One scientist’s theory: the accused and their accusers may have shared a fungus.
In 1976, behavioral scientist Linda Caporael published a theory in Science that reframed the entire outbreak as a public health event rather than a moral panic: ergotism, poisoning by a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that grows on damp rye — a dietary staple in colonial Massachusetts that particular growing season.
The symptom list is genuinely striking on paper: convulsions, muscle spasms, a crawling sensation under the skin, vivid hallucinations, vomiting. Caporael cross-referenced weather records (a cold, wet growing season — ideal for the fungus) with the geography of the affected households, and argued the pattern fit disturbingly well.
The rebuttal arrived almost immediately, in the same journal, the same year — psychologists Spanos and Gottlieb challenged the medical fit point by point, and most historians today favor a social and political explanation over a biological one: land disputes between the agrarian Salem Village and the more commercially minded Salem Town, a bitter rivalry involving the Putnam family in particular, and a community under genuine strain from a recent smallpox epidemic and frontier war with the Wabanaki.
We include the ergot theory here because it is real, published, and still cited — not because Orphea has ruled on which explanation is correct. The honest answer is that historians remain split, and the true cause was very likely a tangle of all of the above: a stressed community, a rigid theology, a legal system with no defense against unfalsifiable claims, and — possibly — a genuinely poisoned harvest sitting underneath all of it.
The same argument — biological cause versus social contagion — replayed almost exactly in Le Roy, New York, in 2011. Roughly twenty students, most of them teenage girls at a single high school, developed sudden tics, verbal outbursts, and seizure-like episodes within weeks of each other. State health investigators found no environmental or infectious cause; doctors ultimately diagnosed most cases as conversion disorder, a real but psychological condition, and the event became a textbook case of mass psychogenic illness spreading through a peer network rather than through water or air. Parents pushed back hard against the ‘hysteria’ framing, much as some historians still push back against Caporael's fungus. Two explanatory instincts — something in the body, or something in the group — keep colliding over symptoms that look, from the outside, identical either way.
A tidy explanation. History rarely offers those. File it as a theory, not a verdict.