The Salem Witch Trials
On the northern coast of Massachusetts, lies one of the oldest known cemeteries in the United States.
Built shortly after the area was settled in 1626, those who called the place home wished to give it a pious, pleasant name, based on the Hebrew word for peace.
The name they chose – was Salem.
The puritan colonists of late 17th century America were a deeply superstitious people.
They believed in a very literal interpretation of the bible, which included the physical manifestations of the Devil.
In other words, they believed Satan could have a very real and very tangible effect on their lives, one facilitated by certain earthly representatives known as – Witches.
In the year 1668, well-respected English philosopher Joseph Glanvill published a work known as ‘Against Modern Sadducism’.
In it, he claimed to have proven the existence of witches, ghosts, and an otherworldly, supernatural realm; and argued that anyone who denied the existence of such things was a heretic. Glanvill also argued that “demons were alive”, and lived among us, disguised in human form.
Given that Glanvill was considered a scholar of high esteem, having graduated from Oxford University, his treatise caused widespread panic and terror among a barely educated population.
When the first copies of ‘Against Modern Sadducism’ made it across the Atlantic, rumors of witchcraft had a devastating effect on the population of New England.
An influential minister named Cotton Mather, who preached out of Boston’s North Church, was a passionate believer in the imminent threat of witchcraft. In his 1689 book ‘Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions’, Mather claims to have witness the effects of witchcraft on a Boston masonry worker named John Goodwin.
Mather described how the Goodwin family’s eldest child had stolen some linen from a washer woman named Goody Glover. Not long after the theft, the Goodwin children began to suffer violent fits, or what were described at the time as “the disease of astonishment”.
They also complained of random pains in their bodies, and suffered manic episodes in which they attempted to harm themselves or those around them. Mather explained that prayer and penance rid the children of their symptoms, but that Goody Glover was to blame, having cast a malevolent spell over the children in revenge for stealing her linen.
It might sound like utter nonsense now, but back then, the word of clergymen was pretty much taken as gospel. So, by the time it trickled up to Salem, it proved just enough to burst the metaphorical dam.
You see, by 1692, and unlike its name suggests, Salem was anything but peaceful.
Its citizens were wracked with internal disputes involving property lines, grazing rights, and church privileges. Inter-family feuds were commonplace, and even Salem’s neighbors remarked that its occupants were particularly “quarrelsome”.
Historians have suggested that the situation in Salem made some sort of conflict inevitable, but the tension eventually boiled over so violently and bizarrely that it would go down as one of the most horrifying incidents of mass-hysteria in world history.
This is story – of the Salem Witch Trials.
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In mid-February of 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris, and her eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, were stricken by an unknown malady.
They began to suffer fits that were described as “beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease”, which included violent outbursts, speaking in tongues, contorting themselves into strange, uncomfortable positions; and sudden, random pains that felt like they were being pricked with a sharp pin.
Shortly afterwards, two twelve-year-old girls named Ann Putnam Jr and Elizabeth Hubbard also began to suffer from a similar mystery affliction, and the apparently virulent spread of the illness terrified local authorities.
They quickly arrested three women, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and a Caribbean slave-girl named Tituba.
Sarah Good was a poor, single woman, who was accused of being a witch purely on the grounds that she rejected the Puritan way of life, and was formally accused of “scorning children instead of leading them toward the path of salvation”.
Sarah Osborne was accused because she eschewed early morning church services, and given that she was trying to control her son's inheritance from her previous marriage, authorities believed it motivated her to resort to witchcraft.
Tituba received the most spurious accusations, as it was said that all she had done was entertain the children with a few tales of witchcraft and enchantment from a book called ‘The Hammer of the Witches’, which has since been described as the ultimate compendium of demonic literature from the 15th century.
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How Tituba, a West Indian slave-girl, came to know of such a work, is quite frankly impressive – but the fact remains that this was seen as nothing but evidence of her guilt.
Two more women were brought before the local magistrates on March 1st of 1692, and were questioned for several days before being held in a nearby jailhouse.
These were Martha Corey, and a woman named Rebecca Nurse.
It turns out that Martha Corey was only arrested because she had expressed skepticism over the credibility of the afflicted girl’s stories. But instead of keeping an open mind, local authorities took her skepticism as a sign of guilt.
The townsfolk sound the charges against Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse to be deeply disturbing, because both Martha and Rebecca were full covenanted members of the town’s church. If such highly regarded members of the community could be witches, then anybody could be a witch.
