January 2, 2019 • 50 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?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. Welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt our compatriot
kol Is off on adventures in the meantime. They call
me Ben. When you're joined with our super producer Paul
mission controlled dec and most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:48):
real life which Trials, and nowadays most people only know
of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etcetera.
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
(01:09):
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
(01:31):
creator of the brand new podcast Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Aaron Mankate, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me. Hey, is
our pleasure to have you on the 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 pulling a fast one on you, h We work
(01:52):
together on this, but the bulk of the work is
most certainly Errand's um. But we we had it was
just a fascinating deep dive into the Salem witch Trials,
right and 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
(02:13):
us are introduced to the Saland 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. But then all of
that gets shaped by all of this pop culture and
all of these other references. So how how has our
understanding of the real witch trials been modified by this
(02:36):
pop culture? Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right.
You know, there's a lot of different factors that come
into play too, I guess hide the true story and
and and not always intentionally. It's not like there's a
dare I say it on this show, But it's not
like there's a conspiracy to to hide the the you know,
the true acts and deeds and all that went on.
(02:58):
You know, the sale and witch trial was 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 of dozen things that you're going to talk
about that semester, and so by necessity you sort of
have to brush over it and and just mentioned a
(03:20):
few things like it happened, Um, nineteen people were hanged,
one was crushed to death by stones, and five died
in jail. And 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 we just we
sort of sum it all up into a couple of sentences,
(03:40):
and especially in this day and age of you know,
small character count tweets and social media posts, it's easy
to try to summarize things up like that. Uh. The
other factory coming into this is, like you mentioned before,
is pop culture, right, like films and and screens like
like The Crucible and TV shows and and even you know,
Bad One our documentaries You can cover something like Sale
(04:03):
and witch trials in one hour. So you know that
those things all just sort of work to to force
us toward an easy SoundBite answer. And when you do that,
you lose all of the nuance. You know something that
a lot of people may not know. It's something that
I learned, uh fairly recently. You actually physically lived within
(04:25):
a very close proximity to where the Salem which trials occurred. Um, yeah,
tell us about well you know, so, um you hear
about the Sale in which 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 expected to
(04:46):
be Salem. Salem, which is a little bit more towards
the East. But back in the late sixteen hundreds, Salem
was like this territory, you know, and you had the city,
but then you have the breadbasket around it of all
these different communities, places that exist now today as their
own independent communities, like when Um and Danvers and Beverly
(05:06):
and andover in tops Field and all these places slowly
were chiseled off of the Salem land mass and became
their own things. So what is now today Danvers used
to be Salem Village, and Salem proper today used to
be Salem Town because that was sort of the the
built up, um, wealthier town aspect of it all. Uh
(05:26):
So this 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 to carve
these distinctions out and clarify them because the last time
that we were in Boston we learned firsthand from uh
(05:48):
some residents about Salem's the current Salem's uh pretty successful
tourism industry based off of this tragedy. Is that a
realing is it's still in full swing? Oh yeah, yeah,
And you know, and we talk about Danvers being old
Salem Village and in Salem being old Salem Town and
(06:08):
that dichotomy between the two places. There's there's a reason
why their name has changed, and that's partly to distance
themselves from what happened most of the Salem base because
there Okay, so there were a lot of victims that
came from other communities and over tops Field, all over
the place, Gloucester, um, but a lot of the Salem
victims came from the Salem village area. So what is
(06:29):
now danvers and a lot of the the legal aspects,
especially the Court of Oyer and Terminal which was sort
of the the higher level um jury plus judges system
um and then moving on to the superior court, those
things all happened in Salem town. So you had victims
coming from one area and that's now Danvers Um. And
that's wildely generalized. I'm just roughly saying it. And then
(06:53):
in Salem all the all the basically all the bad guys, right,
all the people that sat in the jury or on
the court and judge people in in them to death.
So you have these two towns, you know, three and
twenty five years ago, we're 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 has changed its name,
and it's sort of distances itself from the idea that
(07:14):
the Witch Charles happened there, like you can find things.
Rebecca Nurse is one of the victims UM. She was
a seventy five seventy six year old woman whom her
crime was that she was too generous with one of
her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were incredibly um prejudiced against
any other faiths, and so even Quakers, which we never
think of Quakers as being like antagonists or or bad people,
(07:37):
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
among other things, she had some rumors spread about her
and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there. It's it's
a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour three and
twenty five years later. It's still there, and um it's
set up more sensitively and as a as a museum
(07:59):
UM 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
there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue
and Danvers dodging the issue in Salem town sort of
rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a
(08:20):
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 up for her. You know,
it makes sense. 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,
(08:43):
have it's been morphed and changed over all of these years. Um,
what what was a witch in New England? It's such
a tricky question. Which was I mean, you know, in
the in the religious sense. To the Puritan it was
it was somebody who was working for the devil too
(09:04):
tear down the Puritan mission of this utopian society in
the New World. Um. The reason why the Puritans came
over is because, um, the the 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 it hadn't tossed off enough of the Catholic trappings
to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it to be
(09:27):
more pure. Thus the name and UM. Among all of
the colonies that were set up in the sixteen hundreds
that were all sort of like either endeavors of 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
(09:47):
afar by the owners. It was being run here. They
had a charter from the king and you had to
get that um. But they were this They were this
isolated religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was
potentially which 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, um, how many times you've
(10:08):
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 that is a
evil spirit in the form of an animal um that
follows the witch around, and that's just almost a European
an American constant that you have familiars. There are things like, well,
(10:31):
we can tell you're a witch if you have witch
marks on you, which is supposed to be like this
little devil's teeth, this this place where the demons will
will suckle from the witch um and they look like
freckles or moles or 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 of the Puritan faith, but after
(10:54):
that it was just kind of hard to nail it down,
which created problems for them. You know, yeah, we can
I can totally understand this because in the case of Um,
I believe it was Sarah Osborne, right, one of the
first people accused of witchcraft. In in her case, I
think one of the primary uh causes for persecution or
(11:18):
prosecution was that she was suspected of living with her
second husband before they got officially married, 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. Um. And I'm not sure
if I'm getting my people right or not, but I
(11:39):
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 yes,
Sarah Osborne wasn't um she I mean, she was also
just an outsider. She wasn't respected. She 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 or our fears and our anxieties. And there's
(12:03):
something here to be said. It's it's I'm trying to
articulate this correctly, Earon, 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. Um. Yeah,
I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly what I'm
(12:24):
trying 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, uh nowadays,
when you're imagining this time period. How how did that
come into play with setting up these trials, Like we're
the Oyer and Terminal trials. Specifically a um a law
of the land kind of thing or was it a
(12:45):
religious law thing? Well, um, I mean, that's a forty
minute podcast in that answer right there. But like let's
just let's 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. Um. The charter
usually had some laws and regulations that were in there,
and for the most part you were supposed to adhere
(13:07):
to English law, kind of 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 uh you know. Dr Emerson Baker
is one of our historians, and he calls his book
(13:28):
the Storm of Witchcraft because it's it's 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 are allied with them, UM, a harsh winter. Um.
