Salem is a small, charming city on  the North Shore of Massachusetts.

You may know it from The House of Seven Gables, or from the movie Hocus Pocus. But I’m betting more of you  know it from the witch trials.

Townspeople turned against each other, accusing friends and neighbors of witchcraft. In the end, at least 25 people died. And there’s an idea that the  whole witch panic happened because at least half the town was tripping on acid thanks to a fungus on their rye called  ergot, which explains their hallucinations, paranoia, and everything else.

It’s a simple, satisfying explanation.  And it’s completely wrong. Experts have said for years  that the ergot hypothesis doesn’t make any sense, based on a ton of data. So, what really happened?

Let’s get into it. [♪INTRO] The events we now call Salem Witch Trials began in 1692, in Salem Village. The local reverend’s daughter  and niece, 9-year-old Elizabeth, aka Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams started having strange fits. They’d scream, spasm, contort their bodies in bizarre ways, and even throw things.

Soon after, 12-year-old Ann Putnam started experiencing the same symptoms. The girls blamed three people: Tituba, an enslaved Caribbean woman  in the Parris household, Sarah Good, a homeless woman, and Sarah Osborne, a poor woman in town. And if you’re catching on to a  similarity in social status of these three accused women,  well, you’re onto something.

After several days of  interrogations, Good and Osborne maintained their innocence, but  Tituba later confessed to seeing visions and agreeing to serve  the devil by signing his book. She also said there were several  other witches in Salem Village. That set off a series of accusations, primarily coming from a group of preteen and teenage girls.

Anyone accused was hauled in for  questioning by the local authorities, and if they didn’t like what you had  to say, it was off to jail with you. No one was safe, from social outcasts to hoi polloi, senior citizens to children. And I do mean children.

The youngest person to be  arrested was Dorothy Good, who at the time of her arrest was four years old. The accusations didn’t stop at the borders of Salem Village, although that was the epicenter. Trials and executions  happened in nearby Salem Town, which is a different place from Salem Village, as well as Amesbury, Andover,  Marblehead, Peabody, and Topsfield.

Also, here’s a fun fact: The place we call Salem today is  Salem Town, not Salem Village. Salem Village is now called Danvers, but The Danvers Witch Trials just  doesn’t have the same ring to it. So people are getting accused left and right, then chucked into their towns’ jails.

But the governor was in England  at the start of all this, and because of weird colony laws, they weren't allowed to have  any trials until he got back. Eventually, Governor William Phips arrived in Massachusetts in May of 1692, and basically his first action when  he got off the boat was to convene an emergency court to take all  these witches in the jails to trial. During the trials, the allegedly  curse-afflicted girls would cry out, convulse, and report sensations of being choked, pinched, bitten, or stuck with pins.

They even reported seeing  evil spirits in the room. A total of nineteen people  were found guilty of witchcraft and sent to the gallows, and one  man who’d refused to participate in the whole thing was pressed  to death under heavy stones. The witch hunt finally came to  an end after Phips walked the whole thing back in October, in  response to a local minister.

Also, the governor’s wife got  accused of witchcraft, which may have helped him come to the decision  that the trials should stop. Phips forbade any further arrests,  dissolved the special court, and pardoned everyone still  imprisoned for witchcraft by the end of 1693. Well,  everyone that was still alive.

By the time it was over, more  than 200 people had been accused, 20 had been executed, and five died in prison. Looking back from the modern era, it’s hard to fathom how something like this could happen. So it makes sense that a lot of  people, from a lot of disciplines, would spend a lot of time studying the events.

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In 1976, a psychology graduate student at the University of California Santa Barbara named Linnda Caporael published a  paper in the journal Science proposing an entirely novel cause  of the 1692 witch hunts: Ergot. Ergot is a fungal disease that  infects grains, particularly rye. When a plant is infected with  ergot, it releases a yellow mucus, and then strands of the that form  dark balls on the head of the grain.

The rye field gets harvested,  the fungus balls end up mixed in with the healthy  grain kernels, and a farmer may never even notice there was a problem. Which is bad, because eating  the infected grains can cause a condition called ergotism, also sometimes known as Saint Anthony’s  Fire, which sounds way cooler. There are two types of ergotism:  gangrenous and convulsive.

Gangrenous ergotism results in,  you guessed it, gangrene, which can eventually lead to limbs falling  off the affected areas of the body. Convulsive ergotism, on the  other hand, results in crawling sensations on the skin, ringing  ears, dizziness, headaches, hallucinations, vomiting,  diarrhea, and, well, convulsions. Those powerful hallucinations  are caused by a few different compounds in ergot, but the most  relevant is called lysergic acid, which is just a hop skip and  a jump away from the drug LSD.

Which is what Caporael suggests  led to the witch hunts. See, according to Caporael,  the afflicted girls weren’t making up seeing spirits flying around the room. They actually thought they saw them, thanks to ergot-induced hallucinations.

