In a 1962 Southern textile factory, 62 workers, nearly all women, fell ill with nausea and rashes after believing insects from a fabric shipment were biting them — no bug, no toxin, nothing was ever found, and the case became a foundational study in mass psychogenic illness

By the time the entomologists arrived, the bug had a name, a method and 62 victims. What it did not have was a body.

In June 1962, a woman on the dressmaking floor of a textile plant in a Southern mill town came out in a rash and told the plant nurse she felt sick. Something had bitten her, she said, and she blamed a shipment of cloth that had recently come in. Over the following days, 62 of the plant’s roughly 900 workers reported some combination of nausea, dizziness, numbness and a breaking out on the skin. Several went to hospital. Fifty-nine of them were women, and the newspapers had already named the culprit before anyone had laid eyes on it.

What the search turned up

Not much.

Company physicians called for help, and the hunt widened to entomologists and epidemiologists from the US Public Health Service’s Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta, the agency that later became the CDC. They combed the plant. They examined the cloth. They came away with a couple of insects capable of biting a person and nothing whatsoever capable of causing what those workers were describing. No toxin. No allergen. No infestation.

How the illness spread on the shop floor

Two sociologists, Alan Kerckhoff and Kurt Back, had the unusual luck of getting inside the plant while the episode was still running, and they interviewed the sick alongside a comparison group who had stayed well. The results they published with Norman Miller in Sociometry in 1965 describe a process that behaves a lot like gossip. That 1965 paper, and the book that followed it, remain foundational texts in the study of mass psychogenic illness, cited in nearly every subsequent review.

Cases were concentrated on the first shift and among people working overtime, during what happened to be the plant’s busiest month of the year. And when the researchers mapped who named whom as a friend, the cases clustered along those lines too. The illness travelled through the social structure of the workplace, not the ventilation.

This was one episode in one factory, reconstructed from interviews after the fact. Call it a well-supported hypothesis. Sixty years of subsequent outbreaks have been kind to it.

The symptoms were real

Does that mean 62 people invented it? No. The rashes were rashes and the vomiting was vomiting. Clinicians now describe this sort of presentation as functional, meaning the body produces real symptoms through real neurological processes, with nothing external behind them. Anxiety does this quietly, one person at a time, everywhere, all day. Put 900 people in a hot building in peak season on compulsory overtime, hand them a villain in the shape of an insect nobody can produce, and the private version becomes a public event.

Later outbreaks followed the same pattern

November 1998, Warren County High School in McMinnville, Tennessee. A teacher noticed a smell like petrol in her classroom and soon had a headache, nausea, breathlessness and dizziness. The school was evacuated. Eighty students and 19 staff went to the emergency department, and 38 were kept overnight. Five days later, once the building had reopened, another 71 people turned up. Timothy Jones and colleagues from the Tennessee Department of Health and the CDC published their investigation in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the environmental testing came back clean.

In an accompanying commentary, the psychiatrist Simon Wessely observed that textile mills have form here, citing a comparable epidemic in a Lancashire cotton mill in 1787 that ended when a physician named St Clare told the workers their trouble was nervous, curable, and nothing to do with the cotton.

Thirteen years after Tennessee, in Le Roy, New York, adolescent girls at the local high school developed facial tics, twitching and garbled speech, and the state health department settled on conversion disorder. That diagnosis was then fought, publicly and bitterly. Parents formed an advocacy group, patients went on national television to reject it, and Erin Brockovich arrived to investigate a decades-old cyanide dump near the school that state investigators and the EPA had already tested and cleared. Robert Bartholomew, Simon Wessely and James Rubin, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, pointed out what the dump theory left unexplained: an illness that struck almost exclusively adolescent girls while sparing the siblings and staff who had spent decades in the same building, and that had somehow waited forty years to begin.

Contagion without a shared room

The 1962 mill worked as a transmission medium because everybody in it could see everybody else.

That constraint has since dissolved. In 2022, Kirsten Müller-Vahl and colleagues at Hannover Medical School reported in Brain what they consider the first outbreak of this kind to spread purely via social media: teenagers presenting at their Tourette clinic with near-identical functional tic-like behaviours, several of them shouting the same specific German phrases, all of them viewers of one enormously popular YouTube channel. The team proposed the term mass social media-induced illness. Those patients had never met the young man they were copying, or each other.

What the 1962 inquiry produced was a negative result, and that is a hard thing to hand to 62 people with a rash on their arms. It is harder now. A toxin comes with a defendant, a lawsuit and eventually an apology; a social contagion comes with an invoice and nobody to send it to. So the next outbreak will generate a furious argument about the dump, the smell, the vaccine or the app, and the strain everybody was already under will be the last thing anyone wants to discuss.