Swooning, perhaps?

A handsome young hypnotist, Maxime Nadeau, was called in to give the 12-13 year-old girls of a Quebec private school a little show, and while he successfully he put several of the schoolgirls into a spell, he could not wake them out of it; one was spellbound for a reported five hours.

Nadeau called his mentor Richard Whitbred, who hurried from an hour away to snap the schoolgirls out of their trances. Whitbread suggests the girls were profoundly entranced because Nadeau is a handsome young man (giggle). The girls, now awakened, describe the hypnosis as feeling like an out-of-body experience. 

A show at a private girls' high school in Sherbooke, Que., went strangely awry when a young hypnotist left several students in "mass hypnosis" limbo and he had to call in his mentor to snap them out of it.

 

One student at Collège du Sacré-Coeur was reportedly left hypnotized for five hours until Maxime Nadeau, the young hypnotist, called his mentor to the school for an emergency intervention.

It all happened at an end-of-school year event last week, when Nadeau was hired to stage a hypnotism show for a small group of 12- and 13-year-old girls.

He worked on a small group while others watched the show. When it came time to end the event, several girls in the audience remained mesmerized and couldn't snap out of it, no matter what Nadeau did.

Nadeau didn't panic, because "it wasn't dangerous," he recalled in an interview with CBC's French-language service.

\

"Being in a trance is a state of well-being," Nadeau explained. "I wasn't stressed. I knew they would get out of it."

He called his mentor and trainer, Richard Whitbread, who made the hour-long trek to the school from his home in the town of Danville.

Whitbread found several girls were still suffering the effects of "mass hypnosis."