Hysterical - Waiting for Brockovich | 4

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

An anonymous tipster slides an envelope under a parent’s door with a shocking revelation: a toxic train derailment from the 1970s may be contaminating the water in LeRoy. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich sends her team to investigate.Listen to Hysterical on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/hysterical/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Previously on Hysterical. I felt like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I remember exactly like getting out and just like standing there staring at the cameras like, holy shit, like what the hell is going on? There's just a history in the U.S. of women being dismissed by doctors. Hysteria, it's all in your head. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating.

There is something actually happening to their bodies. Something I believe is coming from the outside, the environment somehow. I could live with conversion disorder. I could not live with the environment did it to me. That, to me, was terminal. You say Leroy or Leroy? That's the great debate of Genesee County.

I know. You can't believe I'm still talking about the freaking name thing, right? But you should know that I have uncovered pertinent information. It came up when I was shooting the shit with local Leroy gadfly C.N. Barron's. His ancestors have lived around here since the 1700s. Plaid flannel shirt, skullcap, biker bar mustache. Also, I'll say Leroy. I think it sounds a little better. But even there, I guess half the people say Leroy and the other half say Leroy.

Turns out this isn't just a Leroy-Leroy thing. This whole area is riddled with weird pronunciations. People constantly call itge and Bergen. Oh, you pronounce it Burge-en? Yes. And then there's Avon, which is often pronounced Avon. Yeah, you guys are getting them all wrong. We have Charlotte. No way.

Yeah. Charlotte is clearly Charlotte. Charlotte. That's amazing. There's something to this, the names around here. But put a pin in that for now. Because I met Bairns here at the side of the road a couple of miles from the high school for a different reason. Last time, you'll recall, after several weeks of tests, tests on the girls, some tests on the school grounds,

state and school officials came to believe that this whole thing was a mass psychogenic illness, a mass hysteria, and that nothing else made sense. Until, that is, someone slipped a document and a note under the doormat of one of the affected families. The details of how this went down are sketchy. The note was anonymous, and we still know nothing about the messenger, except they clearly had a sense for the drama of the moment. But the note said, basically, if you're looking for the cause of the outbreak, go back farther. Go back to

something that happened 40 years ago. To an event that was huge at the time, but that everyone seems to have forgotten. And it led investigators here, where Behrens has brought us today. This is Gulf Road in the town of Leroy, over in the area where the stone quarries are. I think this is where the Lehigh Valley tracks actually traverse Gulf Road here. It's a big cleared section of land, squared off and leveled and covered in gray gravel.

There are some not very effective markers posted to keep people off the grounds. How did you know that it was here? Well, I think mutual aid was called to it, so we heard the sirens go off. Oh, you remember it happening? Yeah, it was December 6, 1970. Behrens was in 10th grade when it happened. Somewhere around 3.30 in the morning, a Lehigh Valley train, I think there were 25 cars on it, derailed and emptied two tons of cyanide crystals and 30,000 to 35,000 gallons of trichloroethane solvent. I mean, everybody knew what cyanide was. Nobody knew what trichloroethane was.

Trichloroethylene is a degreasing solvent used in manufacturing. 35,000 gallons of it went into the ground that night and into the groundwater. And it's still there. Long-term exposure to TCE has been known to cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, liver damage, several forms of cancer, and neurological complications. What is in the water in Leroy, New York? And if poisons are bubbling up from the ground beneath your feet, why would you ever believe the people telling you it's all in your head? I'm Dan Taberski.

From Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, this is Hysterical. Episode 4, Waiting for Brockovich. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast, where every week we'll be delving into the real-life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed game series. Join us as we explore the streets of a Viking colony, scale sand dunes in the shadow of the Sphinx, witness world-changing revolutions, and come face-to-face with history's most significant individuals.

So, whether you love history, games, or just a good story, Echoes of History has something for you. Make sure to catch every episode by following Echoes of History has something for you. Make sure to catch every episode by following Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The leaves drift to the ground, the wind rises. Pull up a chair by our fire and listen to stories from the darker side of the past. I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony.

And on our podcast, After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, we tell stories of villages and the death of queens. Of Tudor ghosts that will not sleep and of murder among gravestones. For spine-tingling history from the darker side of the past, listen to After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Picture, if you will, in your mind's eye, Oscar winner and Hollywood icon Julia Roberts. Okay, now picture her teeth. They're incredible, right? And that smile. As someone with a gap in his teeth the width of a Jenga block, it's Julia and that grin who are my shining stars of dental perfection.

