Mass Hysteria Examples

Mass Hysteria is a well known occurrence that involves a group of people that go through an event that may or may not be real that creates paranoia and fear.1 It is sometimes referred to as a physical illness that contributes to hallucinations and having weird symptoms because of a certain witnessing of actions that are questionable. This concept has existed for hundreds of years, and still occurs today in society. Examples of mass hysteria includes 9/11, the holocaust, school shootings, witchcraft, and the ebola outburst. A mass hysteria that was popular in the 1960’s-1970’s was the Zodiac Killer, a horrific murder that shocked society and changed their lives to be surrounded by fear and anxiety. Mass Hysteria has played into the mystery

There is so many missing clues and unanswered questions that investigators are still astonished by. The most recent discovery and possibly a step closer was in 2014, the new book coming out called “The Most Dangerous Animal of all”2. In this novel, author Gary Stewart portrays how his father resembles the criminal sketch they have of the Zodiac Killer, and also explains his theory that his father was the Zodiac, Earl Van Best Jr.2 People have looked closer into depth of the story and there is insufficient evidence that connects the two people to the killings. Their claims to be a few links to Earl and the Zodiac.The book suggests that the author's father was the killer because of small parts of important evidence.6 The Zodiac once sent in a cryptogram that had a variety of different letters and symbols in it. The first link they unraveled is that in the cryptogram his dad’s initials E. V. BEST were located in the cryptogram.6 The second reason was because Earl was out of jail coincidently while the killings were occurring. Earl has a scar on one of his fingers, and when police were analyzing and doing tests on the handwriting of the Zodiac, one of the fingerprints matched to Earl’s scarred