25. Help: I Can’t Stop Dancing!
From time to time, just about everybody gets a tune or jingle stuck in his or her head, and simply can’t seem to get it out, humming or mumbling it on and off for hours or maybe days on end. But what about the next level: how about a dance move that one can’t stop? Almost everyone loves a good shimmy, but what happens if the shimmy is so good that you just can’t quit, and end up dancing yourself to death?
That is what the good people of Strasbourg, Alsace, in what is now France, discovered in July of 1518, when their town was struck with a dancing mania, with hundreds of people dancing nonstop, for days on end. By the time the dance fever finally broke, many had literally danced themselves to death, perishing from heart attacks, strokes, or sheer exhaustion.