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 the people, um shortly before
(13:51):
the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They
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 they're literally uh there there there are society
that has lost all their laws, and so they're leaning
on the people like like John Hawthorne, who you know
his him and his father both worked with the Charter
(14:12):
and then they knew the law. They're kind of leaning
on these people to help them. But I mean, you know,
their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they
have this sphere 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
you know, witchcraft falls on the capital crime list. You're
not going to find that on the books today because
(14:33):
we have a very secular government. Um. And but back
then there that that border between church and state was
a lot more fuzzy and uh, and so things like,
you know, being a witch became this capital offense and uh,
it was executed, executable by death with some exceptions. The
deeper into the trials you get and it just gets
(14:53):
more complex, things like you know, at some point, if
you used witchcraft but you didn't kill anybody, you could
be punished, but you won't be executed and whatnot. But
but yeah, the faith really did. It permeated everything, really,
And it makes sense what you're saying given the context
of the time when people are I think you hit
(15:13):
a really powerful point here. Wouldn't you say that the
people found themselves governless right in in a hostile environment
in terms of the ecosystem they were surrounded by uh.
And if we're if 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
(15:40):
would tend to fall back on the number one organizational
structure that they considered their their core set of values,
which personally, and I don't 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
(16:03):
to remember that people are still people were still the
same cognitive machines, and these sorts of things are not
as implausible in the modern day as they were. You know,
they're not any less plausible, i should say, than they
were in the sixt hundreds. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean one
of the benefits of of I mean, think about how
(16:23):
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 worked together. They worked with a
lot of existing laws around Europe that they knew of,
you know, the Magna Carta was an influence and things
like that. But they they they were they were a
voice for the people as a collective putting things together.
(16:46):
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 in um Salem town I
think had maybe two thousand people in it. Now that's
(17:06):
a smaller group of people, with a smaller pool of
leaders making up laws and trying to find their way.
They're gonna make a lot more mistakes, and they're gonna
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, because one person making choices is going
(17:29):
to make a lot more worse choices than than a
group of people collectively thinking things 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
uh and their personal opinions and their fears and their
hopes and all this stuff, and we get a mess.
(17:49):
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 primary inspirations or motivations that that
(18:11):
set you on the path to explore and clarify this story?
You know. Um, I mean I've I've made the podcast
called Lore for about three and a half years now,
and Laura is essentially a dark historical podcast, you know.
I I look for stories from history that have a
more unusual or um or dark is just the best
(18:32):
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 gonna learn about the drummer
of Tedworth. Um, 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 gonna learn about
these things that history class, and and and and that's
why I I do Lore because I want people to
hear these great sales of things that happened and people
(18:54):
claim that they were true, and I want to explore them.
Most of the time I'm find 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 uh,
that leaves out a few topics, you know. And so
from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem which
(19:15):
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 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
(19:36):
I had this vision of maybe someday when I had
free time, uh, because I just got busier and busier
as time went by. Um, maybe someday I'll be able
to do like a little mini series on on Salem.
And I didn't I didn't know if i'd give it
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,
(19:57):
because I didn't know what the material would would turn into. Um.
So it wasn't until you know, about a year ago
that I started working with some of your folks over
there and how stuff works and realize that if we
were going to build a a network of shows, one
of those could very well be a long form documentary
series that just takes time you know, gives these really
(20:18):
big stories the breathing room that they need and and
let it, 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 and it's
you can't pass up a topic like this. So jumping back,
let's jump back to Salem. It's winter time. It's uh
(20:42):
freaking cold out there, and there's no central heating, there's
no electricity. Um, the only way to keep you and
your family warm enough to not die is to have firewood.
And one thing that I didn't understand going into this
project was just how vital firewood was as a commodity,
(21:04):
as almost a currency in a way. Can you talk
to us about the importance of firewood back then? Yeah,
I mean picture that post apocalyptic movie that you love,
where you know there is no more US currency, the
global markets 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
(21:25):
trying to find ways like what what are valuable commodities
to trade for something? And firewood was certainly UM. I
wouldn't say it was worth its weight in gold, but
it was highly important. So to illustrate this, you know,
the the minister in Salem Village where a lot of
the victims came from, UM was this guy named Samuel
Parris who came from UM. I mean his family was English. Obviously,
(21:50):
his his uncle had uh purchased or somehow acquired a
plantation on the island of Barbados and uh 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. As you know, his uncle that
eventually dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and
(22:10):
runs it well. But some natural disasters happened. There's like
this massive hurricane, and there's a a drought, and I
think some sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually, UM Samuel
Paris has found himself running the place and he doesn't
want to anymore. He realizes it's it's going to kill him,
so he sells it and heads north. Um. He wanted
(22:30):
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 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 um, maybe
just looking for work. He used some of his money
to set up a business there. Finally he ends up
(22:52):
um not doing well at business and taking the position
in Sale and Village as their new minister. Um. The
negotiation process for his contract took him over a year
because he was this super litigious like we have to
get all the tease crossed in the eyes 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
(23:16):
firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, there
was a problem constantly with 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. Um. He was hard to like, it
was hard to get along with, and some of them
just sort of held it back as as a leverage
over him. Uh. And there's these stories of him writing
(23:36):
in his study upstairs in the middle of winter, dipping
his quill and the inkwell to to scratch on the book,
and the ink in the ink well being frozen because
it's so cold in the house. And uh, that firewood
just becomes this thorn in his side for the entire time.
Just chop your own firewood, man. You know, as a minister,
(23:59):
your give in the parsonage to live in. There's no
land with it, um, all the land of budding you
is fenced off, and it belongs to somebody else, and
they're gonna cut down their trees and use it. And
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 so this
(24:20):
is uh 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? Um, could you tell us
a little bit more about the primary written records that
(24:42):
you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and
and how how you took this this vast amount of
uncollected resources, like how how did you arrange them? And
what was what was the process? Like? Was it was
it all up hill? Where there surprising fines? Were there
(25:02):
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. Well, one thing to keep in mind is
that Um toward the end of the which trial period
of six nine two basically starts in January two and
(25:24):
runs through until about May of sixteen nine. And towards
the end of that, the Governor of Massachusetts is this
guy named Sir William Phipps, and he he realizes that
the public perception of what's going on in the trials
is bad. Um. In fact, at some point that the
judges involved in the trial higher Um a minister from
(25:45):
a prominent minister family. Their last name was Mather. Increase
was the father. Cotton was the son Cotton mother. Um.
