In 2011, in the small town of LeRoy, New York, a high school was hit with a strange contagion. One after another, teenage girls started coming down with a mysterious illness that caused them to jerk, flail, twitch and hum uncontrollably. The symptoms presented like Tourette’s Syndrome. But Tourette’s isn’t contagious, and this condition – which would take more and more people down with it, eventually extending out beyond the school’s gates – most definitely was.
Local authorities were mystified. Were the girls faking it? Was there something in the water (or as one rapidly disproved rumor would question, the school’s sanitary products)? Was there a gas leak? Was it mass hysteria? There was no shortage of theories, yet no-one seemed to have a convincing answer. Over the course of Hysterical’s seven episodes, host Dan Taberski interviews just about everyone involved in the bizarre case, in an attempt to paint the full picture of what happened.
An experienced podcaster (his previous shows include Missing Richard Simmons, Running from COPS, and 9/12), Taberski’s interviewing style is warm, witty, and engaging. His subjects are clearly comfortable with him, which in turn helps him extract the human details that bring this peculiar story to life, like an ongoing town dispute over whether it’s pronounced LEE-roy or Luhroy, and the charming intrusion of an interviewee’s cuckoo clock collection.
More than anything though, Taberski’s watchword is empathy. He feels for everyone involved, often actively asking us as an audience to imagine ourselves facing the predicaments faced by his subjects, and to think what we’d do in their situation. He’s an omnivorously curious interviewer, too; when he doesn’t understand, he’s eager to learn, and fascinated by what he discovers.
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He emphasizes that people are a broad church: just because the same thing is happening to everyone, it doesn’t mean everyone is experiencing it in the same way. An early potential diagnosis is “Conversion Disorder” – a gentler sounding term for mass hysteria, of the sort that was once considered akin to witchcraft. Many are, understandably, offended by a diagnosis that implies these very real symptoms are all in their head. Others, however, are relieved. They’d much rather their condition be psychosomatic than something more sinister, like potentially carcinogenic side effects from the six natural gas wells in the grounds of the high school (in one of the many unusual turns in the story, Erin Brockovich’s team come to investigate accusations of potential environmental toxins).
Still, that distaste for the “it’s all in your head” diagnosis, from people who fear and resent being called hysterical, fascinates Taberski. He acknowledges the gendered connotations behind the term, dating back to the days of the Salem Witch trials. Nevertheless, he points to many, many experts who have proven that our brains do have a very real effect on our bodies – Taberski underlines that it’s a fact, not an insult, to state this. We are all a lot more susceptible than we might like to think.
Whether or not that explains what happened in LeRoy, we have to wait for episode seven to find out. Beforehand, in episodes five and six, we leave the town behind and look into further afield cases that have been considered by some to be examples of mass hysteria – instances of “Havana Syndrome” in government agents working abroad, and the idea that Fentanyl can cause a dangerous reaction just via fleeting exposure to the skin. Whilst these episodes are interesting in themselves, and in terms of building towards Taberski’s bigger argument, when we’ve been so enmeshed in life at the school during the outbreak, they do lose the show some of that all-important storytelling momentum. Upon our eventual return to LeRoy for the conclusion, the reminders as to whom some of the characters we’d been following are land a little clunkily.
A large part of establishing Hysterical’s tone is the fact that these events happened thirteen years ago. As the old adage goes, time is a great healer, and it’s certainly a relief to hear in the interviews with all those affected that no-one is still suffering from those debilitating verbal tics. Considering the terrifying experiences some of the women describe – one recounts feeling like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and from the audio footage we hear, that does not seem like an exaggeration – this could have been a very different show if it were made earlier, or if those affected had never recovered.
So, safe in the knowledge that an end to the suffering is in sight, we’re safe to enjoy the twisty, tangent-filled journey into the mysterious links between the body and the brain, and to wonder if the word “Hysterical” might be due for a rebrand.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.