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.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 Was Real and Hundreds of People Danced Until They Died

 In July of 1518 a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a street in Strasbourg, which is now part of France, and began to dance.

She danced for days. She did not stop.

Within a week thirty four more people had joined her. Within a month the number had grown to around four hundred. People were dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and could not stop. They danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some of them danced until they died from heart attacks, strokes, or sheer physical breakdown.

This is not a legend. It is a documented historical event recorded in physician notes, cathedral records, and city council minutes from 1518.

What Actually Happened

Nobody fully knows. That is what makes this one of the strangest events in recorded history.

Historians have proposed several explanations.

Mass psychogenic illness, sometimes called mass hysteria, is one of the leading theories. This is a real documented phenomenon where physical symptoms spread through a group of people through psychological mechanisms rather than physical infection. Under conditions of extreme stress, people can begin experiencing involuntary physical symptoms that spread to others through a kind of social contagion.

Strasbourg in 1518 was experiencing severe hardship. Famine, disease, and social breakdown were common. The people of the city were under enormous psychological pressure. Some historians believe the dancing was an involuntary physical response to that collective stress.

Another theory involves ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain and produces compounds related to LSD. People who eat bread made from ergot contaminated grain can experience hallucinations, convulsions, and involuntary movements. A bad harvest season could have contaminated the grain supply.

The local authorities made things worse. They decided that the cure for the dancing was more dancing. They hired musicians and built a stage to encourage the afflicted to dance it out. That approach did not help.

Why This Story Matters

The Dancing Plague of 1518 is important not just because it is strange but because it shows something real about the relationship between extreme social conditions and human behavior.

Mass psychogenic illness is not just a medieval phenomenon. It has been documented in modern times as well. Groups of people under extreme stress can develop shared physical symptoms that have no direct physical cause. Schools, factories, and communities have experienced outbreaks of symptoms that spread through groups in ways that look like physical illness but are driven by psychological and social factors.

Understanding the Dancing Plague gives us a window into how desperate the conditions were for ordinary people in early sixteenth century Strasbourg. It also gives us an early documented example of a phenomenon that researchers still study today.

It is also just one of the most genuinely bizarre things that has ever happened. And it is completely real. And almost nobody learns about it.

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