Welcome to another edition of Time Sucks Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and what a tale I have for you today.

I will be sharing the story of a mysterious plague, the struck a city of Strasbourg in present-day Germany in 1518 CE.

For over a month, a very, very strange sickness of sorts had thrown into turmoil one of the largest cities of the sprawling collection of provinces and principalities that was the Holy Roman Empire. But people weren't

really getting sick. At least they weren't coming down with anything like the flu or the plague.

It was like, of anything, they'd grown sick of not dancing all the time. To paraphrase

Christopher Walken from one of my favorite S&L sketches of

ever, it was like they had a fever and the only cure was more cowbell, except replaced cowbell

with more dancing. This very strange story began when a woman known as Frau Trofea stepped into the street and began to silently

twist, twirl, and shake. At first, people thought she was trying to piss off her husband.

But when she didn't sleep that night, when she was still dancing, when she didn't stop to eat or

drink, but kept dancing after she passed out for a few hours before resuming dancing again

with her feet now covered in sores and blood, they started to think that something else was, pun intended, afoot.

Soon she was carted off to a shrine 30 miles away in the hopes that prayer to a specific saint would cure her mysterious ailment.

But then another person started dancing and another and another and it kept

spreading. City officials were concerned and mystified. Was this a new punishment from God? Some

biological illness? What was making people go mad with some sort of dance fever? Sometimes dancing

until they literally dropped dead and how would they fix it?

Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother.

I have a dream. I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us.

As crazy as the story is, it was actually not the first dancing plague on record.

The first is said to have taken place in a Saxon town called Colbock, around 1017 C.E.

When several people danced riotously in a graveyard until an offended priest curse them to then keep dancing for an

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