Dark Magic or Moldy Rye?

In January 1692, two young girls in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris began to convulse. They screamed at unseen things, contorted their bodies, complained that their skin was crawling and being pricked with pins. Within months, the affliction had spread, the accusations had begun, and twenty people would be executed.

In 1976, a graduate student in behavioral psychology named Linnda Caporael published a paper in Science magazine that quietly reframed the entire affair. Her diagnosis was not the Devil and not hysteria. It was Claviceps purpurea — ergot, the fungus that grows on rye in cold, wet seasons. The fungus from which Albert Hofmann would later synthesize LSD.

The symptoms match the spores

Ergot poisoning, called ergotism, comes in two flavors: gangrenous (which rots the limbs) and convulsive. The convulsive form produces exactly what the Salem records describe — muscle spasms, the sensation of crawling skin, vomiting, and vivid, terrifying hallucinations. The afflicted girls in Salem lived on the western, low-lying, marshy edge of the village, where rye crops would be most exposed. The previous spring had been unusually wet. The accusations stopped, suddenly, with the next dry harvest.

“The possibility exists that ergot was a factor in the Salem witchcraft crisis.”

A theory still arguing with itself

Historians have pushed back. Not all symptoms fit. Social tension, property disputes, and religious extremism were real and explanatory on their own. But Caporael's paper did something the witch trials had resisted for nearly three centuries — it offered a way to read the afflicted girls as something other than liars or saints. They may simply have been poisoned.