Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry
Speaker 1: over there. Stuff you should know. I'm just so sick
Speaker 1: of my voice right now. I just looked over almost
Speaker 1: a check to see if Jerry was there. Even though
Speaker 1: this room is so small, She's always visible, right. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I did that. How are you okay?
Speaker 1: It's a dude, it's my voice. Man, it's driving me crazy.
Speaker 1: So wound up and caffeinated, and we just talked about
Speaker 1: dark money. Oh yeah, maybe we should have recorded that
Speaker 1: last Maybe he could have just done power lifting for
Speaker 1: the rest of the day. Jim, what do uh? So
Speaker 1: we did an episode. I'm not done talking about power lifting. Okay,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I'm just kidding. I don't want to interrupt you. Uh.
Speaker 1: November we did an episode on collective hysteria? Yes, not
Speaker 1: too long ago. What is collective hysteria? Yeah? And it
Speaker 1: was a good one. Was that a shot at me
Speaker 1: just now? Because I interrupt you a lot? Was what
Speaker 1: a shot that? You don't want to interrupt me because
Speaker 1: I interrupt you? It's part of the show. Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't mean to, and I feel badly when I noticed it.
Speaker 1: How do you notice it? I would say six tenths
Speaker 1: of the time, So three fifths is another way to
Speaker 1: put that. I can live with that. Um, it was
Speaker 1: a good episode, but we did not cover There are
Speaker 1: a lot of cases of mass hysteria, and we only
Speaker 1: covered a small portion. Yeah, we're not gonna go in
Speaker 1: depth about what mass hysteria is. If you want that,
Speaker 1: go listen to that episode, which is a good one
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly. Yeah, we should talk about it
Speaker 1: a little bit, sure, because I think there's stuff in
Speaker 1: here that we didn't even cover about the overall thing,
Speaker 1: or at least it didn't seem familiar to me. So
Speaker 1: it's also called mass psychogenic illness, collective delusions, uh, conversion disorder.
Speaker 1: What else? Um, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: You need to duplicate that though with like tin Josh
Speaker 1: is doing it at once. That's a good right there.
Speaker 1: Maybe Jerry could do that, she says she can't. It's
Speaker 1: a real thing, though, and basically it is when um,
Speaker 1: people have physical symptoms of something without there being a
Speaker 1: physical cause. Not only that, so that's a psychosomatic illness.
Speaker 1: For a mass psychogenic illness, the psychosomatic illness is catching. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's an epidemic, an infection of imagined illness, that's right,
Speaker 1: which is pretty awesome. Oh, it's amazing. I mean not
Speaker 1: when you're going through it and you're suffering, because the
Speaker 1: people who are suffering are actually experiencing suffering. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: there there. It might be made up, it might be
Speaker 1: all in their heads, but to them it's quite real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it is sociologically and psychoical, logically, psychicologically speaking, I'm sick, people,
Speaker 1: so I apologize if I'm not talking good m uh.
Speaker 1: Psychologically speaking and sociologically, it's just like utterly fascinating. Um.
Speaker 1: One thing that happens is is usually triggered by some
Speaker 1: sort of stress, uh, some sort of emotional trigger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it usually happens in very close knit communities. Um,
Speaker 1: often among young women. They're very susceptible to it, apparently,
Speaker 1: perhaps isolated communities. Yeah, and then communities of people who
Speaker 1: are fairly high on the totem pole and that they
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of social status necessarily or a
Speaker 1: lot of say in their own lives. Um. And they, Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a means of saying there's something very wrong
Speaker 1: in my world. Yes, that's people who study these things.
Speaker 1: That's what they've come up with. Like I've got no voice,
Speaker 1: but I can break out in a rash. I can
Speaker 1: bark like a dog and make you do it too, exactly. So, uh,
Speaker 1: the outcome supposedly for this, for getting over this is
Speaker 1: better in children than adults, even though more children are
Speaker 1: stricken with it, it seems like than adults. But that
Speaker 1: makes total sense, like a kid's more likely to follow
Speaker 1: along with the crowd. But then also be like, what
Speaker 1: were we just having a rash about? Let's go play Nintendo?
Speaker 1: So let's all go play Nintendo because it's I wish
Speaker 1: I had an old any Yes, like the original one
Speaker 1: and a copy of Mike Tysones Punch Out. That's all
Speaker 1: you need. Yeah, I was into the whatever that first
Speaker 1: Mario game was where it was the big world? Mario Brothers?
Speaker 1: Was that a super Mario Brothers? And then Metroid? Did
Speaker 1: you play Metroid? I don't think so. I didn't play
Speaker 1: a ton of Yes, but I played what was the
Speaker 1: first really? Not Sega? Was it the first PlayStation that
Speaker 1: had Street Fighter? No, I think street Fighter. I can't
Speaker 1: remember what it was. I'll remember is that there was
Speaker 1: Genesis maybe head street Fighter. No, I wouldn't say of Genesis.
