On July 14, 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked into the narrow street outside her home in Strasbourg and began to dance.
There was no music. No festival. Her husband watched from the doorway as she turned and stepped, turned and stepped, her feet marking a rhythm only she could hear. She did not stop for dinner. She did not stop when the sun went down. By morning, her shoes were soaked red.
She danced for six days.
The Epidemic Begins
By the end of the first week, thirty-four people had joined her. City records from the Strasbourg magistrate—dry administrative notes never meant for posterity—document the spread with bureaucratic precision. “Multiple persons have taken to dancing,” the council noted on July 20th. By August, the number had reached four hundred.
They danced in the market square. They danced in the alleys. They collapsed against church walls and, after a few hours of twitching sleep, rose and continued. Witnesses described their faces: some wore expressions of terror, others of blank ecstasy. Many wept as they spun. A few laughed without stopping, high and thin, until they fell.
The city physician Paracelsus—yes, that Paracelsus—was not in Strasbourg at the time, but he later wrote of the event with clinical fascination. “They could not cease,” he recorded, “though they begged for rest.”
The Cure That Made It Worse
The Strasbourg council convened emergency sessions. They consulted physicians, who declared the affliction a “natural disease” caused by “hot blood.” The cure, the doctors advised, was simple: let them dance it out. The fever would break when the blood cooled.
So the council helped them dance.
They cleared the grain market and erected a wooden stage. They hired a band—pipers and drummers paid from public funds—to provide proper music. The theory was that organized dancing, supervised dancing, would bring the frenzy under control.
It did the opposite. The music drew more dancers. Guild halls emptied. A cobbler left his bench mid-stitch and walked to the square. A woman carrying bread dropped the loaf in the street and began turning in place. The band played faster, and the dancers matched them.
People began to die. The records mention strokes, heart failure, “exhaustion of the limbs.” One chronicle estimates fifteen deaths per day at the plague’s peak—though historians now consider this figure exaggerated. The actual toll was likely in the dozens.
St. Vitus and the Mountain Shrine
When medicine failed, the council turned to the Church.
The dancing plague was reclassified as a curse, specifically linked to St. Vitus—a Christian martyr associated with epilepsy, nervous disorders, and involuntary movement. The logic was medieval but precise: St. Vitus had the power to inflict compulsive dancing, and only St. Vitus could remove it.
The surviving dancers were loaded onto carts and driven to a mountaintop shrine in Hohlenstein, dedicated to the saint. There, priests led them in rituals of penance. Small wooden crosses were pressed into their palms. They circled the altar in red shoes—an offering to St. Vitus, who was said to have been tortured by being forced to dance.
And then, over the following weeks, the dancing stopped.
Whether the shrine cured them, or the epidemic simply burned itself out, no one can say. By September, Strasbourg’s streets were quiet. The wooden stage was dismantled. The musicians went home.
What Happened?
The Dancing Plague of 1518 is not a legend. It is documented in city council minutes, physician reports, cathedral sermons, and regional chronicles. The evidence is extensive and the event is not in historical dispute.
The explanation, however, remains open.
Ergot Poisoning is the most popular modern theory. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye grain and produces alkaloids similar to LSD. Contaminated bread could cause convulsions, hallucinations, and a burning sensation in the limbs—symptoms that match some reports. But ergot typically causes vasoconstriction and gangrene, not coordinated dancing. And why did only some people succumb?
Mass Psychogenic Illness is the current scholarly consensus. Historian John Waller, who has written the definitive study of the event, argues that Strasbourg in 1518 was a city on the edge. Famine had struck the region the previous year. Smallpox swept through shortly before. The peasant population was exhausted, malnourished, and terrified.
In this environment, a single trigger—one woman dancing in the street—could ignite a chain reaction. The dancers were not faking. They were caught in a trance state induced by extreme stress and reinforced by cultural belief. They danced because they believed they had been cursed, and that belief made the curse real.
The Pattern Repeats
Strasbourg was not the only outbreak. Choreomania—compulsive dancing—appeared across Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. In 1374, dozens danced through the streets of Aachen. In 1428, a monk in Schaffhausen danced himself to death. In Italy, it took the form of tarantism, where victims claimed they had been bitten by tarantulas and could only be cured by frantic dancing to specific music.
Each outbreak followed the same pattern: a period of hardship, a single trigger, and rapid spread through a community that already believed in the curse. When belief faded—when people stopped expecting to be struck—the plagues stopped too.
The last recorded outbreak was in Madagascar in 1863. Since then, nothing.
The Empty Stage
There is no memorial in Strasbourg today. The narrow street where Frau Troffea first danced is now lined with shops selling tourist trinkets. The grain market became a parking garage, then a shopping center.
But the city archives still hold the council minutes from that summer, written in faded ink on paper that crumbles at the edges. “Item,” one entry reads, “for the musicians who played for the dancers: two florins.”
Somewhere beneath the modern city, in the foundations of a church that no longer exists, there may still be red shoes buried in the dirt.
References
- Waller, John. (2009). The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Sourcebooks.
- Midelfort, H.C. Erik. (1999). A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Stanford University Press.
- Paracelsus. De Causis Morborum Invisibilium (On the Causes of Invisible Diseases), c. 1531-1533.
- Strasbourg City Archives, Ratsprotokolle (Council Minutes), July-September 1518.
