You don’t hear about mass hysteria often these days, but most of us know the term and have a general sense of the meaning. In very simple terms most of us would probably describe it as a condition where everyone goes a little crazy at the same time. There have been cases in the past of outbreaks of dancing sickness, for instance. 

Every year in the modern world at Halloween we trot out the myth of tampered Halloween candy. It has almost no basis in fact whatsoever but causes extreme paranoia among parents and a deluge of articles from the media about this thing which isn’t real and is arguably another example of annual mass hysteria.

How is it that whole groups of people can go a little loopy in the same way at the same time?  There can’t be no cause at all, right? Something has to cause it and damn it, we are here to get to the bottom of it. Let’s find out just how mass hysteria happens in the first place.

What is Mass Hysteria?

Mass hysteria is a condition characterized by a group of people all feeling sick or exhibiting similar symptoms when there is no physical or environmental reason or cause for the sickness. The word hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb and speaks to how, for generations, this was considered a condition that only affected women. It’s also where the word hysterical comes from, as in “stop being hysterical!” 

The fact is that it can affect both men and women but women and girls do seem more susceptible to it. For as yet unexplained reasons, cheerleaders are especially susceptible. The reasons for that are still unclear but it may be due to the fact that women are more conditioned to suppress stress than men, to not act out or be aggressive. That can potentially make it manifest in other ways, such as what has been called mass hysteria. 

Because of that ingrained sexism, the term is more properly known these days as mass psychogenic illness. That’s defined as “a social phenomenon, that consists of collective anxiety due to a perceived threat and can culminate in a cascade of symptoms suggestive of organic disease without an identifiable cause.”

In simple terms, psychogenic illness happens when you think something has happened. You may think you are exposed to an illness or a toxin, or that an event has occurred even though it has not. We’ll cover some examples that have nothing to do with sickness at all, but rather things groups of people believe they were seeing or experiencing that just didn’t happen. 

One of the key components of a psychogenic illness and how it plays out is that the people involved would not normally behave that way. In psychological terms, it’s similar to how mob mentality works. In large groups, people can act contrary to how they would as individuals. Part of this is because, when you’re part of a group, you do lose touch with your individuality to a degree. There is also a loss of self-awareness and a heightening of emotions. In crowds, these are usually intense emotions. You’re going to be excited, maybe even angry, or fearful. The emotions of a crowd tend to feed the crowd and that can lead to negative consequences.

There are examples of mass hysteria dating back hundreds of years. They occur all over the world and there don’t seem to be any barriers to cultures or groups which are going to be susceptible to it.

What Causes a Mass Psychogenic Illness?

One of the hardest things to do when it comes to explaining a mass psychogenic illness is to account for what caused it in the first place. Because a mass psychogenic illness can take the form of people thinking they’re sick with a disease to thinking that there’s a monkey man loose in town, killing people, it’s hard to say there’s one specific trigger.

For instance, a group of people could be exposed to an unusual smell and think they are now infected by some kind of toxin as happened at a Tennessee school in 1998. As we mentioned in the earlier definition, a perceived threat can be all that it is. So that could be thinking that a virus has been released or even that aliens are loose, a monster is in town, or the government is being illegally overthrown.

In 2014 in Colombia, there was an epidemic among pre-teen and teen girls that lasted for months. 240 girls were hospitalized with symptoms that ranged from nausea to dizziness to fainting and convulsions. The locals decided it must be a side effect of the Gardasil vaccine and protested. But the President assured the people it was not because that has literally happened nowhere else. The real culprit? Mass psychogenic illness. 

These girls had an honest belief that they were sick, it’s not fakery or deception in any way. Their symptoms are real but the illness is entirely psychological and transmitted through psychological means. 

Victims are usually near one another – schools, workplaces, and things that force you to be together with others. Physical symptoms usually involve fainting or seizures but also nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, headaches, and so on.

Data suggests a psychogenic illness will start with one person and then is most likely to spread to people who see them afflicted and know them well. If the first person is considered high status, such as a very popular student at school, it will affect even more people. 

That school in Tennessee was thoroughly investigated as were the people who fell ill. No toxic agent was ever identified, but the investigation showed that most victims saw another person get sick and then began to feel sick themselves. 

In May 2006, a group of hundreds of teens in Portugal all reported illness including a rash, dizziness, and breathing difficulties. The cause was determined to be “Strawberries with Sugar,” a popular teen drama TV series in which the same thing had just happened as a storyline. 

Anxiety seems to be a major trigger for mass psychogenic disorder. The more stress you’re under, the more things around you that cause worry, the more susceptible you’ll be. In fact, the condition is sometimes called “conversion disorder” as stress or trauma are converted into physical symptoms.  If you see other people falling ill, if you or your world is in a time of great upheaval or stress like the end of the school year and exams for those kids in Portugal, it can exacerbate the situation and allow it to take hold more easily.  

The cause of the anxiety can also be very culturally significant. For instance, in African nations, you’re more likely to see a fear of the devil or evil spirits being behind what causes it. In the West, it can be a fear of chemical spills, toxic fumes, and other more tangible things of that nature.

Mass Hysteria, Mass Suggestion, and Bad Media

In the modern world, mass suggestion and mass hysteria are spread more easily than they were in the past. Where many instances back throughout history had to take place out of school, convent, or something like that, now we can all be linked by the media so the spread of an illness that may not be real can happen that much more easily.

In 2021, German researchers discovered that social media was actually helping to spread a mass psychogenic outbreak of Tourette’s Syndrome, or at least what sufferers thought was Tourettes. Videos from Instagram, TikTok, and other social media sites began to spread after one initial video of a person who seemed to exaggerate their symptoms, intentionally or otherwise, went viral. That happened in Germany but another outbreak was linked to a Canadian TikToker with Tourette’s, as well.

After that first video, there was a sharp rise in people going to see doctors with concerns about Tourettes but many of them displayed identical tics to the viral video, including the same vocal tics which were all unusual like “fries” and “Heil Hitler.” The tics only displayed when the afflicted were being asked to do things they didn’t want to do. Since none of the symptoms matched how Tourette’s actually manifests, it was soon ruled out and a new diagnosis was made – mass social media-induced illness.

Other conditions, like dissociative identity disorder, have also seen an increase in self-diagnosis thanks to TikTok trends that draw in billions of views. Teens see these videos, identify something they can relate to, and then may begin to manifest more symptoms based on what they’ve seen. Bipolar disorder and various autism spectrum disorders also can manifest in this way. 

In 2016, the media helped spread the story of a woman hallucinating people trying to take the roof off of her car. They reported that the responding officer as well as others who had contact with the woman all began to hallucinate as well. People were hospitalized and the local ER was put under quarantine. One story told of doctors baffled by the mystery illness spread by touch. Another headline said doctors confirmed the spread by touch but the article never says that at all. 

In reality, there had been no quarantine at all. Anyone who went into the ER was released soon after. There were not five people having hallucinations at all, just one. Others had vaguely flu-like symptoms including someone who recently was exposed to the flu. But the story spread quickly and was reported as far away as the Philippines. Most of the information came from the first article to report on it as breaking news with no actual quotes from involved sources and much of the info seems to have been exaggerated or just made up. 

Examples of Mass Hysteria in History

In recent history, one of the most well-known cases of psychogenic illness seems to be Havana Syndrome. Dozens of people, usually employees of the US Government stationed at embassies around the world, reported similar symptoms after the first outbreak in 2017. Dizziness, ringing in the ears, confusion, fatigue, etc. No physical cause has ever been found.

