March 15, 2016 • 38 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry
over there. Stuff you should know. I'm just so sick
of my voice right now. I just looked over almost
(00:22):
a 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?
It's a dude, it's my voice. Man, it's driving me crazy.
So wound up and caffeinated, and we just talked about
dark money. Oh yeah, maybe we should have recorded that
(00:44):
last Maybe he could have just done power lifting for
the rest of the day. Jim, what do uh? So
we did an episode. I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay,
go ahead, I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. Uh.
November we did an episode on collective hysteria? Yes, not
(01:05):
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 noticed it.
How do you notice it? I would say six tenths
(01:27):
of the time, So three fifths is another way to
put that. I can live with that. Um, 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 gonna go in
depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that,
go listen to that episode, which is a good one
if I remember correctly. Yeah, we should talk about it
(01:47):
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. So
it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions, uh, conversion disorder.
What else? Um, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no no.
You need to duplicate that though with like tin Josh
(02:09):
is doing it at once. That's a good right there.
Maybe Jerry could do that, she says she can't. It's
a real thing, though, and basically it is when um,
people have physical symptoms of something without there being a
physical cause. Not only that, so that's a psychosomatic illness.
(02:29):
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
(02:51):
there there. 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 psychoical, logically, psychicologically speaking, I'm sick, people,
so I apologize if I'm not talking good m uh.
Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Um.
(03:16):
One thing that happens is is usually triggered by some
sort of stress, uh, some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah,
and it usually happens in very close knit communities. Um,
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 and that they
(03:39):
don't have a lot of social status necessarily or a
lot of say in their own lives. Um. And they, Uh,
this is a means of saying there's something very wrong
in my world. Yes, that's 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. So, uh,
(04:03):
the outcome supposedly for this, 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
were we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo?
So let's all go play Nintendo because it's I wish
(04:26):
I had an old any Yes, like the original one
and a copy of Mike Tysones Punch Out. That's all
you need. Yeah, I was into the whatever that first
Mario game was where it was the big world? Mario Brothers?
Was that a super Mario Brothers? And then Metroid? Did
you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play
(04:48):
a ton of Yes, but I played what was the
first really? Not Sega? Was it the first PlayStation that
had Street Fighter? No, I think street Fighter. I can't
remember what it was. I'll remember is that there was
Genesis maybe head street Fighter. No, I wouldn't say of Genesis.
This dude I had new in college had a street
(05:10):
Fighter and uh, Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Mortal Kombat was definitely.
It might have been Super Nintendo or did you play
Golden Eye? 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
(05:30):
playing Street Fighter and that was Mortal Kombat for a
year solid. And I think I went to school and
made grades in the classes. In the classes, man, I
need a nap. You want to talk about semes hysterias? Yes,
Do you want to talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah?
(05:51):
So in in uh, the in medieval times, not the restaurant, no,
but maybe there too. Um, if you had a sister
or a niece or a an aunt or somebody who
was a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Oh,
there weren't mental asylums at the time, so you couldn't
(06:14):
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, yeah, so you
could take you could usurp that that inheritance that was
rightfully there's Or if you had a daughter who was um,
unattractive or possibly disfigured, Uh, you could say, I don't
(06:38):
want the world to see you, I'm gonna send you
a comment or a nunnery. And it sounds pretty bad,
and 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 outfits. Shore were sure, Um,
(07:01):
so it wasn't it wasn't all bad. But I was like,
why did did anybody get sent to convents? 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 these places were very strict and tight knit,
and so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah,
I bet if you like your daughter like kissed a
(07:22):
boy that you didn't like, you could you know, if
you're worried about that. After the convents, after the nunnery Uh,
so we're gonna talk about a couple of cases with nunneries.
But uh, in medieval times there were more than one
hundred cases of mass hysterias breaking out. It happened a
lot those one in Spain and the fifteen hundreds where
(07:43):
nuns bleeded like sheep and had convulsions, one in France,
and four one where they yelped like dogs. Okay, uh
and then this one in France where uh, all of
a sudden, one day a nun started me owing like
a cat. Yes, caught on, caught on like wildfire. Apparently
in this convent. By within a few days, all of
(08:07):
the nuns were mewing and it was loud, like the
neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only mewing, but
it became a mewt in Unison. It became structured with
their mewing. 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 you
(08:29):
heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey. Leg
you show up and you enter into a giant room
filled with nuns all me owing in Unison. Yeah, that
one might have been some guy's idea of a good time,
because 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
(08:51):
the problems though. In medieval times in France, cats were
not well regarded. They were thought to be of the
double uh, and so if you're meowing like a cat,
it's a nun It not good. They also believed in
demonic possession and um, so they brought in some soldiers
who said we're gonna whip you and beat you and
unless you stop me owing. And it worked and they
stopped me. Right. But that's that's a really important point
(09:16):
that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed,
so in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility,
and that is the basis of this, for the person
to really experience it and take it away from an
act of their own will power and rather be a
(09:37):
sufferer of some weird illness. Is a belief that something
like this could possibly happen, and so they were possessed.
Rather than them just me owing and going along with
the crowd or whatever, 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
(09:57):
the hallmark of mass psychogenic illness. Yeah. Absolute. It also
happened in Germany, not the me owing, but in the
fifteenth century, and none bit another, none in the convent,
and then I don't know if that none in turn
bit another, but they started biting one another a lot.
And that didn't just stick around that nunnery, It's spread
(10:18):
all over Germany. Well, they were worried that there was
like an actual infection going on. Yeah, that would cause
you to go crazy and bite people. And not only
did it spread to Germany, chuck, it also spread to Rome,
even all the way to Rome. Yeah. Um. 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
(10:42):
was a weird week? Yeah, they probably did. But I mean, like, 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 you how do groups
that go through that like work that out to get
there or do they just now I don't know, Like
(11:02):
you said, that'd be totally weird to be like, hey,
remember last week when we were all me owing. That
was so weird and we're all of our roasted turkey legs.
