Dance Craze

In the dead of night as people sleep, that is when the spirits creep. As the bell tolls three dark things take power, we like to call it the supernatural hour. Welcome to the supernatural hour podcast. I am your host, Raven.

This is Doug. This is Doug. This is Chad. And Rogue is coming to you from Ogden.

We've actually been turning, so technology. We can have everybody here. Even though they're not here. Even though they're not here.

They're here. Doug, Doug, Doug. Ogden is smoky and a little bit busier than anticipated, but it's very exciting where I am. I am at a friend's preview of his company being shown on the TV show The Prophet.

So energy's high here. Pretty exciting, actually. Awesome. And for business, we got some investigations coming up.

We're proud to announce we've got Fort Douglas coming up on September 25th. That'll be at eight o'clock or eight thirty. Eight thirty. Yeah, eight thirty.

And we'll meet at the Fort Douglas Museum. We've investigated there before. It's a really fun venue. Do you want to talk about it a little bit?

So I've never been to Fort Douglas. I believe you've been there Raven. I think you've taken the team out there before. What kind of stuff's going on out there?

Yeah, as far as events are normal. We've gone out there many, many times. And it is always a great location. I've never gone there where it's been dead.

There's always been something. Always activity. There's some dark energy there. There's some positive energy there.

For the people that are listening that are coming. I don't want to give out too much. I want people to find it on their own. But there's an outside area that has activity.

Where all the military equipment is, we actually go and investigate the museum. At some point I'd like to get back over to the Commander's Building and the main theater. The museum has a little theater within it. But the bigger theater, there's a library where there's some activity.

There's a downstairs area. Part of it is not going to be available to us right now just because of some work that they're doing down there. But we will be able to get into the poker room. There's a place down in the basement where back in the day they would play poker.

And there's always activity back there. And there's always a place where we'll be able to get into there. And then just on the main level, just the main museum itself, we've gotten really great EVPs, really awesome. Some really awesome photographs.

Some of the photographs we've got up on our website. And we haven't been here for a while. It's been a couple years. Yeah, and just as a museum.

It's a fantastic museum. Very interesting in the military background things with the museum itself. The other thing that's, they've got the 9-11 Memorial. Yes.

From the World Trade Center, they've got some debris from the World Trade Center and names and things there I think. It's very neat. That area has been quite active. Where is Fort Douglas at exactly?

Right across the street from the University of Utah. Right, that's why I was thinking. There's a game that night, but we think it should be, we think it's an afternoon game. So I don't think we'll have to deal with traffic.

Otherwise you might have to park a gob down far away. So something close. We're not going way out. No.

Awesome. Then after that, we've got an investigation set up for October 15th at Petit and Neat School in Basin. Yes. And Petit and Neat School is an old school.

It was built in the... It was built in 1902. 1902. For 1901.

There was a school there. That was my grade school from second grade through fifth grade. So I am really excited to go back here. It's kind of a landmark down there in Basin.

Yeah. It's also an old museum or a museum up with has old stuff in it. Okay, let me just tell you. I was born in the Basin Hospital, which is now the city center and the old folks home.

And I think a DUP, daughters of Utah Pioneer's Museum. And then my grade school is a museum. I'm starting to feel really old. When you went to school, it gets turned into a museum.

I want to say anything. In fear. It's like, ugh, okay. I guess I'm old now.

My high school music plays in the elevators. So that's coming up. We don't have that one up on the event right. We're on the page yet, but that's coming up and we'll be getting that up soon.

So be looking for that. And we will be at, I don't know what they call it, parax. I think that's what they're calling it. Logan?

Logan. So the Bridgerland Paranormal Society, I think. Oh, I'm... If you're listening and you're part of that, I'm so sorry.

I think I probably watched that really bad. But it's going to be at the Cache Valley event center in Logan. It will be October 9th from 9 in the morning to 8 o'clock at night. A paranormal expo.

Yes. And we are giving up our Boise versus BYU tickets for this just so you know. So when you come, give us a little love and because we're sad that we're missing the football game. But we're excited to be at the Paranormal Festival.

Yes, we are. It'll be a lot of fun. So you know we love you if we give up our BYU tickets to come and hang out with Paranormal Folk. And we're also going to be, for Halloween spooky season, have a booth at the Indian Hills War haunted house in Provo.

And that's going to be what we're the dates on. The 29th and 30th. Right. Free haunted house.

