I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. The phrase mass hysteria gets tossed around quite a lot to describe many famous or infamous events from our recent and not so recent global history.

There's the Salem witch Trials, of course.

We've all got that one down,

what with half the high schools in America,

putting on thrilling interpretations of the Crucible to this day

for reasons no one can explain.

But what about the dancing plague of 1518? Or the Hammersmith Ghost

Hysteria of 1818, or the satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s? Or what about all the killer

clown sightings just a few years ago? But while experts may quibble over whether mass hysterias, or panics,

if you prefer, can actually cause people to do things that they wouldn't normally do.

If you examine a list of events and phenomena that have been classified as such, you'll soon

notice two distinct categories, the social

fear and the unexplainable.

Now, of course, the unexplainable isn't necessarily supernatural or even necessarily mysterious.

It can simply mean that the explanation, however pedestrian it may be,

has not yet been identified. We, of course, walk that semantic line with some regularity on this show.

If you lose your keys, for instance, it is very unlikely that they have vanished into a void of the

great beyond. You probably left them somewhere silly and boring, and you'd hopefully not make

a podcast episode about the experience. Or maybe you would, and it would be great, who were we

to judge? But there are other times that explanations are less satisfying

and experiences happen on a larger scale, and dismissing them as simple public panics,

while certainly convenient, becomes more difficult the deeper you dig into the subject.

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