This led to the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good being formally accused of witchcraft, and the magistrates actually forced the girl to give evidence in a court of law.
Within a week, the confessions began.
Three women named Abigail Hobbs, Mary Warren, and Deliverance Hobbs all confessed to practicing witchcraft, and began naming what seemed like random townsfolk as accomplices. A whopping fourteen arrests occurred in the days that followed, and additional warrants were issued for almost forty other people.
The conditions in the jailhouse were so poor that one May 10th of 1692, one of the accused actually died whilst in custody. Sarah Osborne was buried before she could ever be acquitted, and we can only imagine the anguish she felt in the hours before she passed.
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The investigation was zealous to say the least, and literally hundreds of people passed through a terrifyingly haphazard system of interrogations, in which illogical arguments and even torture were commonplace.
Even Cotton Mather, the witch-fearing preacher out of North Boston, expressed concern over the intensity of the proceedings. He wrote a letter to member of his congregation shortly after Sarah Osborne died, one passage reads:
“Do not lay more stress on pure spectral evidence than it will bear. It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the Shapes of persons, not only innocent, but also very virtuous. Though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for the speedy vindication of the persons thus abused”.
In a nutshell, even Mather thought they were flogging a judicial dead-horse, and this was a man with a lot to gain from promoting the idea of witches being present in the region.
June of 1692 saw the first of many executions.
Bridget Bishop’s case was the first to be brought before the grand jury, who endorsed all indictments against her.
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Bridget was known to be a rather eccentric figure, who eschewed the Puritan lifestyle in favor of what were referred to as “odd, black costumes”.
At her trial, Bridget was asked a series of bizarre and disparate questions, such as why her coat was cut in a certain way, or why she chose to live an immoral lifestyle.
Her denials and pleas for mercy were basically ignored, and she was convicted of witchcraft that very same day.
There seems to have been a moment of hesitance following Bridget’s hanging, as the court adjourned for almost three weeks while it sought advice from higher authorities.
Some of their collective response reads as follows, and was penned by Cotton Mather himself.
“The afflicted state of our poor Neighbours, that are now suffering by molestations from the invisible world, their condition calls for the utmost help of all persons. With all thankfulness, we acknowledge the success which the merciful God has given us to detect the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in the country, and we pray that the discovery of those mysterious and mischievous wickedness may be perfected. But we also judge that there is need of a very critical and exquisite caution, lest Satan get an advantage over us.”
Mather also urged caution in future investigations, probably as a way of avoiding the conviction of innocents. However, he was also quick to recommend a “speedy and vigorous prosecution for the detection of witchcrafts”.
In other words, despite a warning to be diligent, the Salem Witch Trials were given the green light to root out Satanism and Witchcraft in their community – and they did so with violent fervor.
On August 19, 1692, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard and John Proctor were all put on trial, then executed by hanging.
Robert Calif, a Boston cloth merchant, happened to have witnessed the execution, and wrote the following in his journal.
“Mr. Burroughs was carried in a Cart with others, through the streets of Salem, to Execution. When he was upon the Ladder, he made a speech that insisted on his innocence, with such Solemn and Serious Expressions as were to the Admiration of all present; his recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was so well worded, and uttered with such composedness as such fervency of spirit, that it was very Affecting, and drew Tears from many. The accusers said the Devil stood and dictated to him. As soon as he was hanged, Mr. Cotton Mather addressed the people, saying that the devil often had been transformed into the Angel of Light, and to not be fooled by Burroughs’ apparent piousness. This did somewhat appease the People, and the Executions went on”.
What’s particularly disturbing about this execution is that the Witch Hunters of New England had previously declared that it was impossible for a practicing witch to recite the Lord’s prayer.
Then, when a number of the accused were able to do so, the authorities simply moved the goalposts, claiming that their ability to do so was evidently a trick of the Devil.
In essence, there was no way to prove your own innocence.
All it took was an accusation, and the court would simply bend and shift their argument to ensure a guilty verdict, and subsequently, execution by hanging.
By September of 1692, eighteen additional people had been formally accused of witchcraft, including a man by the name of Giles Corey.
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Both Giles and his wife had been accused of making a pact with the devil, and filled with righteous indignation, Giles refused to make a plea at his trial.
According to 17th century law, a person who refused to plead could not be tried, so, in order to avoid a mistrial, the legal remedy for refusing to plead was known as ‘pressing’.
In preparation, prisoners were detained in a dark jail cell, stripped naked, and large wooden boards were laid on their bodies.