And it's amazing. They didn't have it last year because of COVID. They're planning on having it this year. If you go out to the events Paranormal site and look at previous events, you can go back and take a look at it and see a video of previous things.

Two years ago they had over 2,000 people come through. It's a really amazing haunted house. It's a free haunted house. But I have paid to go into haunted houses that aren't as good as this one.

Yeah, every year I think that's one of the comments that we hear is, man, this was better than the haunted house. I paid 20 bucks for it. It's not as long, but it's surprisingly long for being a home haunted. We'll have the address up on our website.

It's free, but if you were to give them a couple bucks, it would really help to advance it even further to make it even better. So Doc, how long has this been going on? 15 years, I think. Trying to remember the first one.

I think we're about year 15. And so, Doc is one of the original founders of this. Most of the ownership has been shifted over to another family member to Klaus, actually. So he does an amazing job with it.

I had to go to school and was out of state for a while and he kept it going and has grown it every year. But you're still very much in the behind the scenes. Now that I'm back. Yeah.

And I'll tell you though, to put it in perspective, we had more interest for our haunted house than the local mall in Provo did for their trick or treat event on Facebook last year before last. So we had food vendors calling us asking if they could set up outside the house. We had a DJ asking if he could come play music and I didn't know the local laws and I said, we're in a residential area and this is a home. So I told him no, but we did have over, made about 2,500 people.

So come check it out. It's pretty fun. Yeah, it's an amazing home. And speaking of glass, he is coming back.

So don't worry. He's almost done with his little projects. So to where he can come back. So we will are excited for him to come back here pretty quick.

We also have a couple of new patrons. We're really excited about LA and Connor. So they're new to our patrons group. And so we're grateful to have them on board and helping us with the things that we're doing with the broadcast and podcast and everything that we're doing.

And we appreciate them and we appreciate all of the support from our patrons. If you want to help support the program, go out to patreon.com, supernatural hour and you can join up and be a patron. Check out the benefits. There's a number of different levels anywhere from a $5 level on up or you can do a one-time contribution also.

So become a patron and help support us. So as far as residential, we had one but they had to cancel. But we have one coming up on Friday and two more that I have to schedule. So by our next podcast, we should have two or three residential investigations to talk about.

This time of year, things started picking up both from the entertainment side of events, paranormal and the wisp side of home investigations. Yep. And I did kind of a little one today, actually. I went to get my hair done and we've been to my hairdressers house before, officially as paranormal investigators.

And we've discussed that. Merv the perv was there. We kicked him out, but my hairdresser said today, her sister had gone over and said, I'm feeling some negative energy here in a couple places. And because my brain runs on pixie dust half of the time, I forget to bring stuff with me.

So Rogue and I were going to investigate her shop one day before we took us everybody out there with Advanced Paranormal. And I got up there and I forgot my stuff. And so I have just a little emergency ghost hunter kit in my car. Maybe I'll have like a first aid kit and you're like, nope, KT meter.

There's a first aid kit there too. Yeah, I can double prepare. If I'm stranded in a snowstorm, I could live for a few days. But yeah, I've got just a little bitty, dowsing rods, I've got salt and basil and KT meter and celinite.

Yeah. So we went up and a portal opened back up in her closet. And so we closed that portal. What else?

I think that was all we went down to another bedroom that there had been a portal, but that one was still closed. And we think we got that covered. So that was kind of our sort of residential for this episode. Kind of a sincere here.

Could you check the closet in my daughter's room? I said sure. So we did. With your emergency ghost kit.

With my emergency ghost kit. I should start selling those. That's right. Your emergency car goes to trick it.

That's right. Put it on the website. All right. So our main topic for today is when I've heard of this before and I've watched a couple different YouTube videos on it.

And I found it very interesting. It's the 1518 dance craze. AKA the dancing plague. The dancing plague.

Sounds happy. Sounds like a party. The word plague doesn't strike me as happy. But if you're dancing, how sad can it be?

It's like dance fever though, right? Yeah. Dance fever is pretty happy. Yeah.

But dancing plague. I don't know. Yeah. But I agree.

Once you get reading about it, you go, oh, maybe not so happy. It becomes sad. No, it's a sad thing. So the interesting thing, and I didn't know this.

I kind of thought this was a one in Danielle. So one of the things about this podcast is I learned stuff along with you guys. Oh, yeah. We all do.

I'm not an expert on everything. I don't let my kids know that. But, you know. So I thought this was the first time it happened.