That's right, Cotton, uh and and Cotton was hired to
basically write a pr piece. It was a book in
defense of the Sailing witch trials. And right about that
time Governor Phipps decides it will be very bad if
(26:06):
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
sand Witch trials anymore. So you have that which limits
the amount of stuff that's written about it. In then
you have people with with you know, let's let's let's
(26:26):
just pick a judge out of you know, like Nathaniel
Saltonstall or or somebody like that, like or Samuel Sewell
Um their their family documents that would have existed. Personal
journals was a big thing for a lot of 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
(26:49):
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, the Minister for
you know, fourteen fifteen months, kept notebooks of what was
going on, and one page was pulled out of a
(27:09):
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. There's this almost
global cover up of the documentation of what happened. Once
the government gets on its feet in late sixty two
(27:32):
and the Oiler and Terminer is shut down and it
becomes the Superior Court essentially the the state Supreme Court. UM,
the documents don't go away anymore. Those become really official
and we still have all those, but all the court
documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial, all
through the summer six two, it's just gone. So there's
not a lot to look at. There is stuff. Um,
(27:53):
I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great
resources on it. But if you go to history on
obscured 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 University of Virginia that has a like a digital
scan in library of every document relating to it. So
things like the warrant that was issued for um Reverend
(28:18):
George Burrows. Like you can see the warrants right there
written out in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on
and everything. It's it's beautiful. It's tragic. Um. So there
there are things that we have, and we still find things.
You know, every year, somebody is 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
(28:40):
of disappeared. You know. I think this right here is
the stuff they don't want you to know about the
Salem witch Trials. Can you can you imagine now in
this in modern history, if someone attempted to do this,
just if it was a on a year long process
somewhere and someone said, oh, nope, we're gonna strike this
whole thing from the record. Uh nope, everybody put away
(29:03):
your social media note. We're gonna delete everybody's Facebook. Uh
it's over. This didn't happen. Here's the official account in
this one home or this one blog. All right, Uh
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 Archival Center. Yeah.
(29:26):
So the Pbody Essex Library a Pbody Institute Library that's
in Danvers. Pbody is another town, but the Danvers Library
is actually called the Pbody Institute Library. It's confusing, but
they have a 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
(29:47):
descended from a number of the victims from the witch trials,
and he lives within blocks of where it all happened, um,
in a period home. He's 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. Um. The church changed locations.
(30:08):
They moved across the street. A few years after it
was all over. They've got a new minister, Reverend Green
Um maybe in the sixteen ninety nine range or so.
He moved the building across the street. Um. And then
eventually that was, you know, torn down and they built
a bigger building because it's a church, and they grow
and populations grow. Um. In the nineteen seventies, I think
(30:30):
there was a fire of the church and Richard Trask
went with the fire department and was able to get
in and save some things. He saved the the original
communion where you know, like the chealist, 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 in
case there was a fire. Uh. And then two books
(30:51):
were saved. One is think of them both as like
ships logs. You know, you think like Picard talking to
the computer in his in his ready room, um, 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, officers and important people would write
in there, like you know, we excommunicated, you know, Martha
(31:12):
Corey on this date, um, or we brought in this
member this date. It's sort of a happenings of the church.
That book from was saved UM as well as the
Minister's Book, which is sort of a ship's log for
the minister um and and that has Samuel paris Is
writing in it detailing things that are going on, writing
about the events and when he left and Reverend Green
(31:33):
came in that book was handed 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.
So cool, Yeah, and get to get to see them
and hold them and look at them. It's just they're amazing.
And we will continue to explore this in just a
moment after a quick word from our sponsor and we're back.
(32:03):
One of the crucial things about reading these primary sources,
finding these uh, 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
(32:24):
some of the frankly widespread misconceptions that we have in
the modern day, not just look not just in the
world of Hollywood, but in the cultural zeitgeist, even in
academic settings. So what, uh, if you could tell us
here and what were some of the misconceptions that you
found in the course of your work on Unobscured. Well,
(32:47):
you know, I have this belief that people like to
some things up into a sentence. You know, we like
to say, oh, I understand that, you know it was this,
It was it was simple, right, like to be able
to declare something as simple means that we've grasped it
and we're in control of it. And you can't do
that with the Sale and witch trials. It wasn't simple.
(33:07):
It was highly complex. So one of the most common
questions that I get, um, whether it's social media or
in person, regarding the Sale and 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
(33:28):
one answer. Again, I hearkened back to what Dr 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 as
always just rotten bread, right, it was? It was that
(33:49):
ergot poison stuff. Right. Um, hopefully you have learned, um,
but know er, God is this fungus that grows on grains? Uh?
We hear about it as rye um, and people make
bread out of rye, among other things. It makes a
good bourbon on a rye. But um, this, this fungus
(34:13):
can cause hallucinations. And the idea was put forward in
the mid seventies that hey, what if these people were
having hallucinations and and that explains why they were behaving
so bad. They can have convulsions too. And you know,
some of the the afflicted girls as we call them,
the people who are showing symptoms of being attacked by
the witches, um, they had convulsions and fits. They would
(34:34):
fall on the floor and thrash around. So you know, hey,
it sounds like ergot explains this. And the very next
month after that was published in a journal, the same
journal published a um a debunking of it. You know,
two more scientists came on board and said, no, look,
it can't be ergot poisoning. And here's why. Ergot poisoning
reacts to you one of two ways, depending on how
(34:57):
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. Um. But but that's
only one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves.
The other way would be gang green, and I get
that those are wildly disparate, you know, responses for something
(35:21):
in your body. You know, you can either have convulsions
and hallucinations or you can have gang green, you know,
like pick um. And I would certainly grab the convulsions
myself and skip the gang green. But um, you have
to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,
and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem
is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of
(35:44):
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 in vitamin A. So because nobody
ever gets reported as having gang green, we can right
away right off or got poisoning. Um. I sometimes hear people, Yeah,
I mean it's it's it's kind of like, oh, you
(36:06):
pop my bubble, why did 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 and 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 fungus on it, right, Well, it wouldn't work. It's
more complex than that, you know. And uh, you have
(36:28):
you have a lot of people suffering from what was
essentially post traumatic stress disorder UM. 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 Um and the Algonquin,
(36:48):
and you had the French who were allied with them,
and they were constantly kind of hammering back down to
the south. And these refugees, like you, they'd go up
and they'd settle, and they live for a couple of years,
and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would
flee back selth having lost everything they ever took with him.
And it was horrible, it was it was worth. Some
of them watch their parents die, some of them lost children, UM.
(37:11):
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 uh,
of course we mentioned the lack of the charter. They
didn't have a government at the time. It was very
very tricky. Um. The one of the things the government
was doing is I think it was when Governor Andros
(37:34):
took over before Phips like they started to read 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 gonna get taxed again. So financially they
were getting hammered. Um. They had an incompetent leader who
didn't understand how to govern because he had never done
it before, Governor Phipps. Um, all these all these pieces
(37:56):
helped to kind of mix in the bowl and be
this perfect storm that that in that window of time,
that's that's when it could have happened, and it did
well well said well put this also this, this also
reminds me of work by the author Carol Carlson, The
Devil in the Shape of a Woman that I wanted
(38:17):
to wanted to ask you about, because in Carlson's examination, Uh,
what what this author is looking at is more of
an emphasis on how certain women, primarily women, were chosen
(38:37):
to be accused of witchcraft, and Carlson argues that there
is a a violation of social hierarchy that occurs in
some cases. I think one of the specific quotes is
that the accusers and the accused were in a way
(38:58):
in a negotiation about the legit him to see of
female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far
of an assumption to say this was probably a severely
patriarchal society. Is that correct? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You know.
