Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #23 - The Weird But True Dancing Plague of 1518

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

What a tale I have for you today! In 1518, a very peculiar form of madness fell over the people of the city of Strasbourg (modern day France) in the Holy Roman Empire. People started... dancing. A lot of people. As in hundreds. And out in public in full view of anyone who wanted to watch! And many of them only stopped when they died. They literally danced themselves to death. What happened and why??? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to another edition of Time Sucks, Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and what a tale I have for you today. I will be sharing the story of a mysterious plague that struck the city of Strasbourg in present-day Germany in 1518 CE. For over a month, a very, very strange sickness of sorts had thrown into turmoil one of the largest cities of the sprawling collection of provinces and principalities that was the Holy Roman Empire. But people weren't really getting sick. At least they weren't coming down with anything like the

flu or the plague. It was like if anything they'd grown sick of not dancing all the time. To paraphrase Christopher Walken from one of my favorite SNL sketches of ever, it was like they had a fever and the only cure was more cowbell. Except replace cowbell with more dancing. This very strange story began when a woman known as Frau Trofea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl, and shake. At first, people thought she was trying to piss off her husband. But when she didn't sleep that night, when she was still dancing, when she didn't stop

to eat or drink, but kept dancing, after she passed out for a few hours before resuming dancing again with her feet now covered in sores and blood, they started to think that something else was pun intended afoot. Soon she was carted off to a shrine 30 miles away in the hopes that prayer to a specific saint would cure her mysterious ailment. But then another person started dancing. And another, and another, and it kept spreading. City officials were concerned and mystified.

Was this a new punishment from God? Some biological illness? What was making people go mad was some sort of dance fever. Sometimes dancing until they literally dropped dead. And how would they fix it? Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. As crazy as the story is, it was actually not the first dancing plague on record. The first is said to have taken place in a Saxon town called Colbeck around 1017 CE when

several people danced riotously in a graveyard until an offended priest cursed them to then keep dancing for an entire year. It's not clear if that actually happened. Might be more of a local legend. Pretty sure the priest can't cast curses. In 1188, Welsh writer, Geraldus Cambrynsus, described an annual religious ceremony that took place at St. Almeida's Church in South Wales,

during which dozens of people danced and sang around a churchyard until they, quote, fell to the ground. Weirdly enough, in this instance, once on the ground, they started pretending to do their regular jobs, like pantomiming mending shoes, working looms, etc. They worked, quote, as if in a trance while tunelessly singing popular songs of the day. And in the imperial town of Erfurt, located in the center of what is now Germany, during the year 1247, a hundred or more children apparently danced and hopped right out of the town's gates. They were choreomaniacs.

Choreomania, fun rare word. That's having an uncontrollable urge to dance, especially in a frenzied, convulsive manner. When these young choreomaniacs reached a neighboring settlement, they are said to have collapsed with exhaustion and then slept on the streets. By the time their parents found them, some of them were dead, and some of the rest would be afflicted with tremors and fatigue for the rest of their lives. Sorry that dancing story doesn't have a happier ending. And there was what many historians consider to be the first true dancing plague, which

begun in the Rhineland in the summer of 1374, eventually extending all the way from Aachen and Ghent in the north to Metz and Strausburg in the south. For several months, small bands of wild dancers wandered from place to place, seemingly spreading the affliction to local people as if some kind of medieval dance-dance revolution was actually biologically contagious. Accounts describe thousands of men and women dancing chaotically while screeching with pain, leaping into the air, running madly from place to place, and calling upon the mercy of God and the Saints for it to end. But the weirdest claim of all was

that if sheets, like bedsheets, weren't tied around the dancers' waists, quote, they cried out like lunatics that they were dying. What? Simultaneously, the dancers yelled out the names of devils, had strange aversions to pointed shoes and the color red, and said that they were drowning in a red sea of blood. It was assumed at the time that these dancers were being possessed by demons. Some of them even called out the name of a devil they called Frisks.

Most recovered within 10 days, but many relapsed multiple times. The epidemic subsided by the end of a devil they called Frisks. Most recovered within 10 days, but many relapsed multiple times. The epidemic subsided by the end of the year, though it may have struck again in northeastern France in 1375, and then again in the Bavarian city of Outzburg in 1381. And all these places, all of the local priests were freaked out, they were working overtime,

screaming Latin incantations, immersing people in holy water, wondering what kind of devilish trickery had befallen their communities. The dancing plague that struck Strausberg in 1518 was the second largest of Europe's dancing plagues, after that one that began in the Rhineland in 1374, but it was the one that would go down in history as being the craziest, the most intense, and the most deadly. To tell this ludicrous, how did this actually happen, true story? Let's go back a couple of decades before the dancing began. In an era of humanity defined by hardship,

these decades were considered particularly harsh. For starters, portents or omens for the new century, 1500, right? The 16th century did not look good. A nearly 300 pound meteor crashed in the Northeast French community of Ossiceim? Ossiceim? There we go, or Ossiceim? It's a tricky one for me. In 1492, not far from Strasbourg, seemed to be, that seemed to be God's way of telling humanity to stop sinning. Sebastian Brandt, a talented young lawyer living in nearby Basel, Switzerland, who had

