Some Really Interesting Cases of Mass Hysteria

So wound up and caffeinated, and we just talked about dark money. Oh yeah, maybe we should have recorded that last Maybe he could have just done power lifting for the rest of the day. Jim, what do uh? So we did an episode. I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay, go ahead, I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. Uh. November we did an episode on collective hysteria? Yes, not too long ago. What is collective hysteria? Yeah? And it was a good one. Was that a shot at me

just now? Because I interrupt you a lot? Was what a shot that? You don't want to interrupt me because I interrupt you? It's part of the show. Okay, I don't mean to, and I feel badly when I noticed it. How do you notice it? I would say six tenths of the time, So three fifths is another way to put that. I can live with that. Um, it was a good episode, but we did not cover There are a lot of cases of mass hysteria, and we only covered a small portion. Yeah, we're not gonna go in

depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that, go listen to that episode, which is a good one if I remember correctly. Yeah, we should talk about it a little bit, sure, because I think there's stuff in here that we didn't even cover about the overall thing, or at least it didn't seem familiar to me. So it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions, uh, conversion disorder.

What else? Um, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no no. You need to duplicate that though with like tin Josh is doing it at once. That's a good right there. Maybe Jerry could do that, she says she can't. It's a real thing, though, and basically it is when um, people have physical symptoms of something without there being a physical cause. Not only that, so that's a psychosomatic illness.

For a mass psychogenic illness, the psychosomatic illness is catching. Yes, it's an epidemic, an infection of imagined illness, that's right, which is pretty awesome. Oh, it's amazing. I mean not when you're going through it and you're suffering, because the people who are suffering are actually experiencing suffering. Yeah, like there there. It might be made up, it might be

all in their heads, but to them it's quite real. Yeah, but it is sociologically and psychoical, logically, psychicologically speaking, I'm sick, people, so I apologize if I'm not talking good m uh. Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Um. One thing that happens is is usually triggered by some sort of stress, uh, some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah, and it usually happens in very close knit communities. Um,

often among young women. They're very susceptible to it, apparently, perhaps isolated communities. Yeah, and then communities of people who are fairly high on the totem pole and that they don't have a lot of social status necessarily or a lot of say in their own lives. Um. And they, Uh, this is a means of saying there's something very wrong in my world. Yes, that's people who study these things. That's what they've come up with. Like I've got no voice, but I can break out in a rash. I can

bark like a dog and make you do it too, exactly. So, uh, the outcome supposedly for this, for getting over this is better in children than adults, even though more children are stricken with it, it seems like than adults. But that makes total sense, like a kid's more likely to follow along with the crowd. But then also be like, what were we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo? So let's all go play Nintendo because it's I wish I had an old any Yes, like the original one

and a copy of Mike Tysones Punch Out. That's all you need. Yeah, I was into the whatever that first Mario game was where it was the big world? Mario Brothers? Was that a super Mario Brothers? And then Metroid? Did you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play a ton of Yes, but I played what was the first really? Not Sega? Was it the first PlayStation that had Street Fighter? No, I think street Fighter. I can't remember what it was. I'll remember is that there was

Genesis maybe head street Fighter. No, I wouldn't say of Genesis. This dude I had new in college had a street Fighter and uh, Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Mortal Kombat was definitely. It might have been Super Nintendo or did you play Golden Eye? Oh? Yeah, man, that was the first great first person shooter. It was so well done. Yeah. But I just remember listening to Dr Dre's The Chronic and playing Street Fighter and that was Mortal Kombat for a year solid. And I think I went to school and

made grades in the classes. In the classes, man, I need a nap. You want to talk about semes hysterias? Yes, Do you want to talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah? So in in uh, the in medieval times, not the restaurant, no, but maybe there too. Um, if you had a sister or a niece or a an aunt or somebody who was a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Oh, there weren't mental asylums at the time, so you couldn't commit them, but you could have them sent to a

convent or a nunnery. Wow. So like a brother could do that to a sister. Oh, yes, yeah, so you could take you could usurp that that inheritance that was rightfully there's Or if you had a daughter who was um, unattractive or possibly disfigured, Uh, you could say, I don't want the world to see you, I'm gonna send you a comment or a nunnery. And it sounds pretty bad, and in a lot of cases it was. But it also was a good deal for a lot of young

