May 3, 2024 • 51 mins
Join Ben and Matt as they interview Aaron Mahnke, the creator of the world-famous Lore podcast, about Unobscured, the new series where he dives deep into the true story of the Salem witch trials. How many people were tried? How many actually died? What does Hollywood get wrong and, perhaps most importantly, was there something the people of Salem didn't want future generations to know?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are giving
you a classic episode, a conversation we had with a
longtime friend of the show, Aaron Manke, the creator of
Lore and Matt. You worked pretty closely with Aard in
the past, and I think we both really enjoyed this
exploration with it.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh yeah. There are four seasons of the podcast Unobscured.
I am. I think I'm credited as EP on all
of those, but this first season, this conversation, we're talking
about the Salem witch Trials. For another friend of the show,
Alex Williams, and I traveled out to Boston and the
area out there, you know, Salem and the places that
(00:42):
were actually Salem, the towns that were actually Salem, and
we went to libraries and saw original documents, and Aaron
put all of this together in a show called Unobscured.
That is just it's really great. It's the most full
picture of the Salem Witch Trials that I had ever
imagined in my head when I listened to that show
(01:04):
and helped make it, and thankfully we got to speak
with Aaron about it for quite a while.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Our compatriot Nole is off on adventures in the meantime.
They call me Ben when you're joined with our super
producer Paul Mission control deck, and most importantly, you are
here and that makes this stuff they don't want you
to know. Today we are exploring one of the strangest,
most infamous series of events in early American history genuine
(01:59):
real life which trials, and nowadays most people only know
of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etc.
So how do we separate the fact from the fancy here?
How do we establish what really led to these trials,
what genuinely happened to the victims, and how these events
(02:20):
impacted our culture and history from that point onto the
modern day. This is admittedly a tall order, Matt, and luckily,
very luckily, we are not tackling it alone. We are
joined by the creator, producer, and host of the hit
podcast Lore, which has also been adapted into a book
series and a television series, and as well as the
(02:42):
creator of the brand new podcast, Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Aaron Manky, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Hey, is our pleasure to have you on this show. Erin,
And just a bit of full disclosure here, I work
with Aaron in creating the show Unobscured. Just lest you
think we're a fast one on you, We work together
on this, but the bulk of the work is most
certainly Aaron's. But we had it was just a fascinating
(03:12):
deep dive into the Salem Witch Trials, right, and Aaron
Ben hit on it immediately at the top of this show.
But it's something I want to jump right into. Just
this fact that many of us are introduced to the
Salem Witch Trials usually in at least in my case,
an academic setting. You take an early history class about
American history, then you know you kind of have an understanding.
(03:35):
But then all of that gets shaped by all of
this pop culture and all of these other references. So
how has our understanding of the real Witch Trials been
modified by this pop culture?
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right. You know,
there's a lot of different factors that come into play
to I guess hide the true story, and not always intentionally.
It's not like there's a dare I say it on
the show, But it's not like there's a conspiracy to
hide the the you know, the true acts and deeds
and all that went on. You know, the sale and
(04:10):
witch trials was a a you know, roughly thirteen or
fourteen month period of time that had a lot going on,
and so you think about maybe bumping into it in
a high school class on early American history, and you know,
it's one of, you know, a couple a dozen things
that you're going to talk about that semester, and so
by necessity you sort of have to brush over it
and just mentioned a few things, like it happened sixteen
(04:32):
ninety two. Nineteen people were hanged, one was crushed to
death by stones, and five died in jail. And that's
that's the story you hear, you know, and maybe somebody
throws in, well, you know, they believe that there were
witches and the church one of those dead, and you know,
we just we sort of sum it all up into
a couple of sentences. And especially in this day and
age of you know, small character count tweets and social
(04:56):
media posts, it's easy to try to summarize things up
like that. The other factory coming into this. So, like
you mentioned before, is pop culture, right, like films and
screens like like The Crucible and TV shows and even
you know, bad one hour documentaries. You can cover something
like Sale and Wich trials in one hour. So you
know that those things all just sort of work to
(05:19):
force us toward an easy sound bite answer, and when
you do that, you lose all of the nuance.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
You know, something that a lot of people may not know.
It's something that I learned fairly recently. You actually physically
lived within a very close proximity to where the Salewich
trials occurred.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
Yeah, yeah, can you tell us about that? Well, you know,
so you hear about the Sale and Witch trials, and
if you were to find the location where a lot
of the victims came from on a map today, it
would come with the name Danvers as the town and
not Salem, which is sort of confusing, right You kind
of expect it to be Salem Salem, which is a
little bit more toward the east. But back in the
(06:02):
late sixteen hundreds, Salem was like this territory, you know,
and you have the city, but then you have the
bread basket around it of all these different communities, places
that exist now today as their own independent communities like
Wenham and Danvers and Beverly and Andover and Topsfield and
all these places slowly were chiseled off of the Salem
land mass and became their own things. So what is
(06:25):
now today Danvers used to be Salem Village and Salem
proper today used to be Salem Town because that was
sort of the built up, wealthier town aspect of it all.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Ah See, this is going to be new information for
quite a few of our listeners here, you know, and
it's important, I would argue for us to carve these
distinctions out and clarify them because the last time that
we were in Boston we learned firsthand from some residents
(07:00):
about Salem's the current Salem's pretty successful tourism industry based
off of this tragedy. Is that a real thing? Is
it still in full swing?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Oh? Yeah? Yeah? And you know, and we talk about
Danvers being old Salem Village and Salem being old Salem
Town and that dichotomy between the two places. There's there's
a reason why their name is changed, and that's partly
to distance themselves from what happened most of the Salem
based because Okay, so there were a lot of victims
that came from other communities and over Topsfield, all over
(07:33):
the place, Gloucester, but a lot of the Salem victims
came from the Salem village area. So what is now
Danvers And a lot of the the legal aspects, especially
the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was sort of
the the higher level jury plus judges system, and then
moving on to the Superior court, those things all happen
(07:54):
in Salem town. So you had victims coming from one
area and that's now Danvers, and that's wildly generalized. I'm
just roughly saying it. And then in Salem, basically all
the bad guys, right, all the people that sat in
the jury or on the court and judge people and
sentenced them to death. So you have these two towns,
you know, three hundred and twenty five years ago, we're
(08:15):
sort of sitting next to each other, and they've grown,
they've grown up, but they've also grown apart culturally, and
so Danver's changed its name and it sort of distances
itself from the idea that the witch trials happened there
like you can find things. Rebecca Nurse is one of
the victims. She was a seventy five seventy six year
old woman who her crime was that she was too
generous with one of her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were
(08:38):
incredibly prejudiced against any other faiths, and so even Quakers,
which we never think of Quakers as being like antagonists
or bad people, but in the Puritan mind, they just
they weren't Puritans, and so Quakers were bad. And she
took in a Quaker orphan and that sort of sealed
her fate. Among other things. She had some rumors spread
about her and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there.
(08:59):
It's a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour. Three
hundred and twenty five years later, it's still there, and
it's set up more sensitively and as a as a
museum as opposed to the Salem Witch Museum, which is
you know, red lights and dark shadows and witches and
cauldrons and things like that. And and so there's this
(09:22):
there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue
and Danvers dodging the issue, and Salem Town sort of
rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a
statue of Samantha from the the old TV show Bewitched
in the middle of town because she was a witch,
and let's put a statue out for her. You know,
Oh wow, makes sense?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well you've hit on something very
important here, and that's that dichotomy between these two towns.
But there's also a dichotomy between what our understanding of
what a witch is now. That is again, have it's
been morphed and changed over all of these years? What
was a which in sixteen ninety two New England.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
It's such a tricky question. Which was I mean, you know,
in the religious sense. To the Puritans, it was somebody
who was working for the devil to tear down the
Puritan mission of this utopian society in the New World.
The reason why the Puritans came over is because the
(10:24):
Anglican Church, which was kind of a Protestant branch off
of the Catholic Church, the Church of England, that just
wasn't pure enough. It hadn't tossed off enough of the
Catholic trappings to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it
to be more pure. Thus the name and among all
of the colonies that were set up in the sixteen
hundreds that were all sort of like either endeavors of
(10:47):
the crown or business ventures. This was a business venture
that was run purely by the Puritans, and they all
the people that ran it essentially came over with it
and set up shop here. So it wasn't being run
from afar by the owners. It was being run here.
They had a charter from the king and you had
to get that. But they were they were this isolated
religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was potentially
(11:10):
a witch. They were an agent of the devil. And
there were all these cool little trappings that came with
it that we still have pieces of in our culture today.
You know, you think about how many times you've seen
a witch on TV with a black cat, right, like
that's just the it's the partner in crime they always have.
And that comes back to the idea of a familiar,
you know, an animal that is a evil spirit in
the form of an animal that follows the witch around,
(11:33):
and that's just almost a European and American constant that
you have familiars. There are things like, well, we can
tell you're a witch if you have witch marks on you,
which is supposed to be like this little devil's teat
this this place where the demons will will suckle from
the witch and they look like freckles or moles or
(11:54):
skin tags, and of course they found them on people
because everybody has those things. So you know, it was
this really tricky thing where, yeah, they were enemies of
the Puritan faith, but after that it was just kind
of hard to nail it down, which created problems for them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
You know, yeah, we can I can totally understand this
because in the case of I believe it was Sarah Osborne, right,
one of the first people accused of witchcraft.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
In her case, I.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Think one of the primary causes for persecution or prosecution
was that she was suspected of living with her second
husband before they got officially married.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
And there was a little bit of that going on. Yeah,
she had a child with him, She had a child
from a previous marriage, she had a child with I
think before she married her second husband. And I'm not
sure if I'm getting my people right or not. Bish
I think she might have been the one who, like
one of the kids lived at home and one of
them lived in sort of a boarding house situation. But yeah,
Sarah Osburne wasn't she. I mean, she was also just outsider.