All right, maw, let's uh move on to the kissing
bug scare of eight. Uh try a toman bugs. Uh.
They looks sort of like stink bugs, but they carry
(11:27):
a parasite that can cause a disease called Chagas disease,
and Chagas disease wasn't described until nineteen o six or
o nine, and this kissing bug outbreak was eighteen ninety
nine in the United States. And a kissing bug is
called that because they bite you. They feast on your
(11:47):
blood through your lips, which has only three layers of skin,
whereas the rest of your face has about sixteen layers.
Can't 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
(12:09):
whole that it made on your mouth, and I knew
that was coming, and in doing so, it can infect
you with shagas disease. Yeah, no good. If you live
in the upper one third of the United States, you
don't have to sweat it. Basically, draw a line from
the top of California all the way across the United States,
and anything below that, um, you might have kissing bugs.
(12:30):
So by this bug was well known to science already,
but it wasn't popularly known. So it's an exotic, weird species.
And a couple of cases of shagas disease did sprout up.
But what spread this thing and turn it into a
mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this was
(12:53):
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 uh,
maybe a mosquito bite or any a 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, and and so part of it,
part of what it was attributed to. And actually the
(13:14):
guy who is the head of the entomology for the U.
S d A at the time said that this was
He called it a newspaper epidemic. And it was because
the newspaper reporting so clearly described the symptoms that a
person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself for herself.
And so they started collecting bugs. Like if somebody was
(13:36):
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 like the U.
S d A for analysis. And the USDA got everything
from like houseflies to bumblebees, a lot of bugs from
people who were worried that they were Um they were
they'd broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah, And the
good news is, uh, it stopped when the newspaper stopped
(13:57):
writing about it. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bump,
will be And it happened in the nineties and the
eighteen nineties were really really weird decade. Um, there was
a lot of death cults that sprang up around the
around the world. But um, there there was have you
ever read that book Wisconsin Death Trip? It is crazy, man.
(14:19):
It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from
Wisconsin in the eight nineties and assembled it. It paints
one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of
of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people.
(14:41):
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 eight nineties. Something weird
happened that decade. You should check that book out. It's
neat to just look through yet. Uh tomorrow, man, So
don't tell me anything. So speaking of the which actually, Chuck,
(15:02):
I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaw. So
you were on Cinema jaw like a few months back.
It's a great movie podcast, it is, and Um, I
was on it recently and their episode that came out
on Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday, and we talked about missing
persons like we did tie into our episode. Um, what
movies did you talk about? We talked about The Lady Vanishes. No,
(15:26):
not that one because I haven't seen it. Um, have
you ever seen The Vanishing? The original one from the eighties,
the Franco Dutch production that the superior? Right, So I'd
only seen The Jeff Bridges Keeper Southerland, which I liked,
but then I started reading up on it and I
was like, oh, this sucks. Compared to the original Dutch
(15:46):
version of anything before then, it's probably better. It was
so good, dude. I was watching it via YouTube on
my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. It
was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles
have has hazardusly slapped over the Dutch subtitles, and I
(16:06):
was still like, oh man, this is so good. Good movie.
It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear
that episode. Good check it out and see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah,
yeah they did. They did a review of The Witch,
and I put the phone out 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
(16:28):
and you don't even know if you want to call
it a horror movie, but movies like that coming back
with like The Babba Duck, and it follows like people
are making good quality movies. Now. I didn't like The
Bubba Duck. 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. All Right, we're back. We're so back to
(17:07):
talk about the Halifax slasher of ninety eight. Halifax, England,
not Nova Scotia. That's what I thought at first, Nova Scotia.
I didn't know there's two Halifax's, didn't neither Um Halifax
in November nineteen Uh, there was a woman named Um.
Two women, two women, Gerty Watts and Mary Gledhill. We're
(17:30):
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. Yeah, we're bleeding,
for God's sake, look at me. Blood, there's blood. Uh,
go find this creep. Right, that's what they told the cops.
And the cops are like, wa wa wa wa slasher
(17:53):
all right. So they started looking for the guy and
never found any trace of them. And it was like
kind of a thing for a little a 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
(18:14):
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, uh and came
to the police station or came to the newspapers with
stories about how they've been slashed by some anonymous stranger.
And Halifax was f freaked out. They compared the same
(18:35):
fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack
the Ripper era. Um. People were just nervous that that
somebody was going to slash them. Yeah, the soccer hooligan
started beating people up like that guy didn't look right.
He looks like a slasher to me, that's what soccer
hooligans or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down, um,
And it became a real problem. There's a couple of
(18:57):
things though. One these lashes, he wasn't a very good slasher.
These were all very superficial cuts. Uh. No one was
severely wounded at all in any of the cases. So,
but it was still confounding and people are still scared.
He could be a bad slasher, still could improve, So
(19:18):
we better call Scotland Yard and they did, and Scotland
Yards 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 slashers. Scotland Yard said, there's not multiple slashers.
(19:41):
There's not one slasher. They're like they would have known that.
And Nova Scotia. The final lady Beatrice Sorrel, said, uh,
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,
(20:05):
and my Macintosh coat and cardigan. And I know what
you're thinking, it's a waste of a good cardigan and
Macintosh whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. Is it?
That sounds about right? Yeah, I think so, Mac the Mac. No,
I think a mac is a raincoat because the Beatles
song eleanor Rigby the Mac he never wears a mac
(20:27):
and the pouring rain very strange. Man, I never realized that.