In 2016 parts of America and even beyond were gripped by a clown panic, a belief that sinister clowns were trying to lure children into the woods. Nothing was ever confirmed but soon there were sightings of clowns in multiple states. This was exacerbated by people dressing up as clowns to just stand around in cities. They didn’t do anything, but it fueled the fire that clowns were doing dangerous things. 

In 1999, mass hysteria over tainted Coca-Cola in Belgium caused the company to dump hundreds of millions of dollars in product even though nothing was wrong with it. The problem with a psychogenic illness is that the symptoms are real, the people are very sane, and it is hard to convince a person that they are not sick when they are literally sick. Tell someone that they’re imagining things they know to be real and they just won’t believe you. 

The Satanic Panic of the ’80s was a widespread case of mass hysteria that became so pervasive it’s still part of pop culture and influences movies and shows like Stranger Things. People were convinced Satan worship was everywhere and there were cases of serious abuse accusations and ruined lives and innocent people were convicted of horrible crimes that never happened at all, they were only imagined.

Back in 1837, London saw the rise of Spring-Heeled Jack, which still exists as a cryptid to this day. Stories of a sinister being with fierce claws who could leap across rooftops spread across the city. Women claim to have been attacked, and a man was even arrested but ultimately not convicted because the victim claimed he could breathe fire when the man in custody could not. 

America had its Salem witch trials which were also the result of mass hysteria, religious fewer, and probably a bit of good, old-fashioned hatefulness. The end result was the same, however. Innocent people being accused of horrible crimes and even being executed for them.

Anytime you have a group of people together during a stressful situation, which can be as simple as the stress of school to as complex as the stress of a pandemic, religious oppression, or some other societal ills, you have a prime breeding ground for a potential mass psychogenic illness. If you’re keeping track, that means anytime, anywhere. And the fact is, these do happen frequently, all over the world. Often they’re small and isolated and we don’t hear about them, but if you ever come across a situation where a mystery illness is spreading and there doesn’t seem to be any cause, keep in mind that things may not be any more complicated than that.

Earth has suffered five big extinctions and innumerable little ones. A potential sixth mass extinction, the only one created by the planet’s own inhabitants, looms. So in the spirit of collective mass improvement, now’s the perfect time to look back at scenes of chaos and turnover of life that we hope to avoid in the future.

From the hectic dawn of the dinosaurs to the numerous disasters that darkened skies, acidified the seas, and turned our blue planet into a hellscape, these awe-inspiring scenes of destruction and rebirth shaped the Earth.

10 Dinosaurs Take Advantage Of Extinctions

Dinosaurs entered evolutionary history the same way they exited—with an extinction.

This one occurred about 232 million years ago during the Carnian Pluvial Episode when deep-sea volcanoes (the Wrangellia basalts in British Columbia today) forced climate change and a turnover of ancient life.^[1]

This plunged the Earth into a series of wet and dry episodes. Most notably, four successive pulses of warming and cooling in just a million years led to multiple extinction scenarios which devastated the variety of plant and animal life.

Afterward, it took dinosaurs a surprisingly short span of just two million years to claim the globe and its many now-vacant niches.

9 The Chicxulub Asteroid Scores A Lucky Hit

The 10-kilometer-wide (6 mi) asteroid that took away our dinosaurs 66 million years ago was an exceptionally lucky strike which might not have killed the dinos had it struck anywhere else.

In fact, just 13 percent of the Earth’s surface harbored the necessary materials to spur such a mass extinction. The asteroid just happened to slam into a patch of Earth full of fossil fuels, abundant in hydrocarbons and sulfur. The incredible temperatures generated by the collision ignited these rich veins of fuel.^[2]

The resultant hellfires released vast amounts of soot which blocked out the Sun and decreased surface temperature as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 °F). The escaping sulfur fell back down as acid rain.

Researchers modeled other impact sites. They found that the only other places with catastrophic fossil fuel concentrations included North America’s East Coast, the Middle East, and Siberia.

8 A ‘Trickle Of Food’ Feeds Deep-Sea Creatures

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula and relieved the Earth of dinosaurs. It also killed the giant marine reptiles and caused an immediate extinction of many microscopic ocean creatures like plankton which feed other animals.

But deep-ocean creatures survived, fed by some mysterious food source. Researchers thank algae and some bacteria, photosynthesizing organisms that withstood the extinction and rained down on the ocean deep like a slow trickle of food for bigger creatures.

But life recovered quickly. The oceanic food chain restored itself in just 1.7 million years as new species took over recently vacated niches.^[3]

7 The Neanderthals Are Pushed Out

Neanderthals were like us: They buried their dead, crafted tools, controlled fire, talked, cared for the needy, and created art. So species inferiority may not have led to their demise. A new model says that we didn’t kill Neanderthals in bloody ancient warfare. Instead, their population simply fizzled out.

Their territory extended only from Europe to Central Asia. As other types of early humans (with more extensive habitats) poured in, resources weren’t adequate.

But the situation could have just as easily been reversed. Had we been living in the same region and subject to similar emigration from Neanderthal communities, we could have been the ones relegated to obsolescence.^[4]

6 Earth Gets Rung Like A Bell

Earth’s crust is riddled with tens of thousands of miles of cracks, or mid-ocean ridges, where lava bubbles up between tectonic plates.

When the dino-killing asteroid hit, it actually rung Earth, sending seismic shocks through the planet in the form of magnitude-11 earthquakes. As the jolt reached deep down, it shook the planet like a can of soda and irritated the mid-ocean ridges, which squirted even more molten matter.

The evidence?

Two massive magma mounds, or “bumps,” in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were located by scientists thanks to the increased gravitational pull of the bumps. They’re composed of 96,000–1,000,000 cubic kilometers (23,000–240,000 mi³) of magma, which formed within a million years of the impact.^[5]

The eruptions are on par with natural history’s all-time greats, and the increased volcanic activity continued for up to hundreds of thousands of years after the impact.

5 A Cluster Of Extinctions Fuels The Great Dying

The End-Permian Extinction 252 million years ago was the worst of Earth’s five mass extinctions. It wiped out 70–75 percent of terrestrial species and up to 95 percent of sea life (though some say it’s closer to 80 percent). This extinction event is therefore known as the Great Dying.

But newer research suggests that it’s more like the Great Dyings. The extinction was caused by a two-pronged geological attack. First, volcanoes smothered the globe and the oceans acidified. Then a wave of anoxia drained the seas of oxygen.

After this main event, which saw the Siberian Traps release enough lava to cover an area larger than Alaska, two further mini-extinctions followed.

Volcanoes are again to blame. Carbon isotopes reveal that two major events occurred half a million years and 1.5 million years after the Great Dying, a spate of destruction from which it took 10 million years to recover.^[6]

4 Hidden Eruptions Are Deadlier

Mass volcanism is always bad, but location can be more significant than the duration or magnitude. During the previously mentioned Great Dying, subsurface eruptions caused far more chaos. When the Siberian Traps erupted, not all the lava oozed out. Some spread out over 1.6 million kilometers (1 million mi) beneath the Earth’s crust.

It sounds like a lucky break because underground is where lava belongs. But when it pooled at the subsurface, it scorched carbon-rich sediments and sent plumes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

The result was ocean acidification, a rise in temperature, and an apocalyptic haze that decimated life. All in all, enough lava was released to cover a United States–size patch in up to 1 kilometer (0.6 mi) deep of lava.^[7]

3 The Dinosaurs Faded Out Long Before The Asteroid

Statistical analysis on the dinosaurian family tree revealed a marked decline long before the fated asteroid strike 66 million years ago. The downturn began around 140 million years ago. Previously, new species emerged faster than old ones disappeared. But by 90 million years ago, 24 million years before E-day, diversity was heading down the toilet.

