Beat Hysterics: Diagnosing the Great Dance Plague of 1518

When Frau Troffea took to furiously dancing in the middle of a road in Strasbourg, France, in the summer of 1518, no one would join her. In a time of widespread hand wringing, confusion and fear over women succumbing to the cultish clutches of demonic possession, just try to imagine the risks this young lady ran by suddenly taking to a round-the-clock, public show of relentless and spirited writhing.

But no matter – Troffea just kept dancing. Nothing could stop her. She had the fever, damn it. And sure enough, in the span of a week more than 30 Strasbourgan peasants were spazzing alongside her in what would become one of the funkiest bits of mass sociogenic illness on record.

Maybe it was famine, coupled with the region’s wildly fluctuating weather and Biblical hail storms, that had folks falling to the Dancing Plague of 1518. Maybe it was from eating bread laced with ergot, a seizure- and hallucination-inducing psychotropic mold, that had Troffea and a growing band of street dancers locked in a delirious bootstomp. Maybe cutting loose in the streets was just a way to get one’s mind off poverty. The root cause of the Dancing Plague remains unclear, but there’s no denying that for whatever reason Troffea’s condition, which was part and parcel of a larger dancing epidemic that had been rippling out over England, Germany and the Netherlands in earnest since around 1370, pulled people into its orbit singing, shouting, flailing uncontrollably and indefatigably.

A month after Troffea’s outbreak-dance (sorry), a good 400 people were getting down in Strasbourg.

Fast forward nearly 500 years. When 16-year-old Lori Brownell comes to after passing out at a school dance – this after she apparently head-banged herself out of consciousness at a concert in August – up in Corinth, New York, last September, she began exhibiting unexplainable tics, the sort of “involuntary twitching and clapping” that often mark the onset of Tourette’s Syndrome. Indeed, on Christmas Eve she was formally diagnosed with Tourette’s. A few months later, and more than a dozen Corinth teens are now displaying similar symptoms.

Parents and doctors, not to mention Brownell and the others, are puzzled. Curiously or not, most of the kids go to the same high school – and all but one are female. Independent investigations by the school and the state department of health have found no trace of a substance inside the building itself that could be triggering the uncontrollable and glitchy behavior. Environmentalist Erin Brockowich is looking into whether the outbreak traces back to a 1970 train derailment that leaked cyanide and industrial solvent around the region. For the time being, no one can really figure out what the hell is going on.

So I’m not saying that Brownell is the new Troffea. The similarities are almost eerie, though. The mass hysteria, or conversion disorder, going on in Corinth, is not the same thing as the dancing mania, or choreomania, that once beat through Europe’s mainland. But in both cases, it’s a matter of shared nervous symptoms echoing among unexpecting people after they witness others, or a specific Brownell or Troffea, getting spastic.

I mean, humans are weird enough as it is. And the potential social influence that we each individually carry is even weirder. There is historical precedent for this sort of thing. In 1278, a flash dance mob collapsed a bridge over the River Meuse in Germany. One-hundred and fifty years later, a monk danced himself to death in northern Switzerland. He wasn’t alone – boogying to death was not at all unheard of during the dance epidemic years.

Then, just like that, spastic dancing stopped in the 17th century as abruptly and mysteriously as it began.

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson