Soft, lilting music wafts through the open bedroom window. A strange tune, you think as you rise from a fading dream. Strange. But familiar. When you open your eyes, he’s already there, skin stretched taut over bone, grinning down at you. He bows low, offering a skeletal hand. You take it.

Everyone takes it eventually.

We must.

He leads you outside, where other sleepy souls have already gathered. Barefoot on the cobblestones, they dance with their own smiling partners, some gracefully, while others beg and bargain for escape. But all progress forward in a long procession winding through the dark streets, toward the grave.

THE DANSE MACABRE

This is the Danse Macabre, a subgenre of the Memento Mori art form, that was popular in the Middle Ages. Often displayed as murals on church and cemetery walls, Danse Macabre images were accompanied by poems that were read progressing from one panel to the next like a play.

These murals represented all levels of society, from kings and popes to children and beggars, from the very young to the very old. The message was simple: death is the great leveler. It comes for us all, and it can come at any time.

Skeletal figures became the personification of death, their flesh rotting off the bone. These are terrifying images to modern-day viewers, but audiences of the time would have seen these figures in real life often and everywhere. The Black Death (Bubonic Plague) had ravaged Europe in the mid-1300s, carrying off between 30 to 60 percent of the European population.

Cemeteries overflowed. Even with mass graves, bodies piled up faster than the church could bury them. And with too few people left to retrieve the dead, piles of corpses lined the streets for days before being collected. These bodies were predominantly peasants and the poor, the rich having fled from the cities to their country houses at the first signs of plague.

The already significant gap in life expectancy between rich and poor widened, and with it grew a deep resentment toward the wealthy and powerful. A resentment that took shape in the Danse Macabre murals. Like political cartoons of today, the people depicted in the paintings often represented real-life figures whom the local population recognized. The Danse Macabre murals became an outlet for the masses, castigating those in power, but also reminding all classes that in the end, they’d all dance with death.

In the first mural, La Danse Macabre, the dead actively taunted the wealthy and powerful. In one panel, a cadaver tells a portly that the fat ones are always the first to rot.

Another panel shows a skeleton tugging at a physician’s crotch while the terrified man tries not to drop a urine container. And throughout, skeletons gleefully rebuff the wealthy’s attempts at bribes.

Conversely, the poor and elderly workers are gingerly helped along by their skeletal partners.

TENSION BUILDS

But what if the Danse Macabre wasn’t just an allegory? What if it became real?

In 1518, the poor in Strasbourg, a free-city in what is today France, must have felt like the world was ending. Their lives were controlled by the rich and powerful, whose actions favored the wealthy at the expense of the many, a pattern that can be seen today.

Years of poor harvests meant food was scarce. What little farmers produced was owned by wealthy landlords. Landlords who wanted/needed money to cover the expenses of their vast holdings. Rather than selling that food in Strasbourg, the wealthy sent it to richer cities that could pay more, deepening the famine.

Meanwhile, an economic downturn forced city officials to raise taxes and offer fewer services. The Catholic Church also increased tithe amounts to fund the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, eating into the masses’ already dwindling incomes. But the most harrowing blow was the arrival of syphilis.

It came from visiting sailors and returning soldiers, beginning as a rash before erupting into tumors that consumed the face, eating away the nose until only a gaping hole remained. It then attacked the brain, causing madness.

Then in July, a heatwave unlike any in living memory struck. This was the last straw.

Something or someone was about to break.

THE DANSE MACABRE BECOMES REAL

On July 14th, 1518, fishermen and cutpurses, blacksmiths and beggars and deformed syphilitic patients crowded the narrow cobblestone streets, hemmed in by the medieval half-timbered buildings looming overhead. It was into this throng that Frau Troffea danced. Skirts twirling, she jerked and jumped in wild, chaotic movements that vaguely resembled dance. Her husband had followed her, and while a crowd formed around them, he begged her to stop, but she was entranced, oblivious to his pleas.

Frau Troffea danced throughout the heat of day, collapsing near dusk in exhaustion. It was over; they hoped. But, only a few hours later, she awoke, and began again. She danced uncontrollably for the better part of a week, blood pooling in her feet, which swelled until they bled, seeping through her shoes and leaving burgundy footprints on the streets.

Onlookers speculated about the cause. Was this an act of restless spirits? Had sin weakened her ability to fight off the Devil and his demons? But her pallor, the spasms and her trance-like state revealed this wasn’t possession; this was illness. Frightened authorities intervened. They bundled Frau Troffea up and sent her via wagon thirty miles away to Saverne. The hope was that the Shrine of Saint Vitus might give her relief, but more importantly, city officials wanted to stop the illness from spreading.

It didn’t work.

Frau Troffea broke first, but within a week, thirty people would follow. They had contracted Choreomania, the Dancing Plague, and it was going to get worse.

THE DANCING PLAGUE AND THE PIED PIPER

Frau Troffea was not the first case of the Dancing Plague in history. Accounts of spontaneous and overpowering dancing date back as far as the seventh century, with the largest occurring in 1374 when hundreds of people across north-eastern France and the Netherlands danced for months on end.

