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They stood proudly on the showground’s clipped turf, the brass buttons on their bright uniforms gleaming under the Sunday morning sun.

Five hundred excited children waited for their turn to dazzle the large crowd in one of the Midlands’ biggest junior brass and marching band competitions.

The noise of kazoos filled the air, an insect-like soundtrack to the day’s events.

Suddenly, the giggles and shrieks fell silent. The crowd struggled to comprehend what was happening.

There was panic among the facepaint as the carnival was gripped by carnage that, almost 30 years later, remains one of the region’s greatest X-Files mysteries.

One by one, children swooned, then collapsed unconscious.

As one eye-witness put it: “They began falling down like nine pins”. It was as if a faith healer had worked his magic.

Soon Hollinwell Showground, in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, was littered with prone bodies as St John Ambulance struggled to cope with the emergency.

This was the Hollinwell Incident, a July 13, 1986 puzzle that continues to divide opinion.

The chilling incident also goes by another name – All Fall Down.

In all, 300 children and adults, many from the West Midlands, simply dropped to the floor. Many suffered sore eyes and throats and nausea before losing consciousness.

“My legs and arms felt as if they had no bones in them and I had a bad headache,” said one victim.

Four local hospitals were placed on red alert as 259 casualties were ferried by ambulance for treatment. Nine were kept in overnight.

But what caused this mass swooning sickness?

The official line beggars belief. It was, say the experts, an incredibly rare epidemic of hysteria, eclipsing even the peak of Beatlemania.

The precise medical term is “mass sociogenic illness” and it is most common among mass religious gatherings.

Many of the young musicians had travelled early for the annual event, organised by the Forest League of Juvenile Jazz Bands. Add to their tiredness, the adrenaline rush of performing, and the heat, and you have the formula for a crowd-wide panic attack, boffins reasoned.

Certainly, the victims showed classic signs of hyperventilation – nausea, stomach cramps, headaches and fainting. Hysteria is also most prominent among young women gathered in large numbers in one place. The vast majority of Hollinwell victims were female.

The explanation, however, does not wash with those who felt the terrible burning sensation in their eyes and mouths. The official line has not been bought by those gripped by sudden paralysis.

Margaret Palethorpe said: “It’s still hard to explain what it was like but it became a sort of warzone. There were children dropping like flies.

“They seemed to be collapsing for no reason. Panic spread through the site, but it wasn’t like screaming and shouting. It was a strange feeling.

“Everyone was really worried because we didn’t know what was happening.”

Margaret’s three-month-old baby collapsed unconscious in her pram.

“She was still breathing, but we couldn’t wake her up,” said Margaret. “She had to stay in hospital overnight, but she was OK.”

And there’s the flaw in the hysteria explanation. Babies, much too young to be influenced by what was going on around them, also flaked out.

Terry Bingham experienced the effects and knows he was hit hard by something very real, not imaginary.

Speaking in 2013, the Derby man said: “It was like a nasty, burning taste in my throat and my eyes and nose started tingling. I can remember getting home that night and the next thing I knew, I was in Chesterfield Hospital.

“I remember it vividly and I can honestly say that, whatever it was, it wasn’t mass hysteria. I was a fireman and a miner. Do you really think I’d be bothered by mass hysteria?

“What bothers me most is that we never got a proper answer.”

One competitor on the day now accepts hysteria was the catalyst. Writing on nostalgia.com, the former band member said: “I was there along with my sister. I must have been about 14 at the time and my sister 16. We were both members of the Pleasley Carabiniers, one of the marching bands that took part in the competition.

“All I can remember now is my sister becoming rather frightened and collapsing and being taken away on a stretcher. Personally, I didn’t have any of the symptoms, only the normal worry anyone would have seeing their big sister in such a state.

“As for the cause, who knows? Thinking about it now, I’d say it was hysteria – a large gathering of children, excited and also nervous about a competition which they took very seriously. You have to remember that there was a lot of healthy rivalry in those marching bands.

“I’d like to think it was a coincidence, perhaps started off by a couple of kids succumbing to nerves or maybe even food poisoning, alarmed parents leading to scared younger members of the bands – some of those kids were aged around seven or eight, I think – creating a chain reaction.”

Ron Chamberlain, then Kirkby-in-Ashfield Council environmental health committee chairman, also backed the “mass sociogenic illness” conclusion.

He told the Sunday Mercury’s sister Nottingham Post newspaper: “We carried out a full, proper and thorough investigation. We followed up several possible theories and there is still no doubt in my mind that it was down to mass hysteria.”

Only one thing remains sure about the Midlands’ real X Files case. It will never be solved.

All agencies involved agree that no new inquiry should take place.

Were the Hollinwell 300 victims of crop spraying?

There may be a more sinister explanation for The Hollinwell Incident than mass hysteria.

The Hollinwell 300 may have been the victims of crop spraying, specifically the chemical tridemorph, now banned by the Government.

The fungicide, launched in 1960, has been categorised as “moderately hazardous” by the World Health Organisation and has been known to cause irritation to skin and eyes.

There was also a link to birth defects.

The official inquiry into the incident found that Calixin, a pesticide that contained tridemorph, had been used on a field that shouldered the showground.

One academic believed the collapse was caused by both chemicals and the power of the mind.

The children smelled the pesticide, which was the trigger for a dramatic chain reaction: they thought they were being gassed and acted accordingly.

What followed is best described as a “domino effect”.

Professor David Ray, specialist in pesticide toxicity at Nottingham University, said: “There have been cases in America where children have reacted in a hysterical way to pesticides. It’s usually the smell of the pesticide which triggers the reaction.

“But it’s highly unlikely that tridemorph would have caused the children to collapse if they’d been exposed to it directly, given that it isn’t harmful to non-pregnant adults or children and it was sprayed in a field several hundred yards away two or three days before.”

'Hysteria an invention of Sigmund Freud'

Over the years, a number of theories for the bizarre, falling down phenomenon have been explored.

Water supplies were immediately checked and tests for gas leaks proved negative.

High-frequency radio waves and mystery viruses were also considered.

Some have even suggested the answer to the Hollinwell mystery lies in the supernatural, even the Biblical.

Website End Times Prophecy Report believes Satan was at work on that showground.

It states: “From time to time during the past centuries, the public has becomes aware of the effects of demonic power.

“For the last 120 years or so, the diagnosis of mass hysteria has been used to explain, cover up and hide these outbreaks and displays. Mass hysteria was an invention of Sigmund Freud and others around the end of the 1800s.

“These men toiled for the mystery of iniquity, promoting all things anti-christ, while providing aid for those who wished to explain away those inconvenient things which could no longer be hidden; which came to the attention of the public.

“Such as the effects of various outbreaks of the demonic and of those who consulted with familiar spirits.

“Freud and his cohorts manufactured the lie of mass hysteria to hide what could no longer be hidden or explained with the lies which were then being used.”