Factors like climate change and continental breakup started whittling away at the big-money dinosaurs: theropods (T. rex and such), ornithischians (Stegosaurus family), and sauropods (the Brontosaurus group). Conversely, the horned and duck-billed dinosaurs began to establish a stronger foothold, possibly due to the rise of a new food group, flowering plants.

Considering these trends, some researchers believe that the dinosaurs might have bowed out even without a catastrophic cosmic intervention.^[8]

2 Space Wants To Kill Us

Extinctions may have a secret cosmic conspirator: dark matter.

The Earth and our solar system smash through the galaxy at more than 800,000 kilometers per hour (500,000 mph). Every 30 million years or so, they pass through the galactic disc in episodes that apparently line up with past extinctions.

Dark matter generally hangs in halos around Milky Way–like galaxies. But it also accumulates in the central midplane of the galactic disk. So when the solar system flies through this region, dark matter gravitationally perturbs space rocks and sends a few tumbling toward Earth.^[9]

As Earth moves through these invisible clumps, it accumulates dark matter at its core. The particles cause each other to explode, releasing energies up to a thousand times hotter than normal core temperatures. This sends material bubbling to the surface to incite volcanism, magnetic field reversals, and sea level changes.

1 Seedeaters Take Over

About 66 million years ago, a big asteroid slammed into Earth and killed off most of the dinosaurs. However, the birdlike maniraptorans endured.

Birdlike dinos came in two main flavors—toothed and not toothed. They consumed varied diets, but the ones without teeth, with their short and robust beaks, also ate seeds. This is why they survived the end-Cretaceous extinction while their toothy brethren did not.^[10]

In spite of acid rain, darkened skies, landscape-consuming fires, and the eradication of most food sources, maniraptorans kept their bellies full. How? They poked through the ground for seeds deposited by these awesome new things called flowers that proliferated during the Cretaceous.

Ivan Farkas writes about cool stuff for the Internet. You can contact him at [email protected].

Seeing a dead body is disturbing enough, but for those studying the past, it can be incredibly common. When multiple dead bodies are found, it can make for an interesting insight into the darker parts of history. By examining the tragic final resting places of those from history, life back then becomes alive

10Mayan Decapitations

In 2013, archaeologists discovered 24 decapitated and mutilated bodies at the ancient Mayan city of Uxil. The burying of the victims was quite elaborate: They had been stored in an artificial cave that served as a water reservoir, were covered by a layer of gravel, and then were sealed shut in the caves by a layer of clay. The bodies were discovered after an examination of Uxil’s drainage system; they had been forgotten entirely before then.

The corpses dated from the seventh century, sparking two possible theories. They were either prisoners of war who were brutally executed or they were nobility overthrown. There is evidence to the latter theory because many of the corpses had jade in their teeth, a sign of being in the upper class.

9St. Helena Slave Graves

St. Helena is an island located in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America. At one time, it served as an outpost for slave traders. Any slaves who died during the crossing to the Americas were buried on St. Helena, and in 2012, their bodies were uncovered.

In the 1800s, when Great Britain was trying to cease slave trading in their Caribbean colonies, the Royal Navy would take many of the slaves arriving at St. Helena and put them in colonies. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough and the slaves who died afterward were burned in mass graves. Around 325 of an estimated 5,000 bodies were found in the graves during the construction of a new airport being built on the island. 83 percent were young people and children.

8Chinese Disease House

In 2015, the charred remains of 97 people were discovered in a 5,000-year-old house located in a prehistoric village in China. The bodies had been stuffed inside of the tiny house—-it was smaller than most modern-day squash courts —then the house was burned to the ground.

Anthropologists studying the site believe that some kind of prehistoric disaster like an epidemic had occurred. A quick-killing disease could have caused the deaths because it appeared that they died suddenly and were obviously buried with very little reverence. However, all of this happened before Hamin Mangha—the modern-day name for the village—began keeping records, so we can only guess about the real reason for the tragic find.

7Neolithic Massacres

In 2006, road construction in central Germany unearthed 26 brutally killed humans dating from the Neolithic era. All of them had bones broken and their skulls smashed in. There was even evidence that they had been either tortured before death or mutilated afterward.

Two other equally disturbing sites had been found—one also in Germany and another in Austria. The discovery in Germany was an apparent “death pit” containing 34 bodies, while the Austrian discovery contained 64 bodies. All of these findings illustrate a violent and uncertain past.

6Durham University Graves

When excavations were being made for a proposed library addition at Durham University in the United Kingdom, a surprising discovery was made: two graves containing 1,700 bodies from the 17th century. The graves had not been previously recorded, so many were scratching their heads as to the origin of the tragedy.

The graves come from a dark and bloody time in England’s history: the English Civil War. It is believed that the bodies belonged to Scottish soldiers taken captive after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. They were captured by the English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and probably died from starvation or disease and buried in mass graves then forgotten. It is also believed that some of them might have been those killed during the Battle of Dunbar because the graves of the deceased were never actually recorded.

5Quarantine Island

While digging the foundation for a new museum on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio located in the Venetian Lagoon, a grave containing 1,500 corpses were found. The bodies give a clear picture about one of the scariest events to sweep across Europe: the Black Plague. During the 15th and 16th century, Lazzaretto Vecchio served as Europe’s first lazaret—a quarantine colony for those infected.

In 1485, in an effort to end the rapid infection of the population, officials put the infected on Lazzaretto Vecchio, called Lazaretum at the time. Since the bodies were also known to cause the plague to spread, they were buried on the island rather than transported back to the city.

4Paris Medieval Hospital

In January 2015, an expansion of the basement at a Parisian supermarket led to a grisly find: the cemetery of medieval hospital. The hospital, called Hopital de la Trinite, had been built in the 13th century and was then outside the city limits. It served in several capacities, but after the expansion of Paris over the years, the hospital was torn down and its cemetery was forgotten.

The 316 buried in the cemetery could have been the victims of the plague that ravaged Paris in the 1340s, famine, or other factors, but none of them display trauma of any kind, so they weren’t the victims of war. Most people buried in cemeteries similar to the one discovered were moved to the Catacombs, but these weren’t, making the find even more intriguing. The hospital itself was closed during the French Revolution then dismantled in 1812 and built over by other structures.

3Cylon’s Followers

Cylon was a Greek athlete who, thousands of years ago, tried to overthrow the Athenian government. In April 2016, what is believed to be the graves of Cylon’s followers were found. Two graves dating from 675–650 BC contained 85 men, of which 36 were buried bound and shackled.

Cylon was a celebrity athlete who won the double foot race in the Olympics during the seventh century BC. Seizing upon his celebrity status, he gathered a group of his followers and tried to take the Acropolis. They were besieged there, and Cylon and his core group escaped. The remainder of his followers were left there with no food and left after being promised their lives would be spared. Instead, they were brutally killed and allegedly buried in the graves found recently.

2Sacrifice To Anubis

The unearthed catacombs beneath the Ancient Egyptian shrine to the canine god Anubis were found to contain millions of fossils—not of humans but of dogs.

The catacombs were built as a place to leave dogs sacrificially to the Egyptian deity, and the numbers are incredible. An estimated eight million fossils are believed to be held in the catacombs. While many have long since disintegrated or were disturbed by grave robbers, the area of Saqqara near Memphis remains mostly intact.

Other animals have been found, suggesting that the area held other animal shrines. But the most popular was by far the Anubis cult, and the dogs that were served up as sacrifices probably served as a major part of the ancient economy. They were bred and raised specifically for sacrificing, sold to those wanting blessings or good favors from Anubis.

