Stuff You Should Know - Some Really Interesting Cases of Mass Hysteria

Episode Date: March 15, 2016

Around the world and across time, people have fallen victim to one of the strongest contagions of all - the power of suggestion. Here are just a few examples of these bizarre cases. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry over there, the stuff you should know. I'm so sick of my voice right now. I just looked over almost to check to see if Jerry was there. Even though this room is so small, she's always visible. Right. I don't know why I did that. How are you? Okay.

What's up, dude? It's my voice, man. It's driving me crazy. What's wrong? I'm so wound up and caffeinated. Oh yeah. We just talked about dark money. Oh yeah.

Ah. Maybe we should have recorded that last. Maybe we could have just done power lifting for the rest of the day. Jim. That's what I do. I'm a power lifter. So we did an episode.

Wait, I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay, go ahead. I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. November 2014, we did an episode on collective hysteria. Yes. Not too long ago. What is collective hysteria?

Yeah, and it was a good one. Was that a shot at me just now? Because I interrupt you a lot. Was what a shot? That you don't want to interrupt me. Because I interrupt you. It's part of the show. Okay.

I don't mean to, and I feel badly when I notice it. Oh really? Yeah. How often do you notice it? I would say six tenths of the time. So three fifths is another way to put that. I can live with that. It was a good episode, but we did not cover.

There are a lot of cases of mass hysteria, and we only covered a small portion. Yeah. We're not going to go in depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that, go listen to that episode, which was a good one, if I remember correctly. Yeah. We should talk about it a little bit.

Sure, because I think there's stuff in here that we didn't even cover about the overall thing, or at least it didn't seem familiar to me. Right. So it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions, conversion disorder. What else? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You need to duplicate that, though, with like 10 Joshes doing it at once. That's a good right there. Maybe Jerry could do that. She says she can. It's a real thing, though, and basically it is when people have physical symptoms of something without there being a physical cause.

Not only that, so that's a psychosomatic illness. True. For a mass psychogenic illness, the psychosomatic illness is catching. Yes. It's an epidemic, an infection of imagined illness. That's right. Which is pretty awesome.

Oh, it's amazing. I mean, not when you're going through it and you're suffering, because the people who are suffering are actually experiencing suffering. Yeah. Like it might be made up, it might be all in their heads,

but to them, it's quite real. Yeah, but it is sociologically and psychologically. Psychologically. Speaking, I'm sick, people. So I apologize if I'm not talking good. Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Sure, yeah.

One thing that happens is it's usually triggered by some sort of stress. Sure. Some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah, and it usually happens in very close-knit communities, often among young women. They're very susceptible to it, apparently. Perhaps isolated communities.

Yeah, and then communities of people who are fairly high on the totem pole in that they don't have a lot of social status necessarily or a lot of say in their own lives. Yeah. And this is a means of saying there's something very wrong in my world. Yes.

People who study these things, that's what they've come up with. Like I've got no voice, but I can break out in a rash. I can bark like a dog and make you do it too. Exactly. That's power. So the outcome supposedly for getting over this is better in children than adults,

even though more children are stricken with it, it seems like than adults. But that makes total sense. Like a kid's more likely to follow along with the crowd, but then also be like, what are we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo. Right.

So let's all go play Nintendo. Because it's 1987. I wish I had an old NES, like the original one. And a copy of my test is punch out. That's all you need. Yeah, I was into whatever that first Mario game was where it was the big world. Yeah, Super Mario Brothers.

Was that it? Super Mario Brothers. Yeah, that was a good one too. Yeah. And then Metroid. Did you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play a ton of NES, but I played,

what was the first really not Sega? Was it the first PlayStation that had Street Fighter? No, I think it had Street Fighter. I can't remember what it was. All I remember is that there was one year. The Sega Genesis maybe had Street Fighter. No, it wasn't Sega Genesis. I don't know.

This dude I had knew in college had Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Mortal Kombat was definitely, it might have been Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64. Did you play GoldenEye? Oh yeah. Man. That was the first great first person shooter.

