The Strange Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962

On January 30, 1962 a group of school girls in the village of Kashasha in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, broke out in a fit of laughter, a totally normal thing for school children to do. But what started as everyday classroom hijinks quickly turned into an epidemic of chuckles so fierce that schools were shut down in neighboring villages and hundreds of people suffered from various laughing-related health issues.
The event, now known as the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, started when a group of 12 girls began to uncontrollably laugh inside their mission-run schoolhouse near Lake Victoria in Tanzania, Africa. The group’s laughter spread like a contagion to over 95 of their classmates; most of the school’s pupils were unable to complete their work.
When the girls were dismissed, the laughter then spread to their home villages, eventually affecting over 1,000 people, many of them children, and closing 14 schools. The outbreak of mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), caused many different symptoms and side-effects from the excessive laughter including dizziness, pain, fainting, breathing problems, rashes and even increased flatulence.
The laughing fits lasted from a few hours up to 16 days, and the epidemic as a whole lasted about six months. After all was said and done, the school where the initial laughter started was sued and had to close its doors for good.
Despite the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic being widely accepted as a factual story, some researchers are skeptical about what really took place. One such researcher, Christian F. Hempelmann, a 2003 doctoral candidate with Purdue University, claims that stress, not laughter, was the cause of the epidemic and the victims of it were simply expressing complex emotions that they felt they couldn’t let out.
According to Hempelmann, a person can only laugh for around 20 seconds at a time because of its immense strain the respiratory system, therefore, a laughing attack lasting days or months would be humanly impossible.
Though Hempelmann has his doubts, he does believe some sort of mass hysteria took place in Tanganyika in 1962. What exactly transpired is unknown because there were no official records kept for later analysis. Without proper documentation, researchers are unable to examine the event scientifically. So, we may never know how the event occurred and if it will happen again. Mwahahahahahahahahahahaha etc.

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