The Salem Witch Trials

A look at the historical context and events of the Salem Witch Trials, where 19 people were hanged and one pressed to death after being accused of witchcraft. Join Kelli as she gives an overview of the event and looks into the history that explains how this infamous event could happen in a small Puritan town in New England.

Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric

Want to start your own podcast?
Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up!

Insta: @beardwrites

Chapters

• 0:13 Intro
• 2:39 The Event
• 13:26 So many questions!
• 14:07 Historical Context
• 34:39 Outro

Transcript

Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things where we love all things gory, gross, and bloody disgusting. My name is Kelli Beard, and today I’m going to tell you a story about witchcraft. 

In 1692, 20 people were executed as witches; of them, 19 were hanged. But it wasn’t the kind of hanging where their neck snapped and they died quickly; the drop was short, and they slowly suffocated in the hangman’s noose. This event was known as the Salem Witch Trials, a plague of madness that swept through New England’s Puritan society. 

The persecution of witches was not new in the late 17th century; witchcraft has been around since biblical times, and the first witch hunts took place in the late Middle Ages, the 14th century. Yet of all the witch hunts in history, the Salem Witch Trials are the most popular. What is it about this particular event that makes people so curious? Why are we so fascinated by Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible? Why do Millennials love Hocus Pocus so much?

There’s something peculiar about Salem. Something that draws us in. It’s cast a spell on historians ever since 1692; we’re a group obsessed. Salem has become one of the more popular events in American History, but I’m curious to find out why. What is it about Salem Massachusetts that brings in almost 1 million visitors each year?

To find out, we’re going to do the history of the Salem Witch Trials together. First, we’ll take a look at the event in question, focusing on all the gory details of course, but then we’ll look at the context. Historical context is the most important part of history to me; it’s finding out why something happened at that particular moment in time. Why 1692? Why Salem? Why the Puritans? 

To answer this, we need to understand the 17th-century world these people lived in because it’s so different from our 21st-century one. Salem Village was a frontier settlement, a small outpost of Puritans that more or less governed themselves. They fought against the indigenous who lived in Maine, they shivered in the bitter New England cold, they suffered from failing crops, and they struggled against sins and demons. Into this harsh world, in 1692, a handful of girls started to accuse first women, and later men, of witchcraft. Why they did this is purely speculative, but let’s do the history to figure out what might have caused the Salem Witch Trials.

January 1692. The Reverend Parris thinks his daughter Betty and niece Abigail Williams are acting strangely. By February, he believes they are afflicted. The girls writhed on the ground, screaming, crying out in pain, their bodies contorted in unnatural positions. People came to see what had become of them, and word soon spread throughout Salem and other nearby towns that something strange was happening.

Soon after, other girls in Salem Village became afflicted. One of them was Ann Putnam Jr., daughter of the prominent Joseph Putnam. The community, under Reverend Parris, clamored for answers. What was afflicting the girls? Why was their community suffering? To many, there was only one answer - witchcraft.

Before long, Reverend Parris forced the girls to point out who among them was causing these afflictions; who was afflicting his own daughter. Betty Parris calls out her family’s servant, Tituba. Shortly after, Ann Putnam and another girl call out Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne; these three women were the first to be condemned.

When we look at the traditional European depiction of witches, we see similarities to Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne: poor, marginalized women who existed outside the norm of society. For Salem in 1692, that meant Puritan society. 

The Puritan movement grew as a subset of the Church of England in the 16th century. They felt that the Church of England was engaging in ceremonies and practices too similar to Catholicism, so they left England for the Americas so they could practice their religion without temptation or evil surrounding them. The larger context here involves the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century, where the Christian Church split into Catholic and Protestant faiths. It was a tumultuous period where different ideas about the Bible and salvation emerged, and religious conflicts soon followed. Eager to escape this chaos, the Puritans left for New England.

But Puritan life in New England was hard. And now, suddenly, the people of Salem felt they were being attacked by Satan himself with the emergence of witchcraft in their community.

When put on trial, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne denied being witches. Sarah Good was an impoverished widow, forced to beg the community for handouts. The others looked at her as an angry, ungrateful woman, but in reality, she was just a woman living on the fringes of a strict Puritanical society. Sarah Osborne was practically bedridden by this point, but had previously been scandalized when she married an indentured servant. The two fit that classic stereotype of being on the outside, outcasts, unliked by many, and misunderstood by most. 

