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Alex Cabrero ReportingShows with hypnotists are often packed with people curious to see if it really works. Some students in Logan are believers now, after a few of them say they got stuck in a trance and started feeling sick.
Hypnotist shows are supposed to be fun, but Havila Whiting says the show at Logan High School last week wasn't fun at all, especially for a few girls in the audience.
Whiting says, "They were going into seizures and panicking, and then crying."
Students say the hypnotist, Dale Bowman, stopped the show and ran into the audience to help the girls. Others say it appeared they were stuck in some kind of hypnotic trance.
Brandon Larsen said, "There's a lot of people having problems that were just like, wouldn't come out of the trance, they wouldn't wake up."
Bennett Purser said, "It seemed like everyone in the audience was possessed."
One 17-year-old girl was taken to the hospital, but Brigham City-based hypnotist Kerry Sharp says hyper-ventilating isn't a symptom of hypnosis. "A lot of times these things will happen and people assume, ‘whoa, this hypnotist is doing weird, freaky things to these people,' but it's not the case," he said.
Sharp says he did a show where a woman started hyper-ventilating. It turned out she had heat-exhaustion, but at first he got blamed. He feels movies about hypnotists show a lot of things that really don't happen.
"You can't get stuck in hypnosis. It's completely voluntary to go into it, and you can come out at any time you choose," Sharp said.
No matter what it was, for some students it was very real.
"It was just scary. You couldn't describe what was happening," Whiting said.
Logan High's principal, Patt Hansen, said this hypnotist's show is something the school has been doing for several years, but now they don't think they're going to use him anymore.
Michael Monson, with the Logan School District, said, "It's nothing personal with him or his program, but as a district we've decided we won't have a hypnotist show or that type of show again."
The girls who said they were sick, including the one who was taken to the hospital, have all returned to school.
