The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank is a compelling series of essays that explore a wide range of fascinating and unexpected subjects. This excerpt, from an essay called ‘Les Tigres’, tells the story of a massed hallucination event in 1951, France.
On a hot August day in 1951, 280 people in Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France, became sick with what appeared to be food poisoning. Their doctors observed the usual gastric upset, but also a few uncommon symptoms: enlarged pupils, slow pulse, low body temperature. The sickest patients smelled like stale urine and dead mice.
After 48 hours, most people seemed a lot better. True, nobody had slept in two days, but they felt wonderfully vigorous and alert. “You know,” said one woman, “I think this illness—whatever it is—has done me a lot of good. I’ve never had so much energy in my life.”
Then the hallucinations began.
M Delacquis’s body expanded massively as he rode past holographically shimmering vineyards, his bicycle flying over roads like the golden chariot of Apollo.
Five-year-old Marie-Joseph Carle, her muscles locked and small limbs spasming, screamed, “Mama! The tigers! They are going to eat me! They are going to bite me!” She saw tigers in her bedroom walls, snakes on the curtains. “Mama, I am going to die! There is blood dripping from the ceiling!”
M Sauvert smashed his bed apart, believing that he was a strongman in the circus and the bed a series of iron bars he was bending with his hands.
Mme Moulin was terrorised by visions of a tall doctor in a black suit, whose head was a bare skull.
Sometimes the patients felt euphoric; other times they felt a terrifying urge to kill themselves. Sedatives had no effect; barbiturates, morphine and chloral hydrate were all useless.
Those who didn’t hallucinate became obsessed with absurd notions. A young technician from the glass factory found he could not stop thinking about potatoes. Marie-Joseph’s father begged the doctor not for medicine but for a beaded curtain so he could give the flies somewhere to sit.
24 August 1951 is remembered in the village as the Night of the Apocalypse. After 200 hours without sleep, the hallucinating patients became violently psychotic.
The elderly Mme Rieu jumped out a window and landed in a trellis, fracturing her leg. A married couple chased one another around their kitchen table with knives.
M Pommier, a 66-year-old widower, leapt from his sickbed, convinced that enemies were besieging his house. He barricaded the doors with furniture and pointed a loaded shotgun into the street. “Tomorrow, tomorrow I am getting married!” he shouted at the gendarmes. “If you wish, you must all come to the wedding!”
Charles Veladire tried to hurl himself into the Rhône. “I am dead, do you hear? I am dead! My head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach! They are burning, burning, burning!” It took seven men to drag him off the embankment.
The village hospital had only one ambulance and three straitjackets; it was rapidly overwhelmed by dozens of weeping, bloody patients with superhuman strength.
A woman screamed at her doctor to stay back. “Look at the fire roaring from my fingers! Look! It roars out of each of my fingers! I do not want you to burn up!”
A former aviator, Joseph Puche, jumped out of a second- floor window, shouting, “Look at me! I’m an aeroplane, do you understand? I’m an airplane, and I can fly!” He ran 50 metres down the street with both legs broken, bones protruding through his skin and blood soaking his pyjamas, before somebody tackled him.
Healthy volunteers from the village arrived to help, but at least one was so horrified by the scenes inside the hospital that he too reported seeing visions. Bandits with donkey ears pursued one patient wherever he went. Another saw the hospital attendants as giant fish with gaping, hungry mouths. Several patients got loose and fought each other with tomato stakes in the garden.
Near dawn, professional reinforcements arrived. An older man implored the ambulance crew: “My belly is full of snails. They are burning me to death! I am in the water. I am sending out radio messages everywhere. Get me the X-ray, get me the X-ray, and you can see!”
When they came for Emile Cima, who was standing naked on a dung heap, he tore seven straitjackets in half, one after the other, like a machine made for straitjacket tearing. At the hospital at Nîmes, he gnawed at his thick leather restraints, so terrified of the massive tiger in his cell that he didn’t notice his teeth breaking.
