In this year alone, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft, and many others were accused with no execution.
Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts; daughters their mothers; siblings each other…
Reverend Samuel Parris had recently ended his weekly sermons in Salem for the bleak winter, a season so cold in the small Massachusetts town that bread froze and toes were frostbitten.
A couple weeks later his niece and daughter, Abigail and Betty, fell ill with strange symptoms.
Reverend Parris’s niece, Abigail Williams, and daughter, Betty Parris, began acting very strangely.
They were complaining of an invisible force biting and pinching them. They launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches.” Their bodies shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid.
"[Abigail] ran to the fire, and began to throw fire-brands about the house, and run against the back, as if she would run up chimney, and, as they said, she had attempted to go into the fire in other fits."
Through February, Parris fasted and prayed for the girls' safety and freedom from this sudden affliction. He consulted with fellow clergymen. They prayed intensely, gooseflesh rising on their arms. They sang Psalms.
But when the minister had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.
In 1692, a basic medical kit looked about the same as an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In plasters or powders, snails were found in many remedies.
Salem village had one practicing physician that winter. His surgical arsenal consisted of lances, razors, and saws.
The village had one practicing physician that winter.
The physician owned nine medical texts.
The Physician could likely read but not write.
After the examination the girls were deemed to be under the influence of an evil presence. The diagnosis of being under “an evil hand” came as no surprise; the supernatural explanation was already the one on the street.
This likely terrified the girls, whose symptoms continued to deteriorate throughout the winter.
In contrast, this diagnosis may have gratified Reverend Parris. Witchcraft was a Puritan favorite. The Devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that New Englander’s were the chosen people.
Tales of witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century, when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. She could be found all over Europe and made her way to North America with ease.
Among many attributes, she bore a mark on her body for her compact with the Devil, and enchanted others by way of charms, ointments, and doll-like effigies. American folklore said they walked on their hands, made pregnancies last for three years, and rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest. The Massachusetts witch often disordered the barn and the kitchen.
As the magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female, inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. An influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of classical sources to make its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, explanations here verged on the paranormal.
Soon the twelve-year-old daughter of a close friend of Parris’s began to shudder and choke. So did the village doctor’s teen-age niece.
A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the snow; she now realized that it had not been a wolf at all but a much more sinister entity trying to lure her into a pact.
The girls named names. They could see the culprits clearly. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem.
She was a slave of Samuel Parris and was the first one to be accused by Abigail Williams and Betty Parris. During her Trial she confessed to being a witch and said many dramatic things that led to the accusation of others. This trial conivnced many that the Devil had invaded Salem.
Tituba
Osborne was a perfect target for a whitch hunt. She was an ill and fearful woman in her late 40s who was an outcast and subject of gossip partly because her second husband had formerly been her indentured servant. As if this were not enough, it was suspected that they had lived as husband and wife prior to marriage. This was a scandal.
Sarah Osborne
She was the wife of William Good and, at the time of the Salem witch hysteria, was a poor, pregnant beggar who would often wander door to door asking for handouts while her husband worked as a day laborer making her a prime target for the acuusation of witchcraft in Salem where nonconformity was frowned upon.
Sarah Good
These women were all accused by young girls in the village. They may have been the first to be accused, but they were far from the last, soon accusations would spiral out of control.
They might be only eleven or twelve, but under adult supervision they could explain how severeal head of cattle had frozen to death , several communities away, six years earlier.
The initial accusations led to other accusations, as the "witches" confessed and named others. This created a spiraling effect of more and more people being tried.
At least sixty witches were jailed by the end of the month, far more than the Massachussetts prisons had ever accomodated before.
The new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the overwhelming amount of witchcraft cases. He assembled on the bench nine of the "people of the best prudence and figure that could be pitched upon."
At its head he installed his lieutenant governor, sixty-year-old William Stoughton. The court was named "Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide)"
The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch to hang on the tenth.
The way the courts were run directly contributed to the quickly growing amount of accusations. To deny an accusation most often led to a guilty sentence and death.
But to confess to committing the crime of witchcraft, apologizing, and claiming that another made you do it had a good chance of getting you released from jail and staying alive.
One accusation would often lead to many others.
Soon the accusations were spiraling wildly out of control.
Sometimes two people would accuse each other.
The courts at that time did not use the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – if you made it to trial, the law presumed guilt.
Puritans believed that confessing and asking for forgiveness helped absolve someone of guilt, so sometimes it was better to admit false guilt than maintain innocence.
Courts could not base convictions on confessions obtained through torture unless the accused reaffirmed the confession afterward, but if the accused recanted the confession, authorities usually tortured the accused further to obtain the confession again.
These were testimonies from anyone who claimed to see the person they were accusing commit witchcraft related acts. These acts took many forms as witnesses spun bizarre tales.
These stories could be anything from visiting a previously accused spouse in jail to being baptized by the Devil. Many of these testimonies came at the time of another presumed witch's confession.
Spectral evidence refers to a witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared to the witness in a dream. It was accepted in the courts during the Salem Witch Trials.
The evidence was accepted on the basis that the devil and his minions were powerful enough to send their spirits, or specters, to pure, religious people in order to lead them astray.
The whole town was walking on eggshells throughout the summer. To cast aspersions on a bewitched girl or to visit one’s imprisoned spouse too regularly was to risk accusation. It bordered on heresy to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked man.
The word of two ministers could not save an accused parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church membership offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside homeless five-year-old girls.
Inside of your home or out, nowhere was safe.
Visiting a jailed spouse could be considered suspicious.
Everyone was on edge through the whole summer.
The court met again early in August, when three men were convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a much younger one; and John Proctor, the first village man to have been accused.
They all confessed vehemently and identified their ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon. "A vast concourse of people,” made their way to Salem for the event.
The demonic mastermind was a minister in his early forties named George Burroughs. Although he had never been officially ordained.
The claims against George were very intense, his spectre had been terrifying Salem villagers since April. It was said to have chocked a young girl and even to have murdered several women to give souls to the Devil.
Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s preliminary hearing. Nearly twice as many testified at his trial. Eight confessed witches revealed that he had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign.
His trial was no less dramatic, people who weren’t even bewitched claimed to see ghosts flying around the room. He was swiftly given a guilty sentence.
Burroughs was the first to walk up, before he was hung he started reciting the Lord’s Prayer - an impossible feat for a witch or wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution, but to no avail.
This event was shocking to many, it raised qualms from both outsiders and from those within the court as well. Several of the justices soon allowed that their methods had been “too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation”; were they to sit again, they would proceed differently.
