00:00In the summer of 1518, a woman in Strasbourg, France, stepped into the street and began to
00:05dance. No music, no celebration, just frantic, uncontrollable movement. Within days, dozens
00:13joined her. Within weeks, hundreds. And some danced themselves to death. This wasn't the
00:20first time it happened, and it wouldn't be the last. The phenomenon now known as dancing mania
00:25goes back centuries. In 1021, peasants in Kolbig, Saxony, were cursed to dance for a year after
00:33mocking a Christmas mass. Many died when it finally ended. In 1247, over 200 people danced
00:40on a bridge in Erfurt, Germany, until it collapsed, drowning many in the river below. By 1374,
00:47the madness swept through Aachen, Germany, and across the Rhine, with victims screaming,
00:52hallucinating saints and demons, and begging for divine help. And in 1518, the most famous
00:59outbreak, Strasbourg saw up to 400 people seized by the same strange compulsion. The city even hired
01:05musicians to help them dance it out, which only made it worse. This mystery illness happened on
01:11and off for centuries. Smaller outbreaks struck Mönchengladbach, Germany in 1642, and scattered
01:17reports appeared all over Europe. Witnesses claimed dancers had, foamed at the mouth, collapsed with
01:24bloodied feet, laughed and wept at the same time, saw phantom dancers in the crowd, and, in some cases,
01:30flew into rages at the sight of the color red. Some remembered nothing when it ended, as if they'd
01:36been possessed. Historians still argue about what caused it with theories including mass psychogenic
01:42illness, a kind of shared hysteria, triggered by famine, plague, and religious fear. Or,
01:49ergot poisoning, from a fungus on rye bread that can cause LSD-like hallucinations and muscle spasms.
01:55And, neurological disorders, like epilepsy or something similar. Whatever the cause, the dancing
02:01plague is one of history's strangest mysteries, an illness that could grip entire towns and force
02:07people to dance until they collapsed, or died. No cure was ever found. Can you imagine it coming back
02:13today, and gripping the entire world, just dancing away into the apocalypse? Like and subscribe for more
02:19strange history, and comment with what song you'd choose to dance to if you had to.
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