October 3, 2018 • 38 mins
The stage is set, the characters are introduced, and the spell is cast. Welcome to Salem Village, home to a diverse and complicated gathering of families and personalities. It is a pile of dry kindling, and the match is about to be struck.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
None of the remedies had worked. They tried parsnip seeds
ground up in red wine, and spirits of castor mixed
with oil of amber. They tried an elixir by taking
hard shore and oil from the antlers of a deer
and mixing it with soot. They'd even tried collecting dew
drops and let them evaporate so they could use the
minuscule amount of dust to make a tonic, but none
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of it had worked. That was frustrating too, because Samuel's niece,
Abigail wasn't getting any better. It had begun days earlier
when he found the eleven year old girl crouched beneath
a chair, her hands pressed against the signs of her head.
She was twisting and writhing and complaining loudly about some
sort of torment. When things got really bad, Abigail would
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collapse onto the floor in a limp heap, as if
all of her bones had been magically removed from her body.
She would seize up and contort and panic, and in
a house as small and packed as theirs, that was
a frightening sight. Samuel and his wife Elizabeth lived in
that small house with three of their own children, plus
abigail close quarters meant that everyone was suffering vicariously alongside
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the young girl, But it also meant that illness was
likely to spread unless they could treat it fast. Before
they could manage to do that, however, their worst fears
came true. In early January of sixteen ninety two. Screams
from another part of the house pulled Samuel out of
his frigid upstairs study. He bolted down to see who
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was in trouble and what they might need, only to
find his nine year old daughter, Betty, suffering through her
own version of poor Abigail's original symptoms. Elizabeth was crouched
over the girl, hand on her back to comfort her,
but when she locked eyes with her husband, there was
nothing but Hannock in them. The Reverend Samuel Paris felt
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a chill rippled down his spine. He and his wife
shared a common fear, an assumption about what was really
going on in their house. There was no doubt either.
Samuel was a deeply religious man who served as the
minister of the local Puritan settlement. He understood how things
worked and had heard similar stories before. All of it
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pointed to an obvious conclusion, but just because it was
plain to see didn't make it any less frightening. Something
evil had arrived in Salem and it was just getting started.
This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankie. This might come as
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a bit of a surprise, but there's nothing inherently special
about Salem, Massachusetts. Sure, it's old, having been incorporated in
sixty nine, which, if you do the math, is nearly
four years ago, but it's not even the oldest city
in the state. That honor goes to Plymouth, the site
of the Mayflower landing in Si. Salem began life as
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a fishing town founded by a guy named Roger Conant,
but after a couple of years of going at it alone,
the settlement received an infusion of new colonists, one of
whom was a man named John Endicott, who had been
sent to take over leadership of the colony. Conan stepped
as so peacefully that they named the new settlement Salem,
a word that comes from the Hebrew term shalom, which
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means peace. Soon the area became home to a growing
population of English Puritans who were tired of living under
the rule of a king who didn't support them, and
an Anglican Church that all out attacked them. The New
World offered them more freedom and less conflict. Here's historian
Richard Trask, A number of them eventually decided to go
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to the New World. They latched onto an economic device
of the mass Bay Colony. Once they got here, they
for a good generation or two were pretty much independent
to do what they wanted. They looked upon themselves, as
John Winthrop would later say, establishing a new kingdom upon
the hill. The first Puritans in Old England and New
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England were very staunch believers. Over the years to come,
wave after wave of Puritan settlers washed into the new colony.
They built new lives there in a strange land, but
did so upon the familiar foundations of their religious beliefs
and a common vision for a brighter future. Over the
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coming decades, though this vision of a city on a
hill would begin to waver a bit. Some people had
called for the loosening of rules around church membership, a
concept that became official in sixteen fifty two under an
agreement known as the Halfway Covenant. Mary Beth Norton is
a professor of American history at Cornell University. The Halfway
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Covenant allowed people who had been baptized as children but
had not yet experienced saving faith to in effect be
members of the church, to be under the church at supervision,
and to have communion, and to have their babies baptized.
But as the population of Salem grew, it also spread westward,
creating pockets of smaller communities far from Sale Harbor and
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original settlements. They called these the Salem village to avoid
confusion with the older, more wealthy Salem Town. During the
early years, though, some of these smaller communities managed to
break off and become recognized independent towns of their own,
places like marble Head and Manchester, Wenham and Beverly. It
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was as if Salem Town was having babies and they
were moving out and growing up. One other thing. When
these towns became independent, they also earned the right to
collect their own local taxes, as well as build and
staff their own local churches. They became their own authority
in a sense, rather than depending on Salem Town for everything,
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which was a healthy development. The fields and woods farther inland,
about a dozen miles west of Salem Town, were parceled
out to a handful of families who were ready to
settle down and farm there. Families with names like Putnam
and Porter, Hutchinson and ing U Saul. They might sound
unfamiliar to you now, but give it some time. You're
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going to hear a lot about them soon enough. But
as these families moved west to set up their farmsteads,
they encountered a few problems. Namely, they became disconnected socially
from the thriving community in Salem Town. They didn't feel
like they were part of the popular crowd anymore, but
more like outsiders instead. To make matters worse, though, they
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were still required to contribute to the responsibilities of their
former home, having to serve in Salem Town's militia, but
also travel the twelve miles each week to attend church
and participate in the night Watch. As you can imagine,
that was more than a little frustrating. So it probably
won't shock you to learn that a few of the
prominent farmers in Salem Village banded together in sixteen sixty
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six to petition Salem Town for their independence. Salem Town, however,
refused to comply. If you look at a map, Salem
Town is right on the coast. That's Richard Trask again,
it's a fairly large community. In sixteen nine two they
have about dred residents. It looks more to the commercial
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ventures to fishing. People there tend not to be Yeoman farmers,
but people who have occupations besides farming. The center of
Salem Village is about seven miles from the center of
Salem Town, and Salem Village was looked at kind of
as the bread basket for Salem Town. A year later,
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in sixteen sixty seven, these same farmers traveled south to
Boston to petition the General Court. They didn't get the
independence they wanted, but they did walk away with a
smaller victory. Anyone living outside of a four mile circle
would no longer be required to serve in the Salem
Town Watch. It was enough to keep a lot of
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people happy for a while. At least. Every movement has
two things, supporters and detractors, and the push for Salem
Village to become a community independent from the rule and
oversight of Salem Town was no exception. On the side
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in favor of breaking off. Was the second wealthiest family
in the area, the Putnam's. Their dynasty had begun decades
earlier when Old John Putnam arrived in sixteen forty one
and purchased over eight hundred acres of land, land that
now belonged to his three adult sons, Thomas, Nathaniel, and
John Jr. In fact, if you were to time travel
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to Salem Village in the sixteen sixties and take a
walking tour, most of the farmland you would see belong
to one of the Putnam's. The Putnams weren't happy with
a lot of things. They weren't happy with the Halfway Covenant,
that church policy that loosened the rules around membership and piety.
