The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine

Summary

In the late 19th century, a rare and highly unusual neuropsychiatric condition was observed among a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks living in the Moosehead Lake region of northern Maine. Those affected exhibited an extreme and exaggerated startle reflex. When startled by a sudden movement or loud noise, they reacted with dramatic involuntary responses, such as leaping into the air, screaming, repeating words, or instantly obeying shouted commands. It was reported that the "jumpers" were primarily of French descent, born in Canada, and worked as lumbermen in the Maine woods. The mystery of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine first drew the attention of the scientific community in 1878, when prominent American neurologist George Miller Beard informed members of the American Neurological Association at its annual meeting that he had heard accounts of these lumberjacks and their unusual nervous condition. Two years later, Beard himself travelled to the Moosehead Lake region to see first-hand if the accounts were true. He wasn’t disappointed. Lumberjacks at a Maine logging camp, circa 1900. Beard investigated several jumpers: I found two of the Jumpers employed about the hotel. With one of them, a young man twenty-seven years of age, I made the following experiments: 1. While sitting in a chair, with a knife in his hand, with which he was about to cut his tobacco, he was struck sharply on the shoulder, and told to "throw it." Almost as quick as the explosion of a pistol, he threw the knife, and it stuck in a beam opposite; at the same time he repeated the order "throw it" with a certain cry as of terror or alarm. 2. A moment after, while filling his pipe with tobacco, he was again slapped on the shoulder and told to "throw it." He threw the tobacco and the pipe on the grass, at least a rod away, with the same cry and the same suddenness and explosiveness of movement. In another case, a sixteen-year-old boy was playing with one of his mates when someone abruptly commanded...