In July 1518, in the narrow cobblestone streets of Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped out of her front door and began to dance uncontrollably.
There was no music playing. There was no festival occurring. She simply danced with a desperate, wild intensity.
She kept moving through the afternoon heat, collapsed into fitful sleep from exhaustion, and woke up the following morning still twitching and dancing. Within a week, thirty more townspeople had joined her, spinning and leaping alongside her in the public square.
Within a month, the crowd of dancers had ballooned to over four hundred people.
Their feet bled through their leather shoes. Their clothes were shredded, their skin pale and soaked in sweat, but they could not stop. Many wept openly, begging for mercy from God, while their bodies kept twisting and convulsing in synchronized mania.
Local authorities and physicians were completely baffled. Rejecting supernatural curses, the town doctors diagnosed the outbreak as a natural affliction caused by overheated blood.
Their medical solution was to prescribe more dancing.
Believing the victims had to dance the fever out of their systems, city officials cleared two market squares, built wooden platforms, and hired professional pipers, drummers, and brass players to keep continuous rhythm day and night. They even paid burly local men to hold up collapsing dancers so they could keep their feet moving.
The strategy backfired spectacularly. The festive music only drew more spectators into the psychological hysteria. At its peak, the mania claimed as many as fifteen lives a day from cardiac arrest, strokes, and pure physical exhaustion.
Desperate to end the nightmare, authorities finally banned public music and loaded the surviving dancers onto wooden carts, shipping them to a nearby shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus. There, after their bloody feet were placed into consecrated red shoes and priests sprinkled holy water over their heads, the mania slowly burned itself out.
Getting struck by a mysterious psychological urge to dance yourself to death in the public square, only for city doctors to hire an orchestra to make it worse, is peak medieval chaos. That wraps up Day 11 of Crazy History Facts!
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