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= 4 INCIDENTS OF MASS HYSTERIA: = Mass Hysteria is known medically as "Mass Psychogenic Illness", or MPI for short. Mass Hysteria occurs when a bunch of people just start acting like fools for absolutely no discernible reason other than being in a stressful environment and in which case is very noticeable to other people who witness it.

There are loads of documented incidents throughout history so here are a few of them:

Nun
The "Nun Incident" took place somewhere in the middle-aged times where a group of Nuns in a French convent were enjoying a quiet time when suddenly, one of them started meowing, like a cat. Now you probably think that this would last about 5 seconds when another nun would just ask them "Sister Gertrude, would you kindly cut the meowing out?" but instead, another nun joined in, and another, and another, until the entire nunnery if you would call it that was exchanging meows and mouths. And this was not just a one-time thing either, it basically became their way of life and it was said on a given day, they would just stand there at each others faces for hours meowing and meowing. As you can imagine though, it stopped being scary and was actually getting annoying so the neighbors called in a band of soldiers to deal with the situation.

Fatima, Portugal 1917
There was another incident of Mass Hysteria in Portugal 1917 when three shepherd children, ages 10, 9, and 7 claimed they have, "Seen visions of the Virgin Mary and she told us to tell you that on October 13th, the sun will be zooming around the sky". Now if three random farm children started spouting out crazy things to the public today no one would pay any attention but keep in mind, the past is a different country and Portugal is a different country, so thats different country squirty you got to think about [Past + Portugal = (foreign²) ] . Plus, this was in World War One and everyone was holding back for a miracle to happen so the kids story was actually picked up by the local newspapers and spread quickly. It spread so quickly to the point where 30,000 people gathered up to see the phenomenon up in the sky and behold on that day, the sun started moving around, and sending rays of multicolored light cascading across the sky. It was also reported that the sun was moving closer and closer to earth. However keep in mind that this all happened in the 20th century when belief and divine jiggery and/or pokkiri was considered mandatory so naturally there were plenty of skeptics and non-believers who saw it happen. Or so they thought. How do we know that the sun really zigged and zagged throughout the sky changing color? Well accounts differed wildly from person to person, while some say the sun zigged hither, and others say the sun it zagged thither, and some said it stood perfectly still in the sky keeping its shiny, yellow bright light with it. As such the incident was eventually considered to be a case of MPI and some weird, eye problems probably from starring at the sun too much.

Tanganyika 1962
The next incident ended up taking place in Tanganyika, 1962 which is just the Beta version of Tanzania. The nation had just declared its independence from Britan the previous year (1961) and with the future so unpredictable, tensions were running high. So one girl in School ended up handling the times of stress in a bit of an unusual way, instead of looking up at the ceiling for hours or over-consuming she decided to laugh, so she started laughing, and laughing, and laughing until finally, her entire class started laughing. To the point where 95 students ended up laughing because of getting "infected" with laughter. So 95/159 students, or 60 percent of students were laughing and which it lasted for a few hours to a couple of days (3 Hours - 16 Days). Other odd behavior besides laughing was included aimless running and occasional violence .The situation ended up getting so out of hand that the school had to completely shut down temporarily, letting the chortles out onto the streets spreading the affliction further. Thousands of people from all strata came to be affected with 13 additional schools which also temporarily closed down and over the course of the hysteria other symptoms also started to occur, ranging from very obvious ones such as, fainting, breathing problems, and random screaming, to other very random ones such as rashes. No physical cause could be found leaving MPI as the only reason. The epidemic died down after 6-18 months of day-in day-out laughter! Depending on the village.

Strasbourg 1518
Flashback to the year 1518 in the city of Strasbourg at the time of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) where a woman named Mrs. Trophy began fervently dancing in the streets for no discernible reason for hours, then days and without music of course. Her only breaks included occasional food intake and passing out from exhaustion when night came. If someone today would see that they'd be like "Ha, drugs" but people actually started to join in and within a week, 34 people had joined in on the dance floor and after around a month, there were 400 people that joined in on dancing. This wasn't just your casual bobbin' up and down dancing this was outrageous which made Zumba look like Tai Chi. Now people were dancing to the degree where people were lifting each other and spinning each other in the air and jumping and kicking, any crazy thing you would do at a prom or dance if everyone there was drunk including you and you were dancing drunk. Now like any normal human this could take a HUGE toll on a persons health let alone a medieval city dweller but despite bleeding feet and aching bones they just still kept dancing, and dancing, and dancing. In fact, they went so hard for so long that a good portion of the dancers just straight up died from cardiac arrest. It got to the point where 15 dancers would die every day and the city finally decided they should do something about it. And of course, their best idea was more dancing. If you do not see where they were coming from with this its kind of like when you like a song but then you just get sick of hearing it. They went so far they made a stage where they could dance and even some musicians to keep the afflicted moving but that just lured in more normal people into becoming maniac dancers and seeing that their "solution" if you could call it that, backfired and they ended up doing the completely other way and banned any public dancing and for those who still were dancing they were carted off to the Shrine of Saint Vitas (SoSV) where an exorcism like ritual was preformed on them. This ended up being highly effective presumably for no other reason than that the dancers believed it would work and after nearly two months, the plague was quelled. The whole thing was most likely a case of good old-fashioned MPI but some believe it was caused by Ergotism, a state of psychosis brought on by eating tainted bread.