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Ergot poisoning: History, causes, symptoms, and more

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Ergot poisoning occurs when a person eats contaminated grains or bread, such as rye. It occurs due to the growth of a toxic fungus.

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The enduring mystery surrounding the lost colony of Roanoke is one that has captivated people for centuries. Established 20 years before Jamestown, the colony on Roanoke Island in modern-day North Carolina set out to be the first permanent English settlement in North America. Instead, the colony was discovered abandoned only three years after its founding, with no trace of its former inhabitants.

Over the years, there have been many theories put forward about what happened to the Roanoke colonists, some more plausible than others. But to this day, definitive answers remain elusive.
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The story of Roanoke began in 1584, when explorer Sir Walter Raleigh asked Queen Elizabeth I's permission to establish a colony in the New World. She quickly granted him permission, since an English presence in North America would provide a strategic passage to the West Indies. He sent out a reconnaissance expedition later that year, which reported back that Roanoke Island was well-suited for a colony. It was on the water, had plenty of resources, and the local Native American tribes seemed peaceful and friendly.

Encouraged by the first expedition's findings, Raleigh arranged a much larger expedition that set sail in 1585. This time he sent around 600 soldiers and seamen under the command of his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville. This expedition did not go as well as the previous one. Conflict soon arose between the Englishmen and the members of the local Secotan tribe, and the settlers fled back to Europe in 1586.

Related: These Native American History Books Shed New Light on the Past and Present

Still, Raleigh was determined to make his settlement work, and in the summer of 1587, over 100 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island. The group was made up of approximately 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children. Among them was John White, who was to be the governor of the colony. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter, Eleanor Dare. In August, Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas.

Only a few months after the settlers arrived, they found themselves in desperate need of supplies. It was decided that White would sail back to England and return with the things they needed. However, once he arrived there, he found that war had broken out between England and Spain. In order to combat the formidable Spanish armada, Queen Elizabeth ordered that every ship available be conscripted into the fight.

John White was unable to return to Roanoke until 1590, three years after his departure. But when he arrived, he found no trace of the colony or the family that he'd left behind. All that remained was the word "Croatoan" carved into a gatepost and "Cro" etched into a nearby tree. The Roanoke colonists were never seen again, and White never learned what happened to them.

One of the oldest and most popular theories about the fate of the missing colonists is closely linked to the carvings left behind at the Roanoke site. Croatoan Island-known today as Hatteras Island-was 50 miles south of the settlement. Many people believe that the carvings were a message left behind by the colonists to tell White where they'd gone. Perhaps the colonists had failed to carve out an existence at their settlement, and had decided to try their luck elsewhere.

It's widely accepted that Croatoan Island played some part in the fate of the colonists, but to what extent is still the subject of debate. Upon learning that the colonists had abandoned Roanoke, White immediately wanted to sail to Croatoan Island to investigate, but damage to the ship forced him to turn back to England before the rescue mission could be completed.

Related: Demystifying the "Indian Wars", a Complex Series of Conflicts
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Another theory is that the settlers were struggling to survive, so they broke into smaller groups and dispersed to different areas throughout what is now North Carolina. With dwindling supplies, historian Eric Klingelhofer argued that it was not likely that the Roanoke colonists would have traveled anywhere as one big group: "No single Indian tribe or village could have supported them. They would be even larger than some villages." The members of the 1585 expedition had been instructed to break off into smaller groups in the event of an emergency, so maybe the Roanoke colonists had a similar plan in place.

In 2011, researchers discovered patches on a map of the area drawn by John White. When scientists at the British Museum examined the patches, they found a small red and blue symbol drawn at the mouth of the Chowan River west of the colony. Could this strange symbol have indicated a secret emergency location or fort that was to be kept hidden from foreign agents? What if some of the settlers headed there? Archeological excavations have uncovered evidence of a colonial settlement in the area. However, it has been difficult to prove that this settlement was established prior to the 1700s.

If the colonists did voluntarily flee their settlement, most scholars agree that they would have sought the help of Native Americans. Another popular theory is that the colonists developed a friendly relationship with some of the indigenous people living in the area. As time went on and it became clear that outside help would not be arriving, they eventually became integrated into local tribes.

Related: The Mapuche People's Centuries-Long Resistance Against the Spanish

Artifacts that are clearly European in origin and were not the type of objects usually involved in trading have been found at various Native American sites in the region. Plus, there were rumors that people with European features were spotted among Native American tribes in the area in subsequent decades. In 2007, efforts began to collect and analyze DNA from local people to see if they had any relation to the Roanoke settlers, but so far it appears that the project hasn't made headway.