The Putnams believe that the church needed to become more strict,
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not less. They weren't happy with paying taxes to a
town that rarely benefited, and when living outside the town's
borders independence, to them, was a better way of life.
On the opposite side of the argument were the Porter brothers, Joseph,
Benjamin and Israel. While the Putnam's owned eight hundred acres
of land, the Porters had amassed over two thousand acres
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Between them. They were the top dog, the most wealthy
and influential of all the Salem Village farmers. But not
only that, they heartily supported the halfway Covenant, putting them
in direct conflict with the more pious Putnam family. The
Porters also had deep financial ties to Salem Town, and
an independent Salem Village would harm them financially. The land
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they owned actually straddled the line between the two communities,
so breaking them up would also break their property up.
Oh and they also owned three of Salem's four sawmills,
which were incredibly busy thanks to the town's constant growth.
Splitting off from Salem Town was not a plan that
the Porters supported. In six teen seventy, Salem Town voted
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to build a brand new meeting house, a church building
that served double duty as a community gathering place, and
they wanted to levy more taxes to raise the necessary funds.
The Putnam's over in Salem Village refused to hand over
any more wealth to the town. They returned to Boston
to petition the General Court for help, but were sent
back to Salem to sort the matter out with their
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Salem Town counterparts. It took them two years, two years
of haggling and fighting, of arguing and counter arguing, but
in sixteen seventy two they managed to win Salem Village
had permission to build their own meeting house and hire
a minister to lead them. They even had permission to
set themselves up as a township, but not completely independent.
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They would still have to defer to Salem Town for
all of their major legal matters. A good way to
think of it was that Salem Village became a recognized
district within Salem Town, but it wasn't good enough. Building
the meeting house was the easy part. The Putnam's had
the money and timber to help that happen, and there
were enough farmers around to help construct it. The bigger challenge, though,
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was finding the right minister for the job. He had
to be firmly against the halfway covenant, suitably pious and
well trained for the position, and what better place to
start than a friend of the family. James Bailey was
the brother in law of Thomas Putnam, junior, grandson of
Old John Putnam. When Bailey graduated from Harvard, the Putnams
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asked him and his wife to come to Salem Village
and serve as their minister, which sounded like the happy
ending to a long and tragic fairy tale, except it
wasn't that simple. Once Bailey arrived, he proved to be
much less religious and strict then they'd hoped. In fact,
they began to fear that although he was close to
the Putnam family, he wasn't actually close to God. They
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managed to avoid ordaining him for seven whole years, and
even refused to build him a house. He ended up
doing that himself, but life didn't get any easier when
he left Salem in sixteen seventy nine. He actually quit
the ministry entirely, becoming a doctor instead. The second minister
to arrive in Salem Village was George Burrows. He had
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graduated from Harvard the year after Bailey and represented an
attempt to bridge the gap between Salem Village and Salem Town.
You see, Burrows was actually related to the junior minister
of the Salem Town Congregation. Hiring him could be seen
as a sort of olive branch. He was a play
for unity, but when he arrived, he moved into the
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home of one of the Putnam's, which upset the porters.
Whatever hope they had of uniting their divided village evaporated
like missed over a new England field in the spring.
The porters also refused to contribute to the minister's salary,
leaving him without an income. Two years later, Burrows left
for Maine. Their third attempt at finding a minister to
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guide their new church was a man named Deodat Lawson.
He arrived in sixteen eighty four and really did his
best to try to unite the community. They've been trying
to get their new church up and running for twelve
years at that point, and everyone was feeling a bit desperate.
But two years after his arrival, something unexpected happened. Thomas Putnam, senior,
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son of the patriarch Old John Putnam, died in sixteen
eight six and his will needed to be executed. He
had an immense fortune and nine children from two separate marriages.
Everyone expected the fortune to be divided up equally among
the nine, but that didn't happen. That's because Thomas Sr's
second wife, and the mother of only one of his
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nine children, was also the daughter of Israel Porter, and
Israel Porter somehow managed to become appointed executor of the will.
When it was over, a large chunk of the Putnam
family wealth had headed back towards the Salem town side
of the community. Dao dat Law and tried to manage
the situation as any good minister might, but he failed
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to help smooth things over. Defeated, he quit his position
and left the church and the village defend for itself.
Fourteen years after beginning their search for a minister to
bring the community together under one roof Salem Village found
themselves returning to square one. They had tried and failed
not once, but three times, and I have to imagine
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it was beginning to feel rather hopeless. But there were
still some who refused to give up entirely. The Putnam's,
you see, had an ace up their sleeve. Samuel's uncle
made his fortune selling other human beings. John Paris was
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one of those enterprising english Men who took full advantage
of the global empire his country was building. Early on,
he got involved in the African slave trade, helping to
kidnap Africas and sell them to plantation owners in the
New World. One of those locations was the island of Barbados,
which England had begun to colonize in sixty seven. After
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earning a heavy profit from the sale of slaves, John
Paris bought a plantation there and settled in It. Turns
out John wasn't very good at running his own business.
Sometime in the sixteen fifties, his brother Thomas took over
running everything in an attempt to turn things around. In
sixteen sixty, John died, leaving everything to his brother, who
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packed up his entire family and moved them from London
to the plantation, and that included seven year old Samuel.
