Traditional African healers believe that amafufunyana is a kind of spirit possession brought about by witchcraft, and is responsible for driving countless youths mad as well as exploding spellcheckers everywhere.
The perceived method for this bewitchment is weird on its own: it's accomplished by pounding ants that have been feeding from a grave into a poisonous paste that the victim must ingest. But the outcome is even weirder: once they've ingested the grave-ant pudding, the victim begins to hear voices... coming from their own stomach.
Often these voices actually speak a different language from the victim. Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, for example, have reported hearing voices speak Zulu, and vice versa.
And the stomach voices don't just want to talk about the weather or last night's episode of Lost. No, they get very aggressive and begin issuing orders. They've been known to threaten seizures, demand tributes, request acts of violence and, if that's not crazy enough, there have even been a few situations where a case of the stomach-dickheads went viral: at a junior high school in Africa, one outbreak of amafufunyana had over 400 children reporting swollen stomachs and bizarre behavior.
The children ran out of control, rolling their eyes, babbling and striking out uncontrollably at anything around them. One teacher later reported that, upon squeezing the children's stomachs, she could clearly hear the Zulu voices claiming to possess said children.
Might be going out on a limb and suggest that the auditory hallucinations have something to do with eating huge portions of poison ants. As for the schoolchildren all joining in on the act, that sounds like good old-fashioned mass hysteria, since among humans, crazy is more contagious than any disease.
Also, at this point one might be starting to think there's a hidden part of the human brain that just wants an excuse to fuck shit up and blame it on ghosts.
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