It was January 30, 1962.
The scene is a classroom in an all girls’ school in a small village called Kashasha,
which is located in present day Tanzania.
It’s just an ordinary day.
The girls’ chat, and as usual laugh and joke around.
One of the girls says something to her friend.
It’s funny, very funny, because the girl starts laughing loudly.
Then two more girls join in the laughter, and after that, more girls start laughing
and they just can’t stop.
It’s contagious this laughter, and you could say it’s possessing the girls.
Soon around a hundred girls are laughing, rolling around, giggling uncontrollably.
The contagion has started and it’s going to last a long time.
It will leave this school and infect nearby villages.
This will become known as the laughing plague and it will become part of the annals of unbelievable
history.
That intro sounds amusing, but this mad event was certainly no joke.
Those girls couldn’t study, they couldn’t focus; they couldn’t do much besides laugh.
What is wrong with them, thought the teachers.
When the students returned to their villages the laughter would spread there.
And it went on and on, for days, weeks, months, and didn’t die out for about one and a half
years.
In the end over a thousand people came down with this plague.
They weren’t just laughing either, some of them fainted, others could hardly breathe,
some cried, some screamed, some broke out in rashes and a few of them couldn’t stop
passing gas from their behinds.
It was mayhem, madness, and as we said, it was no joke.
Those people weren’t having fun.
They weren’t enjoying those laughing fits.
We say fits, because of course they weren’t continuously laughing for a year and a half.
Some of them stopped, and oh what a relief that was, but then they relapsed, and again
the agony of laughter took control.
The fit might last for just a few hours, but some would be possessed by laughter for days
on end.
There might be a break for a few days, and then it would start back up again.
That first school where it started had to close.
How could teachers work with kids just laughing all the time?.
It opened back up again, and then closed again.
14 schools in total were affected.
The locals had a name for it, which was “Endwara Yokusheka”.
That translates as, “The illness of laughing.”
What you want to know is what caused this?
What was behind the side-splitting malady that moved through this little bit of Africa?
The answer in short is hysteria, and when hysteria happens to a lot of people at the
same time we can call it mass hysteria.
It can also be called Mass Psychogenic Illness or MPI.
That basically means a group of people suddenly come down with the same thing except no external
cause can be found.
Those girls and the other villagers hadn’t just breathed in some toxin.
Laughing gas hadn’t been pumped into their environments.
This was a psychological thing.
But why did it happen?
The leading theory is stress.
You see, those people lived in a place called Tanganyika, and just before the laughter broke
out it had got its independence from the United Kingdom.
Before the outbreak the kids had complained that they felt stressed out about all the
changes going on around them.
There was also the stress of being away from home.
The school where it first broke out was a Christian school, and some experts say that
when the girls were faced with the new values of that school it was hard, given that in
their villages they had learned very different traditional values.
In a way their laughter could have been a result of that stress.
It could have been a matter of cohesion, of people coming together, but in an unconscious
way.
In psychology it might be called conversion, when some kind of anxiety is converted into
something physical.
That doesn’t always have to be a mass thing.
There have been cases of repressed anxiety just paralyzing a person’s limb.
I’m stressed…oops, there goes the use of my leg.
It’s happened.
We should also say that this is not the same as something sometimes called crowd theory,
when crowds can get hypnotized and exhibit a certain kind of behavior.
These people weren’t mimicking each other; they weren’t under the influence of a certain
energy.
They were sick.
One psychiatrist explained it like this: “The symptoms experienced are real - fainting,
palpitations, headaches, nausea, shaking and even fits.
It is often attributed to a medical condition but for which no conventional biomedical explanation
can be found.”
There are other theories of why it happened, too.
Some scientists have said that it could have been caused by a virus in the brain.
One of them wrote, “I find it improbable that a purely psychological mass reaction
would last so long and be so widespread.”
He said that there have been quite a lot of cases when mass hysteria broke out, especially
in schools, but not like the laughing plague.
This was a special case because it went on for so long and was so widespread.
If you want another example of this we can look at the same year, 1962, but this time
it happened in the USA.
It involved a whole bunch of workers in a textile factory, people who were all working
in the dressmaking department.
Around 60 workers suddenly came down with a mysterious bug.
It would become known as the “June Bug.”
Those folks were fainting, throwing up, or just felt very dizzy.
Some were taken to the hospital and the story soon hit the media.
How could so many people all working in the same place just come down with something at
the same time?
The U.S. Public Health Service Communicable Disease Center got on the case and it couldn’t
find anything wrong with those people.
The conclusion was “hysterical contagion”.
Interviews later revealed that those workers had been very stressed.
Does it happen today or is it a thing of the past?
We found a recent case in Thailand when 21 girls at a school were affected by mass hysteria.
These girls were screaming and crying, while others had seizures, muscle spasms or were
hyperventilating.
They were taken to a hospital and given some Valium.
What was happening was happening in their heads.
But get this, the next day it happened again.
The Thai doctor concluded that this was a case of mass psychogenic illness.
We may never know what caused it.
There are even stranger cases, too, when people acted out as if they had been possessed by
a demon.
Here’s an excerpt from a 1979 news report describing mass hysteria in a Singapore school,
“Some cried, shivered, and started eating the grass and empty glasses, others stared
into empty space with open eyes while performing a Tai Chi type of dance movement.”
Imagine being there for that one.
You could have been mistaken for thinking the zombie apocalypse was really happening.
Because there have been so many cases in schools a psychologist named Robert Bartholomew actually
wrote a book about it.
He said it seems to happen in schools that are very religiously devout or very conservative.
When students are told to follow rigid rules they can become anxious, frustrated, and this
can be heavy on the mind.
The affected students might feel powerless, and the hysteria could be a result of that.
They just explode, unconsciously, and it’s contagious.
He said one of the students might witness another just going over the edge, and then
the others fall like dominoes.
It’s real, though, not play-acting.
He said, “I cannot stress enough that this is not a conscious process and the girls are
not faking.”
This was weird right?
But, we think we can top it.
Here are two videos fI think you will enjoy even more: “Could the Black Death (The Plague)
Happen Again?” and “The Disease That Makes You Dance Until You Die”.
Pick one, they are both worth it!
Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!