Outbreak | 1

This is episode one of Hysterical, named Ambie's Podcast of the Year. The entire season of Hysterical is available exclusively and ad-free right now on Wondery+. Start your free trial of Wondery+, in the Wondery app, or on Apple Podcasts.

In December of 2011, a young woman posted a video on YouTube. Hi everyone. My name's and this is my first video. She's got shiny red hair with side bangs and she's wearing a white graphic hoodie. A poster for the metal band Avenged Sevenfold is tacked to her bedroom wall behind her. So I'll start off by telling you a little bit about myself. I'm 16, I'm in 11th grade, and I play softball, like all the time.

When she made this video, there was no TikTok. There was barely an Instagram. She's not looking to monetize, not trying to influence. What this 16-year-old is looking for is a little help. She's been having strange symptoms. that so far no one can seem to explain. Recently, last August, I had passed out at a concert. I was headbanging and I thought, you know, I was just dehydrated and all that.

By now you've noticed that her speech is a bit halting, and her nervous teenage energy is more than just fidgeting. And about a month after, I pass out again. At the homecoming dance. That's awesome, right? It has pattern and repetition. Eyes twitching, hands in the air, fingers flying. And a few days ago, my twitching has progressed into noises like through my nose. or in my throat and it's something that won't go away.

The more she talks, the worse it gets. She's neck tilting now and jerking her head. That's another thing I do a lot. Clap. We're still trying to get answers, so... Going back to the doctors again. Then she signs off, her first missive of many, to wait and see what kind of response she might get. And if anyone wants to talk? About this or if anyone's starting it I'll be willing to talk it at all

I recently Googled the phrase eye twitch, the simplest of our symptoms, just to see. An eye twitch could be a symptom of dehydration or low electrolytes. An eye twitch could mean you have glaucoma. Or a disease like acanthamoeba keratitis. You don't want that one. An eye twitch could be the first sign of a condition called Isaac syndrome, in which your muscles don't stop moving and appear to be constantly rippling under the skin even when you're asleep.

To be fair, Isaac syndrome is extremely rare. But as those sons of bitches at the NIH are quick to point out, there are over 10,000 rare diseases. Over 30 million Americans have been diagnosed with one. In other words... developing a rare disease, not that rare. And that's why it can be so scary when the symptoms you're experiencing all add up to a mystery.

When that teenage girl sent her video out into the void, she wasn't sure she'd get anything back besides her own echo. But she does. She's about to find out there are others. A strange illness has made at least a dozen teenage girls sick at the same high school. And those others are all clustered in one small place and also just came down with the same bizarre symptoms. This is my eighth or ninth day.

Straight ticking and doesn't stop. I would go to art class. I used to go to two art classes every day. Now I'm not in school. And they are all going to discover this isn't just something they have. It might be something they caught. More cases of a mysterious illness have been confirmed. A contagion. Caught from a friend or a classmate or from a place by something in the water or the air or the ground there.

Famous environmentalist and activist Erin Brockovich is getting involved. I mean, we're looking at a myriad of environmental concerns. This one's just standing out like a sore thumb. And a whole town is going to start doubting their own doctors, their own neighbors.

Some will doubt their own kids. A lot of them say that we're faking and... And that you're faking because you want attention. Seriously, why would we fake this? Some will even doubt the brains inside their own heads. Am I going crazy? Is this really happening? Question is, what is this? No, no, I'm done listening to you. You are not doing your job. You are not doing your job. And can they stop it from spreading? Episode 1. Outbreak.

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What was the first you heard that something was happening? I had a patient come in and I hadn't heard anything. If anyone should get credit for putting the pieces together first, that something strange was happening, it's Dr. Jennifer McVig. In the fall of 2011, McVig was a young physician working at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo, New York, a neurologist, newly minted.

I had just finished medical school and I was in fellowship, so I hadn't even sat for my boards yet. I was like, it was new, you know, it was all new. I was a physician, but, you know, just starting. And I look younger than my age. And, you know, the people see that, you know, I'm new or look at me and it's funny. And just about a month into the new school year, in comes a teenage girl, a high school student presenting with unusual symptoms.

