Ep 233: What It Wasn't: Or "How I learned to stop dismissively categorizing potentially paranormal events as mass hysteria"

“So goodbye, everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian; it’s Halloween.”

— Orson Welles, addressing the hullabaloo over the "War of the Worlds" fictional radio drama

Description:

Often when one hears about some group of people claiming to experience a highly strange event or similarly acting out in bizarre and irrational manners, it's easy and common to dismiss the episode as a case of "mass hysteria." Phenomena like the audience reaction to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast, "The Dancing Plague of 1518," the "Windshield-Pitting Mystery of 1954," and "The Mad Gasser of Mattoon" are considered by much of the public to be examples of mass hysteria. In the late 1930s and decades after, some sociologists used occurrences like those to help model their theory of "Social Contagion." Like the idea that one or several people claim to experience something unusual, others hear about it and start to see the same thing. Soon it all spirals into an epidemic of vast numbers of people all testifying to the same weirdness with no real, mystical cause. But is the potentially antiquated term of mass hysteria or even its modern descendant "mass psychogenic illness" accurate or helpful? When explaining how some collectives of people can declare to see the same impossible thing, or how communities usually react in predictable patterns when faced with the Fortean, are they all just "hysterical" or "ill?" Are these events all the same? With the Enfield Monster, sociologist David L. Miller used the incident as a case study for what seems a more suitable way to think about many of the stories we cover, not as contagion or hysteria, but as "Collective Action and Behavior." We may never know what these cryptic creatures and mysterious happenings genuinely are, but at least we can better understand how people react to them and each other when they show up. Regarding the experiencers, we can know what it wasn't. These are important considerations because, after all, what is the value to humans if a paranormal event occurs and no one is around to witness it? 

The “Enfield Monster” by illustrator David Spencer. ©2022 David Spencer All Rights Reserved

©Loren Coleman

Henry McDaniel’s house, showing evidence of scratches to the screen

Henry McDaniel looks down at the spot on his doorstep where he first spotted the Enfield Monster. ©Photo by Tom Dunning for the Evansville Courier and Press, May 9, 1973

“White County Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. (fourth from left) ushers five young men into custody Tuesday following their arrest near Enfield, IL on firearms violations.” ©Photo by Tom Dunning for the Evansville Courier and Press, May 9, 1973

Henry McDaniel’s Draft Registration card

Notable Enfield resident “Lefty” Jamerson, who pitched for one inning for the Red Sox against the St. Louis Browns back in 1924

 

Location:

Enfield, Illinois, the town where the “Enfield Horror” or the “Enfield Monster” was reportedly sighted several times in late April and early May 1973.

Reference Links:

• Chapter on Collective Action in the Enfield Monster case from Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action: Third Edition by David L. Miller on Google Books

• Preview on JSTOR.org of “A Critical Examination of the Social Contagion Image of Collective Behavior: the Case of the Enfield Monster” by David L. Miller, Kenneth J. Mietus, Richard A. Mathers of Western Illinois University, appearing in The Sociological Quarterly, Winter, 1978, Vol. 19, No. 1 

• David L. Miller of Macomb, Illinois | 1944 - 2018 | Obituary

• Mass psychogenic illness

• Social contagion

• Collective behavior

• “Conversion Disorder and Mass Hysteria” by Scott Mendelson, M.D. on huffpost.com

• Conversion disorder

• Social Identity Theory

• Identity disorder

• Dancing plague of 1518

• Epistemology

• Frame analysis

• Crowd psychology

• Tess’ blog entry on “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon”

• “The Windshield-Pitting Mystery Of 1954” on NPR History Dept.

• “Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954.” on HistoryLink.org

• American sociologist Herbert Blumer

• American sociologist Orrin Edgar Klapp

• American sociologist Neil Smelser

• Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel

• “Social Identity Theory” and Henri Tajfel, by Dr. Saul McLeod

• American sociologist Ralph H. Turner

• British and Australian sociologist Bryan Turner

• French polymath, sociologist, and crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon

• USC Cinema Critical Studies professor Drew Casper

• Shag Harbour UFO Incident

• Phoenix Lights incident

• Ariel School UFO incident

• “Sky Over China's Port City Turned Blood Red” from The Quint YouTube channel

• The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama)

• “In 2011, A Highschool Erupted With Mysterious Cases Of A "Tourette's-Like Condition" from IFLScience.com

• Dependent and independent variables

• The Enfield Monster on Wikipedia

• Tess’ blog entry on the Enfield Monster

• Enfield, Illinois

• Loren Coleman’s website, lorencoleman.com

• Loren Coleman on Wikipedia

• International Cryptozoology Museum website

• Conversation with Loren Coleman on Twitter

• “Remembering Richard Crowe Ghost Hunter” Facebook page

• “Chicago Ghost Hunter Richard Crowe Dies” on CBSNews.com/Chicago

• “A ‘Monster’ at Enfield” by Dennis Montgomery, from the Mt. Vernon Register-News, Friday, April 27, 1973

• “‘Monster’ is Pooh-Poohed” by Chris Dettro, from the Reading Eagle, August 22, 1973

• “Enfield Monster – The Beginning of a Legend?” from The St. Cloud Daily Times on Newspapers.com

• Three-legged, six-toed, goggle-eyed monster reported sighted again” from the Southern Illinoian newspaper (Carbondale, IL) Monday, May 7, 1973

• “Enfield’s Monster – It’s still there whatever it is” from the Evansville Courier and Press, May 8, 1973

• “Enfield Folks Fear Gun-Toters – Anybody seen a monster lately?” from the Evansville Courier and Press, May 9, 1973

• “No Monster in Sight” – 25-year-old Loren Coleman investigates, from the Evansville Press, May 13, 1973

• “Is Enfield Monster Midwestern Ape?” from the Evansville Courier and Press, June 10, 1973

• “McDaniel and the Monster of Enfield” by Chris Dettro, Daily News-Post, Monrovia, CA, July 30, 1973, page A-1, part 1

• “McDaniel and the Monster of Enfield” by Chris Dettro, Daily News-Post, Monrovia, CA, July 30, 1973, page A-8, part 2

• “Strangers In the Night: The Enfield Monster Case Study” by Chris Darkes on medium.com

• “Devil’s Kitchen, the Enfield Monster and UFOs” by Mark Tullis at the Republic-Times

• Southern Illinois

• Carmi, Illinois

• Cairo, Illinois

• The Simpsons, S9E2: The Principal and the Pauper

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CREDITS:

Episode 233: What It Wasn't: or "How I learned to stop dismissively categorizing potentially paranormal events as mass hysteria.” Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Audio Editing by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound. Sound Design by Ryan McCullough; Tess Pfeifle, Producer, and Lead Researcher; Research Support from the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a.k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Copyright 2022 Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.