A world where people can’t stop themselves from dancing is an amazing premise for a Britney
Spears video, but in reality, it wasn’t so glam. Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, and this is the List Show.
Today we’re going to chat about puzzling events that caused mass hysteria, including the Dancing
Plague of 1518. Do try to contain yourself. If you haven’t heard
of the Dancing Plague before, think of it as the world’s most horrific flash mob. In July 1518,
a woman identified only as Frau Troffea stepped outside and began dancing. And dancing. And
dancing. Nothing stopped her for the better part of a week. Eventually, she was shipped off to the
shrine of St. Vitus—sometimes considered the patron saint of dancing—in order to be cured.
By then, more than two dozen other people from the town of Strasbourg, in what is now France,
had joined her in the bizarre choreography. Local leaders decided that the only cure was for them to
just dance it out, so officials set up stages, hired musicians and even professional dancers
to help the ailing citizens get it all out of their systems. It seems this made it worse. At
the height of it all, more than 400 people were afflicted with the Dancing Plague; some people
even died of overexertion. Then, in September, the mysterious illness left as suddenly as it came.
Curiously, it’s just one of several dancing plagues throughout history. Another infamous
incident took place in 1374, spreading to several towns along the Rhine River, in modern-day
Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Even today, we don’t know for sure what
caused this strange epidemic. At the time, demonic possession was considered a strong
contender and so was the flip side—religious fervor. More contemporary historians have
speculated that it may have been caused by the ergot fungi that grew on rye;
when consumed in things like bread, it can cause spasms, hallucinations, convulsions and more.
But the theory that has gained the most traction to explain the dancing plague was developed by
medical historian John Waller, who believed that the outbreak was a type of hysteria brought on by
extreme stress. Both the Strasbourg incident and the earlier event along the Rhine were
prefaced by periods of famine and death. For another incident perhaps brought about
by a time of high stress, let’s think all the way back to 2020. People across
the world started receiving mystery packages of seeds in the mail. Materials accompanying
the packages often identified their source as China, and frequently mislabeled the contents
as some type of jewelry. Texas’s agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, advised recipients to
“treat them like they’re radioactive.” He also speculated that the contents of the packages
could release “a new virus of some kind.” Chris Heath detailed the whole saga in a piece
for The Atlantic, which we’ve linked to below. As he laid out, the most likely explanation for the
mystery seeds originally centered around what’s known as a brushing scam. E-commerce merchants
conduct phony transactions with accompanying positive reviews to increase their ranking on
various retailers. They have to send people something to receive the necessary tracking
information, and often use inexpensive substitutes in place of the purportedly
more valuable shipments—something like a bag of harmless seeds labeled as gold earrings.
The explanation seemed simple enough, but when Heath looked into it further, he found something
surprising: all of the supposedly mystery packages he investigated dated back to actual
orders customers had placed and then forgotten about. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of a
brushing scam for some orders, but it does raise the question of why such outlandish theories
arose for what often turned out to be a simple case of delayed shipping and faulty memory. For
more on the tricks of the mind, check out our video all about the Mandela Effect.
Would-be explanations offered for the seeds had included everything from bioterrorism
to an insidious attack on American agriculture. Others thought that it
was an attempt to disrupt the operations of the U.S. Postal Service in the run up to an election
that would feature lots of mail-in voting. Here, we have to enter the domain of speculation,
but it’s hard not to connect the dots to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s easy to
imagine people with extra time and money stress-shopping online—probably not even
aware where the seed seller they were patronizing was based. An order gets delayed for any number
of reasons and then shipped as jewelry—which Heath speculates was a ruse to get around seed
importation controls. When the packages finally arrive, people—through uncertainty or fear,
xenophobia or elevated stress levels—seemed primed to associate China with some kind of
biological danger. The desire to identify a perpetrator where one might not exist at
all is a theme that we’ll see arise in other cases of mass hysteria throughout history.
In September 1944, the people of Mattoon, Illinois, were alarmed by a disturbing and
rather unusual phenomenon occurring in their community. Late at night, some citizens reported
suddenly smelling a sickly sweet odor flooding their homes. Almost immediately after, they and
their families would fall ill or even become temporarily paralyzed. The only explanation,
they decided, was that someone was pumping fumes into open windows in order to incapacitate the
people inside. This inventive villain was dubbed “the Anesthetic Prowler,” later amended to “the
Mad Gasser,” which you have to admit is a little catchier. After one noxious incident,
a tube of lipstick and a skeleton key was discovered near the porch outside of the
house - but the clues didn’t lead to anything. The small town of Mattoon was whipped into a
frenzy, with armed townspeople roving the streets at night and mass slumber parties cropping up
because no one wanted to sleep alone. But even after state police were brought in to investigate,
no culprit was apprehended. The official determination? The strange smell was due
to the large amounts of carbon tetrachloride used by a local diesel engine company involved
in the war effort. The company claimed no investigation had actually been conducted,
they didn’t have more than a few gallons of carbon tetrachloride on-site, and that none
of their employees had ever fallen ill. Still, the case was considered closed,
and the gassings seemed to stop. Perhaps eager to close the case without incriminating a large local
employer, the state attorney of Coles County at first discounted the factory explanation
for not explaining why it didn’t affect houses right across the street. He expressed a belief
that while many of the reports likely were mass hysteria, at least a couple were legitimate. But
years later he seemed to have concluded it was all a case of public hysteria fueled by an imaginative
journalist. For what it’s worth, that reporter remained unconvinced by the hysteria explanation.