become a city official in Strausburg during the dancing plague, argued that the meteor, which put on a hell of a fiery show when it fell from the sky, was a sign that the people of Christendom had forgotten Christ's sacrifice. He berated the clergy, especially young priests and nuns who were oftentimes the sons and daughters of nobles, used to wearing coiffed hair, daggers strapped to their belts, fashionable slippers. These dudes were. Instead of spending their days in prayer and repentance, he said, they were heading to the taverns, wearing fancy jewels, belts sparkling with gold, caps with ostrich feathers. They were being selfish, focused not on God

but on their own glory and hedonistic pleasure. Back at the monasteries and nunneries they dined on sweet breads, prime cuts of meat, fine vintage wines, and even sometimes they fuck people they snuck in and or each other. And everyone knew it. They weren't being that sneaky. And all of this was no good. It was going to bring God's wrath upon them in the community. In the Catholic Church it was the clergy that were supposed to lead you into a pure life. You couldn't pray directly to God. They had to act as messengers for you. Medieval laymen didn't even read the Bible themselves. They relied on the

clergy to relay the material within. So if the people who were supposed to lead you to this purer life weren't themselves pure, not even close, how could these drunk and dirty dongh owners and dirty puss owners, how are they supposed to perform the sacraments intended to purify others? pure, not even close. How could these drunk and dirty dong owners and dirty puss owners, how are they supposed to perform the sacraments intended to purify others? How would anyone ever be saved? And then there was the fact that all of these clergy members weren't paying taxes but were collecting tithes,

sometimes tithing from more than one parish. They were allotted, angering the merchants, artisans, and traders who were importing and exporting more than ever in a world increasingly connected to new maritime technology and the printing press. These bad priests, these fraud nuns, they were getting rich riding everyone's coattails. They took and they took and they took. What did they give? All of this, according to Sebastian Brent, was why God had allowed the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Empire to destroy the ancient Christian empire of Byzantium.

Oh yes, Sebastian was not holding back. He must have had to use a wheelbarrow to carry his big balls around, saying this kind of shit to members of the most powerful regime ever seen in Europe, the Catholic Church. And instead of guiding their people to spiritual and imperial victory, Europe's leaders were busy fighting recklessly with one another. Brandt was, surprisingly to me, not burned alive for being a heretic for saying all this shit. His mind was very respected. The emperor was a fan of his. Probably liked that he wasn't just some kiss-ass who continuously bullshitted him. And the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I read Brandt's words and actually promised he would lead a massive army to challenge the Turks.

He didn't. And the sultan's battle-hardened soldiers continued conquering the Eastern Mediterranean, beginning to chip away at the empire and terrify its citizens, who greatly feared the non-Christian Ottoman warriors. Artists made woodcuts and paintings of the Ottomans and portrayed them as actual devils, sharp chins, narrow, ferocious eyes, blood dripping from their mouths. It was an especially scary time for many living in Europe. And to add to all of this, in the mid-1490s, a severe crop failure occurred throughout

the continent due to freezing winters and torrential rain. Peasants had to consume every sack of wheat, barley, or rye they had to stay alive, meaning they didn't have any leftover for the next year to plant so they would soon go into debt and then starve, or fight not to starve. Food reserves were quickly exhausted and peasants plotted bloody revenge, but then they were swiftly rounded up and executed. And finally, why not add to this shit show of a situation by sprinkling in some good old fashioned syphilis?

The STI was carried to Strausburg by mercenaries who were returning from the wars in Italy where they had come into contact with Spanish troops and their sex workers. And let's be honest, where they probably did a shit-ton of raping, because that's what mercenaries did back then. In early 1495, the executive head of Strausburg, called the Ammeister, spoke of a bad pox in the city, something new and awful. Victims complained of agonizing pain in their joints, which made sleep all but impossible. Soon after their genitals, legs, face, and flanks became rancid with blisters, pustules, and ulcers. As the eruptions turned from red to black, flesh began to fall

away, eating at people's most recognizable features, their noses, faces, cheeks. And all this agony obviously arose from the genitals, since it would always begin with blistered penises and vulvas, meaning it was a carnal disease, a disease brought on by uncontrolled lust. Looking at it another way, it was a punishment for sin. Based on all this, by the middle of the decade, many were saying that 1499 would be the last year before Armageddon. The times, in in many ways they don't change that much. Every generation of humankind has had people running around talking about how the sky is falling, how the world is just about to end, but this era had more than most. Fortunately,

by the late 1490s there were four years of mild winters and temperate summers which brought about some healthy harvests of wine and grain again. Despite brief periods of tumultuous over the following decade, overall things seemed to be returning to normal. Except there was a sort of pessimistic note to daily existence that just kind of hung in the air. Maybe after all the turmoil, it was hard to trust that things were really going to get better. Few trusted landlords, clergy members, or anyone who had money. Peasants still remembered all too well the empty bellies, gaunt faces, and crippling debts of the previous decades,

and they blamed many very real devils. And despite the abundant fear of Satan still definitely being a thing, nearly everyone feared God just as much, if not more. And they didn't trust religious rights to save them from God's wrath. That was the world that Frau Trofia grew up in. She was living in Strausburg in 1511 when another bad harvest sent the price of grain up and

city folk awoke to find themselves covered in painful buboes in their neck, groins, armpits, a wave of the bubonic plague. Fortunately, a freezing winter halted the contagion, but then one catastrophe replaced another when the crops died again. And Trophyia was still living there in 1514 when vegetable drops froze in the ground, crops the following summer, rain fell week after week spoiling food by damp and rot, Jews and Romani people were scapegoated as they often were, tossed into prisons on false

accusations or just simply killed in the streets. And then Nostunar had the rain gone, then weeks of drought followed, withering crops where they stood. Anxiety and fear gripped the region. In 1516, an Alasian woman, Strausberg is in the region of Alsace, Alsatian I should have said Alsatian woman, yeah in the region of Alsace, claimed that she had seen the ghost of her dead soldier husband Clutching his own severed head with bloody hands That's intense This alleged paranormal sighting set off a massive wave of other alleged sightings