That's the world Samuel Paris grew up in, but it
was also a very Puritan lifestyle, leaning hard toward the
conservative side of the Christian spectrum. In fact, Samuel's older
brother was a Puritan minister back in England, and he
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had an uncle, John Oxenbridge, who served as a minister
of Boston's Puritan First Church. So when it came time
for Samuel to consider his edge accation and trained to
be a minister, there was only one place to send him. Harvard. Today,
Harvard is a bastion of progressive thinking, but it began
life as a conservative alternative to more liberal schools like
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Oxford or Cambridge. Sure, Thomas could have sent Samuel back
to England for training as a minister, but Harvard was
the safer choice for a Puritan. So in sixteen seventy
Samuel left home and headed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
where he joined the ranks of students at Harvard just
outside of Boston. Real life doesn't always play along with
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our carefully laid plans, though. Just three years after arriving
in Boston with his degree in sight at the end
of the tunnel, Samuel's father died and he was forced
to return to Barbados to take over the family business.
Two years later, the bottom fell out of the sugar market,
destroying most of his fortune. Months later, a hurricane devastated
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the island, and after that racial tensions began to boil over.
This was a time when nine out of every ten
people on the island were black, yet the whites held
all the power. People were upset, and rightly so. When
a smallpox outbreak arrived in sixteen eighty, Samuel took it
as a sign. He sold everything off, packed up, and
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headed back north. He arrived in Boston with at least
one of his slaves, a woman named Tituba, as well
as a small fortune that he hoped to use as
a seed for something greater. He bought one of the
wharfs in Boston's Harbor, a downtown shop and interest in
one of the smaller shipping companies. Being back in New
England was refreshing for Samuel. He was back in touch
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with his Harvard friends and reconnected to the Puritan movement. There.
He had begun to brush shoulders with religious leaders like
Increased Mather and his popular son Cotton. He even worked
for a time alongside his uncle at the Puritan church
in Boston, and it was there that he met a
physician named William Griggs who had some family north of
the city, and they we're looking for a minister. This
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family turned out to be none other than the Putnams,
and their timing was actually perfect. Samuel wasn't doing so
well compared to some of the other businesses around him.
He was earning good money, but nothing compared to the competition.
So in six he began conversations with the folks in
Salem Village about shifting careers once again and stepping into
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their vacant minister role. Here's Richard Trask. He had not
been an ordained minister. I guess the term today would
be had taken courses. He was a man who had
changed his occupation. He was a merchant. Didn't do that
while there had a belief in wanting to do good,
and so took the call in Salem Village, and the
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village took him on as the minister. It took them
nearly a year of negotiations, but in November of six nine,
Samuel Paris took over as the fourth minister of the
Salem Village Congregation. And not only did he get the job,
but unlike his three predecessors, he was even ordained by
the community there. This was huge, but things weren't all
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rose colored glasses and smooth sailing. You find that in
his coming to Salem Village, you had some problems, and
the problems were you always had within your community, the
covenant members usually like ten of the population, and then
the others, the outsiders who had to contribute to the
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meetinghouse for the church but didn't really have too much
of a say that way. You see, you can hire
a new minister, even one that meets that very specific
list of requirements that Salem Village had, but you can't
change the culture around the village. If Paris was meant
to be a seed for change, he'd been planted in toxic,
unfriendly soil, and nothing good could ever grow. From that.
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Don't get me wrong, there were flaws on both sides
of the argument. On one hand, the Putnam's finally had
an ultrapious minister who would fight against the halfway covenant.
Paris refused to give church membership to anyone who wasn't
willing to take on the highly conservative practices that he taught.
He refused them communion and baptism, which was like depriving
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starving men of a good meal. On the other side
of the argument were the Porters. They were some of
the people denied membership by Samuel Paris, and they weren't
happy about that. But one of the Porters was the
leader of the Salem Tax Committee, so he fought back.
If Paris was going to play hardball with essentials like communion,
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then they would simply refuse to pay him his salary
and regular allotment of firewood. Historian Maryland k Roach at
one point, He's really low on it and complaining about it.
He's riding in the winter and in the ink praises
in the innklow. So it was a necessity, which is
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why in early January Paris was freezing in his upstairs study.
It was his space away from the rest of the household,
where he retreated to prepare his sermons. But New England
winters have always been a brutal experience, and he probably
spent just as much time breathing into his cupped hands
as he did dipping his quill in the ink. Thankfully
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though he kept writing. In fact, his Minister's Notebook is
one of the most important documents we still have today,
and it provides a unique window into the events that
were about to unfold. During my time with historian Richard Trask,
I got to see that notebook for myself. This is
the Minister's record book. We had it restored back in
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the nineties seventies, so he is the original piece of
paunchment on a new binding. Yeah, and this is all
in the handwriting of Reverend Paris. The notebook helps us
see the new wants in the story. The tensions in
Salem were a lot more complex than just withheld firewood
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deliveries and religious disputes between two prominent families. There was
another layer to their worldview, one that was filled with
dark powers, horrifying dangers, and a system of rules that
was so loose and full of holes that anyone could
be accused of breaking them. Taking it all into account,
it wasn't just bad. It was a recipe or a disaster.
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Samuel Paris had guts, that much was clear. But while
he was preaching harsh messages to his church about wandering
in the wilderness, about suffering through hatred and persecution, about
the wicked and reprobate people who were working with the
devil to destroy the church, well, things were falling apart
back home. It wasn't just that Betty Abigail were suffering
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from something they couldn't treat. No, there was something else.
It reminded Paris of another story, one from just a
few years before. In six four children of a Boston
family by the name of Goodwin began to show unusual symptoms, fits, seizures,
and violent twisting, the sort that caused great alarm and
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were also very hard to forget. At some point in
their suffering, the four girls cried out that they were
being attacked by their neighbor, an elderly Irish immigrant named
Goody Glover. Goody, by the way, wasn't a first name.
The terms Goody and good Men were sort of a
seventeenth century version of Mr. And mrs. That After a
long trial, Goody Glover was convicted of witchcraft and hanged
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in Boston. There were others too, and they had all
been written about and spread to the far reaches of
the colony there. We can blame Cotton Mother for that,
because he had a passion for collect these sorts of tales,
in publishing them as a sort of warning to the pious.
Here's Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University.
