Mass Hysteria is a condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness. The most famous example of this condition is the confessions of the women at the Salem Witch Trials. Women who were accused of witchcraft would become irrational and start saying they could see the devil. Eventually the accused went on to accuse other women and the condition spread.
We have seen this sort of viral supernatural scares in modern times too. The chart below demonstrates the surge in searches in relation to a few different viral “supernatural” scares.
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/ZjOIl/
The game “Charlie Charlie” was supposedly able to talk to the dead in a similar way the Ouija Board. Players would stack two pencils on top of each other and balance them in a plus sign. To start the game they would chant “Charlie Charlie can we play?”, then the pencils would move and they would ask the spirit “yes or no” questions.
I can remember people playing this game in middle school and never thought much about it. However, several girls in the Dominican Republic were believed to be possessed after playing in early April of 2011. As you can see from the above chart, searches spiked following this report and similar “possessions” occurred as the story started trending.
Slenderman was a product of the Creepypasta website. This is an online forum to post creepy stories or urban legends. What started off as a scary story became a viral sensation. In May of 2014 two twelve-year-old girls held down and stabbed a classmate 19 times because they claimed Slenderman told them too. As the news story went viral, many other kids started to post how Slenderman had told them to harm themselves or others.
Inexplicably, in 2016 people who were afraid of clowns had a very bad year. Beginning in August, random clown sightings occurred all over the United States. These sightings started off relatively harmless with masked people just standing around looking menacing. However, by the end of the October there were hundreds of clown sightings and warnings posted. People dressed as clowns were trying to lure children into the woods, stalking women at night and even threatening to shoot up schools. The more news stories that came in the more cases rose. Police stations in several states made announcements saying they would arrest anyone wearing a clown costume on sight and vigilante mobs began going out at night to look for clowns.
There is no surprise that shocking or spooky news grabs people’s attention, but what is interesting is the real-world problems these scary stories caused.
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/8S8Sn/
The above chart depicts the number of hospitalizations that occurred in relation to these supernatural mass hysteria events. When you compare the two charts you can a correlation between searches and hospitalizations. People who were hospitalized either believed that they were possessed and exhibited violent behavior, were seeing supernatural creatures, or were physically attacked in the case of the clown scare. This correlation leaves us with the question of whether or not the coverage of these events lead to further incidents? Additionally, how can the media responsibly cover events like these without triggering mass hysteria?
