For years, the Mütter Museum invited visitors through its doors for a Halloween party that emphasized blood and guts. That event, Mischief at the Mütter, was scrapped amid the institute's two-year ethical review .

But the museum has come up with a new party theme for 2025, inspired by an alarming bit of medieval history. MORE: Elmwood Park Zoo's two-toed sloth named Beanie has a baby

The revamped Halloween bash is called Choreomania , after an odd and largely unexplained phenomenon that emerged in the Middle Ages. Also called dancing plagues, the incidents involved groups of people dancing for days or weeks – stopping only when they collapsed from exhaustion or, per some reports, died.

Historians believe at least some of the tales were embellished. But infamous cases like the

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