One of the historians that we that we spoke to,
we spoke to six, did great interviews with them. One
of them is Dr Jane Kaminski. She's a professor of
(39:20):
history at Harvard, which is a school I think some
people have heard of, but she's also the director of
the library there, Slushing Or Library, which is essentially a
library devoted to women studies through history. So we wanted
we wanted a perspective, a historical perspective on like what
sort of a voice did did women have in that age?
(39:41):
What was their place in society, what was seen as wrong,
what was seen as good? You know, things like um,
women in would have been able to read because they
needed to read the scripture to their family, but they
wouldn't necessarily have been able to write. Um. So you know,
years later, when Reverend Green takes over one of the
only afflicted girls, one of the girls who accused people
(40:02):
and got them killed, wanted to join the church, and
her confession is in that church's book that I talked
about that Saved from the Fire, but it's in It's
in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls her 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 what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary.
(40:23):
There's a little bit of control in there too. If
they can't read, um, all right, if they can't write,
then they can't you know, get involved in governments and
things like that, and and so there was a patriarchal
you know, pushed down on that as well. It is
really bizarre what happens in the Sandwich Childs because in
effect you have you have not only women, but you
have young women, girls twelve fourteen years old, who begin
(40:46):
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 shy of being ministers themselves
or or could very well go out and get a
job as a minister. They were who were some of
the most educated people of the day. Um they were
they were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And
(41:08):
so these roles are reversed. There's there's this 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 and do what you're told, that that they
have this opportunity all of a sudden, they notice an
opening right that that they're being listened to and things
are being done based on their stories. And you have
(41:29):
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 study that looks at the list
of victims who are accused by these people, but you know,
I wonder how many of them were we're sort of
like pro traditional women, sort of women like Rebecca Nurse
(41:53):
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 if there's a little bit of a
social battle going on there. You know, we know that
twenty years before the sail in Which Trials, there was
an event in um Gratton. Um. One of the ministers
who pops up in the Witch Trials is this guy
(42:13):
named um 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 speaking about the
devil in the book. Like it's all these elements that
come right from the sailor Wich Trials, but it was
twenty years before Um and and I I see a
lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice
(42:36):
for you know, a few months, uh and and it's
it's a pretty easy way to view these things. I
don't know if I'm reading into it, if I'm applying
my own perceptions onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.
You know. Another person we interviewed, Marybeth Norton, who's an
author as well as a professor. She she makes a
great point about that consolidation of power that you're you're
(42:59):
talking about erin where the same men who are running
the church are also the judge, jury, and executioner essentially.
Uh So, like all four points essentially are covered by
the same old white men UM, who are the best
writers and readers and learned men of the time. And
it really does bring home that idea of these young
(43:22):
women fighting back in any way they possibly could to
to be seen and to be heard and to be known. 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,
(43:43):
and they served as the legislative branch, and that was
the government, and and that's what it was like in UM.
I want to be careful with leading people to believe
that the the Afflicted girls were a social movement UM,
because there might have been part of that, but again
it's not. It's not a neat and clean, black and
(44:04):
white thing. Some of the Afflicted girls were literally refugees
from Maine who had come down having watched their entire
families killed and we're afraid for their life every single day.
There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were
some social things going on, um, 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
(44:26):
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 but there's an
element of that in there for sure. Well, Aaron, we
were coming to the end here, um what well by
and which by the way, un obscured season one about
(44:46):
the sale which trials is finishing. I believe when we're
when this episode is available, the the last major episode
will be out. So you can go and listen to
all twelve episodes right now of a here, Um there
are there are gonna be some other episodes that come
out though, right yeah, so, um, the season is twelve
(45:07):
episodes long, twelve episodes, you know, this story from start
to finish. Um. 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 sitting binge a listen
to un Obscured. It's a great way to do it,
um and uh because at least there's some hope at
the end of the tunnel on that one. And uh.
(45:27):
So when we get back into the new year, we're
gonna take those six interviews we did with the six
historians Dr Emerson Baker, Dr Richard Trask, Uh, Dr Jan Kaminski,
Marybeth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey. I
got them all, um, and we're gonna we're gonna publish
them weekly, one at a time, all six of the
interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,
(45:50):
because Unobscured is narrative stories telling. It's me telling a
story for forty five minutes, and then every now and
then you'll hear like Dr Baker jump in and talk
for fifteen seconds to get a point across for me.
But we never get all of his his interview, and
it's it's a great interview. So this is our way
of sharing those big conversations with people. And you can
just sit in front of the fire hose and drink
(46:11):
and it's awesome. I concur It sounds like a plan.
So so, Aaron, before we leave, what is the one
big lesson that you have learned from making this show
that we should in turn learned. That's wait, yeah, that's right,
teach us the secrets of the universe. Erin, please hurry,
point of order, man Frederick. We part of our exploration
(46:35):
today was how it was about how difficult and misleading
it is. I'm trying trying to get magic magic out
of this thing. No, I hear you. No, look um,
I will say that I'm gonna echo something I heard
somebody say earlier. It's really, really um important to remember
that these were people that week. We look back with
(46:56):
three six years of distance and say crazy like they
shouldn't have done that. I would totally do things different
if I was in 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
(47:18):
we would all do the same thing. And I think
it's important for us, in any historical situation, but especially
the Sandwich Trials, to look back at it and say,
these are just people. 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 in and hide under the radar, whatever it is like.
These are just normal people like us. And if we
(47:39):
forget that, that's when we start to misunderstand history. And
and that's that's one of the biggest lessons that I
can take away from this. Oh man, that was so
much more than I even expected. Okay, thank you, Aaron,
You're very welcome, sir, yeahs, sincerely, thank you so much.
In thank you, listen is for joining us today. As
(48:02):
we said earlier, you can you can, if need be
escape holiday time with your family or just in the
interest of enjoying a fascinating deep dive into a widely
misunderstood period of American history. You can find Unobscured in
its entirety now wherever you find your favorite shows and uh.
(48:24):
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 area to
really put you in the place, as well as books.
If you want to continue your reading and learning. So
(48:46):
once again, that is unobscured season one. We're not I'm
not going to try to finagle any uh any juicy
tidbits about season two out just yet. Uh. You'll have
to take our word to stay tuned, look forward. Let
us know what you think about un ob Steward, Let
(49:07):
us know what you which historical lessons you feel can
be drawn from this series of events in six two. Again, Aaron,
any any last words before we leave, Have fun with
the with the show, dig in, listen and enjoy and
learn something. And thanks for having me on. Guys, thank
you so much for being with us. All right, good
(49:28):
to do it. If you don't want to do any
of those things, find us on social media where we're
Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show. And if you don't
want to do that, just send us a good old
fashioned email. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot
com
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. Welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt our compatriot
kol Is off on adventures in the meantime. They call
me Ben. When you're joined with our super producer Paul
mission controlled dec and most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:48):
real life which Trials, and nowadays most people only know
of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etcetera.