It was so well done. Yeah, but I just remember listening to Dr. Dre's The Chronic and playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat for a year solid. And I think I went to school and made grades in a classes. Good going. In classes. That's nice, man.

Man, I need a nap. You wanna talk about some mass hysterias? Yes. You wanna talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah, so in medieval times. Not the restaurant. No, but maybe there too. If you had a sister or a niece or an aunt

or somebody who was a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Yeah. Well, there weren't mental asylums at the time. So you couldn't commit them, but you could have them sent to a convent or a nunnery. Wow. So like a brother could do that to a sister?

Oh yes. Unbelievable. Yeah, so you could usurp that inheritance that was rightfully theirs. Or if you had a daughter who was unattractive or possibly disfigured, you could say, I don't want the world to see you. I'm gonna send you a convent or a nunnery.

And it sounds pretty bad in a lot of cases it was, but it also was a good deal for a lot of young women because they would get a high quality education. They could pursue creative interests like drawing and painting and sewing or whatever floated their boat. Sexy outfits. Sure, sure. So it wasn't all bad,

but I was like, why did anybody get sent to a convent? And that was why, to either get rid of them or to give them an education that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But these places were very strict and tight-knit. And so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah, I bet if your daughter kissed a boy that you didn't like, you could, you know,

if you're worried about that. Off to the convent. Off to the nunnery. So we're gonna talk about a couple of cases with nunneries, but in medieval times, there were more than 100 cases of mass hysteria is breaking out. It happened a lot. Those one in Spain and the 1500s

where nuns bleated like sheep and had convulsions. Sweet. One in France in 1491 where they yelped like dogs. Okay. And then this one in France where all of a sudden one day, a nun started meowing like a cat. Yes. And caught on.

Caught on like wildfire. Apparently in this convent, within a few days, all of the nuns were meowing. And it was loud like the neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only meowing, but it became, they meowed in unison. It became structured with their meowing.

So for a few hours a day, they would all get together and meow. That's right. Which imagine just like stopping by on your travels because you heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey leg. Sure. And you show up and you enter into a giant room

filled with nuns all meowing in unison. Yeah. That one might have been some guy's idea of a good time. I guess so. You know? You just kind of make a face and go help yourself to a turkey leg and kick back and watch the weirdos meow. Well, here's one of the problems though.

In medieval times in France, cats were not well regarded. They were thought to be of the devil. Yeah. And so if you're meowing like a cat is a nun, it's not good. They also believed in demonic possession. And so they brought in some soldiers who said we're gonna whip you and beat you unless you stop meowing.

And it worked. And they stopped meowing. Yeah. Hooray. But that's a really important point that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed. Yeah.

So in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility. Yeah. And that is a basis of this. For the person to really experience it and take it away from an act of their own willpower and rather be a sufferer of some weird illness is a belief that something like this could possibly happen.

And so they were possessed rather than them just meowing and going along with the crowd or whatever. Yeah. They were instead possessed at the time. And so their responsibility was removed and therefore they could really give themselves over to it. Yeah. I think that's a hallmark of a mass psychogenic illness.

Yeah, absolutely. It also happened in Germany, not the meowing, but in the 15th century, a nun bit another nun in the convent. And then I don't know if that nun in turn bit another, but they started biting one another. Yes. A lot. Yeah.

And that didn't just stick around that nunnery. It spread all over Germany. And they were worried that there was like an actual infection going on. Yeah. That would cause you to go crazy and bite people. Right. And not only did it spread to Germany, Chuck,

it also spread to Rome even. All the way to Rome. Yeah. And then apparently they stopped biting when they got really tired. Yeah. That was the end of that. That seems like a very ham-fisted follow-up. Wouldn't you be like, that was a weird week?

Yeah, they probably did. But I mean, yeah, it's very interesting that mass psychogenic illnesses in and of themselves are very interesting. But I'm also interested in the transition back to normalcy. How do groups that go through that work that out together? Or do they just separate? No, I don't know.

