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In mid-July 1518, on a narrow street in Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped outside her half-timbered house and started to dance. No musicians played. No festival was underway. She simply moved, jerking and turning, for hours, then into the next day, and the one after that. Her husband tried to make her stop. She kept going anyway, on feet that were swelling and starting to bleed. Within a week, more than thirty other residents were dancing beside her, seized by the same compulsion, unable to explain why. By the time the outbreak ran its course some weeks later, chroniclers put the number of dancers as high as 400, and several of them reportedly died from strokes, heart attacks, or sheer exhaustion.
This isn't a folk tale stitched together centuries after the fact. Strasbourg in 1518 kept municipal records, and physicians of the day wrote about what they saw. The dancing plague is one of the best-documented outbreaks of what scholars now call “mass psychogenic illness,” and it remains one of the strangest events in European history precisely because so much of it is on paper, not just in legend.
What the city actually did about it
City physicians examined the dancers and, following the medical logic of the time, decided the affliction was “hot blood” — an imbalance that needed to be worked out of the body, not suppressed. Their prescribed cure was more dancing. Strasbourg's council cleared out a grain market and two guildhalls, built a wooden stage, and hired musicians and professional dancers to keep the afflicted moving, believing continuous motion would burn off whatever was making them sick.
It made things worse. The public dancing spaces became a stage that drew in still more sufferers, and the death toll climbed as exhausted dancers collapsed from cardiac arrest and stroke. Only when authorities reversed course — banning public dancing and music altogether, and instead sending the afflicted to a mountain shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus, the patron saint associated with a nervous affliction already nicknamed "Saint Vitus's Dance" — did the episode finally wind down by early September.
Why “dancing plague” wasn't a one-off phrase
Strasbourg's outbreak was the largest and best-recorded of its kind, but it wasn't the first. Smaller dancing manias had appeared in the Rhineland and neighboring regions for centuries before 1518, including a documented episode in Strasbourg's own history in 1374 that spread along the Rhine through several towns. By the sixteenth century, “choreomania” was a recognized, if rare and alarming, category of affliction in that part of Europe — which is part of why the physicians of 1518 had a ready-made cultural script (hot blood, Saint Vitus, dancing as both symptom and cure) to reach for instead of treating it as something unprecedented.
The two leading theories today
Modern historians and researchers have offered several explanations, and the honest answer is that no single one commands universal agreement:
- Ergot poisoning. A mold that grows on damp rye can produce compounds chemically related to LSD, and some researchers have proposed that contaminated bread caused convulsions and hallucinations across the population. Historian John Waller, who has written the most detailed modern study of the outbreak, argues this theory doesn't hold up well: ergot poisoning is more likely to cause seizures, vomiting, and gangrene than the sustained, coordinated dancing that observers described lasting for days.
- Stress-induced mass hysteria. Waller's own explanation points instead to the extraordinary hardship Strasbourg was enduring in 1518 — a run of failed harvests, famine, and disease including smallpox and syphilis moving through the region. Combined with a strong, shared local belief that Saint Vitus could curse people with an uncontrollable urge to dance, Waller argues that the psychological conditions were primed for a genuine outbreak of what we'd now call mass psychogenic illness: a real, involuntary physical response driven by extreme collective stress and a specific cultural framework for expressing it.
Other, less-favored explanations have included a religious cult ritual or simple deliberate performance, though neither fits the physical toll — bleeding feet, collapse, and reported deaths — described in the surviving accounts.
Why the story still holds up
What makes the Strasbourg outbreak different from most “urban legend” material is that it isn't oral tradition dressed up as history. It's a documented public health crisis that a city government responded to, badly, in real time, using the medical understanding available to them. The dancers weren't acting. Whatever combination of biology, belief, and desperation was driving them, the movement itself, and the deaths that followed, were real enough that Strasbourg's council spent public money building a stage to manage it.
If you want to go deeper into Waller's research and the primary sources behind it, his book A Time to Dance, a Time to Die remains the most thorough modern account of the outbreak. Learn More
FAQ
How many people died in the Dancing Plague of 1518?
Exact numbers weren't tallied precisely, but period accounts describe deaths from stroke, heart attack, and exhaustion among the dancers, with some later estimates suggesting as many as fifteen people a day died at the outbreak's peak in August 1518.
Did the authorities really pay for musicians to keep people dancing?
Yes. Strasbourg's council, acting on the medical advice that “hot blood” needed to be danced out of the body, cleared guildhalls and a grain market, built a stage, and hired musicians and professional dancers, a decision that appears to have prolonged the outbreak rather than ending it.
Was ergot poisoning the cause?
It's one theory, but historian John Waller and others consider it unlikely, since ergot poisoning typically causes convulsions and gangrene rather than the sustained, purposeful dancing witnesses described over multiple days.
Did this only happen once, in 1518?
No. Smaller dancing manias, including one in Strasbourg itself in 1374, occurred in the Rhineland region in earlier centuries, though the 1518 outbreak was by far the largest and most thoroughly documented.
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