Tituba, though, admitted to practicing witchcraft. She went so far as to say that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were tormenting her, and that the three had signed the Devil’s Book with their blood in the Reverend’s house as he slept. She also claimed that there were at least nine other witches in Salem. Why she said these things we’ll never know. But Tituba gave the court what they wanted, and the witch hunt began.

The afflicted girls continued to give names - Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter was accused. Two churchgoing elderly women, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, were next. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the outcasts being labeled as witches, but good, devout, Puritan women.

And then it wasn’t just the women.

John Proctor, another prominent member of the Salem community, was accused by his servant Mary Warren.

Following him, Bridget Bishop was called. Then Giles Corey, husband of the previously accused Martha Corey. The list continued on and on. 

Accusations are now spreading beyond Salem; a Puritan Reverend from Maine - George Burroughs - was accused along with four other women from Woburn, MA. The jail cells at Salem are growing cramped and fetid, as the accused were forced to sit in their own filth until their court hearing. 

The first to die was Sarah Osborne, already in poor health from the beginning; she died in prison awaiting her trial. 

By May, just four months after Parris’ daughter first showed signs of possession, over 40 people had been accused of witchcraft, with more and more every day. The first witchcraft trial took place on June 2, 1692. Though she wasn’t the first accused, Bridget Bishop was the first to plead her case. She fit the bill for a traditional European witch: she was elderly, poor, difficult, and suspicious of others. Ten people came out to testify against her, though they were mostly baseless accusations. The Court found her guilty, and she was hanged to death 8 days later. 

It’s worth mentioning in the quickest of tangents here that the witches of Salem who were hanged to death did not die quickly. Traditionally, a hanging is meant to drop the condemned from a height suitable enough to snap their necks at the bottom of the drop. Death is quick, kinda. However, in Salem, those who were hanged were not dropped from height but left to dangle in the noose, and they slowly suffocated to death, twitching and choking. Immense suffering. Those who witnessed these gruesome executions were unnerved by what they had seen.

Bridget’s death was the first of 19 hangings that took place in 1692. Shortly after Bridget’s ordeal, more women were put on trial. The afflicted said that Sarah Good haunted them with her specter at night. They say she had familiars, which are supernatural entities that take the form of animals to help the witch do her bidding. More and more people are brought on trial and then hanged. 

But with Rebecca Nurse’s execution, things were starting to change. A second phase in the trials, if you will. People looked down on Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne as different, marginalized women that could potentially be witches. They fit the descriptions of witches they had all heard and read about. They certainly weren’t seen as devout Puritan women, free from sin. But to many in Salem, Rebecca Nurse was free from sin. She was the most devout of them all, a woman in her 70s who had served the community all her life, filled with goodness and piousness. She had a spotless reputation. But when her name was called, and when she was convicted by the Court, it showed Salem that nobody was safe.

Rebecca Nurse, along with Sarah Good and 3 others, was hanged on July 19th.

Soon after, the Court started to use torture to get confessions out of the accused. One method was being tied neck to heels, where the person was bent backward so that their heels met the back of their neck. Few people are flexible enough to withstand this for a few minutes, let alone indefinitely. Those tortured this way were left until they bled from their noses and mouths. 

More and more were accused, and at the same time, the Court was preparing for more hangings. On August 19, five more were hanged, but this time four men were among them.

One man, Giles Corey, was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft because his wife has previously been accused. Giles Corey refused to plea before the Court though, calling out the spectacle for what it was. To torture him into submission, he was pressed. Being pressed is when the victim is placed on a wooden board, hands restrained to the sides in a T-pose. Another board is placed on top, and heavy stones are laid upon it until the person is essentially squished to death.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I thought this was what “stoning” was for the longest time. Not until I read The Lottery in high school did I learn that stoning is throwing stones at someone until they die of blunt trauma and internal bleeding. See, you learn something new everyday day!

Giles Corey refused to plead guilty or innocent, despite being pressed for three days. The Court could not abide by his stubbornness, so they added more and more stones on top of him. His last words were “more weight” before succumbing to internal injuries. Keep in mind, Giles Corey was an innocent man, as all the accused witches were, but the Court had just tortured him to death. How far is too far? How will people react to this? Surely this isn’t what the Puritans believe God wants from them, right? By the way, Giles Corey’s death is the only example of pressing as a form of torture or death sanctioned in American history.

Three days after Giles Corey’s death (or can we just call it murder at this point), 8 were hanged, including his wife Martha.