While there are several theories that presume the colonists voluntarily left Roanoke and simply lived elsewhere in obscurity, there are others that consider a much grislier fate. As the only English settlement on the continent, and comprised of families rather than the military, the inhabitants of Roanoke were vulnerable to attack. Earlier expeditions to the site to check its suitability for a settlement had already stirred up conflict with the Secotan tribe. Perhaps the colonists were massacred in a face-off with local Native Americans who were resentful of the settlers' presence and the disruption of their way of life.

There's also a possibility that Spanish forces traveled north from their territories in Florida and slaughtered the colonists during the ongoing tension between the two imperialist powers. Whatever the case may be, researchers are still searching for answers all these years later.

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In 1587, the colony of Roanoke was established in what is now North Carolina. By 1590, its 100 or so inhabitants had disappeared, leaving their fate an enduring mystery.

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The origins of one of America's oldest unsolved mysteries can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Following an earlier, failed attempt at settlement on Roanoke two years earlier, these colonists intended to form the first permanent English outpost in the New World.

John White's Departure and the Spanish Armada

Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship to confront the mighty Spanish Armada.

In August 1590, White finally returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have happened, apart from a single word-"Croatoan"-carved into a wooden post.

Was the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke Ever Found?

Investigations into the fate of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke have continued over the centuries, but no one has come up with a satisfactory answer. "Croatoan" was the name of an island south of Roanoke that was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Perhaps, then, the colonists were killed or abducted by Native Americans.

Other hypotheses hold that they tried to sail back to England on their own and got lost at sea, that they met a bloody end at the hands of Spaniards who had marched up from Florida or that they moved further inland and were absorbed into a friendly tribe.

In 2007, efforts began to collect and analyze DNA from local families to figure out if they're related to the Roanoke settlers, local Native American tribes or both. Despite the lingering mystery, it seems there's one thing to be thankful for: The lessons learned at Roanoke may have helped the next group of English settlers, who would found their own colony 17 years later just a short distance to the north, at Jamestown.

HISTORY Vault: Roanoke: A Mystery Carved in Stone

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What Happened to the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke? | HISTORY

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The terror began in December 1691 in Salem, Massachusetts. Girls in the village began acting strangely. They spoke with slurred speech and had seizure-like fits. Sometimes they were quiet and melancholy. Other times, they were manic. The first to exhibit odd behavior was Abigail Williams, the 8-year-old niece of the reverend. Her family considered her well-behaved and they were frightened when she cried that someone - who they couldn't see - was pinching and biting her.

Area doctors examined the girls but couldn't explain their sudden hysteria. In February 1692, one of the doctors blamed witchcraft for their afflictions. Frenzied authorities pressed the girls to name the witches who tormented them. Over the next eight months, dozens of villagers were arrested and tried for witchcraft. Twenty people were executed for the crime, as well as two dogs.

These legendary trials have had many explanations : Some historians dismissed the accusers as teenage girls who just wanted attention. Others argued the accusations were part of a financially-driven plot to take over land and resources.

But what if the victims were actually under the influence of tainted grain?

Behavioral psychologist Linnda Caporael first suggested the possibility in 1976 when she was a doctoral student in psychology. She argued the summer of 1691 had been wet and hospitable for , a type of fungus that grows on grain - typically rye - in wet conditions. The fungus, Claviceps purpurea , resembles grain when it grows on the crop. Until the 1800s, farmers assumed it was part of the plant and they put it through the mill without realizing it was a toxic fungus .

But ergot is also a hallucinogenic; LSD, most notoriously, is derived from it. Once ingested, there are two responses to ergot poisoning, or ergotism: Convulsive ergotism causes fits, hallucinations, mania, or delirium, while gangrenous ergotism leads to necrotic tissue.

In her landmark paper in Science, Caporael was the first to suggest that the Salem Witch Trials were caused by contaminated grain. The more the villagers of Salem ate bread that had been baked using grain stores from the 1691 harvest, she argued, the more they ingested the toxin and then experienced its side effects - including hallucinations

Caporael referenced the diaries kept by villager Samuel Sewall, who noted the wet and warm spring of 1691 progressed into a hot and stormy summer. For Claviceps purpurea, the conditions were pretty much ideal.

Caporael also contended the ergot ingestion was localized, meaning that not all the grain in the area was tainted and not all the villagers were under the influence. The majority of the accusers lived to the west of the village, or they took their grain supply from farmers who lived west of the village. Eight-five percent of the accused witches lived east of Salem, as did 82 percent of the people who supported their innocence. Ninety-three percent of the adult accusers, in contrast, lived on the east side of Salem. Juvenile accusers also followed the same pattern.

