In Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, there is a fairy tale called "The Red Dancing Shoes", which tells the story of a girl named Jalen, who became selfish because of a pair of red dancing shoes, and God punished her by letting her wear the dancing shoes and keep on dancing until she died of exhaustion, and the girl later realized her past selfishness and mistakes, and begged the executioner to cut off her feet, and prayed to the Lord without stopping. Eventually an angel took her to heaven.
But what few people know is that this fairy tale actually has a historical origin, and because of this, the story of the Red Shoes has been hailed as one of the darkest and cruelest in Hans Christian Andersen's oeuvre.
The incident of the Red Shoes first took place in 1374 at a German military camp, when the camp was on vacation. It was a vacation in the barracks, and a group of German soldiers went out for a walk. When they reached the banks of the Rhine, dozens of soldiers suddenly began to dance.
They danced in an exaggerated manner and made strange movements, which attracted the onlookers. Some even gave them a beat. But people soon realized that something was wrong, these soldiers had already danced out of breath but had no intention of stopping, some had even started to roll their eyes, like they were going to faint.
The onlookers advised them to stop jumping, but they jumped faster and faster until they collapsed and died of exhaustion. The second time a similar incident occurred was in Trasbourg, France, in mid-July 1518, when a woman named Laufey suddenly danced the jig, a physically demanding dance with lots of jumping and kicking, like nobody's business.
When Laufey danced for several hours, she was so tired that she was foaming at the mouth, but no matter how much her husband shouted, she wouldn't stop dancing. Even more bizarrely, gradually, people around Laufey began to join her in the dance, and they poured out onto the streets, growing from an initial 10 or so to more than 400, with the numbers still rising.
By the end of the dance, many had died of strokes, heart attacks or overwork. It was found that once infected, there was no way to stop, and even with tranquilizers, the dancing continued even after the drugs wore off. It is estimated that the "dancing plague" killed an average of 15 people a day, and from the 14th to the 17th centuries it spread from Trasbourg to all of Europe.
These dancers behaved in a bizarre, animal-like, primitive and barbaric manner. In the Middle Ages, when science was backward, ignorant people thought these people were possessed by the devil and burned them with fire as a way to banish him. And when medical knowledge developed, the doctors of the time gave an explanation for the plague.
They believed that it was caused by a fungus called ergot fungus, a fungus with toxicity that can cause people to hallucinate and become mentally hyperactive, and that those who danced had more than one dance due to the infection of ergot fungus, which caused disorders in the central nervous system.
There is also an explanation that the emergence of various phenomena because of the "group psychosomatic diseases", belonging to a kind of hysteria, the disease is mainly in the group of some kind of stimulus, through the psychosocial factors that lead to crowd interaction, which is a kind of infectious diseases with no physiological root cause, most of them due to stress. The disease is a contagious disease with no physiological roots, mostly caused by stress.