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Kind Mother was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society,
fancied himself a scientist of international connection. So it's not
education or intellect that explains where people came down and
and how this is a world in which science and
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religion and ghost stories all are are very much of
a piece. They had a particular cosmology, parts of which
we believe we have proved wrong. We also have a
cosmology right that there are certainly things in our conceptions
of science are totalizing conceptions of science that people in
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two hundred or three hundred years will wonder, how on
earth did they believe that these stories were on Samuel
Paris's mind when he heard a knock at the door
one day in early February. It was a local woman
named Sarah Good. She and her little girl had come
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to beg for assistance. Her husband had no income, and
her relatives had turned her away. She was known to
be rude and unpleasant, and she creeped people out. She
would arrive on their doorstep and beg for food, and
when people turned her away, she would mutter under her
breath and say things about their property that sounded an
awful lot like a curse to their superstitious Puritan ears.
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On this occasion, Paris gave the little girl something to
eat and then turned the pair of them away. As
she left, Sarah Good did more of her mysterious muttering
in Paris didn't like the sound of it. Events like these,
along with all the other stories, served to inform how
the Paris family would treat Abigail and Betty. Sure He
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tried to take the more logical path. First, his old
physician friend, William Griggs, paid them a visit in January
of six two and examine the girls. But despite being
a doctor, he could only agree with Samuel's puzzlement. There
was no bodily illness that could cause the symptoms that
they were witnessing. Instead, Griggs suggested that the girls were
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under an evil hand, a pronouncement that must have chilled
Paris to the bone. Not only that, but it also
made him feel well out of his depths. Yes he
had read about the Goodwin children and others like them.
Yes he was a pious man of faith, but this
was out of his realm of personal experience, and he
was going to need advice. On February six, Samuel and
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his wife Elizabeth left home to attend a nearby gathering
of local ministers and church leaders called a Thursday lecture.
His hope was that there might be someone there who
could consult with him, or even be invited over to
his home to see for themselves what the symptoms looked like.
While he was there, he was able to chat with
both of the Salem town ministers, as well as Reverend
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John Hale from Beverly and former Salem village minister Dao
Dat Lawson. Hale and Lawson both agreed to visit soon
while the paris Is were gone, though they had left
their children in the care of a local woman named
Mary Sibley. She was a pregnant mother of five children
and one of the faithful members of Samuel's congregation. She
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stayed in the house that day to care for Betty
and Abigail, along with the Paris slaves Tituba and John Indian.
What she witnessed that day concerned her enough to drive
her into action. Mary told Tituba and John that she
remembered an old remedy from her time growing up in England.
She gave the instructions to John and he got to
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work preparing this miracle cure. First, John collected urine from
the girls and then mixed it with hour to form
a dough. Then it was shaped into biscuits and baked
in the orange embers of the fireplace. Next, and this
is a bit confusing, and most historians don't have a
definitive explanation why the biscuits were then fed to the
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family dog. Maybe it was a way of passing the
curse over from the girls to the dog, or perhaps
it somehow marked the dog as a better target for
the evil forces attacking the girls. We don't know. All
we know is that Mary Sibley had made the biscuits
in an effort to help, but that help backfired. Both
of the girls experienced an uptick in their symptoms that day.
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It was so dramatic of an increase that Samuel and
Elizabeth noticed it immediately when they returned home on Friday,
as did the guests who came with them. The convulsions
had visibly increased, and both of the girls were now
claiming to see the shape of a stranger in the house,
a stranger who was slapping and pinching them. When Paris
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asked the girl as who it was, both of them
named Tichuba as their attacker. Naturally, Samuel pulled the woman
aside and asked her about it. He'd known Tichuba for years,
long before his time in England, and he thought he
could trust her. His faith was deeper, though, causing him
to believe the girl's claim. Tichuba denied it, of course,
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but she also revealed what had happened while they were gone,
and what Mary Sibley had done. Samuel exploded in rage.
Someone had dared to come into his home, the home
of Salem Village's ordained servants of God, and use magic.
They had called upon the powers of the Devil himself
to save the girls, thereby making the situation worse, not better.
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The increase in the symptoms of both girls was irrefutable
proof of just how bad an idea that had been.
What he did in response after his guests had left
for the evening would only come to light later on.
As the ministers and town of issials went back to
their homes and families, they carried a dark rumor with them.
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There was a witch in Salem and no one was safe.
It's easy to lose perspective on history. The events of
Salem took place over three centuries ago. That's three hundred
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years of looking back, three years of storytelling, and three
hundred years of preconceived notions about what we think happened.
From where we stand today, we've forgotten more about Salem
than we ever remembered. Time has taken it from us.
That's why this series exists. Over the centuries, the Salem
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witch trials have become obscured by time and distance. It's
mysterious and misunderstood by most people. I want to clean
that foggy window, to leave it clear and understandable, unobscured,
So keep that in mind as we dive deeper. These
seemingly unimportant details, the religious divisions, the competing families, and
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the small town politics all of them are essential pieces
in a larger puzzle that my team and I want
to assemble for you over the course of this season.
Along the way, we'll hear from historians and experts in
the study of the Sale and witch trials. Their insight
will prove to be invaluable tools for our journey. That
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Thursday experiment by Mary Sibley and the aftermath it took
place the following day were flashpoints. All of the background
information and context came together like that yurine and flower biscuit,
and after it baked in the heat of Samuel Paris's
rage and his neighbor's fear, it got to work. On
February six, two, the day after Samuel Paris and his
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friends learned of the witch cake experiment, young Elizabeth Hubbard
was walking through the snow toward her home. She was
on an errand for her uncle, William Griggs, who also
happened to be the physician Samuel Paris had been consulting
with for weeks. It had been Griggs that suggested that
Betty and Abigail weren't suffering from a physical illness, but
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a spiritual one. Elizabeth trudged along the path that cut
through the snow and tugged her coat tighter to her body.