1The First War

In Kenya, a 10,000-year-old mass grave was discovered containing the fossils of several humans who showed signs of violent trauma. This grave is believed contains the victims of the oldest war ever discovered.

The remains were found at Lake Turkana and showed signs of blunt force trauma along with arrow wounds. Some of the tools used to kill the victims were found nearby, were made of obsidian. Even females weren’t spared: One died after her hands were bound, while another was bound and killed despite being pregnant.

In the words of Marta Mirazohn Lahr, the lead author of the study conducted at Cambridge University, “These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers.”

Gordon Gora is a struggling author who is desperately trying to make it. He is working on several projects but until he finishes one, he will write for for his bread and butter. You can write him at [email protected].

When Netflix released their feature film Bird Box in 2018, many viewers were left questioning what the “monster” was that drove everyone to suicide. One of the online theories is that the monster represented “mass hysterical contagion,” nowadays known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), where a single individual suffers a psychogenic illness that spreads to a much larger group.

SEE ALSO: 10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing

Generally, women and girls will succumb to MPI more than men, as they are more likely to be triggered by another affected individual. Unlike the film suggests, nobody has reportedly died from the symptoms, which include hyperventilation, dizziness, panic, faintness, abdominal pain, sickness, headache, weakness, and itching.

These following real-life cases of mass hysterical contagion all ended nearly as quickly as they started. However, the sufferers will not easily forget just how frightening and disturbing such an outbreak can be.

10 The Twitching Teenagers

In October 2011, cheerleading captain Thera Sanchez woke up from a nap to find herself violently twitching and jerking. Two weeks later, a senior from the same school named Lydia Parker began humming and swinging her arms around involuntarily. Eventually, the numbers swelled from two to 20 people (mostly teenage girls) affected at Le Roy Junior/Senior High School, near Buffalo, New York.

Parents were becoming increasingly concerned that the tics were caused by the school’s water supply or that the playing fields were contaminated. However, the country’s leading environmentalists agreed there was nothing that would cause these symptoms.

According to Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, who treated 15 patients at the Dent Neurologic Institute, the symptoms were worsened by social media and press attention. Mechtler explained, “One thing we’ve learned is how social media and mainstream media can worsen the symptoms. The mass hysteria was really fueled by the national media, social media—all this promoted the worsening of symptoms by putting these people at the national forefront.”^[1] By the end of the school term, many of the teenage girls who were affected had returned back to normal.

9 June Bug

In June 1962, 62 workers at a dressmaking textile mill in South Carolina began to show symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and “a breaking out over the body.” The workers believed that the outbreak was caused by bug bites after receiving a fabric shipment.

However, investigation by the US Public Health Service, concluded that there was no reliable evidence that the contagion had been caused by an insect. Instead, it was explained that working conditions in the 1960s were so poor that the stress spread both physically and mentally between coworkers. The “June Bug” itself also could have been manifested by the initial untrained medical staff, who were not familiar with such symptoms.

The June Bug outbreak can also be explained as a social contagion, which is where groups of people who have strong social ties are affected in the same way. The majority of the coworkers were women who were the main providers for their families, which meant spending many long hours together.^[2]

8 Tarantism

In Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, tarantism was a form of hysteria that was associated with a bite from a tarantula. The term is derived from the town of Taranto, Italy. Those who were convinced they had suffered a tarantula bite would experience heightened excitability and restlessness. They would break out into a form of frenzied dancing which would allow them to be “cured.”

In 1693, a doctor in Naples suffered two tarantula bites in order to disprove that they would result in any of the typical tarantism symptoms. In front of six witnesses, he experienced no physical changes.

Tarantism gave rise to the tarantella, in which couples dance quickly and flirtatiously with each other. Composers Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Carl Maria von Weber have all written tarantella music.^[3]

7 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, the country of Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika) suffered a laughter epidemic that began with an outbreak at a girl’s school before spreading to the surrounding communities. More than 1,000 people were affected by chronic laughter that lasted several months. Symptoms also included hysterical crying, aimless running, and violent outbursts which could last anywhere between a few hours to more than two weeks. Fourteen schools were closed due to the epidemic.

It is believed that in this particular case, one schoolgirl fell ill with anxiety-induced laughter, which then set off other girls, and a chain reaction occurred throughout the region. Researcher Christian Hempelmann noted, “We build up some magical psychic pressure, and laughter lets us release it. Statistically in this case, this did not release anything. These people were suffering, expressing their suffering through that. Nothing got better because they laughed.”^[4]

6 False Anthrax Alarms

On October 5, 2001, a letter that tested positive for anthrax killed the Sun newspaper’s picture editor Bob Stevens, and the world went berserk. The anthrax antibiotic, Cipro, was one of the fastest-selling drugs on the market, and in Dallas, an airplane was forced to make an emergency landing when potato chips that were crunched into the carpet were mistook for anthrax. In England, Canterbury Cathedral and the London Stock Exchange were evacuated due to false alarms. During the month of the anthrax fatality, there were four letters sent in the US mail that tested positive for anthrax but more than 3,000 cases of both false alarms and hoaxes.

Also during October, newspapers reported huge rises in sales as people were in desperate need of more information, and the media was blamed for overhyping the anthrax threats. Steve Caprus, executive producer of NBC Nightly News, stated that all journalists must “deal with facts—not hyping or being overly dramatic.”^[5] Over the months that followed, five people died from inhaling anthrax, and 17 others were infected after exposure.

5 St. John’s Dance

In 1374, there was an outbreak of uncontrollable dancing in the streets of Aachen, Germany, which still baffles experts even to this day. The writhing of the bodies, sometimes referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” would drive sufferers to exhaustion.

In his 1888 book The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker describes:

They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.^[6]

4 Elsa Perea Flores School

Elsa Perea Flores School in Tarapoto, Peru, fell victim to an outbreak of hysteria affecting nearly 100 children at the school. During the summer of 2016, the children, mostly aged between 11 and 14, claimed they saw terrifying visions of a man in black trying to kill them and also experienced seizures. They experienced fainting attacks, muscular convulsions, delirium, and repeated screaming.

One pupil described her experience, saying, “It’s disturbing for me to think about it. It’s as if someone kept on chasing me from behind. It was a tall man all dressed in black and with a big beard and it felt like he was trying to strangle me.”^[7] Another added, “Several children from different classrooms fainted at the same time. I got nauseous and started vomiting. I heard voices. A man in black chased me and wanted to touch me.” Locals put the hysteria down to demonic possession and claimed that the children must have been playing with an Ouija board before the attacks.

3 Blackburn Fainting Frenzy

During the summer of 1965, more than 300 people in Blackburn, England, began to suddenly faint with no prior symptoms. Princess Margaret was scheduled to visit the newly restored Blackburn Cathedral, and the crowds gathered in their thousands to await her arrival. Then, one by one, people began to collapse on the ground. The ambulance staff who attended the scene said the fainting was due to being stood around in the hot sun.

The following day, 98 pupils at St. Hilda’s Girls’ School also began to suddenly faint without explanation. They were rushed to the hospital, and mattresses were laid out in the hallways to cope with the sudden rise in patients. One ambulance driver recalled, “As fast as we took them away, new cases from classrooms in other parts of the school were being brought in.”^[8]

A year later, a report in the British Medical Journal by a pediatrician and a London psychologist confirmed that this was a case a mass hysteria or, as noted, an “epidemic of over-breathing.”

2 Resignation Syndrome

A mystery illness observed in Sweden has been dubbed “resignation syndrome.” Children of asylum-seekers would withdraw completely, unable to open their eyes, speak, or even walk. Eventually, they did recover, but the illness baffled medical experts for more than two decades. Dr. Elisabeth Hultcrantz, a volunteer with Doctors of the World, revealed, “When I explain to the parents what has happened, I tell them the world has been so terrible that [their child] has gone into herself and disconnected the conscious part of her brain.”

