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In december of two thousand eleven, a Young woman posted a video on youtube.

hi everyone, my names. And this is my first video.

She's got shanny red hair with side banks, and she's wearing a White graphic, a poster for the metal band avenged sevenfold this tack .

to her bedroom wall behind her. Um .

i'm sixteen.

i'm an eleven grade, and I play a softball like all time.

When you made this video, there was no tiktok. There was barely an instagram. She's not looking to monetize, not trying to influence what this sixteen year old is looking for is a little help. She's been having strange symptoms that so far no one can .

seem to explain recently. bless. August, I had passed out at a concert. I was had banging, and I thought, you know, I was just dehydrating .

that by now you've noticed that her speech is a bit halting and her nervous teenage energy is more than just figuring.

And about a month after I passed out again, the home competence is also 嗯。

IT has pattern and repetition, ice twitching, hands in the air, fingers flying.

And a few days ago, my twitching has progress into noises like through my nose or in my throat. And 上品。

了 国外。

the more he talks， the worst .

IT gets. She's nick hitting now jerking.

Her head, that's another thing we're still trying to answer or so going back to the doctors again.

Then SHE signs off her first missive of many to wait and see what kind of response SHE might get.

And if anyone wants to talk about this or if anyone starting IT, i'll be well in the talk at.

I recently google the phrase switch the symbolist of her symptoms just to see an itch. Ch could be a symptom of dehydration or low electro lights. And I twitch could mean you have gloomy or a disease like a cama eba carretas.

You don't want that one like which could be the first sign of a condition called Isaac syndrome, in which your muscles don't stop moving and appeared to be constantly rippling under the skin even when you're asleep. To be fair, isc syndrome is extremely rare. But as those sons of bitches of the nih are quick to point out, there are over ten thousand rare diseases, over thirty million americans of the diagnosed with one.

In other words, developing a red disease, not that rare. That's why I can be so scary when the systems you are experiencing all add up to a mystery. When that teenage girl sent her video out into the void, SHE wasn't sure you could get anything back besides her own ago. What he does, she's about to find out there are others. A strange illness has made at least a dozen teenage girls sick at the same high school, and and those others are all clustered in one small place, and also just came down with the same bizarre symptoms.

This is my A N anthy straight taking and dozen up. I would go to our class. I used to go to two art classes every day.

Now I am now in school, and they are all going to discover this isn't just something they have IT might be something they caught.

More cases of a mysterious illness have been confirmed. News force at drain.

a contagion caught from a friend or classmate or from a place by something in the water or the air or the ground there. Famous environment st. And activist air, rock of which is getting involved.

I mean, we're looking at a myriad of environmental concerns. This one's just standing out like a sort of thumb. And the whole town is going to start doubting their own doctors, their own neighbors. Some will all out their own kids.

A lot of them say that we're faking and and that .

your faking because you want attention.

Seriously, why would we fake this?

Some will even doubt the brains inside their own heads.

Am I going crazy? Is this really happening?

Question is, what is this? No, no. I'm done listening to you.

You are not doing your job. You are not doing your job. And can they stop IT from spreading? Episode one outbreak.

What was the first you heard that something was happening?

I had a patient common, and I I hadn't heard anything.

If anyone should get credit for putting the pieces together first, that something strange was happening. It's doctor Jennifer mig. Vig in the fall of two thousand and eleven, mazzei was a Young physician working at the dent neurologic institute in buffalo, new york, a ologies newly minted. I had just finished .

medical school and fellow. I was in fellowship, so I hadn't even set for my board. dad. I was like, IT was new, you know, as all new. I was a physician, but you know just starting and I look Younger than my age and you know the people see that, you know i'm new or did look at me and it's it's funny.

And just about a month into the new school year, in comes a teenage girl, a high school student presenting with unusual symptoms.

wake up one morning and full blown vocalizations mother text, very prominent IT once. And I thought.

this is very good.