And that's why it's kind of funny to me that in the role she won the Oscar for, she barely cracks a smile. Because in that movie, she was playing Erin Brockovich. And Erin Brockovich is not a big laugher. Oh, see, now that pisses me off. We have more than 400 plaintiffs in. Let's be honest, we all know there are more out there. The movie tells Brockovich's journey as a struggling single mom and file clerk who follows a hunch and discovers a huge corporation, PG&E, has poisoned the

groundwater in Hinkley, California, leading to sickness and death in dozens of families in the town. Take out your calculator and you multiply that number by a hundred. Anything less than that is a waste of our time. The reason it works as a movie is because Brockovich is a little bit toxic herself, but in a fun way, like this. I'm not talking to you, bitch! Or like this. That's all you got, lady. Two wrong feet in fucking ugly shoes. It is a great movie, and it made the real Brockovich famous

for her effectiveness at exposing toxic spill scandals and uncovering cover-ups, and for her truly godlike toxic spill scandals and uncovering cover-ups, and for her truly godlike levels of self-confidence. This is from her own website, Verbatim. Say the name Erin Brockovich and you think strong, tough, stubborn, and sexy. Erin is all that and definitely more. She's a modern-day David who loves a good brawl with today's Goliaths. She thrives on being the voice for those who don't know how to yell. She's a modern-day David who loves a good brawl with today's Goliaths. She thrives on being the voice for those who don't know how to yell.

She's a rebel. She's a fighter. She's a mother. She's a woman. She's you and me. In late January, Brockovich appears on Dr. Drew Pinsky's headline news show. Dr. Drew, by now, is Gaga over the Leroy story. Big surprise. If somebody maybe 10 years ago, or back actually when I watched Julia Roberts playing you in the theaters,

asked me what I'd probably be doing in 2012, probably the very last thing on my list would have been teaming up with Aaron Brockovich to evaluate a medical mystery in the sub-state of New York. I wouldn't have put that high on my list. And it's here Brockovich announces that she is cannonballing into the fray. When word of her interest in the story got out, the tips from Leroy came rolling in. Brockovich herself says she got thousands about the 1970 train derailment, other suspected toxins, and a stream of disturbing health problems that people fear those toxins are causing. I have people reporting to me who grew up in the area whose sons were born with rare birth defects. I have children who grew up in the area who are reporting to me they had bone cancer at the age of 10. I have people reporting to me that their two and a half

year olds have tick-like syndrome. I'm going to stop you because we can't substantiate any of this, but we get the idea. Hi there. I'm Erin Brockovich and I just finished the Dr. Drew show. This is her backstage at that Dr. Drew appearance, doing some extra behind the scenes content for the show. And what is to come next? We have a team going out there that's going to be doing a site assessment. They're going to be meeting with the families.

They're going to go to the original derailment site. We're going to be getting more eye accounts and documentation of the spill, how far the plume has gone. Now, there might have been a time where Erin herself would have just shown up in Leroy. But when you get high profile like that, you don't just go somewhere anymore. You send people ahead to make sure it's legit. You stick your number two on them, the one who does all the work and gets none of the glory.

Before you get Erin Brockovich, what you get is Bob Bocock. The film about her is about 99% accurate. Bob Bocock is a water supply expert and Brockovich's longtime partner in investigations like the one they were about to embark on in Leroy. But I'm not the batshit crazy one. Erin's the batshit crazy one. They've also clearly got the same, shall we say, casual sense of workplace decorum. Okay, she gets on these things and she's like,

oh, Bob, this is just me and my stick-to-it-edness. Or, you know, I've got a feeling here and you know I'm always right. And I'm like, shut up, bitch. I know you're right. Will you just leave me alone and let me figure this out? Their staff meetings must be so uncomfortable. At that time, she hated my guts for the first 10 years. She was very protective of the work she had done. She had your guts for how long? About 10 years. That's a long time. We've been together for 30. More than 30. But all the salty talk aside, Bob clearly believes in her. You know, she's the one that went out there and pulled the frogs out of the ponds and tested the pools and worked with the people and really found out what was going on. And me as a scientist was, you know, skeptical of her application of innuendo to certain aspects of things. But damn it, she's right all the time.