Speaker 1: This dude I had new in college had a street
Speaker 1: Fighter and uh, Mortal Kombat. Yeah, Mortal Kombat was definitely.
Speaker 1: It might have been Super Nintendo or did you play
Speaker 1: Golden Eye? Oh? Yeah, man, that was the first great
Speaker 1: first person shooter. It was so well done. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: I just remember listening to Dr Dre's The Chronic and
Speaker 1: playing Street Fighter and that was Mortal Kombat for a
Speaker 1: year solid. And I think I went to school and
Speaker 1: made grades in the classes. In the classes, man, I
Speaker 1: need a nap. You want to talk about semes hysterias? Yes,
Speaker 1: Do you want to talk about nuns in the Middle Ages? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So in in uh, the in medieval times, not the restaurant, no,
Speaker 1: but maybe there too. Um, if you had a sister
Speaker 1: or a niece or a an aunt or somebody who
Speaker 1: was a rightful heir to the estate that you wanted. Oh,
Speaker 1: there weren't mental asylums at the time, so you couldn't
Speaker 1: commit them, but you could have them sent to a
Speaker 1: convent or a nunnery. Wow. So like a brother could
Speaker 1: do that to a sister. Oh, yes, yeah, so you
Speaker 1: could take you could usurp that that inheritance that was
Speaker 1: rightfully there's Or if you had a daughter who was um,
Speaker 1: unattractive or possibly disfigured, Uh, you could say, I don't
Speaker 1: want the world to see you, I'm gonna send you
Speaker 1: a comment or a nunnery. And it sounds pretty bad,
Speaker 1: and in a lot of cases it was. But it
Speaker 1: also was a good deal for a lot of young
Speaker 1: women because they would get a high quality education. They
Speaker 1: could pursue creative interests like drawing and painting and sewing
Speaker 1: or whatever floated their boat outfits. Shore were sure, Um,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't it wasn't all bad. But I was like,
Speaker 1: why did did anybody get sent to convents? And that
Speaker 1: was why to either get rid of them or to
Speaker 1: give them an education that they otherwise wouldn't have had.
Speaker 1: But these these places were very strict and tight knit,
Speaker 1: and so they were ripe for mass psychogenic illnesses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet if you like your daughter like kissed a
Speaker 1: boy that you didn't like, you could you know, if
Speaker 1: you're worried about that. After the convents, after the nunnery Uh,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna talk about a couple of cases with nunneries.
Speaker 1: But uh, in medieval times there were more than one
Speaker 1: hundred cases of mass hysterias breaking out. It happened a
Speaker 1: lot those one in Spain and the fifteen hundreds where
Speaker 1: nuns bleeded like sheep and had convulsions, one in France,
Speaker 1: and four one where they yelped like dogs. Okay, uh
Speaker 1: and then this one in France where uh, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, one day a nun started me owing like
Speaker 1: a cat. Yes, caught on, caught on like wildfire. Apparently
Speaker 1: in this convent. By within a few days, all of
Speaker 1: the nuns were mewing and it was loud, like the
Speaker 1: neighbors could hear it. Yeah. And not only mewing, but
Speaker 1: it became a mewt in Unison. It became structured with
Speaker 1: their mewing. So for a few hours a day they
Speaker 1: would all get together and meow. That's right. Which imagine
Speaker 1: just like stopping by on your travels because you you
Speaker 1: heard this one convent has really good roasted turkey. Leg
Speaker 1: you show up and you enter into a giant room
Speaker 1: filled with nuns all me owing in Unison. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: one might have been some guy's idea of a good time,
Speaker 1: because you know, you just kind of make a face
Speaker 1: and go help yourself to a turkey leg and kick
Speaker 1: back and watch the weirdos meow. Well, here's one of
Speaker 1: the problems though. In medieval times in France, cats were
Speaker 1: not well regarded. They were thought to be of the
Speaker 1: double uh, and so if you're meowing like a cat,
Speaker 1: it's a nun It not good. They also believed in
Speaker 1: demonic possession and um, so they brought in some soldiers
Speaker 1: who said we're gonna whip you and beat you and
Speaker 1: unless you stop me owing. And it worked and they
Speaker 1: stopped me. Right. But that's that's a really important point
Speaker 1: that there is a widespread belief that you could become possessed,
Speaker 1: so in that it provides this platform that removes individual responsibility,
Speaker 1: and that is the basis of this, for the person
Speaker 1: to really experience it and take it away from an
Speaker 1: act of their own will power and rather be a
Speaker 1: sufferer of some weird illness. Is a belief that something
Speaker 1: like this could possibly happen, and so they were possessed.