Thousands of others suddenly made similar claims of their own Reporting that their dead relatives had escaped from purgatory and were now wandering the streets and fields at night Running and screaming to the sounds of thundering drums and screeching pipes. Then grain prices rose again, and everyone needed grain, and by Christmas the price was higher than it had been for an entire generation. A ferocious winter followed, with temperatures remaining below zero for months, which of course caused more illness and death. One deadpan chronicler dubbed it the bad year. This led to the city of Strasbourg to opening some of their granaries and stores, reducing the price of those goods briefly, though many were still racing to

keep up with the loans they had taken out when their crops had died in previous years. An atypically cold spell in April of 1517 then blistered the wheat, barley and rye, slashing all hopes of a good harvest that year, and a breakout of smallpox, tore through the city, followed by more bubonic plague, and in the summer of 1517 a new mysterious disease called the English Sweat. Why not? Fuck it. Just toss a little more calamity into the shit bucket of these peasants' lives.

With this new illness, possibly some kind of flu virus, we actually still don't know for sure what it was because it vanished before the 16th century began. First came acute anxiety, followed by violent shivers, giddiness, and fatigue. Several hours later, sweat began to pour in streams from the body as the victim panted for breath, becoming delirious and unquenchably thirsty and death then often followed. And this, it all made it seem like God fucking hated the people of Stroudsburg. It felt like ever since that damn meteorite lit up the sky with fire in 1492, life had mostly been horrific.

And so living under the kind of stress and anxiety that all this had to have brought on, on July 14th, 1518, Frau Trofea stepped outside her small house like she did every morning. And before I start talking about how Frau danced her fucking ass off, time for today's mid-show sponsor break. If you don't want to hear these ads, you can sign up for our Patreon, become a space lizard for $5 a month and get the entire catalog ad free and more. And now let's dance, meat sacks. We don't actually know all that much about Trofea.

What we do know is that she was a lowborn woman, so she had almost certainly been lectured her entire life about women's sinfulness. Perhaps she'd also been preyed upon by the nobles who were known to prowl the poor quarters of town, literally raping women with impunity, often with their syphilis infected dicks. Not even kidding. What a time to be alive! If I ever win some kind of ticket to a time machine, traveling to medieval Europe, not gonna be on my agenda.

In the domestic sphere, she was also undoubtedly strictly subordinate to her husband. She was submitting. Statistically speaking, she probably had married him in her teens at the behest of her parents, basically forced and was expected to tolerate severe beatings, sexual violence, and her husband's adultery while still running a household. Life truly was mostly pain back then compared to now. One of the only small bits of power a lowborn woman had in Trophya's day was, so random, opting to be buried apart from her husband.

Man, what a shitty consolation prize. Yeah, my life sucks, big time, but soon. Oh, things are gonna get so much better. I am just counting the days until I am dead, so I can be buried away from my blister-cocked, heavy-handed husband, woohoo! So maybe poor Frau Torfio was really feeling the typical stress and anxiety that went along

with being a poor peasant woman in early 16th century France. And maybe that fed into what she did on July 14th, the day she did something so completely unexpected. And this is, if I say France and Germany, this is on the border of both, of like we're France Germany and Switzerland meet by the way And and maybe that fed into what she did on July 14th The day she had something so completely unexpected not only for women at the time, but for anybody. She just started dancing But for her, no music was playing. She wasn't even laughing or showing any signs of joy.

She was just wildly, but also somehow stoically, dancing like a total psycho. To the increasing irritation of her husband, she went on dancing throughout the day. And as the day wore on, it became clear that Trophyia simply could not stop dancing. Only after many hours of crazed motion did she collapse from exhaustion, bathed in sweat, her muscles twitching. She finally sank into a brief restorative sleep. But then, just a few hours later, she popped up and resumed her strange, solitary jig. Now I gotta cut loose, put loose, kick off the Sunday shoes. Please, Louise. Throughout much of the following day, she just kept dancing with her increasing level

of fatigue, rendering her movements more and more violent and erratic. Once again, at the end of the the day she collapsed so freaking exhausted. I can't imagine how sore her muscles must have been. How cramps from dehydration must have just incredibly pained her. But she was not done. On the third day she woke up started to dance again on bloody blistered and bruised feet. By now dozens of onlookers had gathered, drawn by the sheer strangeness of the spectacle. I mean if she was your neighbor, wouldn't you be watching? I mean how could you not?

Holy shit! Bartholomew! You have to see this! It's Frau! Oh my gosh, Frau Trofea! She has gone mad! Guess what? I got a fever!

And the only prescription is more cowbell. The crowd of onlookers was made up of tradesmen, artisans, porters, hawkers, beggars, pilgrims, priests, monks, nuns, nobles, rave DJs, maybe not that last one, but everyone had come to see what the fuck was going on with Trophyia. They apparently speculated she was doing it on purpose to embarrass her husband for some reason. But over the course of the third day, Trophyia's shoes became soaked with blood. Yeah, soaked. She wasn't putting on a show.

