This Paranormal Life - #119 The Dance Craze of 1518 That Killed Hundreds

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

On one day in 1518, the people of Strasbourg, France would start dancing and wouldn't stop for months. Day and night they danced until they literally dropped dead. To this day no-one can explain what happened. But has it happened before or since? And are there clues that may lead to the truth? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What comes after death? They say space is the final frontier, but what's the next frontier after that? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Paranormal Life! Oh, welcome back to the podcast. You're listening to This Paranormal Life, the weekly show. Every Tuesday, we dissect a different paranormal tale and try to work out whether it's true or not, whether it happened or not, whether it's paranormal or simply mundane like the rest of my life you're joined by your two favorite paranormal investigators very decorated very prestigious very old a lot of a lot of years in the industry my name is true kit greer this guy's rory powers across from me how you doing today rory i'm doing great and as you you know, we're not afraid to ask the big questions, but we're also not

afraid to ask the little questions like, can mice fall in love? Yeah. Even smaller than that. Can a snail fall in love? Yeah. Mostly to do with love because that's love's pretty paranormal. Yeah. We put two ladybirds in a bag and just hope one male one male one female a male ladybird and a female

ladybird get it right yeah yeah um and we just wanted to see what would happen i think one of them ate the other one ate the other one and died yeah yeah because ladybugs are poisonous to other ladybugs but is that love to ladybug who knows to me it is let's find out on this week's episode we have an array of bugs that we're going to be mashing together in a sack so over here we have a variety of different sacks with a variety of different bugs inside and as long as we don't oh holy i don't know which bag i just tipped open the bugs are f***ing everywhere that's a whole situation um i guess we'll let them do their thing we'll come back to that at the end of the show maybe but as always as always, we have a brand new investigation for you this week. We're going

to dive right in. Thank you so much to Alex Stevens for emailing this one into us at thisparanormallifepodcast at gmail.com. Today, I am taking all y'all to the year 1518. We're in Strasbourg, France. Have you ever been, Rory? I've been to France. I've never been to Strasbourg. Strasbourg borders France and Germany. It's, Rory? I've been to France. I've never been to Strasbourg. Strasbourg borders France and Germany. It's a small city for anyone that doesn't know. And it's the fulcrum point of Northern European culture and politics, which is why it's the home of European Parliament, the Strasbourg Cathedral in Notre Dame.

But the city also keeps a dark paranormal secret that almost exactly 500 years ago an event unfolded that would defy explanation to this very day july 1518 it's a normal peaceful day in strasbourg everyone's going about their business bakers pulling baguettes out of the oven merchants on every street corner bustling selling their wares blacksmiths pulling iron baguettes out of ovens aka swords valerian baguettes i cannot stress enough how civilized this place is this is this is where uh these two great countries meet and and those cultures blend but in the middle of this bustling street one woman mrs trofea starts to dance she's in the middle of this bustling street, one woman, Mrs. Trofea, starts to dance.

She's in the street, grooving to her own beat, popping, locking, milly rocking, pulling out every move in her arsenal. And you can imagine everyone's thinking, weird but fine. We don't really hear any music. And as night falls, the bakers are done baking, the blacksmiths are done blacksmithing, baguettes go back in the oven. I don't know how bread works. No. They return home at the end of a long, hard day.

And the next morning, just as they're setting up shop again, and the streets begin to fill with early risers, it becomes very clear that one person never went home, never even went to sleep. Mrs. Trefea. She is exactly where she was yesterday. On the same spot. Still dancing. Alright, alright. So maybe she's busking? Is there a

hat down? Is she accepting coins? That's an interesting take. I don't believe she was. I don't think there was any sign of coinage. That's a little worrying. Which is a good point. If I went into, like, Piccadilly Circus, started dancing yeah but i didn't have like a little receptacle there's no hat on there there's no box there's no coin purse

do people just start throwing money at you or what i mean it would be a truly terrifying moment when you have like a pound coin in your hand and you approach the dancing man on the street to give him money for his performance and slowly into the approach you realize there is no hat there is no basket this man is just dancing for the love of it he is just method he is just passionate and at that point you have two choices you can turn away or you can weirdly just go put that pound coin by his feet yeah which i think is even like that's maybe even a bit insulting and weird that's maybe even weirder pick it up yeah you're not even like he's just like why didn't you hand it to me i don't know i thought you were busy

sir because i'm assuming i mean a old-timey town that is between uh germany and france i'm assuming this is like that town in footloose that doesn't dance. Yeah. It's going to be no nonsense. Totally. Now, Germany has like an international stereotype of being quite serious. Yeah, like no nonsense.

So I feel like this wouldn't be exactly to their character. Even less so medieval Germany, where presumably life was a lot harder, tougher. I mean, they were making swords. So yeah, in any society that has to make swords every day. If I wake up at seven in the goddamn morning to bake loaves of bread, and there's an old woman like grinding on my legs as I'm like pushed against a hot oven. She's like using the baguette as a penis.

Things are getting really weird and sexual. She's like using the baguette as a penis. Things are getting really weird and sexual. She's been there all night long. I would be a little furious as well, to be honest. At the very least, life expectancy is so bad that you're like, I don't have time for almost anything. Least of all dancing. I've got weeks to live.

