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In 1857 in the savoyard parish of Morzine, convulsive phenomena of trance affected young and adolescent girls during the period of their catholic first holy communion, and then many women or girls and some men. From 1857 up to approximatively 1870, the crisis was attributed successively and simultaneously to sorcery, diabolic possession, demonopathy, hysteria, mesmerism, spiritualism, nymphomania. Afterwards some witnesses and protagonists, such as physicians or priests, evoked publicly a local and political affair and suspected simulation. This paper analyses how words diagnosing crisis and religious or medical beliefs interplayed on the trances and, conversely, how trances produced and reassured diagnosis and beliefs.