There's Something in the Water
A strange tale of mass hysteria in modern times
Just outside of Rochester, New York lies a little town named Le Roy. The population is small. Only 7,500 people live in the quaint houses along tree lined streets. Families move there for the schools. The quiet. Suburban paradise.
But that feeling of safety was disrupted in October of 2011, when one girl, a high school cheerleader named Katie Krautwurst, woke up from a nap. Her head was jutting forward and strange muscle spasms twitched across her face. When it didn’t stop, she went to an emergency room.1
They told her she was having an anxiety attack and sent her home. A few days later she was back. The spasms hadn’t stopped. They told her they were tics. No other explanation was given. Katie’s mother demanded more testing.
It was nearly a month later when Katie’s best friend, Thera, another cheerleader, woke up from a nap stuttering. When she showed up to the game that night, her symptoms were noticeable. She could barely get the words to her cheers out. But stuttering was just the beginning.
Two weeks later, a third girl named Lydia woke up from a nap. She was, you guessed it, stuttering. Her mother took her to the emergency room and received no official diagnosis. Over the coming weeks her stuttering turned to spasms in her arms. They would flail randomly. Her legs started to go numb. She suffered periodic blackouts. She had to use a wheelchair for a while.
By December, there were a dozen girls at Le Roy Jr.-Sr. High School who were all experiencing symptoms resembling Tourette Syndrome. They had vocal outbursts. Their muscles contorted. Their bodies would grow rigid. Some of them suffered blackouts like Lydia.
Doctors were stumped. The girls saw neurologists, had blood tests. Everything came back normal. They didn’t have an infection. Environmental causes were suspected, and soon after, the New York State Health Department got involved. Then the EPA.
Le Roy is a working class town, home to manufacturing companies and chemical plants. But an accident from four decades prior was on the minds of many residents. A train derailed and crashed in December of 1970, dumping thousands of pounds of cyanide crystals and over 30,000 gallons of trichloroethylene (TCE).
The fire department came and hosed down the TCE, but that didn’t remove it. Instead it soaked into the ground, contaminating groundwater. Dozens of wells were poisoned, and little was done to clean up the mess.2 Could it be that all these years later, those same chemicals were at the root cause of the girls’ symptoms?
The water was tested, but nothing was discovered that could explain the symptoms the girls were experiencing. One neurologist who was working with many of the girls thought he had an explanation: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness. In laymen’s terms? Mass hysteria.
Conversion disorders are used to group neurological symptoms that manifest with no underlying pathology. My uneducated read on it? It’s a way of saying, “We don’t know what is causing your symptoms. We know you’re not faking it, but we don’t see anything abnormal in any of our testing.”
It can be caused by stress. In fact, the people most likely to be diagnosed with a conversion disorder are those with a history of child abuse, people who have gone through a traumatic event, or those with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.
The brain manifests a mental issue in the form of physical symptoms that a person has no control over. They vary from seizures to numbness, sensory sensitivity and even paralysis. These symptoms all resemble neurological disorders and diseases, but the difference in conversion disorders is that there is no underlying neurological cause.
But something does cause those symptoms. MRI scans of patients diagnosed with conversion disorders reveal unusual activity in the areas of the brain that are related to the symptoms their symptoms. Those changes in brain activity are not something that can be faked. A person suffering from the condition can not simply think their way out of the issue, and they certainly aren’t faking it.
Many of the parents weren’t satisfied with the answer. Neither were those on the outside who had learned of the story through national media coverage. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich actually went to Le Roy. She suspected the train spill had something to do with the onset of symptoms, and when she was went to investigate, she brought more media attention. The girls and their parents started to speak out, appearing on news shows and posting to social media accounts.
As the attention grew, so did the severity of the symptoms. Not only that, it was spreading. A boy and a 36-year-old teacher at the school began exhibiting physical symptoms. By the time the school year ended, 20 people in total had chronic involuntary movements, vocal outbursts, pain and exhaustion.
Doctors recommended that those exhibiting symptoms should stay away from social media and stop seeking out major media attention. It seemed to make the problem worse. The girls who followed that prescription started to get better. As they distanced themselves from newspapers and refrained from updating Facebook with their symptoms, their lives started to return to normal. Those that didn’t were still symptomatic months later.3
When I heard this story, I couldn’t help but remember how the Salem Witch Trials began. It was the winter of 1692. January, the coldest and dreariest of the season. Samuel Parris, a minister in Salem Village, called the doctor to check on his 9 and 11-year-old girls, Betty and Abigail. They were having “fits,” contorting violently and screaming. William Griggs diagnosed them with bewitchment. It wasn’t long before other young girls in the community started exhibiting symptoms as well. 4
We all know how the story went. By its end, 25 people were killed, most executed by hanging, five dead in jail, and as was the fate of one poor soul, crushed to death. The accusers were the afflicted, young women who displayed disturbing outbursts in the courtroom. They writhed. They claimed to see the spirits of accused witches torturing them. The accused would often point the finger at others to try and avoid the gallows.
