The work of Satan? Jelly Babies gummies? Mass hysteria? What caused children to
begin collapsing in multiple incidents across England? Keep watching to learn
all about the Hollinwell incident that took place in England in 1980.
"This field behind Hollinwell and Nottinghamshire is where it all went wrong yesterday."
On July 13, 1980, hundreds of young musicians from local school bands gathered in Kirkby-in-Ashfield,
a mining town just north of Nottingham, England, to compete at the annual Hollinwell Show.
When the show started at 9 a.m., everything seemed
fine. But just after 10:30 a.m., the contestants started to collapse.
Ultimately, 259 people, most of them children, were treated at area hospitals for symptoms
that included fainting, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, and pain in their eyes and throats.
Luckily, nobody died. But more than four decades later, people are still asking:
what caused the Hollinwell Incident?
One reason people are so keen to figure out the cause of the Hollinwell Incident is that
it's not the only time something like this has happened. In fact,
something almost identical happened eight years earlier in Hazelrigg, Northumberland,
where 168 children at another marching band festival also collapsed.
According to Fortean Times, many of those kids, along with a few adults in attendance,
complained of sharp abdominal pains. Doctors noted that the pains seemed to subside once the
victims had been away from the parade field for a period of time. A doctor noted of the victims,
"They were all ... frightened and bewildered, many of them believing they had been poisoned
and several spontaneously said they had thought that they were dying."
And another similar incident happened in Whitchurch, Bristol, where around 500
people watching a pedal-car race at an abandoned airport reported a "stinging"
feeling in their eyes. Many required medical attention for burns on their hands and faces,
as well as watery eyes, and around 200 were still experiencing symptoms the next day.
In the Whitchurch incident, symptoms were blamed on tar dust from the race track. But
coming up with a plausible reason for the incident at Hollinwell has been more difficult.
When the symptoms first hit, people at the event suspected food poisoning,
and people were warned not to eat the ice cream or drink the water.
Photographer Neil Lancashire, who was at the Hollinwell Show, told Nottinghamshire Live,
"I did not think much of it to start and then the person over the tannoy
said something like 'don't eat the ice cream' as they thought
it was causing the fainting. A lot of the children eating ice-cream then fainted."
He said that they also thought something sprayed by local farmers may have tainted the water.
But health inspectors later tested the food and water, and found nothing.
Though the water checked out okay, some thought the Hollinwell Incident may have been caused
by pesticides, either sprayed on the grounds themselves or carried via wind from local farms.
Investigations did find that a pesticide called Calixin had been sprayed on
fields in the immediate area. Calixin contains tridemorph, which the World
Health Organization considers "moderately hazardous," and is now banned by the U.K.
This led to hysterical headlines about gas clouds knocking out children.
However, the Nottinghamshire Fire Service said that a gas cloud from local fields was unlikely,
as the wind was blowing the wrong direction. And a
pesticide toxicity specialist ruled out the grounds themselves, saying,
"It's highly unlikely that tridemorph would have caused the children to collapse if they'd
been exposed to it directly, given that it isn't harmful to non-pregnant adults
or children and it was sprayed in a field several hundred yards away two or three days before."
One of the weirder theories about the Hollinwell Incident was put forward by a man from Scotland
who called the local police and claimed high-frequency radio waves were the culprit.
According to the American Cancer Society, if the human body is hit with a large enough amount of
radio waves, it can cause tissue damage. The difficulty in this explaining the Hollinwell
Incident is that all of the affected people would have to have been exposed to for quite a while
and, even then, there is no proof that the effects would manifest so significantly and so immediately
as to cause the sort of panic that took place on that Sunday morning.
Still, this theory gained some traction, as the Fortean Times reported that a high
frequency radio transmitter was found near the location.
Another theory was that the incident was triggered by the Coxsackievirus, which causes hand, foot,
and mouth disease. This illness typically affects children, causing blisters on the
hands and feet among other symptoms, with patients typically getting better in one to two weeks.
Though this theory fit with the timeline of recovery for many of the children affected,
it didn't explain the immediate symptoms people experienced at the Hollinwell Show.
Ultimately, foot, hand, and mouth disease was rejected as a possible cause due to
its inability to explain the diversity of effects on people during the event.
Weird events like this always bring the possibilities of aliens and UFOs into the fray.
About a week after the Hollinwell Incident, the Daily Telegraph ran a story about claims
of a UFO landing in a nearby field, which the police investigated. But
what connection the two events might have, if any, was never established.
Still, if it wasn't aliens, there's always the possibility that it was Satan. Yes, a website
called End Times Prophecy Report posits that the Hollinwell Incident was a manifestation of demonic
power. According to them, Satan and/or his minions were wreaking havoc on that parade ground in 1980.
Given that the main effect was just some fainting, though,
it's not exactly great p.r. for the effectiveness of Satan or his minions.
"You! Watching this at home! Worship me! I command you!"
Once most of the theories were found to be incapable of fully explaining the Hollinwell
Incident, most experts began to suspect that this was a case of mass hysteria,
or epidemic hysteria. At the time, this idea was put forth by two doctors,
Dr. William Thomson and British Psychological Society spokesman Dr. John Nicholson,
who both offered mass hysteria as an explanation.