Caporael found the accusers' behavior consistent with ergot poisoning. Convulsive ergotism impacts the nervous system, and the accusers were known to have fits and muscle spasms. They also had hallucinations that seemed very real to them, and felt very terrifying to the people who witnessed them. The hallucinations were later used as "spectral evidence" during the trials; some accusers testified to seeing witches in their hearths at home. Others reported that the supposed witches were vanishing from the witness stand only to reappear in the courtroom rafters.

"What happened there was a tragedy of extreme proportions and a community was destroyed for generations," says Caporael. "There was a great deal of shame going on," Caporael says.

An Ongoing Mystery

In recent years, other researchers have found support for Caporael's theory. A 2016 article in JAMA Dermatology analyzed descriptions of the accusers' skin legions. During the trials, the bodies of both the accused and accusers were examined to see if they had a "Devil's mark," a skin blemish that was supposedly a sign that someone had made a pact with the devil. The study's authors saw similarities between these descriptions and gangrenous ergotism.

"Gangrenous ergotism has many forms as it develops," explains Leela Mundra, the study's lead author and a plastic and reconstructive surgery resident at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. "It eventually becomes very dark, woody and hard. It goes through multiple forms before it gets to that point because the tissue is dying." In Salem, such skin exams (and the accusations behind them) had fizzled out by the end of 1692. The summer had been dry and the area experienced a drought, which wasn't hospitable for ergot growth; the villagers soon began ingesting a new, fungus-free grain store.

Other witch trials, however, have also been attributed to ergotism. The Finnmark witch trials , for example, occurred in the 1600s in northern Norway. Hundreds of women were accused, and 92 burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft. Ergot poisoning has also been suspected in several "dancing mania" events in Europe, in which masses of people danced randomly in the street for hours.

But even considering such historical examples, there's only so much we can know about ergot poisoning - and what really happened in Salem. Despite recent studies like Mundra's, there's no solid scientific consensus on what truly sparked the chaos behind the trials. At any rate, by the 1800s, scientists better understood ergot, and farmers learned not to mill the tainted grain. Incidents of ergotism poisoning became increasingly rare, and many people soon forgot it was once a deadly problem.

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This Hallucinogenic Fungus Might Be Behind the Salem Witch Trials

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The trials have confounded historians for centuries. Some scientists think a toxic fungus from rotten grain might be responsible.

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From Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, edited by Charles Dudley Warner, 1896

In 1692 the small Puritan village of Salem, Massachusetts, was plagued by a sudden and brief cloud of witchcraft accusations. After young girls Betty Parris and Abigail Williams exhibited severe convulsions and other strange symptoms, village doctor William Griggs diagnosed them as having been bewitched. Soon after, other townspeople began showing similar symptoms. That's when the accusations started flying. The town quickly decided that they were going to search for, and execute, all the witches of Salem. By the end of the trials in May 1693, 19 people had been hanged, one had been crushed by stones, and four had died in prison-all accused of being witches. Three hundred years later, we're still asking: Did witches really haunt the town of Salem? Or was another devil at work?

In 1976 Dr. Linnda Caporael of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found evidence that supported the latter hypothesis. Caporael proposed that perhaps the brief and intense illnesses suffered by so many of the townspeople were not bewitchment but rather ergotism, a disease commonly contracted by rye. Later, other historians agreed: ergotism was not only an interesting theory but also had some footing. Could all of the crazy happenings in Salem really be explained by some rotted rye?

Surprisingly, a lot of them can. With the exception of a few events (which are typically attributed to groupthink and the power of suggestion), the behavior exhibited in 1692 fits the bill of rye-induced ergotism. Ergotism forms in rye after a severe winter and a damp spring-conditions that Caporael and other historians claim were present in 1691 and therefore affected the rye harvested for consumption in 1692. After the rye plant contracts ergot, the fungus grows and replaces shoots on the grain with sclerotia. Ergot sclerotia are purple-black growths that contain lysergic acid and ergotamine. Since medical knowledge was sparse, the presence of darker shoots on rye was probably thought to be the product of overexposure to the sun, so it was most likely eaten despite being poisonous.

Once contracted from rye bread, ergotism (also called St. Anthony's fire) causes severe convulsions, muscle spasms, delusions, the sensation of crawling under the skin, and, in extreme cases, gangrene of the extremities. Severe hallucinations can also be a symptom, as lysergic acid is the substance from which the drug LSD is synthesized. These symptoms were the same as those shown by the accused in Salem: mostly young girls whose immune systems had not fully developed, leaving them susceptible to diseases such as ergotism. The village doctor, being religious and, so the theory goes, unaware of ergotism as a disease, attributed the strange symptoms to a known evil: witchcraft. He claimed that the girls had fallen victim to the evils of witchcraft, and the girls went along with it. The rest of the townsfolk fell victim to suggestibility, and thus the trials commenced, with accusations of witchcraft being targeted at the outcasts of society by those who were afflicted. According to this theory, the abrupt end of the witch trials in May 1693 happened, quite simply, because Salem ran out of ergot-contaminated grain.

