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0:00Salem is a small, charming city on
the North Shore of Massachusetts.
0:04You may know it from The House of Seven Gables,
0:06or from the movie Hocus Pocus.
0:07But I’m betting more of you
know it from the witch trials.
0:10Townspeople turned against each other,
0:12accusing friends and neighbors of witchcraft.
0:14In the end, at least 25 people died.
0:17And there’s an idea that the
whole witch panic happened because
0:20at least half the town was tripping on acid thanks
0:23to a fungus on their rye called
ergot, which explains their
0:26hallucinations, paranoia, and everything else.
0:29It’s a simple, satisfying explanation.
And it’s completely wrong.
0:34Experts have said for years
that the ergot hypothesis
0:36doesn’t make any sense, based on a ton of data.
0:39So, what really happened? Let’s get into it.
0:46The events we now call Salem Witch Trials
0:47began in 1692, in Salem Village.
0:50The local reverend’s daughter
and niece, 9-year-old Elizabeth,
0:52aka Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams
0:55started having strange fits.
0:57They’d scream, spasm, contort their bodies
1:00in bizarre ways, and even throw things.
1:03Soon after, 12-year-old Ann Putnam started
1:05experiencing the same symptoms.
1:07The girls blamed three people: Tituba,
1:09an enslaved Caribbean woman
in the Parris household,
1:12Sarah Good, a homeless woman,
1:14and Sarah Osborne, a poor woman in town.
1:16And if you’re catching on to a
similarity in social status of
1:19these three accused women,
well, you’re onto something.
1:21After several days of
interrogations, Good and Osborne
1:24maintained their innocence, but
Tituba later confessed to seeing
1:28visions and agreeing to serve
the devil by signing his book.
1:30She also said there were several
other witches in Salem Village.
1:34That set off a series of accusations, primarily
1:36coming from a group of preteen and teenage girls.
1:39Anyone accused was hauled in for
questioning by the local authorities,
1:42and if they didn’t like what you had
to say, it was off to jail with you.
1:46No one was safe, from social outcasts
1:48to hoi polloi, senior citizens to children.
1:51And I do mean children.
1:52The youngest person to be
arrested was Dorothy Good,
1:55who at the time of her arrest was four years old.
1:58The accusations didn’t stop at the borders of
2:00Salem Village, although that was the epicenter.
2:03Trials and executions
happened in nearby Salem Town,
2:06which is a different place from Salem Village,
2:08as well as Amesbury, Andover,
Marblehead, Peabody, and Topsfield.
2:12Also, here’s a fun fact:
2:13The place we call Salem today is
Salem Town, not Salem Village.
2:17Salem Village is now called Danvers,
2:19but The Danvers Witch Trials just
doesn’t have the same ring to it.
2:22So people are getting accused left and right,
2:24then chucked into their towns’ jails.
2:26But the governor was in England
at the start of all this,
2:29and because of weird colony laws,
2:31they weren't allowed to have
any trials until he got back.
2:33Eventually, Governor William Phips
2:35arrived in Massachusetts in May of 1692,
2:38and basically his first action when
he got off the boat was to convene
2:41an emergency court to take all
these witches in the jails to trial.
2:45During the trials, the allegedly
curse-afflicted girls would cry out,
2:49convulse, and report sensations of being
2:51choked, pinched, bitten, or stuck with pins.
2:54They even reported seeing
evil spirits in the room.
2:57A total of nineteen people
were found guilty of witchcraft
3:00and sent to the gallows, and one
man who’d refused to participate
3:03in the whole thing was pressed
to death under heavy stones.
3:06The witch hunt finally came to
an end after Phips walked the
3:09whole thing back in October, in
response to a local minister.
3:12Also, the governor’s wife got
accused of witchcraft, which may
3:15have helped him come to the decision
that the trials should stop.
3:18Phips forbade any further arrests,
dissolved the special court,
3:21and pardoned everyone still
imprisoned for witchcraft
3:23by the end of 1693. Well,
everyone that was still alive.
3:27By the time it was over, more
than 200 people had been accused,
3:3120 had been executed, and five died in prison.
3:34Looking back from the modern era, it’s hard
3:36to fathom how something like this could happen.
3:38So it makes sense that a lot of
people, from a lot of disciplines,
3:42would spend a lot of time studying the events.
3:44And that’s where fungus comes in.
3:46But before we get to that, all science needs funding,
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4:34In 1976, a psychology graduate student at the
4:37University of California Santa Barbara named
4:39Linnda Caporael published a
paper in the journal Science
4:42proposing an entirely novel cause
of the 1692 witch hunts: Ergot.
4:47Ergot is a fungal disease that
infects grains, particularly rye.
