Unbelievable But True: The Strasbourg Dancing Plague and Other Absurd Histories

In July of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked into a street in Strasbourg and started to dance. And just to be clear, we're not talking about a celebration. Last week we had a bear who was an actual soldier in World War Two. This week, we have a woman who just… couldn't stop. She couldn't stop. She danced for somewhere between four and six days. Alone. In the street. Without music. And you'd think people would, you know, intervene. Help her. But within a week, thirty-four other people had joined her. Mm-hm. And by the end of the month, the number of dancers was around four hundred. So you have a public health crisis emerging.

The city's leaders, the magistrates and physicians, they get together. They have to figure this out. Right. And they rule out anything supernatural. They decide it's not a curse, it's a medical condition. They called it "hot blood." Hot blood. And their prescription for this… was more dancing. More dancing. They reasoned that the only way to cure the fever was for the afflicted to, uh, dance it out of their systems. So they set aside halls for them. They built a literal stage in the city market. They even hired professional musicians to play pipes and drums to keep the people moving. So the official, state-sponsored solution to uncontrollable dancing was a mandatory public rave.

Exactly. And it was a complete catastrophe. Because people started dying. You have hundreds of people, already exhausted, being forced to move constantly. They're having heart attacks. Strokes. Sheer exhaustion. The sources say at its peak, the plague was killing up to fifteen people per day. And the whole time, the band is just… playing. Because they were ordered to. It's an unbelievable image. Finally, the magistrates realize their plan is backfiring. Horribly. So they switch tactics. They ban all public dancing. They shut down the music. They take the remaining dancers to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus, hoping for a miracle.

And eventually, over the next few weeks… it just sort of… stopped. The last of the dancers gradually ceased their movements. But nobody really knows why it started. The leading theory today is something called mass psychogenic illness. Basically, mass hysteria, probably triggered by the extreme poverty and famine of the time. There are other ideas—that they ate a type of mold that grows on rye bread, an ergot fungus, which can cause convulsions. But that doesn't really explain the coordinated dancing. No. It doesn't. And the records from the time are very clear. The city council records, sermons from the cathedral, local chronicles… they all describe it the same way.

Not as convulsions, but as dancing. So we're left with this historical fact. For a few weeks in the summer of 1518, a city's solution to a deadly plague was to hire a band. It's a reminder that sometimes the strangest explanation… is simply what happened.