You said that'd be totally weird to be like, hey, remember last week when we were all meowing? That was so weird. Yeah. And where are all of our roasted turkey legs? All right, Meow. Let's move on to the kissing bug scare of 1899. Triatomine bugs.

They look sort of like stink bugs, but they carry a parasite that can cause a disease called chagas disease. Right. And chagas disease wasn't described until 1906 or 1909. And this kissing bug outbreak was 1899 in the United States. And a kissing bug is called that because they bite you, they feast on your blood through your lips, which

has only three layers of skin, whereas the rest of your face has about 16 layers of skin. Yeah, or your eyelids. Sure. So it's easily penetrated, and the bug will just sit there and suck on you while you're sleeping. But it has a little parting gift for you afterward. When it finishes feasting on your blood through your lips,

it turns around and poops on the hole that it made on your mouth or your eyelid. I knew that was coming. And in doing so, it can infect you with chagas disease. Yeah, no good. If you live in the upper one third of the United States, you don't have to sweat it. No.

Basically, draw a line from the top of California all the way across the United States. And anything below that, you might have kissing bugs. So by 1899, this bug was well known to science already. But it wasn't popularly known. Yeah. So it was an exotic, weird species. And a couple of cases of chagas disease did sprout up.

But what spread this thing and turned it into a mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this one's a little bit different. It seems like most of these cases of mass hysteria were pretty confined. But this one is a clear indication of people having maybe a mosquito bite or any of bed bug maybe and itching at it and then seeing something on the news

and then saying, oh, no, I got bit by the kissing bug. Right. So part of it was attributed to. And actually, the guy who is the head of entomology for the USDA at the time said that he called it a newspaper epidemic. Yeah. And it was because the newspaper reporting so clearly

described the symptoms that a person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself or herself. And so they started collecting bugs. Like if somebody was bit by a bug or even saw a bug in their house, they'd be like, oh, god, a kissing bug. Catch it and send it off to the USDA for analysis. And the USDA got everything from house flies to bumblebees. It's a lot of bugs.

From people who were worried that they had broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah. And the good news is it stopped when the newspaper stopped writing about it. Yeah. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bumblebee. And it happened in the 1890s.

And the 1890s were a really, really weird decade. There was a lot of death cults that sprang up around the world. But have you ever read that book, Wisconsin Death Trip? No. It is crazy, man. It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from Wisconsin in the 1890s.

And assembled, it paints one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people. They did the worst things to one another. They just endured so much. And it was a really, really good example of what happened in the 1890s. Something weird happened that decade.

Crazy. You should check that book out. It's neat to just look through. Have you seen The Witch yet? Tomorrow. Oh, man. So don't tell me anything. So speaking of The Witch, actually, Chuck,

I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaws. Yeah. So you were on Cinema Jaws like a few months back. Yeah, it's a great movie podcast. It is. And I was on it recently. And there episode that came out on Tuesday, Monday, or Tuesday, and we talked about missing persons.

Ooh. Like we did tie into our episode. Nice. What movies did you talk about? We talked about The Lady Vanishes. Yeah. Missing, with Jack Lemon. No, not that one, because I haven't seen it.

Have you ever seen The Vanishing, the original one from the 80s? Yeah. The Franco-Dutch production? Yeah, that was the superior version. Right. So I'd only seen the Jeff Bridges. Keeper's other one.

Right, which I liked. But then I started reading up on it, and I was like, oh, this sucks compared to the original. Let me watch that. There's a Dutch version of anything before, then it's probably better. It was so good, dude. Yeah.

I was watching it via YouTube on my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. Right. It was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles, haphazardly slapped over the Dutch subtitles. And it still kicked up. And I was still like, oh, man, this is so good.

Good movie. It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear that episode. Yeah, go check it out. And see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah, oh, yeah. They did a review of The Witch, and I put the phone down. Oh, really?

