This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demail.

The man awoke with a start and threw up.

He could barely see. It was just before dawn. He smelled something strange and sweet in the

air there in his bedroom. He turned to his wife and asked her to run to the kitchen

and make sure that the pilot light in the stove was still on, that there wasn't gas leak.

She went to get up but found that her legs no longer worked.

Later that night on August 31, 1944, a young woman across town, her husband off to war,

awoke, alone in her bed, to the sound of her daughter crying and coughing in the next room.

She went to get up but found that her legs no longer worked.

The next night around 1130, a woman, Mrs. Cairney, was getting ready for bed.

She smelled something strange. She walked around her dark house trying to find the source,

until her legs started tingling and she found they no longer worked.

She screamed, he would too. And her sister came running in from down the hall.

She called the police. When they came she told them that the strange smells seemed to be coming

in through her sister's bedroom window. The police didn't find anything. They left and left

the woman alone. Two hours later Mrs. Cairney's husband Bert pulled into the driveway after

his shift as a taxi driver. There beneath his bedroom window, while his wife slept just inside,

was a strange figure dressed in black, crouching in the darkness.

Bert would later tell the police that the figure, tall and thin, ran off into the woods and vanished.

The good people of Mattoon, Illinois, were terrified. Over the course of several nights,

21 of them were awoken, those who were able to sleep at all, with the smell of gas coming through

the window, or to find that they were unable to move, or to find the strange man in black standing,

...