All right, so Macintosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Uh,
then she said. I then put the blade back into
the cut and scratched down my arm twice and put
my fingers through the cut in the cloth. I saw
that they were covered in blood. The reason why I
cut my arm was because I was in a temper
(20:47):
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 twelve victims eventually
confessed to doing it themselves. Um, and this this, this
is a weird mass psychogenic illness, you know what I mean?
(21:08):
Because these people are slashing themselves. They're not like catching
something they think is 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
four weeks. Still, if you're like a normal, ordinary citizen
(21:28):
who slashes herself for himself, um, just for attention, four
weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. I
wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. Um. The
thing is, Chuck is I could not find whether the
first two victims were actually slashed at They didn't show
up in as far as I know, they weren't once
(21:50):
that confessed, and I didn't see that they got any
jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it
led to the slash or scare, or did they do
it themselves or to each other? That's I don't know.
The Halifax carrier on December two said, carry on, Halifax.
The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half graze,
(22:12):
wild eyed man has been wandering around attacking helpless women
in dark streets is exploded. Waca waka And I wish
I people talked so much better back then. Um, I
was in a temper Macintosh man. Uh. This is not
the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. There's one in Taipei,
(22:35):
Taiwan in the fifties where there's this basically 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 them says, 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? Okay,
if you had been susceptible to this Taipei Taiwan slasher scare,
(22:58):
you may have gone to the police have been like,
I was slashed because and this one was a little
more legitimate to me. The the idea behind the slasher
was he would brush past you in the crowd and
you wouldn't even notice you've been slashed until later. So
that that was yeah, it was that. That's the better
of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses between that and Halifax.
(23:21):
If you asked me, I wonder if Tina fe was
a part of that. You know, that's how she got
that scar. Which scar she has a scar on her face,
and uh, she was slashed when she was a kid
playing in her front yard. She by some random crazy
I didn't know that, and that's kind of all the
information that's out there. She think admitted that in an interview,
(23:42):
and just that was the story slashing. It's just's a
terrible crime. Yeah, it just sounds like seeking and disfigure somebody.
It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do
you remember that m Saturday Night Live. Mel Gibson was on.
It was back in the eighties and it was set
in the Old West, and he was like an Old
West like gun slinger. I just think of sheriff. But
(24:05):
his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid. It
was like matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic
it was. And he got a gunfight with somebody, he
like throws acid on him. And they didn't show that
the acid being like throwing on the guy. It just
showed the crowd's reaction and they were all like, oh god,
(24:27):
that's awful. Oh 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. I got one
right now. There's there's a scene where a guy gets
slashed and right under the eye as like a parting shot,
like these students were gonna fight and it doesn't happen.
(24:48):
They just slashes the guy and the princess pride. Yes,
it is. It's not the Princess Pride. King Humper didn't
get it or Prince Humper didn't gets it from somebody.
It's what I'm thinking, Well that happens. Are you sure
there's something When you're thinking, yeah, somebody Old right in
and tell me. It was like they were faced off
and we're gonna fight, and then they and the guy
(25:11):
had a knife I think on his knuckle. And then
at the variant, Oh, I know, Platoon got it. Tom
Barnger and Charlie Sheen he cuts had had the blade
on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye,
and he was gonna punch him, and they all talked
him down and right at the very and he just
went slash and slashed him. Well, Platoon and Princess Bright
(25:33):
are virtually interchangeable, the same same story. Good point. So yeah,
Platoon was a good movie. That was a big college
movie for me. I'll watched that a lot. All right,
we're rambling, so that means we should take a break in.
Jerry Old, get us back in order. I think I
said Platoon is a good movie. All right, Chuck, Let's
(26:20):
head on over to uh tangan Yika also known as Tanzania.
You mean Tanzania, but back in nine two was known
as Tanganyika and um in Tanga Tanganyika, there was a
boarding school, a girl's boarding school, so you can understand
(26:43):
what's about to happen there. 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. And
it started to spread, Yes, which is normal enough, giggling
like the church giggle you ever heard of that it's contagious,
hard to stop. And that's usually if you're in a
(27:05):
place where you shouldn't be laughing and you can't contain it,
and then your friends starts laughing and you can't contain
it and you have to go excuse yourself. 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. Uh, they had
(27:27):
to shut down the school, yeah, for two months and
then they're like, okay, surely it's over, and I opened
it back up, started by back up. So this one
bothered me a little bit because you can't just constantly
giggle and laugh, and it's impossible. I read this this
interview with the guy. Um, I read the same one,
(27:47):
the Chicago Tribune interview. Yeah, so that I think he
made a pretty good point. He was saying, like, there's
very there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all,
it's called the laughter epidemic. So people just think like
it's like the Monty Python, It's Funniest Jokes Kit or something, right, Um,
that's not the case. It was again, it was not
joyful after it was anxious laughter. And then there were
(28:09):
plenty of other symptoms too. There was crying, there was pain,
there was fainting. Yeah, Um, and there was definitely laughter.
And it definitely did spread, but it wasn't just like
constant laughter. Yeah, and um it did. It did last
for at least six months, and it did spread to
other villages because when these girls who were at this
(28:30):
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
um kicked this off was not just at the boarding school,
that it was larger than that. And around this time
Tanzania was had gained independence, so there was a lot
of anxiety about what the future held. So it started
(28:52):
at the school where the girls were apparently very challenged academically,
and then uh, it spread it through the stress of
you know what, what's the future gonna bring. That's the
that's the official line that this one linguist has come
up with. I believe it. That one's not so great now.