Resignation syndrome was first reported in the 1990s. From 2003 to 2005, more than 400 cases were noted. Karl Sallin, a pediatrician at the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, said, “To our knowledge, no cases have been established outside of Sweden.” More recently, in 2016, Sweden’s National Board of Health stated that numbers had decreased; there were 169 cases that year.^[9]

1 Coca-Cola Scare

In June 1999, Coca-Cola withdrew 30 million cans and bottles from the shelves in Belgium after more than 100 people claimed the product made them ill. It was reported throughout the country that many people, including children, became suddenly sick with “stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and palpitations” after drinking bottled Coca-Cola. After the Belgian government was swamped with complaints from citizens concerned about airborne toxins, an investigation took place. However, four members of Belgium’s Health Council suggested that the epidemic was a case of mass hysteria.

In a public letter, the health council stated, “It is probably significant that a company with such high visibility and symbolic image was involved in this episode. Besides the important role of the media, the scale of the outbreak may have been amplified by the radical measures taken by the health authorities, as well as deficient communication by the Coca-Cola company.”^[10] Coca-Cola quickly recovered from the epidemic, and sales were back on the rise within weeks of the event.

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines.
Twitter: @thecheish

Mass hysteria is a psychological phenomenon which has been documented since the Middle Ages. Political turmoil, environmental stress, fear of the unknown, and the need for social acceptance from our peers can often cause us to behave in an irrational manner, and throughout history, close-knit groups, such as schools and small communities, have experienced inexplicable episodes of mass hysteria.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Bizarre Cases of Mass Hysteria

Many times, a single unusual incident with a logical explanation has escalated into an epidemic in which those close by imagine they are experiencing similar symptoms. From bizarre behavior to imaginary illnesses, there have been a number of epidemics of mass hysteria throughout history.

10 Dancing Plague Of 1518

We’ve all been tempted to “dance till you drop” when out partying or clubbing. But during the Middle Ages, residents of a French town actually died from dancing.^[1]

In 1518, a case of dancing plague broke out in Strasbourg, in the French Alsace region. Starting with one lone dancer, the footloose outbreak led to over 400 people eventually taking to the streets, dancing nonstop for days on end. Many collapsed from exhaustion, some apparently dying from heart attack or stroke. The Dancing Plague lasted for over a month. Those affected were predominantly female. Few historic notes exist to document the exact cause of the plague.

Town leaders were highly unamused with the ongoing displays of frenetic dancing. Learned physicians at the time suggested that the cause was “overheated blood” in the brain during the hot July days. It has been more recently suggested that a fungus, ergot, in the wheat fields (and thus in people’s bread) may have been the cause. The ergot would have produced reactions similar to LSD.

9 Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic

In 1962, three students at a boarding school in Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania) began laughing uncontrollably. Their laughter was contagious and soon spread to 95 students at the school.

Bouts of uncontrolled hysteria lasted from a few hours to more than two weeks. Victims also experienced bouts of crying, pain, and fainting. Teachers were unable to conduct lessons with the bouts of hysterical laughing, and the school was forced to shut down for two months while the epidemic was brought under control.

However, the hysteria reportedly spread to surrounding villages and to a number of surrounding schools. Altogether, over 1,000 people were affected.^[2]

Possible toxins from contaminated food or chemicals were ruled out as a cause of the epidemic. No definite medical cause could be found for the laughing disease, which was blamed on the stress of the strict boarding school regime.

8 Mad Gasser

During World War II, residents of the town of Mattoon, Illinois, became convinced they were under attack from a phantom anesthetist who was attempting to gas them as they slept. Victims complained of a strange odor in their homes before being struck with symptoms ranging from paralysis to coughing, nausea, and vomiting.^[3]

The first report came at the end of August 1944, when a resident awoke to a strange smell and suffered a fit of nausea and vomiting. His wife was paralyzed and unable to leave her bed. Police received over 20 similar reports of “gassings” over the following two weeks. Panic ensued as the nightly “gassings” became more prevalent, but no firm sighting of a culprit ever occurred.

All victims made complete and speedy recoveries. Investigators explained the incidents as combinations of odors from a nearby industrial plant and mass hysteria in reaction to reports of a nocturnal prowler.

7 Meowing Nuns

Nuns in religious orders across France and Germany went barking mad during the 15th century. During medieval times, many women entered convents against their will, being forced into a life of celibacy and poverty by their parents. They were condemned to a life of austerity and manual labor. So it is probably no surprise that convent life caused some bizarre behavior from the inmates.

In 1491, a nun in a large French convent began meowing like a cat. Her sisters soon followed her in this strange behavior until the convent was overcome with a “cat imitation” plague. The surrounding villagers were disturbed by this daily caterwauling, to the point that a platoon of soldiers were stationed outside the convent. The nuns were told they would be beaten with rods if they continued to meow.

Various nunneries across the region reported similar epidemics of nuns imitating cats, dogs, and birds, as well as biting viciously. At the time, “demonic possession” was the explanation for the epidemics. However, the repressive conditions in which the nuns lived causing a form of mass hysteria is a more likely explanation.^[4]

6 Strawberries With Sugar Virus

In 2006, over 300 Portuguese schoolchildren were hit with an unexplained illness. Patients complained of dizziness, breathing difficulties, and rashes. The strange illness only affected schoolchildren and was reported in numerous schools around the country.

A teen soap opera called Strawberries with Sugar was identified as the problem. An episode had aired a few days before the outbreak, in which a strange virus was striking children at the show’s school. Apparently, watching the episode had led to children believing that their everyday ailments or allergies were in fact an outbreak of the deadly virus they had seen on television.^[5]

5 Meissen Trembling Disease

Several German schools were hit with an epidemic of trembling in 1905.^[6] A student in Meissen began trembling and twitching as she wrote in October of that year. By May the following year, over 200 students at surrounding schools had been afflicted with the unexplained twitching epidemic. The tremors only occurred when the students were given writing tasks and were not present when performing other lessons.

All the students were high performers, indicating that the stress of having to achieve good grades combined with reports of other instances of the trembling disease contributed to the hysteria. Students were “treated” with electric shocks to “cure” the tremors, which soon subsided after a rest from writing.

4 Hollinwell Incident

A swooning epidemic hit a group of schoolchildren in England’s East Midlands in July 1986.

Over 500 schoolchildren had traveled from all around to compete in a marching band competition. All were assembled and ready to perform, when suddenly, they began collapsing. Around 300 children and adults ultimately dropped at the Hollinwell showground. Mass panic erupted, with emergency crews called in to deal with the growing crisis.^[7]

Victims later complained of having experienced a sore throat and a burning sensation in the eyes. Initial investigations considered a gas leak or contamination from crop dusting as being possible causes of the mass fainting episode. The incident was officially explained as a form of mass hysteria, caused by a combination of tiredness from a long journey to the contest, the heat of the day, and preperformance jitters.

3 Blackburn Faintings

Schoolchildren in the UK town of Blackburn were hit with a fainting epidemic which lasted several days in 1965.

The fainting frenzy began while people were waiting outside the Blackburn Cathedral for Princess Margaret to arrive to officially open the restorations. An early start to the day, with several hours standing in the sun, were initially blamed when 140 children fainted on the grounds.

However, the following day, another 98 patients were hit with the mysterious fainting epidemic at a nearby school. By the end of the week, over 300 children had been affected.

