A woman on a broom, silhouetted against the moon, is the most dependable image of Halloween on October 31. In recent years it has acquired a popular backstory. Witches, the story goes, greased their broom handles with a salve of deadly nightshade and henbane, rubbed it into the most absorbent skin they had, and "flew" on a drug trip.
The theory returns every autumn, on Atlas Obscura and History.com among others. It is not baseless. It is also far less certain than its retellings suggest, and its oldest evidence is some of the least reliable testimony in European history.
The theory as usually told
Medieval Europe had several toxic, mind-altering plants close at hand: belladonna, henbane, mandrake and jimsonweed, all rich in tropane alkaloids. Swallowed, they make people violently ill. Absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes, they might deliver visions without the vomiting. The broom handle, the argument goes, was the applicator, and the ride was the high.
The proof text usually offered is a 15th-century line from the theologian Jordanes de Bergamo, who wrote that common people believed, and witches confessed, that they "anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place," or else anointed themselves under the arms "and in other hairy places." Atlas Obscura adds that the herbs may have been boiled in oil as broomlike bundles, soaking the handle, but cites no historical source for it.
A staff in Kilkenny
The case everyone cites is older still. In 1324 Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, brought seven charges of witchcraft and heresy against Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, a wealthy moneylender married at least four times. One charge concerned ointments cooked from cocks' entrails, dead men's nails and the brains of unbaptized boys, in the skull of a beheaded thief. Her servant Petronilla de Meath was tortured, confessed among much else to rubbing ointment on a stick in order to fly, and was burned at the stake on November 3, 1324. Kyteler escaped and vanished from the record.
Then there is the famous line. Searching her closet, investigators supposedly found "a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe," on which she "ambled and galloped through thick and thin." The quote is everywhere, but it is written in early modern English, not the Latin of a 14th-century church court, and none of the popular sources that repeat it say where it first appeared. Some writers argue the pipe was really a dildo. That too is interpretation. What is certain is that the earliest flying stick in the record comes from a confession extracted under torture for a bishop intent on finding a satanic conspiracy.
The broom itself arrives later. Atlas Obscura dates the first known confession of broom flight to 1453, from Guillaume Edelin of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, a man, under torture. In 1477 Antoine Rose of Savoy confessed, again under torture, that the Devil had given her a stick 18 inches long and a pot of ointment. She smeared the stick, put it between her legs and said, "Go, in the name of the Devil, go." The first known description of witches using a flying ointment, by Johannes Hartlieb, followed in 1456.
Dream or body?
For most of the Middle Ages the church's answer was that none of this happened. A canon law text known as the Canon Episcopi, recorded by Regino of Prüm and later absorbed into Gratian's Decretum, condemned the belief that certain women rode through the night with Diana and Herodias. Priests were to teach that these were dreams sent by the Devil, and that believing them real was itself the error. Burchard of Worms, writing around 1020, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, listed nocturnal riding through the air among the things that could not be done.
Witch hunters had to argue around this. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, submitted to the University of Cologne in 1487, reinterpreted the canon so that witchcraft could be both real and effective. Ointments sat right on the fault line. If witches anointed themselves and lay in a stupor, perhaps their flight was a delusion after all. The Dominican Bartolommeo Spina, writing in 1525, told of a maidservant in Pavia found unconscious on the floor who said only that she had been "on a journey."
The stakes were not academic. The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries put an estimated 60,000 people to death in Europe, by the figure the BBC cites, and around a quarter of them were men.
The one test on record
At least one official tried the ointment and drew the opposite conclusion. The historian Henry Charles Lea, in his history of the Spanish Inquisition, describes a letter from the inquisitor Avellaneda about Navarre in 1527. He let a prisoner anoint herself with her unguent at midnight on a Friday. She opened a window over a drop that would have killed a cat, called on the Devil, and reached the ground. She was recaptured on Monday with seven others, three leagues away. Officials and lawyers at Pamplona, apparently persuaded by this experiment, agreed that witches really could be carried through the air, and all eight were executed. Avellaneda reported fifty executions and hoped to add twenty more.
Lea offered the episode as a model of how witch finders created witchcraft. A prisoner who escaped through a window had become proof of flight. The Inquisition's governing council grew wary of such cases, and in 1530 it warned that the ambiguity was so great that human reason could scarcely reach the truth.
What holds up
The evidence supports a narrower claim. Ointments built from dangerous plants were real; Johann Weyer's treatise of 1563 named henbane, deadly nightshade and mandrake among their ingredients. These plants contain atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, deliriants rather than gentle psychedelics, and scopolamine can act through the skin. In a 2013 case report from Turkey, a 49-year-old woman who ate a large quantity of belladonna berries turned restless and aggressive within three to four hours, then arrived at the emergency room in a coma and had to be intubated. Yet the feeling of flight is reported: Atlas Obscura quotes a 1966 account by Gustav Schenk describing "an intoxicating sensation of flying" alongside the fear that his body was falling apart.
So some people who used such salves may well have woken convinced they had been somewhere. Lea, no friend of credulity, thought some confessions were sincere accounts of real illusions.
What the record does not support is the confident detail. Nearly every account of an anointed staff comes from torture, hostile witch hunters, or later folklore, and some modern scholars dismiss the flying ointment altogether. The broom as genital applicator is a modern inference from a few suggestive phrases; none of the passages usually quoted says it outright. And the broom has rival explanations. Reginald Scot in 1584 described witches dancing at their assemblies with a broom held aloft, Robin Skelton linked the image to leaping fertility dances with poles and pitchforks, and the broom was a ready symbol of female domesticity.
The skeptics got there first. In a play by Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla of Toledo, who died in 1648, a marquis explains that witches rub on a henbane ointment that puts them to sleep, so that "they think they are flying through the air." His proof is that more than two of them have been found asleep in their own rooms, the ointment still on them.