Salem 1692: The Grain, the Gallows, and the Whispering Tapes

Summary

In 1692, the people of Salem believed the Devil walked among them.

But centuries later, scientists and historians would wonder: could the culprit have been something far more earthly—a hallucinogenic fungus lurking in their daily bread?

This Month of the Macabre episode of Infectious Dose examines the ergotism theory behind the Salem witch trials, blending science, history, and haunting “found tapes” that may hit too close to home. From convulsive fits and crawling skin to the toxic fungus Claviceps purpurea, we explore the blurred line between infection and imagination—and how fear itself became contagious.

Listener note: this episode works better in audio format and it doesn’t end where you think it will.

Listen here or scroll down to read full episode.

Full Episode

Imagine a small seventeenth-century New England village—its streets dusted with frost, its people bound by faith and fear. Girls begin to collapse in fits no doctor can explain. Neighbors whisper of curses in the dark. The courts overflow with confessions of the Devil’s touch. When the fever finally breaks, twenty-five souls are gone—nineteen by rope, one by stone, and others who never made it out of their cells.

Fear spread like infection… and no one was immune.

This is Salem 1692: The Grain, the Gallows, and the Whispering Tape.

If you listen closely, you can almost hear it still—the murmurs of 1692.

In Salem, they tell a story about people who try to “recreate” the trials. Supposedly, when you make the voices speak again, they find a way back—through a recording or through anyone who listens. Fear spreads that way, they say—once you hear it, you carry it.

I thought it was just folklore. Then I started cutting this episode.

So for centuries, people have asked: what really happened in Salem? Was it hysteria—a kind of mass psychological contagion sweeping through a Puritan village? Was it religious fervor and social tension boiling over into accusations and executions? Or could it have been something in the bread—rye infected with a fungus called ergot, producing hallucinations, burning sensations, convulsions, and visions so terrifying they might easily be mistaken for witchcraft?

The records tell us that in the winter of 1692, two young girls—Betty Parris and Abigail Williams—began to convulse, babble, and complain of unseen forces pinching and biting them. Soon other girls followed. Ministers prayed, physicians examined, neighbors whispered. In a tightly wound community already on edge from war on the frontier, food shortages, and longstanding grudges, the accusations spread like wildfire.

Salem Village in 1692 was far from a simple hamlet under the shadow of a larger town. It had long sought autonomy from nearby Salem Town—indeed, in 1672 it became a separate parish with its own meetinghouse and minister, marking the beginning of a rivalry. The village lay in a rural farming zone, while Salem Town prospered as a maritime center...with trading, fishing, and building ships. Tensions over land, taxation, property inheritance, and political control deepened the divide between town and village. Beyond those fences, the frontier was aflame. New England was engaged in conflict with Wabanaki and French forces (part of King William’s War), and raids on frontier settlements sent refugees and terror into the region. The disruption, displacement, and fear only sharpened local resentments and made Salem a more combustible place.

Inside the village, food was scarce, the winter brutal, and the minister—Reverend Samuel Parris—was deeply unpopular. His nine-year-old daughter Betty and eleven-year-old niece Abigail Williams were the first to suffer what the town called “fits”: sudden screams, contorted postures, and hallucinations of spectral animals and invisible attackers. When a local doctor found no physical cause, he declared the explanation supernatural. That was all it took.

Within weeks, the afflicted girls were naming names. The first accused were relatively easy targets—Tituba, the enslaved woman in Parris’s household; Sarah Good, a destitute beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly widow who had neglected church attendance. By spring, the accusations had climbed into higher social circles—ministers, landowners, and once-respected citizens found themselves under suspicion. By summer, gallows stood ready on Gallows Hill (later understood to be Proctor’s Ledge), awaiting the execution of those convicted.

Hang on—Colt, can you turn down the fan? It keeps showing up on the waveform.

That’s better… I think.

Colt (off-mic): You ok?

Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, I just—I swear I hear whispers under the static.

Anyway… where were we?

OK, so here’s the question I want us to sit with tonight: what if we could hear Salem for ourselves? Not just read faded court transcripts, but actually hear the voices of fear and accusation as they unfolded. What if someone had left a tape recorder running in that little Puritan village?

What you’re about to hear are recreated fragments—what the voices of 1692 might have sounded like if someone had been recording inside Salem Village. Of course, there were no tapes back then… but imagine if there had been. What follows are recovered simulations—stitched together from trial records, eyewitness accounts, and the symptoms of ergot poisoning. Think of them as echoes caught in magnetic dust.

Historians describe the afflicted girls collapsing into convulsions—eyes rolled back, limbs jerking, sometimes screaming that they were being pinched or bitten by invisible hands. Whatever overtook them caused not only seizures, but visions so vivid they blurred the line between the physical and the supernatural. When you hear what comes next, it’s hard not to imagine those sounds echoing through the meetinghouse walls.

