A Winter Surge of Hallucinations and Deaths

On Christmas Eve in 1926, a man came running into Bellevue Hospital in New York screaming that Santa Claus had been chasing him for blocks with a baseball bat. Not long after that, he died. And then another person arrived in the emergency room. And then another. This started happening in emergency rooms around the country. And it was happening because of a plan created by the U.S. government.

Deborah Blum’s book is The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

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