Didn't seem likely at all that someone who wanted to annoy their spouse would go to such extremes and hurt themselves so badly. Now the crowd wondered if she was possessed by demons. Suddenly one onlooker claimed to detect the dark energy of a pagan spirit called Major. Damn you, Major! Women in general, they were thought to be more susceptible to demonic possession due to having, as we all know to be true, even if it's not polite currently to say, weaker minds and weaker morals.

That really is what they believed. Supposedly inherently lustful nature led women into committing vile sins much more than men and these in turn drew demons into their very souls. God totally. I mean women they're just there's so much more lustful than us men right? We all know that right? That's reality. That's why I, like many fellow married men, you know, uh, hated going to bars back when I was single. I mean, with no wedding ring on? Holy shit! I was constantly being groped by lustful ladies begging me to ravage them. I always had to say shit like, enough! I'm only here to grab a Shirley Temple and some french fries because my blood sugar fills off! Back up, Jezebels!" So had Trophyia committed a sexual sin?

Was that why she was dancing? Because of her lust? These medieval morons wondered that with their silly little dark-age idiot brains. To some, the dancing did not look demonic, though. Instead, like the meteorite and the outbreak of syphilis, it seemed like a strange and cryptic message from God and not the devil. after many frantic genius level discussions The view then prevailed that Trophy was being chastised by a vengeful saint Fucking vengeful Saints. You couldn't throw a rock back then in Straussburg without hitting a vengeful Saint Geniuses decided that this vengeful Saint was st. Vitus not the American doom metal pioneers, a different

Saint Vitus, a young Sicilian martyr, tortured and tormented in 303 CE for refusing to give up his Christian faith. Oh, Saint Vitus, he had been immersed in a cauldron of boiling lead, where he came out miraculously unscathed. Nor was he harmed when they tried to feed him to a hungry lion. And then he just ascended to heaven without even dying. Totally. 1000%.

That all for sure happened. Already revered as a saint by the 5th century CE, Saint Vitus was also the object of worship of those suffering from epilepsy and women unable to conceive, and he had become the patron saint of dancing in Germany, France, Switzerland, this area, thanks to a feast associated with him involving dancing. And between the epilepsy and the dancing, it just made sense. The St. Vitus was kind of fucking with Trophyia. Apparently Trophyia had done something to really grind his gears.

The arrival at this cause for her madness apparently brought a great deal of relief to the fine folk of Strausberg. Not that they clearly understood the root of her affliction, or excuse me, now that they clearly understood it, they knew how to cure her. Trophyia would then be taken to a musty grotto and chapel dedicated to Saint Vitus that lay about 30 miles away through forests, meadows, and orchards in the foothills of the Voj mountains near the town of Sevir. So after six days on July 20th, Frau Trofea was bundled onto a wagon and transported to this shrine. Maybe that would give her an opportunity to talk to St. Vitus, who according to Catholic tradition would then talk to God and the whole thing would be put to rest. Right?

They'd shake it, they'd shake it out, come on, alright, they'd make their amends and now you know everything is right between St. Vitus and poor frowned Trophy again. Easy peasy. How could this plan possibly ever not work? It wouldn't work. Not for everyone. Trophy may have stopped dancing soon after this sources aren't clear, but overall the dancing had just begun. On July 21st around 34 people now took to the streets, seized by the same violent urge to Dance, dance!

In houses, halls, and public spaces just about everywhere, as fear paralyzed the city and the members of Strausburg's private council just cavorted with just this mindless intensity. They went on day and night in clogs, leather boots, barefoot, their limbs aching with fatigue, their heels bleeding copiously, probably some with sinews torn down to the bone. What the fuck? Starting to rethink my time machine declaration now though. Kind of really want to go back, sit on a curb with a big bucket of popcorn, maybe some Reese's Pieces, and watch this shit show. The numbers of the afflicted rose each passing day. St. Vitus it seemed would be appeased only when the whole city had been consumed with this dancing curse.

And it actually seemed like things were heading that way. We don't know exactly how many danced, what kind of moves they were doing, but the chronicles that describe the 1347 epidemics tell of how some of the dancers then quote held each other's hands and leapt high in the air or danced in circles. Several of these chronicles also spoke of how these choreomaniacs lost all modesty with wildly dancing women exposing their breasts and maidens allowing themselves to be deflowered. So maybe that was also happening. Is this dance? Is this a dance or an orgy?

The show just got better. I'm sitting on that medieval sidewalk riveted using my popcorn bucket to maybe hide my boner. Sebastian Brandt and his fellow city officials are not enjoying this show. They were looking on with rapidly mounting horror. They started to question St. Vitus as being the cause. They deduced that merely seeing another person dancing could lead to the observer also being infected. Was this some new strange disease? City officials on a private council who ran the city, who

called themselves the Council of 21, were both scared and disgusted. In official records, the members of this council called it both a hard terrible affliction and a nasty and wicked dance so wicked and nasty I Mean if these people are literally fucking in the street with their blistered and bloody feet in the midst of also dancing I can't see how they would toss out words like wicked with their dancing Too short wrote this song specifically about the Dancing Plague. Mm-hmm. Oh God. Ugh.