You know, wakes up one morning in full-blown vocalizations, motor tics, very prominent ones. And I thought, this is very odd. The patient had woken up from a nap with a stutter. A severe stammer, trouble speaking. Then it turned into head and facial tics, and then vocal outbursts. But it was a very abrupt onset and odd.

You know, you're sleeping one night, you wake up the next morning, and all of a sudden you have vocalizations as well as motor tics. It just really isn't the way that usually these things evolve or occur. But there it is, happening anyway. And the patient is desperate to make it stop. So we do the metabolic workup. We send them for blood work. We do an EEG. When does patient number two come? Shortly thereafter. I believe it's a couple weeks later.

And again, around the same age, young lady. Another high school student, female. Again, tics, spasms, blurting out sounds and words. So number two comes, and I'm like, okay, well, we do have to treat every single case as an individual entity. And as a physician, you can't just say, oh, I saw this the other day. Maybe we'll do the same thing. You know, you're going to miss something. But still.

It's hard to ignore the similarities. Both young women, both presenting motor and verbal tics, both very loud, and both very something else. The interesting part about it was that the vocalizations were very similar. Now, that doesn't usually happen. You know, if somebody has true Tourette disorder or even a simple or complicated tic disorder, you know, there's some common tics. There's a lot of blinking. There's a lot of head tilts.

But with this new patient, a lot like that first patient who had come in a few weeks ago. The vocalization was so characteristic and so loud that I'm like... This is interesting. So now there's two presenting similarly. Once is chance, two is coincidence. And then I get number three. In walks a young woman. Again.

High school age, again, with severe motor tics, vocalizations like shouts and barks. And again, the onset is sudden, like zero to 60 overnight. So by the third one, I'm having concerns. Dr. McVig suspects that the three cases are connected. They must be connected, right? Easy to assume, harder to prove. It was tough for me because nobody's saying anything about anyone else. And for HIPAA reasons. HIPAA is the federal privacy law for health care. For HIPAA reasons...

I can't be like, hey, do you know so-and-so? Because she just came here two weeks ago. I'll lose my license. And that's not okay. No, it's not okay. And that's how it took me a while to put things together because I couldn't say anything. And so she pokes around, but with a little more finesse. And then I started saying, well, what high school do you go to and where do you live? and then went back to the other two and looked at the zip codes and put two and two together. Her hunch is correct.

All three patients come from the same zip code, 14482, about 50 miles east of Buffalo. More than that, all three girls live in the same small town, Leroy, New York. And more than that... All three girls go to the same school. Leroy Jr. Senior High School go Knights. McVig goes to her boss to tell him that whatever is happening in this small town, it is growing very fast.

I came in his office and I said, I need your help. And he goes, oh, you've got this. You know, this is what you've trained for. You've got this. And I was like, no, the shit's going to hit the fan and all hell's going to break loose. I'm not kidding. And sure enough, a week later, he's like, you were right. I can't believe this is happening. And I'm like, yeah.

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My first question is, is it Leroy or Leroy? Ah, the Leroy Leroy. Well, it depends on who you talk to. Lynn Beluscio is the official town historian here. She's been writing a local history column in the Leroy Pennysaver for over 30 years. Or is it the Leroy Pennysaver? You got to be at least a bit suspicious of a town that can't settle on the pronunciation of their own name. The town supervisor just walked in. How would he say it? Probably Leroy. And how do you say it? Leroy.

Okay, let me, and I will explain it. The family that the town is named after is Leroy. Herman Leroy was a speculator who bought up a ton of acreage here at the end of the 1700s. But sometime between then... And now, Leroy slash Leroy became the Timotei Chalamet of small towns in New York. I'm blaming it on the cheerleaders. Why? Because they want to say, let's go Leroy.

They don't want to say, let's go Leroy. Or if you're the opposing team, it would be destroy Leroy. So I'm blaming it on the cheerleaders. For what it's worth, I'm going to go with Leroy. Given the subject matter here, just the twists and turns of the story that you're about to hear, I suppose the play would be for me to make Leroy seem dark and troubled, a town with a horrible secret. But honestly, I've always kind of liked it around here.

My parents grew up about 50 miles to the west, so I spent a good chunk of my life here in western New York, wearing giant winter coats and giant knit hats with giant pom-poms on top. My folks were the babies of the immigrant wave who came to work in the smoke belching factories here when manufacturing was king. And from my vantage point, this has always been a place where the bowling leagues are competitive. The Bills fans are drunk.