But it didn't. It actually first occurred in the seventh century. And then it popped up again. And I don't know that it said where.

I've got some names and dates. I mean, I have a few dates. I didn't have. I couldn't find a date for the seventh century.

So there was a town called Kilbig, K-L-B-I-G-K. I'm not exactly sure in what Europe or that is Saxony. That was in 1021. There was Erfurt, which was in 1247.

AAKA-A-C-H-E-N in 1374. Hogsberg in 1381. And this one I'm going to murder, Shofhausen, 1428. Strasberg, which is the 1518 Plague.

It's one we're talking about. That's the notorious one. And Basel in 1536. So there's a number of different dancing plagues that have happened throughout Europe.

It was kind of interesting. So like Raven said, I had only heard of the one. And I found out about all of these others. And the one, there was one in 1237.

This is the one in Erfurt. It was a group of children that danced continuously while they traveled between Erfurt and Arnstadt. About 12 miles. This is kids just dancing away.

It's a long dandertime. And they can't stop. They're compelled. Can't stop.

And then the one in 1278, 200 people were dancing on the bridge. It was over the river Muse. If anyone speaks German and you're listening to this, we are so sorry. We do not.

So the river Muse in Germany, this is where we need lurch to help us do this. And they caused the bridge to collapse. So not only did they have dance fever, then they died from ground. And they got hyped for me.

So it wasn't the hot blood that got them. Geez Louise. Yeah, there was another one that I saw happen in Italy in the 15th century where a woman was bitten by a tarantula. And that was the impetus that made her dance uncontrollably.

So she was like Spiderwoman. Yeah, except for her powers were not being able to stop dancing instead of, you know, climbing buildings and stuff. I got a son. I had a child that wanted to be Spiderman.

And so we had to go look for radioactive spiders in the park. That was a fun face. Hoping to get bitten. Come on, man.

No. We were really glad that face passed because that was a tedious, tedious face. That child might have ended up in a dancing fever or a flake. So the one that you said was with Erfurt to some other place that was like 12 kilometers or 12 miles.

12 miles. And it was between the town of Erfurt and Arnstadt. And that's in the same area I believe, I saw another one when I talked about that, as Hamlin, the town Hamlin in Germany. And Hamlin is the town of the Pied Piper.

And this is one of those things where they are talking about that it's probably part of that lore is the Pied Piper and the children with the stance craze, the dance plague and leaving with the Pied Piper. So that one's kind of interesting if you've heard of the Pied Piper family. That may actually be rooted in a dancing flake. Yeah.

And I've actually been in Hamlin and it's kind of interesting because all of the little street signs and they've got little pictures of the Pied Piper everywhere. It's kind of a little bit of a touristy connection, but it was a very beautiful old town, you know, historic 1500s, 1400s, looked to a lot of it and yet modern in many ways too. Very cool. But tonight we kind of want to focus most on this 1518 in Strasburg, France.

Did you notice they're all kind of in that same area? Western Europe. It's kind of in that Western England, France, Germany area, Netherlands. And in a fairly close time, you know, in history.

Right. I don't hear about one in China. Maybe you do, but they didn't write it down or something. But you would think in China there would be records in Egypt, there would be records and I didn't find anything except in the Western Europe area.

And you want to maybe there's a cultural component to this as well? Possibly. So it's Strasburg, I'll say, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire. There was a woman named Frau Trafir and she began dancing in the street, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but she had an agonized look on her face.

And at first people didn't think much about, eh, there's Frau. I guess Frau wouldn't be her first name. Frau. No, but this is in France, so never mind.

But there she is, she's dancing. She's having a good time. But people came out and they were kind of laughing and gawking at her and clapping and you know, just kind of, oh, she's having fun. She's going to move, looking awesome.

But she danced continuously for six days. Right. At some point they go, but then by the end of the week 34 others had joined her, just dancing aimlessly in the streets. Right.

I heard that with the six days of dancing her feet were bleeding. And they said within a month there were said to be 400 dancers in total, some of them danced themselves to death. Not the kind of dance party I want to be in. No, no.

So this is, at this point this is where the fun goes. Bye bye. Right. And like you said, even with patient zero, if you want to call her that, she had a pained look on her face while dancing.

Yes. And one report of, you know, people of the time in diaries said that up to 15 people per day died as a result of the prolonged dancing. And I think it's most likely to do a heart attack or stroke or some. Right.