The schools were closed and carefully inspected for a possible cause, with fumes from a nearby factory initially blamed for the fainting episodes. Mass hysteria, leading to overbreathing, brought on by the excitement of the royal visit was finally declared the cause of the fainting fits.^[8]

2 Wurzburg Screaming Epidemic

A nunnery in Wurzburg, Germany, was hit by a screaming epidemic in 1749. As with the meowing nuns a few centuries earlier, it was probably brought on by a combination of boredom and frustration at being forced into a religious life.

The sub-prioress, Sister Maria Renata, initially denied entry into the convent for a young woman who was prone to convulsions. Her decision was overturned, and other sisters within the community began imitating the young woman’s behavior, showing signs of “demonic possession” during services. Victims experienced episodes of screaming, writhing, foaming at the mouth, and entering a trancelike state.

The sub-prioress was coerced into confessing to witchcraft and was beheaded for her crimes against the Church, ending the screaming sessions from the other nuns.

1 Face-Scratcher

In poorly educated communities, villagers will often turn to folklore and mythology to explain the unknown. A belief that aliens were scratching the faces of victims at night sparked mass panic in a town in Uttar Pradesh.

In 2002, residents were reporting a “brightly lit object” that “flies sideways” attacking victims, leaving scratch marks on their faces. Reports ranged from football-sized objects to a UFO the size of a large tortoise that flew at victims, leaving scratches and burn marks.

From an initial isolated incident, rumors of the alien attacker soon spread, sparking widespread panic. Nighttime vigilante groups were set up to scare away the face-scratcher, and residents demanded police capture the extraterrestrial assailants. The only confirmed deaths, however, were from police firing into large crowds to disperse protesters who had gathered to demand action.^[10]

Explanations for the phenomenon ranged from an insect plague to “lightning balls” striking victims as they slept outside. The face-scratcher disappeared suddenly once the monsoon season arrived.

Lesley Connor is a retired Australian newspaper editor who contributes articles to online publications and her travel blog.

Everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a weapon of mass destruction these days. We typically categorize them in one of three ways: either nuclear, chemical, or biological. Essentially is any weapon that can cause mass death and destruction fairly quickly. The term dates back to 1937 when it was apparently coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

At the time, he was referring to aerial bombardments in Spain that used what today we would think of as standard ordinance. Obviously those weapons evolve to become bigger and more destructive. And in the future, we can look forward to those weapons evolving to be even worse.

10. Antimatter Weapons

The term antimatter brings to mind some kind of Star Trek science fiction imagery. It barely sounds like a real thing. Unfortunately, it is real and the potential for antimatter to cause serious damage is ripe for the picking.

Antimatter is any material composed of what you would call antiparticles. The theory behind antimatter is that every particle in the universe has kind of a mirror image of itself. It is the same thing with an opposite charge. The example most often given is that an electron has a negative charge but a positron has a positive charge. They both have the same mass but they are opposites. This is significant to the world of weapons of mass destruction because when matter and antimatter meet they can no longer exist together so they destroy each other in a spectacular way.

Antimatter was considered theoretical for a long time until evidence of its existence was discovered. When cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere they produce antimatter. Thunderstorms also seem to produce positrons sometimes. And the Large Hadron Collider is able to produce matter and antimatter as well.

When matter and antimatter meet the result is not just destructive, it’s bafflingly destructive. Particle physicist Frank Close has been quoted as saying that if you destroy a kilogram of antimatter it produces about 10 billion times the amount of energy that you get from destroying a kilogram of dynamite. That works out to 1,000 times more energy than nuclear fission. So if you were able to harness enough antimatter you could probably destroy the entire planet with not a lot of effort.

9. Genetic Weapons 

Genetic weapons are what happens when you take biological weapons to the next, terrifying level. These are weapons that are targeted to specific genetics, which means that you could take a standard biological weapon (anthrax, for instance) and tailor it so that it would only infect people with certain genetic traits. That means if you wanted to only eliminate a certain ethnic group you would be able to do so.

The idea of genetic weapons was dismissed in the past as being something that was not feasible or realistic. Advances in genetic science has proven that to be incorrect. According to a report called Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity II, our research into the development of vaccines and attempts to cure genetic conditions has enabled scientists to accurately map the human genome in a way that exposes certain genes that are specific to different ethnic groups. This information can then be exploited by rogue scientists to target those genes rather than use them to benefit mankind and cure diseases. The belief is that in the future, using this information, ethnic-specific biological weapons could be developed.

Other genetic weapons don’t have to use existing diseases; they can interfere with human RNA. By exploiting something called RNA interference, a genetic weapon could shut down important genes that are needed for you to live and function. This could be unleashed on an enemy population and have no effects on the attacking population. It wouldn’t be able to completely eliminate one side, but data suggests that as many as 20% of a population could be affected right away. And that certainly enough to cause some serious damage.

8. High-Powered Microwave

Star Trek made the word phaser part of everyday language. When you hear the word you know exactly what it means even though you’ve probably never seen such a thing before because what even is a phaser? Well, now PHASER is a real thing and the US military has it. It’s their name for a high-powered microwave weapon.  

Looking like a satellite dish fixed atop a shipping container, the PHASER is a cannon that emits radio frequency in a cone-shaped beam. Rather than using heat to destroy a target it can disrupt circuits with a burst of energy.

Currently this technology is being used defensively, the idea is that you would use the PHASER to destroy enemy drones. It takes one single microsecond for a shot from the PHASER to disable a drone’s electronics and destroy it. It’s also able to take out multiple drones with a single shot because of the shape of the beam it produces.

The PHASER is the first direct energy defense weapon that has ever been fielded. The Air Force spent just over 16 million dollars producing it in, and testing was set to be finished by the end of 2020. If the technology is able to prove itself in the field and it’s scalable then the future could see mobile PHASERS being used with regularity. Aircraft can fly over a population and with just a few bursts effectively destroy every piece of technology below, sending any city back to the Stone Age. 

7. Directed Energy

PHASER is not the only direct energy weapon that the military has in its arsenal these days. This umbrella term covers weapons including electro-magnetics, lasers, and microwave. Between 2017 and 2019 the US military doubled its spending on research into direct energy weapons. That went up to $1.1 billion. China and Russia are of course also investing heavily in these systems as well.

The benefits to using direct energy weapons over traditional munitions are fairly clear. To start with, they work at the speed of light. Unlike a traditional missile which could take some time to travel from source to target, a direct energy blast is going to hit a target almost immediately. As well they can be targeted far more precisely. You can use a laser to shoot somebody in the foot from space if you want to. The weapons are also scalable to take one small target or a much larger area as needed.

In May 2020, the US Navy released a video of USS Portland firing a high-energy class solid state laser at a drone, destroying it. The military is also developing what it calls the Indirect Fire Protection Capability High Energy Laser, which is said to be about 10 times more powerful than the one that the Navy uses. This kind of laser would be able to destroy incoming cruise missiles,  disable boats and helicopters, and blind enemy combatants. 

Because these weapons are powered by electricity they’re far more cost-effective in the long run than using bombs which can cost billions of dollars. It costs about $10 worth of energy to fire a laser. As long as you have electrical power, you always have ammunition. But it also means if you are on the attack with lasers, the enemy will never have that moment when you need to reload or you run out of ammunition.

6. Hypersonic Kinetic Energy

Back in 2004 the media called this weapon Rods from God. And for a long time nothing was heard about the hypersonic kinetic energy weapons system. However, it’s still in development and still poses an incredible destructive potential that rivals nuclear weapons.

