Teenage Wasteland

An audio docuseries probes an unsolved mystery of mass contagion.

- NICHOLAS QUAH

IN THE FALL OF 2011, a high-school girl in Le Roy started to display motor tics initially resembling Tourette’s syndrome. Her face twitched. Her arms flailed. She experienced difficulties with speech and became prone to verbal outbursts. But then a second girl at the school began to exhibit the same behavior. After the second, another. Two makes for a curiosity; three a concern. By the time the tally metastasized past a dozen girls, it looked like a contagion. “As the weather grew colder in Le Roy that fall, the symptoms continued to come to life,” narrates Dan Taberski in Hysterical, an audio docuseries that revisits the medical mystery more than a decade later. “An irregular heartbeat finding rhythm.”

Competing theories emerged. Some unaffected students suspected that their peers were faking the malady for attention. Later, the specter of environmental pollution came into play, a natural hypothesis for the industrial town about an hour from Niagara Falls, where the Love Canal disaster, in which toxic-chemical dumping was discovered in the late 1970s to have harmed residents over decades, still looms large. In the case of these girls, state authorities, the media, and large swaths of the community coalesced on a more striking explanation: “conversion disorder,” or the condition in which a person displays physiological responses to emotional trauma or extreme stress. In other words, the girls were deemed to be suffering from mass hysteria. The mystery was the stuff of media frenzies, perfect fodder for cable news and daytime shows as it played out.