The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic: When an Entire Region Could Not Stop — Tanzania, 1962

On January 30th, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha, on the western shore of Lake Victoria in what was then Tanganyika, began laughing uncontrollably. By the end of the week, nearly sixty percent of the school’s one hundred and fifty-nine pupils were affected — fits of laughter lasting hours, sometimes days, accompanied by crying, fainting, rashes, and difficulty breathing. No joke had been told. No toxin was found. No physiological cause was identified.

The school was closed. The students went home. The laughter went with them.

Over the following eighteen months the epidemic spread to at least fourteen schools and villages across the region, affecting nearly a thousand people. Schools closed for months. The local government and the medical community were baffled. The colonial administration found the situation both scientifically inexplicable and politically inconvenient.

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 is documented, investigated, and written up in medical journals. It was not funny. It was terrifying. And it remains, more than sixty years later, stubbornly not fully explained.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the mission school where it started, the specific pressures of colonial Tanganyika that may have made a population vulnerable, the medical response that failed to contain it, and what the best current science says about how fear and stress can move through a community like a contagion with no pathogen at all.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you’re just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-six more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Tanganyika laughter epidemic. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Rankin, A.M. and Philip, P.J. An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika. Transcultural Psychiatric Research, 1963.
• Atlas Obscura. The 1962 Laughter Epidemic of Tanganyika Was No Joke. atlasobscura.com, 2025.
• HowStuffWorks. Not So Funny: The Mysterious 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. health.howstuffworks.com, 2023.
• Commonplace Fun Facts. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962: When Giggles Shut Down a Nation. January, 2026.
• Mental Floss. The Strange Months-Long Laughing Epidemic of 1962 No One Could Stop. May, 2026.
• Owaahh. The Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic of 1962. owaahh.com, 2024.
• Provine, Robert R. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Viking, 2000.
• Bartholomew, Robert E. and Wessely, Simon. Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness. British Journal of Psychiatry, 2002.