She gets a feeling about something and she's usually right. I mean, look at the LeRoy case, for instance. You know, would I have participated in something like that? No, but she kept hounding me. Something's wrong here. Something's not right. How much TCE did that chemical spill leave behind in the soil and the water? What about those fracking wells over by the high school? The EPA was still trying to clean up the old chemical factory just eight miles from the school, where industrial waste had found its way into the ground. The EPA was still trying to clean up the old chemical factory just eight miles from the school,

where industrial waste had found its way into the ground. And even Jell-O and the stories of how the creek in town would change color, depending on what flavor they were cranking out at the Jell-O factory that day. To be clear, these toxic fears aren't just a town's imagination getting away from them. The precedent around here is real. Too real. For several years, chemicals have been seeping into the basements of a number of houses. No case, however, has received more attention than the waste site at Love Canal. Love Canal, one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Locals have been raised on stories of Love Canal, a catastrophic toxic waste scandal from the 1970s.

It happened just 50 miles from Leroy, and for what it's worth, about three miles from the house my mom grew up in. The sickest part of the joke is in the name, Love Canal. It sounds sweet, until you learn that the canal in question was where chemical companies had dumped tens of thousands of tons of toxic waste for years in the 30s and 40s. In the 50s, the canal and all the crap in it was quietly covered over, and a modest neighborhood of 800 or so ranch-style homes was built alongside it. By the 70s, reports of sickness began to spread. Asthma, epilepsy, birth defects, miscarriage. Here's a local on the news at the time.

Her son is sick. Her son is sick. How many more kids have to be sick? How many more kids have to die? We're not going to let it happen. It was the parents in the neighborhood, the moms especially, who got loud and raised the alarm that something was wrong. The women told us the state office had dismissed their studies connecting the pathways of old streambeds and increased health problems as useless housewife data. A local mom named Lois Gibbs helped lead the

charge. I'm not a scientist. I am a housewife as I seem quoted in the paper many times. Before it was over, at least 20 neighborhood kids had cancer and almost 1,000 people were evacuated off the land. We lived in that house. We lived there for two years. We bought that house. Nobody told us this was happening, man. Nothing. What are you going to do for my kids? What are you going to do? Nothing. Our county representatives who are supposed to support us. Well, the nation's looking at you. You look like damn fools and murderers. The memory of Love Canal was looming large in Leroy. It was one of the mothers of one of the impacted young ladies who started writing Aaron.

We're not sure what's going on. This is what's happening in our town. Can you take a look at it? It was primarily aunts, mothers, grandmothers, and their daughters. That's interesting. Initially. In terms of not just people who are suffering, having symptoms, but people who are problem solving. Right, right, right. Is that common with Erin Brockovich?

Yeah, there is a, you know, woman to woman, woman power kind of aspect associated with that. And initially there's the, oh shit, and we got Bob, you know? Yeah, totally. I still suffer from that. Poor Bob. Exactly. Our big story this morning, nationally known environmentalist Aaron Brockovich sent a team to Leroy yesterday to dig for answers about a mysterious medical condition there.

But not everyone is happy about it. And Bob Bocock sets out for the center of the storm. Leroy, New York, late January. Fifteen cases of the sickness now confirmed, one to three inches of snow expected. The media horde now includes camera crews from Sweden and Japan. The New York Times is on the ground knocking on doors. And the local paper does a poll. Two-thirds of respondents say they don't believe the high school is looking out for the best interest of the kids. Here's Jessica, a senior. Yeah, I mean, at that point, I was scared to go to school, but I was more scared of, like, not going and missing something. And, like,

I felt like we were, like, something was being hid from us. That's just how they made it seem. Were you getting into the drama of it as well, like a teenager would? Absolutely, I was. Absolutely. Like, I love a mystery, too. So, like, trying to get to the bottom of it, that was, like, my bread and butter. It was, like, what I lived for. It must have been, I don't want to say fun, but I can see.

Yeah, it almost was, like, fun in a way because it was so exciting. Nothing ever happens in this sleepy little town. And now we're on our national news story. Erin Brockovich is coming. It was crazy. When Bob Bocock arrives in Leroy, he starts by meeting with the affected girls and their families. I was very skeptical when I first showed up because I had seen the news reports, you know, and I was like, I didn't understand it.

You thought they were faking? Oh, yeah. Wow. Oh, yeah. I thought Aaron was full of shit. I thought this was insane. I thought this was crazy. What the hell am I doing? And what changed your mind? I sat in the room with these kids. They couldn't, you can't fake that shit.

You could not fake that. They were inflicting excruciating pain upon themselves. Whether it was chemically induced, whether it was psychologically induced, they were not faking. You couldn't fake that. Bob heads to the high school. First thing I chased down for like a week was the natural gas wells on the school property. Is it unusual to have a natural gas well on school property? Why would you?