(13:00):
She wasn't respected, She didn't tow the line, she didn't
follow the rules, and people then as people now lash
out against the outsider, they become a scapegoat for our
fears and our anxieties.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
And there's something here to be said. I'm trying to
articulate this correctly Erin, but the thin, somewhat non existent
line between religion and the law within the land and
it's almost the same thing in most respects. Yeah, I'm
trying to wrap my head around exactly what I'm trying
(13:35):
to ask you here, But I feel like that is
one of the major contributing factors, or at least that's
one of the things you think about nowadays when you're
imagining this time period. How did that come into play
with setting up these trials? Like were the Oyer and
Terminer trials specifically a law of the land kind of
thing or was it a religious law thing?
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Well, I mean, that's a forty five minute podcast in
that answer right there, But like, let's just let's say
it this way. So they had a charter which was
sort of a permission certificate from the king to go
create this colony. The charter usually had some laws and
regulations that were in there, and for the most part
you were supposed to adhere to English law, kind of
(14:19):
defer to that. But because of the way the Puritan
colony of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was set up, it
was just a little different. They had a little bit
more freedom and latitude, and they were able to build
their faith into the laws a lot more tightly. So
when the Salem witch trials happened, it happens in this
you know, doctor Emerson Baker's one of our historians, and
he calls his book the Storm of Witchcraft because it's
(14:42):
this perfect storm of ingredients. Among all these other things,
the fear of the wars with the Native Americans to
the north, the French who were allied with them, a
harsh winter, all these different factors coming together. You also
had the fact that the King kind of in a
power play, takes the charter away from people shortly before
the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They
(15:04):
don't have any they don't have anything, and there's this
promise of a new charter, but they haven't got it yet.
So they're literally there society that has lost all their laws,
and so they're leaning on the people like John Hawthorne,
who you know him and his father both worked with
the Charter and they knew the law. They're kind of
(15:24):
leaning on these people to help them. But you know,
their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they
have this fear of witches. And I mean even when
they sit down with a new charter and start to
list out, like, all right, we have to put together
a list of capital crimes, which they started doing in
sixteen ninety two. You know, witchcraft falls on the capital
crime list. You're not going to find that on the
books today because we have a very secular government, but
(15:47):
back then that border between church and state was a
lot more fuzzy, and so things like you know, being
a witch became this capital offense and it was executed,
executable by death with some exceptions. The deeper into the
trials you get and it just gets more complex. Things
like you know, at some point, if you used witchcraft
(16:07):
but you didn't kill anybody, you could be punished, but
you won't be executed and whatnot. But yeah, the faith
really did it permeated everything, really.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And it makes sense what you're saying given the context
of the time when people are I think you hit
a really powerful point here when you say that the
people found themselves governless right in a hostile environment in
terms of the ecosystem they were surrounded by, and if
(16:38):
we're being honest, this is in many ways a group
of what we would call religious extremists today. So people
in a vacuum of organizational structure would tend to fall
back on the number one organizational structure that they considered
their core set of values, which personally, and I don't
(17:00):
want to inject too much of my opinion here, is
terrifying because it kind of it sounds as if this
is something that occurs, you know, in the distant past.
But it's very important for us to remember that people
are still people. We're still the same cognitive machines. And yeah,
these sorts of things are not as implausible in the
(17:24):
modern day as they were. You know, they're not any
less plausible, I should say, than they were in the
sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean one of the benefits of I mean,
think about how our government, you know, the original American
government was put together. You had representatives who were you know,
chosen by the people to go to a continental congress
and they lay down laws and they work together. They
worked with a lot of existing laws around Europe that
they knew of, you know, the magnet Carta was an
influence and things like that. But they were they were
(17:53):
a voice for the people as a collective putting things together,
and that made it a lot a lot more infallible.
You had people saying, well, that idea sounds good, but
here are three problems with it, and that's this is
how it could go wrong, and so they could adjust things.
When you move to a society that's smaller, I mean,
Salem Village had about five hundred people in it, five
five fifty. Salem Town I think had maybe two thousand
(18:15):
people in it. Now that's a smaller group of people,
with a smaller pool of leaders making up laws and
trying to find their way. They're going to make a
lot more mistakes, and they're going to bring a lot
more personal bias into things, which is why, I mean,
this is why dictatorships go wrong, and why emperors and
kings have so many problems unless they have some sort
of a parliamentary system around them to keep them in check,
(18:37):
because one person making choices is going to make a
lot more worse choices than that a group of people
collectively thinking being through with common sense. So this is,
you know, this is partly what plays out in Salem.
You have a bunch of people who they're just kind
of leaning on what they know and their personal opinions
and their fears and their hopes and all this stuff,
(18:57):
and we get a mess and will pause right there
for a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
This is a little bit biographical, But what were your
(19:18):
primary inspirations or motivations that set you on the path
to explore and clarify this story? You know, I mean
I've made the podcast called Lore for about three and
a half years now, and Law is essentially a dark
historical podcast. You know, I look for stories from history
that have a more unusual or or dark is just
(19:43):
the best word for it, a dark bent that you know,
that's the kind of stuff you're not going to learn
about in history class. You're not going to learn about
the drummer of Tedworth. You know, a house haunted by
a ghost that keeps making a drumming sound and possibly
a haunted drum and all these You're not going to
learn about these things in history class and and and
that's why I I do lore because I want people
to hear these great tales of things that happened and
(20:05):
people claim that they were true, and I want to
explore them. Most of the time, I'm fine finding topics
that I can do in a half an hour. That's
typically the format of the show, you know, about thirty
minutes long, throwing some ads and some credits and more good.
And that leaves out a few topics, you know. And
so from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem
(20:25):
witch Trials fits. You know that it has all of
these really great details. There's good context lessons in here,
like learning about how witchcraft worked in Europe and England,
all these great things, but you couldn't cover it in
an hour or a half an hour. Even so I
just kind of set it aside. And so for a
couple of years I had a folder on my hard
drive that said it said lower the Salem Project. And
(20:47):
I had this vision of maybe someday when I had
free time, ha ha ha. Because I just got busier
and busier as time went by, maybe someday I'll be
able to do like a little mini series on Salem.
And I didn't know if i'd give its own RSS
feed or if I would, you know, maybe make it
a paid only like you could go, you know, download
the thing, like an audiobook sort of thing, because I
(21:08):
didn't know what the material would would turn into. So
it wasn't until you know, about a year ago that
I started working with some of your folks over there
at host Stuff Works and realized that if we were
going to build a network of shows, one of those
could very well be a long form documentary series that
just takes time, you know, it gives these really big
(21:29):
stories the breathing room that they need and let it
go deep. And so that's that was the perfect home
for the Salem topic. And not only that, but living
in it and around it here in my area, it
just made sense. And it's you can't pass up a
topic like this.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
So jumping back, let's jump back to sixteen ninety two Salem.
It's winter time. It's a freaking cold out there, and
there's no central heating, there's no electricity. The only way
to keep you and your family warm enough to not
die is to have firewood. And one thing that I
(22:08):
didn't understand going into this project was just how vital
firewood was as a commodity, as almost a currency in
a way. Can you talk to us about the importance
of firewood back then?
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Yeah, I mean, picture that post apocalyptic movie that you love,
where you know there is no more US currency, the
global market's gone, and you need to go buy food
from some trader and it's either a precious metal or
it's a bullet. You know, things like that that you're
trying to find ways, like what are valuable commodities to
trade for something, and firewood was certainly I wouldn't say
(22:44):
it was worth its weight in gold, but it was
highly important. So to illustrate this, you know, the minister
in Salem village, where a lot of the victims came from,
was this guy named Samuel Parris who came from I mean,
his family was English. Obviously, his uncle had purchased or
(23:04):
somehow acquired a plantation on the island of Barbados, and
then he was really bad at running the business, and
so he brought his brother in, which was Samuel's dad,
and his brother saved it. You know, his uncle eventually
dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and runs
it well, but some natural disasters happened. There's like this
massive hurricane and there's a drought, and I think some
(23:26):
sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually Samuel Parris has found
himself running the place and he doesn't want to anymore.
He realizes it's going to kill him, so he sells
it and heads north. He wanted to go to Harvard,
and while his dad was still alive, he was attending Harvard,
which is really really old school from the sixteen hundreds
(23:47):
outside of Boston. And so when he finally sold the
place off for good, he moved back to Boston, maybe
thinking that he would finish school because he had stopped
a few classes, shy, maybe just looking for work some
of his money to set up a business there. Finally,
he ends up not doing well at business and taking
the position in Salem Village as their new minister. The
(24:10):
negotiation process for his contract took him over a year
because he was this super litigious, like we have to
get all the tea's crossed and the ice dotted, and
want to be taken care of. I think he had
some high aspirations, but one of the things that he
was super picky about was firewood that he needed his
firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, it
(24:30):
was a problem constantly with you know, farmers in the area.
It was like their turn that week to bring him
a load of firewood, and they just they wouldn't do it.