I gotta bake. I gotta bake this bread. And people on the street corner are talking to each other like, She's been here all night, right? People making jokes, you know, I'll have what she's having. You know, I guess she's having a good time. And before long, others start joining in. Later that day, Mrs. Trefea, without saying any words, has started a dance party. Several people in the middle of the street, in a seemingly endless silent dance-off.

Got a bit of a silent disco on our hands here. Pre-iPod silent disco. You just kind of hum a tune of your choice to yourself. Yeah. And dance. Days started passing, and every day a few more people would join the dance. And every day the other townspeople

became more and more confused about what was happening. Within one week, there were 34 people dancing day and night. Good lord, surely this can't keep going, right? Wrong. Within one month, 400 dancers dominated the street in Strasbourg. At this point, if it had ever been amusing to the locals, it stopped being funny when one dancer dropped dead of a stroke. Oh my god! To this day, people do die at dances, at raves, at parties. It's kind of a byproduct of... Listen, if you throw a legendary rage, someone's gonna die.

There's gonna be fatalities of course of course for one reason or another so you could excuse maybe one the problem is from that point on periodically uh people just started suffering heart attacks hemorrhages strokes and despite that every day more and more people joined this dance what a a terrifying, strange affliction to have. Because, I mean, this would get to the point where, you know, if you're someone in the town that has not started dancing yet, I mean, you're going to be like, I can't listen to any music because I don't know how this thing f***ing starts. I can't even, like, do a little hop-skip when i leave the front door because maybe i won't stop hop skipping yeah it'd be terrifying see you know your friend you know he's he's run to your house

you know you're you're having like a little drink after work after a long day baking baguettes and he's like hey bro you hear the new track from lord uh lord varian and you're like dude do not play me any lord varian his shit is so fire i will be out there in two seconds dancing till my heart stops literally yes get those music box out of thine house and it's too late he's cranking it and you guys are popping you're locking you're magnetically drawn to the courtyard where there's hundreds and thousands of people all dropping and locking together and you know that there's those kind of no-nonsense types and they're just like oh you won't catch me in there i'm not gonna be dancing anytime soon i've never danced in my life and i'm not gonna start today and like that guy's wife is

just like your grandfather is in that square right now he's 95 years old yeah hard cut to the businessman doing the moonwalk like he's in a big dance circle of everyone cheering him on the mayor is just like help help because that's the other difficult thing is you know an infliction like this that is at its surface quite comical i mean that's a hard sort of thing to ask for help with right i mean if you go to the doctor and you're like doc i just can't stop dancing he's like get the hell out of my office absolutely get the hell out of my office the nhs is so overburdened as it is we don't need jokers like you in here yeah seriously my feet hurt man just because usually paranormal encounters are quite scary, terrifying things.

I mean, what happens if you got cursed by a witch and you start pissing orange juice? That's a pretty serious thing. Orange juice coming out of your penis. But a doctor is going to be like, well, actually, a doctor might actually care a lot about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could probably win a Nobel Prize or something with you as like a little freak monkey. Yeah. And that's what the thing you know if you're having health problems because you're dancing too hard i mean yeah people are gonna laugh at you yeah like i said this was super serious people were dropping dead and although the city didn't keep written records of how many died

i guess it was 15 18 you know they didn't have ipads and shit for jotting that down yeah he did record that fatalities occurred and sources say that up to 15 people a day were dropping dead oh my gosh and this city wouldn't have had a massive population at the time maybe like i don't know 50 000 something like that right needless to say this situation quickly escalated from kind of funny to Very horrific in just a couple of days were these people in control of themselves at all are they possessed If so could it happen to anyone for all the times people knew they could be stone-cold Sober working hard yet

Absolutely powerless to stop their own feet from moonwalking towards the town square to join the party. And of course the officials, at least the officials who weren't affected, had to come up with a way to stop it. Sure, they had guards to stop violent criminals and witch doctors to cure diseases, but how do you stop a dance plague? If I learn anything from the popular series Game of Thrones, you need to dance your way into that mosh pit and kill the original dancer. Was that an episode?

With dragonglass straight through the heart. And I'm pretty sure the rest of them will explode. That's an interesting theory, though, all jokes aside. Maybe there is one ringleader to this, some kind of T-virus patient zero who, I don't know some some pied piper of this nonsense yeah if you take them out the spell wears off there was definitely a lot of different schools of thought about what was happening here and they started asking these 16th century doctors and physicians for advice of course being men and women of science they quickly

ruled out astrological and supernatural causes instead they announced that this was a disease they said the affected were suffering from quote hot blood the quote-unquote boogie virus okay that's great that you named it doc but how do we stop it? Yeah, don't try and act like you're this hot shot scientist if your conclusion is going to be something called hot blood. That's not. That's the most old-timey doctor shit I've ever heard. It's like, oh, Doctor, what's the problem? Well, after a little diagnostic, I can confirm they have hot blood.

We need 2,000 ice-cold leeches, stat. This really just seems like you're flying by the seat of your pants at this point you might have as well have said boogie jeans or the boogie virus yeah i just sort of imagine like the kind of doctor that comes up with that is the guy who's like first day of medical school all the medical students are crowded around the the patient's bed and the um head doctor the lecturer is just like, so maybe some of you would like to take a look at this patient's stat sheet here and just see some of the symptoms and try and diagnose. I think I know what it is. Sorry, young man, you haven't actually looked at any of the statistics yet. He's got spongy spine.