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
(01:09):
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
(01:31):
creator of the brand new podcast Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Aaron Mankate, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me. Hey, is
our pleasure to have you on the 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 pulling a fast one on you, h We work
(01:52):
together on this, but the bulk of the work is
most certainly Errand's um. But we we had it was
just a fascinating deep dive into the Salem witch Trials,
right and 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
(02:13):
us are introduced to the Saland 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. But then all of
that gets shaped by all of this pop culture and
all of these other references. So how how has our
understanding of the real witch trials been modified by this
(02:36):
pop culture? Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right.
You know, there's a lot of different factors that come
into play too, I guess hide the true story and
and and not always intentionally. It's not like there's a
dare I say it on this show, But it's not
like there's a conspiracy to to hide the the you know,
the true acts and deeds and all that went on.
(02:58):
You know, the sale and witch trial was 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 of dozen things that you're going to talk
about that semester, and so by necessity you sort of
have to brush over it and and just mentioned a
(03:20):
few things like it happened, Um, nineteen people were hanged,
one was crushed to death by stones, and five died
in jail. And 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 we just we
sort of sum it all up into a couple of sentences,
(03:40):
and especially in this day and age of you know,
small character count tweets and social media posts, it's easy
to try to summarize things up like that. Uh. The
other factory coming into this is, like you mentioned before,
is pop culture, right, like films and and screens like
like The Crucible and TV shows and and even you know,
Bad One our documentaries You can cover something like Sale
(04:03):
and witch trials in one hour. So you know that
those things all just sort of work to to force
us toward an easy SoundBite answer. And when you do that,
you lose all of the nuance. You know something that
a lot of people may not know. It's something that
I learned, uh fairly recently. You actually physically lived within
(04:25):
a very close proximity to where the Salem which trials occurred. Um, yeah,
tell us about well you know, so, um you hear
about the Sale in which 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 expected to
(04:46):
be Salem. Salem, which is a little bit more towards
the East. But back in the late sixteen hundreds, Salem
was like this territory, you know, and you had the city,
but then you have the breadbasket around it of all
these different communities, places that exist now today as their
own independent communities, like when Um and Danvers and Beverly
(05:06):
and andover in tops Field and all these places slowly
were chiseled off of the Salem land mass and became
their own things. So what is now today Danvers used
to be Salem Village, and Salem proper today used to
be Salem Town because that was sort of the the
built up, um, wealthier town aspect of it all. Uh
(05:26):
So this 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 to carve
these distinctions out and clarify them because the last time
that we were in Boston we learned firsthand from uh
(05:48):
some residents about Salem's the current Salem's uh pretty successful
tourism industry based off of this tragedy. Is that a
realing is it's still in full swing? Oh yeah, yeah,
And you know, and we talk about Danvers being old
Salem Village and in Salem being old Salem Town and
(06:08):
that dichotomy between the two places. There's there's a reason
why their name has changed, and that's partly to distance
themselves from what happened most of the Salem base because
there Okay, so there were a lot of victims that
came from other communities and over tops Field, all over
the place, Gloucester, um, but a lot of the Salem
victims came from the Salem village area. So what is
(06:29):
now danvers and a lot of the the legal aspects,
especially the Court of Oyer and Terminal which was sort
of the the higher level um jury plus judges system
um and then moving on to the superior court, those
things all happened in Salem town. So you had victims
coming from one area and that's now Danvers Um. And
that's wildely generalized. I'm just roughly saying it. And then
(06:53):
in Salem all the all the basically all the bad guys, right,
all the people that sat in the jury or on
the court and judge people in in them to death.
So you have these two towns, you know, three and
twenty five years ago, we're 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 has changed its name,
and it's sort of distances itself from the idea that
(07:14):
the Witch Charles happened there, like you can find things.
Rebecca Nurse is one of the victims UM. She was
a seventy five seventy six year old woman whom her
crime was that she was too generous with one of
her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were incredibly um prejudiced against
any other faiths, and so even Quakers, which we never
think of Quakers as being like antagonists or or bad people,
(07:37):
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
among other things, she had some rumors spread about her
and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there. It's it's
a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour three and
twenty five years later. It's still there, and um it's
set up more sensitively and as a as a museum
(07:59):
UM 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
there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue
and Danvers dodging the issue in Salem town sort of
rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a
(08:20):
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 up for her. You know,
it makes sense. 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,
(08:43):
have it's been morphed and changed over all of these years. Um,
what what was a witch in New England? It's such
a tricky question. Which was I mean, you know, in
the in the religious sense. To the Puritan it was
it was somebody who was working for the devil too
(09:04):
tear down the Puritan mission of this utopian society in
the New World. Um. The reason why the Puritans came
over is because, um, the the 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 it hadn't tossed off enough of the Catholic trappings
to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it to be
(09:27):
more pure. Thus the name and UM. Among all of
the colonies that were set up in the sixteen hundreds
that were all sort of like either endeavors of 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
(09:47):
afar by the owners. It was being run here. They
had a charter from the king and you had to
get that um. But they were this They were this
isolated religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was
potentially which 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, um, how many times you've
(10:08):
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 that is a
evil spirit in the form of an animal um that
follows the witch around, and that's just almost a European
an American constant that you have familiars. There are things like, well,
(10:31):
we can tell you're a witch if you have witch
marks on you, which is supposed to be like this
little devil's teeth, this this place where the demons will
will suckle from the witch um and they look like
freckles or moles or 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 of the Puritan faith, but after
(10:54):
that it was just kind of hard to nail it down,
which created problems for them. You know, yeah, we can
I can totally understand this because in the case of Um,
I believe it was Sarah Osborne, right, one of the
first people accused of witchcraft. In in her case, I
think one of the primary uh causes for persecution or
(11:18):
prosecution was that she was suspected of living with her
second husband before they got officially married, 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. Um. And I'm not sure
if I'm getting my people right or not, but I
(11:39):
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 yes,
Sarah Osborne wasn't um she I mean, she was also
just an outsider. She wasn't respected. She 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 or our fears and our anxieties. And there's
(12:03):
something here to be said. It's it's I'm trying to
articulate this correctly, Earon, 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. Um. Yeah,
I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly what I'm
(12:24):
trying 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, uh nowadays,
when you're imagining this time period. How how did that
come into play with setting up these trials, Like we're
the Oyer and Terminal trials. Specifically a um a law
of the land kind of thing or was it a
(12:45):
religious law thing? Well, um, I mean, that's a forty
minute podcast in that answer right there. But like let's
just let's 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. Um. The charter
usually had some laws and regulations that were in there,
and for the most part you were supposed to adhere
(13:07):
to English law, kind of 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 uh you know. Dr Emerson Baker
is one of our historians, and he calls his book
(13:28):
the Storm of Witchcraft because it's it's 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 are allied with them, UM, a harsh winter. Um.