As the sun rose, M Sauvert was transformed from a circus strongman into a tightrope walker. In his pyjamas, he slipped out of his house and down to the Rhône, where a temporary suspension bridge still stood in place of the pont that had been bombed in the war. There, he performed a death-defying routine on a cable high above the river.
A fireman who spent the night volunteering at the hospital was heard to say, “I hope God will never allow again what I have lived through this night.”
The disaster continued long after the Night of the Apocalypse. The violence subsided, but the hallucinations continued, and still the victims had not slept. Some remained psychotic, others went into comas. Depression and fear continued to oppress the patients.
M Delacquis wrote compulsively for three weeks, filling pad after pad with poetry to distract himself from a terrible urge to leap from his bedroom window.
Dark hours—monotonous song
In a minor key, sad and full of torture;
Rhythmic sting of the dagger
Into the mass of brain.
M Carle, Marie-Joseph’s father, counted the six panels in his bedroom window over and over again, in a booming voice, 24 hours a day. Un! Deux! Trois! Quatre! Cinq! Six! Un! Deux! Trois! Quatre! Cinq! Six!
The spectre of the headless doctor continued to haunt Mme Moulin’s home.
At least five people died as a direct result of the poisonings at Pont-Saint-Esprit, their organs failing after days or weeks of torment. Other victims remained physically or mentally maimed. Limbs were lost to gangrene, eyes to blindness. Some spent the rest of their lives in hospitals or rest homes, bedridden by fatigue and vertigo.
It seemed clear that the villagers had been poisoned by their bread; most, but intriguingly not all, of the victims had bought their loaves on 17 August at the same bakery. They’d felt the first symptoms within hours of eating it with lunch or dinner, and pets and farm animals had died after sharing their crusts. While events were still unfolding, the New York Times of August 29 reported definitively that the villagers were “stricken by a poison, as yet undetermined, contained in bread from one of the town’s bakeries”. But the baker, M Briand, was among the victims, as were his wife and assistant. If Briand hadn’t poisoned his loaves, then who had—and with what?
To prevent shortages and waste, which must have seemed more urgent than ever after the deprivations of the recent war, the French government had authorised an organisation called the Union Meunière to distribute all the flour in France. In theory, this should have ensured that everyone got their daily bread, even where harvests were poor; in practice, the union was a rich and much resented private monopoly. No longer free to choose their own millers, bakers had to work with whatever the union delivered, and its quality control was minimal. Flour arrived discoloured, cut with inferior grains or dirtied with insect parts, dust and mouse fur. Complaints were ignored, even when bakery customers became sick; after the events of 1951, it seemed likely that the negligent union had delivered something even worse than usual.
Pont-Saint-Esprit’s three doctors blamed ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye, and concluded that the flour delivered to M Briand’s bakery must have been contaminated. A hydraulic engineer reported finding arsenic and nitrites in the water supply. Still others claim to this day that the CIA dosed the village with a then-new drug called LSD, just to see what would happen. Believers point to the CIA’s mid- century mind control experiments under MKUltra, but that isn’t proof they did it, only proof that they weren’t above doing it. There is a lot of space between ‘would have’ and ‘did’, and if anything the symptoms seem too extreme, too long-lasting and physically crippling, to be explained by LSD.
There was a criminal investigation, two arrests, and 13 years of litigation between the Union Meunière and a victims’ association nicknamed “the society of the not-all-there”. The official ruling was that fungicide had accidentally been spilled onto a sack of flour as it travelled by train towards Pont-Saint-Esprit and M Briand’s bakery. This explanation had the advantage of being no specific person’s fault, and requiring no reforms or further action. But eating fungicide has never been shown to cause hallucinations or madness, nor most of the physical symptoms recorded. Few of the survivors believed it, but over the years their faint protests faded into nothing as their health failed or they simply gave up. Pont-Saint-Esprit’s tigers slipped back into the wallpaper, and even now, the whole strange episode is referred to simply as le pain maudit—”the cursed bread”.
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank ($35, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books.