4:51When a plant is infected with
ergot, it releases a yellow mucus,
4:54and then strands of the that form
dark balls on the head of the grain.
4:57The rye field gets harvested,
the fungus balls end up
5:00mixed in with the healthy
grain kernels, and a farmer
5:03may never even notice there was a problem.
5:05Which is bad, because eating
the infected grains can cause
5:08a condition called ergotism, also sometimes
5:10known as Saint Anthony’s
Fire, which sounds way cooler.
5:13There are two types of ergotism:
gangrenous and convulsive.
5:17Gangrenous ergotism results in,
you guessed it, gangrene, which can
5:21eventually lead to limbs falling
off the affected areas of the body.
5:24Convulsive ergotism, on the
other hand, results in crawling
5:27sensations on the skin, ringing
ears, dizziness, headaches,
5:30hallucinations, vomiting,
diarrhea, and, well, convulsions.
5:34Those powerful hallucinations
are caused by a few different
5:37compounds in ergot, but the most
relevant is called lysergic acid,
5:41which is just a hop skip and
a jump away from the drug LSD.
5:44Which is what Caporael suggests
led to the witch hunts.
5:47See, according to Caporael,
the afflicted girls weren’t
5:50making up seeing spirits flying around the room.
5:52They actually thought they saw them,
5:54thanks to ergot-induced hallucinations.
5:56Those phantom feelings of being
choked were the constriction of
6:00muscles common in ergot poisoning,
and that skin crawling and being
6:03poked with pins could also be
explained by tripping on lysergic acid.
6:08Plus, ergot infection is more
common in grains after cool,
6:11rainy springs and summers,
and in the summer of 1692
6:14in Massachusetts, that’s exactly what they got.
6:17Caporael’s paper also noted that
four of the accusers lived in
6:20the Putnam house, which meant that they all
6:23could have eaten the same contaminated bread.
6:25In fact, the paper stated that all but two of
6:27the accusers either lived in the same part of town
6:30or would likely have been
eating bread from the same area.
6:33Most of the accused witches
and those defending them,
6:35on the other hand, lived
on the other side of town.
6:37An outbreak of ergot in the western
fields is roughly consistent
6:40with who the accusers were and who they accused.
6:43So basically, this paper posits that the
6:46accusers weren’t lying about what they felt.
6:48They were just tripping on acid after
6:50eating bread made with infected rye.
6:52And this is the hypothesis that a lot of people
6:54have jumped on to explain what happened in Salem.
6:57So many, in fact, that it
sometimes gets taught in schools.
7:00But there’s a lot of evidence that
directly refutes the ergot hypothesis,
7:05which is why experts have been
trying to debunk it for a while.
7:08Like, basically since Caporael’s paper came out.
7:10Within months of that first ergot paper,
7:12a rebuttal was published, also in Science.
7:15The authors noted that for one thing,
7:17the symptoms of convulsive ergotism don’t actually
7:20line up with what people
in Salem were experiencing.
7:22Like, if the people of Salem
were getting dosed with ergot,
7:25there’s a good reason to
believe that they wouldn’t have
7:27gotten the convulsive variety
of ergotism in the first place.
7:30Epidemics of convulsive ergotism typically occur
7:32in people who have vitamin A deficiencies.
7:35But Vitamin A is found in fish
and dairy, and Salem Village was
7:38a farming community, with tons
of cows and, therefore, dairy.
7:42And Salem Town was a seaport,
7:43so eating fish would have been common, too.
7:45In people without vitamin A
deficiencies, ergotism usually manifests
7:49as the gangrenous kind, and
there are no reports of anything
7:52remotely like gangrenous ergotism
in Salem around that time.
7:55It’s not like the people keeping
records from that period would just
7:57forget to mention that their neighbor’s
hand fell off in the town square.
8:01And it’s not just the type
of ergotism that doesn’t fit.
8:04Convulsive ergotism includes
other symptoms, like digestive
8:07and skin issues that just didn’t
seem widespread in Salem at the time.
8:11And then there’s the convulsive part.
8:12The historical record definitely
confirms that the girls were convulsing,
8:16but it also tells us when
the girls were convulsing.
8:19And they were twitching pretty much on cue.
8:21Like, some records say they’d start convulsing
8:23when an accused witch would walk near them,
8:26or when the accused was told to
look at them in the court room,
8:29or even when one of the other
girls would start convulsing.
8:31If ergotism was causing the
convulsions, you’d probably expect them
8:35to happen after eating rye bread,
not in response to specific events.
8:39And those convulsions weren’t
the only symptom that Caporael
8:42attributed to ergotism that
was actually pretty suspicious.