These were the last accused witches to be hanged, though, as there was growing opposition to the trials. People started to question things back when the pious Rebecca Nurse was killed. They were starting to see the accused as innocent. The trials were becoming more and more rushed, the evidence less and less convincing. People grew disgusted at the torture and what happened to the elderly Giles Corey - an 81-year-old man who was pressed to death. 

People also started to think; if the Puritans were truly doing God’s work in purging wickedness from Salem, then shouldn’t life be getting better? They thought they were removing the devil from their community, but things only got worse for New England. In July of 1692, a large fire broke out in Boston. Then, drought and mass crop failure. Even a Puritan settlement in Jamaica was leveled by an earthquake. English cities were in trouble, and Puritans began to doubt they were doing the right thing.

The accusations spread to neighboring Andover, then Gloucester, and onwards throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut in the South, and Maine to the North. 

A man named William Phips had been recently appointed as the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor. He quickly put a stop to the madness. He forbade any more charges except under extreme circumstances, especially since his own wife was recently accused, and she had never once set foot in Salem. By now, a majority of the town was against the trials, and the girls who claimed they were afflicted were losing their power over the crowd. 

Curiously, Tituba was one of the last to stand trial. The Salem Court had focused much of its time on those who pled not guilty. Those who confessed to witchcraft, like Tituba, were left to rot in prison while the Court prosecuted those who claimed innocence. But with Governor Phips, the madness of the Salem Witch Trials was over, and she was eventually acquitted, along with many others who were accused of witchcraft or had confessed to being a witch. There would be no more deaths by hanging in Salem; the last to die on the gallows died in September with Martha Corey, nine months after the whole ordeal began. Two other women died in prison awaiting their freedoms; the last passed away on March 10th, 1693.

In all, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft. 19 were hanged, 1 was pressed to death, and three died in jail. 

So what went wrong here? I have so many questions, and I hope you do too. Why were these girls, and even some women, accusing others of being witches? Did they truly believe that? Were they faking it?

All of the girls exhibited symptoms of possession that mirrored prior cases, so how did they know how to act afflicted?

Why did Tituba confess to being a witch, and tell the Court blatant lies?  Why did others confess too if they had never practiced witchcraft? How did the Court decide which ones should hang, and which should stay in jail?

Why did it spread so rapidly from Salem to nearby areas? Why were so many accused?

How did they “prove” witchcraft in court? Was there any way to prove innocence?

And above all why Salem? What went terribly, terribly wrong here?

To fully understand this event, we need to do our history and look into the context. Salem was a community wracked by fear, and we can’t do this story justice without looking into its past and piecing together the evidence, best we can, to explain why.

First I want to explore what was wrong with these afflicted girls. Was there something medically, or supernaturally, wrong with them to make them act as if possessed? And if we can’t figure that out, then why were they doing this? 

Historians over the years have put forth many explanations for what was happening to these girls. Here are some of the more outlandish claims:

In 1976, Dr. Linnda Caporael put forward the idea that the girls were suffering from a hallucinogenic fungus known as rye ergot. It grows on rye when there is a cold winter and a wet spring. People suffering from convulsive ergotism suffer from paranoia, hallucinations, twitches, spasms, and more. It might explain why the girls were acting possessed, but if this were the case, then everyone in the community would be affected.

Rye is what we call a cereal grain. Cereal grains are grasses cultivated for human consumption; like wheat, oat, corn, rice, barley, millet, and rye. The Puritans certainly relied on growing rye to survive the harsh winters, and they would have consumed a lot of it. But if their crop was tainted by ergot spores, the whole community would have been sick, not just a handful of girls. There were also other symptoms of convulsive ergotism they didn’t have, like vomiting, diarrhea, gangrene, and even dementia.

In 1999, Laurie Winn Carlson claimed the girls were suffering from encephalitis lethargica, but that’s primarily a mosquito-borne disease and it would have been too cold in New England for that to functionally spread around so quickly.

In 2008, Mary Drymon proposed in her book “Disguised as the Devil” that it could have been Lyme disease, which you can get from a tick. One of the classic symptoms of Lyme disease is a rash with a red ring around it; if you ever see one of these on your body, go see a doctor ASAP. But Drymon theorized that perhaps the witches were suffering from Lyme disease, which might help explain why they were acting strangely and had what was known as witches' teats. So get this. A witch's teat, or devil’s mark, was thought to be what was left behind when the witches, um, fed the Devil. Hence teat. They believed that the devil suckled on the witch’s flesh, and a red mark or bump was left behind.

