Hypnotism at Greenfield High School
by Joe Stout
It was during the basketball season of 1945/46 that a Hypnotist was brought to Greenfield High School to perform on the stage of the study hall for all the students.
He got 10 or 12 of us to come onstage and began his hypnotism. The first thing I remember he had us do is to start rolling our hands over and over and after a while he told us we could not stop. I remember that I was aware of what I was doing but I could not stop. Some probably did but I don’t remember if they did or not.
I also remember that he got me to come up and stand in front of him with my back to him and he began to tell me that I was going to fall backwards. I also remember having a numbing feeling and I did fall backwards and he caught me. He had others imitating a chicken and doing some antics that were unusable. That is about all I remember of the performance.
This did create a lot of excitement in school, as we had not seen, and many of us had never heard of this before.
Frank Overton was a senior that year and he decided that he could do just as well as the performer. The next day he tried it on a few without success and then he tried it on Betty Jean Coats. Well he was successful on this attempt but he evidently did not know how to bring her out of the hypnotic state.
There was a basketball game that night and Betty Jean did play some still in some kind of hypnotic state. I don’t remember when and how she came out of it.