He was hard to like, it was hard to get
along with, and some of them just sort of held
it back as a leverage over him. And there's these
stories of him writing in his study upstairs in the
middle of winter, dipping his quill in the inkwell to
(24:53):
scratch on the book, and the ink in the inkwell
being frozen because it's so cold in the house, and
wood just becomes this thorn in his side for the
entire time.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Just chop your own firewood, man.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, as a minister, you're giving the parsonage to
live in. There's no land with it. All the land
of Budding you is fenced off and it belongs to
somebody else, and they're going to cut down their trees
and use it. And he was sort of stuck. But yeah,
I mean I'd get a hatchet and go out in
the middle of the night and just you know, start
clearing branches off of trees and bringing them home. Which,
(25:30):
so this is one thing that I think is going
to be fascinating to a lot of our fellow listeners
when they are as they explore unobscured. Is the process
through which you discover these stories? Could you tell us
a little bit more about the primary written records that
(25:52):
you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and
how you took this this vast amount of uncollected resources,
like how did you arrange them?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And what was the process? Like was it all uphill?
Were there surprising fines? Were there times where you know,
it was frustrating because again, the great game of telephone
that is human history got in the way. I think
we're all very curious to learn about that.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that toward
the end of the which trial period of sixteen ninety two,
it basically starts in January sixteen ninety two, it runs
through itun till about May of sixteen ninety three, and
toward the end of that, the governor of Massachusetts is
this guy named Sir William Phipps, and he realizes that
(26:46):
the public perception of what's going on in the trials
is bad. In fact, at some point, the judges involved
in the trial hire a minister from a prominent minister family.
Their last name was Mather. Increase was the father. Cotton
was the son Cotton Mather. That's right, Cotton and Cotton
(27:07):
was hired to basically write a pr piece. It was
a book in defense of the sale Witch trials and
write about that time, Governor Phipps decides it will be
very bad if anybody else prints things about this. We
want this to be the only thing out there. And
so the governor outlaws the press. They can't talk or
write about the sale Witch trials anymore. So you have
(27:28):
that which limits the amount of stuff that's written about
it in sixteen ninety two, sixteen ninety three. Then you
have people with you know, let's just pick a judge
out of you know, like Nathaniel Saltonstall or somebody like that,
or Samuel Sewell. There are family documents that would have existed.
Personal journals was a big thing for a lot of
(27:50):
these judges. They wrote in their journals every night, and
a lot of them just go missing. Letters between judges
who served on the trial and family members kind of
take a break for about a year there where they
just they've vanished. It's not like they stopped writing. Somebody's
gone in and they've taken these sheaves of paper out
and they've destroyed them in some way. Samuel Paris himself,
(28:11):
the Minister for you know, thirteen fourteen, fifteen months, kept
notebooks of what was going on, and one page was
pulled out of a notebook at some point and taken
as evidence for something. We don't know how or why.
But all the rest of the notebooks have vanished. It's
not that they've been misplaced or you know, that the
family just won't give them up. They just don't exist anymore.
(28:33):
There's this almost global cover up of the documentation of
what happened. Once the government gets on its feet in
late sixteen ninety two and the Oier Interminer is shut
down and it becomes the Superior Court, essentially the state
supreme Court, the documents don't go away anymore. Those become
really official, and we still have all those, but all
(28:54):
the court documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial,
all through the summer of sixteen ninety two, it's just gone.
So there's not a lot to look at there is stuff.
I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great
resources on it. But if you go to History Unobscured
dot com, there's a resources page and I can't remember
if it's on there if I need to put it
on there, but there's a link to is that the
(29:16):
University of Virginia that has a like a digital scanned
in library of every document relating to it. So things
like the warrant that was issued for Reverend George Burrows.
Like you can see the warrant right there, written out
in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on and everything.
It's beautiful. It's tragic. So there are things that we
(29:38):
have and we still find things. You know, every year,
somebody's bumping into a new document, some family opens up
a book in their library and finds a warrant or
a letter that was tucked away, like it happens. But
a lot of it's just sort of disappeared.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
You know. I think this right here is the stuff
they don't want you to know about the Salem Witch Trials.
Can you imagine now, in this in modern history, if
someone attempted to do this, just if it was a
a year long process, somewhere and someone said, oh, nope,
we're going to strike this whole thing from the record. Nope,
(30:12):
everybody put away your social media. Nope, we're going to
delete everybody's Facebook. It's over. This didn't happen. Here's the
official account in this one ton or this one blog.
All right, carry on. That's insane to me that that
could even happen. But you know, we did. Where did
we go? We went to the Danvers Archival, the Danvers
(30:35):
Archival Center.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, so the Peabody Essex Library, a Peabody Institute library
that's in Danvers. Peboty's another town, but the Danvers Library
is actually called the Peabody Institute Library. It's confusing, but
they have an archive in the basement. They have an archivist.
One of our historians, Richard Trask, is a you know,
decades long experienced historian. He's also descended from a number
(30:59):
of the victims from the witch trials, and he lives
within blocks of where it all happened, in a period home.
He's a cool guy. I like Richard a lot. And
he sits as the archivist down there in the bowels
of the library and he manages all these amazing things
the church changed locations. They moved across the street. A
(31:20):
few years after it was all over, they got a
new minister, Reverend Green, maybe in the sixteen ninety eight
ninety nine range or so. He moved the building across
the street. And then eventually that was, you know, tore
down and they built a bigger building because it's a church,
and they grow and populations grow. In the nineteen seventies,
(31:40):
I think there was a fire at the church and
Richard Drask went with the fire department and was able
to get in and save some things. He saved the
original communion where you know, like the chalice, the bowl,
those things they're made out of pewter. But they were
in a box right by the door, and on purpose,
like he told them to keep them by the door.
And there was a fire, and then two books were saved.
(32:03):
One is think of them both as like ship's logs,
you know, you think like Picard talking to the computer
in his ready room, you know, ship's log date whatever.
So there was there was a log for the church itself,
and a lot of people wrote in it, whoever were
officers and important people would write in there, like you know,
we excommunicated you know Martha Corey on this date, or
(32:24):
we brought in this member this date. It's sort of
a happenings of the church. That book from sixteen ninety
two was saved as well as the Minister's Book, which
is sort of a ship's log for the minister, and
that has Samuel Parris's writing in it, detailing things that
are going on, writing about the events, and when he
left and Reverend Green came in, that book was handed
(32:45):
off to Reverend Green and then he takes over writing
in it, and it's almost like a diary for whoever
holds the position of minister.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So cool.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Yeah, and to get to see them at hold them
and look at them, it's just they're amazing.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
And we'll continue to explore this in just a moment
after a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
One of the crucial things about reading these primary sources,
finding these contemporary or near contemporary accounts, is that because
they are so much closer to the time in which
these actual events occurred, they do not suffer from some
(33:33):
of the frankly widespread misconceptions that we have in the
modern day, not just in the world of Hollywood, but
in the cultural zeitgeist, even in academic settings.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So what.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
If you could tell us here and what were some
of the misconceptions that you found in the course of
your work on Unobscured.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Well, you know, I have this belief that people like
to sum things up into a sentence. You know, we
like to say, oh, I understand that, you know it
was this, it was simple, right, Like to be able
to declare something as simple means that we've grasped it
and were in control of it. And you can't do
that with the Salem witch trials. It wasn't simple. It
(34:17):
was highly complex. So one of the most common questions
that I get, whether it's social media or in person,
regarding the Salem witch trials is well, why did it happen?
You know? And I think that that's our inclination. It's
a noble question, it's good, But it's people saying, give
me that one sentence that explains why. What's the one answer?
And there isn't There isn't a one answer. Again, I
(34:40):
harken back to what doctor Baker wrote for his book
The Storm of Witchcraft. It's got this great introduction by
somebody else that talks about how it's the perfect storm.
Of all these elements that come together before I go
on to what maybe they were misconceptions. You know, the
big one that I always get is, oh, it was
just rotten bread, right, It was that ergot poison stuff, right,
(35:01):
I thought. We started doing the show, hopefully you have learned. Yes,
But you know, ergot is this fungus that grows on grains.
We hear about it as rye, and people make bread
out of rye, among other things. He makes a good
bourbon on a rye. But this, this fungus can cause hallucinations.
(35:25):
And the idea was put forward in the mid seventies
that hey, what if these people were having hallucinations and
that explains why they were behaving so bad. They can
have convulsions too, and you know, some of the afflicted
girls as we call them, the people who were showing
symptoms of being attacked by the witches, they had convulsions
and fits. They would fall on the floor and thrash around. So,
(35:46):
you know, hey, sounds like Ergo explains this. And the
very next month after that was published in a journal,
the same journal published a debunking of it. You know,
two more scientists came on board and said, no, look,
it can't be er goot point and here's why. Or
got poisoning reacts to you one of two ways, depending
(36:06):
on how you eat. If you are deficient in vitamin A,
you will probably have hallucinations and convulsions. They call it
convulsing or got poisoning something like that. But that's only
one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves. The
other way would be gangreen. And I get that those
(36:27):
are wildly disparate responses for something in your body. You know,
you can either have convulsions and hallucinations or you can
have gangreen, you know, like pick and I would certainly
grab the convulsions myself and skip the gangreen. But you
have to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,
and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem
(36:50):
is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of
the victims, the afflicted girls who have these symptoms are wealthy,
and they could have afforded to have good food and
would have been eating food from the sea. They would
not have been deficient to invite them in a so
because nobody ever gets reported as having gangreen, we can
ride away right off or got poisoning. I sometimes hear people, Yeah.
(37:13):
I mean it's kind of like a oh you pop
my bubble, why'd you do that? But we want there
to be the magic pill, right, We want to say, oh,
it was the one thing. And if we could go
back in time in a time machine and like in
one day, fix everything and make it not happen, we'll
just take away their grain because it's got focus on
it right. Well, it wouldn't work. It's more complex than that,
(37:35):
you know. And you have a lot of people suffering
from what was essentially post traumatic stress disorder, refugees coming
from the middle of Maine down the coast back to
New England, back to Salem where they had come from
years before, because they kept trying to settle the coast
of Maine. But up there you had the Wabanaki and
(37:57):
the Algonquin, and you had the French who were allied
with them, and they were constantly hammering back down to
the south. And these refugees, like they'd go up and
they'd settle, and they'd lived for a couple of years,
and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would
flee back south, having lost everything they ever took with
them and it was horrible. It was it was warping.