After that, extremely heavy rocks or boulders were placed on the boards until the prisoner suffered a great amount of pain.
They were then left there to endure the agony, fed only a few handfuls of mouldy bread and dirty water, until they either entered a plea, or passed away.
According to witnesses, Giles Corey was given one last chance to enter a plea, and save himself from a dreadful ordeal.
On the third day, Giles was asked if he’d like to change his plea.
He was in a terrible state by then, and the magistrate had to lean down close to him in order to hear his answer.
He observed that Giles had been crushed so badly that his tongue had been forced out of his mouth, and it's said the magistrate had to force it back into Giles’ mouth in order to hear him speak.
His answer would go down in history as one of the most steadfast but haunting examples of non-violent protest.
Instead of mercy, Giles Corey asked the magistrate for “more weight”.
The magistrate was enraged, and complied with his request with gusto.
Giles passed away around noon on the 19th of September, 1692, with his wife, Martha, being hanged three days later.
Because she had been officially convicted of being a witch, she was excommunicated by the church and denied a proper burial.
Following her execution, her body was simply tossed in a shallow, unmarked grave as the bloodthirsty crowds dispersed.
All in all, nineteen of Salem’s seventeenth century residents were executed by hanging, in what was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America.
Most of those killed were convicted solely on what was known as “spectral evidence”, which is the accuser claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was apparently afflicting them.
As a result, a nightmare scenario existed in which a person’s alibi was deemed completely inadmissible. It didn’t matter if you weren’t at the scene of the crime, you could still be guilty of it.
What’s more, some of those accused and executed were simply people who tried to calm the hysterical townsfolk, and prevent wrongful executions.
For example, a man named John Proctor was hanged on August 19th of 1692, his only crime being defending his wife, who had in turn been accused of witchcraft during the early stages of the trials.
Proctor had also called out ‘spectral evidence’ as the nonsense that it was, but seizing on the opportunity to appear more pious, a former servant girl of Proctor’s, named Mary Warren, accused him of “forcing [her] to place [her] hand on the Devil’s book”.
Obviously, the accusation was almost definitely a false one, but in the maelstrom of terror and suspicion that gripped the town, the obvious was lost on both the people, and the magistrates.
The first signs that an obvious mistake had been made came very soon after the hangings, but were repressed for quite some time.
Three years later after the Salem Witch Trials, a high-profile Quaker named Thomas Maule wrote, “it would be better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one innocent person be put to death”.
Naturally, he was subsequently accused of witchcraft, and imprisoned for twelve months before he was found not guilty.
Yet by the time he was released, the General Court of Boston all but admitted its grave error of judgement when it ruled that there would be a day of fasting “referring to the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his Instruments”.
John Hale, a minister who was present at many of the proceedings, would later poetically admit “such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way”.
By February of 1703, members of the church of Salem voted to reverse the excommunication of Martha Corey.
Three years later, Ann Putnam Jr, one of Salem’s most zealous and active accusers, publicly asked the townsfolk to forgive her, claiming she had not acted out of malice, but had been deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent people.
In May of 1709, twenty-two people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose relatives had been convicted of witchcraft, presented local authorities with a petition in which they demanded both a reversal of convictions and compensation for financial losses.
It took two years to receive justice, but in December of 1711, the local Governor would elect almost £600 to be divided among the survivors; that’s only about $67,000 in today’s money.
Yet although there had been some degree of financial restitution, and the affected families were assured that their relatives were martyrs, the emotional accounts of those who suffered were far from closed.
There are numerous memorials and museums dedicated to the Salem Witch Trials, but that didn’t stop Salem’s residents from fearing otherworldly reprisals in the years that followed.
For example, the ghost of Giles Corey is said to appear, and walks his graveyard to signal an impending disaster, like when he was said to have appeared the night before the Great Salem Fire of 1914.
Those who held the title of Sheriff of Essex County were also said to have suffered from something known as ‘The Curse of Giles Corey’; as numerous sheriffs have either died or resigned as a result of heart or blood ailments.
It's also very disturbing that humanity doesn’t seem to have moved on all that much since the late seventeenth century.
We’re just as prone to hysteria, just as likely to believe false accusations based on pre-existing prejudices, and just as likely to value the wild and baseless claims of children over educated adults.
Perhaps as long as they are human beings inhabiting the earth, they’ll always seek to hunt out the ‘witches’ among them, no matter what form they take, or if they even exist at all.