I'm looking at water. I'm looking at dot going here. The doctor helped me. I would die from this.

Yeah. It's such an interesting thing. On earth, would someone have that compulsion to dance, literally to death? Yeah.

Over over eating and drinking and the normal, you know, Maslow hierarchy. You mean? Yeah, exactly. Not dance.

And just exhaustion. I would imagine that you get to a certain point that just the exhaustion would maybe not, I don't know if an aggression can kill you, but just wear your body down so much that other factors are going to kick in. Right. So there is something that can kill you called rapdomyelises that people develop sometimes.

These are people who are either on methamphetamines or people who do really excessive type of exercise people that are doing triathlons and that sometimes develop this. And you get muscle breakdown from the continuous movement, continuous motion, continuous effort, and that little bit of muscle tissue basically clobs up your kidneys and they don't function anymore. You go to kitty failure and you can die from rapdomyelises. And so that was one of the things I thought about as excessive motion, excessive movement, lack of water.

Do they develop renal failure? I don't know. From a plausibility standpoint, I think it's plausible. I don't know if that's the cause.

So I think the whole thing is sad, obviously. You know, people uncontrollably dancing to their desk. But this to me made it even more sad. And this is a quote from someone at the time.

It said, contemporaries, or not from someone at the time, but someone who studied this and wrote a paper on it. Contemporaries were certain that the afflicted did not want to dance and the dancers themselves when they could express their misery and need for help. Right. I kind of, have you ever gotten into a laughing fit where you can't stop laughing even though it hurts?

Yeah, I think we did that on the podcast a while back. Yeah, I recall. You get to the point where you're laughing so hard that you want it to stop, but you can't. You know, I wonder if it's a similar feeling with this dancing plague where you know, you hurt, but you can't stop doing the activity.

And I could imagine how hellish that might feel for six days, right? Right. I don't want to do this. And I don't know why.

And just the fear too of why am I doing this? What is happening? Now, the interesting thing is this is the late medieval period. And so you think of the Salem witch trials, which would have been roughly the same time period.

And so why didn't people think that it was some mass possession and the priest going out and killing the witches? But they didn't feel that. They felt like it was a natural phenomenon. There was no witch burnings, there were no exorcisms.

You know, the priests were like, oh, this is a natural thing. And at the time physicians believed it was caused by what they called hot blood and the cure for hot blood. More dancing. More dancing.

But to me, I'm like, they've been dancing for six days straight. How much more can these people dance? I don't know. They're throwing a band with a good drummer.

And that's what they did. So they opened up two guild halls. They opened up a grain market to get the people off the street so they could have a, you know, say, for a place to dance, I guess. And they actually constructed a stage.

And the town authorities hired musicians to play music to keep them dancing. Right. And I heard when they passed out from exhaustion, people would go in, wake them up, stand them up and encourage them to continue dancing. I would take them home and encourage them to get some sleep.

You would think, yeah, they stopped. That was so purpose. I don't get it. I won't get the thought process.

It happened all summer. It went throughout the entire summer. Death tolls rising. At one point, the remaining dancers were taken to a mountaintop shrine to pray.

Right. The greatest artist in the world is the greatest artist in the world. I've heard of St. Vitus dance.

But these aren't the same thing. The St. Vitus dance is different. Yeah, it's the Seidenham's Korea from Huntington to New Zealand.

I think it's what it is. Yeah, I wrote some stuff down about where they put that. I'll look it up. I'm not afraid.

So here's the notes I have. The state Vitus dance is an alternate name for a movement disorder called Sendenham's Korea. And here I'm gonna be all doctor while not looking up stuff. But it presents itself as a jerky, uncoordinated movements of face, feet, hands, sometimes the limbs.

You know more about this. You've been with this. Why am I talking about this? Well, no, you're good.

You hear the term choreography and you think of choreography and that kind of root word. It's that repetitive motion or movement. Yeah, people have a genetic disorder called Huntington's. Well, that's classically what you see with Seidenham's Korea and it usually affects nails.

And I would think that that's probably named after this 1518 deal. It's not this dangerous. No. You talk about it.

No, no. But the St. Vitus and the monastery had a play in that. It's all better than that involuntary motion and jerkiness with Huntington's disease as they play.

Right. They notice they can't stop moving. They can't stop moving their arms and legs. And hey, this is reminiscent of something we've seen even though this was a struggle.

