It’s the south of France in the early 1950s. After a rainy season, the summer sun shines through the idyllic, picturesque farming village of Pont-Saint-Esprit near Avignon on the river Rhone.
A woman working in one of two small boulangeries emerges from the kitchen, where rye dough begins proofing. She steps out onto the street, sneaking a breath of fresh air while wiping the flour from her apron. She lights a cigarette, but as she looks up, cathedrals burst into flames, demons descend from rooftops, faces of neighbors morph into gnarled images of baphomet, beelzebub and baal.
She screams, flames from the streetlights engulf her and set her skin on fire. Her neighbors and family run down the street, swearing and swatting at snakes, bats, screaming and praying for God to come and save them from the depths of hell they’ve found themselves in.
Only none of this is actually happening. It’s all in their heads. The sun is out, the birds are chirping, but all the residents of Pont-Saint-Esprit can see is hell.
In the summer of 1951, a mass hallucination took place in the small French village of roughly 11,000 residents. Experts have disagreed on what caused the widespread panic, but a predominant theory suggests a rye bread fungus, known as ergot mold, led to food poisoning and temporary insanity.
Ergot grows on grains like rye and wheat, producing toxic alkaloids. It replaces individual kernels of grain with dark, hard “ergots,” which can mix into healthy grains during harvest. These kernels contain lysergic acid, a chemical precursor used in the synthesis of LSD. After consuming the psychotropic substance unknowingly, within just 48 hours, residents of Pont-Saint-Esprit started hallucinating hellscapes.
Leon Armunier, a postman at the time, suffered from nausea, followed by wild hallucinations that he described as “the sensation of shrinking and shrinking.” He told visiting reporters that he saw “fire and serpents, coiling around my arms.”
Armunier was taken to a hospital where he was forcefully restrained, as hundreds of other patients were admitted.
Scenes in the hospital escalated according to reporters at the time. One eleven-year-old started strangling his mother. Another girl screamed she was being chased by tigers.
A man ran through the halls of the hospital, shouting he was an airplane prior to jumping from the second-story window. After breaking a leg, he still managed to run another fifty meters before he was restrained by hospital staff.
A third patient, Gabriel Calidire, screamed that he was already dead, yelling “my head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me!” He ran out of the hospital and tried throwing himself into the river.
Even animals around the village started acting strange, as reporters depicted dogs “gnawing on stones until their teeth chipped away,” while ducks started marching in single file lines mimicking military operations.
Reporters continued to flock to the small village to document the insanity, with one doctor comparing the chaos to a scene from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “Night of the Apocalypse.”
In the weeks that followed, residents reported experiencing similar symptoms, starting with nausea, stomach cramps and insomnia, followed by severe diarrhea and intense hallucinations. For some, the experience was filled with violence and aggression, but for others, they started seeing beautiful lights, inspiring one farmer to abandon his crops to sit and write nearly 400 pages of almost incoherent poetry.
As symptoms started to wane nearly a month later, roughly 300 cases were reported, 60 people were admitted into psychiatric wards, and 30 reporting long-term complications. Seven ultimately died as a result.
As panic subsided, the town searched for answers.
The popular explanation was a consignment of rye flour that had been contaminated with claviceps purpurea, or rye ergot fungus. The fungus produces powerful alkaloids that can lead to ergotism, also known at the time as “hell fire” or “the burning disease of St. Anthony’s Fire.”
Ergot poisoning has been around since people first started cultivated grain roughly 10,000 years ago. In the 10th century, ergot was responsible for the deaths of some tens of thousands of individuals throughout Europe. In France alone, 40,000 deaths were reported as a result of the fungus.
Early symptoms included common conditions of nausea, vomiting, muscle pain and overall weakness, numbness, itching and a fluctuating heartbeat. But as they progress, ergot poisoning can lead to gangrene, vision problems, spasms, convulsions, hallucinations and death in certain cases.
Some experts believe the Greeks used the chemical as both a weapon and a psychoactive drug during the celebrations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a collection of secret rituals performed as part of the mystery school of Eleusis that took place from 1600 BCE to 392 BCE.
Ergot activates the same neurotransmitters as serotonin, which are essential for the digestive system, mood, and sleep-wake cycle. But in massive doses, ergot can produce serotonin syndrome, where the brain sends erratic signals to the rest of the body, where intestines empty themselves, muscles contract, and pupils dilate. The same effects are experienced during heavy doses of ecstasy or MDMA.
While not everyone in the town consumed the bread, several loaves were thrown into the Rhone river, killing many fish and contaminating some of the village's water and food supply.
An investigation into the cause was performed under the direction of the French government and the National Health Service. And while certain loaves of contaminated bread were traced back to common providers, the investigation resulted in some unsettling accusations.
Dr. Francois Olieu, an inspector general with the NHS, concluded that the flour had been deliberately contaminated with unknown ingredients.
This led to Poitier’s Maurice Maillet being charged with manslaughter after he admitted to buying grain of suspicious quality.
Famed boulangerie owner Roch Briand was also charged, but after many court cases and inquiries, the case was eventually dropped and never fully explained. Briand was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the baker ended his life penniless and disgraced.
Other experts, in hindsight, have dismissed the bread narrative, citing other examples of mass-ergotism that differed from the length of symptoms and severity of hallucinations.
