A 16-year-old California girl arrived at a pediatric emergency department describing a flying green dinosaur. She wasn't just recalling it. During the interview, she reacted to the dinosaur and responded to things no one else could see. She also heard voices telling her to hurt herself and felt sure people were following her.
Emergency physicians at Loma Linda University Medical Center describe the case in a 2026 report in Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine. It could easily have ended with a transfer to a psychiatric unit. Instead, a set of physical clues kept her in the hospital until a spinal fluid test, returned on her 18th day of admission, showed her own antibodies were targeting her nervous system.