But perhaps one of the earliest and most notorious outbreaks inspired a story famous with children the world over. In 1237, a group of children from Erfurt, Germany, danced out of the city into the countryside and continued dancing twelve miles south to the city of Arnstadt. By the time they arrived, a few had perished; others suffered chronic tremors.

Some historians believe this inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the folktale, the people of Hamelin refuse to pay a traveling rat-catcher for services rendered. In retaliation, he lures their children away with a magical pipe.

Some versions of the folktale end with the rat-catcher leading merry children in a dance out of town. They frolic and laugh as they head toward the river, only to wade in one by one and drown. Other versions have them disappearing into a cave, their giggles echoing out as they disappear into the black abyss. In still others, children ascend a mountain to live in a beautiful paradise-like land. All are allusions to the Greek and Christian afterlives. It’s a chilling example of a Danse Macabre folktale, where death is the Piper, leading children to the grave.

STRASBOURG’S GROWING PANDEMIC

In Strasbourg, Frau Troffea’s illness was running rampant. By August, over 400 in a city of 20,000 were infected with the Dancing Plague. The clergy believed this was a curse, but the guild of physicians disagreed, declaring it a disease of overheated blood. City Council concurred.

The prescription: allow the infected to dance the illness from their system.

Workers hastily erected stages in the horse and grain markets, on official orders, and the carpenters and tanner guilds turned their guild halls into dance floors. Musicians were hired to keep the rhythm going, and professional dancers brought in to encourage the ill to keep dancing. Meanwhile, the curious ringed the dance floor, eager for a spectacle. Though this wasn’t the lighthearted entertainment they’d hoped for.

Contemporary accounts describe dancers not only bleeding through their shoes, but convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Most wore hollow expressions; their minds having fled to some quieter place. But those still conscious had faces set in a rictus of pain.

Soon dancers began dropping dead from heat exhaustion, dehydration and heart attacks. To onlookers, it must have felt cataclysmic. Many panicked. The most devout joined the dancers, afraid that God’s wrath might strike them as well.

Again, the city’s plan hadn’t worked. In fact, things were much worse. In a stunning reversal, Council issued new orders. The stages were immediately torn down, and all music was outlawed. 

THE CURE

At the height of the Dancing Pandemic in Strasbourg, as many as 15 people were dying a day. Desperate authorities turned their backs on the physicians they once trusted and instead embraced the church.

Officials loaded the afflicted into three wagons and brought them, still twitching and bleeding, the thirty miles to the Saint Vitus’ shrine. It made sense, the Saint who had healed with a touch, whose own legs had convulsed in dance when pagans burned him at the stake, and who for centuries was thought to curse those who strayed from the faith, was the very Saint to cure them.

At the shrine, Council hired priests to say mass over each wagon. They gave the dancers a cross and a pair of red shoes sprinkled with holy oil. Red was the symbol of the blood of Christ and healing. Priests then led the dancers around the altar in groups, making the sign of the cross over their shoes and sprinkling them with holy water. Vague accounts detail the dancers’ time at the shrine, but it seems the shrine cured all who survived long enough to reach it.

THE SOURCE OF THE DANCING PLAGUE

Strasbourg was the last of the large Dancing Plague outbreaks. Within a century, the Protestant religion had grown to combat the Holy Roman Empire. Saint Vitus fell out of favor, and with him went the Dancing Plague.

Today, the source of the Dancing Plague remains a mystery. The most widespread theory is accidental ingestion of a rudimentary form of LSD from ergot fungus, but ergot poisoning, ergotism, would have lasted only a few hours, not weeks. Other scholars believe followers of the Cult of Saint Vitus may have scheduled the “outbreaks” in order to sow chaos during difficult and stressful times. Though contemporary accounts of the physical state of the dancers contradict the idea that participants were in control of their bodies.

John Waller, author of two books on the subject, The Dancing Plague and A Time to Dance, A Time to Die, puts forth the current favored solution to the plague: mass hysteria.

Many outbreaks occurred during periods of extreme suffering, like the suffering in Strasbourg leading up to the 1518 outbreak. What must it have been like to grow food, but have it sold in wealthier cities while you starve? To need money, but have the very institutions set up to protect you, take it away? To be surrounded by deformed people driven mad by a new mysterious illness? It’s easy to assume this feeling of loss of control over their lives may extend to their bodies.

Why dance? If the Danse Macabre has taught us anything, it’s that, no matter our wealth nor station in life, control is an illusion. Perhaps the dancers simply made this truth visible. Life is the strange lilting music; drifting in the background through our days. Sometimes it’s the heavy drumbeat of war and strife; other times, a soft lullaby. Death arrives for the finale, grinning, a hand outstretched to take us on our last brief dance toward the grave.

Tammy Komoff was a 2025 finalist for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Stories. Her work has appeared in Abyss & Apex, DreamForge Anvil, All World’s Wayfarer and more. When not writing she spends her time chasing after her semi-feral daughters and their escape-artist mutt while her husband attempts to keep up. For more information visit her website or follow her on Bluesky.