Oh God! He had to have written that song about the Dancing Plague of 1518. I mean we don't know for a fact that he didn't. The Council of 21 had to do something to stop all this sinful madness. The council's first step was to consult the members of a physicians guild, university-trained medical men, led by an officially appointed city physician. In July of 1518, the 21 turned to local physicians like, I'm sure you've heard a lot of these guys, Michel Herr, Johann Muehlin, Lorenz Freis. They may have also consulted the leading surgeon of the day

in the area, Horonimus Brunschweg, who had recently made some innovative advancements in the treatment of gunshot wounds. Some of these medical men went straight to the astrological charts they'd used to explain the earlier outbreaks of plague, syphilis and English sweat. I love it. Can you imagine going to see your doctor today? Explain your symptoms? And then he or she is like, you're a Gemini, right? If you're a Vertos, I would say that we should have a blood panel done on you.

But as a Gemini, I want you to try leaving a glass bottle of water with some quartz crystals in the bottom of it overnight during the full moon this Thursday. Drink it all the next morning and you shall be fine." For these doctors, in the summer of 1518, the position of the stars did seem to verify that disaster had arrived. Earth had entered the 20th degree of the Virgin in opposition to the head of Medusa when Mars and Capricorn were in the Ascendant and that meant obviously the tragedies were to be expected. Not sure

how any of that info was supposed to help get people to stop dancing their asses off but that is what they came up with. Some other leading physicians in the area opted for a physical explanation, and this was the one the Council of 21 recorded in their official books. The verdict? Dance is a natural disease which comes from overheated blood. Huh. So their blood was too hot. So how is that information helpful? Someone need to round up the local dancers, force them into a local river or lake,

until, I don't know, their body temperature lowered to the point of them not wanting to dance themselves to death? According to the physicians and now the council, it wasn't St. Vitus after all. God, they're making so much progress. Good thing the leading minds of the day were all working together to figure this out. Now that they knew what was causing all the dancing all that hot-ass blood The council tossed out a cure More fucking dancing give them a CNC music factory prescription Uh huh. Groove. Uh huh. Oh shit. Keep dancing everybody. Everybody!

Fucking dance now! Get out there! My neighbors here in the building must think I'm insane. They already do. Uh, it's unclear why that was their fix. Possibly they felt that smoky residues of burned blood had built up damage to the air and they were trying to get out of the building. They were trying to get out of the building.

They were trying to get out of the building. They were trying to get out in the building must think I'm insane. They already do. It's unclear why that was their fix. Possibly they felt that smoky residues of burned blood had built up dangerously in the dancer's bodies and that through heavily perspiring these might be expelled. 100% understand that. I hate it with my blood. You know, will my not burn blood when that part of my blood gets too full of smoky residue from some of my burn blood. The mixture just makes me kind of feel funny when that happens, right? You get it. By July 25th, the sickness had seized about 50 people, so much dancing, and the council decided that it was time to take charge. They

first issued instructions that the Carpenters and Tanner's Guilds were to set aside their halls for the dancers. Let's get these weirdos off the streets. We must protect the children. Stalls get these weirdos off the streets. We must protect the children. Stalls, tables, and benches were hastily removed, and the afflicted were escorted inside. The victims soon filled two halls. The Council of 21 next ordered the outdoor grain market to be emptied of stalls, sacks,

and carts, make room for more hot-blooded dancers. In the last days of July, more and more dancers were gathered up and driven inside the market walls, and then just left there to dance freely without interruption. You just gotta push through, right? You just gotta keep bumping and grinding, get that dirty blood out. At least during the morning and evening, the market's walls would provide the dancers some shade, so

that's probably a little helpful. Close to the city walls, the council ordered craftsmen to assemble a makeshift stage for the remaining dancers. 20 or so dancers were placed on stage, provided with pipers and drummers. Gotta keep beat. Hell yeah, this just keeps getting weirder, and I am here for it. Indeed, the council now hired dozens of professional musicians from local music guilds who performed day and night.

Authorities also brought the dancers water, ale, or wine, encouraged them to eat. Not so they wouldn't die, but so they could keep on dancing until they had danced it all out of their systems. And then the council decided to do something even crazier. Provide the sick dancers with healthy, non-infected dance partners. Why? Because everyone in this town is fucking insane. And also, the thought was that these healthy dance partners would make sure that the sick dancers never slowed down.

["Dancing with a Stranger"] In the end, the city of Stroudsburg became a great big party that nobody wanted to be at Soundtracked by drums beating and clogs and leather boots tapping on hard wooden stages Interrupted by the occasional cry or terrified scream from dancers with unfocused eyes spasming limbs emaciated bodies shit is insane the air was filled with the smell of rotten food due to the dancers not eating much and human sweat, excrement, and urine. Yeah, I forgot about these dancers going to the bathroom. Apparently many of them were just pissing and shitting themselves,

or pissing and shitting on the street or stage or whatever. The only quiet places were the churches and sites of religious worship where the council begged the clergy to keep praying for the afflicted just to cover all their bases in case it wasn't a physical disease after all. But no reprieve came. The dancers kept dancing. This mad disease kept spreading. Each day in late July and early August, the city's physicians and officials, along with distraught relatives, led fresh victims to the areas set aside for unrestrained dancing.