(29:12):
I think that's one of the off sited examples though,
of a genuine mass psychogenic illness. You know, because the
fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding
school into the larger into villages outside of it, that's
that's a tense situation. It is very tense. Uh. The
(29:35):
West Bank fainting epidemic of that spring, about a thousand
young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick and uh,
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,
(29:55):
this must be something. Uh. And so of course because
of where it was uh. And then these were young schoolgirls,
largely we're twelve to seventeen years old. So because of
where it was in the world, Uh, 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
(30:16):
like a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. And
if you're in that part of the world, you got
kids breaking out in rashes and and uh, stomach pain
and blurred vision and they're smelling something funny. That's pretty
logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis countered
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,
(30:41):
and all of a sudden, Palestine and Israel are like
publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical
warfare on their own on Arab kids. This is a
big deal. When this happened, it was a big deal,
and it could have escalated to who knows what, But um,
the fact is there was nothing going on at all.
(31:01):
It was another case of mass collective hysteria. They closed
schools in the West Bank. Um, no one else got sick. Uh.
They've they've searched all the buildings and the schools, and
they found no chemical residue, no mouthfeasance going on whatsoever.
They found a smelly bathroom, though, and they think that
might have been the source of the initial foul smell
that kicked it all off. A stinky bathroom. Some boy
(31:24):
uh 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 want
logged out for taking a poop? I gotta go log out.
Oh that's okay, I got it. Well, that's pretty good.
(31:45):
It is good. It does relevant. It's like that Simpsons.
I think I just logged onto my internet. Do you
remember was that Ralph? No, it was m Carl went
back when they were kids when they can't fig about
why Homer's having a mental breakdown. It's because he discovered
a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory.
(32:06):
And Carl's talking about the interneting on his bathing suit.
And then later on he goes, I think I just
logged onto my internet. So great. They blamed the West Bank. Uh,
fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. Uh. And then of
(32:26):
course there were news reports of the toxic gas and
so that's why it's 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 two thousand and six, there was a teen soap
opera called Save by the Bell, called Morongos calm asuka.
(32:47):
That's my Portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good? I
mean strawberries with sugar. It was the name of the uh,
the the teen show Delicious, And in May of two
thousand six, 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
(33:08):
a sudden, kids in the real world who were watching
strawberses Sugar started to come down with a very strangely
similar disease. Yeah. Um, I don't know if we said
it was in two thousand and six. All right, well,
let's drive that home because that was a big year. Um.
Was that the year we started our show No. Two
(33:29):
thousands seven eight, But we've added since two thousand eight.
That's crazy year eight man, who knew that we would
one day be veterans of a medium old veterans like
we were good around on our porch or their Confederate
(33:51):
pistols under our blankets. That's right. Uh So these kids
were not only at one school, they were at fourteen
different schools around the country, which was a little different
than most cases because usually it's like it starts in
this one school. But that's because the clear cause of
this was this television show that kids loved all over
the country. The yeah, was this episode of a TV show. Absolutely,
(34:15):
and luckily the Portuguese authorities health authorities, they did some
investigating and they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness.
Pretty interesting stuff, and they said, what, the kids are
really stressed about our final exams? Well, they think it
started with some kids who had actual allergies and had
(34:37):
seen this episode and started worrying that their own allergies
were actually symptom of a disease that spread the kids
who were basically going along with it be out of
stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one
is because it was two thousand six, you can go
on the internet and look at their articles. You can
log onto your internet. You can log onto your internet
(34:58):
and look up art articles that are like is the
strawberries with sugar virus? Real? Like people were writing into newspapers.
You know, my kid is having these symptoms, Like is
it a real thing? Did they or did they just
make this up? And it still goes on? I mean
apparently this these So there's two kinds. Basically, there's motor
um illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more
(35:18):
like fainting, upset, stomach headache, motors where you're twitching and
mowing and stuff like that. Um. 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 me, Allen, bite the
night away, let it loose for a week. Uh. If
you want to know more about mass hysterias, go listen
(35:40):
to what is collective hysteria or other episode and then
uh you can search for mass hysteria also in the
search part Houston works dot com. Since I said also
it's time for your listener mail, I'm gonna call this
long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and
told Georgia that I was going to read it and
for god, it's about the fairy tales. Hedge Hedge. My
(36:06):
name is Georgia. I live in Stockholm. Hedge, I think
hatch hedges. Hey, hey, sure in Swedish. Uh, Stockholm Swedie. Yes,
we did another good episode on Stockholm. Singer right that
a k a. The Swedish Delight. Sure, that's what the
cops call it. He's got the sweih del My name
(36:29):
is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening
to your show for a few years. I love it.
I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode and
I asked my husband about the term ashen put since
he's German and I often used Disney movies to help
teach me Swedish. Uh. He figured out that it's kind
of a play on words and implies a scullery maid
covered in ashes. Ashen is ash as opposed to cinder,
(36:51):
which is incorrectly used in the English name, since if
you were covered in cinders, you know severe burns. As
it is pieces of burning slag. It's true. It is
translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinda. Uh,
puto doesn't exist in German, he says, Uh, I don't
know that sounds so German to me. It sounds pretty German.
(37:12):
But the term for scullion or kitchen helper is ashan brutal.
I'm so glad you took German. So this is the
male form, he thinks, Ashan put 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
(37:33):
pellets that you would like that would grow into big
snakes close enough, Those are what are growing in your
mouth when you're saying during the words. He thinks, ashan
puto is kind of a feminine version of Ashan brutal,
since German is nonsensical engendered her words. I hope this
information is still interesting to you, guys. Her in broad
dog edged hedge headge Georgia, thanks a lot. That was
(37:58):
extraordinarily intelligent listener mail and we appreciate it, agreed. Uh.
If you want to send us an extraordinarily intelligent message,
we love those. You can tweet to us at s
y s K podcasts. You can join us on Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works
dot com and has always joined us at our home
on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For
(38:26):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry
over there. Stuff you should know. I'm just so sick
of my voice right now. I just looked over almost
(00:22):
a 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?
