The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was when a massive case of dancing mania happened in Strasbourg, Alsace (now modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire in July 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for days.
The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman began to dance randomly in a street in Strasbourg.[1] Some sources claim that, for a short time, the plague killed around fifteen people per day;[2] however, the sources of the city of Strasbourg at the time of the events did not mention the number of deaths, or even if there were any deaths.[3]
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