TSFU Ep. 188 - HISTORY MYSTERY: The Dancing Plague of 1518
That's So Fcked Up
Ashley Love Richards
4.3 • 542 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
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In the summer of 1518, something deeply unsettling took over the streets of Strasbourg, Alsace, in the Holy Roman Empire. It wasn’t a music festival, a flash mob, or a medieval TikTok trend. It was a full-blown, weeks-long dancing epidemic that left hundreds of people physically unable to stop moving… until many of them literally danced themselves to death.
The outbreak started when a woman known as Frau Troffea and her daughter Fräulein Emma Götz began to dance fervently and uncontrollably in a street in Strasbourg. This spiraled into mass hysteria (or something even stranger), as more and more people joined in, day after day, under the brutal summer heat. No food, no rest, no relief. Just nonstop dancing, collapsing bodies, and a city completely unable to explain what the hell was happening.
In this episode, Kristen tells Ash about one of history’s weirdest and most haunting phenomena: the Dancing Plague of 1518. Was it mass psychogenic illness? Religious panic? Poisoned bread? Or something darker lurking beneath the surface? Because serioulsy, how do you explain a situation where your body just… won’t stop dancing?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That is so fucked up. |
| 0:02.8 | It's fucked up. |
| 0:04.5 | So fucked up. |
| 0:05.8 | It is just so damn fucked up. |
| 0:14.2 | That's fucked up. |
| 0:15.8 | Hello, everybody. |
| 0:18.4 | Hello, hello. |
| 0:20.1 | Welcome back to the podcast. |
| 0:23.5 | This is That So Fucked Up, a podcast about things that make you say, ugh. |
| 0:28.1 | That's so fucked up. |
| 0:30.0 | And sometimes, like the last few weeks, it makes you like really ugh. |
| 0:35.7 | But this week, we wanted to bring you something a little bit more light, |
| 0:41.3 | a little bit more fun. Yes. I mean, plagues and death is never actually fun. But the name of this one, |
| 0:49.6 | you know, honestly, it sounded super fun. We are your hosts. I'm Ashley Love Richards. And I'm |
| 0:56.1 | Kristen Jones. And this week we have traded sick places. Last week, you had the like raspy, |
| 1:03.8 | stuffy, down low voice. Now you sound great, which actually, it kind of works out because now you |
| 1:10.2 | sound great. And it's your turn to tell me a story. Yes, that worked out it kind of works out because now you sound great and it's your turn to tell |
| 1:12.1 | me a story. Yes, that worked out well. It worked out well because I sound kind of garbage this week, |
| 1:17.7 | but luckily I don't have to talk too much. So you gave me a list of options for topics. I was like, girl, bring me something with a little bit of levity. |
| 1:31.0 | Because after three weeks of child sex abuse and sex trafficking, especially right around |
| 1:39.1 | the time that we were getting just Epstein files fucking thrown at us from every which way. |
| 1:46.9 | I was like, no, no more. |
... |
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