Pont-Saint-Esprit was a quiet commune in Southern France. On August 15, 1951, dozens of its residents suddenly got sick. They encountered nausea and stomach ache. Many had low body temperatures and weak pulses. Patients looked incredibly pale and couldn’t sleep for days. That’s where the suffering was over for most victims. But some started experiencing tremor and… hallucinations. The town resembled Hieronymus Bosch’s painting for about a week. A married couple ran around trailing each other with knives. A young girl believed she was assaulted by imaginary tigers. A boy tried to strangle his own mother. Some man jumped out of a hospital window screaming “I’m an airplane!” Luckily, it was only the 2nd floor. He broke his leg, got back up, and continued running. Another man thought he was a wirewalker and tried to climb up a suspension bridge. Animals were ill too: ducks marched like penguins, while dogs chewed on stones. Not all the delusions were threatening. Some people “heard heavenly choruses”. A local farmer, all of a sudden, wrote hundreds of poems. But for the most part, it was a disaster. Hospitals were chock-full of patients in straitjackets and chained to beds. By the time the outbreak ended, about 300 people were affected. 5 of them died. The sufferers had only one thing in common. They all ate bread from the local bakery. Doctors assumed it was made of fungus-infected flour which led to ergotism. The last time contamination like that hit France was in the 19th century. Mercury poisoning was also suggested because of the fungicides used to treat grains. The most extravagant theory was that the event was caused by… LSD experiments. The documents were found connecting the incident to the US government. Many believe the bread was drugged by the CIA agents as a field test. Nevertheless, scientists today dismiss all those explanations. Curiously, LSD was originally synthesized from that very fungus ergot 13 years before the tragedy. Subscribe to The Story Behind
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