WILMINGTON –
Strasbourg, France, 1518.
Mrs. Troffea started to dance.
Slowly at first, her body rocked gently back and forth as she stood, alone, in the middle of the street.
That relatively reserved rhythm soon evolved into a much more aggressive swinging of arms, legs, hips and head.
She danced as if she was walking through a never-ending series of invisible spider webs.
She danced as if she had stumbled upon a hornet’s nest that now swarmed around her head.
All to a musical beat that was not there.
She danced.
A crowd began to gather around her.
Heads began to bob and weave as they watched Mrs. Troffea continue her frantic flailing.
Soon, those bobbing heads and weaving necks joined Mrs. Troffea in the street and added their own moves to the mysterious performance.
Night was beginning to fall.
And more people joined the group.
The town went to bed.
And the group continued to dance.
The town awoke the following day to even more dancers in the streets.
Why were they doing this?
How were they doing this?
34 dancers had joined within a week.
Within a month, the crowd had swollen to 400.
Exhaustion, dehydration, heat strokes, and heart attacks began to descend upon the crowded street like seagulls following a garbage barge.
Dancers began to collapse.
And then dancers began to die.
Those that remained upright simply danced around the fallen.
Authorities were notified and immediately made the situation much worse.
Believing that the solution was to exhaust the participants, authorities prescribed “more dancing” as a cure to the epidemic and built two grand wooden stages for the dancers to perform on.
They paid for musicians to be brought in and play continuously to encourage the crowd to keep going.
The strategy, of course, was disastrous.
By placing the dancers in very public spaces, and drawing more attention to them, more and more people were exposed to the “mental contagion” of the dancers and joined the crowd themselves.
After six weeks of inexplicable, seemingly contagious, afflictions of dancing, the crowd began to thin.
The last dancers to join were the last to leave but eventually everything in the town of Strasbourg returned to normal almost as suddenly as the outbreak of dancing had begun.
To this day it is still unknown as to what created the “Dancing Plague” of Strasbourg, France in 1518.
The leading theory points to Ergot poisoning (a psychoactive fungus with properties similar to LSD) and can commonly grow on wheat.
This fungus has also been implicated in other famous hysterical outbreaks (including the Salem Witch Trials), but some folks don’t believe that the Ergot theory holds up.
People on LSD don’t tend to all have the same exact reaction to the drug and neither does it tend to allow people to dance for days on end.
It also fails to explain why every other “Dancing Plague” outbreak (of which there were seven) occurred near the Rhine and Mosselle Rivers.
Something in the water, perhaps?
