The Dancing Plague of 1518: “The People Who Could Not Stop Dancing”

In the summer of 1518, people in Strasbourg watched a woman step into the street and start to dance. There was no music, no festival, no wedding. She just moved, hour after hour, until onlookers realised she could not stop, even when her body was clearly giving out.

This was not a legend told around a fire. City records, sermons, and chronicles from the time all describe a real outbreak of uncontrolled dancing that lasted for weeks. By the peak of it, somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people were moving almost constantly, sometimes collapsing from exhaustion. How many died is still unclear, but the event itself is not in doubt.

So what actually happened in Strasbourg that summer, and why did so many people feel as if their own legs had turned against them? To get close to an answer, it helps to separate what we know from the stories that grew around it.

What Really Happened in Strasbourg in 1518

Strasbourg in 1518 was a busy city in Alsace, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. That year was hard. There had been poor harvests, rising food prices, and outbreaks of disease. People were already living with hunger, fear, and a very strict religious climate.

In July, a woman usually identified as Frau Troffea began to dance in a narrow street. According to later descriptions, she kept going for days, stopping only when her body forced her to rest, then starting again. Within a week, around thirty others had joined her. Within a few more weeks, the number of dancers had climbed into the dozens, and some sources suggest that at the peak there may have been as many as four hundred.

Witnesses described movements that looked frantic rather than joyful. Dancers reportedly cried out for help, tried to stop, then were pulled back into the same patterns. Their feet bled. Some collapsed. Others shook and convulsed. It must have looked like a city square turned into a moving, restless mass of bodies that could not settle.

At first, the authorities treated it as a strange medical and spiritual problem that might have a practical fix. Local physicians rejected explanations like demonic possession and instead blamed “hot blood”, a kind of internal overheating. Their recommendation was almost cruel in hindsight. They advised that the afflicted should be allowed, even encouraged, to keep dancing until the excess heat burned out.

The city leaders followed this advice. They opened guildhalls, set aside a space where the dancers could gather, and even hired musicians and strong attendants to keep people upright and moving. The hope was that this would drain the problem. Instead, it probably made the outbreak more visible, more intense, and more contagious.

Only later did the council change course. Convinced that the dancing might be a punishment linked to Saint Vitus, who was believed to curse people with uncontrollable movement, they organised a religious response. Many of the remaining dancers were taken to a shrine of the saint. Some accounts describe them wearing red shoes marked with crosses, holding small crosses in their hands, and taking part in rituals with incense and prayers. Over the following weeks, the reports of frantic dancing faded and the episode came to an end.

One important detail often gets lost in the retelling. The famous claim that people “danced themselves to death” in large numbers rests on later sources and dramatic summaries. Contemporary records do not give a clear death toll, or even confirm that there were many fatalities. It is very likely that some people died from heart failure, stroke, or sheer exhaustion, but we simply do not know how many. The reality is disturbing enough without exaggeration.

The Main Theories: Cursed, Sick, or in Crisis?

Once you accept that the event really happened, the next question is obvious. Why would hundreds of people dance until they collapsed, and sometimes died, in the middle of a city that was not celebrating anything at all?

Over the centuries, people have offered very different answers. Some belong to the mindset of the time, others come from modern medicine and psychology.

1. A curse from a saint
For people in sixteenth century Strasbourg, the most obvious explanation was spiritual. Saint Vitus was believed to punish sinful or unlucky people by forcing them to dance uncontrollably. If you already live in a world where saints, relics, and curses feel as real as hunger or rain, seeing one woman dance without stopping could slot neatly into that story. Once the idea of a curse spreads, anyone who feels a twitch or a strange sensation might interpret it as the start of the same punishment, and their body can follow their fear.

2. Poisoned bread and ergot
A popular modern idea is that the dancers were victims of ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and other grains and can produce chemicals that cause hallucinations, convulsions, and burning pain. Since many people in Alsace ate rye bread, it sounds like a neat fit at first.