Is it unusual to have six natural gas wells on school property? One is about as dumb as it gets. Six is just kind of pathetically stupid. At six different locations around the school, caged natural gas wells stand sentinel, including one right out front where a statue of Millard Fillmore or some other historical rando would normally be. Just kind of hiding in plain sight. No, we did not know that. Here's Jessica again. I know my mom was big on that one too. She thought for sure that had

something to do with it. She was super angry to find that out. She's like, really? We just built a school and we're building it on six fracking? What? Like, that makes no sense. It makes a little sense, actually. The revenue from the wells helped the school offset the cost of heating the building. Fracking forces natural gas out of the ground by shooting chemicals into the ground. What happens to those chemicals once they're in the ground is the highly controversial question. Environmentalists had already been pushing the state to ban fracking altogether. Nationally known environmentalist Aaron Brockovich sent an investigative team to the school grounds Saturday morning. But when Bob shows up, news cameras in tow and shovel in hand to take soil samples around the wellheads. According to the school district, Brockovich's team never asked

permission to take samples on school property. Sounds like they thought maybe the batshit crazy one is Bob. But after being denied access to school grounds, Bocock remained skeptical. I will tell you that usually in settings or situations like this, when I'm confronted by officials barring access to something, they usually have something to hide. It would soon come out that there had recently been leaks in two of the wells, releasing pools of brine near one of the athletic fields, burning grass and killing trees, right next to where the cheerleaders cheer and the marching band plays. Oh shit, having those natural gas wells on my football field is not a really fucking smart thing to do now, is it?

And if it burns grass and kills trees, what does it do to teenage girls? After taking some water samples at nearby residences, Bocock headed to the derailment site, where in 1970 over 30,000 gallons of the toxic solvent TCE spilled after a train went off the tracks. When you read the reports of that TCE spill, 35,000 gallons of it, the initial cleanup in 1970, it sounds more like an initial tidying. After that, the railroad shut down in 76, and the tracks were yanked out. By the 90s, sky-high TCE levels had been discovered

in dozens of private wells near the crash site. Now, the EPA was assuring parents that the TCE plume, still in the ground, had not made it as far as the school, less than three miles away. When Bob showed up to check out the derailment site in person, it was being devoured by a jungle of tree-sized weeds. Almost like that scene in Tarzan where, you know, they pull back the bushes and you see the lost city. Only what Bob sees are rows and rows of 55-gallon drums,

over 200 of them, holding contaminated soil from the spill site, still there and falling apart. Somebody went out and then left all the contamination there and the barrels rusted out and it leaked all right back into the environment. So they're probably still cleaning it up, you know, 50 years later. Standing in front of a sign saying, Danger! Hazardous Materials. Bocock gives a warning.

You have a sign like that and 55-gallon drums rotting away, leaking material out into the was at its pitch, something else starts happening. The symptoms in many of the girls are getting visibly worse. It all starts to evolve. Here's Dr. McVig, the neurologist. At this point, she's seen almost two-thirds of the known afflicted. She still believes it's a mass psychogenic illness. So it just got crazy because first everyone starts with tics,

and so we're managing these tics, and we're worried about motor issues. Then it turns into, which I think is so interesting, syncopal events. So now we're passing out. So syncope is when we pass out. Near syncope is when I feel like I'm going down and I feel dizzy, but syncope is actually the act of passing out. So people start passing out. They'll start passing out right and left.

Now we're passing out. And remember, Dr. McVig is not some hardened veteran. She hasn't even sat for her boards yet. How are you feeling during all this? It was a very challenging time in my life. Like I lost 10 pounds. My kids thought I was going to be arrested and taken away because there were news vehicles that would follow me home from work. I was a little traumatized by it, I'll be honest. And also, I was very protective of the kids, too, because I did not want anything. I did not want to be the cause of anyone having a problem. This is not a case.

This is a person. This is a human. I know their dog's name. I know their family. I know their parents. These are babies. This could be my baby. Did you ever see the clip where one of the girls and I were on Anderson Cooper and she had an episode right in the middle of the show? No. Anderson Cooper has sort of a daytime talk show back then. Studio audience, the whole thing. He hosts an episode hashing out the medical mystery, and Bob is on it, talking about all the toxins.

Also joining him on the panel was Marge, the 36-year-old nurse with symptoms. There's also another girl there that you might remember. It's like this electrical tingling feeling that never goes away. The girl from YouTube who had been looking for help. Even though she lives a couple hours from Leroy, she too was now fully embroiled in the mania. She's the one who had a seizure on TV. She went into a full-on epileptic fit on the stage.