So let’s press play.

What those villagers witnessed might not have been possession at all—but poisoning.

A silent invader could have crept into their daily bread: Claviceps purpurea, the fungus behind ergotism. It infects rye and other grains, replacing each kernel with a dark, hardened spur called a sclerotium—what people once called ergot, from the Old French for “spur.” If that grain is milled into flour, the toxic alkaloids end up in the bread.

There’s no need for person-to-person transmission—this is a foodborne intoxication. You eat contaminated rye, and the effects set in within hours to days. Medieval Europe documented more than 80 epidemics of ergotism, sometimes killing thousands. The French called it “Saint Anthony’s Fire” for the burning pain it caused in the limbs; German outbreaks were notorious for “the fire which twisted the people,” a reference to convulsions.

So how does ergot cause these symptoms? Modern toxicology shows that ergot alkaloids like ergotamine and ergometrine interact with blood-vessel receptors, causing intense vasoconstriction, and with serotonin and dopamine receptors in the nervous system, producing hallucinations, paranoia, and sensory disturbances. There are two types of ergotism:

• Convulsive ergotism—muscle spasms, seizures, crawling or pinching sensations on the skin (“formication”), headaches, nausea, sometimes hallucinations and psychosis.

• Gangrenous ergotism—burning pain, loss of blood flow to fingers, toes, and limbs, until they blacken, die, and sometimes… fall away on their own. Which is exactly what it sounds like: spontaneous separation of a body part from the rest of the body. Ahem... It's more than a flesh wound.

Both arise from the same core mechanism: ergot alkaloids cause prolonged vasospasm, starving tissues and nerves of blood and oxygen. The psychoactive effects can be striking. Historically, victims of convulsive ergotism reported visions of demons, wild animals, or celestial beings.

Strange noises

What—hold on.

OK… maybe just the house settling.

Right, so—modern pharmacology attributes this to how ergot can partially activate serotonin receptors in the brain, particularly the same type that LSD targets, which explains the vivid hallucinations. Even mild poisoning can produce disorientation, paranoia, and sensory distortions layered over physical symptoms like tremor, nausea, and diarrhea.

Prevention and treatment? Today, the chain of contamination is better understood. Farmers remove ergot sclerotia from grain before milling, fungicides are used, and regulators set maximum allowable alkaloid levels in flour and baby food. In 1692, of course, no one knew what “mycotoxin” meant. Once ergotism was suspected in later centuries, the only effective treatment was to stop eating contaminated grain and provide supportive care. There is still no antidote; even now, modern ergot overdose from migraine medication is treated mainly by discontinuing the drug and managing complications.

Imagine those symptoms appearing in a Puritan community where every twitch, every vision, every mark on the skin could be taken as proof of the Devil’s hand. A child crying that she felt invisible pinches might just have been experiencing ergot poisoning. A girl thrashing in the meetinghouse could have been suffering convulsions from a contaminated loaf. But to the people of Salem, it looked—and sounded—like witchcraft.

Let’s hear what that might have sounded like.

(Audio static fast swell to glitch; Dog whines then one bark)

Gypsy, hush!

All right, accounts like that led some to believe the witches were victims of ergot poisoning. Burning sensations, crawling skin, convulsions, hallucinations—it all matches what we know about convulsive ergotism. It’s an elegant theory, and it caught the public imagination when it was proposed in the 1970s.

But most historians today are skeptical that ergot explains Salem. For one thing, ergot outbreaks usually strike whole communities at once. In Salem, the accusations and symptoms appeared more selectively—often in young girls, or in those with social standing to gain by performing affliction. And the timing of the “fits” was suspicious: many episodes began in court, in front of judges and townspeople, and some stopped abruptly when an accused witch confessed. That looks less like poisoning, and more like mass hysteria or calculated theater.

And Salem was primed for hysteria. And as I mentioned, the community was already under enormous stress—war with Indigenous groups raged on the frontier, crops had failed, and disputes over land and power divided the townspeople. In that kind of environment, fear is contagious. A single accusation can spread through a village faster than any fungus. So maybe a few convulsions began with rye bread. Or maybe they didn’t. Either way, fear and suspicion did the rest, transforming ordinary hardships and illnesses into evidence of witchcraft. And once hysteria takes root, it doesn’t take much to ignite full-blown chaos.

Historians now believe that while some physical symptoms could have been real—seizures, strange sensations, even the possibility of ergot poisoning—the greater engine driving Salem forward was social. Fear spread from house to house, from the pulpit to the courthouse, until entire families were implicated. Once the machinery of accusation began, it was nearly impossible to stop.

Two sharp knocks as if on door.