And the Jell-O molds are perfectly set. Do you make Jell-O? I love Jell-O. Really? Yeah. Lynn is also the former director of Leroy's Historical Jell-O Museum. I made under-the-sea jello for Thanksgiving. Did you? We do it every Thanksgiving, yeah. And that's your traditional? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jello was invented in Leroy in 1897 and was made in the jello factory on the north side of town for most of the last century.

employing 350 workers, mostly women. Old-timers say you could tell what flavored jello they were making that day by the color of the creek running through town. Our family Jell-O recipe for Thanksgiving and Christmas is the Waldorf salad that's made in lime Jell-O. And then it begs the question, is it a salad or is it a dessert?

I figure if you put mayonnaise on it, and if it's got celery in it. There's mayonnaise in it? No, you put mayonnaise on the top, a little dollop. And I hate mayonnaise. Wait. You put mayonnaise on the top of Jell-O? Well, if it's salad, sure. The Jell-O factory is still here, just a mile or so up from the high school. It's empty now, shut down in 1964. Factory shutting down is also the history of this part of the state, just like the rest of the Rust Belt.

But while Leroy had its share of problems, they didn't seem like particularly unusual problems. Until the outbreak. Yeah, I grew up in Leroy my whole life. In the fall of 2011, Jessica was just starting her senior year at the high school. Oh, wait, hold on. You said Leroy. Yeah. You say Leroy. Yeah. Everybody who lives there says Leroy.

That's not what I heard. But you're telling me that everybody who lives there is Leroy. Everybody who lives there is Leroy. Anybody on the news reporting on it calls it Leroy. Really? Yeah. Pretty much anyone under the age of like 60, I would say, calls it Leroy. All right, fuck it. I'm on Team Leroy. Funny enough, Jessica couldn't settle on her own name either. You go by Jessica now. In high school, what did you go by? Jessica. Spell Jessica, please. J-E-S-S-K-A.

Because I was like, you know, just trying to be email, like scene, whatever. And all the scene girls were changing their names. Jessica would go on to be named most creative in the yearbook that year, by the way. She once dyed her hair with cherry Kool-Aid powder. At one point, I dabbled with having three I's in my name. That didn't stick. So how would you spell it then? J-E-S-S-I-I-I-C-A. So I'm glad I didn't stick with that one. And we went with Jessica. It was just more punk, you know.

As far as high schools go, Leroy High looks nice enough. It's practically new. Although there are a few natural gas wells on school grounds. You don't see that every day. And apparently they built the school on wetlands. And in the few years since the building had gone up, there was already talk that it was sinking into the ground. It's got about 500 or so kids, grades 7 through 12.

Everybody's known each other since kindergarten because nobody goes anywhere. This is Emily. She and Jessica sound a bit alike, but that's upstate, baby. Just roll with it. Right, nobody leaves. Yeah, no one wants to move into podunk leave, right? There ain't nothing to do. You want to go to the Jell-O factory? That's about it. At the time all this happened, Emily was starting eighth grade at the school, just turning 13.

Would you say you were popular in school? Not at all. The furthest thing from it. Oh, yeah. Definitely more so labeled as the outcast. And what does that entail? like we had booths in our cafeteria so like your group of people sat at this booth and then all the the popular kids or whatever sat at like the giant tables that were in the middle i was like yep

You go be center of attention. Enjoy that. I'm going to sit in the corner over here and eat my sandwich. She found her crew, though, in the marching band. Emily played the flute. And we do the band camp. We run drills from eight in the morning to like four in the afternoon, learning the entire set and everything and our spots and where to go and the music. And it's a wild time. Did you guys have like a fight song? It's the super stereotypical, like...

They called me Mr. Mihalik. Very often as I got to know the kids more and they got older, the mister got dropped. When Emily was marching, it was under the iron fist of Mr. Mihalik, the band teacher. I had a couple of kids that would joke and they would call me dad and the chorus teacher mom. The marching band was preparing for the state championship and had been grinding it out on the practice field behind the school for weeks now. I basically lived at the school.