Those phantom feelings of being  choked were the constriction of muscles common in ergot poisoning,  and that skin crawling and being poked with pins could also be  explained by tripping on lysergic acid. Plus, ergot infection is more  common in grains after cool, rainy springs and summers,  and in the summer of 1692 in Massachusetts, that’s exactly what they got. Caporael’s paper also noted that  four of the accusers lived in the Putnam house, which meant that they all could have eaten the same contaminated bread.

In fact, the paper stated that all but two of the accusers either lived in the same part of town or would likely have been  eating bread from the same area. Most of the accused witches  and those defending them, on the other hand, lived  on the other side of town. An outbreak of ergot in the western  fields is roughly consistent with who the accusers were and who they accused.

So basically, this paper posits that the accusers weren’t lying about what they felt. They were just tripping on acid after eating bread made with infected rye. And this is the hypothesis that a lot of people have jumped on to explain what happened in Salem.

So many, in fact, that it  sometimes gets taught in schools. But there’s a lot of evidence that  directly refutes the ergot hypothesis, which is why experts have been  trying to debunk it for a while. Like, basically since Caporael’s paper came out.

Within months of that first ergot paper, a rebuttal was published, also in Science. The authors noted that for one thing, the symptoms of convulsive ergotism don’t actually line up with what people  in Salem were experiencing. Like, if the people of Salem  were getting dosed with ergot, there’s a good reason to  believe that they wouldn’t have gotten the convulsive variety  of ergotism in the first place.

Epidemics of convulsive ergotism typically occur in people who have vitamin A deficiencies. But Vitamin A is found in fish  and dairy, and Salem Village was a farming community, with tons  of cows and, therefore, dairy. And Salem Town was a seaport, so eating fish would have been common, too.

In people without vitamin A  deficiencies, ergotism usually manifests as the gangrenous kind, and  there are no reports of anything remotely like gangrenous ergotism  in Salem around that time. It’s not like the people keeping  records from that period would just forget to mention that their neighbor’s  hand fell off in the town square. And it’s not just the type  of ergotism that doesn’t fit.

Convulsive ergotism includes  other symptoms, like digestive and skin issues that just didn’t  seem widespread in Salem at the time. And then there’s the convulsive part. The historical record definitely  confirms that the girls were convulsing, but it also tells us when  the girls were convulsing.

And they were twitching pretty much on cue. Like, some records say they’d start convulsing when an accused witch would walk near them, or when the accused was told to  look at them in the court room, or even when one of the other  girls would start convulsing. If ergotism was causing the  convulsions, you’d probably expect them to happen after eating rye bread,  not in response to specific events.

And those convulsions weren’t  the only symptom that Caporael attributed to ergotism that  was actually pretty suspicious. The really enticing part of  the ergot hypothesis centers around those hallucinations,  but there’s a big problem. See, not all hallucinations are created equal.

We know what lysergic acid  hallucinations feel like because, not to narc, but some people take LSD on purpose. Or so I hear, anyway. I don’t  know anything about it.

Obviously. Anyway, LSD hallucinations usually aren’t fully formed people or  animals or ghosts or objects, which were what the girls  of Salem reported seeing. LSD hallucinations look more  like auras, moving edges, bright colors, or changes to depth perception.

Plus, the form of lysergic acid  in ergot only has 10% of the activity of LSD, so if anything, the  hallucinations would be even tamer. And the problems with the ergot  hypothesis don’t stop there. We’ve only covered the reasons that an individual's symptoms don’t  match up to real ergotism.

But if you zoom out, things don’t look any better. We can study ergotism like an outbreak,  because essentially, it is one. And like any other outbreak, there’s a common pattern to how ergotism affects a community.

In most convulsive ergotism outbreaks, entire households come down with symptoms, because every member of the family is eating the same bread made with the same infected rye. But in Salem, most afflicted girls were the only ones in their houses to start seeing witches. Children are more susceptible to  convulsive ergotism than adults, so you could argue that maybe this  was just a weak strain of the stuff.

But in that case, we’d expect to see  younger kids getting the sickest. Only one of the afflicted  girls in Salem was under 10, while most of the rest were teenagers. And some of those teens had  younger siblings or other kids living in their homes, and those  younger kids didn’t get sick.

It’s worth remembering that while we call this event the Salem witch trials, the events were not confined  to Salem Town and Village. Witnesses who claimed they had seen witchy things lived in neighboring towns as well. For the ergot theory to hold water, either all of those towns  would have to be getting rye from the same farms, or the  ergot infestation would have had to have spread basically across the North Shore of Massachusetts, which would have left a lot more evidence behind.

So while the ergot theory is  both simple and compelling, the experts pretty much all agree that it’s bunk. Just goes to show that diagnosing  people who’ve all been dead for centuries is hard work, and honestly,  not even worth it a lot of the time. Okay, so it wasn’t ergot.

What really happened to make all of Salem and beyond so paranoid about witches? It turns out that a lot of what happened in Salem, both to the afflicted girls  and the society as a whole, could possibly be explained by a few insights from the world of psychology. Let’s start with the first two afflicted girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams,  who lived in the minister’s house.

Samuel Parris was one of the most  powerful men in Salem Village, and was a fire and brimstone  preacher whose sermons were all about the threat of witches, as  well as a looming war with Satan. Like, literal Satan. And if that’s how he talked in the pulpit, we can only imagine what he  said to his family at home.