It's a dude, it's my voice. Man, it's driving me crazy.
So wound up and caffeinated, and we just talked about
dark money. Oh yeah, maybe we should have recorded that
(00:44):
last Maybe he could have just done power lifting for
the rest of the day. Jim, what do uh? So
we did an episode. I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay,
go ahead, I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. Uh.
November we did an episode on collective hysteria? Yes, not
(01:05):
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 noticed it.
How do you notice it? I would say six tenths
(01:27):
of the time, So three fifths is another way to
put that. I can live with that. Um, 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 gonna go in
depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that,
go listen to that episode, which is a good one
if I remember correctly. Yeah, we should talk about it
(01:47):
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. So
it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions, uh, conversion disorder.
What else? Um, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no no.
You need to duplicate that though with like tin Josh
(02:09):
is doing it at once. That's a good right there.
Maybe Jerry could do that, she says she can't. It's
a real thing, though, and basically it is when um,
people have physical symptoms of something without there being a
physical cause. Not only that, so that's a psychosomatic illness.
(02:29):
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
(02:51):
there there. 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 psychoical, logically, psychicologically speaking, I'm sick, people,
so I apologize if I'm not talking good m uh.
Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Um.
(03:16):
One thing that happens is is usually triggered by some
sort of stress, uh, some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah,
and it usually happens in very close knit communities. Um,
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 and that they
(03:39):
don't have a lot of social status necessarily or a
lot of say in their own lives. Um. And they, Uh,
this is a means of saying there's something very wrong
in my world. Yes, that's 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. So, uh,
(04:03):
the outcome supposedly for this, 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
were we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo?
So let's all go play Nintendo because it's I wish
(04:26):
I had an old any Yes, like the original one
and a copy of Mike Tysones Punch Out. That's all
you need. Yeah, I was into the whatever that first
Mario game was where it was the big world? Mario Brothers?
Was that a super Mario Brothers? And then Metroid? Did
you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play
(04:48):
a ton of Yes, but I played what was the
first really? Not Sega? Was it the first PlayStation that
had Street Fighter? No, I think street Fighter. I can't
remember what it was. I'll remember is that there was
Genesis maybe head street Fighter. No, I wouldn't say of Genesis.
This dude I had new in college had a street
(05:10):
Fighter and uh, Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Mortal Kombat was definitely.
It might have been Super Nintendo or did you play
Golden Eye? 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
(05:30):
playing Street Fighter and that was Mortal Kombat for a
year solid. And I think I went to school and
made grades in the classes. In the classes, man, I
need a nap. You want to talk about semes hysterias? Yes,
Do you want to talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah?
(05:51):
So in in uh, the in medieval times, not the restaurant, no,
but maybe there too. Um, if you had a sister
or a niece or a an aunt or somebody who
was a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Oh,
there weren't mental asylums at the time, so you couldn't
(06:14):
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, yeah, so you
could take you could usurp that that inheritance that was
rightfully there's Or if you had a daughter who was um,
unattractive or possibly disfigured, Uh, you could say, I don't
(06:38):
want the world to see you, I'm gonna send you
a comment or a nunnery. And it sounds pretty bad,
and 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 outfits. Shore were sure, Um,
(07:01):
so it wasn't it wasn't all bad. But I was like,
why did did anybody get sent to convents? 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 these places were very strict and tight knit,
and so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah,
I bet if you like your daughter like kissed a
(07:22):
boy that you didn't like, you could you know, if
you're worried about that. After the convents, after the nunnery Uh,
so we're gonna talk about a couple of cases with nunneries.
But uh, in medieval times there were more than one
hundred cases of mass hysterias breaking out. It happened a
lot those one in Spain and the fifteen hundreds where
(07:43):
nuns bleeded like sheep and had convulsions, one in France,
and four one where they yelped like dogs. Okay, uh
and then this one in France where uh, all of
a sudden, one day a nun started me owing like
a cat. Yes, caught on, caught on like wildfire. Apparently
in this convent. By within a few days, all of
(08:07):
the nuns were mewing and it was loud, like the
neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only mewing, but
it became a mewt in Unison. It became structured with
their mewing. 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 you
(08:29):
heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey. Leg
you show up and you enter into a giant room
filled with nuns all me owing in Unison. Yeah, that
one might have been some guy's idea of a good time,
because 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
(08:51):
the problems though. In medieval times in France, cats were
not well regarded. They were thought to be of the
double uh, and so if you're meowing like a cat,
it's a nun It not good. They also believed in
demonic possession and um, so they brought in some soldiers
who said we're gonna whip you and beat you and
unless you stop me owing. And it worked and they
stopped me. Right. But that's that's a really important point
(09:16):
that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed,
so in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility,
and that is the basis of this, for the person
to really experience it and take it away from an
act of their own will power and rather be a
(09:37):
sufferer of some weird illness. Is a belief that something
like this could possibly happen, and so they were possessed.
Rather than them just me owing and going along with
the crowd or whatever, 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
(09:57):
the hallmark of mass psychogenic illness. Yeah. Absolute. It also
happened in Germany, not the me owing, but in the
fifteenth century, and none bit another, none in the convent,
and then I don't know if that none in turn
bit another, but they started biting one another a lot.
And that didn't just stick around that nunnery, It's spread
(10:18):
all over Germany. Well, they were worried that there was
like an actual infection going on. Yeah, that would cause
you to go crazy and bite people. And not only
did it spread to Germany, chuck, it also spread to Rome,
even all the way to Rome. Yeah. Um. 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
(10:42):
was a weird week? Yeah, they probably did. But I mean, like, 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 you how do groups
that go through that like work that out to get
there or do they just now I don't know, Like
(11:02):
you said, that'd be totally weird to be like, hey,
remember last week when we were all me owing. That
was so weird and we're all of our roasted turkey legs.