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 the people, um shortly before
(13:51):
the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They
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 they're literally uh there there there are society
that has lost all their laws, and so they're leaning
on the people like like John Hawthorne, who you know
his him and his father both worked with the Charter
(14:12):
and then they knew the law. They're kind of leaning
on these people to help them. But I mean, you know,
their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they
have this sphere 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
you know, witchcraft falls on the capital crime list. You're
not going to find that on the books today because
(14:33):
we have a very secular government. Um. And but back
then there that that border between church and state was
a lot more fuzzy and uh, and so things like,
you know, being a witch became this capital offense and uh,
it was executed, executable by death with some exceptions. The
deeper into the trials you get and it just gets
(14:53):
more complex, things like you know, at some point, if
you used witchcraft but you didn't kill anybody, you could
be punished, but you won't be executed and whatnot. But
but yeah, the faith really did. It permeated everything, really,
And it makes sense what you're saying given the context
of the time when people are I think you hit
(15:13):
a really powerful point here. Wouldn't you say that the
people found themselves governless right in in a hostile environment
in terms of the ecosystem they were surrounded by uh.
And if we're if 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
(15:40):
would tend to fall back on the number one organizational
structure that they considered their their core set of values,
which personally, and I don't 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
(16:03):
to remember that people are still people were still the
same cognitive machines, and these sorts of things are not
as implausible in the modern day as they were. You know,
they're not any less plausible, i should say, than they
were in the sixt hundreds. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean one
of the benefits of of I mean, think about how
(16:23):
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 worked together. They worked with a
lot of existing laws around Europe that they knew of,
you know, the Magna Carta was an influence and things
like that. But they they they were they were a
voice for the people as a collective putting things together.
(16:46):
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 in um Salem town I
think had maybe two thousand people in it. Now that's
(17:06):
a smaller group of people, with a smaller pool of
leaders making up laws and trying to find their way.
They're gonna make a lot more mistakes, and they're gonna
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, because one person making choices is going
(17:29):
to make a lot more worse choices than than a
group of people collectively thinking things 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
uh and their personal opinions and their fears and their
hopes and all this stuff, and we get a mess.
(17:49):
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 primary inspirations or motivations that that
(18:11):
set you on the path to explore and clarify this story?
You know. Um, I mean I've I've made the podcast
called Lore for about three and a half years now,
and Laura is essentially a dark historical podcast, you know.
I I look for stories from history that have a
more unusual or um or dark is just the best
(18:32):
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 gonna learn about the drummer
of Tedworth. Um, 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 gonna learn about
these things that history class, and and and and that's
why I I do Lore because I want people to
hear these great sales of things that happened and people
(18:54):
claim that they were true, and I want to explore them.
Most of the time I'm find 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 uh,
that leaves out a few topics, you know. And so
from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem which
(19:15):
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 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
(19:36):
I had this vision of maybe someday when I had
free time, uh, because I just got busier and busier
as time went by. Um, maybe someday I'll be able
to do like a little mini series on on Salem.
And I didn't I didn't know if i'd give it
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,
(19:57):
because I didn't know what the material would would turn into. Um.
So it wasn't until you know, about a year ago
that I started working with some of your folks over
there and how stuff works and realize that if we
were going to build a a network of shows, one
of those could very well be a long form documentary
series that just takes time you know, gives these really
(20:18):
big stories the breathing room that they need and and
let it, 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 and it's
you can't pass up a topic like this. So jumping back,
let's jump back to Salem. It's winter time. It's uh
(20:42):
freaking cold out there, and there's no central heating, there's
no electricity. Um, the only way to keep you and
your family warm enough to not die is to have firewood.
And one thing that I didn't understand going into this
project was just how vital firewood was as a commodity,
(21:04):
as almost a currency in a way. Can you talk
to us about the importance of firewood back then? Yeah,
I mean picture that post apocalyptic movie that you love,
where you know there is no more US currency, the
global markets 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
(21:25):
trying to find ways like what what are valuable commodities
to trade for something? And firewood was certainly UM. I
wouldn't say it was worth its weight in gold, but
it was highly important. So to illustrate this, you know,
the the minister in Salem Village where a lot of
the victims came from, UM was this guy named Samuel
Parris who came from UM. I mean his family was English. Obviously,
(21:50):
his his uncle had uh purchased or somehow acquired a
plantation on the island of Barbados and uh 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. As you know, his uncle that
eventually dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and
(22:10):
runs it well. But some natural disasters happened. There's like
this massive hurricane, and there's a a drought, and I
think some sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually, UM Samuel
Paris has found himself running the place and he doesn't
want to anymore. He realizes it's it's going to kill him,
so he sells it and heads north. Um. He wanted
(22:30):
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 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 um, maybe
just looking for work. He used some of his money
to set up a business there. Finally he ends up
(22:52):
um not doing well at business and taking the position
in Sale and Village as their new minister. Um. The
negotiation process for his contract took him over a year
because he was this super litigious like we have to
get all the tease crossed in the eyes 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
(23:16):
firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, there
was a problem constantly with 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. Um. He was hard to like, it
was hard to get along with, and some of them
just sort of held it back as as a leverage
over him. Uh. And there's these stories of him writing
(23:36):
in his study upstairs in the middle of winter, dipping
his quill and the inkwell to to scratch on the book,
and the ink in the ink well being frozen because
it's so cold in the house. And uh, that firewood
just becomes this thorn in his side for the entire time.
Just chop your own firewood, man. You know, as a minister,
(23:59):
your give in the parsonage to live in. There's no
land with it, um, all the land of budding you
is fenced off, and it belongs to somebody else, and
they're gonna cut down their trees and use it. And
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 so this
(24:20):
is uh 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? Um, could you tell us
a little bit more about the primary written records that
(24:42):
you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and
and how how you took this this vast amount of
uncollected resources, like how how did you arrange them? And
what was what was the process? Like? Was it was
it all up hill? Where there surprising fines? Were there
(25:02):
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. Well, one thing to keep in mind is
that Um toward the end of the which trial period
of six nine two basically starts in January two and
(25:24):
runs through until about May of sixteen nine. And towards
the end of that, the Governor of Massachusetts is this
guy named Sir William Phipps, and he he realizes that
the public perception of what's going on in the trials
is bad. Um. In fact, at some point that the
judges involved in the trial higher Um a minister from
(25:45):
a prominent minister family. Their last name was Mather. Increase
was the father. Cotton was the son Cotton mother. Um.