This was not good. If for any individual dancer that translifted the sound of the drums and music and all the other people dancing around them likely plunged them right back into dance dance revolution. Plenty of frightened citizens donated coins, food and wine now to the accursed and the hope of securing their souls immunity from the affliction. Also likely that magistrates and physicians were given the dancers, whatever food and drink they were able to consume. Meaning that the starving farmers who had suffered poor harvest for years,

actually now had a reason to join this madness. If you were broken, hungry, now you could dance your way into coin, wine and food. So now we've got a bunch of opportunists doing this. A bunch of people faking having whatever the hell this affliction was. And the number of dancers of course now just grows and grows. Before long, Tunis doing this. A bunch of people faking having whatever the hell this affliction was. And the number of dancers of course now just grows and grows. Before long some of the physicians began to feel less confident in their dancing therapy approach.

It's not working. This is a bad, bad plan. And now the council is thinking maybe it was a divine curse. After all, they're back on that. Around this time, leading them to think this was a divine curse even more strongly, dancers began to die. Nearby in Nuremberg, a writer and merchant named Lucas Rem estimated the daily fatalities, writing,

In the year 1518 and summer, lots of people died in the St. Vitus dance in Strasbourg. About 15 people died a day. Other observers were less precise, though they agreed that fatalities were commonplace. City records held that many died, which was saying something in a time and place in which death was already so commonplace. Weakened by exertion, hunger, and thirst, the first to succumb were the very young and the very old. The bodies of the dead, escorted by distraught family members, carried off as others around them just kept dancing in various states of oblivion. This is bonkers. I cannot imagine living in Stroudsburg while this shit was going on.

The council now starts to really regret hiring musicians to keep all these fuckers continually dancing. On August 1st, the council wrote, As lots of women and young boys are dancing this evil dance, music should only be provided in secretly in their own homes. Now piping, drumming, even whistling is forbidden. Nein! Stockwisterwissling! And the dance halls and stage are dismantled. The council starts taking the idea of religious curse even more seriously and if it was a religious curse the council felt you know they had to do something now about that. For a long time, they've been trying to get rid of the city's sins, passing laws to punish people

who are swearing, blaspheming, married women who dabbled in prostitution, professional prostitutes. But the council had also leased properties on several streets to known brothel keepers. And some members of the council had paid for the services of the youngest, prettiest, and least disfigured prostitutes in order to charm visiting nobles. Wow, least disfigured, that's what one source described as. Is that supposed to be a compliment? We would love to hire you, Matilda. You're well?

Well, you're the least disfigured of this lot. The council was ready to put their sinful ways behind them. Now the magistrates began to banish all, quote, loose persons from the city for a time. They went to the city's dozens of brothels, shut them down. They combed the streets looking for the lowest class of sex workers and then drove them out beyond the city walls. They also tried to reach any of the dancers who might still have a shred of consciousness in them, issuing instructions threatening that if any guild member was seen dancing in public

a penalty would be issued by the council. The only exception, Sebastian Brandt wrote, is that if the honorable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first mass in their houses they may do so using stringed instruments but they are on their conscience to not use tambourines and drums. I love that. If you indeed have a shred of decency, sir, you will set down that tambourine. Shortly after the 21 issued another notice, also threatening a heavy fine, that the dancers remain hidden from public view lest the contagion infect even more people. A contemporary official recorded as the dancing

disease did not wish to end, the city council decided that families should stay in their houses when a member is infected to make sure that nobody else is infected. If one of the servants is infected, families have to keep them on their expenses somewhere or send them to centritis. It was important that these people were not seen in public. The council was afraid that the people might start dancing frightened, even infecting the healthy people. If this happened, the offending families were punished heavily. But by August 10th, the dancing epidemic had still failed to recede. The few who had recovered were liable to slip back into it, and in total it had infected roughly 400 people now. As the dancing disease starts now to be more widespread again, the council wrote, our consents

grow from day to day. Finally the council agreed. They had to make things right with St. Vitus. They're back on that. They ordered a team of masons, carpenters, architects, and laborers now to construct a new temple dedicated to St. Vitus. They told Guildmaster to dispatch the the dancers at the expense of the guild to the shrine of St. Vitus, just as Frau Trofea had been,

and to have their families isolated until the afflicted returned cured. That was not going to be easy. Only semi-conscious at best, with their limbs writhing, it was almost impossible to get these people across 30 miles of fields, rivers, and forests like a herd of dancing cats. It would take over a full day to walk that distance. It might take weeks to get these dancing maniacs, you know, herd it over there. Meanwhile city officials ordered three special masses to be held at the cathedral in which thousands of unaffected people would pray for the well-being of the city. Then there would be a sacrifice made to Saint Vitus in the form of the Saint himself in effigy,

seated in a boiling cauldron made from 110 pounds of wax, melted in this boiling cauldron. Around August 20th, by which time the crazed dance had been going on for a little over a month now, the Council of 21 spent some hours debating whether to send the wax image to Severn right away before the new chapel had been sanctified or to install it temporarily on the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral right there in the city.

Got so many important, helpful decisions to make. They finally decided to melt the wax into a huge candle and dispatch this gigantic candle over to the shrine immediately. Okay, good job guys. A few days later the masses were sung, the giant candle was prepared for a journey. This is so fucking ridiculous, I just picked just the biggest fucking candle by far anyone's ever seen. Like it's just like 40 feet long, you know, it's five feet in diameter, a team of horses carrying this big-ass candle.

