Another Freak Accident Minisode: Opposite Day Footloose

It’s freak accident time, baby! And we’ve got two fun ones this week.

Now, I (Brooke) had a bit of a time finding a subject that wasn’t horrendously depressing… until I found the jackpot. It’s an example of mass hysteria that I found through Sam O’Nella on YouTube (who needs to make more videos, please and also thank you), and it technically counts as an accident for reasons I’ll touch on later.

Mass hysteria, you say?

You betcha. Picture this: it’s lovely day in Strausberg in what was the Holy Roman Empire in 1518. A woman you’ve seen about the town before - maybe your neighbor, maybe your kid’s teacher - steps out her door and starts… dancing… uncontrollably. For hours.

And then more hours.

Until she passes out on the ground.

You’d think after a long day of dancing and passing out from exhaustion she’d head back home for a cold drink and a nap, but it didn’t quite play out that way. She continued dancing, a glazed look in her eye, no music to speak of, passing out when she got too tired to go on, for a week. And by the end of that week, over 30 people had joined her with the same fervor. According to historical eyewitness accounts, the dancers would continue dancing even after their feet began to bleed. Talk about dedication to the groove.

I don’t even know how to respond.

Well, you’d have that in common with the government at the time! City authorities were completely at a loss, and doctors of the day decided that it was either demonic possession (which they initially ruled out) or too much “hot blood.” So what do you do when your city’s blood is too toasty?

You tell the citizens to wiggle it out, of course. Not only did officials mandate that the city folk had to dance day and night, they also built a special stage in the center of town, hired musicians and dancers to help folks along, put up decorations - the whole nine yards.

Oh, thaaaat’s what you meant by Opposite Day Footloose.

You got it.

So did it work?

Not at all!

On one hand, I understand the idea of reverse psychology. If you’re compelled to dance all day, nothing takes the magic out of it like a cop telling you that you have to keep dancing. Ew.

Unfortunately, I think they went a little too hard on the encouragement. By making the whole thing into a spectacle, they actually achieved the opposite. Onlookers everywhere suddenly wanted to get in on the action, and at its peak over 400 people had joined the party. Even worse, there are accounts of people who suddenly came to their senses in the middle of dancing, only to dance themselves back into oblivion because they truly believed that the only cure for the curse was to keep dancing.

This may all sound like fun and games, but in the end many were injured and collapsed from exhaustion, and some folks even dropped dead from strokes and heart attacks. Literally danced ‘til they were dead. Like that song.

How did it finally stop?

Eventually city officials gave up the ghost on the dance party and started carting the dancers to shrines to St. Vitus and St. John to pray away their otherworldly dancing curse. Strangely enough, the plague of dance ended almost immediately after and folks went back to their normal lives.

Which begs the question…

Why did they start dancing to begin with?

Opinions were split for a long time. This wasn’t the first time a dance plague had taken over a town or city (though it was one of the last), so the goal was to figure out what the common thread was in the pre-1600s.

Some thought it could be a fungus called ergot that infects rye and can turn bread into a pretty wild psychedelic, cause convulsions, etc. Others thought that it was a heretical group that was trying to win the favor of its deities, but that seems like a reach for obvious reasons.

The most accepted theory is simply that human brains are bad. More specifically, something known as Mass Psychogenic Illness (colloquially known as mass hysteria). This could mean a lot of things, provided it falls within the category of “people feeling bad or sick for no discernible reason,” but this example of MPI was more than likely purely psychological. MPI can often manifest in populations under high stress, and the manifestation is almost always influenced by the group’s culture.

It just so happens that 1518 Strausberg had just endured a series of societal disasters (plagues, famines, etc.) and had also been culturally preconditioned to believe that those who didn’t appease the saints would be punished with curses. And since St. Vitus is the patron saint of epilepsy and dance… well, you make the connection.

In the face of overwhelming stress, the people of Strausberg manifested their fear as what they expected based on their belief systems. So, when one deeply disturbed and mentally ill person began dancing in the street, it didn’t take much coaxing for the rest of the population to assume they were being cursed by a saint.

So there you have it: an accidental city-wide plague of dancing caused by the perfect storm of cultural beliefs, social elements, and lack of medical knowledge.

So what next?

Though one of the most famous industrial disasters, many people don’t remember the Oppau Disaster, an explosion that devastated the German city on Wednesday, September 21st, 1921. What started as a routine ammonium sulfate nitrate (ASN) processing turned deadly as a 4,000-4,500-ton silo containing ASN exploded in a deadly blast. Leaving a crater larger than a football field, the blast took 507 lives and injured 1917 people. 

How did the explosion start?

So, some fertilizer is composed of ASN, a double salt that should be inert when prepared properly. However, due to a fabrication process, the salt produced was, simply put, incredibly reactive. You see, the salt was produced using a spray-drying process that produced mountains of fine powder. Over time, this hygroscopic powder would compact and yield a rock-like bottom that could only be broken apart using small explosives.

Wait, they were using explosives with a reactive material?

That’s the trouble. For years and years, they were able to run this procedure repeatedly without issue – none at all. It was a mystery for years and years why this happened, and the investigative committees concluded that the cause was beyond science and couldn’t be solved at the time.

So there’s no resolution?

There is, dear reader, and it involves seemingly miniscule oversights that absolutely could not have been accounted for at the time. But since Olivia had to scour the depths of the research paper abyss, we’re leaving it a secret. You gotta listen to the episode! Yay for holding content hostage!