Speaker 1: Rather than them just me owing and going along with
Speaker 1: the crowd or whatever, they were instead possessed at the time,
Speaker 1: and so their responsibility was removed and therefore they could
Speaker 1: really give themselves over to it. Yeah. I think that's
Speaker 1: the hallmark of mass psychogenic illness. Yeah. Absolute. It also
Speaker 1: happened in Germany, not the me owing, but in the
Speaker 1: fifteenth century, and none bit another, none in the convent,
Speaker 1: and then I don't know if that none in turn
Speaker 1: bit another, but they started biting one another a lot.
Speaker 1: And that didn't just stick around that nunnery, It's spread
Speaker 1: all over Germany. Well, they were worried that there was
Speaker 1: like an actual infection going on. Yeah, that would cause
Speaker 1: you to go crazy and bite people. And not only
Speaker 1: did it spread to Germany, chuck, it also spread to Rome,
Speaker 1: even all the way to Rome. Yeah. Um. And then
Speaker 1: apparently they stopped biting when they got really tired. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the end of that. That seems like a
Speaker 1: very ham fisted follow up, wouldn't you be like that
Speaker 1: was a weird week? Yeah, they probably did. But I mean, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very interesting that mass psychogenic illnesses in and of
Speaker 1: themselves are very interesting. But I'm also interested in the
Speaker 1: transition back to normalcy. How do you how do groups
Speaker 1: that go through that like work that out to get
Speaker 1: there or do they just now I don't know, Like
Speaker 1: you said, that'd be totally weird to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: remember last week when we were all me owing. That
Speaker 1: was so weird and we're all of our roasted turkey legs.
Speaker 1: All right, maw, let's uh move on to the kissing
Speaker 1: bug scare of eight. Uh try a toman bugs. Uh.
Speaker 1: They looks sort of like stink bugs, but they carry
Speaker 1: a parasite that can cause a disease called Chagas disease,
Speaker 1: and Chagas disease wasn't described until nineteen o six or
Speaker 1: o nine, and this kissing bug outbreak was eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine in the United States. And a kissing bug is
Speaker 1: called that because they bite you. They feast on your
Speaker 1: blood through your lips, which has only three layers of skin,
Speaker 1: whereas the rest of your face has about sixteen layers.
Speaker 1: Can't or your eyelids, sure, so it's easily penetrated, and
Speaker 1: the bug will just sit there and suck on you
Speaker 1: while you're sleeping. But it has a little parting gift
Speaker 1: for you afterward. When it finishes feasting on your blood
Speaker 1: through your lips, it turns around and poops on the
Speaker 1: whole that it made on your mouth, and I knew
Speaker 1: that was coming, and in doing so, it can infect
Speaker 1: you with shagas disease. Yeah, no good. If you live
Speaker 1: in the upper one third of the United States, you
Speaker 1: don't have to sweat it. Basically, draw a line from
Speaker 1: the top of California all the way across the United States,
Speaker 1: and anything below that, um, you might have kissing bugs.
Speaker 1: So by this bug was well known to science already,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't popularly known. So it's an exotic, weird species.
Speaker 1: And a couple of cases of shagas disease did sprout up.
Speaker 1: But what spread this thing and turn it into a
Speaker 1: mass psychogenic illness was newspaper reporting. Yeah, and this was
Speaker 1: This one's a little bit different. It seems like most
Speaker 1: of these cases of mass hysteria were pretty confined, but
Speaker 1: this one is a clear indication of people having uh,
Speaker 1: maybe a mosquito bite or any a bed bug maybe
Speaker 1: and itching at it and then seeing something on the
Speaker 1: news and then saying, oh, no, I got bit by
Speaker 1: the kissing bug, right, and and so part of it,
Speaker 1: part of what it was attributed to. And actually the
Speaker 1: guy who is the head of the entomology for the U.
Speaker 1: S d A at the time said that this was
Speaker 1: He called it a newspaper epidemic. And it was because
Speaker 1: the newspaper reporting so clearly described the symptoms that a
Speaker 1: person's imagination could create these symptoms in himself for herself.
Speaker 1: And so they started collecting bugs. Like if somebody was
Speaker 1: bit by a bug or even saw a bug in
Speaker 1: their house, they'd be like, oh God, a kissing bug.
Speaker 1: Catch it and send it off to like the U.
Speaker 1: S d A for analysis. And the USDA got everything
Speaker 1: from like houseflies to bumblebees, a lot of bugs from
Speaker 1: people who were worried that they were Um they were
Speaker 1: they'd broken out in this kissing disease. Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: good news is, uh, it stopped when the newspaper stopped
Speaker 1: writing about it. Everyone was like, oh, it's just a bump,
Speaker 1: will be And it happened in the nineties and the
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties were really really weird decade. Um, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of death cults that sprang up around the
Speaker 1: around the world. But um, there there was have you
Speaker 1: ever read that book Wisconsin Death Trip? It is crazy, man.
Speaker 1: It's basically this really artful collection of newspaper clippings from
Speaker 1: Wisconsin in the eight nineties and assembled it. It paints
Speaker 1: one of the grimmest, bleakest pictures of humanity ever, of
Speaker 1: of civilized humanity. Just the worst stuff happened to these people.
