The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

Who amongst us hasn’t had an uncontrollable laughing fit in middle school that dragged your friends into it and got everyone in trouble? But what if it lasted for months? In this episode we dive into a laughter epidemic that remains a mystery, even to this day.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is So Bizarre, a podcast where we find the weirdest stories from history and share them with you. I'm Bianca. I'm Nicole. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hi Bianca. Hi, Nicole. How are you doing today? I am doing very well. How are you doing? Fine. Excellent. I feel like I always say fine, and you're like, excellent, good, great. Wonderful. I'm doing alright. I'm doing alright. Yeah. So before we get into my real fun story, do you have a weird story or anecdote for us?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

I do. I was thinking of something earlier and I was like, oh yeah, that was kind of weird. Um, so when I was younger, my family moved around a lot, and we lived in Asia for a while. And I remember one time coming home and the house was in chaos. I was like a little, little kid getting off the school bus. The house was in chaos because a monkey broke into our house. Fun. I mean, I was terrified, but in retrospect, super fun. And like for some reason it honed in on our cassettes, like our little like tape cassettes, and just throwing them out the window.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

For the younger viewers, tape cassette. Well, no, actually, I think they're back in. They're back in. All right, never mind. Yeah, so so just like in Jumanji.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah, and so it's just like uh Michael Bolton, um Duran Duran, whatever else my parents were listening to, guns and roses. Do you know which monkeys? No idea, but my sister, as like a little prank to me, um, because she was older, she gave me like a a stick, like a mop, and put me in a corner and was just like, if the monkey comes, make sure you know how to fight it.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

So that did you know how to fight it?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Oh no, I was six. And my parents and everybody was just running around trying to get this monkey out. Who he did eventually leave.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

By himself? Yeah. On his own.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Yeah, he was just like, uh I don't like any of those. I don't like any of these cassettes. The vibes are off.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Americans and their Michael Bolton.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Yeah, so that was uh that's my weird little anecdote.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Thank you. That was a great anecdote. Um, okay. So are you ready for my weird story?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yes, I've been waiting for this. I know I've been talking up weeks. All right.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

All right, we are going to talk about the Tanganyika laughter epidemic. Have you heard of this?

SPEAKER_01 2:56

No, but I feel like this is something I would get involved with.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Well, it is wait, a laughter epidemic? So I'll explain what that is. Please. So the Tanganika laughter epidemic was an outbreak of mass hysteria that occurred in 1962 in the village of Khashasha, where hundreds of young girls had sudden laughing fits simultaneously that lasted weeks. So before we really get started on the story, do you know what mass psychogenic illness is? Or better known as mass hysteria?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Off the top of my head, no.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Mass hysteria. Have you ever heard of mass hysteria?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

I mean, I've heard like I think there was like a dancing one way back like in the 1500s.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Oh yes, there was. I was gonna actually bring that up as a Okay, so I'm not gonna spoil it.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

No, no, no. I'll shut up then.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Do you actually know more about that?

SPEAKER_01 3:51

No, but I'll let you do it soon.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

That's enough. That's good. That is uh good on you. All right, so mask psychogenic illness. Um, we're gonna call it MPI, and I didn't make that up. It's how they refer to it, and I'm just gonna say MPI, and you're gonna remember what that means. Better known as mass hysteria. This is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group. Cases of MPI usually involve adolescents and children as the primary affected groups, with females often being disproportionately impacted. Sound sexist. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Wow, they're hysterical. They must have the MPI.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Basically, yes, but these are real things that happened as well. So the first example I'm gonna bring up is the dancing one. So the earliest studied cases linked with epidemic hysteria are the dancing manias of the Middle Ages. You were very close in date. We're actually talking about the 600s, the seventh century. But there were there were other ones. Um, so that's the earliest known outbreak of dancing mania in Bernburg, Germany, where 18 peasants began singing and dancing around a church, disturbing a Christmas Eve service.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

I mean, it kind of sounds like they were making it better, but um another incident in 1278 involved about 200 people dancing on a bridge over the river Meuse, let's say, in Europe, resulting in its collapse. So those are uh older examples, and most of the sources I read suggest that dancing likely began as a way for people to cope with the stress and tension caused by events like plagues and floods at the time.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah, because that stuff was like very, very horrific back then. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

But especially for poor people.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

You know what? There's one side of me that's like that. How can you just like break into hysteria? And then there's another side of me that's just like, you know, if everybody in my village died, I too would probably start dancing. Start dancing and singing and just have a complete break from reality. So it's it's all what was it? You gotta throw a party. MPI? MPI is uh checking out for me.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Thank you for immediately jumping on boards.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Yeah, I'm here to support if nothing else.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Here are some more recent cases. In 2011, multiple students at LaRoy Junior Senior High School in upstate New York began having symptoms similar to Tourette syndrome and were eventually diagnosed with mass psychogenic illness, which is la la la la la MPI. We sound like and you're listening to MPR.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Publicly funded.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