The winds had picked up and it was throwing daggers
of bitter cold. But as she walked, she had the
overwhelming feeling that something was following her. She glanced back
a few times, but didn't see anything until she was
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very close to her home. That's when she caught a
glimpse of what she believed to be a wolf. It
had been following her the entire time, stalking her through
the wind and snow, but there was something wrong about
that wolf, something different. Elizabeth Bubbard believed it was a familiar,
an animal under the control of a witch acting as
(34:05):
a servant and helper. And while I have no idea
how she made this next leap in logic, she told
her uncle that the wolf served one which, in particular
Sarah Good, the grumpy beggar who went door to door
for handouts. Later that day, she claimed that another woman,
Sarah Osburne, was also tormenting her. Elsewhere in Salem Village,
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another family was encountering their own problems. Thomas Putnam Jr.
Was a veteran of the wars on the main Frontier,
so he had seen a lot of evil in his life.
He was also most likely one of the friends who
witnessed Betty and Abigail's new symptoms on Friday, and in
the middle of all of that, at the same time
Elizabeth Hubbard was seeing demonic wolves. Thomas's twelve year old
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daughter Annie began to convulse and writhe on the floor.
A storm blasted Salem that Sunday, pinning most people down
inside their homes. When it lifted on Monday morning, though,
Thomas and three other local men made their journey to
Salem Town, where they requested to speak with the local
magistrates there, John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin. They told the
(35:14):
magistrates about the events of the past two months of
Tituba and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. They told them
about the fear that was creeping into the village, and
that was enough for Corwin and Hawthorne. They called two
constables to assist them and drafted the arrest warrants for
the accused witches before setting an examination time for the
(35:36):
very next day. They were hoping to stop the evil
before it spread, to contain it and remove it from
the village, but they started something else entirely, something that
would leave a mark on history that we can still
see today. The Salem witch trials had begun. That's it
(36:00):
for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this
short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store
for next week. Next time on Unobscured, Have you made
no contract with the devil? John Hawthorne began, No, she replied, then,
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pointing toward the four girls who had begun the entire ordeal,
Hawthorne continued, why do you hurt these children? I do
not hurt them, she replied. In response, Hawthorne asked the
girls to look at Sarah Good and say whether or
not she was the person who had been tormenting them.
They replied that Good was one of the people responsible. Yes.
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A moment later, all four of them began to convulse
and cry out in pain. For the first time, all
of the torment and despair that had been kept behind
the closed doors of the Paris home was on full display,
laid bare to the eyes of everyone in the galleries.
If their accusations of witchcraft had begun as a private matter,
(37:03):
left to the realms of whispers and rumor, this was
the moment it transformed a cat as black and evil
as it was was finally out of the bag. Unobscured
(38:09):
was created and written by me Aaron Mankey and produced
by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams in partnership with How
Stuff Works, with research by Carl Nellis and original music
by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians further
reading material, resource archive and links to our other shows
at History unobscured dot com. Until next time, thanks for listening.
None of the remedies had worked. They tried parsnip seeds
ground up in red wine, and spirits of castor mixed
with oil of amber. They tried an elixir by taking
hard shore and oil from the antlers of a deer
and mixing it with soot. They'd even tried collecting dew
drops and let them evaporate so they could use the
minuscule amount of dust to make a tonic, but none
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of it had worked. That was frustrating too, because Samuel's niece,
Abigail wasn't getting any better. It had begun days earlier
when he found the eleven year old girl crouched beneath
a chair, her hands pressed against the signs of her head.
She was twisting and writhing and complaining loudly about some
sort of torment. When things got really bad, Abigail would
(00:57):
collapse onto the floor in a limp heap, as if
all of her bones had been magically removed from her body.
She would seize up and contort and panic, and in
a house as small and packed as theirs, that was
a frightening sight. Samuel and his wife Elizabeth lived in
that small house with three of their own children, plus
abigail close quarters meant that everyone was suffering vicariously alongside
(01:22):
the young girl, But it also meant that illness was
likely to spread unless they could treat it fast. Before
they could manage to do that, however, their worst fears
came true. In early January of sixteen ninety two. Screams
from another part of the house pulled Samuel out of
his frigid upstairs study. He bolted down to see who
(01:42):
was in trouble and what they might need, only to
find his nine year old daughter, Betty, suffering through her
own version of poor Abigail's original symptoms. Elizabeth was crouched
over the girl, hand on her back to comfort her,
but when she locked eyes with her husband, there was
nothing but Hannock in them. The Reverend Samuel Paris felt
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a chill rippled down his spine. He and his wife
shared a common fear, an assumption about what was really
going on in their house. There was no doubt either.
Samuel was a deeply religious man who served as the
minister of the local Puritan settlement. He understood how things
worked and had heard similar stories before. All of it
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pointed to an obvious conclusion, but just because it was
plain to see didn't make it any less frightening. Something
evil had arrived in Salem and it was just getting started.
This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankie. This might come as
(03:22):
a bit of a surprise, but there's nothing inherently special
about Salem, Massachusetts. Sure, it's old, having been incorporated in
sixty nine, which, if you do the math, is nearly
four years ago, but it's not even the oldest city
in the state. That honor goes to Plymouth, the site
of the Mayflower landing in Si. Salem began life as
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a fishing town founded by a guy named Roger Conant,
but after a couple of years of going at it alone,
the settlement received an infusion of new colonists, one of
whom was a man named John Endicott, who had been
sent to take over leadership of the colony. Conan stepped
as so peacefully that they named the new settlement Salem,
a word that comes from the Hebrew term shalom, which
(04:06):
means peace. Soon the area became home to a growing
population of English Puritans who were tired of living under
the rule of a king who didn't support them, and
an Anglican Church that all out attacked them. The New
World offered them more freedom and less conflict. Here's historian
Richard Trask, A number of them eventually decided to go
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to the New World. They latched onto an economic device
of the mass Bay Colony. Once they got here, they
for a good generation or two were pretty much independent
to do what they wanted. They looked upon themselves, as
John Winthrop would later say, establishing a new kingdom upon
the hill. The first Puritans in Old England and New
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England were very staunch believers. Over the years to come,
wave after wave of Puritan settlers washed into the new colony.
They built new lives there in a strange land, but
did so upon the familiar foundations of their religious beliefs
and a common vision for a brighter future. Over the
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coming decades, though this vision of a city on a
hill would begin to waver a bit. Some people had
called for the loosening of rules around church membership, a
concept that became official in sixteen fifty two under an
agreement known as the Halfway Covenant. Mary Beth Norton is
a professor of American history at Cornell University. The Halfway
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Covenant allowed people who had been baptized as children but
had not yet experienced saving faith to in effect be
members of the church, to be under the church at supervision,
and to have communion, and to have their babies baptized.
