The strange event that left history searching for answers

Dancing plague of 1518(Chapter1): The Mystery Begins

Investigating the event where fear, belief, and human behavior collided

Photo By Hondius and Hendrick The Elder on Bridgeman Images

On july 1518,a young aged women named Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street near the timber market and started to dance uncontrollably . She continued to dance for weeks and months, with her more and more people joined the dancing and within one week 30 people had fell for this epidemic, by the mid-august number of affected citizens have swelled up to 400.

The dancers begged themselves to stop , but they couldn’t stop themselves as they died from heat stroke, myocardial infraction, excessive bleeding, cerebrovascular incident and exhaustion(https://www.britannica.com/event/dancing-plague-of-1518.

At its peak, the mania claimed up to 15 kills per day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518?utm)

What could have caused this lethal mania that reportedly drove hundreds of people to dance until they collapsed or died?. Historians have proposed numerous explanations, yet they fail to completely explain this lethal mania. These competing explanations would be examined in Part 2.