The brain is an incredibly powerful machine. It has been proven time after time that our minds can convince us of all manner of things. Throughout our history, there have been many confirmed cases of completely incomprehensible and unexplainable outbursts shared by a large group. We classify these cases as mass hysteria: widespread fear, anxiety, irrational behaviour or unexplained illness shared by a group or subculture of people.
Some are simply coincidental oddities — others seem to confirm that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. Here are a few of the most notable cases.
The Dancing Plague of 1518
In 1518, a case of dancing mania took place in what was then the Holy Roman Empire, and is now Strasbourg, Austria. It all started when one woman began to dance wildly in the streets; she continued doing so for four to six days without stopping. Within the following week, over 30 joined in, and in under a month there were 400 dancers in the streets of Strasbourg. The local law enforcement even set up a temporary stage in the town centre.
No one knows why they danced, and why they would not stop. Local doctors ruled out any supernatural causes, and decided to blame it on the “hot blood” of the victims. They encouraged the dancers to simply continue, with the belief the plague would end on its own. They were right — most of the dancers collapsed due to fatigue, and some actually died from heart attacks and dehydration.
Gives a whole new meaning to dance ‘til you drop, doesn’t it?
The Meowing Nuns
Ever since the Middle Ages, many religious communities in Western Europe held the belief that animals were capable of possessing human beings. After the incident involving the French meowing nuns, you might believe it, too.
One day in 1844, in a large covenant in central France, a nun began to meow. It wasn’t long before the nuns around her joined in, until every single one of them began to mimic the noises of cats, screeching and purring in unison. Every day thereafter, the entire convent would meow in unison for hours at specific times. Eventually folks from the neighbouring houses began to complain, and soldiers were called in to intervene — they threatened to whip the nuns unless they stopped meowing.
Though the nuns stopped cooing in unison, occasional outbursts of animal noises and behaviours continued throughout the region for many years. No one knows why.
The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic
Another case of mass hysteria occurred in 1962 in a small village of Tanzania, known as Tanganyika at the time. Beginning at an all girls’ boarding school, three young girls began to chuckle to themselves. Chuckling turned into laughter, and laughter turned into a full scale guffaw. Suddenly, their laughter spread like contagion, and 95 out of about 150 students began laughing uncontrollably.
With the students unable to do their schoolwork due to their incessant laughter, the school closed down, and the girls returned to their village. Upon returning home, the laughing epidemic spread; over 200 people in their village began to experience the same bizarre symptoms as the girls. Soon, it spread to the surrounding villages.
Overall, it is estimated that a thousand people were affected to some degree, with symptoms that stemmed from the high levels of laughter such as fainting, pain, crying attacks, random screaming, and respiratory problems. The crazy phenomenon took about six months to abate, and 18 full months to die down completely.
The War of the Worlds
A great example of panic before logic can be found in the 1938 Halloween radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel, War of the Worlds, performed by a pre-Citizen Kane Orson Welles. Though the radio play began with a disclaimer, most tuned in halfway through the program — and got more than they bargained for.
The radio play was so realistically portrayed, with no commercial breaks for the hour and formatted as a stream of news bulletins, that 1.7 of their six million listeners actually believed that the world would soon be at war with the Martians. Accurate depictions of real life places led to people imagining that they could actually see the destruction occurring in the distance, and some saying they could smell poison gas in the air.
Historians say that the mass hysteria experienced may have been a result of the vast technological changes of the era. After all, with the advent of the radio and the automobile, who’s to say that Martians can’t land on Earth?
Strawberries with Sugar
Thought you hated soap operas before? Think again. In 2006, a popular Portuguese drama for teenage girls, Morangos com Açúcar (Strawberries with Sugar), aired an episode in which a life-threatening virus affected the fictional TV show’s school. After the episode was broadcast, teenage girls across the country began to experience the same symptoms as seen on their favourite show. Soon boys and schoolteachers began to report similar symptoms.
These included difficulty breathing, dizziness, and rashes. Across the country, over 300 students at 14 schools were reportedly “ill.” When these symptoms were all found to be false, the incident was classified and dismissed as epidemic hysteria. Eventually the symptoms all but disappeared, along with most of the girls’ TV privileges.