Please let God stop this punishment, we are giving you... God, we've given you the giant candle! What more do you want, St. Vitus? So they have wagons to take this candle. They put a bunch of remaining dancers on wagons, take them to the shrine. Each wagon carrying up to 30 people. Others were following on carts, horses, donkeys, mules, simply on foot. What a parade. After a night of sleeping in fields or barns along the way, the convoy finally arrives in Severn whose residents are now growing accustomed to seeing crazy men, women, and children carted into their city. It's August 25th. The servants briefly left their wagons carrying with them signed orders from the 21 which instructed them to choose three or four priests with the help of

the local dean who will then perform masses for the groups. Once the priests had joined up, the party set off to the far side of town, where they disembarked at the foot of what locals called either Vitis Mountain or the Hollow Stone. The dancers were then carried, pulled, dragged, or pushed along the steep path that led them to the shrine, a grotto of smooth reddish sandstone filled with dozens of votive offerings including many iron toads. Yeah sure why not? Don't want to rule anything out at this point as a possible cure. Right? Maybe these dancing fools needed some iron toads to get the devil out of their bodies. The new chapel was being built right outside the grotto and on top I could shake and groove it, now I'm a dancing fool.

The new chapel was being built right outside the grotto and on top of the mountain was a small monastery inhabited by a lone hermit, who I'm sure was like, what the fuck, who was charged with maintaining the shrine. The dancers are now led into this hermit's chapel and not the new one, but the one that had been built there before the outbreak,

whereupon an altar illuminated by candles lay a richly colored wood carving from the 1400s celebrating the legend of Saint Vitus. The chapel also held a miniature figurine of Saint Vitus again sitting in a boiling cauldron alongside statues of Saint Christopher, Saint Anthony, and Saint Sebastian all richly gilded in silver. So much saint. Oh, this will have to cure the dancing fever, won't it? This amount of saint? The afflicted were given red shoes and crosses to pray with.

Gotta have those red shoes on. Then the priest's, priest's, priest dipped their hands into a consecrated mixture of oil and balsam called a chrism and smudged the sign of the cross on the upside and downside of each person's shoes. They blessed all the shoes. The dancers, their feet now enclosed in blessed red shoes damp with holy water and oil, were divided into three groups each with a priest and servant assigned to them.

This is quite the experiment. The groups each heard a mass and then were led in a circular motion around the altar, very specific. Each dancer would then give a penny to the carved figures, except if you didn't have a penny, the priest would pay the toll for you. This done, they were escorted out of the chapel, down the steps, past the grotto and lower chapel, and then back onto the wagons at the base of the mountain and carted home. But would they be cured? Would St. Vitus finally be appeased and call off his dancing death attacks? In the medieval mind, everything about the pilgrimage to Severn promised a positive outcome. This made total sense, right?

The excruciating journey, the grueling climb, the wearing of the sacred shoes, a chapel atmosphere charged with incantations and the thick scent of incense. And there was another reason to think it might be successful. On a level that medieval Europeans probably weren't consciously aware of, but nevertheless felt these people who have been neglected by officials as they dealt with illness and famine for decades, were now receiving the earnest attention of civic and religious leaders. They were being taken seriously. They were being treated as human beings. And indeed, the dancing did come to a halt now. Didn't

disappear overnight. But over the following weeks, many more came to Severn for healing and the flood of people gradually reduced to a trickle. The fall's harvest was then decent too. Everything seemed to be going back to normal in Strasbourg. Of course, there were probably long lasting after effects for the dancers who didn't die. Twitches, shakes, ticks, anxiety, insomnia might have lasted for years according to some sources. As the crisis passed, Strasburg's magistrates returned to their neglected administrative and commercial affairs now. Prohibitions against public dancing and the playing of drums, horns, and tambourines, don't forget about the tambourines,

came to an end late in September, and the brothels and bathhouses reopened to crowds of people in low-cut bodices, short jackets, and fancy slippers, just as before. Certain amount of sin was again seen as acceptable. Then in late 1518, word came to Strausberg of a rebellious Augustinian friar from Wittenberg named Martin Luther.

You've probably heard of him, founder of Protestant Christianity, kind of a big deal, who would accuse the Catholic Church of getting rich off of the contributions of the poor, in essence selling God's grace. Reformers like Luther insisted that grace could only come as a gift from God, not through costly penances or indulgences sold by the church. And they found eager listeners in Strausbourg who had been sick of the behavior of the clergy for multiple generations, the clergy who had done nothing to protect them from the dancing plague.

Luther's was the first widely known argument for individualism in Europe in centuries, if not millennia, that you could become saved through reading the Bible, that you didn't have to trust the pope, a priest, or a bishop to tell you what to do. This vision of religion was, in essence, democratic. And this would pave the way for so much throughout history, including the American Revolution and the French Revolution. In response to the religious turmoil, Strausberg officials reformed the dispensing of charity, processing it through the city instead of through the church.

And so, while St. Vitus's curse never did come back to terrorize the inhabitants of Strausberg, it did do one thing. The What the fuck happened to the people of Strausburg? Why did they randomly start dancing? Several historians have pointed to a biological source, like ergot, a mold that flourishes on the stalks of damp rye. When this happens, ergot infects and replaces the cereal grain with a dark fungal body called a sclerotium. When made into bread or otherwise ingested like a barley beer, it causes ergotism, also known as St. Anthony's Fire or the Devil's Curse. Ergotism is characterized by convulsions, muscle

spasms, vomiting, hallucinations, and a gangrenous pain where the victim's limbs, fingers, toes, and nose are quote eaten up. Victims often lose part to their extremities or entire limbs due to blood vessel constriction and gangrene. In addition, the ergot fungus contains a number of highly poisonous and psychoactive alkaloids including lysergic acid diethylamide aka LSD, which was synthesized from the ergot fungus centuries later in 1938 by the late great chemist Albert Hoffman. And not very far from where all this went down, he was just over in Switzerland. Back in 1518 when people had no idea what hallucinogenics were, back when everyone was part of a culture that was highly

