THE DANCING PLAGUE OF 1518: WHEN 400 PEOPLE DANCED UNTIL THEY DIED episode artwork

EPISODE · Apr 27, 2026 · 20 MIN

THE DANCING PLAGUE OF 1518: WHEN 400 PEOPLE DANCED UNTIL THEY DIED

from History Mystery · host History Mystery

Episode 6 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained EventsIn this Mystery episode we focus on the Dancing Plague of 1518 — the event where a woman in Strasbourg began dancing in the street and couldn't stop, approximately 400 people joined her within a month, some danced for days without rest, several died, and the city hired musicians to help, which made it worse.This episode covers the civic records, the physician reports, the church documents, the mass psychogenic illness hypothesis and what it actually means, the ergotism theory and its problems, and the comparison to documented modern cases of mass psychogenic illness.Thoroughly documented. More than five hundred years later, still not fully explained.#HistoryMystery #DancingPlague #MassHysteria #MedievalHistory #MysteryPodcast

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