What? the statistics yet he's got spongy spine what this is the doctor who's like in medical school but he never buttons up his lab coat and he's got his sunglasses on and he's like leaning back his chair it's like sponge spine it's like that's not a real thing he's like look you don't like us young doctors coming in here and shaking things up huh it scares you with our new diagnostics sponge spine hot blood the diseases of the 21st century. These are diseases by millennials for millennials. Like, did you pay for your tuition? Absolutely not.

I found a coat in a closet and I came in wearing it. And speaking of shaking shit up, I need to shake the shit out of that guy's spine. This man is incredibly frail don't touch him no uh believe it or not there was thankfully it wasn't just an empty diagnosis there was a cure for hot blood uh which was to bleed the patient god i that's not that's not a cure that was the cure to almost anything in that in those years but if your blood is hot get rid of the blood terrible logic they would bleed you dry in order to remove the hot blood from your body hopefully leaving just just enough cold blood which i think is what humans are cold

blooded in these days bleeding the patient was the answer to every problem except when the patient came in bleeding and the solution would be to stop the bleeding. But of course, this was a time and a place of enlightenment, of scientific progress. And the authorities said, wait, we can't drain all the blood of these people, nor do we have to. What if I told you there's another way? The authorities banded together and decided that the only cure for what was happening was more dancing. They simply had to get it out of their system, only by dancing, day and night. The authorities took the course of opening even more venues to dance in. They opened two guild halls, a grain market. They built literal stages and dance floors

to try and help these people dance their disease away. As you might have guessed, this didn't exactly work and make the dance go away. So they had only one other option. One other nuclear option to solve this. Nuke them? You're going to nuke the crowd? I just mean kind of like that level of stakes.

You know, we're going to bring out all the guns here. Right, sorry. The authorities assembled a crack squad to tackle this disease, an Avengers-style team to finish this once and for all. We're talking an army of elite musicians who were deployed to play the most foot-tapping, booty-twerking, moonwalking, body-popping feats.

What do they think is happening here? To decimate the dance floor, lutes and all. This is a... What you need are the most bland-ass, grey humans alive. Don't bring the toe-tapping virtuosos of a generation to this crowd. It's so backwards what it doesn't make any sense i know what you mean you need to if this was like modern day you would need to banish anything with a beat yeah very very far away and import as many kind of ed sheeran type people as

possible so that they cannot possibly dance to whatever's left. Yeah, exactly. Just get people who have like hearing impediments, have their vision impaired, you know, they can't even see or hear and they just go into this crowd and hopefully sort it out. That's like the M. Night Shyamalan twist version of this movie, is that the only person who can stop it is someone who can't hear at all. They can't hear the secret, silent paranormal beat. That's right. These musicians played day and night, tirelessly, probably until they started dropping dead. But sadly, this only exacerbated the spreading

dance plague. This thing became bigger and bigger until it hit a critical mass. And in the end, the only thing that finished this paranormal phenomenon for good was time. Eventually, the mysterious disease subsided and those who survived could return to normal life. But the people of Strasbourg never determined the cause of the dancing plague. I guarantee you it would have lasted maybe two days max if it weren't for the interferences. People start dancing and they can't stop dancing. So they build them dance halls and fly over the top musicians in the world to make people want to dance even more. Like, what is the mayor of this town doing? doing if their town hall catches fire is he like we are planning to burn the surrounding buildings first before the fire can reach it thus containing the fire we think that if we amass as much wood

as possible and dump it on top of the blaze it should contain it for some amount of time ridiculous thoughts this is an interesting story i don't know if we've ever investigated something like this before some sort of boogie fever i mean we really don't have a lot of information as to why this happened how it was spread and as we've talked about old-timey medicine was and doctors were so god-awful at this point that it feels like they did very little research and put very little effort into trying to find out how this was spreading at all. And every solution just seemed to make things even worse.

So I don't know what to think, really. Yeah, I think that's fair to say that they pretty much couldn't have done anything more backwards than they already did yeah absolutely i mean they constructed dance halls hey at least that is like making the best out of a bad situation it is some blue sky thinking it's like the equivalent of ohio being like hey the frogman's here he's got a wand he smells like almonds we're not getting rid of him anytime soon because he's a little magical wizard let's have an annual frogman festival we're not getting rid of him anytime soon because he's a little magical wizard let's have an annual

frogman festival we're not getting rid of him anytime soon because he is our mayor we voted him in he is the best public representative we have we wanted almonds he smelled like almonds turns out it was just a smell he had no almonds he said he drained the swamp he made the swamp three times as big because he lives there the wand can do that we didn't know it at the time the wand can do that could do a lot of magical shit actually he said the wand was a walking stick it's very magical he did the willy wonka thing where on his way to his inauguration pretended to trip did a roll through his wand that made the swamp take over all of the main parts of the town uh he said you're not inaugurated yet we can still vote you out uh but he pointed the wand at us and we we thought it'd be best to vote

him in we just we just got used to swamp life christ how to get back to the frog man oh it's taking the best out of a bad situation it's like you're monetizing it it's like it's like denver international airport if you remember all sorts of conspiracy theories rumors sightings of ufos all sorts of shit and denver international airport now just makes billboards about the fact that they've got ufos in their basement absolutely it's business you know if bigfoot's kicking around in my back garden i'm gonna start selling big shoes if people people start spontaneously combusting, guess who's selling water buckets? And they're going to cost you too, you cheap assholes. So rude to people who aren't even your customers yet.