For something a little less sinister, let’s turn to the Seattle Windshield Pitting Delusion. In
March 1954, folks in the town of Bellingham, a city in northeast Washington state, began
noticing tiny pockmarks on their car windshields. As residents speculated about the cause—theories
varied wildly, from sand fleas to H-Bomb test fallout—the mysterious problem began spreading
across the Evergreen State. By mid-April, even Seattle was reeling from the damage, which was
now concerning enough that the governor, a team of research scientists, and even President Dwight
D. Eisenhower were notified of the situation. Law enforcement conducted an official inspection
of 15,000 cars in the state and concluded that only 3000 cars had noteworthy damage. A police
official commented that 5 percent of that damage was attributed to “hoodlumism.” The other 95
percent? Mere public hysteria. There may have been pits on windshields, sure, but likely because of
normal, non-nefarious wear-and-tear. However, due to the media attention,
people turned these mundane marks into something more mysterious. By the end of April, the pitting
reports stopped in Seattle—but began picking up elsewhere. At least eight additional states
and Canada reported pits in car windshields, the glass of airplane cockpits, and even in
the roofs of greenhouses in Michigan. This new wave brought on another round of theories. One
scientist picked up the H-Bomb idea, but thought the marks were from remains of marine life that
had been displaced by testing. Another wondered if acid from flying bugs was the culprit.
By the time summer concluded, pit-mania died down and no definitive answer was ever found.
It’s usually concluded that people were just noticing the pits that naturally develop in
windows. Without the increased media attention, they might otherwise have gone ignored.
If they say laughter is the best medicine, what are you supposed to do when laughter is the
thing that needs treatment? In 1962, a group of students at a boarding school in what is
now Tanzania were overtaken by a laughing fit. Now, the giggles are certainly not uncommon among
school kids. But when the giggles spread to the entire school, and then to the children’s parents,
and then to the neighbors, and then to nearby villages, ultimately causing over a thousand
people to collapse in laughter—well, something strange is definitely afoot.
It was reported that this unstoppable epidemic continued uninterrupted for more than a year,
but today most historians think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It was serious enough that it
shut the school down, and it probably did happen for that ridiculously long period of time. But it
wasn’t the continuous year of laughing that it’s often made out to be. The giggles started and
stopped, only to relapse or crop up in another part of town or a different village. We also
now believe that the laughs were inspired not by hilarity, but anxiety. As with the dancing disease
from centuries earlier, this outbreak occurred among a very stressed population. In this case,
Tanganyika had just gained its independence from British rule and the newly formed sovereign
state was awash in change and uncertainty. Younger generations reported that the high expectations of
their elders were impacting their mental health. Look, I don’t know anyone who actually likes
clowns. But in 2016, as a society, we took our coulrophobia a step too far when we started a
bona fide panic about evil clowns that weren’t actually lurking behind every corner (or sewer).
The first sighting happened in August, and it was the only real one—a clown named Gags was spotted
in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Gags didn’t do anything illegal; he just stood on a corner, holding black
balloons and looking creepy. It turned out he was part of a viral marketing stunt for a low-budget
short film, but the clowndemic he set in motion would long outlast the hype for the movie.
A couple of weeks later, some kids in Greenville, South Carolina, reported a
gaggle of scary clowns standing at the edge of the woods, whispering menacingly. In early September,
clowns were said to be harassing children at a bus stop in Macon, Georgia. Similar reports popped up
across dozens of other states—and yet, nary an evil clown was arrested (though a few people
apparently did eventually dress up as clowns to piggyback on the hoax). There were, in fact,
multiple arrests for false reports about clowns. It got to the point where police had to issue
statements reminding people not to shoot random clowns. The New York Times dubbed it
a “contagion,” but it’s not the first time we’ve been infected by it. Phantom clown sightings—the
official name of this phenomenon—have intermittently gripped us since at least 1981,
from Honduras to England and beyond. The sightings seem to correlate with times
of social unease and moral panic—so we’re probably due for another one any day now.
Of course, one of the most infamous—and deadliest— cases of mass hysteria in history
is the Salem Witch Trials that took place in Massachusetts in 1692. It all started when
two young girls—ages 9 and 11— had strange fits that included uncontrollable screaming
and violent spasms and contortions. A doctor was quick to blame “bewitchment,” a diagnosis
that seemed to spread through the village like wildfire. At least five more girls
came down with the same dubious symptoms, and together, they placed the blame on three people:
An enslaved woman named Tituba, a beggar named Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, an elderly lady.
Tituba, likely knowing that no one was going to believe her anyway, may have decided that naming
names was the only thing that could possibly save her. During the trial, she declared that
it was all true, and that there were a number of other witches living in Salem. The hysteria set in
immediately. Townspeople soon began making wild accusations. Even a 4-year-old girl was accused
and thrown in a dungeon for 8 months. More of the accused confessed, thinking it was their only way
out. It wasn’t, unfortunately. By the time the hysteria settled down, around 25 people had died
(there’s still disagreement today about some of the exact figures). Nineteen were hanged; about
five died in jail; and one man was pressed to death by stones when he refused to enter a plea.
It didn’t take long for history to realize how wrong Salem had been. Just five years later,
in one of the most egregious cases of “too little too late” ever, one of the judges
apologized for his role in the hysteria. Five years after THAT, the Massachusetts
General Court declared the trials unlawful. And now, more than three centuries later,
the last remaining “guilty” woman has finally been cleared of wrongdoing. Although most victims
were pardoned long ago, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was accused but never executed,
was somehow left off the list. An 8th-grade civics class in Massachusetts took up her
plight and lobbied lawmakers to make it right, which they did in 2022.
That’s it for this episode of The List Show! Subscribe to Mental Floss for
new videos every week. We’ll see you next time!