00:00In the summer of 1518, the city of Strasbourg, France, did something that sounds utterly insane.
00:05The city council cleared out a large hall, built a wooden stage, and hired a band of musicians.
00:10But the people climbing onto that stage weren't performers. They were patients. These men and
00:16women had one thing in common, their clothes were soaked in sweat, their eyes were hollow,
00:20and their feet were bleeding. Yet they could not stop dancing. This is the story of the dancing
00:25plague, one of the strangest mass events in human history. It started in July 1518, on a street in
00:31Strasbourg. A woman named Frau Traffia stepped into the road and began to dance. No music was playing.
00:37She just started moving, and she could not stop. Onlookers assumed she was having some kind of
00:42episode and would soon tire out. They were wrong. Traffia danced for nearly a week without stopping.
00:48Within days, about 30 people joined her. By August, the number of dancers had exploded to over 400.
00:55To call it dancing was generous. These people moved like zombies, their arms flailing without control,
01:01their bodies twisting and jerking, as if something inside them was pulling the strings.
01:05Historical records describe dancers with headaches, difficulty breathing, and frothing at the mouth.
01:10Some saw hallucinations. A few literally danced themselves to death from exhaustion.
01:15The terrified city council summoned physicians. Their diagnosis. The dancers' brains were overheating
01:21because of hot blood. And the prescribed cure was not medicine, and not surgery. It was more dancing.
01:28The doctors reasoned that if the blood was hot, the only way to cool the body was to let the
01:31heat escape.
01:32So they built that stage, hired those musicians, and told the dancers to keep going until they burned
01:37off the fever. Of course, it made things worse. The dancers got even more frenzied.
01:43So the council tried a new plan, they moved the sufferers to a shrine on a mountain outside the city.
01:48Officially, they were sent there to dance and wash away their sins. In reality, the city just wanted
01:53them out of sight, left to fend for themselves. That failed too. Finally, the council banned all
01:59dancing and public entertainment. They expelled prostitutes and gamblers from the city. They even
02:04blamed the whole affair on cursed women. None of it worked. By the end of September, after months of
02:10chaos, the dancing plague finally faded away. Historians still argue over what caused it,
02:15mass hysteria, food poisoning from Birgit fungus, or possibly a strange psychosomatic illness.
02:20What we know for certain is this, in the summer of 1518, hundreds of people danced until their feet
02:25bled, and no one could make them stop.
02:27Good.
02:33Good night.
02:35Good night.
02:37Good night.