You burst into flames? Yeah, now you come crawling back to Rory's farm. What'll it be? I've got all the answers to all your paranormal problems. You have a lot of matches as well. Yeah, sometimes you gotta just they're not they don't combust by themselves you gotta get things going a little bit i think that's what spontaneous combust means though that it happens on its own spontaneously i think what you're doing

is arson or murder actually but like it's still combustion sure not so spontaneous sure but at the end of the day they still need the the bucket. It's like murder combustion. It is pretty much. But again, they need the bucket. And that's going to cost them probably about two. Okay, yeah, you get. Two, three hundred dollars, I'd say. Okay, you're going to jail for life. I go to my jail cell with a box of matches. Hope y'all got some noodles to trade for water.

Flicking matches at like this seven foot dude who's wearing nothing he just promptly beats the shit out of me something really funny about my scrawny ass in jail like within a whole cell full of like neo-nazis you guys are gonna be giving me all your shit soon better get used to that gotta be running the place i appreciate the business savvy i mean they're making money off those dance stages and those dance halls are they if people are coming in to dance i don't think they were charging these people i think they think this is like a public big mistake pal okay business 101 i think it's a public health hazard i learned that from my first combustion you got to charge them to make the cash if anything anything, I think this is probably, they probably want to solve it

because this is costing the city an enormous amount. They have baguettes not getting baked because the bakers are out there body popping, molly rocking. Yeah, you got to get people to clean up the bodies as well. And they're going in. They're not coming out. They're dancing their little hearts out.

Then you need to send in another team to pick up those bodies. They're in for life. It takes like three months to ship in the New World's greatest physician. New World's greatest doctor. He solved every case. He's been put on every medical mystery. They put him in for five minutes. He cracks. he's gone

his eyes are black he's dancing better than any professional dancer you've ever seen they pay half a mil for a sensory deprivation hurt locker style bomb suit for a man to go in and then as soon as the crowd parts they're all like go go go go And he's like breakdancing in the middle. That's half a million gone. Absolutely wasted military technology. Honestly, if this happened today, I don't think we'd handle it much better. And what we just heard about what happened in Strasbourg in 1518 is insane. But I haven't even told you the craziest, most compelling piece of this puzzle. It didn't just happen once it's happened again and again the earliest known account of a dance plague is 1300s Aachen in

Germany weirdly the same kind of region of not just earth but also Europe that it's these are both essentially in Germany wow yet a full 150 years plus before this first story took place, which is kind of interesting because if it happened a couple of years later, you would kind of say, hmm, if this is fake, if it's psychological, if it's something like that, you know, copycat incidents could take place. But when it's hundreds of years apart, that seems like a stretch. Yeah. And both fascinatingly and alarmingly, there is even a modern example of this. The 1962 laughing plague of Tanzania. It's January 30th, 1962 at an all-girls school in Kshasha, Tanganyika, or modern-day Tanzania. And without warning, by all accounts, no hilarious jokes or pranks being pulled that morning,

three girls started laughing together in class. That's fine. Nothing weird so far. Nothing weird so far. You know the teacher's going, okay, girls, what's so funny? Quiet down over there. Quiet down over there. Shut the f*** up!

Respect me! This is the 60s. I can beat beat you it's a weird thing for a teacher to say yeah i don't uh i can't do a very good girl laugh my vocal cords like don't go that high oh yeah well that makes sense yeah you're not that size i can't it's not gonna work yeah so just do my regular laugh then so high is that your real laugh oh my that's my real laugh my real you'll know you'll know my real laugh when you hear it in in over a hundred episodes we've never heard your real laugh you said anything funny man so that honestly hurts to hear make a joke you might hear it uh knock knock who's there sorry just the thought of jokes make me laugh. Because I didn't even say a joke.

I just did like a bad setup to a joke. You also answered your own joke. You said knock, knock. Who's there? Why are you laughing? I'm just laughing. It wasn't a joke. Sorry.

It's funny because you answered. You said my part. I honestly think we should stop the podcast sorry because if that's your real life i don't think this is gonna work well all right well i'll just try not to laugh all right cool yeah that's fine okay let's be serious blah blah cool as long as you can just be serious rory don't laugh i mean you didn't laugh for over 100 episodes, so I guess it'll be fine. Stop it. You're going to make me laugh. I'm being completely serious.

There's no reason why you would laugh. Now it's in my head, though. I've got the giggles or whatever. That's not a giggle, though. You're trying so hard not to laugh right now. Sweat is dripping down my head. I can barely focus the corners of my eyes are are actually going black to a pinpoint i think you're turning into a donkey

yeah there's some kind of metamorphosis going on here but the girls in this class just keep laughing girls enough you're distracting everyone but they keep going before long the teacher realizes that from the expression on the girls' faces, they can't stop, even if they wanted to. Ooh. It's said that this laugh spread gradually throughout the school, affecting almost 100 of the 159 pupils that went there, except not one teacher was affected.