8:44The really enticing part of
the ergot hypothesis centers
8:48around those hallucinations,
but there’s a big problem.
8:51See, not all hallucinations are created equal.
8:54We know what lysergic acid
hallucinations feel like because,
8:57not to narc, but some people take LSD on purpose.
9:00Or so I hear, anyway. I don’t
know anything about it. Obviously.
9:03Anyway, LSD hallucinations usually aren’t
9:06fully formed people or
animals or ghosts or objects,
9:09which were what the girls
of Salem reported seeing.
9:11LSD hallucinations look more
like auras, moving edges,
9:15bright colors, or changes to depth perception.
9:17Plus, the form of lysergic acid
in ergot only has 10% of the
9:22activity of LSD, so if anything, the
hallucinations would be even tamer.
9:26And the problems with the ergot
hypothesis don’t stop there.
9:29We’ve only covered the reasons that an
9:30individual's symptoms don’t
match up to real ergotism.
9:33But if you zoom out, things don’t look any better.
9:36We can study ergotism like an outbreak,
because essentially, it is one.
9:39And like any other outbreak, there’s a common
9:41pattern to how ergotism affects a community.
9:44In most convulsive ergotism outbreaks,
9:46entire households come down with symptoms,
9:48because every member of the family is eating
9:50the same bread made with the same infected rye.
9:53But in Salem, most afflicted girls were the only
9:55ones in their houses to start seeing witches.
9:57Children are more susceptible to
convulsive ergotism than adults,
10:01so you could argue that maybe this
was just a weak strain of the stuff.
10:05But in that case, we’d expect to see
younger kids getting the sickest.
10:09Only one of the afflicted
girls in Salem was under 10,
10:12while most of the rest were teenagers.
10:13And some of those teens had
younger siblings or other kids
10:16living in their homes, and those
younger kids didn’t get sick.
10:20It’s worth remembering that while we
10:21call this event the Salem witch trials,
10:24the events were not confined
to Salem Town and Village.
10:27Witnesses who claimed they had seen
10:29witchy things lived in neighboring towns as well.
10:31For the ergot theory to hold water,
10:33either all of those towns
would have to be getting rye
10:35from the same farms, or the
ergot infestation would have
10:39had to have spread basically across the
10:41North Shore of Massachusetts,
10:43which would have left a lot more evidence behind.
10:45So while the ergot theory is
both simple and compelling,
10:48the experts pretty much all agree that it’s bunk.
10:51Just goes to show that diagnosing
people who’ve all been dead for
10:54centuries is hard work, and honestly,
not even worth it a lot of the time.
10:59Okay, so it wasn’t ergot.
11:01What really happened to make all of Salem
11:03and beyond so paranoid about witches?
11:05It turns out that a lot of what happened in Salem,
11:08both to the afflicted girls
and the society as a whole,
11:11could possibly be explained by a few
11:13insights from the world of psychology.
11:14Let’s start with the first two afflicted girls,
11:17Betty Parris and Abigail Williams,
who lived in the minister’s house.
11:20Samuel Parris was one of the most
powerful men in Salem Village,
11:23and was a fire and brimstone
preacher whose sermons were all
11:26about the threat of witches, as
well as a looming war with Satan.
11:29Like, literal Satan.
11:31And if that’s how he talked in the pulpit,
11:32we can only imagine what he
said to his family at home.
11:35That’s a super stressful and probably
11:37trauma-inducing environment for two young girls.
11:39That stress could have manifested
as functional neurological disorder,
11:43sometimes called conversion
disorder, which is a neurological
11:46condition that causes seizures,
visual or hearing disruption,
11:49paralysis, tremors, and fainting.
11:51This is a really tough diagnosis
to make from centuries afar,
11:54because in order to diagnose
someone with functional
11:57neurological disorder, you
need to rule out any other
12:00medical conditions first which
we can’t do at this point.
12:03But most of the symptoms do seem to line up
12:05with the fits that Betty and Abigail experienced.
12:07Of course, there were more than just
two girls experiencing symptoms,
12:10and functional neurological
disorders aren’t terribly common,
12:14so it’d be unlikely that every
single afflicted person had one.
12:17But they could have been
experiencing a mass panic event,
12:20where functional neurological
disorders spread through a population,
12:23sometimes to fatal extremes.
12:25The dancing plague of 1518 has been
12:27suggested to be a mass panic event.
12:29And mass panic events may have
even happened in this century, too.
12:32Back in 2011, at least 15 teenagers
in New York all developed tics,
12:36twitches, and speech problems, one after another.
12:39After doctors ruled out as many environmental
12:41and infectious causes as they could think of,
12:43they speculated that the girls were experiencing
12:46a functional neurological disorder triggered
12:48by social media use and community stress.