In a piece for The Observer, Denise Winn wrote,
"It was primed by a combination of the anxiety of performing and
the tension of waiting for a long period at attention, so that when
the trigger came [...] the rest followed in a mounting wave of unintentional mimicry."
One of the kids present during the show now
believes as an adult that it was mass hysteria, writing,
"As for the cause, who knows? Thinking about it now, I'd say it was hysteria — a large gathering
of children, excited and also nervous about a competition which they took very seriously. You
have to remember that there was a lot of healthy rivalry in those marching bands."
Another form of mass hysteria that came up in connection with
the Hollinwell Incident is sociogenic hysteria,
or mass psychogenic illness. According to the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
"[This involves the] rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a
cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation,
loss or alteration of function."
For example, there's evidence that
today's youth are developing mass disorders through social media.
"Mental health professionals worldwide are documenting outbreaks of adolescents
who are picking up Tourette's like behavior from TikTok."
In Hollinwell, the excitement and weariness felt by a bunch of kids
who had been up and practicing for a while and were nervous about the
upcoming competition might have been enough for sociogenic mass illness to take place.
Dr. Robert Bartholomew notes that this has happened throughout history.
The forms it took on varied from "convent fever" to "panics" at factories, theaters, and schools.
One famous example was the laughing epidemic of 1962 which affected school children in Africa.
"Thousands of people in the nation of Tanzania would start laughing
for no apparent reason, for days, even weeks. It became known as the laughing disease."
Dr. Bartholomew notes that this kind of mass hysterical illness can mimic
the symptoms of other illnesses that are common to the culture or setting.
Sociogenic illness might be the most likely culprit for the Hollinwell Incident because
it would explain the immediacy of the event as well as the eventual
dying down of symptoms once people had been removed from the context.
Another truly strange element of this tale is what happened after the initial event.
It was like a domino effect. According to reports, three days after the Hollinwell Incident,
four people in Worksop, not far away, suddenly suffered similar symptoms. The following weekend,
one of the bands originally affected at Hollinwell again passed out during
a march. And two weeks after the Hollinwell Incident, 19 children fell ill on a bus ride
from Lincoln to Leicester. It seemed that whatever was going on was not strictly tied
to the immediate local context but was spreading out almost like a pandemic.
These later incidents made it difficult for those who were present and got
sick — or saw loved ones get sick — to accept the diagnosis of mass hysteria.
According to Dr. Robert Bartholemew and Bob Rickard,
"Sloppy and excitable reporting dogged the event and undoubtedly
contributed to the overall confusion in the wider public. For example,
The Guardian reported that traces of blood and protein had been found in samples of
urine taken from some of the children, possibly indicating kidney damage."
It seemed misinformation around what a diagnosis of mass hysteria actually means was prevalent
in reporting — and still was during later re-investigations into the Hollinwell Incident,
such as one the BBC did in 2003. Many conspiracy theorists believe that "mass
hysteria" is a convenient dodge meant to cover up the truth, while parents of the afflicted
children believed that their kids were being blamed, or even accused of making it all up.
There was still another aspect of the Hollinwell Incident that was easily missed in all of
the reporting done on it. According to the Fortean Times, before the event took place,
there had been an announcement over the intercom warning people to not consume "joke jelly babies."
"Would you like a jelly baby?"
"SHUT UP!"
Jelly babies are a British treat similar to gummy bears, and some believe it may
have been this announcement that planted the seed of mass hysteria that followed.
It also could have been the widely reported warning about ice cream,
but investigators couldn't determine whether that warning actually even happened or not.
The panic was only heightened by two mothers and their infants.
One reportedly looked down to see her baby covered in blisters, and the other could not rouse her
baby from sleep — and her terror was only made worse by the children collapsing around her.
All of these incidents taken together could help
explain the context in which some form of hysteria could have easily been stoked.
With events like the Hollinwell Incident, it is hard enough to come to a conclusion with
a typical investigation. When one adds in the media frenzy, the conflicts between the
public record and witnesses, and the continuous misinformation and misconceptions that abound,
it is not at all surprising that the truth became
included within the wider hysteria of high-profile cases like these.
Among the many missing pieces of information is the lack of knowledge of who, in fact,
was the first child or adult to fall ill or faint. Another one is
whether or not there were additional announcements made over the intercom
after the warning about "joke jelly babies" that stoked the theories of food and drink poisoning.
Adding to the climate of fear, there was also a radio bulletin stating that a horse
fell ill during the Hollinwell Incident, as did five other horses during a subsequent
event. The animals reportedly had to be put down. But neither of these claims were
confirmed as true by the organizers of the events or the investigators.
It also doesn't help that no matter how conclusive an investigation is,
there will still be those who refuse to believe the official explanation, whether due to
misconceptions or outlying evidence that doesn't quite fit the official record. Parents believed
there was a cover-up, and politicians were quick to capitalize by stoking even more fears.
In the end, we are left with more questions than answers.