And this is kind of hard for us to imagine because, okay, maybe something funny happened at school that day something unbelievably funny yeah and maybe everyone's laughing about it so you would at least expect that the girls go home at night laugh it off go to sleep come back fine the next day but this lasted for months Almost three months later on March 18th, the school was forced to close because they couldn't teach anymore. And there's no laughing matter. This spread

to neighboring villages. In one village 217 people were affected. In another village, 48. The original school reopened in May, two months after closing, five months since the original laughter episode, and they had to close again a full

month later. So six months after the fact, the school's closed. Did anyone die from this? Or was this just laughing? Nope. As far as I'm aware, this was totally fine. I mean, which is kind of interesting because I guess it shows that the dance deaths were pretty much to do

with the dancing, not any disease potentially got it like bodies just shut down and after 18 months of this laughter plague and 1 000 people affected the condition gradually wore off completely and symptoms including pain fainting breathing problems rashing and screaming went away for good. Good lord. And who's to say that that's the end of these modern examples? Who's to say that frickin' soldier boys crank that? That Psy's gangnam style

that Fortnite dances aren't some kind of new 21st century shit? Some kind of digital dance plague? Well, I mean, I think we would hopefully know because kids can stop dancing. It's like, if there was an unstoppable dance plague well i mean i think we would hopefully know because kids can stop dancing it's like if there was an unstoppable dance plague can they hopefully we would know by now that roy purdy guy seems to be dancing all the time to be fair we don't know what the hell's

going on in in the world anymore i assume in some sort of government bunker they have one of those you know it's like every zombie movie they have that world map yeah and you can see the infected areas like yeah like the red circles growing on the map they probably have one of those somewhere what it's with dancing and and laughing i mean there's worse ways to go i guess there's like 50 year old veteran generals just watching tiktok all day long looking for signs of a dance plague that could take down the whole nation i mean it sucks because obviously no one really wants to die but dancing or laughing to death isn't i mean it's not the worst thing in the world like imagine there was one town over communist imagine one town over like another place called like doodle dorf and over in doodle

dorf you know you catch a bug so rude the fact that there is a place called do doodle dwarf and over in doodle dwarf you know you catch a bug so rude the fact that there is a place called doosel door and you're just calling it doodle door for fun use the goddamn name you asshole yeah and in imagining doodle door if you just like piss yourself to death immediately bam gone one day you're fine and then oh urinated blah i pissed out my organs that would be bad you'd be begging for a dance virus at that point wouldn't you i mean if your point is that there's always a worse way to die you're right there is yeah i think that was my point i'm not entirely sure and this pretty much sums up the case of the dancing plague of 1518 uh we're left with a couple of clues the fact that this hasn't happened just once but it's happened a couple of times throughout

history but it leaves us with a tall order on our hands here to come down to a decision whether this is truly paranormal or not yeah we have almost zero help from uh anyone who was alive at the time in terms of documenting or really trying to help cure or find out why this happened they just made it a lot worse so we got that going for us as well what i can tell you is the kind of egghead theories today as to why these things happened i love it the reason i left this to last is because as you're about to hear these are really unsatisfying answers there's been a few things thrown around. People have hypothesized something that we talked about in a previous episode. Maybe the harvest around Strasbourg was thrown off in 1518 and that all the wheat that they would normally use for bread was rotten with ergot and that that could have

basically caused LSD, a powerful hallucinogenic drug to be present in their food causing them to trip balls that's a kind of interesting theory as to why people might have lost it and started dancing the problem is that doesn't last for months yeah it lasts for like a day yeah so there's basically no way that could have been it yeah because presumably these people aren't like dancing like they didn't take a bite out of an apple dance for 12 hours and be like whoa that was crazy anyway time to finish this delicious ass apple second bite whoa and it starts back up again like they it's just it took over and they couldn't stop that's it basically the only thing people can kind of agree on is that this is psychological in some way that this is some kind

of mass hysteria something we've talked about in the podcast before something that's hard to wrap our head around but that through some combination of social conditions environmental pressures people's psychology switches in such a way that they behave bizarrely and irrationally. And in this case, in a really big coordinated way. One piece of information that helps that theory is the fact that I kind of left out that most of the people that's affected in Strasbourg in 1518 were women, young women as well. Okay. And that becomes even more interesting when you look at the 1962 incident in Tanzania,

because it was at an all-girls school. Ah. All girls between the ages of 11 and 18. So there seems to be some connection between this psychological infliction and young women. Okay. psychological uh infliction and young women okay which gets a lot of kind of anthropologists and psychologists thinking that did this affect women because women were facing the most stress out of any demographic in society apparently in tanzania during this time it was a really rapidly shifting political landscape as well as being a patriarchal society i mean and then of

course even more so times 100 in 1518 strasbourg yeah living in medieval times with a kind of very powerful social hierarchy where men dominate over women and you have very little freedom as a woman and that could this be affecting their psychology um to breaking point even that alone like look at the contrast in the possible hypotheses offered up by current day scientists and the olden day scientists one was the the incredible amount of pressure that was inflicted on a certain uh age and demographic of people in the surrounding towns the other one was hot blood yeah their blood was too hot and it made them dance because they were hot i mean both very viable options both very possible and neither

proven so hot blood it is i mean it's an interesting theory but also i'm not going to argue that things are as stressful as they were back in the day but people these days you know come under incredible amounts of stress in their everyday 21st century lives there's war zones today absolutely there's horrible situations in the world absolutely you know i'm out and about in central london iphone runs out of battery i can't get an uber i don't know where i am i said war zones it's probably distasteful to like i hit my freaking credit limit on my cards so i can't even get a freaking donut if i want you spit okay so you're you spent so much money you couldn't buy a donut i'll ask my friends if they want to go for a beer uh-oh did i say my phone's dead because it

is i can't go anywhere i just still went for the beer you're you're so yeah by myself and i ran into a few buddies but i couldn't even prep them that i was gonna be there granted and then what happened stayed out too late couldn't get an uber home had to get the night bus on my other card that i'm not supposed to you had a car i had a second card sure i wasn't just gonna let my buddies pay for the drinks. But that's for emergencies only. But you buy a Rolex. An emergency Rolex. Because, uh-oh, let me check the time on my f***ing phone. It's dead, Kit. I needed to know the time.

