In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and couldn't stop. Within days, dozens had joined her in this compulsive, uncontrollable dancing; within a month, up to 400 people were dancing themselves to death. The city's authorities, consulting the best medical minds of the time, prescribed the worst possible solution: more dancing, complete with hired musicians and constructed stages to "help them dance it out of their systems." This catastrophically bad decision led to scores of deaths from exhaustion, heart attacks, and strokes before the plague mysteriously ended in September. The Dancing Plague of 1518 remains one of history's most documented cases of mass psychogenic illness, showing what happens when extreme social stress meets spectacularly incompetent crisis management.

This is the second episode of "Wait, That Actually Happened?" a weekly podcast exploring history's most unbelievable true stories. Up next: we're heading to London in 1814, where a tsunami of beer killed more people than sharks do in a year. Yes, really. It's called the London Beer Flood, and it's exactly as bizarre as it sounds.

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