The patient had woken up from a nap with a studdy, a severe stammer, trouble speaking, then IT turned into head and facial ticks and then vocal outbursts.

But IT was a very abrupt on SAT. And od, you know, you're sleeping one night, wake up the next morning, and all the sudden you have voc stations as well as motor tech is just really isn't the way that usually these things evolve or occur.

But there IT is happening anyway, and the patient is desperate to make a stop.

So we do the metabolic, we send them for blood work. do. Eg.

when does patient number two .

come shortly thereafter, I believe is a couple weeks later um and again around the same age, uh, Young lady.

another high school student, female, again, tics, spasms, blurting out sounds and words.

So number two comes and i'm like, okay, will we do have to treat every single case as an individual entity and as a physician? You can just say, oh, I saw this the other day, maybe would do the same thing. Know you're going to miss something.

But still, it's hard to ignore the similarities, both Young women, both presenting motor and verbal tics, both very loud in both very something else. The interesting .

part about IT was that the localization were very similar. Now that doesn't you really happen. You know, if somebody has true direct disorder or even simple or complicated tic disorder, you know, there's some common text, there's a lot of blinking, there's a lot of head tilts.

But with this new patient, a lot like that first patient who would come in a few weeks ago.

the vocalist was so characteristic and so loud that i'm like, this is interesting.

I'm so others too.

And then I get number .

three in walks. A Young woman, again, high school age, again, with severe motor, a text vocalizations like shouts and barks. And again, the onset is sudden, like zero to sixty overnight. So by the third one.

i'm having concerns .

that mic vega suspects that the three cases are connected. They must be connected, right? Easy to assume, harder to prove.

IT was tough for me because nobody y's saying anything about anyone else. And for hipper reasons.

hippa is the federal privacy law for health care.

For hippa reasons. I can't be like, hey, do you know so and so because he just came here two weeks ago, I was my license and that's not OK.

It's not okay.

And that's how at IT took me a while to put things together because I couldn't say anything.

And so SHE pokes around, but with a little more fitness.

And then I started saying, well, what high school do you go to and where do you live? And then went back to the other two and looked at the zip codes and put two into together.

Her hunch is correct. All three patients come from the same as I could, one, four, four, eight, two, about fifty miles east of buffalo. More than that, all three girls live in the same small town, live in new york. And more than that, all three girls go to the same school, liberate junior, senior high school, go nights. Big vogue goes to her boss to tell him that whatever is happening in this small town, IT, is growing very fast.

I came in his office and I said, I need your help. And he goes, oh, you've got this. You know, this is what you've trained for.

You've got this now is like, no, the shots can hit the fan and all hell could have big loose. I'm not kidding. And sure enough, a week later, he's like, you were right. I can't believe this is happening, and i'm like A.

My first question is, is that leo .

I or leo I the li leo I, it's x. Well, depends on who you talk to.

Lin b. Lucio is the official town history in here. He's been writing a local history column in the library, penny saver, for over thirty years. there.

Is that the Lori penny saver? You gotta at least a bit suspicious of a town that can't settle on the pronunciation of their own name. The time supervisor just walked in. How would he said probably?

And how do you say luy? Okay, let me an arrow explain IT. The family that the town is named after is loy herman li was .

a speculator who bought up a ton of an accurate year at the end of the seventeen hundreds. But sometime between then and now, the roy slash luri became the timetable shallowly of small towns in new york.

I'm blaming IT on the cheerleaders .

because they will .

only say let's go levi. They don't wana say let's go the roy or if you're the opposing team and would be destroy. So i'm blaming IT on the cheerleaders.

For what it's worth, i'm gona go with liberal.

I given the subject matter here.

just the twists and turns of the story that you're about to hear. I suppose the play would be for me to make the world seem dark and troubled. Ed, a town with a horrible secret, but lonely.

What was kind of like that around here? The parents grew up about fifty miles to the west. So I spent a good chunk of my life here in western new york wearing giant winter coats and giant net hats with giant palm poms on top.

