Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson, joint day by staff writer Josh Clark.
Speaker 1: How's it going, Josh? Going pretty well? How are you, Candide?
Speaker 1: I'm doing great. I was just listening to one of
Speaker 1: my favorite albums of all time, Pink Floyd Dark Side
Speaker 1: of the Moon, and I'm really pretty mellow. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: far out because my question today actually has to do
Speaker 1: with LSD, which, as I understand, is a great accompaniment
Speaker 1: to Dark Side of the Moon. I wouldn't know that. Indeed,
Speaker 1: it actually has to do with, strangely enough, the Salem
Speaker 1: Witchcraft Trials, if you can believe it. That's really weird.
Speaker 1: What can colonial Salem have to do with a bad
Speaker 1: ascid trap? Well, I'll tell you, okay, So let me
Speaker 1: set the scene. It's Salem, Massachusetts. There's about five people
Speaker 1: living in in Salem Colony at the time, and things
Speaker 1: are really starting to go awry. They are, And just
Speaker 1: to bring everybody up to speed, this is a settlement
Speaker 1: that was founded on Puritan ideal. So we're supposed to
Speaker 1: be a new eat in a very religious place and
Speaker 1: then it seemed like the devil had been set loose
Speaker 1: on this village. The smallpox outbreak attacks from Indian born nearby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and basically the kids weren't adhering quite as much to
Speaker 1: the rules that the adults had hoped for. They were,
Speaker 1: you know, American born children of immigrants, and you know
Speaker 1: how crazy they can be. And if you thought Paris
Speaker 1: Hilton's antics were bad, Elizabeth Parris was an entirely different story.
Speaker 1: Now she's the twelve year old daughter of the new minister,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden one day she comes down
Speaker 1: with this weird mania. She's throwing herself around the room.
Speaker 1: She's marking like a dog, complaining of being bitten um
Speaker 1: and pinched by unseen forces. So they bring the doctor,
Speaker 1: and the doctor reaches the extent of his medical knowledge apparently,
Speaker 1: and pronounces the girl under the influence of witchcraft. So
Speaker 1: at this point all fingers point to Chichiba, who's a
Speaker 1: Barbadian born sleigh end. Then when she denyes having any
Speaker 1: hand in this, what happens to the town? Well, actually
Speaker 1: they pressed her and she eventually confessed bafflingly enough, but uh,
Speaker 1: other people started having fingers pointed at him and next
Speaker 1: thing you know, ipso facto, nineteen people are hung and dead. Now,
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about is a theory um that this
Speaker 1: was actually the result of an ascid trip, that the
Speaker 1: colonists were under the influence of drugs. Is that fact
Speaker 1: or fiction? Oh, I'm on the fence about this one.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go with a little bit fact, a
Speaker 1: little bit fiction. There's a historian named Linda Caparell who
Speaker 1: posed the theory that these girls suffered from something called
Speaker 1: ergot poisoning. And ergot essentially is the type of mold
Speaker 1: that grows on grains like rye, and it can affect
Speaker 1: your body. And there's two basic types, gangrenus, which causes
Speaker 1: dry rotting limbs and blisters on your skin and itching,
Speaker 1: burning skin. And then the other type is called convulsive urgetism.
Speaker 1: And that's a lot like the symptoms Elizabeth Paris had
Speaker 1: with the mania and the psychosis, working like a dog,
Speaker 1: barking like a dog. And here's the crazy thing, and
Speaker 1: that's that no matter how much you refine the grain
Speaker 1: on which this mold grows, even if you refine it
Speaker 1: down into bread, you can still get this type of poisoning.
Speaker 1: It's possible that this is what caused the Salem witchcraft trust.
Speaker 1: It's definitely one contender in the realm of possibility, and
Speaker 1: now it's hard to believe. Well, if you want to
Speaker 1: learn more about it, you can check out where the
Speaker 1: American colonists drug during the Salem witchcraft trial on how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com,
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