women because they would get a high quality education. They could pursue creative interests like drawing and painting and sewing or whatever floated their boat outfits. Shore were sure, Um, so it wasn't it wasn't all bad. But I was like, why did did anybody get sent to convents? And that was why to either get rid of them or to give them an education that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But these these places were very strict and tight knit,

and so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah, I bet if you like your daughter like kissed a boy that you didn't like, you could you know, if you're worried about that. After the convents, after the nunnery Uh, so we're gonna talk about a couple of cases with nunneries. But uh, in medieval times there were more than one

hundred cases of mass hysterias breaking out. It happened a lot those one in Spain and the fifteen hundreds where nuns bleeded like sheep and had convulsions, one in France, and four one where they yelped like dogs. Okay, uh and then this one in France where uh, all of a sudden, one day a nun started me owing like a cat. Yes, caught on, caught on like wildfire. Apparently in this convent. By within a few days, all of the nuns were mewing and it was loud, like the

neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only mewing, but it became a mewt in Unison. It became structured with their mewing. So for a few hours a day they would all get together and meow. That's right. Which imagine just like stopping by on your travels because you you heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey. Leg you show up and you enter into a giant room

filled with nuns all me owing in Unison. Yeah, that one might have been some guy's idea of a good time, because you know, you just kind of make a face and go help yourself to a turkey leg and kick back and watch the weirdos meow. Well, here's one of the problems though. In medieval times in France, cats were not well regarded. They were thought to be of the double uh, and so if you're meowing like a cat,

it's a nun It not good. They also believed in demonic possession and um, so they brought in some soldiers who said we're gonna whip you and beat you and unless you stop me owing. And it worked and they

stopped me. Right. But that's that's a really important point that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed, so in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility, and that is the basis of this, for the person to really experience it and take it away from an act of their own will power and rather be a sufferer of some weird illness. Is a belief that something like this could possibly happen, and so they were possessed.

Rather than them just me owing and going along with the crowd or whatever, they were instead possessed at the time, and so their responsibility was removed and therefore they could really give themselves over to it. Yeah. I think that's

the hallmark of mass psychogenic illness. Yeah. Absolute. It also happened in Germany, not the me owing, but in the fifteenth century, and none bit another, none in the convent, and then I don't know if that none in turn bit another, but they started biting one another a lot. And that didn't just stick around that nunnery, It's spread all over Germany. Well, they were worried that there was like an actual infection going on. Yeah, that would cause

you to go crazy and bite people. And not only did it spread to Germany, chuck, it also spread to Rome, even all the way to Rome. Yeah. Um. And then apparently they stopped biting when they got really tired. Yeah, that was the end of that. That seems like a very ham fisted follow up, wouldn't you be like that was a weird week? Yeah, they probably did. But I mean, like, yeah, it's very interesting that mass psychogenic illnesses in and of

themselves are very interesting. But I'm also interested in the transition back to normalcy. How do you how do groups that go through that like work that out to get there or do they just now I don't know, Like you said, that'd be totally weird to be like, hey, remember last week when we were all me owing. That was so weird and we're all of our roasted turkey legs. All right, maw, let's uh move on to the kissing

bug scare of eight. Uh try a toman bugs. Uh. They looks sort of like stink bugs, but they carry a parasite that can cause a disease called Chagas disease, and Chagas disease wasn't described until nineteen o six or o nine, and this kissing bug outbreak was eighteen ninety nine in the United States. And a kissing bug is called that because they bite you. They feast on your blood through your lips, which has only three layers of skin, whereas the rest of your face has about sixteen layers.

Can't or your eyelids, sure, so it's easily penetrated, and the bug will just sit there and suck on you while you're sleeping. But it has a little parting gift for you afterward. When it finishes feasting on your blood through your lips, it turns around and poops on the whole that it made on your mouth, and I knew that was coming, and in doing so, it can infect you with shagas disease. Yeah, no good. If you live in the upper one third of the United States, you

don't have to sweat it. Basically, draw a line from the top of California all the way across the United States, and anything below that, um, you might have kissing bugs. So by this bug was well known to science already, but it wasn't popularly known. So it's an exotic, weird species. And a couple of cases of shagas disease did sprout up. But what spread this thing and turn it into a mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this was

This one's a little bit different. It seems like most of these cases of mass hysteria were pretty confined, but this one is a clear indication of people having uh, maybe a mosquito bite or any a bed bug maybe and itching at it and then seeing something on the news and then saying, oh, no, I got bit by the kissing bug, right, and and so part of it, part of what it was attributed to. And actually the guy who is the head of the entomology for the U. S d A at the time said that this was

He called it a newspaper epidemic. And it was because the newspaper reporting so clearly described the symptoms that a person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself for herself. And so they started collecting bugs. Like if somebody was bit by a bug or even saw a bug in their house, they'd be like, oh God, a kissing bug. Catch it and send it off to like the U.