My folks were the babies of the immigrant way who came to work in the smoke belching factories here when manufacturing was came. And from my vantage point, this has always been a place where the bowling leagues are competitive, the bills fans are drunk, and the gel modes are perfectly set. Do you make joe?

I love jee, really. yeah.

Lyn is also the former director of the roy's historical jelly museum I made under the sea jelly for .

thankful ling .

is a traditional jelly, was invented in the road and eighteen ninety seven, and was made in the jelly factory on the north side of town for most of the last century, employing three hundred and fifty workers, mostly women. All time. I say you could tell what flavor jelly they were making that day by the color of the creek running through town.

Our family ello recipe for thanksgiving and Christmas is the world of salad that made in lime ello and then IT beggs. The question, is that a salad or is there a desert? I figured you put manage on IT. And if it's got seven and IT, it's just manage. No, if you put manage on the top a little bit, and I hate you.

put man in the top of gel.

well, the.

The gel factory is still here, just a mile, or sow up from the high school. It's empty now, shut down in one thousand nine hundred and sixty four. Factory shutting down is also the history of this part of the state, just like the rest of the rest built. But while the roy had a share of problems, they didn't seem like particularly unusual problems until the outbreak.

Yeah, I grow up in my whole life.

In the false two thousand and eleven, Jessica was just starting her senior year at the high school body. That's not what I heard, but you're telling me that everybody .

who lives there, everybody who lives, I really, anybody on the news reporting on IT cause .

A Y really yeah.

pretty much anyone under the age of, like sixty, I would take a little right.

Alright, bucket. I'm on teams. Funny enough. Jusici link settle on her own name either you go by Jessica now in high school. Where did you go by Jessica? Jessica, please.

J E S S, K, A. I was like, you know, just trying to be email. Like, seen whatever. And all the scene girls were changing their names.

Jessica would go on to be named to most creative in the year book that year. By the way, SHE once died her hair with Cherry cool aid powder.

At one point, I doubled with having three eyes of my name stakes.

How you like them?

S S, I, I, I C, A, yeah. So i'm glad I didn't stick with that one. And we went with just cut IT was a small punk in on.

As far as high schools go, li high looks nice enough, critically new, although there are a few natural gas wells on school grounds, you don't see that every day. And apparently they built the school on wet tanks. And in a few years since the building had gone up, IT was already talked that IT was thinking into the ground. It's got about five hundred or so kids, grades seven through twelve.

Everybody's know each other sense kindergarten, because nobody goes .

anywhere and nobody this is Emily SHE and jesica sound a bit alike. But that's upstate, baby. Just know that. Yeah, nobody want to punk.

Nothing to do. You want to go to the yellow factory that's about IT.

At the time all this happened, Emily was starting eighth grade at the school, just turning thirteen. Would you say you were popular in school?

Not at all. The further thing from IT. Oh yeah, definitely more so labeled as the outcast.

So and what is like.

we had booth in our cafeteria, so like your group of people said at this booth, and then although the popular kids I would ever set IT like the giant tables that were in the middle, like you, you will be center of tension. Enjoy that. I'm going to sit in the corner over here and need my same.

which SHE found her cruz o in the marching band. And we played .

the flute and we do the band. Can we run drills from eight the morning to, like four in the afternoon, learning the entire set and everything in our spots and where to go in the music? And it's it's a wild time.

Did you just .

have like a fight song is the super steel type.

They called mr. mr. Mahlich very often as I got to know the kids more and they got older. The mister got dropped .

when Emily was marching. IT was under the iron fist of mr. Maholm, the band teacher.

I had a couple of kids that would joke and they would call me dad and the course teacher mom.

The marching band was preparing for the state championship and had been grounding IT out on the practice field behind the school for weeks now .

I basically lived at the school. Um so what I always wanted to do was marching band and have my own program and that and um IT was a great place to be.

Then I hated IT.

Jessica had a different tag.

