The date was August 15, 1951. It was a perfectly ordinary day for France. Until a 'state of madness' spread rapidly from the south of the country in the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit.

An epidemic that has not been seen in history and has not been seen again since that day has emerged. This epidemic went down in history as the French phrase "l'affaire du pain maudit", the Cursed Bread Incident. All the people in town lost their sanity.

Many of the outbreaks had such strange names. Like bubonic plague, Smallpox, yellow fever. In fact, the names of the epidemics that spread in the recent past were also observed in this strangeness. Outbreaks had a wide range of 'strange names' from mumps to swine flu. Some have killed tens of millions of people. However, almost all of them had similar symptoms. Mostly it was like a severe flu. Sometimes, respiration sometimes appeared as a skin disease, and was limited to physical damage, except in the case of an extraordinary fever.

However, there was one thing that set the Cursed Bread incident apart from all these epidemics. It was also signs of the paranormal...

The symptoms were seen in people who consumed the bread produced in the town's bakery. They had all lost their sense of reality. The hallucinations followed the usual symptoms of food poisoning, such as vomiting, drop in blood pressure, and fatigue. The chemical in the bread caused severe damage to the brains of those who consumed it, and people were seen throwing themselves out of the window, thinking that their skin was on fire due to these delusions.

Someone who nearly lost consciousness thought he was being followed by a man-eating tiger. A man with two broken legs, who thought his brain had been taken over by red snakes, was also trying to crawl away.

What made the event even more interesting was that the animals that ate from that bread also showed interesting symptoms. The dogs, trying to eat the stones, broke their teeth. The ducks began to walk and sound like penguins.

The New York Times wrote that some people hear divine voices and see bright colors. 5 people died due to hallucinations. 50 people were imprisoned in mental hospitals. 300 people also got various diseases.

In November of the same year, an article titled 'Out of Poisoning' was published in the British Medical Journal. The veil of this mysterious event was slightly lifted with this article. According to the scientists who wrote the article, this event happened because of the contamination of the ergot fungus in the rye used in bread making.

There was insufficient evidence for the validity of this claim. Then, different claims started to emerge.

According to another claim, the perpetrator of the incident was mercury, not rye. The water was contaminated with mercury. This was not an adequate and realistic assumption by some. No material was contaminated. This was a CIA project. As part of an experiment underway for brain management, the hallucinogen LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) was deliberately added to breads. According to this conspiracy theory, people were used as subjects. The CIA has always denied this accusation.

Ergot fungus can cause ergotism, also called rye spur poisoning. In this disease, the symptoms seen in the Cursed Bread Incident were also possible. Between 900 and 1300 AD, between 20,000 and 50,000 deaths related to ergot alkaloids were recorded.

However, it was not realistic for processed ergot alkaloids to produce such an effect. So what caused the Cursed Bread Incident remained a mystery in history.

 

Source: 1