasion trying to barricade their victims inside their homes using uprooted trees and piles of rocks.

But the fact that mask-wearing females were reported amongst their number and high-heeled footprints were again recovered from the scenes bears a striking similarity to the Mattoon attacks.

It still remains to be seen whether these two sets of incidents can ever be successfully linked.

It is entirely possible that the gas attacks in Virginia could have been the first experimental efforts of one or more serial offenders, some of whom would eventually find their way to Illinois over a decade later.

It is also possible that someone in Mattoon researched the incidents in Botator County before carrying out copycat attacks of their own.

This was certainly the hypothesis of author Scott Maruna, who published a book about the Mad Gasser attacks in 2003.

After extensive research, Maruna hypothesized that the attacker was an antisocial local misfit by the name of Farley Llewellyn.

His reasoning for this was that Llewellyn was believed to have an unnatural fascination with harmful and noxious substances, and that many of the households that were targeted contained either his classmates or teachers.

This is not a conclusion that the Mattoon Police Department ever came to, citing vastly different reasons for what they believed was taking place in their town.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Chief of Police C.E.

Cole released a statement in which he declared that he believed the incidents were a result of accidents and chemical leakage at the nearby Atlas Imperial manufacturing plant.

The company were quick to deny this accusation, citing a strong safety record and pointing to the fact that none of their employees had ever reported suffering any similar harmful effects.

Chief Cole then went one step further, declaring that he was fully of the opinion that no such mad gasser had ever actually existed, and that what had taken place in the town was a classic case of mass hysteria.

There have been many famous cases of the mass hysteria phenomenon, where members of some communities have gone on to suffer undiagnosable illnesses with mysterious symptoms and side effects in the aftermath of a key trigger event.

Recent examples include multiple employees at the US Embassy in Havana claiming to be the victims of inexplicable sonic attacks of some kind and viral outbreaks of fainting at a girls' school in Malaysia.

Cole believed that the idea of phantom gas attacks within the community had been planted by the initial incident reported by Aileen Kearney, and in the aftermath of that report, suddenly every odd symptom or illness in the town was attributed to this so-called mad gasser.

Rather than rationally analysing their own individual elements of sickness, The people of Matoon were helplessly drawn into a cycle of fear and suspicion, nervously mistaking every shadow and movement for a sinister attacker.

It is important to look at the social landscape in America at the time of the Matun gassings.

The country had been at war for three years, during which time the government and media had repeatedly told the population to be on the alert for enemy agents and invaders.

Any suspicious activity was to be feared and reported.

This raises another hypothetical possibility that the gasser was indeed some form of Japanese agent or sympathizer.

In 1942, a biplane launched from a Japanese submarine had already successfully bombed targets in the state of Oregon, and at the time of the attacks in Mattoon, the Japanese Army were in the process of launching 10,000 firebomb balloons in the hope of causing damage to the US mainland.

An even more eccentric suggestion favoured by conspiracy theorists is that the incidents were perpetrated by the US Army itself, who were testing the effects of a new weapon on their own domestic population.

Ultimately, however, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this was the case.

So what exactly did transpire in the alleyways and backstreets of this rural settlement for two terrifying weeks in late 1944?

Alien visitors from another planet?

Japanese wonder weapons?

Or simply a little understood phenomenon where people became ill out of fear and suspicion of what may have happened to others around them.

Given the physical evidence that was recovered by the authorities from the crime scenes, and the very real sickness and symptoms that the victims experienced, Police Chief Cole's declaration that the matter was a case of mass hysteria seems a little disingenuous.

It is highly likely that at least one malicious attacker was stalking the streets of Matoon, intent on causing as much chaos and confusion as was humanly possible.

As scientific understanding and technological advances continue to steadily progress, it seems like mysterious happenings such as the Mad Gasser of Mattoon have become less and less prevalent.

That does not mean, however, that you should not think twice about closing your bedroom windows before you go to sleep at night.

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