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

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 combinat…