5 Mass Hysteria Events That Make Peer Pressure Seem Pathetic

5 The Dancing Plague

The word plague and the activity of dancing aren’t usually connected, for obvious reasons — for example, agitating the painful and fragile buboes. In 1518, a still-strange epidemic struck the city of Strasbourg. Here, patient zero wasn’t a bed-bound, coughing mess, but instead a single woman, dancing in the street. Notably, to no audible music. 

Without explanation, more and more of the Strasbourg population joined her, but there was more to worry about here than the inherent obnoxiousness of a flash mob. These dancers did not and could not stop dancing when they felt sufficiently expressed. They would continue dancing until they literally collapsed, and some even died from heart attack or stroke. 

The best explanation? A combination of the tale of St. Vitus, who was associated with a similar dancing plague, and a whole lot of mid-century stress. Who knows how many lives could have been saved with one of those squishy dolls whose eyes pop out when you squeeze them?

4 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

In 1962 in Tanganyika, now known as Tanzania, another usually-pleasurable act presented itself in a fully terrifying manner. In a young girl’s school, one student and then her whole class fell into a fit of laughter. It wasn’t so easily explained, though, as perhaps their teacher accidentally making a sexual gesture or hitting themselves in the nards with a yardstick, as you might guess.

It seems the laughter was spontaneously produced as an effect of anxiety, and anxiety was apparently rampant, because it spread widely and quickly. Over the course of this undiagnosable epidemic, almost a full thousand people found themselves unable to do anything but laugh for up to 16 days at a time.

3 Biting Nuns

I’m not Catholic, or particularly knowledgeable about the religion, but I do know that nuns aren’t supposed to bite people. Nobody is, really, which means nuns definitely aren’t. But in the 15th century in Germany, one nun decided, rules be damned, she was going to bite the other nuns, and she did. What’s strange is that this story doesn’t end with the de-nunning of one toothy nun and a return to normalcy.

Instead, the other nuns at her convent, and even more strangely, nuns at other convents, all picked up a penchant for gnawing on their fellow nuns or other unlucky victims. As far away as Rome, if you were near a nun, it was best to keep your bitable bits covered. Then, they stopped, apparently because they got tired, which also feels a little like what might have happened to the people in charge of trying to explain it.

2 The ‘Strawberries With Sugar’ Outbreak

It would be ideal if illnesses existing in the mind were kind enough to stay there. Yet, in a huge testament to the power of the human brain, belief can genuinely be strong enough to cause physical effects. Hysteric pregnancy, or pseudocyesis, is one example. In 2006, schools in Portugal got a real-life education on the physical power of thought. A hugely popular teen drama at the time featured a deadly virus on an episode — a virus presenting with symptoms like rashes and dizziness. 

Shortly afterward, this virus, despite not existing in the real world, was running rampant through Portugal’s schools. It seems that scores of stressed-out students had convinced themselves they had the virus, enough to produce genuine rashes of their own.

1 The Taipei Slasher

Sometimes, hysteria presents itself in a form other than a medical curiosity. Instead, the collective conscious can create an entire, fictional figure. Not necessarily one as far-fetched as a Sasquatch or Loch Ness monster, but a criminal on an entirely imagined spree. This was the case in Taipei in 1956, during the reign on the nonexistent Taipei Slasher.

Supposedly, the slasher’s M.O. was to use a razor blade to cut victims while brushing by, leaving lacerations on 21 supposed victims across Taipei. Rumors grew, and quickly, many people were terrified of the brush of a razor while walking the streets. It turned out that there had never been a slasher at all, and the cuts in question? They were a mix of self-inflicted, accidental and entirely imagined.