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In the summer of 1518, something deeply unsettling took over the streets of Strasbourg, Alsace, in the Holy Roman Empire. It wasn’t a music festival, a flash mob, or a medieval TikTok trend. It was a full-blown, weeks-long dancing epidemic that left hundreds of people physically unable to stop moving… until many of them literally danced themselves to death.
The outbreak started when a woman known as Frau Troffea and her daughter Fräulein Emma Götz began to dance fervently and uncontrollably in a street in Strasbourg. This spiraled into mass hysteria (or something even stranger), as more and more people joined in, day after day, under the brutal summer heat. No food, no rest, no relief. Just nonstop dancing, collapsing bodies, and a city completely unable to explain what the hell was happening.
In this episode, Kristen tells Ash about one of history’s weirdest and most haunting phenomena: the Dancing Plague of 1518. Was it mass psychogenic illness? Religious panic? Poisoned bread? Or something darker lurking beneath the surface? Because serioulsy, how do you explain a situation where your body just… won’t stop dancing?
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Audio editing by Gaytrice Perdue.
South Africa