Some of them watched their parents die, some of them
(38:19):
lost children. And so they come back to Salem and
they tell their stories, and you know, they passed this
trauma on to the people there. Everything outside their borders
was darkness and evil and danger and they were afraid.
And of course we mentioned the lack of the charter.
They didn't have a government at the time. It was very,
very tricky. One of the things the government was doing
(38:40):
is I think it was with when Governor Andros took
over before Phipps, Like they started to re tax property
that had already been taxed and so you had paid
your tax and you had your profit leftover and now
you're going to get taxed again. So financially they were
getting hammered. They had an incompetent leader who didn't understand
how to goned because he had never done it before.
(39:01):
Governor Phipps. All these all these pieces helped to kind
of mix in the bawl and be this perfect storm
that that in that window of time, that's that's when
it could have happened, and it did.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Well well said well put this also this this also
reminds me of a work by the author Carol Carlson,
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, that I
wanted to wanted to ask you about, because in Carlson's examination, uh,
what what this author is looking at is more of
(39:38):
a an emphasis on how certain women, primarily women, were
chosen to be accused of witchcraft, and Carlson argues that
there is a a violation of social hierarchy that occurs
(39:59):
in some case. This is I think one of the
specific quotes is that the accusers and the accused were
in a way in a negotiation about the legitimacy of
female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far
of an assumption to say this was probably a severely
patriarchal society.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Is that correct? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You know. One of
the historians that we spoke to, we spoke to six,
did great interviews with them. One of them is doctor
Jane Kamenski. She's a professor of history at Harvard, which
is a school I think some people have heard of,
but she's also the director of the library there, Schlushinger Library,
(40:39):
which is essentially a library devoted to women's studies through history.
So we wanted. We wanted a perspective, a historical perspective
on what sort of a voice did women have in
that age, what was their place in society, what was
seen as wrong, what was seen as good? You know,
things like women in sixteen ninety two would have been
able to read because they needed to read the scripture
(41:01):
to their family, but they wouldn't necessarily have been able
to write. So, you know, years later, when Reverend Green
takes over the one of the afflicted girls, one of
the girls who accused people and got them killed, wanted
to join the church. And her confession is in that
churches book that I talked about that saved from the fire,
but it's in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls
(41:22):
her signature underneath it because she couldn't write. She could read,
but she couldn't write, And that was pretty common for
women back then. It was, you know, partly out of this,
you know, what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary.
There's a little bit of control in there too. If
they can't read or if they can't write, then they
can't you know, get involved in government and things like that.
And so there was a patriarchal you know, push down
(41:44):
on that as well. It is really bizarre what happens
in the Salem witch trials because in effect, you have
not only women, but you have young women, girls twelve, thirteen,
fourteen years old, who begin to guide the process of
the court like their word is taken as law. And
these judges, these educated men, a lot of them had
gone to Harvard Divinity School, like they were either just
(42:06):
shy of being ministers themselves or could very well go
out and get a job as a minister, who were
some of the most educated people of the day. They
were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And so
these roles are reversed. There's the shift there, and you
have to wonder, like you said, in a time when
women are told to shut up and be quiet, sit down,
(42:27):
and do what you're told, that they have this opportunity
all of a sudden, they notice an opening right that
they're being listened to and things are being done based
on their stories. And you have to think at least
some of them sort of leaned into that that I
have freedom right now, and I'm going to use this
freedom right now. And you know, I haven't seen any
(42:50):
study that looks at the list of victims who are
accused by these people. But you know, I wonder how
many of them were sort of like pro traditional women,
sort of women like you know, Rebecca Nurse was seventy six,
and maybe she was one of those people that tow
the line and say, look, I'm a good, quiet Christian woman,
I'm not going to speak up. I have to wonder
(43:11):
if there's a little bit of a social battle going
on there. You know, we know that twenty years before
the Saling witch Trials, there was an event in Grotten.
One of the ministers who pops up in the witch
trials is this guy named Samuel Willard. I think twenty
years before he was in Groton, and he had a
household servant who was having fits and seizures and was
(43:32):
speaking about the devil and the book like it's all
these elements that come right from the Sailing Witch Trials,
but it was twenty years before, and I see a
lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice
for you know, a few months. And that's a pretty
easy way to view these things. I don't know if
(43:53):
I'm reading into it, if I'm applying my own perceptions
onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
You know, another person we interviewed, Mary Beth Norton, who's
an author as well as a professor. She makes a
great point about that consolidation of power that you were
talking about erin where the same men who are running
the church are also the judge, jury, and executioner essentially,
so like all four points essentially are covered by the
(44:21):
same old white men who are the best writers and
readers and learned men of the time. And it really
does bring home that idea of these young women fighting
back in any way they possibly could to be seen
and to be heard and to be known.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Right, Yeah, I mean, I think the way she describes
it as like, let's pretend today that the presidents at
his cabinet, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of State, all these
this very small window of people. They also all served
as the Supreme Court, and they served as the legislative branch,
and that was the government, and that's what it was
like in sixteen ninety two. I want to be careful
(45:01):
with leading people to believe that the afflicted girls were
a social movement, because there might have been part of that,
but again, it's not a neat and clean, black and
white thing. Some of the afflicted girls were literally refugees
from Maine who had come down having watched their entire
families killed and were afraid for their life every single day.
(45:23):
There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were
some social things going on, some of the better off
families versus competitive families, you know. So it's this big mix.
But I think it would be wrong to say that
there isn't some aspect of this rebellion against the patriarchy
going in there. It's not the only thing, it's not
even the primary thing, but there's an element of that
(45:45):
in there for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Well, Aaron, we were coming to the end here, what well?
And which, by the way, Unobscured season one about the
Salem witch trials is finishing. I believe when we're when
this episode is available, the last major episode will be out.
So you can go and listen to all twelve episodes
(46:08):
right now of Unobscure. Yeah, there are there are gonna
be some other episodes that come out though, right.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Yeah, So the season is twelve episodes long, twelve episodes,
you know, the story from start to finish, which, by
the way, if like, if you want to get away
from the political arguments in your household, grab your iPhone
and your headphones, and just go find a dark room
and sit and binge listen to Unobscured. It's a great
way to do it. And uh, because at least there's
(46:34):
some hope at the end of the tunnel on that one.
And so when we get back into the new year,
we're gonna take those six interviews we did with the
six historians doctor Emerson Baker, doctor Richard Trask, doctor Jane Kaminski,
Mary Beth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey,
I got them all, and we're gonna we're gonna publish
them weekly, one at a time, all six of the
(46:55):
interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,
because Unobscured is narrative storytelling. It's me telling a story
for forty five minutes, and then every now and then
you'll hear like doctor Baker jump in and talk for
fifteen seconds to get a point across for me. But
we never get all of his interview, and it's it's
a great interview. So this is our way of sharing
(47:16):
those big conversations with people. And you can just sit
in front of the fire hose and drink and it's awesome.
I concur sounds like a plan.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
So erin before we leave. What is the one big
lesson that you have learned from making this show that
we should in turn learned.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
That's wait, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Right, teach us the secrets of the universe. Aaron, please hurry.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
Point of order, Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Part of our exploration today was how it was about
how difficult.
Speaker 4 (47:47):
And misleading it is. I know, thanks absolute things.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
I'm trying. I'm trying to get magic magic out of
this thing.
Speaker 4 (47:54):
No, I hear you. No, Look I will say that
I'm ann echo something I heard somebody say earlier. It's
really really important to remember that these were people that
we look back with three hundred and twenty six years
of distance and say crazy like they shouldn't have done that.
I would totally do things different if I was in
(48:14):
their shoes, and you know what, you probably wouldn't because
of the way it was built, the structure, the social,
the religious, the government, the wars and the weather and
all of those pieces. I think we would all do
the same thing. And I think it's important for us
in any historical situation, but especially the same witch trials
to look back at it and say, these are just people.
(48:36):
They have hopes and they have dreams, they have fears,
they have insecurities, they have talents, they have desires to
be on stage, they have desires to slip and hide
under the radar, whatever it is like, these are just
normal people like us. And if we forget that, that's
when we start to misunderstand history. And that's one of
the biggest lessons that I can take away from this.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Oh man, that was so much more than I even expected. Okay,
thank you Erin, You're very welcome, sir.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah, sincerely, thank you so much, and thank you listeners
for joining us today. As we said earlier, can you can,
if need be escape holiday time with your family or
just in interest of enjoying a fascinating deep dive into
a widely misunderstood period of American history. You can find
(49:28):
Unobscured in its entirety now wherever you find your favorite
shows and Aaron mentioned earlier the website, which is chock
full of some excellent additional resources, including for our more
visually driven audience members, maps and diagrams of the surrounding
(49:49):
area to really put you in the place.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, as well as books if you want to continue
your reading and learning.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
So once again that is unobscured season one. I'm not
going to try to finagle any juicy tidbits about season
two out just yet, so you'll have to take our
word to stay tuned, look forward. Let us know what
you think about Utam Steward. Let us know which historical
(50:19):
lessons you feel can be drawn from this series of
events in sixteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Again, Aaron, any last words before we.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
Leave, Have fun with the show, dig in, listen and
enjoy and learn something. And thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Guys, thank you so much for being with us. All right,
glad to do it if you don't want it. And
that's the end of this classic episode. If you have
any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get
into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three std WYTK. If
(50:56):
you don't want to do that, you can send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are giving
you a classic episode, a conversation we had with a
longtime friend of the show, Aaron Manke, the creator of
Lore and Matt. You worked pretty closely with Aard in
the past, and I think we both really enjoyed this
exploration with it.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh yeah. There are four seasons of the podcast Unobscured.
