Book: The Mad Gasser

The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County
Reconsidering the Facts
By William B. Van Huss
Copyright 2017
88 pages


The author of this book contacted me for assistance in setting up a book signing about his modest effort to bring recognition to an interesting piece of local legend. He sent me the .pdf copy so I have read this piece at no cost to myself.

"The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County" is an incident that occurred here in 1933. Multiple households in Botetourt reported an invasion of a noxious gas that sickened people in the house. It began not far from where I currently live and moved around the community, and included a house across the road from the farm where my grandfather and his family grew up. You can read more about it here on my Botetourt  History blog if you want a brief synopsis.

The incident is often linked in with a similar occurrence that took place in Illinois about 10 years later. Most frequently, the incidents are considered to be an example of mass hysteria.

Van Huss has pulled out information about the Botetourt County incident, using newspapers as his primary source, in an effort to separate the two incidents. He argues at the end that the two incidents, while bearing some similarities, are not, in fact, related.

He has an intriguing cover, designed by his wife, for his book. Unfortunately, he needed a better proofreader as after about page 50 or so I began to notice typographical errors and missing words. This is common in self-published efforts, and since I edit manuscripts as part of my freelance work I am quick to pick up on such mistakes. Because the work is short - I read it in under an hour - it did not take away from the narrative but I do wish self-published writers would take the time and if necessary spend the money to have their work proofed before they hit "send."

The story he presents is much the way I have heard it and seen it in other publications. His information was more detailed than some I have seen, and if one wants a decent round-up of information available about the incident, then this book offers that.

What was missing for me, as a life-long county resident, journalist, and amateur historian, was a real effort to find other sources. There are no interviews of relatives of those involved in the incidents, (many of them still live here, including, I think, descendants of the officer and doctor involved), no apparent search for journals or diaries that may still exist and offer up a first-person narrative of the incident, and apparently no effort to visit the communities in question and drive around and see the distance involved between the attacks.
 
The roads have changed some since 1933, of course, but the distance between Haymakertown and Cloverdale is still the same, and it is more than "a few miles" and this would, at the least, indicate a perpetrator had to have a vehicle and couldn't have easily done this on foot or horseback. Pictures of the areas and homes involved would have been a nice touch and addition to the book. Many of the dwellings in question still stand.

Additionally, the newspapers used are The Roanoke Times and a few other sources, and not The Fincastle Herald. I know that editions of The Fincastle Herald from 1933 are missing in the microfilm archives, but I think, if one made an effort, that copies of those papers could be found and would prove interesting reading.

All in all, this will be a nice little keepsake book for those who want an outline of the story of Botetourt's mad gasser. It does not offer up new information, though, or reach conclusions that local residents haven't already reached.

The book is available on Amazon.