The more closely you look, the weaker this theory seems. Ergot poisoning can make people very ill, confused, and prone to spasms, but it usually does not lead to coordinated dancing that lasts for days. It also does not explain why so many people in one city would react with the same specific behaviour, while others eating similar bread elsewhere did not. Modern neurologists and historians tend to see ergot as a possible background factor at most, not a full explanation.

3. Disease, epilepsy, or some unknown illness
Others have suggested that the dancers had a neurological disease, a kind of epilepsy, or an infection like encephalitis or typhus. These conditions can definitely affect movement and behaviour. The problem is that no single known disease matches the pattern of this outbreak, and none of the contemporary descriptions read like a normal epidemic of infection.

4. Mass psychogenic illness in a city under pressure
The explanation that fits best for many researchers today is what used to be called mass hysteria and is now often called mass psychogenic illness. In simple terms, it is when a group of people start to show the same strange symptoms because they share the same fears, stresses, and expectations, not because they all caught a virus.

Strasbourg in 1518 gave this kind of illness plenty of fuel. There was hunger after bad harvests, new and frightening diseases, harsh religious preaching, and political tension. Life for the poor in particular was insecure and frightening. On top of that, the region already had a history of dancing manias, so people knew the idea. When one woman began to dance and the story travelled, others who were close to a breaking point could slip into the same pattern.

Modern descriptions of mass psychogenic illness show how powerful this kind of social and emotional contagion can be. One person faints at a school, others see it, then suddenly several students feel dizzy and collapse. In other cases, people develop tics or strange movements after being exposed to similar behaviour in their social group. There is no conscious act of imitation. People genuinely feel ill, but the trigger is shared stress and belief.

Some modern writers also highlight another angle that I find convincing. Human beings need chances to come together, move, sing, and feel part of something larger than themselves. In times when those outlets are blocked by fear, hunger, or strict control, built up tension can spill out in strange ways. In Strasbourg, that release just happened to look like relentless, frightening dance.

What Most Likely Happened (and What It Says About Us)

No single theory explains every detail of the dancing plague. It probably was not just poisoned bread, just a saint’s curse, or just a mysterious disease. Real history is rarely that tidy.

The most convincing picture, to me, is a mix of forces stacked on top of each other. You had a population under extreme stress from hunger, disease, and harsh preaching about sin. You had a well known belief that Saint Vitus could punish people by making them dance. You had fresh memories of other dancing outbreaks in the region. Then you had one woman whose body finally gave out under that pressure and began to move in a way that everyone around her recognised as the start of something dangerous and supernatural.

Once the first few dancers appeared, the response of the authorities probably poured fuel on the fire. By gathering the dancers in halls, bringing in musicians, and turning the crisis into a kind of public spectacle, they made the behaviour more visible and more contagious. Each new person who joined confirmed the story in everyone else’s mind that a force was loose in the city. When the council finally shifted to a religious solution and removed the dancers from public view, the spell slowly broke.

I do not think the people of Strasbourg were foolish or simple for reacting this way. They were trying to make sense of a terrifying world using the tools they had. In their minds, saints and curses were as real as infection or hunger. If you already believe that your community might be punished in that way, and you are exhausted and afraid, your own body can become the stage where that fear plays out.

Looking at the dancing plague from today, it feels distant at first. Most of us are not afraid of saints or relics, and we know more about brain chemistry and infection. But the core pattern is very familiar. We still see sudden waves of shared behaviour driven by fear, stress, or hope. It can be a run on certain medicines, a burst of strange symptoms in a school, or risky challenges that spread online. The form is different. The human nervous system underneath is the same.

So when we picture those people swaying and stumbling through the streets of Strasbourg, it is tempting to treat them as characters in a bizarre old story. They are closer to us than that. They remind us that bodies and minds are not separate, that communities can become sick together, and that the stories we tell about danger and punishment have real physical power.

For me, the most useful way to read the dancing plague is not as a horror tale about people who lost control, but as a warning about what happens when whole communities live for too long on the edge of survival, with no safe way to express fear or grief. Under enough pressure, the line between “acting” and “being taken over” starts to blur. Once that line is crossed, stopping can be just as hard as it was for the people who could not stop dancing in 1518.