For weeks in the summer of 1518, hundreds of people in Strasbourg danced without music, without rest, without wanting to — collapsing from strokes, heart attacks, and sheer exhaustion. Horrified authorities responded by hiring more musicians. It really happened, it's in the civic records, and no one is entirely sure why.
A vivid retelling of how one woman's compulsion spread into a city-wide epidemic of involuntary dancing. The strangest possible way to be introduced to the story.
Frau Troffea's first steps on July 14, the swelling crowd, the deaths, and the eyewitness sources — physician notes, sermons, and city council records that prove it wasn't a legend.
National Geographic on the astonishing official response: convinced the cure was more dancing, the guildsmen cleared a stage, hired pipers, and made things catastrophically worse.
The Public Domain Review places the outbreak in a whole tradition of medieval 'choreomania,' from the Rhine to the earlier dancing manias, with period woodcuts and chronicles.
The strongest case for the leading theory: mass psychogenic illness, born of famine, disease, and dread — how collective terror can literally seize the body.
A survey of every competing culprit — hallucinogenic ergot mold in the rye, a religious cult of Saint Vitus, and trance states — and why none of them fully fits.