The Twitching Girls of Le Roy

2026-07-11 · Strange Mass Events · 9 min read

It started, as these things so often do, with something that looked like nothing at all. In October 2011, a seventeen-year-old cheerleader named Katie Krautwurst lay down for an afternoon nap in the small farming town of Le Roy, in western New York. When she woke, her chin was jutting forward on its own, her face pulling into expressions she did not choose, her arms flinging out in sharp involuntary jerks. She was a straight-A student. She had no history of anything like this. Within days her best friend and fellow cheerleader, Thera Sanchez, woke from a nap of her own stuttering, her head snapping sideways, her arms flailing. Then it happened to another girl. And another.

By December the count at Le Roy Junior-Senior High School had reached a dozen. Over the course of that school year, from October 2011 to June 2012, roughly twenty people would be affected: eighteen teenage girls, one teenage boy, and one thirty-seven-year-old woman. Most were students. Many knew each other. Several were cheerleaders or athletes. Their symptoms were vivid and frightening and impossible to fake convincingly for months on end: verbal outbursts, facial tics, jerking limbs, stuttering speech, episodes that looked like seizures, arms that flew up without warning in the middle of a sentence. Parents filmed their daughters and the footage was hard to watch. These were not subtle complaints. These were healthy adolescents whose bodies had apparently stopped taking orders.

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