But as the population of Salem grew, it also spread westward,
creating pockets of smaller communities far from Sale Harbor and
(06:00):
original settlements. They called these the Salem village to avoid
confusion with the older, more wealthy Salem Town. During the
early years, though, some of these smaller communities managed to
break off and become recognized independent towns of their own,
places like marble Head and Manchester, Wenham and Beverly. It
(06:21):
was as if Salem Town was having babies and they
were moving out and growing up. One other thing. When
these towns became independent, they also earned the right to
collect their own local taxes, as well as build and
staff their own local churches. They became their own authority
in a sense, rather than depending on Salem Town for everything,
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which was a healthy development. The fields and woods farther inland,
about a dozen miles west of Salem Town, were parceled
out to a handful of families who were ready to
settle down and farm there. Families with names like Putnam
and Porter, Hutchinson and ing U Saul. They might sound
unfamiliar to you now, but give it some time. You're
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going to hear a lot about them soon enough. But
as these families moved west to set up their farmsteads,
they encountered a few problems. Namely, they became disconnected socially
from the thriving community in Salem Town. They didn't feel
like they were part of the popular crowd anymore, but
more like outsiders instead. To make matters worse, though, they
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were still required to contribute to the responsibilities of their
former home, having to serve in Salem Town's militia, but
also travel the twelve miles each week to attend church
and participate in the night Watch. As you can imagine,
that was more than a little frustrating. So it probably
won't shock you to learn that a few of the
prominent farmers in Salem Village banded together in sixteen sixty
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six to petition Salem Town for their independence. Salem Town, however,
refused to comply. If you look at a map, Salem
Town is right on the coast. That's Richard Trask again,
it's a fairly large community. In sixteen nine two they
have about dred residents. It looks more to the commercial
(08:11):
ventures to fishing. People there tend not to be Yeoman farmers,
but people who have occupations besides farming. The center of
Salem Village is about seven miles from the center of
Salem Town, and Salem Village was looked at kind of
as the bread basket for Salem Town. A year later,
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in sixteen sixty seven, these same farmers traveled south to
Boston to petition the General Court. They didn't get the
independence they wanted, but they did walk away with a
smaller victory. Anyone living outside of a four mile circle
would no longer be required to serve in the Salem
Town Watch. It was enough to keep a lot of
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people happy for a while. At least. Every movement has
two things, supporters and detractors, and the push for Salem
Village to become a community independent from the rule and
oversight of Salem Town was no exception. On the side
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in favor of breaking off. Was the second wealthiest family
in the area, the Putnam's. Their dynasty had begun decades
earlier when Old John Putnam arrived in sixteen forty one
and purchased over eight hundred acres of land, land that
now belonged to his three adult sons, Thomas, Nathaniel, and
John Jr. In fact, if you were to time travel
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to Salem Village in the sixteen sixties and take a
walking tour, most of the farmland you would see belong
to one of the Putnam's. The Putnams weren't happy with
a lot of things. They weren't happy with the Halfway Covenant,
that church policy that loosened the rules around membership and piety.
The Putnams believe that the church needed to become more strict,
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not less. They weren't happy with paying taxes to a
town that rarely benefited, and when living outside the town's
borders independence, to them, was a better way of life.
On the opposite side of the argument were the Porter brothers, Joseph,
Benjamin and Israel. While the Putnam's owned eight hundred acres
of land, the Porters had amassed over two thousand acres
(10:18):
Between them. They were the top dog, the most wealthy
and influential of all the Salem Village farmers. But not
only that, they heartily supported the halfway Covenant, putting them
in direct conflict with the more pious Putnam family. The
Porters also had deep financial ties to Salem Town, and
an independent Salem Village would harm them financially. The land
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they owned actually straddled the line between the two communities,
so breaking them up would also break their property up.
Oh and they also owned three of Salem's four sawmills,
which were incredibly busy thanks to the town's constant growth.
Splitting off from Salem Town was not a plan that
the Porters supported. In six teen seventy, Salem Town voted
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to build a brand new meeting house, a church building
that served double duty as a community gathering place, and
they wanted to levy more taxes to raise the necessary funds.
The Putnam's over in Salem Village refused to hand over
any more wealth to the town. They returned to Boston
to petition the General Court for help, but were sent
back to Salem to sort the matter out with their
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Salem Town counterparts. It took them two years, two years
of haggling and fighting, of arguing and counter arguing, but
in sixteen seventy two they managed to win Salem Village
had permission to build their own meeting house and hire
a minister to lead them. They even had permission to
set themselves up as a township, but not completely independent.
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They would still have to defer to Salem Town for
all of their major legal matters. A good way to
think of it was that Salem Village became a recognized
district within Salem Town, but it wasn't good enough. Building
the meeting house was the easy part. The Putnam's had
the money and timber to help that happen, and there
were enough farmers around to help construct it. The bigger challenge, though,
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was finding the right minister for the job. He had
to be firmly against the halfway covenant, suitably pious and
well trained for the position, and what better place to
start than a friend of the family. James Bailey was
the brother in law of Thomas Putnam, junior, grandson of
Old John Putnam. When Bailey graduated from Harvard, the Putnams
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asked him and his wife to come to Salem Village
and serve as their minister, which sounded like the happy
ending to a long and tragic fairy tale, except it
wasn't that simple. Once Bailey arrived, he proved to be
much less religious and strict then they'd hoped. In fact,
they began to fear that although he was close to
the Putnam family, he wasn't actually close to God. They
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managed to avoid ordaining him for seven whole years, and
even refused to build him a house. He ended up
doing that himself, but life didn't get any easier when
he left Salem in sixteen seventy nine. He actually quit
the ministry entirely, becoming a doctor instead. The second minister
to arrive in Salem Village was George Burrows. He had
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graduated from Harvard the year after Bailey and represented an
attempt to bridge the gap between Salem Village and Salem Town.
