Fungus and Salem

Ok, here's something tht I saw a few years back, on PBS.

The hysteria in Salem may have been caused by food poisioning:

Caporael, now a behavioral psychologist at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, soon noticed a link between the strange symptoms reported by Salem's accusers, chiefly eight young women, and the hallucinogenic effects of drugs like '___'. '___' is a derivative of ergot, a fungus that affects rye grain. Ergotism -- ergot poisoning -- had indeed been implicated in other outbreaks of bizarre behavior, such as the one that afflicted the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

www.pbs.org...

Might interest some of you...

I once saw a documentary that was talking about that very same thing. The fungus was growing in with the wheat. Wen the villagers grinded up the wheat to make flour to make bread, they are grinding up the fungus as well. So wen they ate the products, produced using this flour, they had "bad trips" from the lsd-like substance (the fungus) which was present. And were subsequently thought to be possessed by demons or the like.