I mean, it was on the ground screaming. It was scary. And we went to commercial break right then and there. They called in a doctor. I mean, it was horrible. We tried to get a copy of that moment in the episode. The company wouldn't release it. But according to someone who worked at the show at the time, the last thing the viewers at home heard before cutting to commercial was an off-camera voice yelling, Code Blue. Whoops, the a** is having a little bit of a reaction there.

A**, are you okay? Something similar had already happened on Dr. Drew, with a different affected girl. That time, however, when the seizure starts, instead of cutting away to commercial, Let's get back to this. I'd like to go back to her so I can see what's going on here, please. Help me. Control room. They cut back, and we see the mom leaning over her daughter, who's on the floor, seizing, just out of frame. Are you all right? Mom, what's going on there?

No, she's not. She's having a seizure. And it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to maybe point the cameras in a different direction for a minute. Are we okay? Do we need to call paramedics? Yes. You calling paramedics? No, they... Okay. No, they...

It's okay. It's okay. I'm pissed. This is ridiculous. We've been waiting months. We come down here and you tell us CDC, this, that. It takes months. The school calls another town meeting in the auditorium.

Lobb Canal took years. This is going to take years. We want to know now what's going on. This is just a few days after Bob Bocock began poking around. He had raised too many new questions and kicked up too much dust. And the parents are getting ready to erupt. The crowd this time includes environmental activists from around the state, cameras from everywhere, and even a paranormal investigator has arrived to take a crack at the medical mystery. And that is when it all finally spins out of control. My daughter was a perfect attendant.

Ma'am. All of a sudden she's getting sent home with headaches. What are you guys doing? Do you have children? Do your children, will you send them to this school? Absolutely. No, no, I'm done listening to you. You guys need to do something.

You are not doing your job. You are not doing your job. You are not doing your job. And not answering the question. I'm sorry. Hysteria. It's a tricky word, isn't it? The hysteria we've been talking about so far is the medical one. An age-old thing, usually called by more polite terms now, almost always pinned on women. But still, that perplexing battery of symptoms where mind and body seem to meet. The medical definition of the unknown,

in a way. But there's also that other hysteria, our collective reaction to that unknown. When all of our attention is on one thing, one moment, one fear, one big question, creating something huge and explosive and out of anyone's control. And it can be hard to know, when you're investigating one kind of hysteria, whether or not you're unintentionally creating another. After four trips back and forth to Leroy, Bob Bocock brings his investigation to a close. Nine times out of ten, I actually have a result that I can report. Leroy was one of those few instances where I literally spent months down there and never resolved or had a complete conclusion as to what happened.

That suspicious brine that leaked from the fracking wells into the sports fields, it was deemed not toxic. The school was cited, but not fined. The TCE plume from the train derailment, it was still in the groundwater, but further tests showed that it had not migrated toward the school. As for the 200 disintegrating barrels of waste, the EPA would spend the next decade trying to clean up the derailment site, but they say tests showed no additional toxins seeped into the ground because of them.

Basically, before you came, the EPA and the New York State Department of Health said that we did tests on the school grounds. And there's nothing. And there's nothing. Right. Why was that not good enough for you? Back to what I was saying earlier, where Aaron was like, no, Bob, there's something else. Just keep looking. Just keep looking.

And they did find a lot of problems. But no smoking gun. Meaning, the big claim made by the school and the state that there was no toxic component to the contagion, it seemed to be true. Or, perhaps more accurately, no one could prove that it wasn't. In the end, Aaron Brockovich never shows in Leroy. After all that lead-up, the lack of anything concrete makes it a wash. She pops up again the following week in Berlin, promoting her next movie appearance about safe drinking water.

Were you afraid that you were making it worse? Were you getting that criticism? Both. Both. Did something good come out of it from an environmental investigator's perspective? Yeah. I got the TCE site cleaned up that had been neglected for probably the better part of 20 years. Did the fact that I came to town and found environmental things of concern exacerbate or contribute further to the psychological impacts to these kids did it validate their feelings could have you know could we have made it worse