So when Bridget Bishop was on trial, you may remember her as the first witch tried and hanged, the Court forced this woman to strip in front of nine women and a surgeon. They were looking for evidence of possession through a witch’s teat on her body; they found one. There’s no pleasant way to say where they found it, so I’ll just say it was on her lady bits. The Court thought this was proof of signing the Devil’s Book and practicing witchcraft; coupled with the accusations against her, the Court quickly found her guilty.

Drymon thinks that perhaps these red bumps were symptoms of Lyme disease and not Satanic possession. However, this doesn’t help explain why innocent people were calling out other innocent people, and it was likely too cold in New England for ticks to survive anyway. 

Speaking of Bridget Bishop, by the way, some of the men in Salem Village testified that her specter would appear to them in the night, sit on their chest, and choke them. Some historians have attributed this to sleep paralysis, where victims can see and hear, but cannot move. Many who suffer from sleep paralysis complain of weight on their chest, a choking sensation, and the feeling that they are under attack. This matches some of the descriptions of the afflicted, but it’s strange to think several members of a community were all suffering from sleep paralysis at the same time.

Hypothermia was also brought up as a potential reason for the afflicted girls’ behavior. You may recall hypothermia being the chief threat in my last episode on the Donner Party; if you haven’t listened to that, you should! Hypothermia is when your body loses its core temperature below the level of homeostasis, and your brain starts to do weird things. Perhaps in 1692, when the winter was the coldest it had been in ages, people were suffering from hypothermia.

But at the end of the day, as historian Tad Baker wrote in his book A Storm of Witchcraft, we’re using 21st-century perspectives to explain a 17th-century phenomenon. Salem residents in 1692 had their own explanation: witchcraft. It was something they all believed in and feared. Since they all believed in the existence of god, they also believed in the existence of the devil, and the devil was always trying to tempt them towards evil. The primary way he did this was through witchcraft.

I’d like to read a passage from Chris Bohjalian’s historical fiction, Hour of the Witch. Excellent book by the way, highly recommended. It takes place about 30 years before Salem, but it also uses the themes of the devil and witchcraft to tell a story about a woman trapped because of her gender in Puritan New England. Bohjalian does a really good job encapsulating how Puritans felt about God, the devil, and sin:

“But God is mindful of their wickedness. Men who crave darkness are the objects of a wrath that no mortal mind can imagine. They will see their skin seared from their arms and their bones blackened, they will watch the flames turn their legs to charred logs and their feet to ash. And they will see it and feel it every single day for eternity. Every single day. Every minute and every hour, their eyelids burned away so they cannot close them to their deformity and torture and shame. Yes, shame. The shame of the sinner, the worse shame there can be. They will live always with the smell of burnt hair and burnt flesh, with flames on their skin that cannot be smothered by their sweat or their humours or even an ocean as wide as the one that separates our world from the one we left. But their eyes will never melt - not first, not last, not ever - so they can see always what Satan can and what Satan will do. Their screams will be shrieks that will make thunder quail… this will be our condemnation too, if we do not strive with greater zeal to live the life that God wants for us.”

Powerful stuff there. And if this is truly what the Puritans believed, then no wonder they were all so scared of the devil and witchcraft.

So the real question then is how do we detect witchcraft, and were the accusers faking their afflictions?

Let’s look at one accuser in detail to get a better understanding of what’s going on here.

Mary Warren was a 20-year-old servant who worked for John and Elizabeth Proctor. Like Betty Parris and Ann Putnam, Mary Warren started to show signs of affliction, claiming that Martha Corey’s specter was haunting her. John Proctor was a vocal critic of these trials and threatened to beat Mary Warren when she started acting afflicted, and she magically got better. Warren essentially recants and says the other girls are lying about being possessed by witches. The other afflicted girls took this as a threat against whatever it was they were doing, so the girls then said that Mary Warren was a witch! They turned on her!

To save her skin, because accusations were flying at this point, she accuses her masters Elizabeth and John Proctor of witchcraft. Mary Warren had taken the heat off of her, and instead blamed someone else.

This is part of the reason witchcraft accusations spread so rapidly in Salem; one could save themselves by blaming another. It was a feedback loop. And so this system of blaming your neighbors spiraled out of control. If you were accused and confessed, you were spared a hanging but had to point the finger at someone else who turned you into a witch. It led to an outbreak.