That's right, Cotton, uh and and Cotton was hired to
basically write a pr piece. It was a book in
defense of the Sailing witch trials. And right about that
time Governor Phipps decides it will be very bad if
(26:06):
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
sand Witch trials anymore. So you have that which limits
the amount of stuff that's written about it. In then
you have people with with you know, let's let's let's
(26:26):
just pick a judge out of you know, like Nathaniel
Saltonstall or or somebody like that, like or Samuel Sewell
Um their their family documents that would have existed. Personal
journals was a big thing for a lot of 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
(26:49):
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, the Minister for
you know, fourteen fifteen months, kept notebooks of what was
going on, and one page was pulled out of a
(27:09):
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. There's this almost
global cover up of the documentation of what happened. Once
the government gets on its feet in late sixty two
(27:32):
and the Oiler and Terminer is shut down and it
becomes the Superior Court essentially the the state Supreme Court. UM,
the documents don't go away anymore. Those become really official
and we still have all those, but all the court
documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial, all
through the summer six two, it's just gone. So there's
not a lot to look at. There is stuff. Um,
(27:53):
I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great
resources on it. But if you go to history on
obscured 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 University of Virginia that has a like a digital
scan in library of every document relating to it. So
things like the warrant that was issued for um Reverend
(28:18):
George Burrows. Like you can see the warrants right there
written out in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on
and everything. It's it's beautiful. It's tragic. Um. So there
there are things that we have, and we still find things.
You know, every year, somebody is 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
(28:40):
of disappeared. You know. I think this right here is
the stuff they don't want you to know about the
Salem witch Trials. Can you can you imagine now in
this in modern history, if someone attempted to do this,
just if it was a on a year long process
somewhere and someone said, oh, nope, we're gonna strike this
whole thing from the record. Uh nope, everybody put away
(29:03):
your social media note. We're gonna delete everybody's Facebook. Uh
it's over. This didn't happen. Here's the official account in
this one home or this one blog. All right, Uh
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 Archival Center. Yeah.
(29:26):
So the Pbody Essex Library a Pbody Institute Library that's
in Danvers. Pbody is another town, but the Danvers Library
is actually called the Pbody Institute Library. It's confusing, but
they have a 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
(29:47):
descended from a number of the victims from the witch trials,
and he lives within blocks of where it all happened, um,
in a period home. He's 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. Um. The church changed locations.
(30:08):
They moved across the street. A few years after it
was all over. They've got a new minister, Reverend Green
Um maybe in the sixteen ninety nine range or so.
He moved the building across the street. Um. And then
eventually that was, you know, torn down and they built
a bigger building because it's a church, and they grow
and populations grow. Um. In the nineteen seventies, I think
(30:30):
there was a fire of the church and Richard Trask
went with the fire department and was able to get
in and save some things. He saved the the original
communion where you know, like the chealist, 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 in
case there was a fire. Uh. And then two books
(30:51):
were saved. One is think of them both as like
ships logs. You know, you think like Picard talking to
the computer in his in his ready room, um, 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, officers and important people would write
in there, like you know, we excommunicated, you know, Martha
(31:12):
Corey on this date, um, or we brought in this
member this date. It's sort of a happenings of the church.
That book from was saved UM as well as the
Minister's Book, which is sort of a ship's log for
the minister um and and that has Samuel paris Is
writing in it detailing things that are going on, writing
about the events and when he left and Reverend Green
(31:33):
came in that book was handed 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.
So cool, Yeah, and get to get to see them
and hold them and look at them. It's just they're amazing.
And we will continue to explore this in just a
moment after a quick word from our sponsor and we're back.
(32:03):
One of the crucial things about reading these primary sources,
finding these uh, 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
(32:24):
some of the frankly widespread misconceptions that we have in
the modern day, not just look not just in the
world of Hollywood, but in the cultural zeitgeist, even in
academic settings. So what, uh, if you could tell us
here and what were some of the misconceptions that you
found in the course of your work on Unobscured. Well,
(32:47):
you know, I have this belief that people like to
some things up into a sentence. You know, we like
to say, oh, I understand that, you know it was this,
It was it was simple, right, like to be able
to declare something as simple means that we've grasped it
and we're in control of it. And you can't do
that with the Sale and witch trials. It wasn't simple.
(33:07):
It was highly complex. So one of the most common
questions that I get, um, whether it's social media or
in person, regarding the Sale and 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
(33:28):
one answer. Again, I hearkened back to what Dr 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 as
always just rotten bread, right, it was? It was that
(33:49):
ergot poison stuff. Right. Um, hopefully you have learned, um,
but know er, God is this fungus that grows on grains? Uh?
We hear about it as rye um, and people make
bread out of rye, among other things. It makes a
good bourbon on a rye. But um, this, this fungus
(34:13):
can cause hallucinations. And the idea was put forward in
the mid seventies that hey, what if these people were
having hallucinations and and that explains why they were behaving
so bad. They can have convulsions too. And you know,
some of the the afflicted girls as we call them,
the people who are showing symptoms of being attacked by
the witches, um, they had convulsions and fits. They would
(34:34):
fall on the floor and thrash around. So you know, hey,
it sounds like ergot explains this. And the very next
month after that was published in a journal, the same
journal published a um a debunking of it. You know,
two more scientists came on board and said, no, look,
it can't be ergot poisoning. And here's why. Ergot poisoning
reacts to you one of two ways, depending on how
(34:57):
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. Um. But but that's
only one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves.
The other way would be gang green, and I get
that those are wildly disparate, you know, responses for something
(35:21):
in your body. You know, you can either have convulsions
and hallucinations or you can have gang green, you know,
like pick um. And I would certainly grab the convulsions
myself and skip the gang green. But um, you have
to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,
and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem
is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of
(35:44):
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 in vitamin A. So because nobody
ever gets reported as having gang green, we can right
away right off or got poisoning. Um. I sometimes hear people, Yeah,
I mean it's it's it's kind of like, oh, you
(36:06):
pop my bubble, why did 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 and 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 fungus on it, right, Well, it wouldn't work. It's
more complex than that, you know. And uh, you have
(36:28):
you have a lot of people suffering from what was
essentially post traumatic stress disorder UM. 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 Um and the Algonquin,
(36:48):
and you had the French who were allied with them,
and they were constantly kind of hammering back down to
the south. And these refugees, like you, they'd go up
and they'd settle, and they live for a couple of years,
and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would
flee back selth having lost everything they ever took with him.
And it was horrible, it was it was worth. Some
of them watch their parents die, some of them lost children, UM.
(37:11):
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 uh,
of course we mentioned the lack of the charter. They
didn't have a government at the time. It was very
very tricky. Um. The one of the things the government
was doing is I think it was when Governor Andros
(37:34):
took over before Phips like they started to read 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 gonna get taxed again. So financially they
were getting hammered. Um. They had an incompetent leader who
didn't understand how to govern because he had never done
it before, Governor Phipps. Um, all these all these pieces
(37:56):
helped to kind of mix in the bowl and be
this perfect storm that that in that window of time,
that's that's when it could have happened, and it did
well well said well put this also this, this also
reminds me of work by the author Carol Carlson, The
Devil in the Shape of a Woman that I wanted
(38:17):
to wanted to ask you about, because in Carlson's examination, Uh,
what what this author is looking at is more of
an emphasis on how certain women, primarily women, were chosen
(38:37):
to be accused of witchcraft, and Carlson argues that there
is a a violation of social hierarchy that occurs in
some cases. I think one of the specific quotes is
that the accusers and the accused were in a way
(38:58):
in a negotiation about the legit him to see of
female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far
of an assumption to say this was probably a severely
patriarchal society. Is that correct? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You know.