Back in 1967, 107 countries signed the Outer Space Treaty. This treaty included a prohibition on using weapons of mass destruction from outer space. At the time, however, weapons of mass destruction were listed as nuclear, biological, and chemical. And a hypersonic kinetic energy weapon is none of those things.  In fact, these weapons are just tungsten rods. Twenty feet long and 1 foot in diameter. If these were to be launched from ,by the time they hit the earth they would bring with them the power of an intercontinental ballistic missile, laying waste to anything below.

Known as Project Thor, this was inspired by Lazy Dog bombs used during the Vietnam War. Those were pieces of steel that were two inches long and dropped from airplanes.  As they gained velocity they would hit the ground at about 500 miles per hour. No explosives needed and they could penetrate concrete nearly a foot deep.

Project Thor, or Rods from God, involves dropping tungsten rods the size of telephone poles from satellites in space. They can reach 10 times the speed of sound before they hit the ground. And when they hit the ground, they would go several hundred feet into it as well. That means if some target is hiding in a bunker they’re still not safe. Enough force would be released when the rods hit that it would rival a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon. And the added bonus  is that there is no fallout from the blast.

5. Geophysical Weapons 

The concept of geophysical weapons sounds a bit like the kind of stuff you might expect from a 1970s James Bond villain. These are the kind of weapons that are able to affect the climate and the environment, as well as the Earth itself in the form of seismic weapons.

It has long been believed that the US military has a facility located in Alaska known as HAARP which stands for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Conspiracy theorists believe that this facility is researching high frequency radio waves and how they can affect the ionosphere in terms of being used as a geophysical weapon. 

Beyond Alaska, China has been making strides with technology that many feel could be used as geophysical weapons. They just recently  reported that they’ve had success controlling the local weather. So while it may sound a lot like fiction, it seems like China has at least had some success moving forward with these plans.

4. Cyber Weapons

In the modern world, mass destruction doesn’t have to take place in a way that can be described with explosions and rubble and big craters in the Earth. If you really want to cripple an enemy all you need to do is lay waste to their infrastructure. While destructive physical warfare with bombs and bullets will probably never go out of style, cyber warfare can cause more damage in a shorter period of time.

In theory, if you have the capability, launching a cyberattack can destroy an enemy from within. Communications systems, military systems, even a country’s power grid and financial infrastructure can all be either shut down or even erased. There’s just short of nothing in the modern world that is not run by computers and managed over a computer network. The ability to control an enemy’s weapon’s arsenals, to cripple their economy, to leave them literally in the dark can all be done from the other side of the world with a team of skilled cyber attack specialists.

3. Isomer Bombs

To understand what an isomer bomb might be you have to know a little bit about how nuclear works. Isomers are atomic nuclei that have the same mass and atomic number but different radioactive properties. If you were to design an isomer bomb, you would be able to rapidly change the state of these nuclear isomers. They call it triggering, because normally these nuclei decay very slowly but if you trigger them and If it works successfully you would be able to receive a massive burst of gamma and x-ray radiation.  So essentially it would be stable enough until you needed it to blow up on demand. The resulting burst of energy would be incredible.

At present, the idea of an isomer bomb, typically linked to the nuclear isomer of hafnium, is thought to be at least one hundred thousand times more energetic than a chemical reaction. One gram of hafnium contains the equivalent energy of 660 pounds of TNT. The energy produced is a transition of energy between nucleons so it’s actually a different kind of nuclear energy than either fission or fusion. It’s also entirely theoretical at the moment.

There’s something called the hafnium controversy that occurred in the ’90s, in which a team of researchers claim to have actually been able to cause an isomer reaction. No other scientists were able to duplicate the results however and many scientists consider it impossible.  That said, Russia has apparently been continuing research into the idea of an isomer bomb 

2. Psychotronic Weapons

If you have weapons that can destroy buildings, control the weather, destroy a country’s infrastructure, and scramble electronics, what else might be left?  The only thing you’re missing at this point is a weapon that can destroy your enemy from the inside. That’s where the field of psychotropic weapons comes in. These are weapons that are meant to affect the minds of soldiers in enemy combatants. Anything that’s meant to affect the consciousness and the brain of another person. Laid out like this it sounds utterly preposterous. What kind of weapon can control another person’s mind? Or make them see things that aren’t there? 

In 2018, research conducted into unexplained injuries suffered by American diplomats in Cuba concluded that there was a possibility the diplomats had been subjected to psychotronic weapons. It was believed that a microwave device was used and the resulting effect was brain injuries. When you’re subject to one of these attacks you can hear noises that sound natural but are actually coming from inside your own head. Even deaf people can hear when they’re being attacked with a microwave device. Sounds and words can be beamed directly into someone’s head. The effects can be painful and debilitating, even to the point of rendering a victim incapacitated. 

1. Brain Drones

Drones are fairly ubiquitous in warfare these days and have proven to be quite destructive. An unmanned aircraft flown from potentially the other side of the world capable of dropping bombs on any target is definitely something out of nightmares. The only thing that could make it worse is if that person on the other side of the world who is controlling it wasn’t actually there. And that’s what apparently DARPA has been working on for some time.

Autonomous drones powered by a neuromorphic chip are essentially artificial intelligence machines. This is all in the very early and rudimentary stages right now, and we’re not quite at the point of having Sentinels from the Matrix just yet. But the groundwork has been laid and the technology will continue to advance. The neuromorphic chips are hoped to be able to help these drones recognize their environment and respond accordingly. One extremely off-putting line from a 2014 article stated that there was hope that the chip would offer the potential ability for the drone to feel different levels of safety or affinity for different places. And while safety and an affinity for a place is good, it also implies that a drone might be able to feel the opposite at some point in time as well and potentially react defensively to that.

So while no one is promising the future of warfare is going to be emotional drones that know where they are and can react with fear to confrontation, it does seem like that is the road we’re heading down.

Throughout history there have been numerous events that were left mostly unexplained by those who witnessed them. Incidents where people all began to act mysteriously and demonstrate symptoms that seemingly made no sense, like nuns that bark or children that can’t stop laughing. As quickly as they come, they often fade away and few people are any worse for it. When these unexplained conditions pop up, mass hysteria is often the cause. 

10. The Cuban Embassy Attacks

One of the biggest and scariest stories of 2016 and beyond dealt with a series of bizarre illnesses that befell American diplomats at the US Embassy in Cuba. Numerous people came down with serious issues ranging from memory loss to hearing loss to actual, physical brain damage. The Trump White House accused Cuba of deploying some kind of secret sonic weapon against the Embassy. But subsequent research has made this less plausible.

Today, if you look at the Wikipedia page for the attacks, there is a section that dismisses the idea of mass hysteria thanks to JAMA research that concluded the victims had suffered physical trauma. That makes it seem pretty cut and dry. However, that was dated from 2018. 

Other researchers reviewed the data and came up with some critical errors. The reports that staffers at the embassy were riddled with physical ailments offered no context. There is no data whatsoever to back up claims that people suffered injuries, including the nature of the injuries, how they were evaluated, or anything else.

Much of the data relied on for reports cited in the media were based on self-reporting.The idea that the trauma was inflicted by a new sonic weapon took off, except that no one in the world has ever made such a weapon and even those that have tried, like the US government, have had little success with anything similar to what happened in Cuba because physics don’t allow things to work that way. 

What the condition did seem to mirror very well were the symptoms of mass hysteria outbreaks.

9. Salem Witch Trials

Possibly America’s most famous case of mass hysteria, and one of its darkest, the Salem Witch Trials show just how extremely dangerous mass hysteria can get. In the span of one year in the late 1600s, nineteen women were executed by hanging as witches while hundreds more faced persecution for the made up crime. More died in prison and from additional methods of torture.