Speaker 1: They did the worst things to one another. They just
Speaker 1: endured so much. And it was a really really good
Speaker 1: example of what happened in the eight nineties. Something weird
Speaker 1: happened that decade. You should check that book out. It's
Speaker 1: neat to just look through yet. Uh tomorrow, man, So
Speaker 1: don't tell me anything. So speaking of the which actually, Chuck,
Speaker 1: I want to give a plug to Cinema Jaw. So
Speaker 1: you were on Cinema jaw like a few months back.
Speaker 1: It's a great movie podcast, it is, and Um, I
Speaker 1: was on it recently and their episode that came out
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday, and we talked about missing
Speaker 1: persons like we did tie into our episode. Um, what
Speaker 1: movies did you talk about? We talked about The Lady Vanishes. No,
Speaker 1: not that one because I haven't seen it. Um, have
Speaker 1: you ever seen The Vanishing? The original one from the eighties,
Speaker 1: the Franco Dutch production that the superior? Right, So I'd
Speaker 1: only seen The Jeff Bridges Keeper Southerland, which I liked,
Speaker 1: but then I started reading up on it and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, this sucks. Compared to the original Dutch
Speaker 1: version of anything before then, it's probably better. It was
Speaker 1: so good, dude. I was watching it via YouTube on
Speaker 1: my TV, so it couldn't have been more grainy. It
Speaker 1: was in spoken French with Dutch subtitles, with English subtitles
Speaker 1: have has hazardusly slapped over the Dutch subtitles, and I
Speaker 1: was still like, oh man, this is so good. Good movie.
Speaker 1: It was very good. Well, I can't wait to hear
Speaker 1: that episode. Good check it out and see The Witch tomorrow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah they did. They did a review of The Witch,
Speaker 1: and I put the phone out and just went like
Speaker 1: I could just barely hear that they were still talking,
Speaker 1: and when they finished, I put the phone back up
Speaker 1: for the interview. Yeah, it's good to see horror movies
Speaker 1: and you don't even know if you want to call
Speaker 1: it a horror movie, but movies like that coming back
Speaker 1: with like The Babba Duck, and it follows like people
Speaker 1: are making good quality movies. Now. I didn't like The
Speaker 1: Bubba Duck. Oh man, I thought it was great. A
Speaker 1: lot of people did. It's got high ratings on Netflix.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's take a break. Maybe we'll just
Speaker 1: come back and talk about movies for the rest of
Speaker 1: the show. All Right, we're back. We're so back to
Speaker 1: talk about the Halifax slasher of ninety eight. Halifax, England,
Speaker 1: not Nova Scotia. That's what I thought at first, Nova Scotia.
Speaker 1: I didn't know there's two Halifax's, didn't neither Um Halifax
Speaker 1: in November nineteen Uh, there was a woman named Um.
Speaker 1: Two women, two women, Gerty Watts and Mary Gledhill. We're
Speaker 1: taking a little walk after work at their mill. I
Speaker 1: guess they were walking home and they said a man
Speaker 1: came out and slashed us with a knife. Yeah, we're bleeding,
Speaker 1: for God's sake, look at me. Blood, there's blood. Uh,
Speaker 1: go find this creep. Right, that's what they told the cops.
Speaker 1: And the cops are like, wa wa wa wa slasher
Speaker 1: all right. So they started looking for the guy and
Speaker 1: never found any trace of them. And it was like
Speaker 1: kind of a thing for a little a while, but
Speaker 1: it really became a thing five days later when another
Speaker 1: woman came to the police station and said, look at this.
Speaker 1: Some guys just came by and slashed my wrist. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was Mary Sutcliffe and she supposedly fought him off
Speaker 1: even and gave a very clear description of what he
Speaker 1: looked like. So the newspapers are like, I think there
Speaker 1: might be a slasher at large. And within the next
Speaker 1: five days, several more people came forward, uh and came
Speaker 1: to the police station or came to the newspapers with
Speaker 1: stories about how they've been slashed by some anonymous stranger.
Speaker 1: And Halifax was f freaked out. They compared the same
Speaker 1: fear and panic to what was experienced during the Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper era. Um. People were just nervous that that
Speaker 1: somebody was going to slash them. Yeah, the soccer hooligan
Speaker 1: started beating people up like that guy didn't look right.
Speaker 1: He looks like a slasher to me, that's what soccer
Speaker 1: hooligans or a West Ham fan. Let's go take him down, um,
Speaker 1: And it became a real problem. There's a couple of
Speaker 1: things though. One these lashes, he wasn't a very good slasher.
Speaker 1: These were all very superficial cuts. Uh. No one was
Speaker 1: severely wounded at all in any of the cases. So,
Speaker 1: but it was still confounding and people are still scared.