I am. I think I'm credited as EP on all
of those, but this first season, this conversation, we're talking
about the Salem witch Trials. For another friend of the show,
Alex Williams, and I traveled out to Boston and the
area out there, you know, Salem and the places that
(00:42):
were actually Salem, the towns that were actually Salem, and
we went to libraries and saw original documents, and Aaron
put all of this together in a show called Unobscured.
That is just it's really great. It's the most full
picture of the Salem Witch Trials that I had ever
imagined in my head when I listened to that show
(01:04):
and helped make it, and thankfully we got to speak
with Aaron about it for quite a while.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Our compatriot Nole is off on adventures in the meantime.
They call me Ben when you're joined with our super
producer Paul Mission control deck, and most importantly, you are
here and that makes this stuff they don't want you
to know. Today we are exploring one of the strangest,
most infamous series of events in early American history genuine
(01:59):
real life which trials, and nowadays most people only know
of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etc.
So how do we separate the fact from the fancy here?
How do we establish what really led to these trials,
what genuinely happened to the victims, and how these events
(02:20):
impacted our culture and history from that point onto the
modern day. This is admittedly a tall order, Matt, and luckily,
very luckily, we are not tackling it alone. We are
joined by the creator, producer, and host of the hit
podcast Lore, which has also been adapted into a book
series and a television series, and as well as the
(02:42):
creator of the brand new podcast, Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Aaron Manky, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Hey, is our pleasure to have you on this show. Erin,
And just a bit of full disclosure here, I work
with Aaron in creating the show Unobscured. Just lest you
think we're a fast one on you, We work together
on this, but the bulk of the work is most
certainly Aaron's. But we had it was just a fascinating
(03:12):
deep dive into the Salem Witch Trials, right, and Aaron
Ben hit on it immediately at the top of this show.
But it's something I want to jump right into. Just
this fact that many of us are introduced to the
Salem Witch Trials usually in at least in my case,
an academic setting. You take an early history class about
American history, then you know you kind of have an understanding.
(03:35):
But then all of that gets shaped by all of
this pop culture and all of these other references. So
how has our understanding of the real Witch Trials been
modified by this pop culture?
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right. You know,
there's a lot of different factors that come into play
to I guess hide the true story, and not always intentionally.
It's not like there's a dare I say it on
the show, But it's not like there's a conspiracy to
hide the the you know, the true acts and deeds
and all that went on. You know, the sale and
(04:10):
witch trials was a a you know, roughly thirteen or
fourteen month period of time that had a lot going on,
and so you think about maybe bumping into it in
a high school class on early American history, and you know,
it's one of, you know, a couple a dozen things
that you're going to talk about that semester, and so
by necessity you sort of have to brush over it
and just mentioned a few things, like it happened sixteen
(04:32):
ninety two. Nineteen people were hanged, one was crushed to
death by stones, and five died in jail. And that's
that's the story you hear, you know, and maybe somebody
throws in, well, you know, they believe that there were
witches and the church one of those dead, and you know,
we just we sort of sum it all up into
a couple of sentences. And especially in this day and
age of you know, small character count tweets and social
(04:56):
media posts, it's easy to try to summarize things up
like that. The other factory coming into this. So, like
you mentioned before, is pop culture, right, like films and
screens like like The Crucible and TV shows and even
you know, bad one hour documentaries. You can cover something
like Sale and Wich trials in one hour. So you
know that those things all just sort of work to
(05:19):
force us toward an easy sound bite answer, and when
you do that, you lose all of the nuance.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
You know, something that a lot of people may not know.
It's something that I learned fairly recently. You actually physically
lived within a very close proximity to where the Salewich
trials occurred.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
Yeah, yeah, can you tell us about that? Well, you know,
so you hear about the Sale and Witch trials, and
if you were to find the location where a lot
of the victims came from on a map today, it
would come with the name Danvers as the town and
not Salem, which is sort of confusing, right You kind
of expect it to be Salem Salem, which is a
little bit more toward the east. But back in the
(06:02):
late sixteen hundreds, Salem was like this territory, you know,
and you have the city, but then you have the
bread basket around it of all these different communities, places
that exist now today as their own independent communities like
Wenham and Danvers and Beverly and Andover and Topsfield and
all these places slowly were chiseled off of the Salem
land mass and became their own things. So what is
(06:25):
now today Danvers used to be Salem Village and Salem
proper today used to be Salem Town because that was
sort of the built up, wealthier town aspect of it all.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Ah See, this is going to be new information for
quite a few of our listeners here, you know, and
it's important, I would argue for us to carve these
distinctions out and clarify them because the last time that
we were in Boston we learned firsthand from some residents
(07:00):
about Salem's the current Salem's pretty successful tourism industry based
off of this tragedy. Is that a real thing? Is
it still in full swing?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Oh? Yeah? Yeah? And you know, and we talk about
Danvers being old Salem Village and Salem being old Salem
Town and that dichotomy between the two places. There's there's
a reason why their name is changed, and that's partly
to distance themselves from what happened most of the Salem
based because Okay, so there were a lot of victims
that came from other communities and over Topsfield, all over
(07:33):
the place, Gloucester, but a lot of the Salem victims
came from the Salem village area. So what is now
Danvers And a lot of the the legal aspects, especially
the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was sort of
the the higher level jury plus judges system, and then
moving on to the Superior court, those things all happen
(07:54):
in Salem town. So you had victims coming from one
area and that's now Danvers, and that's wildly generalized. I'm
just roughly saying it. And then in Salem, basically all
the bad guys, right, all the people that sat in
the jury or on the court and judge people and
sentenced them to death. So you have these two towns,
you know, three hundred and twenty five years ago, we're
(08:15):
sort of sitting next to each other, and they've grown,
they've grown up, but they've also grown apart culturally, and
so Danver's changed its name and it sort of distances
itself from the idea that the witch trials happened there
like you can find things. Rebecca Nurse is one of
the victims. She was a seventy five seventy six year
old woman who her crime was that she was too
generous with one of her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were
(08:38):
incredibly prejudiced against any other faiths, and so even Quakers,
which we never think of Quakers as being like antagonists
or bad people, but in the Puritan mind, they just
they weren't Puritans, and so Quakers were bad. And she
took in a Quaker orphan and that sort of sealed
her fate. Among other things. She had some rumors spread
about her and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there.
(08:59):
It's a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour. Three
hundred and twenty five years later, it's still there, and
it's set up more sensitively and as a as a
museum as opposed to the Salem Witch Museum, which is
you know, red lights and dark shadows and witches and
cauldrons and things like that. And and so there's this
(09:22):
there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue
and Danvers dodging the issue, and Salem Town sort of
rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a
statue of Samantha from the the old TV show Bewitched
in the middle of town because she was a witch,
and let's put a statue out for her. You know,
Oh wow, makes sense?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well you've hit on something very
important here, and that's that dichotomy between these two towns.
But there's also a dichotomy between what our understanding of
what a witch is now. That is again, have it's
been morphed and changed over all of these years? What
was a which in sixteen ninety two New England.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
It's such a tricky question. Which was I mean, you know,
in the religious sense. To the Puritans, it was somebody
who was working for the devil to tear down the
Puritan mission of this utopian society in the New World.
The reason why the Puritans came over is because the
(10:24):
Anglican Church, which was kind of a Protestant branch off
of the Catholic Church, the Church of England, that just
wasn't pure enough. It hadn't tossed off enough of the
Catholic trappings to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it
to be more pure. Thus the name and among all
of the colonies that were set up in the sixteen
hundreds that were all sort of like either endeavors of
(10:47):
the crown or business ventures. This was a business venture
that was run purely by the Puritans, and they all
the people that ran it essentially came over with it
and set up shop here. So it wasn't being run
from afar by the owners. It was being run here.
They had a charter from the king and you had
to get that. But they were they were this isolated
religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was potentially
(11:10):
a witch. They were an agent of the devil. And
there were all these cool little trappings that came with
it that we still have pieces of in our culture today.
You know, you think about how many times you've seen
a witch on TV with a black cat, right, like
that's just the it's the partner in crime they always have.
And that comes back to the idea of a familiar,
you know, an animal that is a evil spirit in
the form of an animal that follows the witch around,
(11:33):
and that's just almost a European and American constant that
you have familiars. There are things like, well, we can
tell you're a witch if you have witch marks on you,
which is supposed to be like this little devil's teat
this this place where the demons will will suckle from
the witch and they look like freckles or moles or
(11:54):
skin tags, and of course they found them on people
because everybody has those things. So you know, it was
this really tricky thing where, yeah, they were enemies of
the Puritan faith, but after that it was just kind
of hard to nail it down, which created problems for them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
You know, yeah, we can I can totally understand this
because in the case of I believe it was Sarah Osborne, right,
one of the first people accused of witchcraft.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
In her case, I.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Think one of the primary causes for persecution or prosecution
was that she was suspected of living with her second
husband before they got officially married.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
And there was a little bit of that going on. Yeah,
she had a child with him, She had a child
from a previous marriage, she had a child with I
think before she married her second husband. And I'm not
sure if I'm getting my people right or not. Bish
I think she might have been the one who, like
one of the kids lived at home and one of
them lived in sort of a boarding house situation. But yeah,
Sarah Osburne wasn't she. I mean, she was also just outsider.
