The Laughter Epidemic of 1962 Infected Hundreds of People in Africa and Lasted for Months

 On January 30, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha in what is now Tanzania started laughing.

They could not stop.

The laughter spread. Within days dozens of students at the school were affected. The laughter was uncontrollable and it did not stop after a few minutes or a few hours. It went on for days. Students who were overcome by the laughter also experienced crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.

The school closed on March 18 after 95 of its 159 students had been affected. But that was not the end of it.

How Far It Spread

When the students were sent home to their villages, the laughter went with them. It spread to the communities where those students lived. Other schools in the region were affected. More villages were impacted.

By the time the epidemic finally died down several months later, hundreds of people across multiple communities had been affected. Some individuals experienced symptoms for weeks at a time.

The affected people were not laughing because something was funny. The laughter was involuntary and distressing. People described it as painful. They could not eat or sleep properly while the episodes were happening. Some people had to be restrained during the worst episodes.

What Caused It

No physical cause was ever identified. Doctors who investigated found no infectious agent, no contaminated food source, and no environmental factor that could explain the outbreak.

The scientific consensus is that the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic was a case of mass psychogenic illness. The same phenomenon that likely caused the Dancing Plague of 1518 that we covered in an earlier post. A real physical response spreading through a community through psychological and social mechanisms rather than biological infection.

The school in Kashasha had opened recently and students were reportedly under significant stress. The political situation in Tanganyika was also tense. The country was approaching independence from British colonial rule, which happened in December 1961. The social pressure on communities during that period was real and significant.

Mass psychogenic illness tends to occur in communities under stress. The physical symptoms, whether laughter or dancing or illness, are real even though they do not have a traditional biological cause.

Why This Story Matters

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic is genuinely strange. It is hard to describe without it sounding made up. But it is fully documented by physicians, government officials, and researchers who investigated at the time.

It is also an important piece of evidence about how human beings respond to extreme social stress. We are social creatures in ways that go deeper than we usually acknowledge. What happens in our communities affects our bodies in ways that science is still working to fully understand.

The laughter epidemic of 1962 is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of that we have on record. And almost nobody knows it happened.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

India Lost Three Million People in World War Two and American History Books Barely Mention It

 When American students learn about World War Two they learn about the European theater and the Pacific theater. They learn about D-Day and Midway and the liberation of Paris. They learn about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

They almost never learn about India.

Here is what happened in India during World War Two and why it matters.

What India Actually Did

Around 2.5 million Indians served in Allied military forces during World War Two. It was the largest volunteer army in history at that time.

Indian soldiers fought in North Africa. They fought in Italy. They fought in Southeast Asia against Japan. They fought across multiple theaters of the war on multiple continents. Their contribution to the Allied effort was enormous.

And roughly three million people in India died as a result of World War Two conditions.

Most of those deaths did not happen in battle. They happened in Bengal in 1943 during a famine that historians now largely attribute to British wartime policies.

The Bengal Famine of 1943

The Bengal Famine killed between two and three million people in British-controlled India.

There was food in the region. The famine was not caused by an absolute shortage of food. It was caused by a combination of factors that included British wartime policies, the prioritization of food exports to feed British troops and populations elsewhere, war related disruption to food distribution, and decisions made by British colonial administrators that Indian lives mattered less than British strategic interests.

Winston Churchill, who is celebrated in Western history books as a hero of World War Two, made comments about Indians during this period that historians have described as deeply callous. His government's policies contributed to the conditions that killed millions of people in Bengal while the war was being fought.

This is documented history. It is not disputed by serious historians. And it is almost entirely absent from the World War Two history that American students learn.

Why the Gap Exists

American World War Two history focuses on American and British contributions and sacrifices because those were the countries that shaped the postwar world and wrote most of the dominant historical narratives.

India was a British colony. Its soldiers fought under British command. Its resources were mobilized in service of British war aims. And the suffering of its people during the war was treated as a colonial management problem rather than as a human tragedy worthy of historical attention.

Three million people died. That is almost eight times the total American military deaths in the entire war. And most Americans have never heard the words Bengal Famine.

That is not a small oversight. That is a fundamental gap in how the war gets remembered and who gets counted as having contributed and suffered.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Voynich Manuscript Has Never Been Decoded and Nobody Knows What It Says

 Somewhere in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University sits one of the most puzzling objects in human history.

It is a handwritten book. About 240 pages. Made of vellum which is animal skin. It dates to the early 1400s based on carbon dating.

It is written entirely in a language that nobody has ever been able to read.

What the Voynich Manuscript Contains

The book is organized into sections. Some sections appear to be about plants and show detailed illustrations of plants that do not match any known species. Some sections show astronomical diagrams including what look like zodiac symbols. Some sections show women bathing in pools connected by tubes and pipes. Some sections appear to be recipes or instructions for something.

Every page is dense with text written in a flowing script that looks purposeful and organized. It has clear patterns. It has what look like spaces between words. It has what look like paragraphs and sections. It looks like a real language written by someone who knew what they were saying.

Nobody has been able to figure out what any of it says.

The manuscript was discovered by book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 among a collection of old books in a Jesuit college in Italy. He published news of its existence and the puzzle has captivated researchers, codebreakers, and historians ever since.

Who Has Tried to Decode It

This is not for lack of effort. Some of the best codebreakers in history have worked on the Voynich Manuscript.

During World War Two codebreakers who cracked Nazi and Japanese military codes tried to decode it and failed.

Linguists have analyzed its structure and found that it follows patterns similar to natural languages. The distribution of characters and word lengths resembles real language rather than random noise. That means it is probably not gibberish.

Computer analysis has identified patterns that some researchers believe correspond to known languages. Some researchers have claimed to have decoded portions. None of those claimed decodings have been accepted by the wider scholarly community.

As recently as the early 2020s researchers were still publishing papers proposing new theories about the manuscript's origin and meaning.

What People Think It Is

There are several main theories.

One is that it is a genuine manuscript written in a real but now extinct language or dialect. A natural language that has simply left no other traces that would allow comparison.

One is that it is an artificial language invented by the author. A constructed system of communication known only to a small group that has since died out.

One is that it is an elaborate hoax. A skilled forger creating a convincing looking but meaningless manuscript, possibly to sell to a wealthy collector.

One is that it is a cipher. A known language disguised by a substitution or encoding system complex enough that it has not yet been cracked.

Nobody knows. After more than a century of serious scholarly effort the Voynich Manuscript remains exactly as mysterious as it was when Voynich found it in 1912.

The original is at Yale. High resolution digital scans are available online for anyone to look at. The puzzle is still open. Nobody has solved it yet.

Maybe you will.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.