I hate IT you really yes, I hate to high school so much. Actually the year that this happened was only year I did .

like so yeah nothing like a contains national .

scandal to brighter thing now.

So okay, two thousand eleven. Do you remember when you first saw, heard or knew about people coming down with weird symptoms? Here's italy.

So there was a girl in my class who had actually had at the entire time that i'd known her like SHE is actually like diagnosed with turrets and everything.

So even before any of this started, there had already been at least one person at the school with symptoms that didn't just look like to red syndrome. IT actually was turrets.

What were her symptoms? Very, very vocal. SHE was very vocal with her. IT was like the little like screeching noise and like sometimes, you know, kind of like fly a little bit to the point where, like, are you having a seizure? No.

you're good. They were little things, motor text or a verbal tex.

mr. Maholm, the band teacher, the grow with tirez SHE was actually in the marching band with Emily for all those hours of .

practice on the field. They were easy to gnp. They were something that I was used to. They were something that I accommodated.

So till then, at least potentially disruptive symptoms, like you might see with turrets, weren't entirely forum to leave very high. But then the rumors started that there were others.

The first time I heard about IT was from that girl.

Here's Emily again.

He was like, oh, one of these older girls from one of the older grades is apparently got the same thing that I do and I was like, oh, well, that's weird and then I just want about my day.

Here's Jessica.

I was trying to think back on like when exactly I realized something was happening. But I remember being in my art class, and two of the girls were like two of the first ones to have IT.

By most accounts, these were the first girls to develop symptoms of the illness. Edi very had a junior and a senior, both cheerleaders on the varsity squad.

And I remembered thinking like where they making IT up, like what is going on?

Like people thought they were good.

Yeah, we thought they would might be faking IT because IT was just like a bunch of the earlier, like girls who want attention typically.

you know, so doing this for attention.

right? yeah. And like everybody, kind of just doubt IT, until which just can't be happening.

First two, then another than two more.

You know, within a matter of days, IT was something that .

was blowing up, really. Yeah, I came on pretty fast. mr.

Mahal c, the motor text, the verbal text, they were more dramatic than anything you've ever seen. We heard a lot of like a iping sound from some of the students, or a reaching sound. I even heard sounds, maybe this sound like a cat nearing.

And the symptoms seem to be growing more severe.

That's when things got scary for everybody, because I was located down the half in the nurses office. So I certainly, at times that I did closed the door because you would hear something happening out there that I knew would frighten the kids. Are somebody hitting themselves against a while? wow.

So that I was frightening. IT was frightening for the kids. That was frightening for me.

A teacher is jesica.

And then my friend and came to school the one day. And I was like, my owner came up to me and choose, like, stuttering, super bad. And my, what are you doing and like stuff fucking around.

Like are you talking like that? Just like OK and SHE like could not talk like was stubborn so bad that he could not even get out of world. She's like watching.

She's like crying at that point. Like just trying to get out her words and like, holy shit, this is real. Like, what happened? Like I have day before.

Like you find before. Like the way he was starting, you cannot make that up. Like that's like happening in her brain.

Emily has a similar experience.

so woke up ninety .

percent of my day, completely Normal day.

with one big difference. IT isn't her best .

friend to catch IT. I was pretty fine. Then I felt a little funny of like, I feel kind of off.

You know, you have those office. I got to my history class right after lunch, and I started feeling cana. I had to move. I like do something you .

feel like the urge to move, yes.

like you feel like the urge, like you can't stop yourself from doing IT was just one of those things, as if you had to do IT little fidget here and there.

or they are the same type of fish.

Yeah, I think he was my, my ARM and my all the same time.

Emily is not sure what's happening.

so SHE just tries to go about her day. But then in study hall, SHE says that he gets called to the nurses office.

close the door, not good. And the nurse tells you to close the door. That's not good. And school councillors in there as well. And I go, oh, i'm well for something they started talking to me about and they are like, some your teachers have noticed that you have started showing that these symptoms that all these other girls seem to be showing as well. And we just want to know, are you actually do you or are you just kind of like pull in, I like with this and you're just doing that to fit in .

the suggestion? Are you faking IT for attention? Yes, before this happened to you, were you thinking that other people affecting in certain people?