(13:00):
She wasn't respected, She didn't tow the line, she didn't
follow the rules, and people then as people now lash
out against the outsider, they become a scapegoat for our
fears and our anxieties.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
And there's something here to be said. I'm trying to
articulate this correctly Erin, but the thin, somewhat non existent
line between religion and the law within the land and
it's almost the same thing in most respects. Yeah, I'm
trying to wrap my head around exactly what I'm trying
(13:35):
to ask you here, But I feel like that is
one of the major contributing factors, or at least that's
one of the things you think about nowadays when you're
imagining this time period. How did that come into play
with setting up these trials? Like were the Oyer and
Terminer trials specifically a law of the land kind of
thing or was it a religious law thing?
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Well, I mean, that's a forty five minute podcast in
that answer right there, But like, let's just let's say
it this way. So they had a charter which was
sort of a permission certificate from the king to go
create this colony. The charter usually had some laws and
regulations that were in there, and for the most part
you were supposed to adhere to English law, kind of
(14:19):
defer to that. But because of the way the Puritan
colony of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was set up, it
was just a little different. They had a little bit
more freedom and latitude, and they were able to build
their faith into the laws a lot more tightly. So
when the Salem witch trials happened, it happens in this
you know, doctor Emerson Baker's one of our historians, and
he calls his book the Storm of Witchcraft because it's
(14:42):
this perfect storm of ingredients. Among all these other things,
the fear of the wars with the Native Americans to
the north, the French who were allied with them, a
harsh winter, all these different factors coming together. You also
had the fact that the King kind of in a
power play, takes the charter away from people shortly before
the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They
(15:04):
don't have any they don't have anything, and there's this
promise of a new charter, but they haven't got it yet.
So they're literally there society that has lost all their laws,
and so they're leaning on the people like John Hawthorne,
who you know him and his father both worked with
the Charter and they knew the law. They're kind of
(15:24):
leaning on these people to help them. But you know,
their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they
have this fear of witches. And I mean even when
they sit down with a new charter and start to
list out, like, all right, we have to put together
a list of capital crimes, which they started doing in
sixteen ninety two. You know, witchcraft falls on the capital
crime list. You're not going to find that on the
books today because we have a very secular government, but
(15:47):
back then that border between church and state was a
lot more fuzzy, and so things like you know, being
a witch became this capital offense and it was executed,
executable by death with some exceptions. The deeper into the
trials you get and it just gets more complex. Things
like you know, at some point, if you used witchcraft
(16:07):
but you didn't kill anybody, you could be punished, but
you won't be executed and whatnot. But yeah, the faith
really did it permeated everything, really.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And it makes sense what you're saying given the context
of the time when people are I think you hit
a really powerful point here when you say that the
people found themselves governless right in a hostile environment in
terms of the ecosystem they were surrounded by, and if
(16:38):
we're being honest, this is in many ways a group
of what we would call religious extremists today. So people
in a vacuum of organizational structure would tend to fall
back on the number one organizational structure that they considered
their core set of values, which personally, and I don't
(17:00):
want to inject too much of my opinion here, is
terrifying because it kind of it sounds as if this
is something that occurs, you know, in the distant past.
But it's very important for us to remember that people
are still people. We're still the same cognitive machines. And yeah,
these sorts of things are not as implausible in the
(17:24):
modern day as they were. You know, they're not any
less plausible, I should say, than they were in the
sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean one of the benefits of I mean,
think about how our government, you know, the original American
government was put together. You had representatives who were you know,
chosen by the people to go to a continental congress
and they lay down laws and they work together. They
worked with a lot of existing laws around Europe that
they knew of, you know, the magnet Carta was an
influence and things like that. But they were they were
(17:53):
a voice for the people as a collective putting things together,
and that made it a lot a lot more infallible.
You had people saying, well, that idea sounds good, but
here are three problems with it, and that's this is
how it could go wrong, and so they could adjust things.
When you move to a society that's smaller, I mean,
Salem Village had about five hundred people in it, five
five fifty. Salem Town I think had maybe two thousand
(18:15):
people in it. Now that's a smaller group of people,
with a smaller pool of leaders making up laws and
trying to find their way. They're going to make a
lot more mistakes, and they're going to bring a lot
more personal bias into things, which is why, I mean,
this is why dictatorships go wrong, and why emperors and
kings have so many problems unless they have some sort
of a parliamentary system around them to keep them in check,
(18:37):
because one person making choices is going to make a
lot more worse choices than that a group of people
collectively thinking being through with common sense. So this is,
you know, this is partly what plays out in Salem.
You have a bunch of people who they're just kind
of leaning on what they know and their personal opinions
and their fears and their hopes and all this stuff,
(18:57):
and we get a mess and will pause right there
for a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
This is a little bit biographical, But what were your
(19:18):
primary inspirations or motivations that set you on the path
to explore and clarify this story? You know, I mean
I've made the podcast called Lore for about three and
a half years now, and Law is essentially a dark
historical podcast. You know, I look for stories from history
that have a more unusual or or dark is just
(19:43):
the best word for it, a dark bent that you know,
that's the kind of stuff you're not going to learn
about in history class. You're not going to learn about
the drummer of Tedworth. You know, a house haunted by
a ghost that keeps making a drumming sound and possibly
a haunted drum and all these You're not going to
learn about these things in history class and and and
that's why I I do lore because I want people
to hear these great tales of things that happened and
(20:05):
people claim that they were true, and I want to
explore them. Most of the time, I'm fine finding topics
that I can do in a half an hour. That's
typically the format of the show, you know, about thirty
minutes long, throwing some ads and some credits and more good.
And that leaves out a few topics, you know. And
so from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem
(20:25):
witch Trials fits. You know that it has all of
these really great details. There's good context lessons in here,
like learning about how witchcraft worked in Europe and England,
all these great things, but you couldn't cover it in
an hour or a half an hour. Even so I
just kind of set it aside. And so for a
couple of years I had a folder on my hard
drive that said it said lower the Salem Project. And
(20:47):
I had this vision of maybe someday when I had
free time, ha ha ha. Because I just got busier
and busier as time went by, maybe someday I'll be
able to do like a little mini series on Salem.
And I didn't know if i'd give its own RSS
feed or if I would, you know, maybe make it
a paid only like you could go, you know, download
the thing, like an audiobook sort of thing, because I
(21:08):
didn't know what the material would would turn into. So
it wasn't until you know, about a year ago that
I started working with some of your folks over there
at host Stuff Works and realized that if we were
going to build a network of shows, one of those
could very well be a long form documentary series that
just takes time, you know, it gives these really big
(21:29):
stories the breathing room that they need and let it
go deep. And so that's that was the perfect home
for the Salem topic. And not only that, but living
in it and around it here in my area, it
just made sense. And it's you can't pass up a
topic like this.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
So jumping back, let's jump back to sixteen ninety two Salem.
It's winter time. It's a freaking cold out there, and
there's no central heating, there's no electricity. The only way
to keep you and your family warm enough to not
die is to have firewood. And one thing that I
(22:08):
didn't understand going into this project was just how vital
firewood was as a commodity, as almost a currency in
a way. Can you talk to us about the importance
of firewood back then?
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Yeah, I mean, picture that post apocalyptic movie that you love,
where you know there is no more US currency, the
global market's gone, and you need to go buy food
from some trader and it's either a precious metal or
it's a bullet. You know, things like that that you're
trying to find ways, like what are valuable commodities to
trade for something, and firewood was certainly I wouldn't say
(22:44):
it was worth its weight in gold, but it was
highly important. So to illustrate this, you know, the minister
in Salem village, where a lot of the victims came from,
was this guy named Samuel Parris who came from I mean,
his family was English. Obviously, his uncle had purchased or
(23:04):
somehow acquired a plantation on the island of Barbados, and
then he was really bad at running the business, and
so he brought his brother in, which was Samuel's dad,
and his brother saved it. You know, his uncle eventually
dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and runs
it well, but some natural disasters happened. There's like this
massive hurricane and there's a drought, and I think some
(23:26):
sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually Samuel Parris has found
himself running the place and he doesn't want to anymore.
He realizes it's going to kill him, so he sells
it and heads north. He wanted to go to Harvard,
and while his dad was still alive, he was attending Harvard,
which is really really old school from the sixteen hundreds
(23:47):
outside of Boston. And so when he finally sold the
place off for good, he moved back to Boston, maybe
thinking that he would finish school because he had stopped
a few classes, shy, maybe just looking for work some
of his money to set up a business there. Finally,
he ends up not doing well at business and taking
the position in Salem Village as their new minister. The
(24:10):
negotiation process for his contract took him over a year
because he was this super litigious, like we have to
get all the tea's crossed and the ice dotted, and
want to be taken care of. I think he had
some high aspirations, but one of the things that he
was super picky about was firewood that he needed his
firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, it
(24:30):
was a problem constantly with you know, farmers in the area.
It was like their turn that week to bring him
a load of firewood, and they just they wouldn't do it.
He was hard to like, it was hard to get
along with, and some of them just sort of held
it back as a leverage over him. And there's these
stories of him writing in his study upstairs in the
middle of winter, dipping his quill in the inkwell to
(24:53):
scratch on the book, and the ink in the inkwell
being frozen because it's so cold in the house, and
wood just becomes this thorn in his side for the
entire time.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Just chop your own firewood, man.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, as a minister, you're giving the parsonage to
live in. There's no land with it. All the land
of Budding you is fenced off and it belongs to
somebody else, and they're going to cut down their trees
and use it. And he was sort of stuck. But yeah,
I mean I'd get a hatchet and go out in
the middle of the night and just you know, start
clearing branches off of trees and bringing them home. Which,
(25:30):
so this is one thing that I think is going
to be fascinating to a lot of our fellow listeners
when they are as they explore unobscured. Is the process
through which you discover these stories? Could you tell us
a little bit more about the primary written records that
(25:52):
you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and
how you took this this vast amount of uncollected resources,
like how did you arrange them?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And what was the process? Like was it all uphill?