That’s a super stressful and probably trauma-inducing environment for two young girls. That stress could have manifested  as functional neurological disorder, sometimes called conversion  disorder, which is a neurological condition that causes seizures,  visual or hearing disruption, paralysis, tremors, and fainting. This is a really tough diagnosis  to make from centuries afar, because in order to diagnose  someone with functional neurological disorder, you  need to rule out any other medical conditions first which  we can’t do at this point.

But most of the symptoms do seem to line up with the fits that Betty and Abigail experienced. Of course, there were more than just  two girls experiencing symptoms, and functional neurological  disorders aren’t terribly common, so it’d be unlikely that every  single afflicted person had one. But they could have been  experiencing a mass panic event, where functional neurological  disorders spread through a population, sometimes to fatal extremes.

The dancing plague of 1518 has been suggested to be a mass panic event. And mass panic events may have  even happened in this century, too. Back in 2011, at least 15 teenagers  in New York all developed tics, twitches, and speech problems, one after another.

After doctors ruled out as many environmental and infectious causes as they could think of, they speculated that the girls were experiencing a functional neurological disorder triggered by social media use and community stress. One girl started experiencing  symptoms, and the rest followed. So some experts have suggested that that’s what happened in Salem, too.

It started with Betty and Abigail,  and then spread to other girls in the town who were also  experiencing their own stressors, like financial difficulties or physical violence. And we can also use psychology  to understand what made the rest of the town so willing  to accept that there were witches in their midst, and  get all murder-y about it. It’s pretty likely that at least  some of the accusers were lying, and made their accusations for selfish reasons.

But that doesn’t tell us why the  rest of the town believed them, enough to arrest and kill people. It’s important to remember that  witchcraft was very real to the people of Colonial New  England, and the people of Salem were primed to accept witchcraft  as a legitimate accusation. They would have heard stories  of witchcraft from other places across Europe, and even a few  closer to home, like the case of Elizabeth Knapp in Groton,  Connecticut 20 years before.

The ministers of Salem preached  a holy war with the devil and everyone knew the kind  of tricks the devil pulled. So in their moral framework at  the time, plenty of people thought that purging the towns of witches was important and even necessary to help the town survive. And that survival may have  seemed far from a given, because Salem was going through it at the time.

The colonists were deep in the  throes of a war with both France and the local indigenous tribes,  and the colonists were tired and traumatized. No word on  how the indigenous people felt. But yeah, taxes had gone up to pay for this war, which kicked off inflation and a rough economy.

That wasn’t helped by the  fact that fishing and lumber exports had also taken a hit, so money was tight. To top it all off, the government for the whole of Massachusetts was in shambles. See, because Governor Phips wasn’t even in Massachusetts when the whole situation kicked off, the colony had been stuck with an  interim governor for several years.

Laws needed to be rewritten and  courts needed to be recreated, which left a lot of towns having to fend for themselves, governmentally speaking. Worst of all, church attendance  in Massachusetts was down, spurring some religious  animosity in the community. So there were spiritual,  political, and economic tensions.

Basically, the area was a powder keg. Throughout history and across  cultures, people have believed that some misfortunes are caused by  people wielding magic for evil. And there’s plenty of evidence that witch hunts spike during periods of social upheaval.

Anthropological research indicates  that accusations of witchcraft go up when people are looking for someone  to blame for their misfortunes. In other words, when they’re  looking for scapegoats. In 2012, psychologists at the University of Kansas proposed that scapegoating serves a few purposes.

For one, it can make people feel like they’re in control of a bad situation. By blaming someone else and punishing them for it, they’re taking an active role  in protecting their community. I mean, that’s what they think they’re doing.

It should be obvious that  blaming certain subgroups of people for what’s wrong in your community is….. Shall we say, counter-productive. The second benefit to a scapegoat  is that blaming other people for their woes allows the accusers to shift fault away from themselves and onto someone else.

It’s sort of like projection. I don’t have to take  responsibility for my part in a situation because those other people did it. It’s protective for the individual  and it facilitates community, as long as you’re in the in-group.

Unfortunately, we’ll likely never  know exactly what happened in Salem. In part, that’s because so much time has passed and historical diagnosis isn’t always helpful. But historians also agree that  there were probably multiple causes.

Some accusers might have  been experiencing functional neurological disorder, others might  have had other physical illnesses, others were lying, and the  town was in such a volatile state that this one straw broke the camel’s back. Which is a lot less satisfying of an answer than “girls were tripping after eating LSD bread”. And if you think about it, the  widespread acceptance of that hypothesis has become a bit of  a scapegoat in its own right.

The hysteria and paranoia that gripped the people in Salem couldn’t ever happen to us. We can protect ourselves from ergot. We would never be so misled that we’d turn on our neighbors or friends for our  own self interests… right?

But it’s important to remember  that anyone can be vulnerable to the social and contextual factors that  lead to this kind of scapegoating. Even if you are not so big on rye bread. [♪OUTRO]