No matter how much you may have hit the dance floor this past weekend, these French villagers have you beat. In 1518, a "Dancing Plague" swept through a small town in then-Alsace, leading multitudes of people to shake it until they either died or experienced horrifying injuries.
From the origins of this mass hysteria to the theories behind why it happened, here are 10 images telling the story of the Dancing Plague of 1518.
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Long before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sang “dance ’til you’re dead” in “Heads Will Roll,” up to 400 French folks wound up doing just that during the Dancing Plague of 1518.
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Like with any plague, this dancing hysteria had a patient zero. In July 1518, a local woman named Frau Troffea took to the streets of Strasbourg, France (then Alsace) and proceeded to dance, dance and dance some more.
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“Frau Troffea had started dancing on July 14th on the narrow cobbled street outside her half-timbered home,” explained London-based writer Ned Pennant-Rea. “As far as we can tell she had no musical accompaniment but simply 'began to dance.’”
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Frau Troffea’s solo only lasted for so long, with more and more folks joining her in her impromptu performance. “Some of those who had witnessed her strange performance had begun to mimic her,” Pennant-Rea added, “and within days more than thirty choreomaniacs were in motion, some so monomaniacally that only death would have the power to intervene."
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It didn’t take long for things to get gruesome. Alongside the dancers growing sweaty and bleeding into their shoes, several died of strokes and heart attacks.
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It’s unclear how many people died during the ordeal, but some accounts claim up to 15 people died per day at the height of the deadly craze, per “A Time To Dance, A Time To Die.”
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Though the dancing ultimately died down that September, the cause of why, exactly this started remains a mystery, despite "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" confirming it all went down, as Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News put it back in 2008.
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Even so, some experts have devised a few theories as to why folks decided to get a little too jiggy with it. One point to food poisoning — specifically, that folks were consuming a psychedelic compound related to LSD that may have been growing on their grains.
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Another theory stated that stress may have been behind the ordeal, arguing that factors like disease and lack of food may have sent locals into a form of psychosis.
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Though the world may never know what, exactly caused this dancing plague, one thing is certain: It’s one heck of a creepy tale.
