The abdomen was distended with tympanites and the rectum much dilated with accumulated feces.

Dr.Madden left her, telling her that she was not pregnant, and when she reappeared at his office in a few days, he reassured her of the nonexistence of pregnancy; she became very indignant, triumphantly squeezed lactescent fluid from her breasts, and, insisting that she could feel fetal movements, left to seek a more sympathetic accoucheur.
Underhill, in the words of Hamilton, describes a woman as "having acquired the most accurate description of the breeding symptoms, and with wonderful facility imagined that she had felt every one of them." He found the woman on a bed complaining of great labor-pains, biting a handkerchief, and pulling on a cloth attached to her bed.

The finger on the abdomen or vulva elicited symptoms of great sensitiveness.

He told her she was not pregnant, and the next day she was sitting up, though the discharge continued, but the simulated throes of labor, which she had so graphically pictured, had ceased.
Haultain gives three examples of pseudocyesis, the first with no apparent cause, the second due to carcinoma of the uterus, while in the third there was a small fibroid in the anterior wall of the uterus.
Some cases are of purely nervous origin, associated with a purely muscular distention of the abdomen.

Clay reported a case due to ascites.