No. This story is a complete modern fabrication. It is titillating, it is sexist, it brings Science and Reason to the supernatural, and it is a whole lot more comfortable than the reality it was invented to explain away.

The various pieces of the figure that would become "the witch" in the early modern era were falling into place by the beginning of the fifteenth century. Broomsticks enter the legend fairly early on, but not nearly as early as that article would have you believe.

The trial of Alice Kyteler and Petronilla of Mearth (who never gets mentioned despite being the one who was actually burned at the stake--guess which one was the aristocrat and which one was the servant) referenced in the article, in 1324, predates maleficium as a formal charge; Petronilla was burned as a heretic, not a witch. But it's considered a very important sign of the diabolization of 'black magic' because a lot of the pieces of the later witch trope are present.

But not the broomstick.

You'll notice the article's quotation uses some funky spelling: ladie, staffe, and so on. That's because this is not from the chronicle account written by Bishop Richard Ledrede, who was present for the actual events, translated from its Latin into modern English. It's from Holinshed's Chronicles, which is to say, 1577. The closest Ledrede comes is:

The bishop [i.e. the author] made a huge fire in the center of Kilkenny, and on it, for all to see, he burnt a sack full of potions, powders, oils, nails, hair, herbs, worms, and countless other horrible items which Alice had used in her sorcery and magic.

Whatever the "truth" behind Ledrede's account (his narrative has little to do with the actual heresy case and is much more concerned with discussing injustices against him and the matter of Church versus secular authority, so he needs to make himself look good), we see the trappings of what appear to be spells and potions if one is already inclined to see their owner as a witch.

This is important when looking at the full passage from Holinshed and other later accounts with almost the same wording (but not Ledrede's). They recount among the charges against Kyteler:

Also that she swept the streets of Kilkennie between Compline and twilight, raking all the filth towards the doores of hir sonne William, murmuring secretlie with hir self these words: To the house of William my sonne / Hie all the wealth of Kilkennie towne.

First, Holinshed is sort of right about some of the other charges (Kyteler's alleged sexual liason with a demon/incubus called the Son of Art or Robin, Son of Art, becomes a "nightly conference with a spirit called Robert Artisson, to whom she sacrificed on the highway nine red cocks and nine peacocks' eyes.") However, the broom/sweeping bit is a post-14th century addition to the tale. This is important became it makes the broom another one of those "tools of the witch's trade."

That is to say, the broom in the witch legend by the late 16th century was an everyday object assimilated into people's idea of the "witch's toolbox". The interesting thing is, it wasn't the only one initially. Early witch iconography from Germany has witches with cooking forks as their symbol--cooking and consumption (including cannibalism) were major components of the witch legend, too. However, the imagery of broomsticks became more popular in France first. From a group of 1420s-40s witch hunts, royal magistrate Claude Tholosan pieced together the following information out of confessions. (Broedel observes that this was a different version of cannibalism than Tholosan had originally found in stories of non-witch heretical movements).

His witches would go out one night a week, identify an unlucky local child, and slaughter them. The witches would cook the victim, literally. The fat from the child would be the ointment smeared on the broomstick to enable them to fly to their feasts with the devil. It's a specific, gory, and well-attested in global cannibalism folklore idea of the "witches' brew" used in a spell--here, to animate the broomstick.

But /u/sunagainstgold, you say, there's a problem. You're citing official investigative reports and the actual confessions of women accused as witches as though they were factual.

And therein lies exactly the problem: women and men in early modern Europe confessed to witchcraft.

And not just confessed. Confessed in all the gruesome, sacrilegious, titillating, diabolic detail their inquisitors could record. The pattern happens frequently enough across national/cultural/linguistic boundaries (with details varying regionally), and is found in diverse enough types of sources, that scholars are very comfortable saying: yes, women and men accused of witchcraft confessed, and named their accomplices, even knowing there was a high risk they were sentencing themselves and their friends to a horrible death. They told stories of naked nighttime flights to have sex with Satan, of wild parties with the other witches of the town in the woods, of the deceptions they laid on other people, the things they made other people believe they saw. They said these things under oath and despite the potential, or certain, death to follow. They said these things despite them not being in the least bit true.

This should be deeply unsettling to us.

That's where the hallucinogenic dildos come in.

There's this idea perennially circulating in various pop medieval/early modern bad history about ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that can grow on various grains and cause a whole bunch of bad symptoms before it kills the person who inadvertently eats it. Ergot poisoning has been used to explain medieval prophetic visions, the Anabaptist kingdom in Munster, most famously the testimony of the accusers at Salem--and here it is pressed into service to explain why 50,000 women and men across Europe died at the stake, in the river, or on the gallows as witches.

We crave a "biological" explanation for the confessions. The witches, it is comforting to believe, believed what they were confessing was true, and believed it because of Science. In the modern world, we can prevent this by preventing rye poison. We're smarter, we're better, it can't happen again.

Ergot poisoning, as numerous scholars have shown, bears very little resemblance to the actual situations noted above...unless those 50,000 people also developed seizures, gangrene, diarrhea, vomiting, skin peeling off, and other fun things without this being noted in records. Some people occasionally fall into hallucinations or psychosis. But, you know, Science.

And you'll notice one more important part about this myth: it implicates the victims, and does so in a way that criminalizes female sexuality. Medieval women trying to get themselves off did a thing that made them believe they were witches. And this practice is why, when faced with physical and psychological torture, they told stories of flying through the night to consort with Satan. Because in this worldview women are just that lustful, and that can only ever be a bad thing.

The intentional stimulation of visions of the divine played a major role in later medieval culture. It was in fact associated with women in particular. This association grew stronger over the 14th century as male theologians grew ever more anxious about the power of women's visions and the potential that women, the weaker sex, could so so easily be corrupted ("seduced") like Eve. It was an interpretation forced onto and yet accepted by women visionaries, a bargain for the potential authority their visions might grant them in a deeply patriarchal world. By the 15th, it was an open question whether a woman's visions of God and Christ, once only needing her word to confirm their veracity, came from "nature" (hallucinations), God--or the devil.

But when these women (and much more rarely in this case, men) had visions of the devil, they recounted themselves oppressed and tempted by the demons, they told of their victories over Satan. And they didn't need hallucinogens smeared on instrumenta vel machinae to produce these visions.

The method that medieval monks had developed to provoke the mind to higher contemplation of God, the method that filtered out to lay people? Reading religious books.