You see, Burrows was actually related to the junior minister
of the Salem Town Congregation. Hiring him could be seen
as a sort of olive branch. He was a play
for unity, but when he arrived, he moved into the
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home of one of the Putnam's, which upset the porters.
Whatever hope they had of uniting their divided village evaporated
like missed over a new England field in the spring.
The porters also refused to contribute to the minister's salary,
leaving him without an income. Two years later, Burrows left
for Maine. Their third attempt at finding a minister to
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guide their new church was a man named Deodat Lawson.
He arrived in sixteen eighty four and really did his
best to try to unite the community. They've been trying
to get their new church up and running for twelve
years at that point, and everyone was feeling a bit desperate.
But two years after his arrival, something unexpected happened. Thomas Putnam, senior,
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son of the patriarch Old John Putnam, died in sixteen
eight six and his will needed to be executed. He
had an immense fortune and nine children from two separate marriages.
Everyone expected the fortune to be divided up equally among
the nine, but that didn't happen. That's because Thomas Sr's
second wife, and the mother of only one of his
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nine children, was also the daughter of Israel Porter, and
Israel Porter somehow managed to become appointed executor of the will.
When it was over, a large chunk of the Putnam
family wealth had headed back towards the Salem town side
of the community. Dao dat Law and tried to manage
the situation as any good minister might, but he failed
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to help smooth things over. Defeated, he quit his position
and left the church and the village defend for itself.
Fourteen years after beginning their search for a minister to
bring the community together under one roof Salem Village found
themselves returning to square one. They had tried and failed
not once, but three times, and I have to imagine
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it was beginning to feel rather hopeless. But there were
still some who refused to give up entirely. The Putnam's,
you see, had an ace up their sleeve. Samuel's uncle
made his fortune selling other human beings. John Paris was
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one of those enterprising english Men who took full advantage
of the global empire his country was building. Early on,
he got involved in the African slave trade, helping to
kidnap Africas and sell them to plantation owners in the
New World. One of those locations was the island of Barbados,
which England had begun to colonize in sixty seven. After
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earning a heavy profit from the sale of slaves, John
Paris bought a plantation there and settled in It. Turns
out John wasn't very good at running his own business.
Sometime in the sixteen fifties, his brother Thomas took over
running everything in an attempt to turn things around. In
sixteen sixty, John died, leaving everything to his brother, who
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packed up his entire family and moved them from London
to the plantation, and that included seven year old Samuel.
That's the world Samuel Paris grew up in, but it
was also a very Puritan lifestyle, leaning hard toward the
conservative side of the Christian spectrum. In fact, Samuel's older
brother was a Puritan minister back in England, and he
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had an uncle, John Oxenbridge, who served as a minister
of Boston's Puritan First Church. So when it came time
for Samuel to consider his edge accation and trained to
be a minister, there was only one place to send him. Harvard. Today,
Harvard is a bastion of progressive thinking, but it began
life as a conservative alternative to more liberal schools like
(17:13):
Oxford or Cambridge. Sure, Thomas could have sent Samuel back
to England for training as a minister, but Harvard was
the safer choice for a Puritan. So in sixteen seventy
Samuel left home and headed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
where he joined the ranks of students at Harvard just
outside of Boston. Real life doesn't always play along with
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our carefully laid plans, though. Just three years after arriving
in Boston with his degree in sight at the end
of the tunnel, Samuel's father died and he was forced
to return to Barbados to take over the family business.
Two years later, the bottom fell out of the sugar market,
destroying most of his fortune. Months later, a hurricane devastated
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the island, and after that racial tensions began to boil over.
This was a time when nine out of every ten
people on the island were black, yet the whites held
all the power. People were upset, and rightly so. When
a smallpox outbreak arrived in sixteen eighty, Samuel took it
as a sign. He sold everything off, packed up, and
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headed back north. He arrived in Boston with at least
one of his slaves, a woman named Tituba, as well
as a small fortune that he hoped to use as
a seed for something greater. He bought one of the
wharfs in Boston's Harbor, a downtown shop and interest in
one of the smaller shipping companies. Being back in New
England was refreshing for Samuel. He was back in touch
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with his Harvard friends and reconnected to the Puritan movement. There.
He had begun to brush shoulders with religious leaders like
Increased Mather and his popular son Cotton. He even worked
for a time alongside his uncle at the Puritan church
in Boston, and it was there that he met a
physician named William Griggs who had some family north of
the city, and they we're looking for a minister. This
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family turned out to be none other than the Putnams,
and their timing was actually perfect. Samuel wasn't doing so
well compared to some of the other businesses around him.
He was earning good money, but nothing compared to the competition.
So in six he began conversations with the folks in
Salem Village about shifting careers once again and stepping into
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their vacant minister role. Here's Richard Trask. He had not
been an ordained minister. I guess the term today would
be had taken courses. He was a man who had
changed his occupation. He was a merchant. Didn't do that
while there had a belief in wanting to do good,
and so took the call in Salem Village, and the
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village took him on as the minister. It took them
nearly a year of negotiations, but in November of six nine,
Samuel Paris took over as the fourth minister of the
Salem Village Congregation. And not only did he get the job,
but unlike his three predecessors, he was even ordained by
the community there. This was huge, but things weren't all
(20:12):
rose colored glasses and smooth sailing. You find that in
his coming to Salem Village, you had some problems, and
the problems were you always had within your community, the
covenant members usually like ten of the population, and then
the others, the outsiders who had to contribute to the
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meetinghouse for the church but didn't really have too much
of a say that way. You see, you can hire
a new minister, even one that meets that very specific
list of requirements that Salem Village had, but you can't
change the culture around the village. If Paris was meant
to be a seed for change, he'd been planted in toxic,
unfriendly soil, and nothing good could ever grow. From that.
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Don't get me wrong, there were flaws on both sides
of the argument. On one hand, the Putnam's finally had
an ultrapious minister who would fight against the halfway covenant.
Paris refused to give church membership to anyone who wasn't
willing to take on the highly conservative practices that he taught.
He refused them communion and baptism, which was like depriving
(21:19):
starving men of a good meal. On the other side
of the argument were the Porters. They were some of
the people denied membership by Samuel Paris, and they weren't
happy about that. But one of the Porters was the
leader of the Salem Tax Committee, so he fought back.