Yeah, classically people dancing where this other one is just people with having all writing motions exactly. Right. So what I found out was the name St. Vitus dance is actually comes from a Christian martyr who is the patron saint of dancers and in the late Middle Ages, which would have been roughly this time ish, worshippers in Germany and Latvia would have reportedly danced maniacally before St.

Vitus statues to celebrate his feast day. And the movements associated with the disease that we think of as a disease or condition that's genetic disorder. That resembles what these dancers would do. The more flaky writing kind of motions.

Right. And the thing I think is interesting is the term choreography. But chore is Greek for two dance. There you go.

There's your turn. So yeah. Yeah. It was some of the remedies that they tried were interesting.

Obviously we talked about more dancing, more cowbell, just keep going. Cowbell man, you know, from the hot blood. But you're right. I think they, people did suspect that there might have been some type of a religious component to this, whether it was, you know, was this a punishment from God?

Was this something from the devil? Nobody knows what the heck's going on? Because nobody's experienced this in the area, right? And then is it contagious?

We got one person and now all of a sudden we got up to 400 people doing the same thing. I think it was me. I think people, I'm going to go in the house. Yeah.

I don't want to be there for six days. You know, like some bread or something. Right. You know, and they start wondering, well, is this, you know, was there some infection that was causing people to have, I don't know, encephalitis?

So they're, you know, their minds weren't working right. Was this a psychiatric issue? Was it a possession? Who knows?

You know, from a psychiatry standpoint, there's something called Faliadu that you see where one person has a delusion and then someone else buys into that delusion. And so I don't know. Would that be a mass hysteria? You know, I think a mass hysteria would be difficult to categorize as Faliadu because that specifically involves two, sometimes three, four people, but to expect a good portion of a community to buy into the same kind of idea, this uncontrollable dancing thing.

I don't know. I don't know that you could be compelled because you know, you dance for three or four hours, your feet start to hurt. I'd be like, I'm out. I had fun.

We're good. See you. Not tell your feet are bleeding. Right.

I'll come back tomorrow for a bit. Exactly. I'm sure the party will still be going. I'll be back.

Exactly. You know, and so root cause, you know, analysis just makes you go, what is this? It's a weird thing. I've never seen it in the modern era.

I mean, unless you know of any examples. No. I've never heard of it either. So you know, you go, well, what led to this?

I read a lot of things online and watched a lot of YouTube videos that suggested it was a mixture of hard times and the superstitious population and just mental exhaustion and stress just made something snap. Right. Historically, in this area, it sounds like there were multiple fannons that had happened over a period of decades. The plagues.

And then a plague came in and smallpox came in and these people had just had a beat down for a long period of time. Stress after stress after stress. Yeah. Did people finally just lose it?

Did something snap? I don't know. Yeah. And then you wonder where it wasn't the entire population.

But 400 people at that time would have been a big chunk of the community. Absolutely. And you just wonder, let's say that it was something to do with stress and superstitions at the time. You know, we'll get it manifest in people who maybe didn't have, I don't even know how to toward this, a predisposition to lose it.

Other ones that lost it. Right. Maybe they tolerated stress a little less. Less good than others.

Oh, there's nobody else. I don't know. But it is interesting because when you start thinking about you talked about the sync videos and or sync by this and the statue and from what I was reading, what they decided to do was say, hey, we're going to rally these people up. We're going to go over to the shrine and we're all going to throw a penny in.

And it worked. People stopped dancing. You go, well, what does that mean? Right?

Was it all on everybody's head? And it just spread like wildfire that it just was somehow socially acceptable to dance till you die? I don't know. Weird.

And then when you made that little token move, something switched off. And it was from what I understand, the shrine was miles away. And so, you know, if you're with a population that's superstitious and believes in curses, you may think that also they believe in penance or they believe in, you know, blessings and this act of making this pilgrimage, you could say to the shrine and making an offering of the shrine may have been enough to snap them out of it. Right.

Just a visual thing that they could see that maybe they had enough faith in that motion that it turned off. Some of the information I found, I think that it might be a mass hysteria. You know, we talked about that a little bit and they talked about some of the different areas about mass hysteria, the 1300s through the 1700s, mass hysteria manifests itself more in the idea of a demonic possession or witchcraft or plagues, you know, that they did. But then in the 1700s, you know, and that's part of the dancing place and those kinds of things in the 1700s, the 1300s and 1700s, but from the 1700s to the 1900s, mass hysteria changed because people's stressors changed, things charged around them.