Speaker 1: He could be a bad slasher, still could improve, So
Speaker 1: we better call Scotland Yard and they did, and Scotland
Speaker 1: Yards sent two detectives and the detectives said, well, let
Speaker 1: us start interviewing witnesses, and the moment they did, they
Speaker 1: found that the witnesses stories just started crumbling. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, none of the descriptions matched, so they thought
Speaker 1: at first, the dumb cops in Halifax thought, well, maybe
Speaker 1: there's multiple slashers. Scotland Yard said, there's not multiple slashers.
Speaker 1: There's not one slasher. They're like they would have known that.
Speaker 1: And Nova Scotia. The final lady Beatrice Sorrel, said, uh,
Speaker 1: they finally, I guess they put the bright light in
Speaker 1: her eyes. And she said I did it myself after
Speaker 1: having a row with my boy, after she discovered she
Speaker 1: was pregnant. She had bought a new razor blade and said,
Speaker 1: I held hold of the blade in my right hand
Speaker 1: and slashed down my left arm, making a long cut,
Speaker 1: and my Macintosh coat and cardigan. And I know what
Speaker 1: you're thinking, it's a waste of a good cardigan and
Speaker 1: Macintosh whatever that is. I think it's a raincoat. Is it?
Speaker 1: That sounds about right? Yeah, I think so, Mac the Mac. No,
Speaker 1: I think a mac is a raincoat because the Beatles
Speaker 1: song eleanor Rigby the Mac he never wears a mac
Speaker 1: and the pouring rain very strange. Man, I never realized that.
Speaker 1: All right, so Macintosh coat. I hope it's a raincoat. Uh,
Speaker 1: then she said. I then put the blade back into
Speaker 1: the cut and scratched down my arm twice and put
Speaker 1: my fingers through the cut in the cloth. I saw
Speaker 1: that they were covered in blood. The reason why I
Speaker 1: cut my arm was because I was in a temper
Speaker 1: and had been reading in the papers about girls being slashed.
Speaker 1: So she, I guess was in a temper and it
Speaker 1: wasn't just her. Like nine of the twelve victims eventually
Speaker 1: confessed to doing it themselves. Um, and this this, this
Speaker 1: is a weird mass psychogenic illness, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Because these people are slashing themselves. They're not like catching
Speaker 1: something they think is is making them dizzy or whatever.
Speaker 1: They're cutting themselves and then going to the police and
Speaker 1: saying a slasher did it. I guess for attention. Maybe,
Speaker 1: well they did get attention. They got attention in jail
Speaker 1: four weeks. Still, if you're like a normal, ordinary citizen
Speaker 1: who slashes herself for himself, um, just for attention, four
Speaker 1: weeks in jail, it's going to be a problem. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to do four weeks in jail. Um. The
Speaker 1: thing is, Chuck is I could not find whether the
Speaker 1: first two victims were actually slashed at They didn't show
Speaker 1: up in as far as I know, they weren't once
Speaker 1: that confessed, and I didn't see that they got any
Speaker 1: jail time. So did somebody initially get attacked and it
Speaker 1: led to the slash or scare, or did they do
Speaker 1: it themselves or to each other? That's I don't know.
Speaker 1: The Halifax carrier on December two said, carry on, Halifax.
Speaker 1: The slashing scare is over. The theory that a half graze,
Speaker 1: wild eyed man has been wandering around attacking helpless women
Speaker 1: in dark streets is exploded. Waca waka And I wish
Speaker 1: I people talked so much better back then. Um, I
Speaker 1: was in a temper Macintosh man. Uh. This is not
Speaker 1: the only slasher mass hysteria epidemic. There's one in Taipei,
Speaker 1: Taiwan in the fifties where there's this basically this idea
Speaker 1: that there was a slasher walking around, and this one
Speaker 1: was more akin to the kissing bug thing where people
Speaker 1: who had cuts on them says, you know, you'll get
Speaker 1: a cut every once in a while and be like,
Speaker 1: where did I get that cut on my thumb? Right now? Okay,
Speaker 1: if you had been susceptible to this Taipei Taiwan slasher scare,
Speaker 1: you may have gone to the police have been like,
Speaker 1: I was slashed because and this one was a little
Speaker 1: more legitimate to me. The the idea behind the slasher
Speaker 1: was he would brush past you in the crowd and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't even notice you've been slashed until later. So
Speaker 1: that that was yeah, it was that. That's the better
Speaker 1: of the slasher mass psychogenic illnesses between that and Halifax.
Speaker 1: If you asked me, I wonder if Tina fe was
Speaker 1: a part of that. You know, that's how she got
Speaker 1: that scar. Which scar she has a scar on her face,
Speaker 1: and uh, she was slashed when she was a kid
Speaker 1: playing in her front yard. She by some random crazy
Speaker 1: I didn't know that, and that's kind of all the
Speaker 1: information that's out there. She think admitted that in an interview,
Speaker 1: and just that was the story slashing. It's just's a
Speaker 1: terrible crime. Yeah, it just sounds like seeking and disfigure somebody.
