The mysterious story of how hundreds of people danced nonstop and uncontrollably for weeks till they collapsed or died

• A woman reportedly began dancing uncontrollably in Strasbourg in July 1518, with the number of dancers eventually reaching hundreds.

• Doctors blamed “hot blood”, while authorities tried music, restrictions and religious intervention.

• Historians have proposed ergot poisoning and mass psychogenic illness, but neither theory has been proven.

In July 1518, one of the strangest outbreaks in recorded history struck Strasbourg, a city in what was then the Holy Roman Empire.

Hundreds of people reportedly developed an irresistible urge to dance, hopping, leaping and twisting through streets, houses and public spaces. 

They danced for days, sometimes barely stopping to eat, drink or rest. Some collapsed from exhaustion, while later accounts claimed that others danced themselves to death.

More than 500 years later, historians and medical researchers are still trying to establish what could have caused such bizarre behaviour.

Interestingly, people have voluntarily danced for extraordinary lengths of time in modern attempts to enter the Guinness World Records (GWR). 

India's Srushti Sudhir Jagtap danced for 127 hours in 2023, breaking Nepal's Bandana Nepal's 126-hour record set in 2018. Indian dancer Kalamandalam Hemaletha previously held the title with 123 hours and 15 minutes in 2010.

Nigeria has also had its contenders. Odumewu Debbie, popularly known as Pink Debbie, attempted a 137-hour dance marathon in Lagos in 2017, while Ben Dancer reportedly danced for more than 176 hours during a seven-day challenge in September 2026, pending GWR verification.

But unlike these determined record challengers, the people of Strasbourg were not dancing for fame or a place in the record books. According to historical accounts, they simply could not stop.

So, what made hundreds of people dance against their will, and how did it even start?

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THIS: The bizarre story of how ‘witchcraft bees’ reportedly led a Nigerian man to Christ in 1989

On July 14, 1518, Frau Troffea took to the streets of Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and now a city in northeastern France, and started dancing uncontrollably and strangely without music.

Within a week, about 34 people had joined her. By the end of the month, the crowd was said to have grown to around 400.

Historian John C. Waller describes the episode in his 2008 article, In a Spin: The Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518, published in Endeavour.

“Hundreds of people were seized by an irresistible urge to dance, hop and leap into the air,” Waller writes in the article’s abstract.

He describes people dancing in homes, halls and public spaces, sometimes for days or weeks, with little opportunity to eat, drink or rest.

The behaviour was recorded as one that isn’t joyful. People appeared unable to control their movements, even when exhausted.

READ NEXT: Meet the Nigerian woman who shocked everyone by becoming the country's first female guitarist before dying at just 28

As the event continued, Strasbourg’s authorities were so alarmed that they consulted physicians, who blamed an excess of 'hot blood' in the body, an explanation rooted in the medical belief that illness resulted from imbalances in the body.

Some locals believed that the event was a divine punishment from St Vitus – an early Christian martyr from Sicily – for their failure to appease him. 

Quite interestingly, mediaeval crowds in Germany danced around his statue on his feast day to invoke him against epilepsy, lightning strikes, animal attacks and oversleeping.

So, it is quite believable that the martyr could have punished them severely with their very act of worship.  

Anyway, Waller and other modern researchers attribute it to mass psychogenic illness.

They drew their theories from the fact that Strasbourg had endured hardships, including extreme poverty, diseases like smallpox and syphilis, and starvation due to crop failures. 

Another theory blames ergot, a fungus that infects grains such as rye and produces toxic compounds capable of causing serious illness.

Ergot poisoning can cause hallucinations, convulsions and other neurological symptoms. Researchers have therefore considered whether contaminated food might explain the dancers’ unusual movements.

READ NEXT: The strange story of Daniel Ekechukwu, the Nigerian pastor who reportedly died, saw heaven and hell and came back to life

But the theory has significant weaknesses. Medical historian Waller has questioned whether ergot poisoning could account for the particular behaviour described in Strasbourg. 

Severe ergotism can also cause gangrene, yet historical accounts do not clearly document the characteristic blackening of affected limbs.

The authorities, in a bid to quell the situation, arranged spaces where the afflicted could continue moving. Musicians and professional dancers were brought in to help and as expected, the plan didn’t work. 

In her 2017 study, Divine Punishment or Disease? Mediaeval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague, historian Lynneth J. Miller explains that the outbreak exposed a clash between medical and religious understandings of illness.

The event, she argues, was “trapped between mediaeval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief.”

Eventually, authorities banned public dancing and musical performances, and the afflicted were reportedly taken to a St Vitus shrine.

The episode eventually subsided, although the surviving evidence does not prove precisely when or why it ended.

The mystery remains, although the Strasbourg outbreak was not an isolated example of dancing mania. Similar episodes had been reported in parts of Europe before 1518, including a major outbreak in the Rhine region in 1374.

What made the Strasbourg case particularly striking was the scale of the reported incident and the number of surviving accounts describing it.