The Laughter That Closed the Schools: Tanganyika, 1962

2026-07-06 · Strange Mass Events · 8 min read

The rains had barely eased over Lake Victoria on the morning of 30 January 1962 when three pupils at a mission boarding school for girls in the village of Kashasha, in the Bukoba district of what was then Tanganyika, began to laugh in class. The laughter was not a response to a joke. It came in waves that doubled the girls over, and when one wave passed another followed. Within hours it had spread to the girls sitting beside them, and then to the girls beside those, until the teachers at the front of the room had lost the class entirely. Over the following eighteen months the same condition would empty fourteen schools and affect roughly a thousand people across one corner of a country that had been independent for less than two months.

The popular label, the laughing epidemic, describes the outbreak poorly. Witnesses and the doctors who later examined the victims recorded attacks in which laughing and crying alternated without warning, accompanied by screaming, aimless running, restlessness, fainting, difficulty breathing, rashes on the skin and a diffuse pain the girls could not locate. Some of those affected reported a fear that something or someone was chasing them. An individual attack could last from a few hours to as long as sixteen days, with an average of about a week, and the same girl could be seized again after apparently recovering. Between attacks the victims looked and behaved normally. Almost all of them were young, roughly twelve to eighteen years old, and while an episode held a girl she was, for practical purposes, unreachable.

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