Speaker 1: It's like throwing acid on their face or something. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that m Saturday Night Live. Mel Gibson was on.
Speaker 1: It was back in the eighties and it was set
Speaker 1: in the Old West, and he was like an Old
Speaker 1: West like gun slinger. I just think of sheriff. But
Speaker 1: his thing was rather than guns, he threw acid. It
Speaker 1: was like matt acid or something like that. That's fantastic
Speaker 1: it was. And he got a gunfight with somebody, he
Speaker 1: like throws acid on him. And they didn't show that
Speaker 1: the acid being like throwing on the guy. It just
Speaker 1: showed the crowd's reaction and they were all like, oh god,
Speaker 1: that's awful. Oh that's great. Don't you hate it when
Speaker 1: you get a scene from a movie in your head
Speaker 1: and you can't pinpoint where it's from. I got one
Speaker 1: right now. There's there's a scene where a guy gets
Speaker 1: slashed and right under the eye as like a parting shot,
Speaker 1: like these students were gonna fight and it doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: They just slashes the guy and the princess pride. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is. It's not the Princess Pride. King Humper didn't
Speaker 1: get it or Prince Humper didn't gets it from somebody.
Speaker 1: It's what I'm thinking, Well that happens. Are you sure
Speaker 1: there's something When you're thinking, yeah, somebody Old right in
Speaker 1: and tell me. It was like they were faced off
Speaker 1: and we're gonna fight, and then they and the guy
Speaker 1: had a knife I think on his knuckle. And then
Speaker 1: at the variant, Oh, I know, Platoon got it. Tom
Speaker 1: Barnger and Charlie Sheen he cuts had had the blade
Speaker 1: on his knuckle and he had it right in his eye,
Speaker 1: and he was gonna punch him, and they all talked
Speaker 1: him down and right at the very and he just
Speaker 1: went slash and slashed him. Well, Platoon and Princess Bright
Speaker 1: are virtually interchangeable, the same same story. Good point. So yeah,
Speaker 1: Platoon was a good movie. That was a big college
Speaker 1: movie for me. I'll watched that a lot. All right,
Speaker 1: we're rambling, so that means we should take a break in.
Speaker 1: Jerry Old, get us back in order. I think I
Speaker 1: said Platoon is a good movie. All right, Chuck, Let's
Speaker 1: head on over to uh tangan Yika also known as Tanzania.
Speaker 1: You mean Tanzania, but back in nine two was known
Speaker 1: as Tanganyika and um in Tanga Tanganyika, there was a
Speaker 1: boarding school, a girl's boarding school, so you can understand
Speaker 1: what's about to happen there. And some girls started to giggle,
Speaker 1: and apparently it wasn't like a happy giggle. It was
Speaker 1: like a nervous giggle, you know, like anxious laughter. And
Speaker 1: it started to spread, Yes, which is normal enough, giggling
Speaker 1: like the church giggle you ever heard of that it's contagious,
Speaker 1: hard to stop. And that's usually if you're in a
Speaker 1: place where you shouldn't be laughing and you can't contain it,
Speaker 1: and then your friends starts laughing and you can't contain
Speaker 1: it and you have to go excuse yourself. Then you
Speaker 1: never go back in the room. So this supposedly lasted
Speaker 1: though for like six months, six months to a year
Speaker 1: and a half, spreading all over the place, depending on
Speaker 1: who you ask. Uncontrollable and contagious laughter. Uh, they had
Speaker 1: to shut down the school, yeah, for two months and
Speaker 1: then they're like, okay, surely it's over, and I opened
Speaker 1: it back up, started by back up. So this one
Speaker 1: bothered me a little bit because you can't just constantly
Speaker 1: giggle and laugh, and it's impossible. I read this this
Speaker 1: interview with the guy. Um, I read the same one,
Speaker 1: the Chicago Tribune interview. Yeah, so that I think he
Speaker 1: made a pretty good point. He was saying, like, there's
Speaker 1: very there's a lot of misinformation about this. First of all,
Speaker 1: it's called the laughter epidemic. So people just think like
Speaker 1: it's like the Monty Python, It's Funniest Jokes Kit or something, right, Um,
Speaker 1: that's not the case. It was again, it was not
Speaker 1: joyful after it was anxious laughter. And then there were
Speaker 1: plenty of other symptoms too. There was crying, there was pain,
Speaker 1: there was fainting. Yeah, Um, and there was definitely laughter.
