Events with striking similarity to the Salem Witch Trials
have occured periodically throughout history.
In a bog in England, a preserved body was found. The victim was a middle-aged man. His throat was slashed from ear to ear, and his skull was cracked wide open. In his stomach were high contents of Ergot, and grain. Update: It is theorized that this man got ergot poisoning, and showed all the symptoms, causing his midievel companions to kill him, for fear the the devil had consumed his body.
Early in the century, in France a town was rocked by a stange illness. Footage from the village, recorded by scientists from all over Europe, shows one victim of this illness convulsing so strongly that to grown men had to hold her down. One woman claimed to have been chased by bears and snakes in her room. She leapt from her hospital window, only to survive, and die later of poison. One first hand account from a young woman: "There's a snake in my bed!" She also claimed to have seen tigers, and bears, and her walls dripped with blood.
In another first hand account, a dog was fed a piece of bread. Not long afterward, the dog began "running in ever-widening circles. And bent to the ground and gnashed at rocks. And this caused it to break it's teeth, and it kept gnashing at rocks. And it died, blood caked around it's mouth." At the Salem Trials, a piece of bread was fed to a dog, and the dog reacted in the same way. That dog spawned the Witch Trials. The illness in the town in France was traced back to a bakery, and the bread sold there had been contaminated with Ergot.
Everything accounted in France, early in the century, exactly parallels all accounts from the Salem Witch Trials.