Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for September 13, 2012

SeaFox10, put a lid on it!

All this time, I thought mass hysteria referred to crowds panicking about some apparent disaster. I didn’t know it had a stranger meaning in psychology.

If those dueling French generals had been thrown into jail, they would have realized that the ‘pen’ was mightier than the sword!

OMG! Not verbal outbursts.

Mass hysteria? Most likely someone passed around some drug and dared the girls to take it.

In my high school outbreaks of mass hysteria with painful shaking and verbal outbursts usually came right after the announcement of a math quiz.

This just proves that French Generals can’t fight worth a darn, or one of them would have won long before 19 years had passed.

A couple of links about what happened at the high school.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/mystery-illness-is-social_n_1262480.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/26/leroy-high-school-mystery_n_1234111.html

The most likely hypothesis is that one person started having symptoms as a result of stress and then other people started mimicking. At first they thought it was some type of contamination but that was ruled out by multiple agencies.

Were those students autistic?

@ Chikuku Do you remember the name of that short story? I’d like to read it.