And just went, like, I could just barely hear that they were still talking. And when they finished, I put the phone back up for the interview. Yeah, it's good to see horror movies. And I don't even know if you want to call it a horror movie. But movies like that coming back with the Baba Dook, and it follows.

Like, people are making good quality movies now. I didn't like the Baba Dook. Oh, man, I thought it was great. A lot of people did. It's got high ratings on Netflix. All right, well, let's take a break. Maybe we'll just come back and talk about movies for the rest of the show.

Man alive. Stuff you shouldn't know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back. We are so back to talk about the Halifax slasher of 1938. Halifax, England, not Nova Scotia.

That's what I thought at first. Nova Scotia. I didn't know there was two Halifaxes. I didn't either. Halifax in November 1938. There was a woman named. Two women. Two women, Gertie Watts and Mary Gledhill.

We're taking a little walk after work at their mill. I guess they were walking home, and they said a man came out and slashed us with a knife with a razor. Yeah, we're bleeding, for God's sake. Look at me. Bleed. There's blood. Go find this creep.

That's what they told the cops. And the cops were like, wah, wah, wah, wah? Slasher. Right. So they started looking for the guy and never found any trace of him. And it was kind of a thing for a little while, but it really became a thing five days later when another woman

came to the police station and said, look at this. Some guys just came by and slashed my wrist. Yes, that was Mary Sutcliffe. And she supposedly fought him off, even, and gave a very clear description of what he looked like. So the newspapers are like, I think there might be a slasher at large. And within the next five days, several more people

came forward and came to the police station or came to the newspapers with stories about how they'd been slashed by some anonymous stranger. And Halifax was freaked out. They compared the same fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack the Ripper era. People were just nervous that somebody was going to slash them. Yeah, the soccer hooligans started beating people up.

That guy didn't look right. He looks like a slasher to me. That's what soccer hooligans do. Or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down. And it became a real problem. There's a couple of things, though. One, these slashes.

He wasn't a very good slasher. No. These were all very superficial cuts. No one was severely wounded at all in any of the cases. But it was still confounding, and people were still scared. He could be a bad slasher. Still creepy. He could improve.

So we better call Scotland Yard. And they did. And Scotland Yard sent two detectives. And the detectives said, well, let us start interviewing witnesses. And the moment they did, they found that the witnesses' stories just started crumbling. Well, first of all, none of the descriptions matched.

So they thought, at first, the dumb cops in Halifax thought, well, maybe there's multiple slashes. Scotland Yard said, there's not multiple slashes. There's not one slasher. They're like, they would have known that in Nova Scotia. The final lady, Beatrice Sorrell, said, they finally, I guess, they put the bright light in her eyes. And she said, I did it myself after having a row with my boy

after she discovered she was pregnant. She had bought a new razor blade and said, I held hold of the blade in my right hand and slashed down my left arm, making a long cut in my Mac and Tosh coat and cardigan. And I know what you're thinking. It's a waste of a good cardigan. Sure.

And Mac and Tosh. Whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. Is it? That sounds about right. Yeah, I think so. A Mac. The Mac.

No, I think a Mac is a raincoat. Because the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby. The Mac. He never wears a Mac in the pouring rain. Very strange. Bam. Man, I never realized that. All right.

So Mac and Tosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Then she said, I then put the blade back into the cut and scratched down my arm twice. I put my fingers through the cut in the cloth. Saw that they were covered in blood. The reason why I cut my arm was because I was in a temper and had been reading in the papers about girls being slashed.

So she, I guess, was in a temper. And it wasn't just her. Like nine of the 12 victims eventually confessed to doing it themselves. And this is a weird mass psychogenic illness. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because these people are slashing themselves.

They're not catching something they think is making them dizzy or whatever. They're cutting themselves and then going to the police and saying a slasher did it. I guess for attention, maybe. Well, they did get attention. They got attention in jail. Yeah, they served a whole whopping four weeks.