Speaker 1: And it definitely did spread, but it wasn't just like
Speaker 1: constant laughter. Yeah, and um it did. It did last
Speaker 1: for at least six months, and it did spread to
Speaker 1: other villages because when these girls who were at this
Speaker 1: boarding school away from home were sent home because the
Speaker 1: school was shut down, they actually took it with them
Speaker 1: to their other villages, which suggests that the stress that
Speaker 1: um kicked this off was not just at the boarding school,
Speaker 1: that it was larger than that. And around this time
Speaker 1: Tanzania was had gained independence, so there was a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety about what the future held. So it started
Speaker 1: at the school where the girls were apparently very challenged academically,
Speaker 1: and then uh, it spread it through the stress of
Speaker 1: you know what, what's the future gonna bring. That's the
Speaker 1: that's the official line that this one linguist has come
Speaker 1: up with. I believe it. That one's not so great now.
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the off sited examples though,
Speaker 1: of a genuine mass psychogenic illness. You know, because the
Speaker 1: fact that it's spread from outside of a tiny boarding
Speaker 1: school into the larger into villages outside of it, that's
Speaker 1: that's a tense situation. It is very tense. Uh. The
Speaker 1: West Bank fainting epidemic of that spring, about a thousand
Speaker 1: young Arabs in the West Bank started feeling sick and uh,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of these cases, it's like dizziness, headache, weird,
Speaker 1: stomach pains. It's like things that you can't really put
Speaker 1: a finger on as far as tracing it back, like well,
Speaker 1: this must be something. Uh. And so of course because
Speaker 1: of where it was uh. And then these were young schoolgirls,
Speaker 1: largely we're twelve to seventeen years old. So because of
Speaker 1: where it was in the world, Uh, Palestinian leaders started saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, Israelis are using chemical warfare against us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the first kids to fall ill had reported smelling
Speaker 1: like a foul odor, kind of like rotten eggs. And
Speaker 1: if you're in that part of the world, you got
Speaker 1: kids breaking out in rashes and and uh, stomach pain
Speaker 1: and blurred vision and they're smelling something funny. That's pretty
Speaker 1: logical conclusion to come to. And so the Israelis countered
Speaker 1: back with if there's any chemical warfare being used, you
Speaker 1: guys are using it on your own people, so you
Speaker 1: can blame us. So these kids fell ill from the smell,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, Palestine and Israel are like
Speaker 1: publicly going at it, accusing one another of using chemical
Speaker 1: warfare on their own on Arab kids. This is a
Speaker 1: big deal. When this happened, it was a big deal,
Speaker 1: and it could have escalated to who knows what, But um,
Speaker 1: the fact is there was nothing going on at all.
Speaker 1: It was another case of mass collective hysteria. They closed
Speaker 1: schools in the West Bank. Um, no one else got sick. Uh.
Speaker 1: They've they've searched all the buildings and the schools, and
Speaker 1: they found no chemical residue, no mouthfeasance going on whatsoever.
Speaker 1: They found a smelly bathroom, though, and they think that
Speaker 1: might have been the source of the initial foul smell
Speaker 1: that kicked it all off. A stinky bathroom. Some boy
Speaker 1: uh went into the hurt locker. He logged out. That
Speaker 1: was a reference to a listener mail, by the way,
Speaker 1: I know, and somebody else wrote in the best one
Speaker 1: in my opinion, logged out. I was like, you want
Speaker 1: logged out for taking a poop? I gotta go log out.
Speaker 1: Oh that's okay, I got it. Well, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1: It is good. It does relevant. It's like that Simpsons.
Speaker 1: I think I just logged onto my internet. Do you
Speaker 1: remember was that Ralph? No, it was m Carl went
Speaker 1: back when they were kids when they can't fig about
Speaker 1: why Homer's having a mental breakdown. It's because he discovered
Speaker 1: a dead body years ago and then repressed the memory.
Speaker 1: And Carl's talking about the interneting on his bathing suit.
Speaker 1: And then later on he goes, I think I just
Speaker 1: logged onto my internet. So great. They blamed the West Bank. Uh,
Speaker 1: fainting epidemic on stress and anxiety. Uh. And then of
Speaker 1: course there were news reports of the toxic gas and
Speaker 1: so that's why it's spread. And Chuck, we can do
Speaker 1: this all day, but we're not going to. Let's bring
Speaker 1: it home with one more so. In Portugal, in May
Speaker 1: of two thousand and six, there was a teen soap
Speaker 1: opera called Save by the Bell, called Morongos calm asuka.
Speaker 1: That's my Portuguese. What do you think? Pretty good? I
Speaker 1: mean strawberries with sugar. It was the name of the uh,
Speaker 1: the the teen show Delicious, And in May of two
Speaker 1: thousand six, the show aired an episode where this mysterious
Speaker 1: illness was striking kids down left and right, and the
Speaker 1: source of the disease was at school. It was being
Speaker 1: spread at school. It was a virus, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, kids in the real world who were watching
Speaker 1: strawberses Sugar started to come down with a very strangely
Speaker 1: similar disease. Yeah. Um, I don't know if we said
Speaker 1: it was in two thousand and six. All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's drive that home because that was a big year. Um.