One of the historians that we that we spoke to,
we spoke to six, did great interviews with them. One
of them is Dr Jane Kaminski. She's a professor of
(39:20):
history at Harvard, which is a school I think some
people have heard of, but she's also the director of
the library there, Slushing Or Library, which is essentially a
library devoted to women studies through history. So we wanted
we wanted a perspective, a historical perspective on like what
sort of a voice did did women have in that age?
(39:41):
What was their place in society, what was seen as wrong,
what was seen as good? You know, things like um,
women in would have been able to read because they
needed to read the scripture to their family, but they
wouldn't necessarily have been able to write. Um. So you know,
years later, when Reverend Green takes over one of the
only afflicted girls, one of the girls who accused people
(40:02):
and got them killed, wanted to join the church, and
her confession is in that church's book that I talked
about that Saved from the Fire, but it's in It's
in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls her 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 what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary.
(40:23):
There's a little bit of control in there too. If
they can't read, um, all right, if they can't write,
then they can't you know, get involved in governments and
things like that, and and so there was a patriarchal
you know, pushed down on that as well. It is
really bizarre what happens in the Sandwich Childs because in
effect you have you have not only women, but you
have young women, girls twelve fourteen years old, who begin
(40:46):
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 shy of being ministers themselves
or or could very well go out and get a
job as a minister. They were who were some of
the most educated people of the day. Um they were
they were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And
(41:08):
so these roles are reversed. There's there's this 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 and do what you're told, that that they
have this opportunity all of a sudden, they notice an
opening right that that they're being listened to and things
are being done based on their stories. And you have
(41:29):
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 study that looks at the list
of victims who are accused by these people, but you know,
I wonder how many of them were we're sort of
like pro traditional women, sort of women like Rebecca Nurse
(41:53):
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 if there's a little bit of a
social battle going on there. You know, we know that
twenty years before the sail in Which Trials, there was
an event in um Gratton. Um. One of the ministers
who pops up in the Witch Trials is this guy
(42:13):
named um 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 speaking about the
devil in the book. Like it's all these elements that
come right from the sailor Wich Trials, but it was
twenty years before Um and and I I see a
lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice
(42:36):
for you know, a few months, uh and and it's
it's a pretty easy way to view these things. I
don't know if I'm reading into it, if I'm applying
my own perceptions onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.
You know. Another person we interviewed, Marybeth Norton, who's an
author as well as a professor. She she makes a
great point about that consolidation of power that you're you're
(42:59):
talking about erin where the same men who are running
the church are also the judge, jury, and executioner essentially.
Uh So, like all four points essentially are covered by
the same old white men UM, who are the best
writers and readers and learned men of the time. And
it really does bring home that idea of these young
(43:22):
women fighting back in any way they possibly could to
to be seen and to be heard and to be known. 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,
(43:43):
and they served as the legislative branch, and that was
the government, and and that's what it was like in UM.
I want to be careful with leading people to believe
that the the Afflicted girls were a social movement UM,
because there might have been part of that, but again
it's not. It's not a neat and clean, black and
(44:04):
white thing. Some of the Afflicted girls were literally refugees
from Maine who had come down having watched their entire
families killed and we're afraid for their life every single day.
There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were
some social things going on, um, 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
(44:26):
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 but there's an
element of that in there for sure. Well, Aaron, we
were coming to the end here, um what well by
and which by the way, un obscured season one about
(44:46):
the sale which trials is finishing. I believe when we're
when this episode is available, the the last major episode
will be out. So you can go and listen to
all twelve episodes right now of a here, Um there
are there are gonna be some other episodes that come
out though, right yeah, so, um, the season is twelve
(45:07):
episodes long, twelve episodes, you know, this story from start
to finish. Um. 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 sitting binge a listen
to un Obscured. It's a great way to do it,
um and uh because at least there's some hope at
the end of the tunnel on that one. And uh.
(45:27):
So when we get back into the new year, we're
gonna take those six interviews we did with the six
historians Dr Emerson Baker, Dr Richard Trask, Uh, Dr Jan Kaminski,
Marybeth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey. I
got them all, um, and we're gonna we're gonna publish
them weekly, one at a time, all six of the
interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,
(45:50):
because Unobscured is narrative stories telling. It's me telling a
story for forty five minutes, and then every now and
then you'll hear like Dr Baker jump in and talk
for fifteen seconds to get a point across for me.
But we never get all of his his interview, and
it's it's a great interview. So this is our way
of sharing those big conversations with people. And you can
just sit in front of the fire hose and drink
(46:11):
and it's awesome. I concur It sounds like a plan.
So so, Aaron, before we leave, what is the one
big lesson that you have learned from making this show
that we should in turn learned. That's wait, yeah, that's right,
teach us the secrets of the universe. Erin, please hurry,
point of order, man Frederick. We part of our exploration
(46:35):
today was how it was about how difficult and misleading
it is. I'm trying trying to get magic magic out
of this thing. No, I hear you. No, look um,
I will say that I'm gonna echo something I heard
somebody say earlier. It's really, really um important to remember
that these were people that week. We look back with
(46:56):
three six years of distance and say crazy like they
shouldn't have done that. I would totally do things different
if I was in 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
(47:18):
we would all do the same thing. And I think
it's important for us, in any historical situation, but especially
the Sandwich Trials, to look back at it and say,
these are just people. 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 in and hide under the radar, whatever it is like.
These are just normal people like us. And if we
(47:39):
forget that, that's when we start to misunderstand history. And
and that's that's one of the biggest lessons that I
can take away from this. Oh man, that was so
much more than I even expected. Okay, thank you, Aaron,
You're very welcome, sir, yeahs, sincerely, thank you so much.
In thank you, listen is for joining us today. As
(48:02):
we said earlier, you can you can, if need be
escape holiday time with your family or just in the
interest of enjoying a fascinating deep dive into a widely
misunderstood period of American history. You can find Unobscured in
its entirety now wherever you find your favorite shows and uh.
(48:24):
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 area to
really put you in the place, as well as books.
If you want to continue your reading and learning. So
(48:46):
once again, that is unobscured season one. We're not I'm
not going to try to finagle any uh any juicy
tidbits about season two out just yet. Uh. You'll have
to take our word to stay tuned, look forward. Let
us know what you think about un ob Steward, Let
(49:07):
us know what you which historical lessons you feel can
be drawn from this series of events in six two. Again, Aaron,
any any last words before we leave, Have fun with
the with the show, dig in, listen and enjoy and
learn something. And thanks for having me on. Guys, thank
you so much for being with us. All right, good
(49:28):
to do it. If you don't want to do any
of those things, find us on social media where we're
Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show. And if you don't
want to do that, just send us a good old
fashioned email. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot
com
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