In 1976, a college paper blamed the Salem witch trials on moldy bread. It wasn’t true.

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In the mid-1970s, Linnda Caporael was a college student facing a seemingly mundane decision. 

A science major at U.C. Santa Barbara, she needed a humanities course to graduate. The course she chose, on women in American history, came with a term paper, and she had to pick a topic.

Caporael’s first choice—Lydia Wardell, a Quaker woman who protested Puritan persecution by walking naked into a meeting house in the 1660s—was intriguing, but already taken. So Caporael instead settled on her second choice: Ann Putnam, one of the accusers in the 1692 Salem witch trials. In doing so, Caporael reshaped the way millions of people view a nearly 300-year-old chapter of American history. 

Caporael’s paper introduced the theory that the visions, convulsions, and distress the “afflicted” girls reported might not have been supernatural after all. Instead, she proposed, they could be explained by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye grain and produces a hallucinogenic toxin. In other words, blame moldy bread. 

The ergot theory, despite being debunked within a year of being published, has continued to spread and thrive like fungus on rye. As recently as 2023, comedian-turned-podcasting-juggernaut Joe Rogan discussed the theory enthusiastically on his show, effectively reanimating a story that seems destined to never fully die.

“It’s sexy,” says historian Margo Burns about the enduring appeal of Caporael’s ergot theory. “It’s about drugs. It’s about witches. It’s about killing people. Also, we like to think that when there’s an unjust sentence or execution, there’s someone or something to blame.”

Burns, a Salem scholar who has spent years tracing how the ergot theory took hold and persisted, says she rarely gets through a talk on the trials without someone in the audience bringing up moldy bread.

How a term paper went viral

The fact that a single undergraduate college paper could have such a lasting and wide-ranging impact on our understanding of the Salem witch trials seems bizarre, but it can be explained in part by a thoroughly modern phenomenon: virality. Although the World Wide Web was still decades away, Caporael’s paper found a way to spread fast through newspaper wire services.

After she started graduate school, Caporael submitted the paper to Science, which, to her surprise, published it in April 1976. That alone might have kept the theory confined within academic circles. Instead, newspaper editors saw a story with mass appeal.

“Editors and newspapers just grabbed it, saying, ‘Oh, here’s a human interest thing,’” Burns says. “And when they put it in their papers, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, it got syndicated. And the syndication of those articles went through the whole country and Canada within a matter of weeks.”

Caporael, who had explored the topic through the lens of the scientific method, wasn’t claiming to know what had happened at Salem. At the suggestion of a pre-med friend, she began looking into ergot poisoning as a possible explanation, not a definitive answer. 

According to Burns, who has spoken with Caporael directly, she was only testing whether ergot could be ruled out. Working from the limited sources available to her, Caporael determined that she couldn’t rule it out. Even then, though, she called her own findings “suggestive,” not conclusive.

But that nuance didn’t survive exposure to the public, which in 1976 was already fixated on LSD and what it might do to young people. The press coverage essentially retrofitted 1692 with the anxieties of 1976, recasting the Salem girls as teenagers on a bad trip.

“You give that to the American public, which doesn’t understand there’s a difference between scientific inquiry and historical storytelling, and it’s just so compelling,” Burns says.

Debunked, but far from dead

Not all the viral attention was positive, though. Within that same year, researcher Nicholas Spanos and graduate student Jack Gottlieb published a rebuttal in Science, dismantling Caporael’s argument point by point. By their reckoning, various aspects of the Salem girls’ symptoms did not add up. 

“There are a couple of different kinds of ergot poisoning, and one of them is gangrenous, so people’s fingers would start rotting,” Burns says. “And they would have gastrointestinal problems, and we don’t have any instances in the records that either of those things happened.”

The problems for the theory didn’t end there. Ergot poisoning was thought to hit hardest among people with vitamin A deficiencies, but Salem’s residents had dairy cows and the sea nearby, and likely plenty of vitamin A. (Ironically, Burns notes, that the vitamin A argument was itself based on a discredited 1930s source that relied on circumstantial evidence and has never been replicated.) And while whole families ate from the same supply of rye, usually only one or two people per household fell ill.

The rebuttal, though methodical and logical, was little more than a momentary speed bump for the runaway popularity of the psychedelic bread story. In fact, it may have helped. 

Arguing with a claim, however insubstantial, implies that it’s worth arguing about, and a formal rebuttal in Science can make a student’s term paper look like one side of a valid scientific debate.

“It’s really hard to refute something,” Burns says. “If anything, it just sort of nails it and makes it more permanent.”

“They were eating their own”

Whatever was causing young women in Salem to convulse, the atrocities that followed are much harder to grasp. By the time the panic ended, 152 people had been formally accused, 19 had been hanged, and one man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death with stones for refusing to stand trial. Several more died in jail.

“The people who were responsible were the adults in the room,” Burns says.

To the modern eye, this looks like lunacy. To most people in 1692, though, witchcraft wasn’t superstition. It was an accepted fact, part of an invisible world in which Satan and his agents wreaked havoc on everyday life. Conflict with Indigenous peoples on the Maine frontier had sent traumatized refugees into the region, relating horror stories of attacks on their homes. Many colonists thought Satan engineered those attacks, too.

In a way, the people of Salem did exactly what Americans would do nearly 300 years later, when the psychedelic era latched onto the ergot theory: They explained strange behavior through the lens of what frightened them most.

In such a charged social climate, suspicion could fall on just about anyone, and it did. The accused weren’t just outcasts, Burns says. Many were fully covenanted members of the Puritan church.

“We’re not talking about going after ‘The Other,’” she says. “They were eating their own.”

Someone to blame

Burns knows the cost of Salem’s betrayals about as well as anyone. An associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, the definitive collection of the trials’ legal records, she is also the 10th-generation great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged on the charge of witchcraft in 1692.

Nurse, a respected member of the church in Salem Town, was tried and found not guilty. But Chief Justice William Stoughton refused to accept the verdict. He sent the jury back to reconsider a remark Nurse had made when confessed witches Deliverance Hobbs and her daughter, Abigail, were brought in to testify against her: She had said the two were “of our company.” Nurse meant that they had been jailed together, but the court heard that they were fellow witches. 

When jurors asked her what she meant, the courtroom was in such an uproar that Nurse didn’t hear the question. At the time, failing to answer an accusation was treated as a confession, and the jury returned a guilty verdict. In a later appeal, Nurse wrote that she was “something hard of hearing, and full of grief,” and didn’t realize she was being asked to explain herself.

It was the kind of injustice no mere fungus could cause.

“[Chief Justice] Stoughton was singularly, individually responsible for her execution,” Burns says.

The question of who is to blame is rarely so straightforward, though. Which might be part of the ergot theory’s appeal; it offers “one silver bullet” that tidily explains everything.

“There are just so many reasons that all came together,” Burns says.

But when pressed on why she thinks it happened, she offers an answer that’s part joke, part harsh reality: “People are mean.”

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