So what I always wanted to do was marching band and have my own program and that. And it was a great place to be then. I hated it. Jessica had a different take. I hated high school. You really did? Yes, I hated high school so much. Actually, the year that this happened was the only year I did like. Nothing like a contagious illness. Yeah, a national scandal to brighten your senior year, you know?

So, okay, 2011. Do you remember when you first saw, heard, or knew about people coming down with weird symptoms? Here's Emily. So there was a girl in my class who had actually had it the entire time that I'd known her. Like she is actually like diagnosed with Tourette's and everything.

So even before any of this started, there had already been at least one person at the school with symptoms that didn't just look like Tourette's syndrome. It actually was Tourette's. What were her symptoms? Very, very vocal. She was... very vocal with her tics. It was like the little like screeching noise and like sometimes she'd, you know, kind of like flail a little bit to the point where like, are you having a seizure? No? Okay, you're good. They were little things, motor tics or verbal tics.

Mr. Mihalik, the band teacher. The girl with Tourette's, she was actually in the marching band with Emily for all those hours of practice on the field. They were easy to ignore. They were something that I was used to. They were something that I accommodated.

So till then, at least, potentially disruptive symptoms like you might see with Tourette's weren't entirely foreign to Leroy High. But then the rumors started that there were others. The first time I heard about it... was from that girl here's emily again she was like oh one of these older girls from one of the older grades is apparently got the same thing that i do and i was like oh well that's weird and then i just went about my day here's jessica

I was trying to think back on like when exactly I realized something was happening, but I remember being in my art class and two of the girls were like two of the first ones to have it. By most accounts, these were the first girls to develop symptoms of the illness at Leroy High. A junior and a senior, both cheerleaders on the varsity squad. And I remember thinking, like, were they making it up? Like, what is going on?

People thought they were faking it. Yeah, everybody thought they might be faking it. Because it was just like a bunch of the cheerleaders, like girls who want attention typically, you know? And they would be doing this for attention. Right, yeah. And like everybody kind of just doubted it until it just kept happening.

First two, then another, then two more. You know, within a matter of days, it was something that was blowing up. Really? Yeah, it came on pretty fast. Mr. Mahalik. The motor texts, the verbal texts. They were more dramatic than anything I'd ever seen. We heard a lot of like a yipping sound from some of the students or a screeching sound. I even heard sounds maybe that sounded like a cat meowing. And the symptoms seemed to be growing more severe.

That's when things got scary for everybody because I was located down the hall from the nurse's office. So I certainly had times that I had to close the door because you would hear. Something happening out there that I knew would frighten the kids or somebody hitting themselves against the wall. Wow. So it was frightening. It was frightening for the kids. It was frightening for me as a teacher. Ms. Jessica. And then my friend came to school.

The one day and I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like. What are you doing? Like, stop fucking around. Like, why are you talking like that? She's like, I can't. And she like could not talk, like was stuttering so bad that she could not even get out a word. She's like twitching. She's like crying at that point, like just trying to get out her words. And I'm like, holy.

shit this is real like what happened like i had hung out with her the day before like she was fine the day before like the way she was stuttering you cannot make that up like that's that's like happening in her brain Emily has a similar experience. So, woke up, 90% of my day, completely normal day. With one big difference, it isn't her best friend who catches it.

I go to lunch and I was pretty fine then. I felt a little funny. I was like, I feel kind of off. You know, you have those off days. I go to my history class right after lunch and I start feeling kind of... finicky i gotta move i gotta like do something you feel like the urge to move yeah it's like you feel like the urge to like you can't stop yourself from doing it it was just one of those things it was just you had to do it little fidgets here and there

Were they all the same type of fidget? Yeah. I think it was my arm and my head all at the same time. Emily is not sure what's happening, so she just tries to go about her day. But then... In study hall, she says that she gets called to the nurse's office. She's like, close the door. And I go, that's not good. When the nurse tells you to close the door, that's not good. And the school counselor's in there as well. And I go, oh, I'm in trouble for something.

They start talking to me about it and they're like, some of your teachers have noticed that you have started showing these symptoms that all these other girls seem to be showing as well. And we just want to know, are you actually doing it? Or... are you just kind of like pulling our leg with this and you're just doing it to fit in so the suggestion was are you faking it for attention yeah before this happened to you were you thinking that other people were faking it

Honestly. Certain people. But just because I knew those people and I was like, she seems the type that would be like. So you thought that some people were. Yeah. But that like I figured out later on, I was like, oh, that's very real. You totally weren't. I'm so sorry that I thought that about you. Because here I am, and we're in the same boat now, girly.

