Today In Worst Nightmares Realized

by Alexandra Molotkow

So! Last year a man named Frank Maldonado ordered a burger and a drink from an In-n-Out Burger in L.A. He drank half the beverage then, he says, began to experience “nausea and severe mental distress.” The next day he found two blue pills at the bottom of the cup, he alleges, which a toxicology lab determined to be meth. When he returned it to the restaurant he was offered a free burger. He is now suing.

Being dosed is one of my bottom five worst fears. I’ve never worried about meth specifically, although that sounds horrible and I’m sure I’d have a heart attack and die, but I have worried a great deal about having my drink or candy spiked with acid — about some jokester down at the soda bottling plant, or the snack warehouse, dosing cookies and pops just for the thought of some poor, anonymous sucker tripping balls.

Not unreasonably! Last year, a family in Tampa — a man, a woman, and her two daughters ages six and seven — cooked a steak purchased from Walmart, and began to feel giddy, then sick:

Before Elyana Serrano threw up, her sister Rayna was laughing and trying to grab colors out of the air. When Ronnie Morales looked at his hand, he saw several other hands jutting from his wrist. His pregnant girlfriend, Jessica Rosado, couldn’t feel her fingers or toes.

They went to the hospital, where the woman, who was nine months pregnant, had an emergency C-section. (That is, she had a baby on acid.) The meat was found to contain traces of LSD, and a thorough investigation was held, which yielded zero results: no one knows who put the acid in that meat, or where, or… why.

In 1951, the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit “was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations.” Five people died, and dozens more were institutionalized. From the Telegraph:

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets

Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”

“It was terrible,” a postman named Leon Armunier recalled to the BBC. “I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms… I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”

The cause was determined to be “Cursed Bread” — Le Pain Maudit — tainted by toxic mold and sourced from the local bakery. In 2009, the journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. claimed the town had in fact been dosed by the CIA as part of a mind control experiment. (I have no idea how widely accepted this theory is, but his case seems extensive.)

My friends in ninth grade did a lot of acid, for reasons I never understood. Why do teens drop acid? What teenager is not already horrified by their own brain?! We were “classic stoners,” but weed did not agree with me, and I spent most of that year in silent but thankfully unmanifested terror.

Acid, I thought, equaled Literal Hell. One friend, who had a staggering tolerance for everything, ran from my parents’ bathroom screaming that her face had come out of the mirror and tried to eat her face. Another friend had what looked to me like a seizure after a multi-day acid binge. “Yeah, don’t try it,” he said to me once. “I can see you just backed up against the wall screaming for eight hours.”

And yet: acid was everywhere! People at school kept it in breath mint droppers, on Listerine Strips, dumped it in their pop cans. I imagined it landing in droplets on my skin like any airborne contaminant. It seemed inevitable that someone would dose me, or that I’d dose myself by accident. I imagined and reimagined and reimagined the moment I would swig my Coke, or pop my Sour Skittle, and a friend would point at me and chuckle and say, You just ate the most acid I’ve ever seen anybody eat in my life.

The story that gets me worst, maybe because it most resembles this ultimate horror, is that of Barbara Hoyt, a one-time associate of the Manson Family who left Spahn Ranch after realizing the others had been involved in murder. She’d been thinking about testifying against them in court, but was receiving threats from some of the girls. So when Family members offered her a trip to Hawaii for her silence, she went with Ruth Ann Moorehouse, she says, to make them think she was on their side.

After a few days, Moorehouse had to leave suddenly for Los Angeles. At the Honolulu airport, she bought Barbara a hamburger. “Just imagine if there were ten tabs of acid in that,” she said, after Barbara had finished eating.

All of a sudden I was feeling really weird, very high, and I realized there were ten tabs of acid in the hamburger. I got to a bathroom and made myself throw up. I don’t know how I did it, but I got to the steps of the Salvation Army building. I sprawled out. A man asked me, “Are you all right?” I said no. I told him to call Mr. Bugliosi. They took me to a hospital and gave me Valium by IV to bring me down. The Valium went up my arm and into my brain and ripped it out. That’s when I lost consciousness.

She testified.