Have you danced so much that your body was tired all over and you felt like you were going to collapse if you didn’t sit down? Or your body collapsed before you sat down and ended up very embarrassed in front of people?

Well, imagine doing that, but with 50 or 400 other people, dancing to your heart’s content.

In July 1518, in Strasbourg, in what is now France, two people, Frau Troffea and her daughter Fräulein Emma Götz, suddenly began to uncontrollably dance. A spectator wrote, “Frau Troffea had started dancing on July 14th on the narrow cobbled street outside her half-timbered home. As far as we can tell she had no musical accompaniment but simply ‘began to dance’ .”

More people began to imitate the two, but soon found themselves dancing, and within days, 30 people joined the dance party. The number soon ballooned to 400 by the next month, and dancers began to die from strokes, heart attacks, or other causes. Early September saw the outbreak begin to die down.

But how did this begin in the first place?

The question of how this outbreak began remains a mystery to this day. Common guesses include food poisoning, though the theory can be easily dismissed because it seems pretty stupid to think food poisoning can cause bodies to move uncontrollably.

Another theory suggests that it was stress-induced hysteria, as the region where it began was facing starvation, which could cause some people to go crazy.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the only dance-acre incident. From the 14th to the 17th century, there were many cases of dancing incidents across Europe, and no one knows how those began.

So summarizes the dancing plague of 1518. The bottom line is that a bunch of people got into a groove and no one knows why, but we might know in the future. And anothr thing is that–

wha–hey…

…why can’t I stop doing the Macarena?! Oh no…