Witches were convicted in two primary ways: first, the witch confessed. Second, there were eyewitnesses to an accused witch practicing black magic. These make sense, I guess, but most of the convictions in Salem were done using dubious measures. The most prominent was the use of spectral evidence. This was witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit came to them in the night and tormented them. Hopefully, you see the glaring problem with this as evidence in a Court of law; how you do even prove something like this happened? These mainly teenage girls were saying that another person’s specter was haunting them, and the Court believed them, but it’s dubious evidence. When Governor Phips and others heard this was being used to convict witches, they quickly disallowed it as evidence.

Another way the Salem Court tried witches was through the touch test. If the afflicted girl touched the witch who was tormenting her, the afflictions would stop. Ok so suppose I claimed that YOU were afflicting me. I could tell the Court that I saw your spirit attack me in the night. I would rant and rave and contort my body in your presence in Court, screaming that my skin was burning, and I felt hands on my throat. When they made me touch you, a hand on the shoulder perhaps, my afflictions magically stopped, until we broke contact. That is ludicrous. It lends itself well to the prevailing and most obvious theory that this was all made up! The girls were faking it! And the evidence used to convict and hang people for this folly was completely subjective. They just trusted that these girls saw specters, and trusted their afflictions were real. And as a result, 23 people died. 

I can think of three basic reasons the afflicted girls were doing this.

1. They wanted attention. Puritan women, and more specifically Puritan girls, were seen and not heard. Women were seen as the weaker sex, easily corrupted, with a penchant towards sinning. In an environment where they were always ignored and belittled, having this kind of power must have felt good. They had the entire town wrapped up in their afflictions, and they had the power to do what they wanted, to whomever they wanted. This is the theory *I* agree with.
2. They wanted to rebel against the strict patriarchy and social order of Puritan Massachusetts. Maybe the girls had had enough, and this was their way of reclaiming power. And finally,
3. The opposite of what I just said; maybe the girls wanted to save Puritanism and, like the Reverend Parris and other prominent Salem men, they saw it on the decline. By purging people they thought were ruining Puritanism, maybe the girls thought they were helping.

Based on what we saw happen with Mary Warren, where the girls turned on her for threatening to expose their lies, I’m more inclined to believe the girls were faking it and liked having the power.

But that doesn’t answer the bigger question here - why now? Why the girls of Salem in 1692? There has to be a reason, or several reasons, that explain why the girls are acting out and accusing their neighbors of witchcraft. That doesn’t just happen randomly. History is all about being able to answer the why, so let’s do that.

Salem was a tense place before Parris’ daughter and niece were overcome by fits. The families that lived there squabbled frequently over land, and there emerged two groups: the ones in charge of the town council, led by the Putnams, and the ones who lived closer to the mercantile Salem Town by the sea. The original Puritans who came here wanted to live a peaceful, farming life in a place without temptation. But by the late 17th century, the forces of capitalism and global trade had come to New England, and men became rich off of trade. Some Salemites were among those who got rich this way. But some of the families, like the Putnams, saw this method of making money as a sin. They thought it smacked of pride and greed. It doesn’t help that families like the Putnams used to have money and more land in Salem but had lost it over the years. These political and economic tensions gave rise to factionalism. 

Factionalism is where different sub-groups break away from the main group. In this group of Puritans, some wanted to eschew all things modern, while others wanted to embrace change. Long story short and simplified, it caused a lot of tension. To make matters worse, in the years leading up to 1692, Salem had gone through three different Reverends. It seems that the Reverend was being used as a political tool for the old-school Puritans to get what they wanted, a return to the “old days.” 

When Parris was appointed, he was promised a new home and lots of wood as his salary. He was allied with Thomas Putnam, whose family had been much more prominent in years past. Through the Reverend, Putnam hoped to cast out those who were against him and his family. He brought the Reverend in, built him a large home, and promised a tax of wood from his neighbors; this, of course, only added fuel to the factionalism fire. 

In return, the Reverend gave fiery sermons about evil and sin, scaring his congregation into thinking that Satan was in their midst. And it wasn’t just empty threats; New England was a harsh place in these early days of settlement. In addition to the factionalism present in the village, the people in Salem had to deal with an ongoing war in Maine against the Wabanaki indigenous peoples. Refugees from this conflict, scarred from war and likely suffering from PTSD, came to live in Salem. An orphan named Mercy Short was one of them, and she later became one of the afflicted who accused many people of witchcraft. With the ongoing war and an influx of refugees came an increase in taxes, too. To deal with this, the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to print more bills to help, but all that did was cause inflation.