And they said that that was more seen, mass hysteria kinds of things with convulsions and neurological complaints. And today, the mass hysteria from the 1900s to the present is more around nausea, vomiting and those types of things. Can you wonder if that's a cultural thing that has the shift in that? Right.

I mean, the most recent example of a mass hysteria that I can think of was something that happened at a hospital where a patient came in and had some type of oily substance on their body and ended up with everybody feeling sick, nausea, vomiting, they moved, removed everybody else from the emergency department, all the staff, all the patients. And I thought, wouldn't it be easier to just take the one afflicted person out of the hospital, but I wasn't there. So, you know, sorry, guys. But there was this big hysteria that staff members were sick, other patients were sick, and they couldn't figure out what actually happened with this substance that they were trying to blame it on was some type of an oil or cream for women who had cancer.

It wasn't some caustic, toxic substance. But they didn't know. But they all just assumed it was making people sick and everybody got sick. Another one, another really good example of the mass hysteria is the girls with the beetles and the fainting.

You'd see that or with Elvis with, or they would literally pass out. And just the screaming and fainting. And, you know, again, one of those things where there's really not a physiological reason, but there's a physiological response to psychological underpinning, essentially. And, you know, I wouldn't say necessary, but working at the hospital, I see pseudo-seizures a lot, which are not true epileptic seizures or not people who actually have change in brain waves, right?

It's with their manifestation. It's usually stress-induced, but we're always stressed out. So I have the seizure work, you know, but that's how pseudo-seizures do work. Right.

And if your mind tells you that, I mean, the power of the mind is incredible. And if you tell yourself when I get stressed out, I have seizures, you could have some sort of a seizure. I mean, it might not be an actual seizure, but a seizure. That's exactly right.

And I tell people, this isn't epilepsy. This isn't an epileptic seizure, but I don't think you're faking it. Some people do. Things, you know, for a secondary game, they're trying to get things like medications or whatever.

But there are other people who are just victims of that psychiatric process. They have a mental condition that throws them into seizure-like episodes. They're not doing it on purpose. They're not doing it for attention.

And it's hard to reconcile that with people and say, hey, it's all in your head, but you're not doing it on purpose, right? That's a hard thing to explain to somebody. And the dancing craze may be something like that where, hey, it's coming from your mind. Psychosomatic, almost kind of thing.

Psychosomatic, but you're not intentional. It doesn't make sense. So when I get stressed out, I just don't sleep in slam doors. Perfect.

I have seizure episodes and you don't dance wildly for six days. No one wants to hear me sing and no one wants to see me dance. I dance a little bit like Napoleon Dynamite, Elaine from Zanko. I thought Napoleon Dynamite was pretty smooth, but maybe later we'll see it.

There's now choreograph dance. I'm all over it. If you can choreograph psychotic dancing, okay. So you dancing's not going on TikTok?

Oh, no. So you said that they took a lot of these ill people up to a shrine and paid for any year. Yeah, they threw in a penny basically to the shrine and it cured their illness. You know, which made people go, oh, maybe this was a curse and we were blessed by Sink Vitus or whoever you know by offering, making and offering and sacrificing and making this journey.

But really one of the interesting things about this whole experience is during that time when people acted strangely, it was demonic possession, let's do horrible things to them until they break it, right? Let's die them up. Let's light them on fire. Let's do these things.

Or even, or even, let's medically, let's release the rumors. Yeah, come up and do all of this stuff. And what was so different about Strasburg was the fact that the community was concerned about these people. And instead of just assuming that they were all just witches or there was some demonic entity at play, their approach was, well, what can we do to help them?

What can we do? I guess we'll make stages so they can dance safely so they don't get hurt. Even inside, give them perfection. We'll talk to doctors who tell them to dance more.

But they need little red shoes for these people. That was one of the things that I did read is that, you know, as a community, they can be together to make shoes so people's feet wouldn't bleed so much, you know? I wonder how that was trying to put the shoes on. Probably.

They can't stop dancing. And that's not meant to be cruel. I'm just literally... It's probably a tough thing to do.

That was probably hard. But you know, in a time where everything was so cruel, you think about, you know, the whole idea of what do they do to these people that they thought were possessed, everybody came together and they were trying to find solutions because they cared about these people. And it was kind of against the grain for that time. And you think about medieval.