S d A for analysis. And the USDA got everything from like houseflies to bumblebees, a lot of bugs from people who were worried that they were Um they were they'd broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah, And the good news is, uh, it stopped when the newspaper stopped writing about it. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bump, will be And it happened in the nineties and the eighteen nineties were really really weird decade. Um, there was a lot of death cults that sprang up around the

around the world. But um, there there was have you ever read that book Wisconsin Death Trip? It is crazy, man. It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from Wisconsin in the eight nineties and assembled it. It paints one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people. They did the worst things to one another. They just endured so much. And it was a really really good

example of what happened in the eight nineties. Something weird happened that decade. You should check that book out. It's neat to just look through yet. Uh tomorrow, man, So don't tell me anything. So speaking of the which actually, Chuck, I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaw. So you were on Cinema jaw like a few months back. It's a great movie podcast, it is, and Um, I was on it recently and their episode that came out on Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday, and we talked about missing

persons like we did tie into our episode. Um, what movies did you talk about? We talked about The Lady Vanishes. No, not that one because I haven't seen it. Um, have you ever seen The Vanishing? The original one from the eighties, the Franco Dutch production that the superior? Right, So I'd only seen The Jeff Bridges Keeper Southerland, which I liked, but then I started reading up on it and I was like, oh, this sucks. Compared to the original Dutch

version of anything before then, it's probably better. It was so good, dude. I was watching it via YouTube on my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. It was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles have has hazardusly slapped over the Dutch subtitles, and I was still like, oh man, this is so good. Good movie. It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear that episode. Good check it out and see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah,

yeah they did. They did a review of The Witch, and I put the phone out and just went like I could just barely hear that they were still talking, and when they finished, I put the phone back up for the interview. Yeah, it's good to see horror movies and you don't even know if you want to call it a horror movie, but movies like that coming back with like The Babba Duck, and it follows like people are making good quality movies. Now. I didn't like The Bubba Duck. Oh man, I thought it was great. A

lot of people did. It's got high ratings on Netflix. All right, well, let's take a break. Maybe we'll just come back and talk about movies for the rest of the show. All Right, we're back. We're so back to talk about the Halifax slasher of ninety eight. Halifax, England, not Nova Scotia. That's what I thought at first, Nova Scotia. I didn't know there's two Halifax's, didn't neither Um Halifax in November nineteen Uh, there was a woman named Um.

Two women, two women, Gerty Watts and Mary Gledhill. We're taking a little walk after work at their mill. I guess they were walking home and they said a man came out and slashed us with a knife. Yeah, we're bleeding, for God's sake, look at me. Blood, there's blood. Uh, go find this creep. Right, that's what they told the cops. And the cops are like, wa wa wa wa slasher all right. So they started looking for the guy and

never found any trace of them. And it was like kind of a thing for a little a while, but it really became a thing five days later when another woman came to the police station and said, look at this. Some guys just came by and slashed my wrist. Yes, that was Mary Sutcliffe and she supposedly fought him off even and gave a very clear description of what he looked like. So the newspapers are like, I think there

might be a slasher at large. And within the next five days, several more people came forward, uh and came to the police station or came to the newspapers with stories about how they've been slashed by some anonymous stranger. And Halifax was f freaked out. They compared the same fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack the Ripper era. Um. People were just nervous that that

somebody was going to slash them. Yeah, the soccer hooligan started beating people up like that guy didn't look right. He looks like a slasher to me, that's what soccer hooligans or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down, um, And it became a real problem. There's a couple of things though. One these lashes, he wasn't a very good slasher. These were all very superficial cuts. Uh. No one was severely wounded at all in any of the cases. So, but it was still confounding and people are still scared.

