Transcribe your podcast
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When's the last time you've talked publicly about this?

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Publically? When it happened.

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So it's been a while.

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It's been a while.

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In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York.

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There was a lot going on with these girls having outbursts.

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Reporting more than a dozen girls at Leroy High School say they have an illness that caused a severe tic and verbal outburst.

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I was at my locker and she came up to me and she was stuttering super bad. I'm like, Stop around. She's like, I can't.

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I felt like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

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Wow. A mystery illness spreading fast. Then next thing you know, they're going blah, and their arms are swinging. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. By then, everybody thought I was holding something bad. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah. Well, yeah. When it finally comes out, it feels positively looney tunes.

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It's called mass hysteria.

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Especially for a woman.

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It's used when doctors don't know the diagnosis.

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Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the witches of Salem?

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It's like, no, that just does not fit. That's not it. I know it's not.

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Or is it something else entirely?

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What's the common denominator here?

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I remember hearing at some point, it must be a bad batch of tampons. A nationally known environmentalist, Erin Brockovich, sent a team to Leroy yesterday. Leroy was the new dateland, and everyone was trying to solve the murder.

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Something happened. And I think what happened to you happened to me.

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Who's susceptible? Just how often is this happening? And what do you do when they tell you it's all in your head?

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The idea that this is somehow psychogenic, psychosomatic, mass hysteria, I mean, that just doesn't apply to me.

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People are just so tired of being called liars that they don't talk about it anymore. I don't fault anybody for believing in at the time. I was one of them. I'm Dan Tabersky, and this is Hysterical, a new limited series from Wondery, Pineable Street Studios, and the team that brought you 912, Running from Cops and Missing Richard Simmons.

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Am I going crazy? Is this really happening?

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Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen everywhere on July 22nd, or you can listen ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple Podcasts.