12:50One girl started experiencing
symptoms, and the rest followed.
12:53So some experts have suggested that
12:54that’s what happened in Salem, too.
12:56It started with Betty and Abigail,
and then spread to other girls
12:59in the town who were also
experiencing their own stressors,
13:02like financial difficulties or physical violence.
13:05And we can also use psychology
to understand what made
13:08the rest of the town so willing
to accept that there were
13:10witches in their midst, and
get all murder-y about it.
13:13It’s pretty likely that at least
some of the accusers were lying,
13:16and made their accusations for selfish reasons.
13:19But that doesn’t tell us why the
rest of the town believed them,
13:22enough to arrest and kill people.
13:24It’s important to remember that
witchcraft was very real to
13:27the people of Colonial New
England, and the people of Salem
13:30were primed to accept witchcraft
as a legitimate accusation.
13:33They would have heard stories
of witchcraft from other places
13:35across Europe, and even a few
closer to home, like the case of
13:39Elizabeth Knapp in Groton,
Connecticut 20 years before.
13:42The ministers of Salem preached
a holy war with the devil
13:44and everyone knew the kind
of tricks the devil pulled.
13:47So in their moral framework at
the time, plenty of people thought
13:51that purging the towns of witches was important
13:53and even necessary to help the town survive.
13:56And that survival may have
seemed far from a given,
13:59because Salem was going through it at the time.
14:01The colonists were deep in the
throes of a war with both France
14:04and the local indigenous tribes,
and the colonists were tired
14:07and traumatized. No word on
how the indigenous people felt.
14:11But yeah, taxes had gone up to pay for this war,
14:14which kicked off inflation and a rough economy.
14:16That wasn’t helped by the
fact that fishing and lumber
14:19exports had also taken a hit, so money was tight.
14:22To top it all off, the government for the
14:24whole of Massachusetts was in shambles.
14:26See, because Governor Phips wasn’t even in
14:29Massachusetts when the whole situation kicked off,
14:31the colony had been stuck with an
interim governor for several years.
14:35Laws needed to be rewritten and
courts needed to be recreated,
14:38which left a lot of towns having to fend
14:40for themselves, governmentally speaking.
14:42Worst of all, church attendance
in Massachusetts was down,
14:45spurring some religious
animosity in the community.
14:47So there were spiritual,
political, and economic tensions.
14:51Basically, the area was a powder keg.
14:53Throughout history and across
cultures, people have believed that
14:56some misfortunes are caused by
people wielding magic for evil.
14:59And there’s plenty of evidence that witch
15:00hunts spike during periods of social upheaval.
15:03Anthropological research indicates
that accusations of witchcraft go up
15:07when people are looking for someone
to blame for their misfortunes.
15:10In other words, when they’re
looking for scapegoats.
15:12In 2012, psychologists at the University of Kansas
15:15proposed that scapegoating serves a few purposes.
15:17For one, it can make people feel like
15:19they’re in control of a bad situation.
15:21By blaming someone else and punishing them for it,
15:23they’re taking an active role
in protecting their community.
15:26I mean, that’s what they think they’re doing.
15:28It should be obvious that
blaming certain subgroups
15:30of people for what’s wrong in your community is…..
15:33Shall we say, counter-productive.
15:35The second benefit to a scapegoat
is that blaming other people for
15:38their woes allows the accusers to shift fault
15:40away from themselves and onto someone else.
15:42It’s sort of like projection.
15:44I don’t have to take
responsibility for my part in
15:46a situation because those other people did it.
15:48It’s protective for the individual
and it facilitates community,
15:51as long as you’re in the in-group.
15:53Unfortunately, we’ll likely never
know exactly what happened in Salem.
15:56In part, that’s because so much time has passed
15:59and historical diagnosis isn’t always helpful.
16:01But historians also agree that
there were probably multiple causes.
16:04Some accusers might have
been experiencing functional
16:07neurological disorder, others might
have had other physical illnesses,
16:10others were lying, and the
town was in such a volatile
16:13state that this one straw broke the camel’s back.
16:16Which is a lot less satisfying of an answer
16:18than “girls were tripping after eating LSD bread”.
16:21And if you think about it, the
widespread acceptance of that
16:23hypothesis has become a bit of
a scapegoat in its own right.
16:26The hysteria and paranoia that gripped
16:28the people in Salem couldn’t ever happen to us.
16:31We can protect ourselves from ergot.
16:33We would never be so misled that we’d turn on our
16:35neighbors or friends for our
own self interests… right?
16:38But it’s important to remember
that anyone can be vulnerable to
16:41the social and contextual factors that
lead to this kind of scapegoating.
16:45Even if you are not so big on rye bread.
