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Myths and legends all start somewhere.

You’ll usually find their origins in time periods before science was really a thing, as a way for people to explain and come to terms with the world around them.

Did you get sick after taking a walk in the rain? The fairies probably got hold of you and switched you out with one of their own. If that’s the case, it’s perfectly reasonable for your family to burn you alive.

Did the milk go sour before it was supposed to? That old lady who gave you the stink eye the other day must be a witch. You should probably burn her, too, or at least crush her under a few heavy stones. If in doubt, throw her in a lake to see if she floats.

Humanity has survived some dark times.

Usually, concrete proof was pretty hard to come by under these circumstances, unless you lived in Alicudi, a small volcanic island off the northern coast of Sicily.

There, residents had no doubts that the world was a magical place because they’d all seen it with their own eyes.

According to VICE, the island, once described by Alexander Dumas as “a corner of the earth forgotten by creation, and stuck in the era of chaos”, is home mostly to fishermen or goat shepherds, and hasn’t evolved much over the years.

You won’t find cars, but there are donkeys to help move things around if they’re too heavy.

That’s not what makes it famous, though – between 1903 and 1905, people in Alicudi started having visions.

We’re talking witches enjoying a meal on the beach, talking sacks, women growing wings so that they can head on over to Sicily to do their shopping, clowns, ghosts, and a range of other things.

Experts reckon it all had to do with the local bread.

The rye plant, then commonly used to make bread, is susceptible to infection from a fungus called ergot.

When infected, the normally beige plant grows small black spikes on its head. Ergot produces an alkaloid called lysergic acid, which is also the basic compound in LSD. In short, eating ergot makes you trip balls.

And balls they tripped for a good two years, although some researchers think it was a lot longer.

Anthropologist Macrina Marilena Maffei, who specialises in myths and legends of the Aeolian Islands, interviewed elderly locals in the 1990s and early 2000s.

She thinks ergot could have once been common throughout the archipelago, and believes the infestation could date back centuries.

Hippies, drawn to the island’s air of myth and mystery in the 1960s, debunked the locals’ claims when they recognised the effects of LSD.

Eventually, the local church declared the bread “the Devil’s bread” and people avoided it until it disappeared completely in the 1960s.

But years on, older residents still tell the tales of those strange hallucinatory visions.

You can hear those first-hand in a 2007 documentary about it:

Read more about the island and its history here.

It’s trippy stuff.

[source:vice]