(no subject)
Last week I watched the PBS show Secrets of the Dead: Witches Curse(on library DVD). This was about the cause of the disease that infected some salem residents. I forget the woman's name, but she connected the symptoms of the bout of hallucinations and writhing, contortions and fever that the Salem victims suffered with a bad LSD trip. She was watching something about Woodstock and watching a hippie going through convulsions on the grass. She did some research about the Salem experience and contacted the scientist who had discovered LSD while researching ergot fungus. He had accidentally separated it from the poison of the fungus.
She found out that most of the victims lived near a source of rye or barley that grew in marshy soil, and that the growing season had been a wet one in the year of the disease. There was a whole lot more research on the areas in Europe that went through Witch persecutions and how they moslty coincided with the most likelihood of conditions being right for ergot poisoning, that mostly peasants got the poisoning because they ate rye, were the most likely to be eating of and working with infected rye grain.
They even looked at a one of the corpses from the area of Europe where people were found buried in bogs, usually with evidence of violence done to the bodies before death. The body they examinged had stomach contents and evidence of the Ergot alkaloids in the food. So the guy had shown symptoms and been hacked to death (his throat was cut and his skull bashed in) and been hit in the back of the head for good measure. It sounds like all the deaths could have been an effort to stop a plague from spreading, or stop "witchcraft" from spreading. Too bad they didn't know about ergot poisoning.
What I want to know is how many girls were affected by it as opposed to adults, in Salem.
EDIT: oh yeah, I guess I'll give this a title, Bats and Witches. A bit early for Halloween, but I had a couple bat encounters this week. # nights ago I had a bat in my room in the middle of the night--it circled round and I chased it some, and it went to sitting on the ledge over the transome in my room. There is a hole in the ceiling there, exposing some laths, and there are spaces there where it undoubtedly got in.
THEN I get to Patty's to housesit and there's a bat in her living room suddenly! Sheesh. Both of them apparently got scared and aren't coming back, but we'll see. I didn't do what I said I was going to do before I left, which was to get a staple gun and some screen and put it over the hole. I dunno why.
She found out that most of the victims lived near a source of rye or barley that grew in marshy soil, and that the growing season had been a wet one in the year of the disease. There was a whole lot more research on the areas in Europe that went through Witch persecutions and how they moslty coincided with the most likelihood of conditions being right for ergot poisoning, that mostly peasants got the poisoning because they ate rye, were the most likely to be eating of and working with infected rye grain.
They even looked at a one of the corpses from the area of Europe where people were found buried in bogs, usually with evidence of violence done to the bodies before death. The body they examinged had stomach contents and evidence of the Ergot alkaloids in the food. So the guy had shown symptoms and been hacked to death (his throat was cut and his skull bashed in) and been hit in the back of the head for good measure. It sounds like all the deaths could have been an effort to stop a plague from spreading, or stop "witchcraft" from spreading. Too bad they didn't know about ergot poisoning.
What I want to know is how many girls were affected by it as opposed to adults, in Salem.
EDIT: oh yeah, I guess I'll give this a title, Bats and Witches. A bit early for Halloween, but I had a couple bat encounters this week. # nights ago I had a bat in my room in the middle of the night--it circled round and I chased it some, and it went to sitting on the ledge over the transome in my room. There is a hole in the ceiling there, exposing some laths, and there are spaces there where it undoubtedly got in.
THEN I get to Patty's to housesit and there's a bat in her living room suddenly! Sheesh. Both of them apparently got scared and aren't coming back, but we'll see. I didn't do what I said I was going to do before I left, which was to get a staple gun and some screen and put it over the hole. I dunno why.