Ergot poisoning can cause convulsions and hallucinations. That does not mean it caused Salem.
In 1976, Linnda Caporael published an article in Science proposing that ergotism — poisoning by the rye fungus Claviceps purpurea — might help explain the strange symptoms reported among the afflicted girls in Salem Village.
The proposal was attractive because convulsive ergotism can produce severe neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms. Caporael argued that weather, rye consumption, geography, and the reported afflictions could fit the hypothesis.
The theory was challenged almost immediately. Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb argued in 1976 that the Salem pattern did not resemble an ergotism epidemic and that the reported symptoms and course of the crisis did not fit well. Spanos later revisited and rejected the hypothesis again, and a 2000 medical review concluded that ergotism was unlikely to explain much of what happened in Salem.
The Salem Witch Museum likewise treats the “moldy bread” explanation as a theory that has been heavily criticized, not as an unresolved fifty-fifty split among historians. Social, political, religious, legal, and wartime pressures remain much more central to mainstream historical explanations of the crisis.
Archive Oculus keeps ergot as a playable hypothesis because it creates a meaningful counterfactual route: what if the player interprets the symptoms as poisoning rather than witchcraft? The route is a simulation of that hypothesis. It is not an archive claim that the afflicted girls actually had ergot poisoning.
Later clusters of unexplained symptoms, such as the 2011 outbreak in Le Roy, New York, show why biological and social explanations can compete when visible physical symptoms spread through a group. The comparison is about diagnostic uncertainty, not evidence that Salem and Le Roy had the same cause.
A theory can be useful in a simulation without becoming a verdict in the archive.