Dog whines

Wait. Someone's knocking.

Dog barks

It's OK, girl. Nothing there.

Anyway—The next fragment comes from Salem’s records—an actual letter written in August 1692...less than...umm...two months before the gallows went silent.

Let’s press play on what’s left of that letter.

Letter Snippet Transcript

August 5, 1692

Reverend Sir,

Our good God is working of miracles. Five witches were lately executed, impudently demanding of God a miraculous vindication of their innocency. Immediately upon this, our God miraculously sent in five Andover witches, who made a most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies, and declared the five newly executed to have been of their company, discovering many more, but all agreeing in Burroughs being their ringleader, who, I suppose, this day receives his trial at Salem.

OK, so that was a real letter, written in 1692. Not by a villain or a madman, but by a minister’s colleague, marveling at what he called ‘God’s miracles.’ Proof that the panic had become piety—that executions were seen as miracles rather than murders.

But let’s be clear: Salem didn’t hang witches or crush them under stones. They murdered people—men and women. Twenty-five in all, ordinary neighbors condemned by fear, delusion, and faith twisted into certainty.

(audio Glitch and noises...)

What the...Gypsy what are you doing? it's OK, girl.

OK… where was I?

Right.

Let’s roll the next section...the trial.

And as the voices grew louder, so did the visions. What began with twitching limbs and cries of invisible pinches became spectral evidence—testimony that an accused person’s spirit had appeared in the night, or tormented the girls in dreams. The more the hysteria spread, the more vivid the claims became. What’s clear from every account of Salem is that when hysteria takes hold, it doesn’t ask for evidence. It only asks for another name.

This is what mass hysteria sounds like. Chaos. Voices tumbling over one another. Logic swallowed by fear. We sometimes call it psychogenic illness—when symptoms spread not through a germ or a toxin, but through suggestion and expectation. A child convulses, and soon others around her feel the same twitching, the same crawling skin. Fear itself can be infectious.

And in Salem, that fear found fertile ground. Neighbors already distrusted each other. Families were divided by property disputes and rivalries that went back years. Add to that the strain of a harsh winter, failed harvests, and a colony under siege from war on its borders…and you have a community primed for paranoia.

So… let’s listen one final time to the last surviving reel from the Salem recordings...that I know of.

Sorry—hold on—the recorder’s glitching. It keeps catching…something in the background.

Dog whines then one short bark

Colt, if you’re still monitoring the levels—

—just cut this part out later.

Yeah… later.

By this point, Salem was no longer a town—it was a tinderbox—every whisper, every shadow, a spark. Whether fueled by ergot-tainted bread, mass hysteria, or deliberate manipulation, the result was the same: fear that spread like fire. Ordinary aches, sudden spasms, even the flicker of a shadow became proof of witchcraft.

So the bottom line? Ergotism could explain some of the convulsions and visions of Salem in 1692—but not all. And if it did, hysteria would explain how those symptoms multiplied, how each girl seemed to echo the next. Salem’s politics and rivalries explain the rest—why accusations spread so selectively, tearing neighbors and families apart.

The truth is, we’ll never know exactly what combination of poison, psychology, and panic drove Salem in sixteen-ninety—is that… is that bleeding through? Colt, do you hear that? Jesus.

But we know what it sounded like when fear reached its breaking point…and it sounds a lot like this. The best-supported conclusion… is that… social…social and psychological tensions… amplified b-

audio interrupted by sharp feedback...

Dog barks once—audio glitch then silence.

Editor’s Note: Following the audio malfunction, an additional segment was discovered on the source tape. The speaker’s identity is unconfirmed. Here is a transcription of that final fragment, preserved as it appeared on the file:

Epilogue: A Note on the Ending

If you listened to the audio version of this episode, you’ll know it ends without the usual outro or closing notes. That was by design. For our Month of the Macabre, I wanted to experiment with how fear and hysteria can leave us hanging—with no resolution, no clean ending, just silence where certainty should be.

In Salem, the people living through the witch trials didn’t get closure either. There were no neat answers, no moment when everyone agreed on what had really happened. Fear simply burned itself out, leaving lives destroyed and a community scarred.

So if the ending left you unsettled, that’s the point. It’s a reminder that sometimes horror—in history and in health—doesn’t tie itself up neatly. It just… stops.

I want to thank my precious doggie Gypsy for her eager participation and declare that no dogs were stressed or hurt during production. And finally... a big thank you to my son and friends who'd like to remain anonymous for helping me with voices for the snippets used in this episode. They don't know how it turned out yet...what say you?

Thanks for being here...Join us next week for our 3rd Month of the Macabre episode...another glimpse of horror inspired by infectious disease. Until then, stay healthy, stay informed, and spread knowledge not diseases.