The Laughter That Closed the Schools: Tanganyika, 1962

2026-03-05 · Strange Mass Events · 2 min read

On January 30, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in the village of Kashasha, in what was then Tanganyika, three students started laughing — and could not stop. The giggles turned to convulsive fits, the fits spread from desk to desk, and within weeks the school was in chaos. Of the 159 pupils, aged twelve to eighteen, 95 were eventually affected. On March 18, 1962, the school gave up and closed its doors.

Closing the school did not end the outbreak; it exported it. Girls sent home carried the strange condition to their villages, most notably Nshamba, where hundreds of residents were soon struck. When Kashasha reopened in May, it relapsed within weeks and had to close again. Researchers who traced the episode counted around fourteen schools closed and roughly a thousand people affected in the Lake Victoria region, in waves that rolled on for somewhere between six and eighteen months.

Reader comments (0)