And the most recent one, in early 2023, thousands of students, mostly girls, in numerous schools in Iran, were initially believed to have been poisoned, and numerous arrests were made. Eventually, the Iranian intelligence ministry released the findings of a comprehensive investigation which cited mass hysteria. So this all leads us to the Tanganyika laughter epidemic. The laughter epidemics began on January 30th, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha, on the western coast of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika near the border with Uganda. Three girls began laughing, possibly in a response to a joke, and couldn't stop.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Possibly.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Possibly.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

I like how they had to interject. Something funny may have happened.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Soon the laughing fit spread to their classmates until nearly 60% of the students were experiencing a rare collection of symptoms. The students were restless, alternating between uncontrollable bouts of laughter and sobbing that lasted from a few minutes to a few hours at a time. Does that sound like something that happens once a month to you?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Well, I need to hear the joke, is number one. But number two, there's something especially sinister about laughing. Like about, you know, that prolonged imagine being a teacher in that room and just being like, all your kids are just laughing for an hour.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

I'd be very self-conscious.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Is there something on my face?

SPEAKER_00 8:32

I need to go to the bathroom. They don't respect me. Um, so psychologists, doctors, and scientists were called in, all of them at a loss for an explanation for what was happening. No toxins or environmental factors seemed to be causing the laughter, and all the lab tests came back normal. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to sixteen days, averaging around seven days. The teaching staff were unaffected. By March, the school officials gave up and requested that their parents take their daughters home, but as the girls fanned out into the respective communities around the country, their families and people in their villages started laughing too. Other schools became infected.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

No, fuck that.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

It's kind of cute. It's kind of cute. Sorry, we shouldn't laugh about MPI. When the school reopened in May, a second phase of the outbreak affected an additional 57 pupils. The all-girl boarding school reclosed at the end of June. The phenomenon died off 18 months after it all started. In all 14 schools were shut down, and a thousand people were affected. There were no fatalities. Here's something so weird. The Kishasha school was sued for allowing the children and their parents to transmit it to the surrounding area. What? Sued.

unknown 9:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

It's probably like really poor all girls' school.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

But also like Okay. There's a part of me that's like, did they not fake it? But if you kind of see that you're disrupting a class, I mean I used to do some really dumb things to like if I had a test and if I could see that my teacher was easily distracted. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Sure. But could you get other schools on board in the surrounding areas?

SPEAKER_01 10:29

I think I could. I would present my case and say, I really don't want to take this pop quiz.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

And Okay, maybe you should start that with just jobs and being underpaid. Start live. Stop paying taxes.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

You're onto something.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

So yeah. So that's what went down in that school. So remember how I said the dancing manias most likely started from needing to cope with the stress of things like plagues? The most plausible explanation has to do with what was happening in the country in the months leading up to it. So remember I was like, oh yeah, sure, it's danzania. Yeah. Super I was super vague and mysterious about it. I know you've been holding your breath.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

I've been waiting. Here goes an explanation. Thank God.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So Tanganyika was a sovereign state that existed from 1961 to 1964 and is present-day Tanzania. In late 1961, they gained independence after being a British colony for four decades, and they joined with the People's Republic of Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanzania, which is what we have today. So it this is exactly when this um laughing epidemic happened. Like in between these years. This basically threw the country into cultural chaos. Tanzania was suddenly a socialist state, and the new government made drastic changes overnight. There was a huge amount of pressure to adopt Christianity instead of the belief systems and social structures that they known for thousands of years. So much like we were saying before with the plague, not that it's a plague, but um, it's easy to imagine how stressful that must have been. Like overnight, these girls they dispersed tribes, like ancient tribes that have been there forever, and yeah, basically just overturned their life. And it's like, here's a new religion, here's how we do things now.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I also like I think that age where you're just so um vulnerable in a lot of ways, and then you're also at a boarding school, so you're out of your like family structure. It's probably ripe for something like this to happen.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Yeah, and you know, they definitely didn't have the appropriate like coping skills to deal with this. I'm assuming no one the t the adults were probably just as confused as they were. Yeah. And also didn't have coping skills.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Imagine being that confused, and then a room full of children just start laughing. I'm not saying that this is like the premise of like uh a scary movie, but like you're saying the teacher told the joke.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

