Weird. Wouldn’t you say?
What is weird, though? I mean, one person’s “weird” could be another person’s “normal.” We’ve probably all picked our noses at one time or another. But doing it while standing in line at the busy grocery store is, well, a little weird.
Even still, weird has a way of touching our lives. Just the other day, I noticed something that was out of place in our home. It had moved from where it normally sat. And without thinking, I said, “Oh. That’s pretty weird.”
And then, there are times when we see the worldly weirds. Those things that seem to happen without any rhyme or reason. The unexplainable. This has been going on since humans became humans. History has written numerous accounts of bewildering episodes throughout time.
Today, I found a couple that have touched on the human experience. Those things that happened without a reasonable cause.
First, we need to travel back to 1962 in Tanzanian. Tanzania (then Tanganyika) is a country in East Africa. It’s on the far east side of the continent, right on the Indian Ocean coastline, where Madagascar sits.
Anyway. Back in 1962, they experienced a laughter epidemic that originated in a girl’s school. The students started laughing uncontrollably. This quickly spread to over 1,000 people, with symptoms lasting for months. They experienced things like chronic laughter, hysterical crying, aimless running, and violent outbursts. With no apparent cause.
The epidemic got so bad that they had to close fourteen schools. They explained it away as having originated with anxiety-induced laughter in one of the schoolgirls. And supposedly, that triggered a chain reaction in the region.
Now. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like much of an explanation. In fact, it simply sounds “weird” to me.
In case that wasn’t weird enough. Here is another.
This time, the story comes from Peru. Elsa Perea Flores School in Tarapoto, Peru, to be exact. This took place some eight years ago, in 2016.
The school experienced a mass hysteria outbreak. Without warning, this “hysteria” affected nearly 100 children aged 11 to 14. The students reported terrifying visions of a man in black attempting to kill them. They also had seizures, fainting, convulsions, delirium, and repeated screaming bouts.
The locals in the village attributed the hysteria to demonic possession, suggesting the children may have played with an Ouija board before the attacks. I am not sure how long it lasted, but there was never any explanation for their behavior.
Okay. How does this happen to a large group of people at one time? Something in the water? Or a bad Ouija board.
Then how about this?
This one happened in 2002. The place was a town in Uttar Pradesh, India. Many of the people living there experienced mass panic. Residents believed aliens were scratching victims’ faces at night.
The reports described a “brightly lit object” flying sideways, leaving scratch and burn marks on victims. It happened a lot. And to many people. So much so that the panic led to nighttime vigilante groups and demands for police intervention. Well, the police intervention didn’t go so well, as it resulted in confirmed deaths from police firing into crowds.
No good explanations were ever given. Some said it could have been insect plagues. Other suggested they were “lightning balls.” Weird.
I saw a guy picking his nose at a traffic light the other day.
Weird? Maybe.
But in comparison? I’ll take it.
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“Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
– John Ruskin
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“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”
– Coco Chanel
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“The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”
– Albert Einstein
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Weird? Let’s compare.