Still, if you're like a normal ordinary citizen who slashes herself or himself just for attention, four weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. That'll set you right. I wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. No. The thing is, Chuck, is I could not find whether the first two victims were actually slashed at.

I don't think so. They didn't show up in, as far as I know, they weren't ones that confessed. Oh, right. And I didn't see that they got any jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it led to the slasher scare? Or did they do it themselves or to each other?

That's a good point. I don't know. The Halifax Courier on December 2nd said, carry on, Halifax. The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half-grazed, wild-eyed man has been wandering around. Attacking helpless women in dark streets is exploded.

Waka, waka. Man, I wish people talked so much better back then. I was in a temper. I slashed through my Macintosh. This is not the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. Oh, yeah? What else? There's one in Taipei, Taiwan, in the 50s,

where there's this idea that there was a slasher walking around. And this one was more akin to the kissing bug thing, where people who had cuts on themselves, you know, you'll get a cut every once in a while and be like, where did I get that cut? On my thumb right now. OK.

If you had been susceptible to this Taipei, Taiwan, 1950s slasher scare, you may have gone to the police and been like, I was slashed. Because, and this one was a little more legitimate to me, the idea behind the slasher was he would brush past you in a crowd, and you wouldn't even notice you'd been slashed until later. Ooh.

The sneaky slash. Yeah, that's the better of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses between that and Halifax, if you ask me. Agreed. I wonder if Tina Fey was a part of that. You know, that's how she got that scar. Which scar? She has a scar on her face.

And she was slashed when she was a kid, playing in her front yard by some random crazy. I didn't know that. And that's kind of all of the information that's out there. She admitted that in an interview, and just that was the story. Slashing, that's a terrible crime. Yeah, it just sounds like.

Seeking and disfigure somebody. Yeah. It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do you remember that Saturday Night Live, Mel Gibson was on? It was back in the 80s. And it was set in the old West. And he was like an old West like gunslinger. I think a sheriff.

But his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid on you. It was like Matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic. It was, and he got in a gunfight with somebody. He throws acid on them. And they didn't show the acid being thrown on the guy. It just showed the crowd's reaction. And they were like, oh, god, that's awful.

That's great. Don't you hate it when you get a scene from a movie in your head and you can't pinpoint where it's from? Yeah. I've got one right now. It's here. There's a scene where a guy gets slashed right under the eye as like a parting shot.

Like these two dudes are going to fight and it doesn't happen. And the guy just slashes the guy and walks. It's the Princess Bride. No. Yes, it is. It's not the Princess Bride. King Humperdink gets it. Or Prince Humperdink gets it from somebody.

It's not the one I'm thinking. Well, that happens. Are you sure it's not the one you're thinking? Yeah, somebody will write in and tell me. It was like they were faced off and were going to fight. And then the guy had a knife, I think, on his knuckle. And then at the very end, oh, I know, platoon. Oh.

Got it. Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen. He cuts Charlie Sheen. He had the blade on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye and he was going to punch him. And they all talked him down. And right at the very end, he just went slash and slashed him under the eye.

Well, platoon and Princess Bride are virtually interchangeable. Same story. Good point. So yeah, platoon was a good movie. That was a big college movie for me. I watched that a lot. All right, we're rambling, so that means we should take a break and Jerry will get us back in order.

I think I said platoon is a good movie. Stuff is should go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, let's head on over to Tanganyika. It's also known as Tanzania. You mean Tanzania. But back in 1962, it was known as Tanganyika.

That's right. And in Tanganyika, there was a boarding school, a girl's boarding school, so you can understand what's about to happen there. Sure. And some girls started to giggle. And apparently it wasn't like a happy giggle. It was like a nervous giggle, you know, like anxious laughter.

Yeah. And it started to spread. Yes, which is normal enough. Giggling is like the church giggles. You ever heard of that? It's contagious. Hard to stop. Yes.

And that's usually if you're in a place where you shouldn't be laughing, and you can't contain it. Right. And then your friend starts laughing, and you can't contain it, and you have to go excuse yourself. Yeah. Then you never go back in the room. So this supposedly lasted, though, for like six months.