And the teacher told the joke. She whispered, she's like, Hey, yeah, hey, want to hear something? Laugh. And on top of that, it usually occurs in people without a lot of power. So as a last resort for people of a low status. So it's just like an easy way to, well, I don't know if easy is the word, but a way to express that something is wrong. Yeah. Without having the words to express that.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

It's wild because as you know crazy as this all sounds, I again, there's a part of me that it's like, I could see myself in the throes of like something just being like, I'm just gonna laugh hysterically.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah, and also like adolescents feel like they want to be accepted by a group. So they're like super vulnerable to influences. I have noted some unhealthy ones. Please. Guess them. Unhealthy things that adolescents do to blend in.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

This is is this turning into an episode for like mad mothers against drug drive? Like, what are we yes?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

You're on the right path. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

Adolescence. Let me let me pull up my degrassi um episode catalog. They love to drink before a school dance.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Yes.

unknown 14:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

All right, just uh they're we're making too big of a deal. It was just like drinking, smoking, stuff like that, frat boy behaviors. Ugh. And then also I wanted to mention positive ones as well, because these are affecting women adolescents, you know. So uh, for example, protesting, like in the past few years, younger generations, I'm gonna include us in the younger generations as well. I guess generally on the more liberal side of the spectrum, have been educating themselves about social injustices because they don't want to be left out of the conversation whilst vaping and still shrinking.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yeah, so less hysterical laughing and more constructive ways to deal with wanting to fit in.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Because humans just look to each other basically for how to fall in socially, I think. You're not inventing, you're not waking up and being like, who do I want to be in this in this world?

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yeah. Hear that, everybody?

SPEAKER_00 15:47

So lastly, I'm just gonna touch on um some additional research I did in regards to it mostly affecting women, which is sus, let's be real. So do you wanna do you wanna say what you think about it?

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Of it being women involved?

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Like why, for example, are there not a lot of cases of mass hysteria in men?

SPEAKER_01 16:12

I uh I well like hysteria in general being used as a term mostly for women because I think when a woman loses control, it's the opposite of what a woman should be. She should be, you know, kind of composed and she should be pious and whatever else you want to throw in there. So I think when a woman loses control and is abnormal in that sort of way, they're like, ah, you're touched by the devil. Yes, you're hysterical, you're possessed. I don't know what to do with these emotions, so you must be fucked up.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Like you got the MPI. Oh, yes. So yeah, definitely that. And then I there's a book by Mark uh Mikhail, McAuley, I don't know. I'm not gonna. Anyways, a man called Hysterical Men: The Hidden Story of Male Nervous Illness. So I didn't get a chance to read the whole book, but from what I did read, you can probably guess what he researches, the very understudied aspect of mental health in men. In short, he kind of writes that male nervous and mental illness has been suppressed in official discourses of science and medicine, leading to a hidden history of male hysteria. They are established as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity. So, in other words, they need to maintain an image of like male competence and rationality to stay in power professionally and politically. Because, you know, how are go are men going to rule over everything if they have doubts about their life, they get nervous?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Yeah, there's not as much of a wide birth there enough, definitely for men.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

For sure. One could almost call starting wars as mass male hysteria. And that's at least if women are dancing around and laughing, men are like, I will go conquer this country now. Do you want to? Do you want to? Everyone, let's go do it. Yay.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

I would call that mass hysteria. I would I'd definitely call it something hysteria for sure. But I think the problem is, like, in general, it's like, you know, the hysteria is born for men, for women. Um, just putting anyone in a box, really, right? That's when you start having that hysterical component come out. I remember this movie I saw called Hysterical Blindness that no one saw starring Uma Thurman.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

I've seen it.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Really? Nope. Got me.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Got you.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Don't make me laugh too hard. I might be hysterical. No, but it was really good. And it was about this, like, apparently, I think it was based on a true story, but it was like Uma Thurman playing this woman who, when she got quote unquote, hysterical, she would go blind. Oh. And that always like, I remember that stuck with me as a kid growing up after seeing that movie. I was just like, whoa, you can like lose your shit enough where you go blind. Like the human body, everything for. Yeah, but it's the that's what I mean. It's like there is when I hear stories like this, I'm like, yeah, the human body can be crazy. It can be wild.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Alright, well, that was my short and sweet story.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Loved it.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

I don't know about sweet, but kind of sweet. Could be worse.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Well, yeah, let's not tell any more jokes, maybe for the rest of the night. I got a big day tomorrow. I don't want to be dancing all night, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

That's a joke. Okay, Bianca, do you have your housewipes? Tagline. Tagline. Oh my god, no. This is a rough one.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

These ladies may dance around and look like fools, but I'll have the last laugh.