we tried not to yeesh this is awkward can i see those statistics yeah because in fact dr mcvig has been looking into that very question. So they're not in steps. And she's collected the data somewhere in those drawers that suggests team Brockovich actually may have demonstrably made things worse. So this is an actual statistical analysis because it's very hard to do correlational stuff. And we had to go back through. McVig and her team went back and tracked every time a patient had what she calls an exacerbation, like a trip to the emergency room or a dramatic worsening in the severityouhaha, the Today Show appearances, the contentious town hall meetings, and Team Brockovich parachuting into the mystery, all to see how her patients fared afterwards. And then Erin Brockovich comes into town and there were 11 exacerbations. So now the

tics start to get worse again. Now we have syncopal episodes. Now we have a lot of non-epileptic seizures. It was the worst stretch by far of the outbreak in Leroy. This is in the week after Erin Brockovich. The following week. There's 11 exacerbations the following week. And in the following two years after the New York Times, there's only five. I don't mean to make this a knock against Brockovich or Bocock or demanding answers or the press and the cameras or Dr. and the cameras, or Dr. Drew,

well, maybe Dr. Drew. But it's not a knock against the hysteria that grew around the hysteria. And that is because of the third meaning of the word. Being hysterical will not do you any good. We're going to just be hysterical? We're going to have to, you know, ask you to leave. Will you stop being so hysterical? Every night it's a fire. No, I'm not hysterical. I'm trying to tell you this as calmly as I know how. This hysterical is the one they hurl when they want to diminish you. When they want to make you seem like you're reacting over nothing.

Or if it's something, then you're way overreacting. I was sort of a regular housewife buying the American Dream in 1978. There was a series of interviews done a while back about Love Canal, a toxic waste disaster in western New York. The interviews are with Lois Gibbs, the local mom who raised hell at the center of it. It wasn't until I picked up the newspaper one day and it talked about 20,000 tons of chemicals underneath the 99th Street School and leaking out into the homes. And Gibbs tells the story of when she first brought her concerns to the school and how hard it was to get them to take her seriously.

And so I went to the school board and said, can you move Michael out of the school? By then he was in kindergarten, 1978. And they said, no, we cannot, because if we move Michael Gibbs because of the potential threat, we have to move all 407 children. We're not going to do that. We're not closing the school because of one irate Gibbs hysterical too, to shut her up. But Lois Gibbs didn't shut up. And she helped cause what I'm sure felt like mass hysteria over the chemicals in the ground beneath their feet. You aren't going to, because those who do wrong pay, sweetie. And Lois Gibbs was right.

In 2004, after 25 years of cleanup and remediation, the EPA finally removed Love Canal from its list of worst unresolved environmental disasters in the country. The Leroy train derailment is still on that list. So, what do you think? Are we ready to call it? We know it's not a virus, and now we know it's not toxins, at least as far as anyone can prove. So unless the bad tampon theory makes a comeback, I guess what happens next is that everyone in Leroy accepts mass hysteria in a warm, town-wide embrace as the answer to their medical mystery. Yeah, fat chance. That's not how this story ends. But before it does end, before we come to our grand unifying theory of what happened in Leroy, New York,

you're going to want to hear from this guy that we talked to in Northern Virginia. The idea that this is somehow psychogenic, psychosomatic, mass hysteria, I mean, that just doesn't apply to me. And you're definitely going to want to hear what's happening to this woman in Highland County, Ohio. People are just so tired of being called liars that they don't want to talk about it anymore. And before you try and say what's happening in any of these places, you're first going to have to come to terms with one indelible and fairly nauseating fact. Whatever is happening to these people, you are not immune to it. No one is.

And that's next time on Hysterical. I've never been in a CIA operative's house before. In their basement. In their basement, yeah. You know, the room was spinning wildly. I had a splitting headache. I had tinnitus, which is, you know, ringing in my ears. And I knew something was really wrong. It was scary. Hysteria is alive and well. So for you, functional disorder or psychogenic illness is

the same as saying that you were abducted by an alien. Because it makes no sense. The human mind is a very powerful thing. Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. And if you have a tip about a story that you think we should investigate, please write to us at wondery.com slash tips. Hysterical is a production of Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Thank you. Dianne Hansen is our editor. Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. Fact-checking by Natsumi Ajisaka.

Mixing by Hannes Brown. Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija. Original music composed and performed by Dina McAbee. Legal services for Pineapple Street from Crystal Tupia. For Wondery, our senior producers are Lizzie Bassett and Claire Chambers. Coordinating producer, Mariah Gossett, senior managing producer Callum Plews. Hysterical is written and executive produced by me. I'm Dan Taberski. Our executive producers for Pineapple Street are Max Linsky, Henry Malofsky, Asha Saluja, and Jenna Weiss-Berman.

Executive producers for Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent. Thanks for listening.