The local priest had set up an environment where citizens were shamed publicly for their transgressions. When his children began having fits, he accused locals of devilry. Dozens were arrested and put on trial to face bizarre and nonsensical tests to prove whether they were witches. One of the tests involved simply touching someone having one of these fits. If the fit stopped, the person was a witch. Even the presence of a mole, then known as a witch’s teat, was considered direct evidence of witchcraft.

8. Monkey Man

Some cases of mass hysteria seem easier to believe than others. But there’s long been a powerful thread of the supernatural and unbelievable behind many cases that makes it even harder to understand how any of it could have been believed by anyone, let alone many people. Few cases of this are more dramatic than the Monkey Man of New Delhi.

In 2001, residents of New Delhi began reporting sightings of a terrifying half-man, half monkey. The creature traveled across rooftops and had razor sharp metal claws as well as a helmet, presumably for safety.

People reported being attacked and injured by the creature. Worse, several people even died in what was believed to have been attempts to escape the monkey man that resulted in them falling from rooftops. Police were unable to keep up with all the reports, and most of the injuries were chalked up to animal bites rather than supernatural monkey man bites. 

The hysteria was believed to have been fueled not just by superstition but by rolling blackouts that were leaving people unexpectedly in darkness at random times. That likely exacerbated fears and made the situation worse. 

The situation got bad enough at some point that gangs of vigilantes were roaming the streets and had even beat up a very short man, assuming he was the monkey man in question. 

7. Halifax Slasher

In 1938 in Halifax, England, a man with shiny buckles on his shoes and a mallet began attacking women. Two women claimed the man attacked them and set off a panic that saw people taking to the streets in an effort to hunt the villain down. 

Within the first week other attacks were reported, and the weapon changed from a mallet to a knife or razors. Scotland Yard was called to help with the investigation. Vigilantes attacked those that they felt might be the slasher, and things spiralled out of control. Local businesses closed up shop in fear and the panic spread to other towns where attacks also started being reported.

Eventually one of the victims caved in and admitted they had made the attack up and actually harmed themselves. Others did the same, and eventually five of the so-called victims were charged with public mischief.

6. Tanganyika Laughter Incident

Laughter is the best medicine, some people say, but that can’t be the case when laughter is also the problem. That was the case of an incident in 1962 in Tanzania when one girl at a school started laughing and couldn’t stop. School officials tried to make her stop to no avail and laughter contagious as it sometimes is, spread to other students. Nearly 100 of the school’s 159 students were affected. The event started in January and was still going on in March when the school was forced to shut down.

The laughing epidemic spread beyond the borders of the school. People in other towns and other schools fell victim. Some people were affected for days, some for weeks. But it spread around enough that over 1,000 victims were claimed in total and 14 different schools had to be closed over the course of several months. 

Looking back on the incident, most researchers have concluded that the laughter was anxiety-borne. There were a number of contributing factors that were causing excessive stress to students at the time. Unknown expectations of the British run schools and thr fact that the region has just gained independence were likely major causes of unrest in people’s minds. 

5. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

You’d be forgiven for not knowing much about the town of Mattoon, Illinois. With a population under 20,000 people, it’s a tiny place that isn’t well known for much. Except for the Mad Gasser who plagued the town in the 1940s and who also didn’t actually exist. 

For several weeks, residents in the town reported being attacked by a stranger who exposed them to poisonous gas. Witnesses also corroborated these reports, assuring police they had seen the gasser at work. 

According to reports, victims would be at home and notice an unusual smell. They would then suffer symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and paralysis. Despite this, police never found a shred of evidence that the gasser existed. In fact, they were able to find much more evidence that there was no gasser, and the strange smells all had easy to pinpoint 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” reportedly summoned forth nefarious spirits from beyond and led to death and suicide. None of that was true but it didn’t stop countries like Fiji and Libya from banning the game outright to protect vulnerable children.

The idea of the game is simple. You place a pair of pencils on a sheet of paper, one balanced on the other to create what looks like a plus sign. You have things like names written in each of the four segments of the sheet of paper that are bordered by the pencils. Players ask a question like “which boy likes me?” and the pencil rotates on a pivot point to point at one of the four names you have written on the sheet of paper.

Because the pencil is very precariously balanced, it can move with very little force. Even breathing near it will cause it to rotate. In principle it’s very similar to how a Ouija board works, seemingly moving of its own volition even though there are easy to understand forces at work.

In 2015, however, this game got out of hand. Renamed “Charlie Charlie,” the idea was that kids were asking a spirit or demon to move the pencil. Most stories called it a Mexican demon, despite the English name. Four girls in Colombia ended up going to the hospital as a result, screaming and hysterical, believed to be victims of the supernatural forces at work. Doctors diagnosed it as mass hysteria and nothing more. 

3. The Clown Panic

In 2016, the world was in the grip of clown panic. Chiefly centered in the United States, it had spread to many other countries including Canada, the UK and others. There was a widespread belief that evil clowns were roaming the streets. By October there were dozens of reports coming in every day about sinister clowns. 

The clown panic seems to have started as the result of a single viral marketing stunt in Wisconsin. And stunt was a generous term. A man dressed as a creepy clown was simply standing in street corners looking like a clown.

After that, reports began rolling in from all over the country. Clowns with weapons, clowns making threats, clowns looking ominous. And as near as anyone could tell, none of it was real. Not a single clown actually did anything ominous or dangerous during the entire event.

Police were receiving anonymous reports of clowns trying to lure children and little to no evidence to back anything up. But each subsequent story made national news, and that put more fuel on the fire. The panic lasted for months, throughout the summer and well into the fall. 

By October most media sources were openly calling it all a hoax since no genuine harm had been caused and no real arrests had been made, just false arrests based on false reports. 

2. The Dancing Plague

One of the oldest known cases of mass hysteria took place all the way back in 1518. The incident was actually used as a partial basis for a plot point in Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in the day as well. The residents of Strasbourg, Alsace were struck with an inextricable urge to dance. It became known as the Dancing Plague.

The incident started in July. A woman called Frau Troffea took to the street one day and began to dance. She danced for a day and then two days. She danced for an entire week and by week’s end, she had three-dozen back up dancers. By the time August rolled around, as many as 400 residents of the town were busting moves in the streets.

Doctors, already at a loss to explain most well-known illnesses, settled on “hot blood” as the cause. So the cure was basically an “if you can’t beta ‘em, join ‘em” situation. The town erected a stage and hired a band. 

Instead of fixing the problem, the dancers were just pushed to their breaking point. Reports that people danced themselves to death circulated after the fact and whether or not they are true is still up for debate. 

1. Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome

Generally speaking, mass hysteria is a limited scope phenomenon. It happens for a defined period of time then it goes away when people realize the thing they fear is not real. Such is not the case with puppy pregnancy syndrome in West Bengal, India. This strange mass panic keeps popping up again and again over the years. 

Puppy pregnancy syndrome is tragically very much what it sounds like. Victims are bitten by dogs and then convinced that the dog bite has impregnated them with puppies. The vast majority of people in one small village are convinced this is a very real thing.

According to their beliefs if a dog in a clear state of sexual arousal bites a human, the dog saliva transmits the fetal dogs to the human bloodstream. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, the dog babies will take root. That means men are in a far worse position than female bite victims as, according to the belief, they are doomed to birth puppies through their urethra. 

Men are convinced they will die during the delivery process. As a result, there are so-called experts in town who can perform rituals to abort the puppies and save human lives. This must be especially important when you consider some female victims have claimed that they could even hear the puppies in their abdomen barking in the night. 

As silly as it sounds, the syndrome has had serious, real consequences. Victims had to be medicated to overcome serious fears of dogs and obsessive compulsive disorders.