He could be a bad slasher, still could improve, So we better call Scotland Yard and they did, and Scotland Yards sent two detectives and the detectives said, well, let us start interviewing witnesses, and the moment they did, they found that the witnesses stories just started crumbling. Well, first of all, none of the descriptions matched, so they thought at first, the dumb cops in Halifax thought, well, maybe there's multiple slashers. Scotland Yard said, there's not multiple slashers.

There's not one slasher. They're like they would have known that. And Nova Scotia. The final lady Beatrice Sorrel, said, uh, they finally, I guess they put the bright light in her eyes. And she said I did it myself after having a row with my boy, after she discovered she was pregnant. She had bought a new razor blade and said, I held hold of the blade in my right hand and slashed down my left arm, making a long cut,

and my Macintosh coat and cardigan. And I know what you're thinking, it's a waste of a good cardigan and Macintosh whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. Is it? That sounds about right? Yeah, I think so, Mac the Mac. No, I think a mac is a raincoat because the Beatles song eleanor Rigby the Mac he never wears a mac and the pouring rain very strange. Man, I never realized that. All right, so Macintosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Uh,

then she said. I then put the blade back into the cut and scratched down my arm twice and put my fingers through the cut in the cloth. I saw that they were covered in blood. The reason why I cut my arm was because I was in a temper and had been reading in the papers about girls being slashed. So she, I guess was in a temper and it wasn't just her. Like nine of the twelve victims eventually

confessed to doing it themselves. Um, and this this, this is a weird mass psychogenic illness, you know what I mean? Because these people are slashing themselves. They're not like catching something they think is is making them dizzy or whatever. They're cutting themselves and then going to the police and saying a slasher did it. I guess for attention. Maybe, well they did get attention. They got attention in jail

four weeks. Still, if you're like a normal, ordinary citizen who slashes herself for himself, um, just for attention, four weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. I wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. Um. The thing is, Chuck is I could not find whether the first two victims were actually slashed at They didn't show up in as far as I know, they weren't once that confessed, and I didn't see that they got any

jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it led to the slash or scare, or did they do it themselves or to each other? That's I don't know. The Halifax carrier on December two said, carry on, Halifax. The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half graze, wild eyed man has been wandering around attacking helpless women in dark streets is exploded. Waca waka And I wish I people talked so much better back then. Um, I was in a temper Macintosh man. Uh. This is not

the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. There's one in Taipei, Taiwan in the fifties where there's this basically this idea that there was a slasher walking around, and this one was more akin to the kissing bug thing where people who had cuts on them says, you know, you'll get a cut every once in a while and be like,

where did I get that cut on my thumb? Right now? Okay, if you had been susceptible to this Taipei Taiwan slasher scare, you may have gone to the police have been like, I was slashed because and this one was a little more legitimate to me. The the idea behind the slasher was he would brush past you in the crowd and you wouldn't even notice you've been slashed until later. So that that was yeah, it was that. That's the better of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses between that and Halifax.

If you asked me, I wonder if Tina fe was a part of that. You know, that's how she got that scar. Which scar she has a scar on her face, and uh, she was slashed when she was a kid playing in her front yard. She by some random crazy I didn't know that, and that's kind of all the information that's out there. She think admitted that in an interview, and just that was the story slashing. It's just's a terrible crime. Yeah, it just sounds like seeking and disfigure somebody.

It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do you remember that m Saturday Night Live. Mel Gibson was on. It was back in the eighties and it was set in the Old West, and he was like an Old West like gun slinger. I just think of sheriff. But his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid. It was like matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic it was. And he got a gunfight with somebody, he like throws acid on him. And they didn't show that

the acid being like throwing on the guy. It just showed the crowd's reaction and they were all like, oh god, that's awful. Oh that's great. Don't you hate it when you get a scene from a movie in your head and you can't pinpoint where it's from. I got one right now. There's there's a scene where a guy gets slashed and right under the eye as like a parting shot, like these students were gonna fight and it doesn't happen. They just slashes the guy and the princess pride. Yes,

it is. It's not the Princess Pride. King Humper didn't get it or Prince Humper didn't gets it from somebody. It's what I'm thinking, Well that happens. Are you sure there's something When you're thinking, yeah, somebody Old right in and tell me. It was like they were faced off and we're gonna fight, and then they and the guy had a knife I think on his knuckle. And then