Were there surprising fines? Were there times where you know,
it was frustrating because again, the great game of telephone
that is human history got in the way. I think
we're all very curious to learn about that.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that toward
the end of the which trial period of sixteen ninety two,
it basically starts in January sixteen ninety two, it runs
through itun till about May of sixteen ninety three, and
toward the end of that, the governor of Massachusetts is
this guy named Sir William Phipps, and he realizes that
(26:46):
the public perception of what's going on in the trials
is bad. In fact, at some point, the judges involved
in the trial hire a minister from a prominent minister family.
Their last name was Mather. Increase was the father. Cotton
was the son Cotton Mather. That's right, Cotton and Cotton
(27:07):
was hired to basically write a pr piece. It was
a book in defense of the sale Witch trials and
write about that time, Governor Phipps decides it will be
very bad if anybody else prints things about this. We
want this to be the only thing out there. And
so the governor outlaws the press. They can't talk or
write about the sale Witch trials anymore. So you have
(27:28):
that which limits the amount of stuff that's written about
it in sixteen ninety two, sixteen ninety three. Then you
have people with you know, let's just pick a judge
out of you know, like Nathaniel Saltonstall or somebody like that,
or Samuel Sewell. There are family documents that would have existed.
Personal journals was a big thing for a lot of
(27:50):
these judges. They wrote in their journals every night, and
a lot of them just go missing. Letters between judges
who served on the trial and family members kind of
take a break for about a year there where they
just they've vanished. It's not like they stopped writing. Somebody's
gone in and they've taken these sheaves of paper out
and they've destroyed them in some way. Samuel Paris himself,
(28:11):
the Minister for you know, thirteen fourteen, fifteen months, kept
notebooks of what was going on, and one page was
pulled out of a notebook at some point and taken
as evidence for something. We don't know how or why.
But all the rest of the notebooks have vanished. It's
not that they've been misplaced or you know, that the
family just won't give them up. They just don't exist anymore.
(28:33):
There's this almost global cover up of the documentation of
what happened. Once the government gets on its feet in
late sixteen ninety two and the Oier Interminer is shut
down and it becomes the Superior Court, essentially the state
supreme Court, the documents don't go away anymore. Those become
really official, and we still have all those, but all
(28:54):
the court documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial,
all through the summer of sixteen ninety two, it's just gone.
So there's not a lot to look at there is stuff.
I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great
resources on it. But if you go to History Unobscured
dot com, there's a resources page and I can't remember
if it's on there if I need to put it
on there, but there's a link to is that the
(29:16):
University of Virginia that has a like a digital scanned
in library of every document relating to it. So things
like the warrant that was issued for Reverend George Burrows.
Like you can see the warrant right there, written out
in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on and everything.
It's beautiful. It's tragic. So there are things that we
(29:38):
have and we still find things. You know, every year,
somebody's bumping into a new document, some family opens up
a book in their library and finds a warrant or
a letter that was tucked away, like it happens. But
a lot of it's just sort of disappeared.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
You know. I think this right here is the stuff
they don't want you to know about the Salem Witch Trials.
Can you imagine now, in this in modern history, if
someone attempted to do this, just if it was a
a year long process, somewhere and someone said, oh, nope,
we're going to strike this whole thing from the record. Nope,
(30:12):
everybody put away your social media. Nope, we're going to
delete everybody's Facebook. It's over. This didn't happen. Here's the
official account in this one ton or this one blog.
All right, carry on. That's insane to me that that
could even happen. But you know, we did. Where did
we go? We went to the Danvers Archival, the Danvers
(30:35):
Archival Center.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, so the Peabody Essex Library, a Peabody Institute library
that's in Danvers. Peboty's another town, but the Danvers Library
is actually called the Peabody Institute Library. It's confusing, but
they have an archive in the basement. They have an archivist.
One of our historians, Richard Trask, is a you know,
decades long experienced historian. He's also descended from a number
(30:59):
of the victims from the witch trials, and he lives
within blocks of where it all happened, in a period home.
He's a cool guy. I like Richard a lot. And
he sits as the archivist down there in the bowels
of the library and he manages all these amazing things
the church changed locations. They moved across the street. A
(31:20):
few years after it was all over, they got a
new minister, Reverend Green, maybe in the sixteen ninety eight
ninety nine range or so. He moved the building across
the street. And then eventually that was, you know, tore
down and they built a bigger building because it's a church,
and they grow and populations grow. In the nineteen seventies,
(31:40):
I think there was a fire at the church and
Richard Drask went with the fire department and was able
to get in and save some things. He saved the
original communion where you know, like the chalice, the bowl,
those things they're made out of pewter. But they were
in a box right by the door, and on purpose,
like he told them to keep them by the door.
And there was a fire, and then two books were saved.
(32:03):
One is think of them both as like ship's logs,
you know, you think like Picard talking to the computer
in his ready room, you know, ship's log date whatever.
So there was there was a log for the church itself,
and a lot of people wrote in it, whoever were
officers and important people would write in there, like you know,
we excommunicated you know Martha Corey on this date, or
(32:24):
we brought in this member this date. It's sort of
a happenings of the church. That book from sixteen ninety
two was saved as well as the Minister's Book, which
is sort of a ship's log for the minister, and
that has Samuel Parris's writing in it, detailing things that
are going on, writing about the events, and when he
left and Reverend Green came in, that book was handed
(32:45):
off to Reverend Green and then he takes over writing
in it, and it's almost like a diary for whoever
holds the position of minister.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So cool.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Yeah, and to get to see them at hold them
and look at them, it's just they're amazing.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
And we'll continue to explore this in just a moment
after a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
One of the crucial things about reading these primary sources,
finding these contemporary or near contemporary accounts, is that because
they are so much closer to the time in which
these actual events occurred, they do not suffer from some
(33:33):
of the frankly widespread misconceptions that we have in the
modern day, not just in the world of Hollywood, but
in the cultural zeitgeist, even in academic settings.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So what.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
If you could tell us here and what were some
of the misconceptions that you found in the course of
your work on Unobscured.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Well, you know, I have this belief that people like
to sum things up into a sentence. You know, we
like to say, oh, I understand that, you know it
was this, it was simple, right, Like to be able
to declare something as simple means that we've grasped it
and were in control of it. And you can't do
that with the Salem witch trials. It wasn't simple. It
(34:17):
was highly complex. So one of the most common questions
that I get, whether it's social media or in person,
regarding the Salem witch trials is well, why did it happen?
You know? And I think that that's our inclination. It's
a noble question, it's good, But it's people saying, give
me that one sentence that explains why. What's the one answer?
And there isn't There isn't a one answer. Again, I
(34:40):
harken back to what doctor Baker wrote for his book
The Storm of Witchcraft. It's got this great introduction by
somebody else that talks about how it's the perfect storm.
Of all these elements that come together before I go
on to what maybe they were misconceptions. You know, the
big one that I always get is, oh, it was
just rotten bread, right, It was that ergot poison stuff, right,
(35:01):
I thought. We started doing the show, hopefully you have learned. Yes,
But you know, ergot is this fungus that grows on grains.
We hear about it as rye, and people make bread
out of rye, among other things. He makes a good
bourbon on a rye. But this, this fungus can cause hallucinations.
(35:25):
And the idea was put forward in the mid seventies
that hey, what if these people were having hallucinations and
that explains why they were behaving so bad. They can
have convulsions too, and you know, some of the afflicted
girls as we call them, the people who were showing
symptoms of being attacked by the witches, they had convulsions
and fits. They would fall on the floor and thrash around. So,
(35:46):
you know, hey, sounds like Ergo explains this. And the
very next month after that was published in a journal,
the same journal published a debunking of it. You know,
two more scientists came on board and said, no, look,
it can't be er goot point and here's why. Or
got poisoning reacts to you one of two ways, depending
(36:06):
on how you eat. If you are deficient in vitamin A,
you will probably have hallucinations and convulsions. They call it
convulsing or got poisoning something like that. But that's only
one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves. The
other way would be gangreen. And I get that those
(36:27):
are wildly disparate responses for something in your body. You know,
you can either have convulsions and hallucinations or you can
have gangreen, you know, like pick and I would certainly
grab the convulsions myself and skip the gangreen. But you
have to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,
and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem
(36:50):
is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of
the victims, the afflicted girls who have these symptoms are wealthy,
and they could have afforded to have good food and
would have been eating food from the sea. They would
not have been deficient to invite them in a so
because nobody ever gets reported as having gangreen, we can
ride away right off or got poisoning. I sometimes hear people, Yeah.
(37:13):
I mean it's kind of like a oh you pop
my bubble, why'd you do that? But we want there
to be the magic pill, right, We want to say, oh,
it was the one thing. And if we could go
back in time in a time machine and like in
one day, fix everything and make it not happen, we'll
just take away their grain because it's got focus on
it right. Well, it wouldn't work. It's more complex than that,
(37:35):
you know. And you have a lot of people suffering
from what was essentially post traumatic stress disorder, refugees coming
from the middle of Maine down the coast back to
New England, back to Salem where they had come from
years before, because they kept trying to settle the coast
of Maine. But up there you had the Wabanaki and
(37:57):
the Algonquin, and you had the French who were allied
with them, and they were constantly hammering back down to
the south. And these refugees, like they'd go up and
they'd settle, and they'd lived for a couple of years,
and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would
flee back south, having lost everything they ever took with
them and it was horrible. It was it was warping.
