# Hundreds of people danced themselves to death in Strasbourg in 1518

**Verdict: Proven.** The event itself is not in dispute: it is one of the best-documented mass phenomena of the pre-modern era, recorded in municipal records, physician notes, and multiple chronicles. What remains genuinely debated is the cause: stress-induced mass psychogenic illness is the leading explanation, not ergot poisoning.

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: Renaissance · First circulated: 1518 · Believed by: Accepted by historians as a real event; the cause is actively debated in peer-reviewed scholarship, not by the public at large
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/dancing-plague-1518

## Summary
In July 1518, a woman in Strasbourg began dancing in the street and could not stop. Within a month, by contemporary accounts, hundreds of others had joined her, some dancing for days until they collapsed, and chroniclers reported that a number died. The episode itself is thoroughly documented. What historians still argue over is why it happened.

## The claim
That in the summer of 1518 in the free imperial city of Strasbourg, a woman known as Frau Troffea began an uncontrollable dancing fit that spread to dozens and then reportedly hundreds of townspeople, some of whom danced for days without rest until they collapsed, and that a number of them died of exhaustion, stroke, or heart attack before the episode subsided by early autumn.

## Origin and timeline
- 14 Jul 1518: A woman recorded by chroniclers as Frau Troffea steps into a narrow street in Strasbourg and begins to dance without music or apparent cause, continuing for hours and, by most accounts, for several days.
- Late Jul 1518: Within a week, more than thirty other residents have reportedly joined the dancing, unable to stop on their own; city physicians and the Strasbourg council take notice.
- Aug 1518: The council, on medical advice that the dancers needed to 'dance it out,' clears guild halls and grain and horse markets, builds wooden stages, and hires musicians. The strategy appears to backfire, and chroniclers report the number of afflicted climbing toward the hundreds.
- Aug 1518: The council reverses course: it tears down the stages, bans public music and dancing, and organizes wagons to send the afflicted to the shrine of Saint Vitus at Saverne, where priests perform rites involving red shoes, small crosses, and holy water.
- Early Sep 1518: Contemporary accounts describe the mania subsiding through the autumn as the pilgrimages and the ban take hold, bringing the episode to an end.
- 2008–2009: Medical historian John Waller publishes a series of peer-reviewed analyses in The Lancet, followed by a full-length history, arguing the episode was a stress-induced mass psychogenic event rather than poisoning.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: This sounds too strange to be a real historical event. Surely it's been exaggerated or invented after the fact.
  Evidence: It is one of the most thoroughly attested mass phenomena of the period. It appears independently in Strasbourg municipal and council records, in physician notes from the time, and in multiple chronicles written by people in a position to know: not a single late legend, but a documented civic crisis that the city itself spent weeks and real money responding to.
- Claim: Hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for days, some until they collapsed and died.
  Evidence: Contemporary chroniclers do describe a mania that spread to dozens within days and, by some accounts, hundreds within a month, with dancers exhausting themselves to the point of swollen, bleeding feet and, per some sources, fatal collapse. The scale most likely grew somewhat in the retelling, and the exact death count was never tallied in surviving records, but the core event (sustained, involuntary, and dangerous dancing) is not seriously disputed by historians.
- Claim: The city's own leaders responded by hiring musicians and building stages for the dancers, which only makes sense if they believed something serious and real was happening.
  Evidence: True, and it is a striking, well-documented fact. The council acted on the physicians' prevailing theory that the mania was a physical excess ('hot blood') that needed to be danced out of the body. When the strategy seemed to worsen the outbreak, the council abandoned it within weeks, banned dancing outright, and turned to religious pilgrimage instead, a real, escalating civic response to what officials experienced as a genuine emergency.
- Claim: It must have been poisoning from tainted bread, since a toxin explains uncontrollable movement better than 'stress' does.
  Evidence: Ergotism was the leading folk explanation for centuries, but it fits the specific symptoms poorly: ergot poisoning constricts blood flow and produces convulsions, gangrene, and hallucinations, not the sustained, ambulatory, hours-long dancing described in Strasbourg. Most historians researching the episode consider a psychological rather than toxicological cause better supported by the documented symptoms.

## Why people believe it
- The dancing itself is not folklore: it is recorded in the city's own administrative and medical records, so treating the whole episode as a myth would mean dismissing genuine period documentation, which is precisely the kind of source this project weighs most heavily.
- A single dramatic, visible cause (a curse, a poison) is easier to hold in mind than a diffuse explanation involving famine, disease anxiety, and a shared belief system acting on the body; the mind reaches for one legible villain over several interacting, harder-to-picture ones.
- The story arrives pre-loaded with vivid, specific details (red shoes, a saint's curse, people dancing themselves to death) and vivid specificity reads as credibility even when it is the part most likely to have been embellished in the retelling.
- It happened in a genuinely frightening year: Strasbourg in 1518 was living through famine, smallpox, syphilis, and heavy taxation, and a population under that much real strain was primed to both produce and believe in an affliction that felt like it was being inflicted on them from outside.

## Open questions
- Mass psychogenic illness is the explanation the modern peer-reviewed literature (and this entry) favor over ergotism, but it is built from chronicle descriptions, physician notes, and city records, not from clinically examining a single living dancer. Ergotism remains a minority position among specialists, and a few researchers have floated other explanations entirely, including the possibility that some participants in the wider dancing-mania tradition belonged to unorthodox religious movements performing deliberate ritual dance rather than experiencing involuntary compulsion. None of these accounts can be tested against the dancers themselves five centuries on, which is the actual reason the question remains open rather than settled.
- The figure most often repeated in popular retellings (roughly fifteen deaths a day at the outbreak's peak) comes from John Waller's own synthesis of later, non-contemporaneous accounts, not from any surviving Strasbourg tally. No document produced by the city itself in 1518 records a specific death count or confirms one occurred at all, so the real toll, and how much of the popularly cited scale is period fact versus later embellishment, cannot be checked against a primary source.
- Strasbourg was not new to this affliction: the city had its own smaller dancing mania in 1418, and sat within a Rhine-Moselle corridor that saw recurring outbreaks for nearly a century and a half before 1518. That history explains why the region had a standing template for the behavior to follow, but historians have not settled why this particular convergence of famine, disease, and taxation tipped into an outbreak on the scale of 1518 rather than a smaller, more contained episode like the city's own 1418 mania or the many other hard years the region endured across those same centuries.
- The council's physicians, working from Galenic 'hot blood' theory, prescribed more dancing (guild halls, stages, hired musicians) as the cure, then reversed course within weeks and banned dancing outright once the numbers kept climbing. Whether the stages and music actually made the outbreak worse, as the council concluded at the time and many modern retellings repeat, or the mania would have grown on roughly the same trajectory regardless of the treatment, is a causal question the surviving records describe only from the outside: nobody at the time or since has been able to run the outbreak twice.

## Sources
- In a spin: the mysterious dancing epidemic of 1518, John C. Waller, The Lancet, vol. 373, issue 9463 (2008): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932708000379
- A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania, John C. Waller, The Lancet, vol. 373, issue 9664, pp. 624–625 (2009): https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(09)60386-X/fulltext
- A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, John Waller (Icon Books) (2009)
- Opus Paramirum (contemporary medical account of the outbreak, written c. 1526), Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim) (1526)
- Strasbourg municipal and council records of 1518 (as compiled and analyzed in period chronicles by Johann Schilter and Daniel Specklin), Strasbourg Municipal Archives (1518)
- The Dancing Plague of 1518, The Public Domain Review: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1518
- Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague, Lynneth J. Miller, Dance Research, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 149–164 (2017): https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/drs.2017.0199
- A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, H. C. Erik Midelfort (Stanford University Press) (1999)
- The Dancing Mania (in The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, trans. B. G. Babington, ed. Henry Morley), Justus F. C. Hecker (Cassell & Company, 1888 ed.) (1832): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1739/1739-h/1739-h.htm

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