Speaker 1: Was that the year we started our show No. Two
Speaker 1: thousands seven eight, But we've added since two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: That's crazy year eight man, who knew that we would
Speaker 1: one day be veterans of a medium old veterans like
Speaker 1: we were good around on our porch or their Confederate
Speaker 1: pistols under our blankets. That's right. Uh So these kids
Speaker 1: were not only at one school, they were at fourteen
Speaker 1: different schools around the country, which was a little different
Speaker 1: than most cases because usually it's like it starts in
Speaker 1: this one school. But that's because the clear cause of
Speaker 1: this was this television show that kids loved all over
Speaker 1: the country. The yeah, was this episode of a TV show. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and luckily the Portuguese authorities health authorities, they did some
Speaker 1: investigating and they figured out that this is mass psychogenic illness.
Speaker 1: Pretty interesting stuff, and they said, what, the kids are
Speaker 1: really stressed about our final exams? Well, they think it
Speaker 1: started with some kids who had actual allergies and had
Speaker 1: seen this episode and started worrying that their own allergies
Speaker 1: were actually symptom of a disease that spread the kids
Speaker 1: who were basically going along with it be out of
Speaker 1: stress from exams. Yeah. The good thing about this one
Speaker 1: is because it was two thousand six, you can go
Speaker 1: on the internet and look at their articles. You can
Speaker 1: log onto your internet. You can log onto your internet
Speaker 1: and look up art articles that are like is the
Speaker 1: strawberries with sugar virus? Real? Like people were writing into newspapers.
Speaker 1: You know, my kid is having these symptoms, Like is
Speaker 1: it a real thing? Did they or did they just
Speaker 1: make this up? And it still goes on? I mean
Speaker 1: apparently this these So there's two kinds. Basically, there's motor
Speaker 1: um illness and then there's anxiety. And anxiety is more
Speaker 1: like fainting, upset, stomach headache, motors where you're twitching and
Speaker 1: mowing and stuff like that. Um. But there's supposedly hundreds
Speaker 1: of these cases around the world every year. They happen
Speaker 1: a lot. Maybe it'll come to your town if you're lucky,
Speaker 1: join right in. I say, yeah me, Allen, bite the
Speaker 1: night away, let it loose for a week. Uh. If
Speaker 1: you want to know more about mass hysterias, go listen
Speaker 1: to what is collective hysteria or other episode and then
Speaker 1: uh you can search for mass hysteria also in the
Speaker 1: search part Houston works dot com. Since I said also
Speaker 1: it's time for your listener mail, I'm gonna call this
Speaker 1: long overdue. I printed this one out months ago and
Speaker 1: told Georgia that I was going to read it and
Speaker 1: for god, it's about the fairy tales. Hedge Hedge. My
Speaker 1: name is Georgia. I live in Stockholm. Hedge, I think
Speaker 1: hatch hedges. Hey, hey, sure in Swedish. Uh, Stockholm Swedie. Yes,
Speaker 1: we did another good episode on Stockholm. Singer right that
Speaker 1: a k a. The Swedish Delight. Sure, that's what the
Speaker 1: cops call it. He's got the sweih del My name
Speaker 1: is Georgia and I live in Stockholm. I've been listening
Speaker 1: to your show for a few years. I love it.
Speaker 1: I recently listened to the Dark Fairy Tales episode and
Speaker 1: I asked my husband about the term ashen put since
Speaker 1: he's German and I often used Disney movies to help
Speaker 1: teach me Swedish. Uh. He figured out that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a play on words and implies a scullery maid
Speaker 1: covered in ashes. Ashen is ash as opposed to cinder,
Speaker 1: which is incorrectly used in the English name, since if
Speaker 1: you were covered in cinders, you know severe burns. As
Speaker 1: it is pieces of burning slag. It's true. It is
Speaker 1: translated from the French word for ashes, which is cinda. Uh,
Speaker 1: puto doesn't exist in German, he says, Uh, I don't
Speaker 1: know that sounds so German to me. It sounds pretty German.
Speaker 1: But the term for scullion or kitchen helper is ashan brutal.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you took German. So this is the
Speaker 1: male form, he thinks, Ashan put it sounds like words
Speaker 1: are just growing in your mouth, like you know those
Speaker 1: dinosaurs you can get wet and they turn into giant
Speaker 1: sponge dinosaurs. No, but I do know the little lead
Speaker 1: pellets that you would like that would grow into big
Speaker 1: snakes close enough, Those are what are growing in your
Speaker 1: mouth when you're saying during the words. He thinks, ashan
Speaker 1: puto is kind of a feminine version of Ashan brutal,
Speaker 1: since German is nonsensical engendered her words. I hope this
Speaker 1: information is still interesting to you, guys. Her in broad
Speaker 1: dog edged hedge headge Georgia, thanks a lot. That was
Speaker 1: extraordinarily intelligent listener mail and we appreciate it, agreed. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you want to send us an extraordinarily intelligent message,
Speaker 1: we love those. You can tweet to us at s
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