Six months to a year and a half, spreading all over the place, depending on who you ask. Uncontrollable and contagious laughter. They had to shut down the school for two months. And then they're like, OK, surely it's over. And they open it back up, started right back up. So this one bothered me a little bit, because you can't just constantly giggle and laugh.

No, and that's impossible. I read this interview with a guy. I read the same one. The Chicago Tribune interview? Yeah. So I think he made a pretty good point. And he was saying, there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all, it's called a laughter epidemic.

So people just think it's like the Monty Python world's funniest jokes kit or something, right? That's not the case. It was, again, it was not joyful laughter. It was anxious laughter. And then there were plenty of other symptoms, too. There was crying. There was pain.

There was fainting. Rashes. Yeah. And there was definitely laughter, and it definitely did spread. But it wasn't just like constant laughter. Yeah, it would come and go. Yeah.

And it did last for at least six months, and it did spread to other villages, because when these girls who were at this boarding school away from home were sent home, because the school was shut down, they actually took it with them to their other villages, which suggests that the stress that kicked this off was not just at the boarding school, that it was larger than that.

And around this time, Tanzania had gained independence. So there was a lot of anxiety about what the future held. So it started at the school where the girls were apparently very challenged academically. And then it spread through the stress of what's the future going to bring. Right. That's the official line that this one linguist has come up with.

I believe it. That one's not so great. Now, I think that's one of the off-sighted examples, though, of a genuine mass psychogenic illness. Because the fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding school into the larger villages outside of it, that's a tense situation. It is very tense.

The West Bank fainting epidemic of 1983, that spring, about 1,000 young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick. And like a lot of these cases, it's like dizziness, headache, weird stomach pains. It's like things that you can't really put a finger on as far as tracing it back like, well, this must be something. And so of course, because of where it was, and then these were young school girls largely, 70%

were 12 to 17 years old. So because of where it was in the world, Palestinian leaders started saying, you know what? Israelis are using chemical warfare against us. Yeah, because the first kids to fall ill had reported smelling like a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. Sure. And if you're in that part of the world,

you've got kids breaking out in rashes and stomach pain and blurred vision, and they're smelling something funny. That's a pretty logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis counter back with, if there's any chemical warfare being used, you guys are using it on your own people so you can blame us. So these kids fell ill from the smell,

and all of a sudden, Palestine and Israel are publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical warfare on Arab kids. Yes. This is a big deal when this happened. It was a big deal, and it could have escalated to who knows what. But the fact is, there was nothing going on at all. It was another case of mass collective hysteria.

They closed schools in the West Bank. No one else got sick. They searched all the buildings in the schools, and they found no chemical residue, no malfeasance going on whatsoever. They found a smelly bathroom, though. And they think that might have been the source of the initial foul smell.

Yeah. That kicked it all off. A stinky bathroom. Some boy went into the hurt locker. He logged out. That was a reference to a listener mail, by the way. I know, and somebody else wrote in, the best one, in my opinion, logged out.

I was like, you won. Logged out for taking a poop? Yeah. I got to go log out. Oh, that's OK. I got it. That's pretty good. It is good.

It really grows on you. That brings it into the information age. It does. It's relevant. It's like that Simpsons. I think I just logged on to my internet. Do you remember? Was that Ralph?

No, it was Carl. Went back when they were kids, when they can't figure out why Homer's having a mental breakdown. It's because he discovered a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory. And Carl's talking about the internetting on his bathing suit. And then later on, he goes, I think I just logged on

to my internet. So great. And this one's been all over the place, hasn't it? They blame the West Bank fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. And then, of course, there were news reports of the toxic gas and so that's why it spread. And Chuck, we can do this all day, but we're not going to.

Let's bring it home with one more. So in Portugal, in May of 2006, there was a teen soap opera called Save by the Bell called Morangos Com Açucar. That's my Portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good. I mean, Starberries with Sugar. It was the name of the teen show.