In the end, the Puritan movement was crushed. The community lost its trust in the authorities, including Cotton Mather, an influential minister who staunchly defended the “spectral evidence” brought by the girls, only to later admit that better proof should have been required for conviction.
I keep wanting these stories to fit in neat little boxes. This is spiritual, and this is obviously material. But I can’t do that, can I? After all, that tendency is what drove me to fundamentalism. The constant need to have the theme make sense, the details neatly matched, the strings cut at the ends. The realization and admittance that life doesn’t work that way, is what brought me out of it.
The acknowledgement of Both, And. You read a story like this, and look up to see hundreds of them throughout history. Instances of mass hysteria, delusions and outbreaks that overtook entire groups of people. You imagine it’s something reserved for the history books, the product of religion and superstition. Only to find that it’s an observable and repeated human behavior across many beliefs and times. Our own is no different.
I see how strongly we are all connected to one another. How deeply we are affected by the symptoms and actions of those around us. The undeniable tie between body and brain and, if you’ll allow me get philosophical here, spirit. I want to tell you stories that are purely supernatural. But I find there is no single explanation, no one source to point to when I read things like this.
On the one hand, the medical explanation is completely unsatisfying. Vague and to a degree, unbelievable. But what can we turn to instead? Were the girls from Le Roy, New York plopped in the middle of medieval Europe, they may have been tried as witches. To save their own lives, they would have had to point the finger at someone else. That is the beauty of living in a non-superstitious culture. You are allowed to be sick without having to attach demons or spiritual purity to it. You can get the help you need without having to undergo an exorcism.
There was one girl out of the group of 20 symptomatic people, who was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome. Doctors believe that the tics seen in the others may have been subconsciously copied from that one true diagnosis. As media attention faded and the school year came to a close, most of the girls were cured. The doctors stood confident in the diagnosis that had brought so much criticism in the early months.
Conversion disorder is a controversial diagnosis. When a doctor says it, people hear, it’s just in your head. That interpretation of the diagnosis doesn’t sit well. Not when people’s lives are being ruined by an invisible sickness they can’t understand.
But maybe we discount the power that is in our brain. The ability for chronic stress, untapped trauma, and childhood abuse to unravel us. To make us sick. To ruin us if unchecked and untreated. Maybe our minds hold keys we can’t understand. The power to raise us up and heal us, or the power to bring us to death’s door and destruction.
The girls who exhibited symptoms seemed to be perfectly happy. The three mentioned at the beginning of this story were a picture of popularity. Cheerleaders, kids with good grades and bright futures. But Katie’s own mother was severely ill. She had just undergone her 13th brain surgery and was in chronic pain. The stress of it had taken a toll on the family. Thera had suffered a traumatic and sudden loss in her family a few years before. And Lydia was physically abused by her dad.
I hold the explanation as possible. Very possible. Especially given that the symptoms improved with less attention. Less outside input and constant worry. But my mind can’t put it to rest on that alone. I think of my own experiences growing up. The kids that went to my school who suffered immense difficulties at home. The everyday stress of being alive and having deadlines and family expectations. Those who lost parents and siblings to accidents and divorce and mental illness and addiction.
Never did this manifest in anyone I knew, let alone in more than a dozen at one time. There seems to be an invisible thread, some underlying power or force that manifests at certain times, in certain places. Why Salem and not some other New England town? Why, out of every other high school in the American suburbs, Le Roy, New York?
The reason will probably never be known. At least not in a way that satisfies my curiosity. And not all of that is due to the bizarre diagnosis that was landed on. Some of that is because, as noted in this paper, further testing around the school grounds was not completed. Known chemicals in the area were never searched for on the athletic fields that the girls practiced on. Then, just three years after the outbreak of symptoms, the town finally started a cleanup effort for the toxic spill that had occurred in the 70’s. Strange timing to be sure.
Be that as it may I have to leave it in the gray zone that occupies most of my brain these days. Stick it in the I don’t know pile, and continue down the next rabbit hole. Ask you to suspend disbelief and listen to these strange tales. I hope you’ll come with me. It’s so dark and damp and curious. Ever so curious.
In 2015, a cleanup effort for that toxic spill from the 70’s did finally begin. I wonder why…
I have heard of this incident, and when suddenly the number of girls who think they are in the wrong body dramatically increased I couldn't help thinking that that was the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.
Hadn’t heard of this incident. Fascinating read. Thank you!!