at the variant, Oh, I know, Platoon got it. Tom Barnger and Charlie Sheen he cuts had had the blade on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye, and he was gonna punch him, and they all talked him down and right at the very and he just went slash and slashed him. Well, Platoon and Princess Bright are virtually interchangeable, the same same story. Good point. So yeah, Platoon was a good movie. That was a big college

movie for me. I'll watched that a lot. All right, we're rambling, so that means we should take a break in. Jerry Old, get us back in order. I think I said Platoon is a good movie. All right, Chuck, Let's head on over to uh tangan Yika also known as Tanzania. You mean Tanzania, but back in nine two was known as Tanganyika and um in Tanga Tanganyika, there was a boarding school, a girl's boarding school, so you can understand what's about to happen there. And some girls started to giggle,

and apparently it wasn't like a happy giggle. It was like a nervous giggle, you know, like anxious laughter. And it started to spread, Yes, which is normal enough, giggling like the church giggle you ever heard of that it's contagious, hard to stop. And that's usually if you're in a place where you shouldn't be laughing and you can't contain it, and then your friends starts laughing and you can't contain it and you have to go excuse yourself. Then you

never go back in the room. So this supposedly lasted though for like six months, six months to a year and a half, spreading all over the place, depending on who you ask. Uncontrollable and contagious laughter. Uh, they had to shut down the school, yeah, for two months and then they're like, okay, surely it's over, and I opened it back up, started by back up. So this one bothered me a little bit because you can't just constantly giggle and laugh, and it's impossible. I read this this

interview with the guy. Um, I read the same one, the Chicago Tribune interview. Yeah, so that I think he made a pretty good point. He was saying, like, there's very there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all, it's called the laughter epidemic. So people just think like it's like the Monty Python, It's Funniest Jokes Kit or something, right, Um, that's not the case. It was again, it was not joyful after it was anxious laughter. And then there were

plenty of other symptoms too. There was crying, there was pain, there was fainting. Yeah, Um, and there was definitely laughter. And it definitely did spread, but it wasn't just like

constant laughter. Yeah, and um it did. It did last for at least six months, and it did spread to other villages because when these girls who were at this boarding school away from home were sent home because the school was shut down, they actually took it with them to their other villages, which suggests that the stress that um kicked this off was not just at the boarding school, that it was larger than that. And around this time Tanzania was had gained independence, so there was a lot

of anxiety about what the future held. So it started at the school where the girls were apparently very challenged academically, and then uh, it spread it through the stress of you know what, what's the future gonna bring. That's the that's the official line that this one linguist has come up with. I believe it. That one's not so great now. I think that's one of the off sited examples though,

of a genuine mass psychogenic illness. You know, because the fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding school into the larger into villages outside of it, that's that's a tense situation. It is very tense. Uh. The West Bank fainting epidemic of that spring, about a thousand young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick and uh, Like a lot of these cases, it's like dizziness, headache, weird,

stomach pains. It's like things that you can't really put a finger on as far as tracing it back, like well, this must be something. Uh. And so of course because of where it was uh. And then these were young schoolgirls, largely we're twelve to seventeen years old. So because of where it was in the world, Uh, Palestinian leaders started saying, you know what, Israelis are using chemical warfare against us. Yeah, because the first kids to fall ill had reported smelling

like a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. And if you're in that part of the world, you got kids breaking out in rashes and and uh, stomach pain and blurred vision and they're smelling something funny. That's pretty logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis countered back with if there's any chemical warfare being used, you guys are using it on your own people, so you

can blame us. So these kids fell ill from the smell, and all of a sudden, Palestine and Israel are like publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical warfare on their own on Arab kids. This is a big deal. When this happened, it was a big deal, and it could have escalated to who knows what, But um, the fact is there was nothing going on at all. It was another case of mass collective hysteria. They closed

schools in the West Bank. Um, no one else got sick. Uh. They've they've searched all the buildings and the schools, and they found no chemical residue, no mouthfeasance going on whatsoever. They found a smelly bathroom, though, and they think that might have been the source of the initial foul smell that kicked it all off. A stinky bathroom. Some boy uh went into the hurt locker. He logged out. That was a reference to a listener mail, by the way, I know, and somebody else wrote in the best one

in my opinion, logged out. I was like, you want logged out for taking a poop? I gotta go log out. Oh that's okay, I got it. Well, that's pretty good. It is good. It does relevant. It's like that Simpsons. I think I just logged onto my internet. Do you remember was that Ralph? No, it was m Carl went back when they were kids when they can't fig about why Homer's having a mental breakdown. It's because he discovered a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory.