The first thing that pops up is like torture devices and things like that, right? Those people think about it. And if they didn't understand it, it scared them, which still holds a certain point today, but especially back then, you know, because they didn't have the science that we have now. Right.

And so if they didn't understand it, it was of the devil. And instead of saying, all these people are evil, let's kill them all. It was like, man, we gotta find a way to help these people. Right.

Now, one thing I find is interesting is, and they didn't do this at this time, but you know, as people through the years have researched this incident and tried to... So just spoiler alert, they still don't know exactly what the cause is. Everything is still, you know, it could be this, it could be this. But at one point, they wondered if it was...

Let's see what do they call... Ingested ergo. It's a toxic mold found on rye. If the rye gets a little bit damp and it produces hallucinations.

Or LSD comes from it. And spasms, that's just what I'm gonna say. It contains LSD, which is a psychoactive product, as we all know. So they're tripping out on mold.

Yep. Is it structurally similar to lyssergic acid? Which is LSD essentially as well. And maybe there's a component of that.

We see people, you know, you look at rave culture, right? People who go to raves and they'll use volume and ecstasy, whatever, you know. And a lot of them, you see people that suffer consequences from that too. They're just up and dancing and partying and they don't drink water and they get dehydrated and a lot of them, well not a lot, but people will collapse and they'll come in in bad shape from over dancing.

And we're just talking at like several hours at a rave. You can only imagine doing that for several days. Now, there's a fellow by the last name of Waller. I believe he was in the time period of when this was all happening.

I'm actually gonna back up just a second. An asipi usually only lasts about 24 hours, not that I know from experience, but for the internet. So that doesn't explain why they would dance for weeks and months at a time. But this fellow named Waller pointed out that they're going, I guess they didn't know a little bit about the mold that mold that wasn't good for you and just, they didn't know that it was basically LSD.

But one thing that Waller said was that this mold, typically cuts off blood supply to the extremities, making coordinated movements very difficult to do. And so that's another reason why some people go, maybe it's this mold. Oh, but maybe if they were dancing, that's different, right? And also it has a hard time to, if they have famine, there might not be the rye around to get moldy.

Right. And there were several things. And then other people say, but they were keeping every single bit of food they had. So maybe it was old rye and that's why it was moldy.

I mean, nobody knows. A lot of interesting theories out there. One of the things where you talk about that they took them up and how they treated it, one of the things I was hearing is how they treat hysteria, mass hysteria now and what the things that they want to do. And they say, separate the ill from the well, right?

Okay. Which it sounds like they did by taking them up to the shrine, let the people know the environment is safe from an authoritative source, you know, and the authoritative source, let the people know that the environment is safe. And again, you think, okay, this would be the town leaders and the priests and the things taking the people up to the shrine and that gives them an area of safety and everything else. And then the third is remove any social validation or or or reinforcements by the people, you know, here with them, keep them from from helping perpetuate the historian and not promoting it as far as yeah, go on, but but perpetuating and helping to perpetuate.

That may be where they've been wrong and elsewhere. That's a point you need to, you know, that's kind for them to make them the shoes, but maybe that added to the stage is and to hire a, you know, a nice little band to come in and play for them, but you validate it to. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you're so concerned, but you don't need to validate. Exactly. So maybe that's where things went awry and maybe that's why 400 people ended up doing this mass hysteria. So interestingly enough, when I had heard about this before, I thought it was just the one incident like I mentioned before, in doing the research, there were some earlier incidences.

Turns out there were some later incidences. That's hard to say that many times in a row, incidences. You nailed it though. Barely by the skin of my teeth.

There were some that happened in the 16th century in Switzerland, so still in the same area. But then we start to branch out in from 1973 to 1978, there were actually six outbreaks of a kind of dancing plague in factories located in Singapore. The factory worker symptoms include screening, trance states and unprecedented levels of fear. So not exactly the same thing, but close enough, similar enough that they mention it in several different topics when they talk about the 1518 dance.

And then it says, the most notable recent case of dancing plague occurred in 2011. And this was at the Leroy Junior Senior High School in upstate New York. And in this case, there were 12 teenagers. There were girls, 12 teenage girls that began twitching as though they had Tourette's.

And authorities came in and they ruled out any source of infection or poisoning. And they concluded it was mass hysteria. And they named it, in this specific incident, they called it mass psychogenic illness. But you don't hear as much about these because they didn't dance themselves to death for other people.

