Interesting speculation about Salem, Yve. In the book, I mention some of the German folklore that sprung up around ergot. I'll excerpt a quick passage here:

Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, included several [word for ergot] in The Road to Eleusis, testifying to the parasite’s age-old relationship with grains: Rockenmutter, Afterkorn, Todtenkorn, and Tollkorn. Even as a young boy the Swiss chemist would have been exposed to the rich legends about ergot that survived in Central Europe. As it turns out, his ergot hypothesis wasn’t so far-fetched for someone whose native language has multiple words for the deadly fungus that no brewer can afford to ignore. “In German folklore, there was a belief that, when the corn waved in the wind,” Hofmann once wrote, “the corn mother (a demon) was passing through the field, her children were the rye wolves (ergot).” Hofmann thought the word Tollkorn (mad grain), in particular, demonstrated a “folk awareness” of the “psychotropic effects of ergot” — “deeply rooted in European traditions.”

Did some of those deeply-rooted traditions enter the American colonies?