Claims started to surface, suggesting it may have been mercury, nitrogen trichloride, even cannabis sativa that grew wild in parts of Europe during the same period.
Others turned to more spiritual answers, blaming witches and the sins committed by the town's residents. Quickly the accusations unfolded and every man, women and child was accused of some satanic influence similar to the Salem Witch Trials.
But in 2009, investigative journalist and historian H. P. Albarelli Jr. offered a different explanation altogether, arguing the chaos was the result of a nefarious experiment in mass hypnosis and collective hallucination under the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency.
Albarelli was first introduced to Pont-Saint-Esprit while conducting research on the murder of Frank Olson.
Albarelli said he obtained declassified CIA documents that referred to the “Pont-Saint-Esprit incident” by name, and noted that at the same time, rogue operations around the world were being carried out by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, now infamous for orchestrating experiments as part of the declassified MKUltra and MKNAOMI projects.
Gottlieb started his career with the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils and specialized in metabolisms of fungi. His experiments resulted in the death and psychotic breaks of several unwitting participants, culminating in confirmed assassination attempts against Fidel Castro during the 1960s.
Prior to his death, Gottlieb testified before the Church Committee under the alias “Joseph Schneider,” where he claimed to have destroyed nearly all records of mind control projects he worked on during his time with the CIA.
Frank Olson, the original subject of Albarelli’s book, was a chemist who worked in the 1950s for the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division. Stationed at Fort Detrick in Maryland, Olson worked closely with Gottlieb and was eventually appointed to the committee of Project Artichoke, an experimental CIA interrogation program. Olson went on to serve as a committee member for Project SPAN as well, a code name that Albarelli alleges is a reference to the bridge at Pont-Saint-Esprit.
During a retreat at Deep Creek Lake for those working on MKUltra, Olson was dosed with LSD by Gottlieb. Five days later, Olson tried to resign from the agency, and four days after that, Olson “fell” from his tenth-story window of the Hotel Statler in New York. The death was first ruled a suicide, then a misadventure, and finally, a murder, following a 1975 Rockefeller Commission report.
Olson served as a liaison for French Intelligent counterparts, having traveled to the country in both 1950 and 1951, the latter being the year the hellish events at Pont-Saint-Esprit took place.
One key document adding credibility to Albarelli’s claim was released via a Freedom of Information Act request. The title of the document is redacted, but beneath it reads, “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson files. SO Span/France Operation file, including Olson. Intel Files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried.”
Belin refers to David Bellin, head of the Rockefeller Commission, formed by the White House in 1975 to investigate the abuses carried out by the CIA.
Another bizarre coincidence in the report is the mention of the Sandoz Chemical Company in Switzerland , a contract company for the CIA which, at the time, was the only location where LSD was being produced throughout the world. The facility, led by Albert Hoffman, was just a few hundred kilometers from Pont-Saint-Esprit.
Nearly all of the scientists who carried out the investigation on the poisoning were from Sandoz Chemical Company. And it was this same group of scientists that first cited ergotism as a potential cause.
Albarelli adds that one agent directly stated to him, “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all, it was not grain ergot.”
Also included in the book is the strange mention that among the residents in the village at the time were the Bouvier family.
Michel Bouvier, a cabinetmaker, became known as the great-grandfather of John Vernou Bouvier III, father of former U.S. first lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
But many historians disagree with Albarelli’s claims.
Cornell historian Steven Kaplan, a specialist in French bread history, published his own book on the incident.
Kaplan points out that while LSD can take effect in just a few minutes or hours, many inhabitants didn’t start showing symptoms until 36 hours or more.
Kaplan also cited other discrepancies including the digestive ailments reported by the townspeople, a lack of technology for air distribution, and skepticism surrounding Pont-Saint-Esprit, which was already half destroyed by the U.S. Army during World War II.
“It makes no sense,” he told The Atlantic back in 2010.
Other skeptics noted the similarity of symptoms experienced in other reported cases of ergotism throughout history.
“There most certainly were secret LSD experiments during the 1950s and 1960s,” said pharmaceutical chemist Derek Lowe. “But it’s rather hard to see why the CIA should decide to dose some village in the Auvergne, especially when the symptoms (burning sensations in the extremities as well as hallucinations) seem to match ergotism quite well.”
But Albarelli describes in his book the method he assumes was used for LSD distribution during Operation SPAN.
He claims the LSD powder was originally dusted throughout the air, but with minimal result. Instead, the CIA started slipping the drug into local food supplies. He added that similar experiments were occurring throughout the world during the same stretch of time including in Canada, the UK, Morocco, Iraq, Vietnam, the Belgian Congo, Haiti and British Guiana.
But Kaplan responded again, saying there were other sanitary-related events taking place in nearby towns prior when the ‘nuit d’apocalypose,’ or night of the apocalypse took place.
In Issirac, Connaux and Saint-Genies-de-Comolas, tainted flour was received from the same Maurice Maillet’s mill that was operating in Saint-Martina-Riviere. Instances of food poisoning and similar visual experiences were reported among hundreds of individuals from the villages. Other bakers throughout the area reported receiving flour that month they described as “gray” and “full of worms.”
Regardless of the cause, the impact was severe. And as a result, the ability to control and mitigate the spread of ergot furthered, with the incident at Pont-Saint-Esprit being the last known severe outbreak of ergot in recent history. If, that is, ergot was the cause of all the chaos.