Throughout history, there have been many events that have remained largely unexplained to those who witnessed them. Incidents where entire populations began to behave mysteriously and exhibit symptoms that seemingly made no sense, such as barking nuns or children who couldn’t stop laughing. As quickly as they appeared, they often disappeared, and few were worse off. When these unexplained conditions occurred, mass hysteria was often the cause.
10. Attacks on the Cuban embassy
One of the biggest and scariest stories of 2016 and the years since has been a series of strange illnesses that have befallen American diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Cuba. Many have suffered serious problems, from memory loss and hearing loss to actual physical brain damage. The Trump White House has accused Cuba of using some kind of secret sonic weapon against the embassy. But subsequent research has made this less plausible.
Today, if you look at Wikipedia page , dedicated to the attacks, you'll see a section that dismisses the idea of mass hysteria, thanks to a JAMA study that concluded that the victims suffered physical injuries. That makes it pretty cut and dry. However, that's from 2018.
Other researchers looked at the data and found several critical errors. Reports that embassy staff suffered physical ailments were out of context. There is no data to support the claims that people were injured, including the nature of the injuries, their assessment, or anything else.
Much of the data that the media reports relied on was self-reported. The idea that the injury was caused by a new sonic weapon was widely accepted, except that no one in the world had ever produced such a weapon, and even those that had tried, like the US government, had little success with anything like what happened in Cuba because physics doesn't allow things to work that way.
What the condition seemed to reflect very well were the symptoms of outbreaks of mass hysteria.
9. Salem Witch Trials
Perhaps America's most famous case of mass hysteria, and one of its darkest, the Salem witch trials illustrate how extremely dangerous mass hysteria can be. Over the course of a single year in the late 1600s, nineteen women were executed by hanging as witches, and hundreds more faced prosecution for a fictitious crime. Many more died in prison and from additional torture methods.
The local priest created an atmosphere in which citizens were publicly shamed for their misdeeds. When his children began having seizures, he accused the locals of being devils. Dozens were arrested and brought to trial to undergo bizarre and pointless tests to prove they were witches. One test involved simply touching someone who was having one of these seizures. If the seizure stopped, the person was a witch. Even the presence of a birthmark, then known as a witch's nipple, was considered direct evidence of witchcraft.
8. Monkey Man
Some cases of mass hysteria are easier to believe than others. But many have had a strong thread of the supernatural and the incredible behind them for a long time, making it even harder to understand how anyone, let alone many people, could believe it. Few cases are more dramatic than the New Delhi Monkey Man.
In 2001, residents of New Delhi began reporting sightings of a terrifying half-man, half-ape creature. The creature traveled across rooftops and had razor-sharp metal claws and a helmet, presumably for safety.
People have reported being attacked and injured by this creature. Worse, several people even died trying to escape the ape man, causing them to fall off rooftops. Police I couldn't keep up with all the messages , and most of the injuries were attributed to animal bites rather than supernatural bites from the ape-man.
It was believed that the hysteria was caused not only by superstition, but also by constant power outages that left people in the dark at random times. This probably increased fears and made the situation worse.
At one point, the situation became so bad that gangs of vigilantes roamed the streets and even beat up a very small man, believing him to be the ape-man in question.
7. Halifax Slasher
In 1938, in Halifax, England, a man with shiny shoe buckles and a hammer began attacking women. Two women reported that the man had attacked them and caused panic , as people took to the streets trying to track down the villain.
During the first week, more attacks were reported, and the weapons changed from hammers to knives and razors. Scotland Yard was called in to help with the investigation. Vigilantes attacked those they believed to be the killers, and the situation spiraled out of control. Local businesses closed their shops in fear, and panic spread to other towns where attacks began to be reported.
Eventually, one of the victims gave in and admitted that she had made up the attack and had actually hurt herself. Others did the same, and eventually five of the so-called victims were charged with public nuisance.
6. The Tanganyika Laughter Incident
Laughter is the best medicine, some say, but it is not the case that laughter is also the problem. Such was the case in a 1962 incident in Tanzania, when a girl at school started laughing and couldn’t stop. School officials tried unsuccessfully to make her stop, and the laughter, as sometimes happens, spread to other students. Suffered almost 100 of 159 students schools . The event began in January and continued into March when the school was forced to close.
The laughter epidemic spread beyond the school. People in other cities and other schools became victims. Some were sick for days, some for weeks. But it spread so much that more than 1000 victims , and within a few months 14 different schools had to be closed.
Looking back on the incident, most researchers have concluded that the laughter was caused by anxiety. There were a number of factors that were causing excessive stress to students at the time. The unknown expectations of British schools and the fact that the region had just gained independence were probably the main reasons for the unrest in people’s minds.
5. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
You'd be forgiven for not knowing much about Mattoon, Illinois. With a population of less than 20,000, it's a tiny place that few people know about. Except for the Mad Gasser who plagued the town in the 1940s, who also didn't really exist.
For weeks, residents of the city reported that they had been attacked and poisoned by a stranger. poisonous gas Witnesses also confirmed these reports, assuring police that they saw the gasman at work.
The victims would reportedly be at home and notice an unusual smell. They would then suffer from symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and paralysis. Despite this, the police never found a shred of evidence that the gasser existed. In fact, they found much more evidence that the gasser did not exist, and all the strange smells had easy, accurate explanations, from spilled nail polish to animals.
4. Charlie Charlie
The Charlie-Charlie challenge, an adaptation of a much older game simply called the "pencil game," was said to summon nefarious spirits from beyond and lead to death and suicide. None of this was true, but that hasn't stopped countries like Fiji and Libya from banning the game entirely to protect vulnerable children.
The idea of the game is simple. You place a pair of pencils on a piece of paper, balancing one on top of the other to form a plus sign. You have things like names written on each of the four sections of the paper, bordered by pencils. Players ask a question like "Which boy likes me?" and the pencil rotates around the pivot point, pointing to one of the four names you've written on the paper.
Because the pencil is so precariously balanced, it can move with very little effort. Even breathing near it will cause it to spin. In principle, this is very similar to how a Ouija board works, which appears to move of its own accord, although there are easily understood forces at work.
However, in 2015, the game got out of hand. Renamed "Charlie Charlie," the idea was that children would ask a spirit or demon to move a pencil. In most stories, he is called a Mexican demon, despite his English name. As a result, they ended up in the hospital four girls from Colombia , screaming and hysterical, presumably victims of supernatural forces. Doctors diagnosed it as mass hysteria and nothing more.
3. Clown Panic
In 2016, the world was gripped by a clown panic. Mostly centered in the United States, it spread to many other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and others. It was widely believed that evil clowns were roaming the streets. By October they came every day dozens of messages about sinister clowns.
Clown panic seems to have started with a viral marketing stunt in Wisconsin. And stunt was a generous term. A man dressed as a creepy clown simply stood on a street corner looking like a clown.
After that from all over the country messages started pouring in . Clowns with guns, clowns making threats, clowns looking sinister. And as far as anyone could tell, none of it was real. In fact, not a single clown did anything sinister or dangerous during the entire event.
Police received anonymous tips about clowns trying to lure children, and little evidence to support anything. But each subsequent story made national news, adding fuel to the fire. The panic lasted for months, through the summer and into the fall.
By October, most media outlets were openly calling the whole thing a hoax, since no real harm had been done and no real arrests had been made, only false arrests based on false reports.
2. Dancing Plague
One of the oldest known cases of mass hysteria occurred as far back as 1518. The incident was actually used as part of the basis for a plot point in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The people of Strasbourg, Alsace were overcome by an irresistible urge to dance. It became known as The Dancing Plague .
The incident began in July. One day, a woman named Frau Troffea went out into the street and started dancing. She danced for a day, then two days. She danced for a week, and by the end of the week, she had three dozen backup dancers. By the time August rolled around, up to 400 city residents were protesting in the streets.
Doctors, already at a loss to explain most known diseases, settled on "hot blood" as the cause. So the cure was basically a "if you can't test them, join them" situation. The city set up a stage and hired an orchestra.
Instead of solving the problem, the dancers were simply pushed to their limits. Reports of people dancing to death were spread after the fact, and whether they were true or not is still debated.
1. Puppy pregnancy syndrome
Generally speaking, mass hysteria is a limited phenomenon. It happens for a period of time and then subsides when people realize that what they are afraid of is not real. This is not the case with puppy pregnancy syndrome in West Bengal, India. This strange mass panic occurs again and again over the years.
Puppy pregnancy syndrome is, unfortunately, very similar to what it sounds like. Victims are bitten by dogs and then convinced that the dog bite has made them pregnant. puppies . The vast majority of people in one small village are convinced that this is a very real thing.
They believe that if a dog bites a human in a state of obvious sexual arousal, the dog's saliva will transfer the dog's fetus into the human's bloodstream. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, the dog babies will survive. This means that men are in a much worse position than female bite victims, as they are doomed to have puppies delivered through the urethra, according to the belief.
The men are convinced that they will die during childbirth. As a result, the city has so-called experts who can perform rituals to abort the puppies and save human lives. This must be especially important considering that some female victims have claimed that they could even hear the puppies barking in their bellies at night.
As silly as it sounds, the syndrome had serious, real-life consequences. Victims had to take medication to overcome a severe fear of dogs and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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