And Carl's talking about the interneting on his bathing suit. And then later on he goes, I think I just logged onto my internet. So great. They blamed the West Bank. Uh, fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. Uh. And then of course there were news reports of the toxic gas and so that's why it's spread. And Chuck, we can do this all day, but we're not going to. Let's bring

it home with one more so. In Portugal, in May of two thousand and six, there was a teen soap opera called Save by the Bell, called Morongos calm asuka. That's my Portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good? I mean strawberries with sugar. It was the name of the uh, the the teen show Delicious, And in May of two thousand six, the show aired an episode where this mysterious illness was striking kids down left and right, and the source of the disease was at school. It was being

spread at school. It was a virus, and all of a sudden, kids in the real world who were watching strawberses Sugar started to come down with a very strangely similar disease. Yeah. Um, I don't know if we said it was in two thousand and six. All right, well, let's drive that home because that was a big year. Um. Was that the year we started our show No. Two thousands seven eight, But we've added since two thousand eight.

That's crazy year eight man, who knew that we would one day be veterans of a medium old veterans like we were good around on our porch or their Confederate pistols under our blankets. That's right. Uh So these kids were not only at one school, they were at fourteen different schools around the country, which was a little different than most cases because usually it's like it starts in this one school. But that's because the clear cause of this was this television show that kids loved all over

the country. The yeah, was this episode of a TV show. Absolutely, and luckily the Portuguese authorities health authorities, they did some investigating and they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness. Pretty interesting stuff, and they said, what, the kids are

really stressed about our final exams? Well, they think it started with some kids who had actual allergies and had seen this episode and started worrying that their own allergies were actually symptom of a disease that spread the kids who were basically going along with it be out of stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one is because it was two thousand six, you can go on the internet and look at their articles. You can

log onto your internet. You can log onto your internet and look up art articles that are like is the strawberries with sugar virus? Real? Like people were writing into newspapers. You know, my kid is having these symptoms, Like is it a real thing? Did they or did they just make this up? And it still goes on? I mean apparently this these So there's two kinds. Basically, there's motor

um illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more like fainting, upset, stomach headache, motors where you're twitching and mowing and stuff like that. Um. But there's supposedly hundreds of these cases around the world every year. They happen a lot. Maybe it'll come to your town if you're lucky, join right in. I say, yeah me, Allen, bite the

night away, let it loose for a week. Uh. If you want to know more about mass hysterias, go listen to what is collective hysteria or other episode and then uh you can search for mass hysteria also in the search part Houston works dot com. Since I said also it's time for your listener mail, I'm gonna call this long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and told Georgia that I was going to read it and for god, it's about the fairy tales. Hedge Hedge. My

name is Georgia. I live in Stockholm. Hedge, I think hatch hedges. Hey, hey, sure in Swedish. Uh, Stockholm Swedie. Yes, we did another good episode on Stockholm. Singer right that a k a. The Swedish Delight. Sure, that's what the cops call it. He's got the sweih del My name is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening to your show for a few years. I love it.

I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode and I asked my husband about the term ashen put since he's German and I often used Disney movies to help teach me Swedish. Uh. He figured out that it's kind of a play on words and implies a scullery maid covered in ashes. Ashen is ash as opposed to cinder, which is incorrectly used in the English name, since if you were covered in cinders, you know severe burns. As it is pieces of burning slag. It's true. It is

translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinda. Uh, puto doesn't exist in German, he says, Uh, I don't know that sounds so German to me. It sounds pretty German. But the term for scullion or kitchen helper is ashan brutal. I'm so glad you took German. So this is the male form, he thinks, Ashan put it sounds like words are just growing in your mouth, like you know those dinosaurs you can get wet and they turn into giant

sponge dinosaurs. No, but I do know the little lead pellets that you would like that would grow into big snakes close enough, Those are what are growing in your mouth when you're saying during the words. He thinks, ashan puto is kind of a feminine version of Ashan brutal, since German is nonsensical engendered her words. I hope this information is still interesting to you, guys. Her in broad dog edged hedge headge Georgia, thanks a lot. That was

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