The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic: When Laughter Became a Contagious Nightmare
January 30, 1962. A boarding school in the small village of Kashasha, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Three teenage girls began to laugh. Within hours, the laughter had spread to 95 students—over half the school. But this wasn’t joyful laughter. The students couldn’t stop. They laughed until they collapsed from exhaustion, until tears streamed down their faces, … Read more