The Laughing Sickness That Shut Down Schools

On January 30, 1962, a mission girls' boarding school in Kashasha, on the shore of Lake Victoria, had a normal morning. Then three students started laughing and didn't stop.

The laughter wasn't a joke that got out of hand. It came in fits that lasted minutes or hours, and it was joined by crying, screaming, fainting, rashes, and trouble breathing.

Within weeks it spread through the classrooms. Of the school's 159 pupils, aged 12 to 18, 95 were hit by the attacks, and lessons became impossible. The school closed on March 18, 1962.

Sending the girls home made things worse. The outbreak jumped to Nshamba, a village where several of them lived, and in April and May 217 people, mostly young villagers, were struck by laughing attacks.

Kashasha reopened on May 21 and shut again at the end of June. That same month the laughter reached a girls' middle school near Bukoba, where 48 students were affected.

Researchers who studied it classified it as mass psychogenic illness, a stress response that passes from person to person through watching and shared surroundings. This was Tanganyika in 1962, a country that had only just gained independence from Britain.

Later retellings say it reached about 14 schools and up to roughly 1,000 people, though the original 1963 report firmly documents the 95-of-159 figure. Accounts also disagree on how long it lasted, from about six months to well over a year. Nothing in the water, the food, or the air was ever blamed.