All right, maw, let's uh move on to the kissing
bug scare of eight. Uh try a toman bugs. Uh.
They looks sort of like stink bugs, but they carry
(11:27):
a parasite that can cause a disease called Chagas disease,
and Chagas disease wasn't described until nineteen o six or
o nine, and this kissing bug outbreak was eighteen ninety
nine in the United States. And a kissing bug is
called that because they bite you. They feast on your
(11:47):
blood through your lips, which has only three layers of skin,
whereas the rest of your face has about sixteen layers.
Can't 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
(12:09):
whole that it made on your mouth, and I knew
that was coming, and in doing so, it can infect
you with shagas disease. Yeah, no good. If you live
in the upper one third of the United States, you
don't have to sweat it. Basically, draw a line from
the top of California all the way across the United States,
and anything below that, um, you might have kissing bugs.
(12:30):
So by this bug was well known to science already,
but it wasn't popularly known. So it's an exotic, weird species.
And a couple of cases of shagas disease did sprout up.
But what spread this thing and turn it into a
mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this was
(12:53):
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 uh,
maybe a mosquito bite or any a 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, and and so part of it,
part of what it was attributed to. And actually the
(13:14):
guy who is the head of the entomology for the U.
S d A at the time said that this was
He called it a newspaper epidemic. And it was because
the newspaper reporting so clearly described the symptoms that a
person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself for herself.
And so they started collecting bugs. Like if somebody was
(13:36):
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 like the U.
S d A for analysis. And the USDA got everything
from like houseflies to bumblebees, a lot of bugs from
people who were worried that they were Um they were
they'd broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah, And the
good news is, uh, it stopped when the newspaper stopped
(13:57):
writing about it. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bump,
will be And it happened in the nineties and the
eighteen nineties were really really weird decade. Um, there was
a lot of death cults that sprang up around the
around the world. But um, there there was have you
ever read that book Wisconsin Death Trip? It is crazy, man.
(14:19):
It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from
Wisconsin in the eight nineties and assembled it. It paints
one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of
of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people.
(14:41):
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 eight nineties. Something weird
happened that decade. You should check that book out. It's
neat to just look through yet. Uh tomorrow, man, So
don't tell me anything. So speaking of the which actually, Chuck,
(15:02):
I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaw. So
you were on Cinema jaw like a few months back.
It's a great movie podcast, it is, and Um, I
was on it recently and their episode that came out
on Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday, and we talked about missing
persons like we did tie into our episode. Um, what
movies did you talk about? We talked about The Lady Vanishes. No,
(15:26):
not that one because I haven't seen it. Um, have
you ever seen The Vanishing? The original one from the eighties,
the Franco Dutch production that the superior? Right, So I'd
only seen The Jeff Bridges Keeper Southerland, which I liked,
but then I started reading up on it and I
was like, oh, this sucks. Compared to the original Dutch
(15:46):
version of anything before then, it's probably better. It was
so good, dude. I was watching it via YouTube on
my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. It
was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles
have has hazardusly slapped over the Dutch subtitles, and I
(16:06):
was still like, oh man, this is so good. Good movie.
It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear
that episode. Good check it out and see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah,
yeah they did. They did a review of The Witch,
and I put the phone out 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
(16:28):
and you don't even know if you want to call
it a horror movie, but movies like that coming back
with like The Babba Duck, and it follows like people
are making good quality movies. Now. I didn't like The
Bubba Duck. 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. All Right, we're back. We're so back to
(17:07):
talk about the Halifax slasher of ninety eight. Halifax, England,
not Nova Scotia. That's what I thought at first, Nova Scotia.
I didn't know there's two Halifax's, didn't neither Um Halifax
in November nineteen Uh, there was a woman named Um.
Two women, two women, Gerty Watts and Mary Gledhill. We're
(17:30):
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. Yeah, we're bleeding,
for God's sake, look at me. Blood, there's blood. Uh,
go find this creep. Right, that's what they told the cops.
And the cops are like, wa wa wa wa slasher
(17:53):
all right. So they started looking for the guy and
never found any trace of them. And it was like
kind of a thing for a little a 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
(18:14):
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, uh and came
to the police station or came to the newspapers with
stories about how they've been slashed by some anonymous stranger.
And Halifax was f freaked out. They compared the same
(18:35):
fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack
the Ripper era. Um. People were just nervous that that
somebody was going to slash them. Yeah, the soccer hooligan
started beating people up like that guy didn't look right.
He looks like a slasher to me, that's what soccer
hooligans or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down, um,
And it became a real problem. There's a couple of
(18:57):
things though. One these lashes, he wasn't a very good slasher.
These were all very superficial cuts. Uh. No one was
severely wounded at all in any of the cases. So,
but it was still confounding and people are still scared.
He could be a bad slasher, still could improve, So
(19:18):
we better call Scotland Yard and they did, and Scotland
Yards 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 slashers. Scotland Yard said, there's not multiple slashers.
(19:41):
There's not one slasher. They're like they would have known that.
And Nova Scotia. The final lady Beatrice Sorrel, said, uh,
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,
(20:05):
and my Macintosh coat and cardigan. And I know what
you're thinking, it's a waste of a good cardigan and
Macintosh whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. Is it?
That sounds about right? Yeah, I think so, Mac the Mac. No,
I think a mac is a raincoat because the Beatles
song eleanor Rigby the Mac he never wears a mac
(20:27):
and the pouring rain very strange. Man, I never realized that.
