Why is Everyone Hallucinating?

For most people, horror stories are momentarily terrifying, yet appeased by the knowledge that at the end of the day, they’re just fictions of the imagination. Unless, they’re not. In an Oregon news story that would make the likes of Stephen King turn pale, five people started hallucinating in succession, and had to be hospitalised as a result. The common denominator? Contact with a woman experiencing delirious visions in the dead of night.

Hospitalised for hallucinations

The phenomenon began when the woman called the police to report vandalism to her vehicle. At the time, she was employed as a caretaker for a 78-year-old woman. Police arrived on the scene, though found the car perfectly intact. After responding to another false alarm at 5.30am police escorted the woman to hospital, suspecting she was hallucinating. Though in a matter of hours she was given the all clear, and was discharged.  

But as the day progressed, all four people who’d come into contact with the woman started experiencing similar symptoms. Both police deputies, a hospital employee and the 78-year-old woman were hospitalised for mental distress and reports of hallucinations.

HAZMAT left hanging

The multiple cases triggered the descent of a HAZMAT team, which swept both the residential home and Oregon's Bay Area Hospital for traces of contamination. Nothing was found, which raises the tenacious question of how five unrelated people, who’d only spent a matter of minutes together, could experience a synchronised outbreak of hallucinatory episodes.

The ‘campfire effect’

According to medical experts, without a tangible catalyst like magic mushroom spores, aerosolized psychotogen or stray hallucinogenic drugs, the phenomenon can be explained by the ‘campfire effect.’ Basically, the term describes the knock on effect that sees one-person cry wolf, and a succession of others experience phantom symptoms in response to the stress.

Yet to Professor James Giordano, Ph.D. at Georgetown University Medical Center's Department of Neurology and Biochemistry, this theory doesn’t quite suffice. Perhaps the 78-year-old woman’s ‘sympathy’ hallucinations could’ve been triggered by stress, but surely both the hospital worker and the police officers experience far more taxing situations on a daily basis?

"If the situation is stressful enough, that it’ll really sort of play on somebody’s mind strings. Here’s an individual who’s having vivid hallucinations," Giordano explains. "If they’re describing the hallucinations, particularly if they’re being very vocal about it... The idea that they may be having simultaneous experiences can happen."

Hallucinogenic drugs, or Halloween epidemic?

Hallucinations can be triggered by other factors like dehydration and fatigue, but once again Giordano testifies that it’s unlikely all five victims were simply having a bad day. So, he concludes that the most plausible explanation is the presence of a contaminant.

"Although they said there was nothing there, the likelihood is that they missed it." It could have been a very small concentration of a highly potent drug, carried on the patients' persons from home to hospital. The five might have been exposed to a drug that altered their brain chemistry, and then were influenced by the previous patients' experiences to follow the same path,” he muses.

Of course, given the fact that Halloween is just around the corner it’s all too tempting to put the incident down to supernatural forces. With five perfectly healthy patients and a complete lack of contamination evidence, paranormal activity isn’t entirely out the question.   

As well as dehydration and sunstroke that can bring on hallucinatory episode, the effects of UV exposure can have long-term medical implications. ‘Sun, Safety, Spectroscopy - The Science of UV Measurement and Assessing Sun Protection’ explores the dangers in further detail, with a focus on how spectroscopy can be used to rate the defensive value of products like sunglasses and sunscreen.