You have an Apple Watch on the other wrist. It's for my apps. It's for my apps and it can't do shit without my phone. This one's on East Coast time. How am I supposed to tell the time in the UK uk there's very stressful situations in the 21st century and to my knowledge we haven't seen people or really heard about people breaking down into dance because of it yeah it doesn't happen too often no although we have covered some um suggested cases of mass hysteria before it's also so difficult because on one level it seems kind of

woke for the scientists to be like this is affecting women because women were the most oppressed but it also seems kind of not woke because it's kind of like the wenches lost it yeah like their little pea brains can't handle the man problems i mean it's it's almost as bad as hot blood yeah yeah it's like i said unsatisfying answers but damn it roy whether we have science on our sides or not we have to come to a decision what are you saying today that's right that's right um i mean it's not even the fact that we have a good reason behind why any of this has happened, we don't even have a single paranormal reason. I mean, we didn't really talk about any paranormal theories as to why this could happen.

Which, again, it makes this abnormal, but not necessarily paranormal. Which is what we've been coming down to. All right, now I think about it. We might have made this same conclusion for the last 36 episodes yeah i think we just briefly touched upon with this one that the scientists back in the day sort of even they sort of quickly considered astronomical reasons paranormal supernatural reasons possession sort of those are the obvious things but even back then they sort of didn't think that that was likely which is i mean so many things wrong you diagnose someone with hot blood and then you dismiss the paranormal i mean you couldn't have made any wrong

wronger choices it's it's it's um you're gonna put your your faith in science in 15th century science bad move buddy because i don't trust 21th century science? Bad move, buddy. Because I don't trust 21st century science. The only fact I know about science is that it's a lie. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I've been Rory Powers. So your scientific fact is that scientific fact is a lie? It's wrong?

The only scientific fact that I know is that science is a lie that's kind of beautiful yeah i think it's one of those weird things that if i did say it at a convention people might actually think it's genius because he's like it's right science has year after year been able to disprove its own hypotheses it's like yeah that's what i meant you're yelling for the background no it's bullshit***ing bullshit is what it is I don't think the moon's real they're drowning you out with applause he's a genius

the earth is flat I thought stars were demons eyes yes they're handing me the Nobel Prize what I thought gravity was a curse to keep humans on Earth. They're all laughing like it's a joke. They're all chanting, four more years.

I haven't been elected one year. What am I doing, four years off? So yeah, I don't think they should have been so quick to dismiss the paranormal in this case. Is that what you think it could be? I think it could be i think it could be i haven't had the opportunity to do enough research into what possible paranormal event could have caused this behavior but maybe there's something in there maybe a particularly groovy alien had sex with a local and this this boogie fever just spread it was airborne who knows i mean have we even investigated whether lizards like to dance

that seems like the first thing i would have done like i appreciated the thing what was it you said something about it was like people were stressed or something right right right so something like that but which like it's fine because like i'm sure you researched it and somebody researched it and like i guess it's all right but if there were lizard humanoids could they still hear music like do lizards have ears these are the kind of questions i think that you should have answered today but it's fine you did your best you think that that like lizard humans came to earth and the first thing they did was start dancing i didn't say that necessarily i just well i asked if lizards have ears and you couldn't answer that question i can't answer that question i don't know that was the original name of my ted talk presentation but so many people showed up to call me an asshole it was just do lizards have ears you know one like reptile expert just yelling from the back

no you idiot to be fair my case there was no music boom that's another bombshell you don't have to have ears to dance you don't have to be a lizard to dance here but it helps i think that just about answers your question i don't know if it does but it's gonna have to i guess i wanted to cover this case because it's so incredibly bizarre and sort of inherently paranormal that it sort of sends the imagination flying but also the reason we haven't really talked about many or any specific paranormal methodologies as to how this could have happened is that i don't really see any i don't really know how other than just plain old 1500s possession you got a demon in you because you're dancing

i don't know how anything other than that would explain this and i feel like whether it was hot blood whether it was so a sociological uh illness yeah some sort of psychological malady. It's something closer to that world than the world of possession. Yeah, yeah, I do agree with you. I think the only one that we didn't look at, which isn't paranormal, but does fall under conspiracy,

is maybe some sort of very early version of local governments and military testing experimental shit on townspeople. Jesus, I didn't even consider that. We're talking some Game of Thrones era testing. Of biological weapons, absolutely. Again, we've got no reason to believe that's actually what happened. I just literally pulled that out of nowhere.

