Real Life Mysteries

30 Real Life Mysteries That Sound Like They Came Straight Out Of An X-Files Episode

18. A young boy was reincarnated

This young boy told his mother that he used to be somebody else, that he used to be a Hollywood agent in it’s ‘golden age’ and was married several times. He even listed his birth year correctly even though it was listed incorrectly on his birth certificate; along with dozens of details that he couldn’t possibly know.

19. There was a mass poisoning in France

The 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit Mass Poisoning.

On a quiet morning of August 15th 1951 residents of a small town located in the South of France were finishing their breakfasts and beginning to get ready for their day. Soon after many residents began to complain of feeling unwell; describing a sense of unease in their stomach, experiencing sudden warmth followed by bouts of cold, intense sweating, and excessive salivation.

It wasn’t long before a plague of madness seemed to strike the town, jumping from one person to the next. As the residents began to act out erratically, some even violently, describing deep and vivid hallucinations – often of animals and flames. As the day progressed into night the symptoms remained, those afflicted now suffering from insomnia and intense irritability.

For some the breaking of the next morning did nothing to stop the symptoms. The town would continue to plunge into madness, with some people suffering upwards of 3 days from madness.

All told an estimated 250 to 500 total were said to have had been poisoned. Fifty people had been committed to asylums, and 7 people died – 2 of an apparent suicide, the other 5 caused by cardiac arrest and convulsions. Afterwards scientists fell onto the town to try and discover the cause of the poisoning and began to develop theories on how or why it occurred.

The predominant theory is ergot poisoning. The ergot mold naturally grows on rye and similar plants. Consumption of the mold causes ergotism through its alkaloids within humans (as well as other mammals). The most common symptoms of ergotism will cause stomach pain, seizures, itching, spasms, and psychosis. In fact the first batch of LSD used ergot as a precusor for the synthesis of LSD.

The other, darker, theory is that it was a CIA operation. At the time the CIA was running experiments to determine if LSD could potentially be weaponized. Two pieces of evidence are often used to link the CIA, in some fashion, to the area. The first is that some declassified CIA documents make mention of the Pont-Saint-Espirit, but it doesn’t appear to be anything significant beyond routine interest. The second is that individuals from the Sandoz Chemical Company from Sweden were working closely with the CIA at this time, and some of its biochemists had been dispatched to Pont-Saint.

The case remains to be unsolved.

Holly is the author of Severe(d): A Creepy Poetry Collection.

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