Weird Historical Events That Would Break The Internet If They Happened Now
Monday, August 24, 2020
You hear loud, concerned murmurs from outside your window one evening, and, intrigued, you're taking your coat and sneak on out of the house to ascertain what the commotion is all about.
You follow the crowd’s voice through the dirty, dimly lit, and unpaved roads until finally, you encounter dozens of your neighbors gathered around a dancing woman.
Seems like fun initially, but something’s not right here.
The woman looks to be in great pain, and her face is filled with sorrow as if she was doing this all involuntarily. Her limbs move energetically, almost violently actually, and her sweat-drenched linen cap suggests that she has been doing this for a few hours.
Suddenly she collapses from fatigue. The people around you look even as confused as you are doing. Some attend to check on her, others leave with amused looks on their faces thinking the show is over.
But once you or anyone else least expect it, the lady wakes up and again resumes her stuporous frolicking. and she or he continues. for 6 days straight. Even stranger, others start to obsessively dance on their own, and shortly whole parties of delirious dancers begin to fill the streets.
What if we told you this all actually happened on July 14th, 1518 in Strasbourg, modern-day France? Yep, it’s dubbed the ‘Dancing Plague’, and a few even ended up dying from it.
That woman’s name was Frau Troffea, and just days after her initial dance, the number of sufferers grew larger and bigger, soon leading the superstitious populace to believe that the plague was sent by God as punishment for his or her sins.
With fear and paranoia at Strasbourg's’ breaking-point, the administration of Strasbourg stepped in to use their solution to the matter, which yes, included paying healthy citizens to bop with the affected and truly hiring musicians to fill the streets with music to form it easier to bop.
This is because the town physicians hypothesized that the dancing was used as a sort of stress-relief, but it seems that nobody was cured by having their dancing facilitated, in fact, even more people joined in on the macabre fun as a result. Great going, Renaissance physicians.
As a final resort, the council ordered healthy citizens to require up the sufferers in order that they might be loaded and tied-down onto wagons. The end. Not really; the thought was to move them to a spiritual shrine some 25-miles away in hopes that the remedy lay in religious cleansing.
Oddly enough, that appeared to do the trick. The pilgrimage helped recover many of the estimated 400 people afflicted that summer. That was the last time the incident was seen in Strasbourg, however, it had been not the primary time the plague haunted Europe.
That’s right, there’s a surprising amount of historical records documenting the dancing sickness, mainly from the medieval period. only one of them comes from 1374 when a serious outbreak of dancing plague erupted in Germany, Netherlands, and France, where thousands reportedly danced from town-to-town shrieking like demons.
So, can we know what caused the Dancing Plague? Not really.
Experts still afflict the cause to the present day. Some blame a fungus that grew on the townspeople's’ crops called ergot. It can cause wild hallucinations, and it’s actually what LSD is synthesized from.
But we are inclined to believe it had been beating their heads.
People, as a rule, succumb pretty easily to the facility of suggestion, and once you contribute a touch mysticism, you bought yourself a patented example of medieval epidemic hysertia and therefore the supposed ‘cures’ that go alongside it.
That being said, the plague remains pretty fuckin’ scary, and, to mention the smallest amount, quite strange. Therefore, the July 14th, 1518 case, the foremost well-documented one, goes down on behalf of me because of the strangest day in history.
2. Telephone booth stuffing took off everywhere the globe in the late 1950s.
Like the "Keep Calm and Carry On" mantra, telephone booth stuffing first gained popularity outside the US. But once it arrived stateside, within the spring of 1959, kids couldn't help but take part . People would cram their bodies into narrow spaces like olives during a jar. Some adopted other methods, like stacking themselves horizontally. the planet record for telephone booth stuffing came in March of 1959 when 25 people in South Africa piled into a booth. Incidentally, the phone rang during the stunt, but nobody could answer it. Sadly, the trend died by the top of 1959.
Thanks for reading.