Ergot and the Salem Witchtrials

Some researchers allege that ergot poisoning may have been responsible for triggering the Salem witchcraft trials -- but is this fact, or fiction? Learn more about ergot and the Salem witch trials in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joint day by staff writer Josh Clark.
How's it going, Josh? Going pretty well? How are you, Candide?
I'm doing great. I was just listening to one of

(00:22):
my favorite albums of all time, Pink Floyd Dark Side
of the Moon, and I'm really pretty mellow. Yeah, well
far out because my question today actually has to do
with LSD, which, as I understand, is a great accompaniment
to Dark Side of the Moon. I wouldn't know that. Indeed,
it actually has to do with, strangely enough, the Salem
Witchcraft Trials, if you can believe it. That's really weird.

(00:44):
What can colonial Salem have to do with a bad
ascid trap? Well, I'll tell you, okay, So let me
set the scene. It's Salem, Massachusetts. There's about five people
living in in Salem Colony at the time, and things
are really starting to go awry. They are, And just
to bring everybody up to speed, this is a settlement
that was founded on Puritan ideal. So we're supposed to

(01:07):
be a new eat in a very religious place and
then it seemed like the devil had been set loose
on this village. The smallpox outbreak attacks from Indian born nearby. Yeah,
and basically the kids weren't adhering quite as much to
the rules that the adults had hoped for. They were,
you know, American born children of immigrants, and you know
how crazy they can be. And if you thought Paris

(01:29):
Hilton's antics were bad, Elizabeth Parris was an entirely different story.
Now she's the twelve year old daughter of the new minister,
and all of a sudden one day she comes down
with this weird mania. She's throwing herself around the room.
She's marking like a dog, complaining of being bitten um
and pinched by unseen forces. So they bring the doctor,

(01:49):
and the doctor reaches the extent of his medical knowledge apparently,
and pronounces the girl under the influence of witchcraft. So
at this point all fingers point to Chichiba, who's a
Barbadian born sleigh end. Then when she denyes having any
hand in this, what happens to the town? Well, actually
they pressed her and she eventually confessed bafflingly enough, but uh,

(02:11):
other people started having fingers pointed at him and next
thing you know, ipso facto, nineteen people are hung and dead. Now,
what I'm talking about is a theory um that this
was actually the result of an ascid trip, that the
colonists were under the influence of drugs. Is that fact
or fiction? Oh, I'm on the fence about this one.
I'm going to go with a little bit fact, a

(02:31):
little bit fiction. There's a historian named Linda Caparell who
posed the theory that these girls suffered from something called
ergot poisoning. And ergot essentially is the type of mold
that grows on grains like rye, and it can affect
your body. And there's two basic types, gangrenus, which causes
dry rotting limbs and blisters on your skin and itching,
burning skin. And then the other type is called convulsive urgetism.

(02:55):
And that's a lot like the symptoms Elizabeth Paris had
with the mania and the psychosis, working like a dog,
barking like a dog. And here's the crazy thing, and
that's that no matter how much you refine the grain
on which this mold grows, even if you refine it
down into bread, you can still get this type of poisoning.
It's possible that this is what caused the Salem witchcraft trust.

(03:17):
It's definitely one contender in the realm of possibility, and
now it's hard to believe. Well, if you want to
learn more about it, you can check out where the
American colonists drug during the Salem witchcraft trial on how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com,
let us know what you think. Send an email to

(03:38):
podcast at how stuff works dot com.