All right, so Macintosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Uh,
then she said. I then put the blade back into
the cut and scratched down my arm twice and put
my fingers through the cut in the cloth. I saw
that they were covered in blood. The reason why I
cut my arm was because I was in a temper
(20:47):
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 twelve victims eventually
confessed to doing it themselves. Um, and this this, this
is a weird mass psychogenic illness, you know what I mean?
(21:08):
Because these people are slashing themselves. They're not like catching
something they think is 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
four weeks. Still, if you're like a normal, ordinary citizen
(21:28):
who slashes herself for himself, um, just for attention, four
weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. I
wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. Um. The
thing is, Chuck is I could not find whether the
first two victims were actually slashed at They didn't show
up in as far as I know, they weren't once
(21:50):
that confessed, and I didn't see that they got any
jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it
led to the slash or scare, or did they do
it themselves or to each other? That's I don't know.
The Halifax carrier on December two said, carry on, Halifax.
The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half graze,
(22:12):
wild eyed man has been wandering around attacking helpless women
in dark streets is exploded. Waca waka And I wish
I people talked so much better back then. Um, I
was in a temper Macintosh man. Uh. This is not
the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. There's one in Taipei,
(22:35):
Taiwan in the fifties where there's this basically 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 them says, 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? Okay,
if you had been susceptible to this Taipei Taiwan slasher scare,
(22:58):
you may have gone to the police have been like,
I was slashed because and this one was a little
more legitimate to me. The the idea behind the slasher
was he would brush past you in the crowd and
you wouldn't even notice you've been slashed until later. So
that that was yeah, it was that. That's the better
of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses between that and Halifax.
(23:21):
If you asked me, I wonder if Tina fe was
a part of that. You know, that's how she got
that scar. Which scar she has a scar on her face,
and uh, she was slashed when she was a kid
playing in her front yard. She by some random crazy
I didn't know that, and that's kind of all the
information that's out there. She think admitted that in an interview,
(23:42):
and just that was the story slashing. It's just's a
terrible crime. Yeah, it just sounds like seeking and disfigure somebody.
It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do
you remember that m Saturday Night Live. Mel Gibson was on.
It was back in the eighties and it was set
in the Old West, and he was like an Old
West like gun slinger. I just think of sheriff. But
(24:05):
his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid. It
was like matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic
it was. And he got a gunfight with somebody, he
like throws acid on him. And they didn't show that
the acid being like throwing on the guy. It just
showed the crowd's reaction and they were all like, oh god,
(24:27):
that's awful. Oh 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. I got one
right now. There's there's a scene where a guy gets
slashed and right under the eye as like a parting shot,
like these students were gonna fight and it doesn't happen.
(24:48):
They just slashes the guy and the princess pride. Yes,
it is. It's not the Princess Pride. King Humper didn't
get it or Prince Humper didn't gets it from somebody.
It's what I'm thinking, Well that happens. Are you sure
there's something When you're thinking, yeah, somebody Old right in
and tell me. It was like they were faced off
and we're gonna fight, and then they and the guy
(25:11):
had a knife I think on his knuckle. And then
at the variant, Oh, I know, Platoon got it. Tom
Barnger and Charlie Sheen he cuts had had the blade
on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye,
and he was gonna punch him, and they all talked
him down and right at the very and he just
went slash and slashed him. Well, Platoon and Princess Bright
(25:33):
are virtually interchangeable, the same same story. Good point. So yeah,
Platoon was a good movie. That was a big college
movie for me. I'll watched that a lot. All right,
we're rambling, so that means we should take a break in.
Jerry Old, get us back in order. I think I
said Platoon is a good movie. All right, Chuck, Let's
(26:20):
head on over to uh tangan Yika also known as Tanzania.
You mean Tanzania, but back in nine two was known
as Tanganyika and um in Tanga Tanganyika, there was a
boarding school, a girl's boarding school, so you can understand
(26:43):
what's about to happen there. 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. And
it started to spread, Yes, which is normal enough, giggling
like the church giggle you ever heard of that it's contagious,
hard to stop. And that's usually if you're in a
(27:05):
place where you shouldn't be laughing and you can't contain it,
and then your friends starts laughing and you can't contain
it and you have to go excuse yourself. 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. Uh, they had
(27:27):
to shut down the school, yeah, for two months and
then they're like, okay, surely it's over, and I opened
it back up, started by back up. So this one
bothered me a little bit because you can't just constantly
giggle and laugh, and it's impossible. I read this this
interview with the guy. Um, I read the same one,
(27:47):
the Chicago Tribune interview. Yeah, so that I think he
made a pretty good point. He was saying, like, there's
very there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all,
it's called the laughter epidemic. So people just think like
it's like the Monty Python, It's Funniest Jokes Kit or something, right, Um,
that's not the case. It was again, it was not
joyful after it was anxious laughter. And then there were
(28:09):
plenty of other symptoms too. There was crying, there was pain,
there was fainting. Yeah, Um, and there was definitely laughter.
And it definitely did spread, but it wasn't just like
constant laughter. Yeah, and um it did. It did last
for at least six months, and it did spread to
other villages because when these girls who were at this
(28:30):
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
um kicked this off was not just at the boarding school,
that it was larger than that. And around this time
Tanzania was had gained independence, so there was a lot
of anxiety about what the future held. So it started
(28:52):
at the school where the girls were apparently very challenged academically,
and then uh, it spread it through the stress of
you know what, what's the future gonna bring. That's the
that's the official line that this one linguist has come
up with. I believe it. That one's not so great now.
