The Rye Fungus That May Have Made the Salem Girls Convulse in 1692

In April 1976 the Science journal published a four-page paper by Linnda R. Caporael, then a graduate student at the University of California Santa Barbara, titled “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?” The paper proposed a specific medical-environmental explanation for the convulsions, hallucinations, and bodily contortions that the accusing girls of Salem Village displayed in winter and spring 1692: they were suffering from convulsive ergotism, caused by eating bread made from rye contaminated with the fungus Claviceps purpurea.

The paper has been argued about ever since. The argument is unsettled. The ergot theory is currently the leading non-supernatural explanation in the popular and undergraduate medical-history literature; the leading academic-historiographical view treats it as substantially overstated; the leading modern theory of the Salem episode (Mary Beth Norton’s 2002 In the Devil’s Snare) attributes the crisis primarily to the political-psychological pressure of contemporary frontier warfare with French-allied Native American forces, with the accusers’ physical symptoms an MPI episode triggered by sustained collective stress.

What ergotism is

The fungus Claviceps purpurea infects rye and several other cereal grasses under specific climate conditions — cool, wet springs followed by warm, moist summers. The infected grain contains a set of toxic alkaloid compounds (ergotamine, ergometrine, and related substances) that are chemically related to LSD and produce a defined clinical syndrome when ingested.

The syndrome has two recognised forms. Convulsive ergotism produces convulsions, hallucinations, the sensation of being burned or pierced (“Saint Anthony’s fire”), and various other neurological symptoms. Gangrenous ergotism produces vasoconstriction so severe that fingers, toes, and eventually whole limbs become gangrenous and fall off. Both forms have been epidemic in medieval and early-modern Europe in periods of contaminated grain supply; both are essentially extinct in modern industrial agriculture because modern grain processing removes the ergot bodies before milling.

The convulsive form fits some of the documented Salem accusers’ symptoms — particularly the convulsions, the visual hallucinations, and the reports of burning sensations on the skin. The fit is partial; not every symptom matches, and not every accuser had every symptom.

What Caporael argued

Caporael’s 1976 paper made three specific claims:

The 1691 New England summer climate (cool, wet) was consistent with ergot proliferation in the late-summer rye harvest.

The Salem Village agricultural records show the affected families ate substantially rye-based bread (rather than the wheat-based bread of the more prosperous Salem Town households).

The accusing girls’ specific symptoms — convulsions, the “spectres,” the visions of being bitten, the sensation of being squeezed or stuck with pins — match the convulsive-ergotism symptom complex documented in subsequent medical case-histories.

The paper concluded that ergotism was the medical-environmental trigger of the accusations and that the trials themselves were the consequence of a misinterpretation of the medical symptoms within the Puritan demonological framework.

What the historians answered

The historiographical response was mixed and progressive. The immediate 1976–1982 academic reception was substantially skeptical: the historian Nicholas Spanos and the psychologist Jack Gottlieb published a 1976 Science response (later expanded as Spanos’s 1983 paper in Psychological Bulletin) arguing that several specific features of the Salem episode — particularly the geographic restriction of the accusations to specific families with specific pre-existing community feuds, and the time-course of the accusations (running from January through October without the symptom-reduction during the late-summer non-rye-eating period that the ergot theory predicts) — could not be explained by ergotism.

The historian Mary Matossian published a partial defense of the Caporael theory in her 1989 book Poisons of the Past, arguing that the ergot hypothesis was consistent with a wider 16th- and 17th-century European pattern of witchcraft accusations correlating with cool-wet climate years suitable for ergot growth. Matossian’s broader European-historical argument has been substantially better-received than Caporael’s specific Salem claim.

The dominant modern academic view, formalised in Mary Beth Norton’s 2002 In the Devil’s Snare, treats the Salem crisis primarily as a political-psychological event in which the contemporary Massachusetts frontier wars with French-allied Wabanaki Native American forces created sustained collective stress in the Salem Village community. Norton’s account treats the accusers’ symptoms as broadly MPI-like (without using the term explicitly), with the specific accusations shaped by the demonological-religious vocabulary of late Puritan New England rather than by any specific chemical exposure.

What the Salem trials actually were

Whatever the proximate cause of the accusers’ symptoms, the institutional event the symptoms produced is well-documented. Between January 1692 and the final dissolution of the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October 1692, approximately 200 people were accused of witchcraft across Essex County, Massachusetts. Approximately 30 were convicted. Nineteen were hanged between 10 June and 22 September 1692 (the most famous victims included Bridget Bishop, the first to die; Rebecca Nurse; and the Reverend George Burroughs). Giles Corey was pressed to death on 19 September 1692 — the only documented case of peine forte et dure in American history — for refusing to enter a plea. Several additional accused died in prison awaiting trial.

The trials were halted by Governor William Phips in October 1692 after his own wife was accused. The convictions were progressively reversed over the following decade by the Massachusetts colonial government, and substantial financial restitution was paid to the families of the executed in 1711. The Reverend Samuel Parris — the Salem Village minister whose daughter Betty had been among the first accusers — was forced out of his position in 1697 after a sustained community split.

The episode is the most studied single instance of large-scale witchcraft accusation in American history. It produced approximately 20 deaths, the institutional discrediting of spectral evidence (testimony about visions of accused individuals’ spirits) in American colonial courts, and the extended late-Puritan religious-political reflection in works like Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) and Robert Calef’s More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).

The medical-historical question of whether the original accusers were poisoned by their bread has continued to attract attention partly because the implications of the alternative explanations are unsettling. If ergotism was the trigger, the Salem trials were a tragic environmental misfortune that a better contemporary medical understanding could have prevented. If MPI plus political-religious stress was the trigger, the trials reveal a recurring pattern of judicially-administered violence under demographic-political pressure that no medical intervention could have prevented and that subsequent communities under comparable pressure have repeatedly reproduced. The Württemberg witch trials of the same century, with their substantially better-documented bureaucratic procedure and their approximately 350 executions, suggest the second pattern is the more common one.