10 Bizarre Cases Of Mass Hysteria
7. The Laughing Plague (1962)
In a classroom in the African country of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), on 20 January 1962, three girls began to giggle. By the time the hysteria ended more than a thousand people had been infected by their laughter.
The hysteria spread through the school: one girl would laugh, and then another, and then another until 95 of the 159 pupils were laughing uncontrollably. The symptoms lasted anywhere between a few hours and 16 days and by 18 March the school was forced to shut down.
With the girls sent home, the madness spread to a local village, Nshamba, where some of the girls lived. 217 people had laughing attacks in the village.
It wasn’t a good laughter either. It was not a laughter of joy or amusement; it was born out of stress and was accompanied by bouts of screaming, flatulence, and crying. In 1962 Tanganyika won its independence and new ideas were being taught in school that clashed with their beliefs and the girls couldn’t reconcile their beliefs with reality and they just snapped.
As the hysteria spread 14 schools were shut down and astonishingly, it took between 6 and 18 months for the phenomenon to wear off.