Delicious. And in May of 2006, the show aired an episode where this mysterious illness was striking kids down left and right. And the source of the disease was at school. It was being spread at school. It was a virus. And all of a sudden, kids in the real world

who are watching Starberries with Sugar started to come down with a very strangely similar disease. Yeah. I don't know if we said it was in 2006. I did say. All right. Well, let's drive that home because that was a big year. Was that the year we started our show?

No, 2007, 2008. We've been at it since 2008. That's crazy. Year eight, man. Who knew that we would one day be veterans of a medium? Old, not crazy. Aged veterans. You know?

Like, I didn't say we were good ones. On our porch are there confederate pistols under our blankets. That's right. So these kids were not only at one school. They were at 14 different schools around the country, which was a little different than most cases because usually it starts in this one school. Right.

But that's because the clear cause of this was this television show that kids loved all over the country. The Vector. Yeah. Was this episode of a TV show? Absolutely. And luckily, the Portuguese authorities, health authorities, they did some investigating.

And they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness. Pretty interesting stuff. Agreed. And they said what the kids are really stressed about are final exams. Well, they think it started with some kids who had actual allergies and had seen this episode and started worrying that their own allergies were actually

symptom of a disease. Right. That spread to kids who were basically going along with it out of stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one is because it was 2006, you can go on the internet and look at their articles. You can log on to your internet.

You can log on to your internet and look up articles that are like, is the strawberries with sugar virus real? Yeah. Like people were writing into newspapers. You know, my kid is having these symptoms. Like, is it a real thing? Or did they just make this up? And it still goes on.

I mean, apparently, so there's two kinds. Basically, there's motor illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more like fainting, upset stomach, headache, motors where you're twitching and meowing and stuff like that. But there's supposedly hundreds of these cases around the world every year. They happen a lot. Maybe it'll come to your town if you're lucky.

Join right in, I say. Yeah. Meow and bite the night away. Let it loose for a week. If you want to know more about mass hysteria, go listen to What is Collective Hysteria or other episode. And then you can search for mass hysteria also in the search part, howstoveworks.com.

Since I said also, it's time for you to listen to their mail. I'm going to call this long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and told Georgia that I was going to read it and I forgot. It's about the fairy tales. All right. Hedge hedge. My name is Georgia.

I live in Stockholm. Hedge hedge. I think hedge hedge is hey, hey. Sure. In Swedish. Stockholm, Sweden? Yes. We did another good episode on Stockholm, Sweden.

That's right. And that was good one. AKA the Swedish delight. Sure. That's what the cops call it. Well, he's got the Swedish delight. My name is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening to your show for a few years and I love it.

I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode and I asked my husband about the term Aschen puttels since he's German. And I often use Disney movies to help teach me Swedish. He figured out that it's kind of a play on words that implies a scullery made covered in ashes. Aschen is ash as opposed to cinder, which is incorrectly used in the English name.

Since if you were covered in cinders, you'd have severe burns as it is pieces of burning slag. It's true. It is translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinder. Puttels doesn't exist in German, he says. I don't know. That sounds so German to me.

Sounds pretty German. But the term for a scullion or a kitchen helper is Aschenbrötel. I'm so glad you took German. Though this is the male form. He thinks Aschenputtels is. It sounds like words are just growing in your mouth. Like, you know those dinosaurs?

You can get wet and they turn into giant sponge dinosaurs? No, but I do know the little lead pellets that you would like that would grow into big snakes. Close enough. Those are words are growing in your mouth when you're saying German words. He thinks Aschenputtels is kind of a feminine version of Aschenbrötel since German is nonsensical and gendered.

Her words. Hope this information is still interesting to you guys. Her and bra dog, Hedgehedge. Hedgehedge, Georgia, thanks a lot. That was an extraordinarily intelligent listener mail and we appreciate it. Agreed. If you want to send us an extraordinarily intelligent

message, we love those. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.