There is, however, still much debate over whether or not this theory should be accepted. Many social psychologists insist that the actions of the girls can be attributed to social and political unrest and that ergotism doesn't factor into certain social aspects that could explain what really happened. Such aspects include Reverend Parris's possible ulterior motives and the immense amount of stress put on the population during 1692 due to a smallpox outbreak and a quickly expanding population. Unfortunately, we will probably never know exactly what happened in Salem during the witch trials. All sides of the argument agree, however, that there was probably nothing supernatural at work. According to some people, the real evil might have been on the supper table.

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How Rye Bread May Have Caused the Salem Witch Trials

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The real devil in Salem may have lived on the supper table.

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

In February 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem Village found itself at the center of a notorious case of mass hysteria: eight young women accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Trials ensued and, when the episode concluded in May 1693, fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for their supposed supernatural crimes.

The Salem witch trials occupy a unique place in our collective history. The mystery around the hysteria and miscarriage of justice continue to inspire new critiques, most recently with the recent release of The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff.

But what caused the mass hysteria, false accusations, and lapses in due process? Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories.

The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a "little ice age" that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself.

Emily Oster posits that the "little ice age" caused economic deterioration and food shortages that led to anti-witch fervor in communities in both the United States and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Temperatures began to drop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the coldest periods occurring from 1680 to 1730. The economic hardships and slowdown of population growth could have caused widespread scapegoating which, during this period, manifested itself as persecution of so-called witches, due to the widely accepted belief that "witches existed, were capable of causing physical harm to others and could control natural forces."

Salem Village, where the witchcraft accusations began, was an agrarian, poorer counterpart to the neighboring Salem Town, which was populated by wealthy merchants. According to the oft-cited book Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Village was being torn apart by two opposing groups-largely agrarian townsfolk to the west and more business-minded villagers to the east, closer to the Town. "What was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be." In a retrospective look at their book for a 2008 William and Mary Quarterly Forum, Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that as tensions between the two groups unfolded, "they followed deeply etched factional fault lines that, in turn, were influenced by anxieties and by differing levels of engagement with and access to the political and commercial opportunities unfolding in Salem Town." As a result of increasing hostility, western villagers accused eastern neighbors of witchcraft.

But some critics including Benjamin C. Ray have called Boyer and Nissenbaum's socio-economic theory into question. For one thing -the map they were using has been called into question. He writes: "A review of the court records shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is, in fact, highly interpretive and considerably incomplete." Ray goes on:

Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum's conclusions in Salem Possessed, geo graphic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different economic status.

On the other hand, the physiological theories for the mass hysteria and witchcraft accusations include both fungus poisoning and undiagnosed encephalitis.

Linnda Caporael argues that the girls suffered from convulsive ergotism, a condition caused by ergot, a type of fungus, found in rye and other grains. It produces hallucinatory, LSD-like effects in the afflicted and can cause victims to suffer from vertigo, crawling sensations on the skin, extremity tingling, headaches, hallucinations, and seizure-like muscle contractions. Rye was the most prevalent grain grown in the Massachusetts area at the time, and the damp climate and long storage period could have led to an ergot infestation of the grains.

One of the more controversial theories states that the girls suffered from an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica, an inflammation of the brain spread by insects and birds. Symptoms include fever, headaches, lethargy, double vision, abnormal eye movements, neck rigidity, behavioral changes, and tremors. In her 1999 book, A Fever in Salem, Laurie Winn Carlson argues that in the winter of 1691 and spring of 1692, some of the accusers exhibited these symptoms, and that a doctor had been called in to treat the girls. He couldn't find an underlying physical cause, and therefore concluded that they suffered from possession by witchcraft, a common diagnoses of unseen conditions at the time.

The controversies surrounding the accusations, trials, and executions in Salem, 1692, continue to fascinate historians and we continue to ask why, in a society that should have known better, did this happen? Economic and physiological causes aside, the Salem witchcraft trials continue to act as a parable of caution against extremism in judicial processes.
Editor's note: This post was edited to clarify that Salem Village was where the accusations began, not where the trials took place.

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What Caused the Salem Witch Trials? - JSTOR Daily

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Looking into the underlying causes of the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.