1518年斯特拉斯堡有人跳舞停不下来，一个月后有四百人在跳

In July 1518, in Strasbourg, France—a city of the Holy Roman Empire at the time—a woman named Troffea on the street suddenly began to dance. She danced for a long time, a full day and night, without music, and without stopping.

A week later, about thirty people joined her. A month later, according to records, some four hundred were dancing in the streets. Some danced until their shoes were torn and their feet bled; others collapsed, got up, and kept dancing, crying for help, yet unable to stop.

The city officials did not treat it as an illness; they called in doctors, who said it was overheated blood. So their solution was: they built a stage, hired musicians, and let everyone keep dancing, thinking they would eventually tire themselves out. As a result, even more people danced. A few days later, they changed their minds and brought the dancers to a chapel in the mountains, where, before the altar, they ate bread and put on red shoes, and only then did they stop one by one.

Legend has it that some danced until they fell down dead. Some records say several people died a day. But historical scholars say there are no reliable records of the death toll. Some speculate it was ergot poisoning from moldy rye, but that toxin causes convulsions and makes it impossible to dance for days on end, so more people now believe it was a collective psychological reaction.

In the years before that, the region had suffered several years of poor harvests and disease; people starved in the streets, and in churches people told the story of Saint Vitus, said to make people dance. Later scholars suggested this dancing might have been a form of mass hysteria, with the body as the only outlet and no words.

Such "dancing plagues" occurred more than once in medieval Europe. Along the Rhine in the fourteenth century, there were similar accounts: groups of people gathered and danced without stopping until they fell down.

The Strasbourg incident is the best-documented. The municipal records of that year preserve the officials' discussions of countermeasures.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #世界悬案