As I previously mentioned, 1692 was an unusually cold year, so people were suffering from crop failures. That, with inflation, high taxes, refugees, trauma, and a war with the Wabanaki, made for some very tense times. Puritanism felt under attack, so Reverend Parris made it his mission to bring back good Puritan values. Which I guess includes hanging innocent people for crimes of witchcraft that they didn’t commit. Or torturing people to deal by pressing them with stones.

Another huge issue that plays a part in this story is their charter. Before 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter was revoked. This meant that, among other things, they didn’t have an official legal system. So what were they to do when Salemites were going to trial for witchcraft? Without a proper system, they created informal ones known as Courts of Oyer and Terminer, which translates to “hear” and “decide.” The man put in charge of this was William Stoughton, a Puritan hardliner who had little sympathy for the outcasts of Salem. He was the one who insisted on accepting spectral evidence and the touch test as proof of witchcraft. The clerk? Thomas Putnam.

Now this part is important and relates back to the factionalism that was ripping Salem apart; the other members of the Court had family that were part of the accusers. The young girls themselves couldn’t formally accuse someone of witchcraft; they were merely the catalyst. Their parents, oftentimes the father, would be the ones who levied the charges. One of the afflicted who did the most accusing? Ann Putnam. Her father? Thomas Putnam, an ally of the Reverend Parris who wanted to see his opposition crushed, including men like John Procter. Rebecca Nurse, too, was from a family that often squabbled with the Putnams over land and boundary disputes. No surprises then when the daughter of Thomas Putnam decried her as a witch, whose specter was haunting her in the night.

Ah, so it seems we’ve started to come to the heart of all this, then. The factionalism that destroyed Salem was the main reason why accusations were levied against some and not others. None of the Putnams were ever accused of witchcraft; only the outcasts of society, or their enemies. Or those who dared to speak out against how ludicrous these trials were. And because there was no formal legal system or government charter until Governor Phips arrived on the scene, Stoughton and the other Judges were free to run trials how they wanted and execute accused witches in large quantities. 

This was a political thing.

So why were the girls ranting and raving, acting possessed? Why were they afflicted?

My prevailing theory is that they were stressed. They lived in a strict Puritan society, one that saw them as weak and sinful. They were either adjacent to, or lived through, serious trauma and PTSD through King Philip’s War with the Wabanaki. Their parents were stressed, engaged in factionalism with their neighbors. Their Reverend preached fire and brimstone, scaring them. It was a combination of factors that led them to break; perhaps the first few girls did suffer some sort of reaction, and the other girls followed suit. The first ones to show signs of possession were, after all, the two little girls living in Reverend Parris’ house. It was an incredibly tense time, and perhaps this was their form of release. But at some point, it spun out of control, and when it was over 23 people were dead.

We may never know what actually happened at Salem. We have plenty of documents, accounts, and histories… but there are still so many holes in the story. Tituba, who confessed to witchcraft, was never hanged. Those who were acquitted had to pay fines before they were released from prison, and she was not able to do so. Eventually, another family bought her to get her out of prison, and she disappeared from the historical record.

Many of the afflicted girls never explained themselves. Many married off and left Salem, disappearing from the historical record. But we did hear from Ann Putnam, one of the chief accusers and daughter of hardliner Thomas Putnam.

Here’s what she read before a Pastor and his church congregation at the Salem Village Church in 1706:

“I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ninety-two; that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom, now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though, what was said or done by me against any person, I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorant, being deluded by Satan.

And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing [Rebecca] Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humble for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offense, whose relations were taken away or accused.” 

It’s an admission of guilt, and the closest we can get to hear her say that she lied. She’s the only one to have apologized for her actions. But when this happened, she was only a child; her father, Thomas Putnam, was the one actually bringing forth the accusations. A handwriting analyst looked at a lot of the court documents, the depositions describing what the afflicted girls saw, and over 100 of them were written by Thomas Putnam. Over 100! How much of them were altered? Tampered? How many people did he condemn to die because of land disagreement and political factionalism? When we look at this story, we can be shocked at how a bunch of preteen and teenage girls acted in court, whether it was for attention or to please their fathers, but pulling the strings behind the scenes was the Reverend Samuel Parris and men like Thomas Putnam. 

Thanks for joining me on this adventure! This has been an episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and it’s been my pleasure to have you along for the ride. Stay tuned for my next episode as we dive into the past to uncover the weirdest, grossest, most mysterious stories in history.