In the same boat now, girly, is a great way to put it. In fact, she has no idea how in the same boat now, girly, we all might be. My twitching has progressed into noises like through my nose. Because what's happening in Leroy, it might be connected to what's happening to the girl on YouTube, hundreds of miles away. It's something that won't go away.

And what's happening to all of them might be connected to a sickness afflicting people today, right now, and spreading to places like Ohio and Massachusetts and Moscow and Stockholm and Tehran. A contagion that's been with us for centuries, and one we still don't fully understand. There was a neurologist up in Canada in the 1970s.

And his name was Adrian Upton. Upton was teaching in med school at the time about the human brain and decided to try an experiment that was a little cheeky. Upton filled a bowl full of Jell-O. He put it in the fridge, he let it set, and then he flipped it over onto a plate, making a lime-flavored, brain-sized blob. Then, he hooked the jello brain up to an EEG machine. That's the one that measures brain waves.

A squiggly line means brain activity. It means life. No squiggles means no brain activity, no life. And when he connected the wires and nodes of the EEG machine to that jello brain, squiggles. Faint, but unmistakable. In fact, there was a trick to it. The machine was picking up stray electrical signals from around the room. But if you don't know the trick, the fuck? My point here isn't that Jello can think.

That would be silly. My point is that you should not eat Jell-O because it's alive. No. No, the point is this. This is for real this time. And it's something that's going to keep coming up over and over again in this series. The point is that the brain is a mystery, even when it's Lyme. There's a mysterious illness among some students in Leroy. It has families there both stumped...

And scare. Good evening, I'm Jenny Ryan. But just because it's a mystery, it doesn't mean it can't be solved. School officials sent home a letter today assuring parents that they are trying to get to the bottom of all of this. I'm Dan Taberski.

From Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, this is Hysterical. Or is it? This season on Hysterical. I felt like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. They thought it was all in my head and that I was making it up. I just said, what do you think? Do you think she's faking? And she's like, I don't know.

These kids are just totally normal, and then next thing you know, they're going, and their arms are swinging. Everybody decided they were a detective and tried to figure it out. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder.

Oh shit, having those natural gas wells on my football field is not a really fucking smart thing to do now, is it? The doctors kept coming back to its mass hysteria. The idea that this is somehow psychogenic mass hysteria, that just doesn't apply to me. People are just so tired of being called liars that they won't talk about it anymore. It looked like Tourette's. It really did. But you don't catch Tourette's.

Thanks for listening to episode one of Hysterical. In episode two, tensions rise as parents demand answers from school officials. The state health department comes up with a diagnosis, but they're reluctant to share it publicly. And suspicions grow that authorities may be hiding the real cause of the outbreak. Is there an external pathogen or something even more mysterious?

Find out right now. Episodes two through seven of Hysterical are available now exclusively on Wondery Plus. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. or on Apple Podcasts and finish this unfolding story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Hysterical is a production of Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios.

Our lead producer is Henry Malofsky. Our associate producer is Marie-Alexa Kavanaugh. Producer, Sophie Bridges. Managing producer, Aaron Kelly. Senior producer, Lina Masitsis. Additional production by Zandra Ellen. Diane Hansen is our editor. Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. Fact-checking by Natsumi Ajisaka. Mixing by Hannes Brown. Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija.

Original music composed and performed by Dina McAbee. Legal services for Pineapple Street from Crystal Tupia. For Wondery, our senior producers are Lizzie Bassett and Claire Chambers. Coordinating producer, Mariah Gossett. Senior Managing Producer, Callum Plews. Hysterical is written and executive produced by me. I'm Dan Taberski. Our executive producers for Pineapple Street are Max Linsky, Henry Malofsky, Asha Saluja, and Jenna Weiss-Berman.

Executive producers for Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent. Thanks for listening. I'm Raza Jafri, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Morten Storm, the spy who lived inside Al-Qaeda. Unfulfilled with his life in a notorious Danish biker gang, Morten Storm is lost.

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