Some of them watched their parents die, some of them
(38:19):
lost children. And so they come back to Salem and
they tell their stories, and you know, they passed this
trauma on to the people there. Everything outside their borders
was darkness and evil and danger and they were afraid.
And of course we mentioned the lack of the charter.
They didn't have a government at the time. It was very,
very tricky. One of the things the government was doing
(38:40):
is I think it was with when Governor Andros took
over before Phipps, Like they started to re tax property
that had already been taxed and so you had paid
your tax and you had your profit leftover and now
you're going to get taxed again. So financially they were
getting hammered. They had an incompetent leader who didn't understand
how to goned because he had never done it before.
(39:01):
Governor Phipps. All these all these pieces helped to kind
of mix in the bawl and be this perfect storm
that that in that window of time, that's that's when
it could have happened, and it did.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Well well said well put this also this this also
reminds me of a work by the author Carol Carlson,
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, that I
wanted to wanted to ask you about, because in Carlson's examination, uh,
what what this author is looking at is more of
(39:38):
a an emphasis on how certain women, primarily women, were
chosen to be accused of witchcraft, and Carlson argues that
there is a a violation of social hierarchy that occurs
(39:59):
in some case. This is I think one of the
specific quotes is that the accusers and the accused were
in a way in a negotiation about the legitimacy of
female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far
of an assumption to say this was probably a severely
patriarchal society.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Is that correct? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You know. One of
the historians that we spoke to, we spoke to six,
did great interviews with them. One of them is doctor
Jane Kamenski. She's a professor of history at Harvard, which
is a school I think some people have heard of,
but she's also the director of the library there, Schlushinger Library,
(40:39):
which is essentially a library devoted to women's studies through history.
So we wanted. We wanted a perspective, a historical perspective
on what sort of a voice did women have in
that age, what was their place in society, what was
seen as wrong, what was seen as good? You know,
things like women in sixteen ninety two would have been
able to read because they needed to read the scripture
(41:01):
to their family, but they wouldn't necessarily have been able
to write. So, you know, years later, when Reverend Green
takes over the one of the afflicted girls, one of
the girls who accused people and got them killed, wanted
to join the church. And her confession is in that
churches book that I talked about that saved from the fire,
but it's in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls
(41:22):
her signature underneath it because she couldn't write. She could read,
but she couldn't write, And that was pretty common for
women back then. It was, you know, partly out of this,
you know, what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary.
There's a little bit of control in there too. If
they can't read or if they can't write, then they
can't you know, get involved in government and things like that.
And so there was a patriarchal you know, push down
(41:44):
on that as well. It is really bizarre what happens
in the Salem witch trials because in effect, you have
not only women, but you have young women, girls twelve, thirteen,
fourteen years old, who begin to guide the process of
the court like their word is taken as law. And
these judges, these educated men, a lot of them had
gone to Harvard Divinity School, like they were either just
(42:06):
shy of being ministers themselves or could very well go
out and get a job as a minister, who were
some of the most educated people of the day. They
were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And so
these roles are reversed. There's the shift there, and you
have to wonder, like you said, in a time when
women are told to shut up and be quiet, sit down,
(42:27):
and do what you're told, that they have this opportunity
all of a sudden, they notice an opening right that
they're being listened to and things are being done based
on their stories. And you have to think at least
some of them sort of leaned into that that I
have freedom right now, and I'm going to use this
freedom right now. And you know, I haven't seen any
(42:50):
study that looks at the list of victims who are
accused by these people. But you know, I wonder how
many of them were sort of like pro traditional women,
sort of women like you know, Rebecca Nurse was seventy six,
and maybe she was one of those people that tow
the line and say, look, I'm a good, quiet Christian woman,
I'm not going to speak up. I have to wonder
(43:11):
if there's a little bit of a social battle going
on there. You know, we know that twenty years before
the Saling witch Trials, there was an event in Grotten.
One of the ministers who pops up in the witch
trials is this guy named Samuel Willard. I think twenty
years before he was in Groton, and he had a
household servant who was having fits and seizures and was
(43:32):
speaking about the devil and the book like it's all
these elements that come right from the Sailing Witch Trials,
but it was twenty years before, and I see a
lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice
for you know, a few months. And that's a pretty
easy way to view these things. I don't know if
(43:53):
I'm reading into it, if I'm applying my own perceptions
onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
You know, another person we interviewed, Mary Beth Norton, who's
an author as well as a professor. She makes a
great point about that consolidation of power that you were
talking about erin where the same men who are running
the church are also the judge, jury, and executioner essentially,
so like all four points essentially are covered by the
(44:21):
same old white men who are the best writers and
readers and learned men of the time. And it really
does bring home that idea of these young women fighting
back in any way they possibly could to be seen
and to be heard and to be known.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Right, Yeah, I mean, I think the way she describes
it as like, let's pretend today that the presidents at
his cabinet, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of State, all these
this very small window of people. They also all served
as the Supreme Court, and they served as the legislative branch,
and that was the government, and that's what it was
like in sixteen ninety two. I want to be careful
(45:01):
with leading people to believe that the afflicted girls were
a social movement, because there might have been part of that,
but again, it's not a neat and clean, black and
white thing. Some of the afflicted girls were literally refugees
from Maine who had come down having watched their entire
families killed and were afraid for their life every single day.
(45:23):
There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were
some social things going on, some of the better off
families versus competitive families, you know. So it's this big mix.
But I think it would be wrong to say that
there isn't some aspect of this rebellion against the patriarchy
going in there. It's not the only thing, it's not
even the primary thing, but there's an element of that
(45:45):
in there for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Well, Aaron, we were coming to the end here, what well?
And which, by the way, Unobscured season one about the
Salem witch trials is finishing. I believe when we're when
this episode is available, the last major episode will be out.
So you can go and listen to all twelve episodes
(46:08):
right now of Unobscure. Yeah, there are there are gonna
be some other episodes that come out though, right.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Yeah, So the season is twelve episodes long, twelve episodes,
you know, the story from start to finish, which, by
the way, if like, if you want to get away
from the political arguments in your household, grab your iPhone
and your headphones, and just go find a dark room
and sit and binge listen to Unobscured. It's a great
way to do it. And uh, because at least there's
(46:34):
some hope at the end of the tunnel on that one.
And so when we get back into the new year,
we're gonna take those six interviews we did with the
six historians doctor Emerson Baker, doctor Richard Trask, doctor Jane Kaminski,
Mary Beth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey,
I got them all, and we're gonna we're gonna publish
them weekly, one at a time, all six of the
(46:55):
interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,
because Unobscured is narrative storytelling. It's me telling a story
for forty five minutes, and then every now and then
you'll hear like doctor Baker jump in and talk for
fifteen seconds to get a point across for me. But
we never get all of his interview, and it's it's
a great interview. So this is our way of sharing
(47:16):
those big conversations with people. And you can just sit
in front of the fire hose and drink and it's awesome.
I concur sounds like a plan.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
So erin before we leave. What is the one big
lesson that you have learned from making this show that
we should in turn learned.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
That's wait, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Right, teach us the secrets of the universe. Aaron, please hurry.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
Point of order, Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Part of our exploration today was how it was about
how difficult.
Speaker 4 (47:47):
And misleading it is. I know, thanks absolute things.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
I'm trying. I'm trying to get magic magic out of
this thing.
Speaker 4 (47:54):
No, I hear you. No, Look I will say that
I'm ann echo something I heard somebody say earlier. It's
really really important to remember that these were people that
we look back with three hundred and twenty six years
of distance and say crazy like they shouldn't have done that.
I would totally do things different if I was in
(48:14):
their shoes, and you know what, you probably wouldn't because
of the way it was built, the structure, the social,
the religious, the government, the wars and the weather and
all of those pieces. I think we would all do
the same thing. And I think it's important for us
in any historical situation, but especially the same witch trials
to look back at it and say, these are just people.
(48:36):
They have hopes and they have dreams, they have fears,
they have insecurities, they have talents, they have desires to
be on stage, they have desires to slip and hide
under the radar, whatever it is like, these are just
normal people like us. And if we forget that, that's
when we start to misunderstand history. And that's one of
the biggest lessons that I can take away from this.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Oh man, that was so much more than I even expected. Okay,
thank you Erin, You're very welcome, sir.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah, sincerely, thank you so much, and thank you listeners
for joining us today. As we said earlier, can you can,
if need be escape holiday time with your family or
just in interest of enjoying a fascinating deep dive into
a widely misunderstood period of American history. You can find
(49:28):
Unobscured in its entirety now wherever you find your favorite
shows and Aaron mentioned earlier the website, which is chock
full of some excellent additional resources, including for our more
visually driven audience members, maps and diagrams of the surrounding
(49:49):
area to really put you in the place.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, as well as books if you want to continue
your reading and learning.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
So once again that is unobscured season one. I'm not
going to try to finagle any juicy tidbits about season
two out just yet, so you'll have to take our
word to stay tuned, look forward. Let us know what
you think about Utam Steward. Let us know which historical
(50:19):
lessons you feel can be drawn from this series of
events in sixteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Again, Aaron, any last words before we.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
Leave, Have fun with the show, dig in, listen and
enjoy and learn something. And thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Guys, thank you so much for being with us. All right,
glad to do it if you don't want it. And
that's the end of this classic episode. If you have
any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get
into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three std WYTK. If
(50:56):
you don't want to do that, you can send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.