But just because I knew those people and I was like, SHE seems the type that would be like so .

you thought that some people were yeah but .

that like I figured out later on us oh, that's very real. You totally weren't. I'm so sorry that I thought that about you. Because here I am and we're on't the same boat now early.

In the same boat now, girly is a great way to put IT. In fact, he has no idea how in the same boat now early, we all might be.

My twigging has progressive to noises like do my nose because what's .

happening in libri IT might be connected to what's happening to the girl on youtube hundreds of miles away.

It's something .

that go away.

And what's .

happening to all of them might be connected to a sickness afflicting people today right now and spreading to places like ohio and masseuses and moscow and starcom and tyran, a contagion that's been with us for centuries. And when we still don't fully understand. There is an neurologist up on canada in one thousand nine hundred seventies, and his name was Adrian upton.

Up was teaching in mid school at the time about the human brain and decided to try an experiment that was a little chicken and filled a ball full of yellow. He put in my fridge, he let IT set, and then he flipped ed over onto a plate, making a lion flavored brain sized blood. Then he hooked the yellow brain up to an eeg machine.

That's the one that measures brain waves. A square icky line means brain activity. IT means life. No squirt les means no brain activity, no life.

And when he connected the wires and nodes of the E E G machine to that, jill brain squats faint but unmistakable. In fact, there was a trick to IT. The machine was picking australia electrical signals from around the room.

But if you don't know the trick, the fuck, my point here isn't that yellow can think that would be silly. My point is that you should not eat jelly because it's alive now. Now the point is this, this is for real this time, and it's something that's going to keep coming up over and over again in this series. The point is that the brain is a mystery even when it's lime.

There's a mysterious .

illness among some students in the roy IT has families there both stumped and scared. Good evening.

I'm jan ryan. But just because it's a mystery IT doesn't mean IT can't be solved. School officials sent home a letter today assuring parents that they are trying to get to the bottom of all of this. I'm dantis kate from wondering and pineal street studios, this is hysterically. There is IT.

This season on .

historical, I felt like .

Linda blair in the.

I thought IT was all in my head and that I was making, you know.

I just said, what do you think .

do you think she's vacant and she's like.

I don't know. These kids are just totally Normal, and the next thing you know, they're going and their arms are swing in.

Everybody decided they were detective and trying to .

figure that out lever. I was the new date line, and everyone was trying to solve the murder shit, having those natural gas wells on my football fields. Not a really fucking smart thing to do .

now is the doctors cut coming back to its master rea.

the idea that this is somehow psychogenic master stereo that just doesn't apply to me.

People are just so .

tired to called liars that they don't talk about anymore. IT looked like IT really did, but you don't catch to ads. Follow hysterically on the wondering APP amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can manage all episodes early and add free right now by joining wondering plus in the wondering APP or on apple podcast.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondering dot com slash survey, and if you have a tip about a story that you think we should investigate, please write to us at wondering docs flash tips. Hysterically is a production of wondering and kind of a street studios. Our lead producer is herry milosch y.

Our associate producer is maria ex okabe a producer sophie bridges managing producer aron Kelly, senior producer linna seat is additional production by sander Allen. Dian hanson is our editor. Our executive editor is joe level fact checking by not sumi argia ca, mixing by hand as Brown, our head of sound and engineering is rage marketer original music composed and performed by genomatica legal services for a pineal street from Crystal tupia.

For wondering, our senior producers are lazy based and clear chAmbers coordinating producer maria, gossip senior managing producer Colin plus historical is written and executive produced by me on dantin sy. Our executive producers for panel street are maxell, si, enry, elastic, asa, saluda and generalise berman. Executive producers for wondering are Morgan Jones, martial lewi and gene urgent? Thanks for listening.