(29:12):
I think that's one of the off sited examples though,
of a genuine mass psychogenic illness. You know, because the
fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding
school into the larger into villages outside of it, that's
that's a tense situation. It is very tense. Uh. The
(29:35):
West Bank fainting epidemic of that spring, about a thousand
young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick and uh,
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,
(29:55):
this must be something. Uh. And so of course because
of where it was uh. And then these were young schoolgirls,
largely we're twelve to seventeen years old. So because of
where it was in the world, Uh, 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
(30:16):
like a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. And
if you're in that part of the world, you got
kids breaking out in rashes and and uh, stomach pain
and blurred vision and they're smelling something funny. That's pretty
logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis countered
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,
(30:41):
and all of a sudden, Palestine and Israel are like
publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical
warfare on their own on Arab kids. This is a
big deal. When this happened, it was a big deal,
and it could have escalated to who knows what, But um,
the fact is there was nothing going on at all.
(31:01):
It was another case of mass collective hysteria. They closed
schools in the West Bank. Um, no one else got sick. Uh.
They've they've searched all the buildings and the schools, and
they found no chemical residue, no mouthfeasance going on whatsoever.
They found a smelly bathroom, though, and they think that
might have been the source of the initial foul smell
that kicked it all off. A stinky bathroom. Some boy
(31:24):
uh 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 want
logged out for taking a poop? I gotta go log out.
Oh that's okay, I got it. Well, that's pretty good.
(31:45):
It is good. It does relevant. It's like that Simpsons.
I think I just logged onto my internet. Do you
remember was that Ralph? No, it was m Carl went
back when they were kids when they can't fig about
why Homer's having a mental breakdown. It's because he discovered
a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory.
(32:06):
And Carl's talking about the interneting on his bathing suit.
And then later on he goes, I think I just
logged onto my internet. So great. They blamed the West Bank. Uh,
fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. Uh. And then of
(32:26):
course there were news reports of the toxic gas and
so that's why it's 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 two thousand and six, there was a teen soap
opera called Save by the Bell, called Morongos calm asuka.
(32:47):
That's my Portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good? I
mean strawberries with sugar. It was the name of the uh,
the the teen show Delicious, And in May of two
thousand six, 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
(33:08):
a sudden, kids in the real world who were watching
strawberses Sugar started to come down with a very strangely
similar disease. Yeah. Um, I don't know if we said
it was in two thousand and six. All right, well,
let's drive that home because that was a big year. Um.
Was that the year we started our show No. Two
(33:29):
thousands seven eight, But we've added since two thousand eight.
That's crazy year eight man, who knew that we would
one day be veterans of a medium old veterans like
we were good around on our porch or their Confederate
(33:51):
pistols under our blankets. That's right. Uh So these kids
were not only at one school, they were at fourteen
different schools around the country, which was a little different
than most cases because usually it's like it starts in
this one school. But that's because the clear cause of
this was this television show that kids loved all over
the country. The yeah, was this episode of a TV show. Absolutely,
(34:15):
and luckily the Portuguese authorities health authorities, they did some
investigating and they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness.
Pretty interesting stuff, and they said, what, the kids are
really stressed about our final exams? Well, they think it
started with some kids who had actual allergies and had
(34:37):
seen this episode and started worrying that their own allergies
were actually symptom of a disease that spread the kids
who were basically going along with it be out of
stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one
is because it was two thousand six, you can go
on the internet and look at their articles. You can
log onto your internet. You can log onto your internet
(34:58):
and look up art articles that are like is the
strawberries with sugar virus? Real? Like people were writing into newspapers.
You know, my kid is having these symptoms, Like is
it a real thing? Did they or did they just
make this up? And it still goes on? I mean
apparently this these So there's two kinds. Basically, there's motor
um illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more
(35:18):
like fainting, upset, stomach headache, motors where you're twitching and
mowing and stuff like that. Um. 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 me, Allen, bite the
night away, let it loose for a week. Uh. If
you want to know more about mass hysterias, go listen
(35:40):
to what is collective hysteria or other episode and then
uh you can search for mass hysteria also in the
search part Houston works dot com. Since I said also
it's time for your listener mail, I'm gonna call this
long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and
told Georgia that I was going to read it and
for god, it's about the fairy tales. Hedge Hedge. My
(36:06):
name is Georgia. I live in Stockholm. Hedge, I think
hatch hedges. Hey, hey, sure in Swedish. Uh, Stockholm Swedie. Yes,
we did another good episode on Stockholm. Singer right that
a k a. The Swedish Delight. Sure, that's what the
cops call it. He's got the sweih del My name
(36:29):
is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening
to your show for a few years. I love it.
I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode and
I asked my husband about the term ashen put since
he's German and I often used Disney movies to help
teach me Swedish. Uh. He figured out that it's kind
of a play on words and implies a scullery maid
covered in ashes. Ashen is ash as opposed to cinder,
(36:51):
which is incorrectly used in the English name, since if
you were covered in cinders, you know severe burns. As
it is pieces of burning slag. It's true. It is
translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinda. Uh,
puto doesn't exist in German, he says, Uh, I don't
know that sounds so German to me. It sounds pretty German.
(37:12):
But the term for scullion or kitchen helper is ashan brutal.
I'm so glad you took German. So this is the
male form, he thinks, Ashan put 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
(37:33):
pellets that you would like that would grow into big
snakes close enough, Those are what are growing in your
mouth when you're saying during the words. He thinks, ashan
puto is kind of a feminine version of Ashan brutal,
since German is nonsensical engendered her words. I hope this
information is still interesting to you, guys. Her in broad
dog edged hedge headge Georgia, thanks a lot. That was
(37:58):
extraordinarily intelligent listener mail and we appreciate it, agreed. Uh.
If you want to send us an extraordinarily intelligent message,
we love those. You can tweet to us at s
y s K podcasts. You can join us on Facebook
dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works
dot com and has always joined us at our home
on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For
(38:26):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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