It sounds like a couple no's today it's it's gonna be no unfortunately as much as it pains us to say that we've got to do some yeses soon i'll get a yes i'll get a yes if you were in strasbourg in 1518 if you were in tanzania in 1962 if you were in the fictional town of doodledorf so offensive to our listeners in dooseldorf get in contact please and let us know at this paranormal life podcast at gmail.com um let us know what you thought of that one if you can't stop grooving then we want to hear about it because of this paranormal life commune does not yet have a physical dance arena somewhere that we can recreate this sort of thing you will have to do all of that kind of dancing on our message board

on this paranormal life secret society on facebook i guess you can post like the salsa emoji the salsa dancing emoji there's probably a couple dancing related ones you can throw in there i will say for the record there actually there is a dance hall in the um paranormal members club the hotel obviously you know that because kids never been into the hotel password because as we've said he refuses to dm me on twitter give me your secrets master that's all you have to do i think it's bullshit bullshit. You just got to kiss the ring. I think you're bluffing. I think it's not even real.

So guys, just stick to this Paranormal Life Secret Society, whatever about this dumbass members club. It's real. Send me the DM. Give me your secrets, master. Or I want to see any variation of wanting the secrets. And you get the link to the secret the secret website so it's a it's a real thing you can dance your little hearts out well if any club that it won't

have me so it won't be that awesome actually but that's right there will be all sorts of um medieval peasant style dances going on in the this paranormal life secret society and if you can't get enough this paranormal life episodes head on over to patreon.com forward slash thisparanormallife where there's a backlog of bonus episodes. The Too Hot for TV. The Too Hot for the Medieval Dance Floor. It was banned out of Germany

because these episodes are making people groove until they f***ing died. Too Hot blooded for human bodies. You gotta get that shit out out yeah there's a bunch of episodes that you can listen to right now for as little as five bucks a month you can get access to those two bucks a month gets you shout outs and above that we've got t-shirts and more that's right patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life it's the only way that we sustain this podcast that you listeners sustain us in doing this podcast. It's a beautiful relationship. We're glad to have you over there.

And at the end of every episode, we like to thank those who've supported us on Patreon by giving them a shout out right here in the show. And that's what we're going to do right here and now. Let's go. Thank you to Kevin Guinto. Kevin, did it hurt when you fell from heaven? That's right. You're an angel, but you actually sinned pretty hard. And I think God just took away your wings mid-flight. You came crashing down to us. You got into a paranormal podcast and you've been with us ever since.

They say heavens, you know, like it's supposed to be the pearly gates like forever and ever, you know, like for eternity. Not for him. Hely gates, like, forever and ever, you know, like, for eternity. Not for him. He was in there for, what, eight minutes? Nine minutes? I think that was a record. Yeah, he got in there, tried to have sex with another angel. That'll get you.

Immediately banned, yeah. But good to have you back on Earth, brother. Thanks also to Miriam Goldstein. Miriam Goldstein, the inventor of Goldsteam. gold steam what that's right gold in gaseous form the uh i mean it was brought on the market as like a super light way to carry all your riches and gold just in like a jar or in a balloon or something jesus yeah i mean i mean it's a pretty smart idea if you breathe it you die if it gets in your eyes you're blind and it sounds very expensive it's pretty expensive yeah because i mean it worked pretty well just

having it in a bar form uh the gas form is a bit dangerous i mean a gust came and i lost half a mil to the winds you have you have to really be careful with it i mean cool she invented it i guess yeah i and it's been good to her she's dropping gold steam on our patreon account so thank you so much hey and uh goldstein i'll raise a cold stein to that one glug glug thanks miriam thank you also to chris salmon you know they call him chris the salmon salmon uh because he's always doing everything upstream. Battling against the currents. Yeah, going against the grain, man.

Yeah. One-way street? F*** no. Driving my 2x4 straight down. Wait, a 2x4 isn't a... That's not a car. That's a plank. F*** cars.

I'm driving a plank of wood wrong way down the one-way street my company said here chris take a company car i said cars i'm gonna attach a bike to a two by four i love it this guy doesn't play by the rules he doesn't follow the flow we appreciate the hustle man he's had a hard life though it's been very difficult yeah it's not easy going upstream 24 7 hey man take the night off go downstream order a pizza yeah thanks also to emily coop emily the last thing we need in this commune is a coop all right i'll be honest with you there's people are really antsy if you started throwing the coop word around,

people start thinking there's going to be an overthrow. People start... The people who are in the commune are very easily made afraid. So if you could change your name, because there's no coop, there's no coo, there's nothing that sounds like that. So it would be

really beneficial to us if you could just we've already banned chicken coops exactly uh four-door coops yeah and anything that we can't play pool because pool q sounds like coo and people think coo and then they start looting and and trying to overthrow us and suddenly we're not in charge anymore and no one wants that so you might have to change your name to, let's just throw something out there, tennis or marbles. Either one. Anything with balls.

Anything that's calming and involves balls. Yes. Thanks also to Justin Parton. Pardon the interruption, Justin. But I just wanted to thank, why am I Irish? But I just wanted to thank you for your irish but i just wanted to thank you for your donation you made to our patreon oh it's much appreciated thanks for dropping a

a pot of paranormal gold in the in the in the pot of the paranormal peasants i don't know why i was gonna end it with harigato harigato goes out nice thank you thank you too dan sharp dan sharp half man half blade whoa that's right his soul was was merged with a you'd think like hopefully like an ancient japanese katana but it was one of those like sushi set knives like the small tiny one yeah so i mean it's still pretty cool he's pretty dangerous because he's like half knife half you it's actually mean it's still pretty cool he's pretty dangerous because he's like half knife half you it's actually it's mostly knife i think he's like 90 knife oh he can't really speak or he just kind of sits there but you know actually he might just be a knife that seems more i think it's yeah i think it's just because he doesn't move or anything actually