superstitious and saw omens, portents, and messages from God just about everywhere, you could easily see some ergod poisoning as something demonic or as some kind of divine punishment dished out by God or by one of his saints. As an example, many historians believe that the witchcraft trials that plagued Europe and North American and the North American colonies were related to ergot poisoning, that the victims of the Salem witch trials possibly exhibited signs of ergot poisoning. So is ergot poisoning the culprit? Well, it's not entirely clear. Though compounds produced by ergot can induce delusions, twitching, and violent jerking, it seems that the millers near Stroudsburg were aware of that risk.

They even carved hideous faces into the ends of the wooden pipes that dumped flour into sacks, possibly as a reminder of the hallucinations that can take place if they're not careful. But even if quality control wasn't great back then, there are also some dissimilarities between ergot poisoning and the behavior that the dancers displayed. Ergot poisoning creates convulsions and delusions but not rhythmic movements lasting for days. And it's not all that feasible for hundreds of people to have acted in the same bizarre way to Urgot poisoning. And then there was the matter of gangrene and blood restriction common to Urgot poisoning. None of the Strasbourg dancers seemed to exhibit those symptoms. Now the dancing plague

seemed to have been entirely psychological in all likelihood. So could it have been a form of mass hysteria? Because mass hysteria can take so many different forms, it's, you know, difficult to define. But in the seminal 1987 article he published on the topic, Professor Simon Wesley from King's College in London defines it this way. That it is an outbreak of abnormal illness behavior that cannot be explained by physical disease. That it affects people who would not normally behave in this fashion. That it excludes symptoms deliberately provoked in groups gathered for that purpose, such as when someone intentionally gathers a group of people

and convinces them that they are collectively experiencing a psychological or physiological symptom. That it excludes collective manifestations used to obtain a state of satisfaction unavailable singly, such as fads, crazes, and riots. And finally, that the link between the individuals experiencing collective obsessional behavior must not be coincidental, meaning, for instance, that they are all part of the same close-knit community. What happened in Strausberg fits all of this criteria. And if you remember what we talked about at the beginning, how god-awful the 30 or so years before the dancing plague were, we can see why a lot of people's brains would already be incredibly fragile. Catastrophe after catastrophe, befalling people who were steeped in a world of religious fear and superstition, combined

to send the most vulnerable members of society into a trance state. And this means that the first attempt by the council to curtail the dancing by putting them on display on stages and in dance halls actually made it worse. Those measures ensured that the minds of the city folk dwelt dangerously on the curse and the Saints' insatiable appetite for revenge. They could see that the numbers of afflicted grew while few recovered. As more and more music drifted around halls and squares, the plague reeled in more and more victims. Immersed in the seductive rhythms of drums, horns, those damned tambourines, more and

more of the emotionally frail felt themselves drawn in. And of course, with each new victim, the power of the dancing epidemic was reinforced. Every time another man, woman, or child began to dance, dance, dance in the street or square, the conviction hardened amongst onlookers that St. Vitus' ghost figures stalked their city in search of sinners to punish. But why dance at all? Why not become a stark raving crazy, become a serial killer, or become completely catatonic? Well consider the context that Straussberg's poor might have danced in otherwise, Carnival.

In the weeks before Lent, people danced with drunken, cathartic, and restless abandon in this area at this time. Revelers performed dizzying ring and chain dances during which they swirled in large circles around fires, trees, and poles. People of all levels danced with invigorating freedom and intimacy. Bishops, popes, and papal councils had been trying to suppress these bouts of revelry for centuries, but to the common person, dancing felt good. They got to live on the wild side without risking the little safety or

security they had, and moving together made them feel like members of a harmonious, harmonious whole, a community. Is it possible the dancing existed in everyone's minds as a form of rebellion, self-soothing, and community therapy all at once. And that their minds, so broken by the poverty, starvation, and death of the past three decades, turned to the one thing that nobody could take away from them. Becoming a dancing queen. A la sweet tambourine! Who knows? We'll never know with certainty why the city of Strausburg succumbed to such dancing madness back in 1518, but for the purpose of our amusement today in

2024, I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of glad they did. This is the most entertaining topic I've come across in a while. Oh my god, it was so fun just to work off of the research that Sophie provided. Oh my god just look into it further. I hope it captivated you as much as it did me. Now go channel your inner Frau Torfia and get to dancing. Go dance in the street. Let your freak flag fly. Oh it feels good. Maybe you'll get the neighbors to join in. It doesn't matter what you wear Just as long as you are there Come on, everybody Cry, but girl

Everywhere around the world Oh, so fun Dancing in the street Dancing in the street And that is it for this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Beefier episodes of Time Suck every Monday at noon Pacific time. New episodes of the now long-running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death every Tuesday at midnight. Two episodes of

Nightmare Fuel, the fictional horror written, narrated by me, scored by Logan Keith, thrown into the mix each month. A lot of people loving people loving it over there. If you haven't checked it out, please do. Thanks to Sophie Evans for the initial research. Thanks to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode, making that cool episode thumbnail for you to see on your podcast player. Please go to badmagicproductions.com for all your bad magic needs and have yourself a great weekend.