Mass psychogenic illness. So that's an interesting topic. I had heard about it a little bit, but I had no idea how pervasive it had been over time and kind of some of the possible causes. The interesting thing about getting ready to do this podcast, like I said, I had heard of this before.

But after hearing the little snippets here and there and the couple of little YouTube videos I had watched, I thought it was poisoning from from the rye. Oh, you know, they, but as I did research for the podcast and looked more into, you know, these other cases, I'm kind of leaning more towards a psycho, a mental breakdown. I think so too. More more of a psychosis than a, than a logical.

I think the cure is what kind of tips me off. It's like, ah, you went to a shrine and prayed to this patron saint of dancing and all of a sudden you were cured. You're here. Yeah, that sounds to me psychology based, not necessarily.

I mean, you know, it's like, oh, it's religion, right? But I think it was that act of them doing something to break it, to break the curse and then it was broken. And you get one person that has a breakdown literally and starts dancing uncontrollably and maybe the attention fed that a little bit. And then people are thinking, oh, this isn't just a lady having fun on the street.

There's something wrong because this has gone on for days. And then that worry of, is this going to happen to me? And there is that, you know, the fear in the time of, you know, the witch trials and possessions and then they, you know, then they worry, I'm going to get burned at the stake because I'm doing this and just, you know, the fan, just everything. I think it's my personal opinion is it's just induced psychosis.

Yeah, they had some hard times. Lots of hard times. I think that if I was making a conclusion, I would say that as well. The power of the mind.

The power of the mind is crazy. All right. Chad, do you have a bucket list for us? Yeah, I do.

One of the things, one of the places that I really want to go is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I was watching a video the other day about Gettysburg and a war museum that they have there that was just awesome. And it wasn't just for the Civil War. This war museum had a lot of Adolf Hitler's personal belongings that had been brought back after World War II at the Gettysburg War Museum.

It was fascinating, but Gettysburg for the Civil War and for, you know, all the other things at the War Museum, I mean, they've got, you know, his silver tea set. Some of the things that the GIs were able to bring back was just amazing that have ended up in the Gettysburg War Museum. So I'm really interested. I'm always have been interested in history and interested in the supernatural.

And I'm interested in the ghost stories. We talked about some of those on a previous podcast, but I'd really like to go back and experience Gettysburg myself. Right. Some of the ghost stories when we were talking about, I don't know that we talked about Gettysburg specifically.

I think it was just Civil War. Civil War. But we talked, I mean, there were some that related to Gettysburg. Right.

But some of those stories, I mean, you'll hear stories here and there of, oh, something touched me or I saw something, but you've got those Gettysburg stories, whole, you know, trains of people. It's a whole battalion marching in the disappeared and, you know, many horse people and horseback. Yeah, it's cool area. I've been there.

I didn't do any ghost hunting and Gettysburg when I was there, but it is, it's a, it's a, it has a different feel for sure. You go there, it's kind of hallowed ground in the sense that there were, there was a massive loss of life in a very short period of time there. You know, and it's, yeah, it definitely made an impact on me. That's for sure.

Well, the only place in Pennsylvania I was Erie and. Did it paint an impact on you? Yes, yes it did. I found out that Raven and humidity don't go well together.

You want to hear the story? Let's do it. I woke up about midnight. It was humid.

I'm from Utah. I don't do humid. And I thought I was drowning and I was gonna die. From the?

Humid content in the air. Yeah, anybody who's from a humid area is dying right now going, oh my gosh, you're such a wuss. I am. I'm drowning.

Anything above 35% humidity. I think I'm dying. I did. I literally was pacing.

I had to talk myself off a ledge. It was a panic attack. I had. I had.

I only had one panic attack in my life. That was it. I was pacing the room going, babies live here, animals live here, people live here, you're not dying. I almost went in the bathroom and turned on the air conditioner to breathe hot dry air.

Just, just to get something that wasn't human. Human. It should have tipped me off when we went to the restaurant and I picked up the straw and the straw wrapper was moist. Yeah, you just.

The second, these are supposed to be crackly, not soggy. I lived in North Texas and that was even enough for me. I went down to Houston in one time and was interviewing there and went, nope, in January. Got off the plane and went, not for me.

So people do it though. So do you have a personal experience for us? Yeah, I'm trying to remember which one I shared last time. I hate to repeat myself.

We'll start and we'll tell you if you repeat. I never told you about the time when I saw the lady in the bathroom when I was a kid. No. Sweet.