so i guess i mean that's cool he's like the only knife that supports us on Patreon. Oh, I actually misread it. It's not Dan Sharp. It's Dan's harp. Oh, this is actually, this guy's 90% harp, 10% boy. And not the instrument, the alcoholic beverage. He is 90% a whole pint of harp. This is a literal glass of lager thank you for your support

thanks also to samantha schick everybody get down with the schickness samantha would be we know it she'd be the first person to start boogieing if the virus comes back she's in there with glow sticks whistles dancing her little heart out till it explodes. Yeah, she, she, like, most of us need a lot of persuasion to dance until we die. She needs a light little nudge in that direction. Yeah, she was

examined. She didn't even have the virus. She just wanted to be involved in the party. So, Samantha, thank you for supporting the show. I'm glad you enjoyed dancing, but take it easy on the old ticker. Thanks also to Henry Beach. Henry, you son of a beach. I got in a bar fight once, and Henry wouldn't defend me.

Did you know him? Know who? Henry. No, not at the time. Well, why would he defend you then? Defend my honor. I was borderline sucker punched when i tried to take this guy's wallet and henry wouldn't even step in and defend my honor the whole thing was backwards

it was it was it was insulting to me it was insulting to everyone involved you told me about that now you said it was you said that little beach henry you stole his wallet why would he possibly defend you for that? Don't say it on the podcast. Henry didn't know I stole his wallet. I was stealing a lot of wallets that night. He got caught in the crosshairs. It was at one of our Patreon meetups.

Mid telling us how much the show means to him. Uh-huh, yeah, that's great, buddy. That's great. Is your hand in my back pocket? Just touching your ass henry no chill out thank you henry for your support and i know you're giving it because i've got your wallet don't cancel any of your cards please henry thank you also to ivan's percolant well if it isn't conniving ivan perant. You sneaky bastard.

He thought he could just sneak on in to our Patreon page. What do you think he's planning to do while he's in there? I don't know, but it's going to be sneaky. Think you're going to get access to the secret members club? Fat chance. Nope, not unless you call me master. And I, for one, know Ivan would never call me master. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah.

I've tried multiple times. I've tried, I've basically I've had like, I don't want to get into like the details or anything like that but you know, I've like stolen some of his possessions before and I've not returned them. Oh so was that at the same meetup?

It was, yeah it was actually at that meetup, yeah the live show. Yeah, Ivan was there and I was like I have some of your possessions like i have your kids etc like tell me call me master yeah you know whoa you know can ivan ivan he's always up to something hey if you bring your kids to a patreon meetup a paranormal meetup there's a chance that's what's gonna happen uh ivan just call me master and you know the kids are fine so just call me master they'll come back and i'll give you access to the secret members club so there you go it's your choice buddy thank you thanks also to daniel trivet daniel trivet is always with it this is

the guy with the latest iphone the latest macbook pro the latest yeezys but again too far the latest diseases he's got the latest infections the latest uh addictions he's really bad into crypto uh currency and like online crypto betting it's pretty much drained him dry so he pretty much just he's always got the latest everything whether it's good or bad exactly and there's a lot of bad in there involved i think he might be a nazi now whoa yeah because that's pretty in because it's coming back in a lot of parts in the world yeah unfortunately yeah um so just you gotta hang in there man you got and start picking the good from the bad that's all i'll say get in touch with what you like don't just which hopefully isn't just white power yeah try and get away hopefully

it's like the fine things the easies or something sure another that's close enough to a personality absolutely okay good luck daniel thank you lastly but not leastly to andrew meanie andrew meanie uh is actually a pretty comically um light kind of name to have for such a hardened criminal uh like meanie is really the least of what this guy said when you look at his criminal record yeah that's really you know it's it's it's underselling him really he's convicted in multiple states of varying crimes, of which he's landed lifetimes in prison. So yeah, I think Meanie doesn't really do him... It doesn't really do justice. I'm pretty sure you know the way the US military

had a deck of cards for the war in Iraq with high-profile targets for each card in the deck. There's a deck with just Andrew, and it's called the Meanie deck and he's every card. Every single card. He's every joker in the pack. When he was on the stand,

you know, they were like, do you have anything to say? Can you even defend yourself? And he kind of like shrugged and he was like, I guess I'm just a bit of a meanie. No, no, no.

You're a war criminal. Yeah, like you're wanted for, like this is a triple homicide. Yeah. You know, you've killed multiple people. It's in my jeans. I'm a meanie. He, like, knocks over a glass of water.

Like, who even let him have a glass of water? This guy is, he's one of the most wanted criminals in American history. He turns around to his defense lawyer, winks. Defense lawyer is nodding, like, perfect. They, like, send him to jail. Alright, next case. Kevin Scoundrel. Bring up Kevin Scoundrel. Oh, I did it again. Just go to, all you go to jail.

Every single one of you go to jail. So hopefully, I don't know how you're getting these payments out of prison and into the Patreon, but thank you so much for all the effort, you little meanie. And thanks to everyone we shouted out uh today and everyone we shot out previously um um we've for a little while we've had a backlog of of names to get through but we are getting there slowly but surely so if you haven't heard your shout out just yet please rest assured that it is coming just hang in there we

have a whole bunch next week and more importantly a whole brand new investigation coming on Tuesday. We'll see you then. Bye-bye.