If Paris was going to play hardball with essentials like communion,
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then they would simply refuse to pay him his salary
and regular allotment of firewood. Historian Maryland k Roach at
one point, He's really low on it and complaining about it.
He's riding in the winter and in the ink praises
in the innklow. So it was a necessity, which is
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why in early January Paris was freezing in his upstairs study.
It was his space away from the rest of the household,
where he retreated to prepare his sermons. But New England
winters have always been a brutal experience, and he probably
spent just as much time breathing into his cupped hands
as he did dipping his quill in the ink. Thankfully
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though he kept writing. In fact, his Minister's Notebook is
one of the most important documents we still have today,
and it provides a unique window into the events that
were about to unfold. During my time with historian Richard Trask,
I got to see that notebook for myself. This is
the Minister's record book. We had it restored back in
(22:43):
the nineties seventies, so he is the original piece of
paunchment on a new binding. Yeah, and this is all
in the handwriting of Reverend Paris. The notebook helps us
see the new wants in the story. The tensions in
Salem were a lot more complex than just withheld firewood
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deliveries and religious disputes between two prominent families. There was
another layer to their worldview, one that was filled with
dark powers, horrifying dangers, and a system of rules that
was so loose and full of holes that anyone could
be accused of breaking them. Taking it all into account,
it wasn't just bad. It was a recipe or a disaster.
(23:38):
Samuel Paris had guts, that much was clear. But while
he was preaching harsh messages to his church about wandering
in the wilderness, about suffering through hatred and persecution, about
the wicked and reprobate people who were working with the
devil to destroy the church, well, things were falling apart
back home. It wasn't just that Betty Abigail were suffering
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from something they couldn't treat. No, there was something else.
It reminded Paris of another story, one from just a
few years before. In six four children of a Boston
family by the name of Goodwin began to show unusual symptoms, fits, seizures,
and violent twisting, the sort that caused great alarm and
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were also very hard to forget. At some point in
their suffering, the four girls cried out that they were
being attacked by their neighbor, an elderly Irish immigrant named
Goody Glover. Goody, by the way, wasn't a first name.
The terms Goody and good Men were sort of a
seventeenth century version of Mr. And mrs. That After a
long trial, Goody Glover was convicted of witchcraft and hanged
(24:48):
in Boston. There were others too, and they had all
been written about and spread to the far reaches of
the colony there. We can blame Cotton Mother for that,
because he had a passion for collect these sorts of tales,
in publishing them as a sort of warning to the pious.
Here's Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University.
(25:10):
Kind Mother was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society,
fancied himself a scientist of international connection. So it's not
education or intellect that explains where people came down and
and how this is a world in which science and
(25:32):
religion and ghost stories all are are very much of
a piece. They had a particular cosmology, parts of which
we believe we have proved wrong. We also have a
cosmology right that there are certainly things in our conceptions
of science are totalizing conceptions of science that people in
(25:56):
two hundred or three hundred years will wonder, how on
earth did they believe that these stories were on Samuel
Paris's mind when he heard a knock at the door
one day in early February. It was a local woman
named Sarah Good. She and her little girl had come
(26:16):
to beg for assistance. Her husband had no income, and
her relatives had turned her away. She was known to
be rude and unpleasant, and she creeped people out. She
would arrive on their doorstep and beg for food, and
when people turned her away, she would mutter under her
breath and say things about their property that sounded an
awful lot like a curse to their superstitious Puritan ears.
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On this occasion, Paris gave the little girl something to
eat and then turned the pair of them away. As
she left, Sarah Good did more of her mysterious muttering
in Paris didn't like the sound of it. Events like these,
along with all the other stories, served to inform how
the Paris family would treat Abigail and Betty. Sure He
(27:01):
tried to take the more logical path. First, his old
physician friend, William Griggs, paid them a visit in January
of six two and examine the girls. But despite being
a doctor, he could only agree with Samuel's puzzlement. There
was no bodily illness that could cause the symptoms that
they were witnessing. Instead, Griggs suggested that the girls were
(27:21):
under an evil hand, a pronouncement that must have chilled
Paris to the bone. Not only that, but it also
made him feel well out of his depths. Yes he
had read about the Goodwin children and others like them.
Yes he was a pious man of faith, but this
was out of his realm of personal experience, and he
was going to need advice. On February six, Samuel and
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his wife Elizabeth left home to attend a nearby gathering
of local ministers and church leaders called a Thursday lecture.
His hope was that there might be someone there who
could consult with him, or even be invited over to
his home to see for themselves what the symptoms looked like.
While he was there, he was able to chat with
both of the Salem town ministers, as well as Reverend
(28:10):
John Hale from Beverly and former Salem village minister Dao
Dat Lawson. Hale and Lawson both agreed to visit soon
while the paris Is were gone, though they had left
their children in the care of a local woman named
Mary Sibley. She was a pregnant mother of five children
and one of the faithful members of Samuel's congregation. She
(28:32):
stayed in the house that day to care for Betty
and Abigail, along with the Paris slaves Tituba and John Indian.
What she witnessed that day concerned her enough to drive
her into action. Mary told Tituba and John that she
remembered an old remedy from her time growing up in England.
She gave the instructions to John and he got to
(28:52):
work preparing this miracle cure. First, John collected urine from
the girls and then mixed it with hour to form
a dough. Then it was shaped into biscuits and baked
in the orange embers of the fireplace. Next, and this
is a bit confusing, and most historians don't have a
definitive explanation why the biscuits were then fed to the
(29:14):
family dog. Maybe it was a way of passing the
curse over from the girls to the dog, or perhaps
it somehow marked the dog as a better target for
the evil forces attacking the girls. We don't know. All
we know is that Mary Sibley had made the biscuits
in an effort to help, but that help backfired. Both
of the girls experienced an uptick in their symptoms that day.
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It was so dramatic of an increase that Samuel and
Elizabeth noticed it immediately when they returned home on Friday,
as did the guests who came with them. The convulsions
had visibly increased, and both of the girls were now
claiming to see the shape of a stranger in the house,
a stranger who was slapping and pinching them. When Paris
(29:59):
asked the girl as who it was, both of them
named Tichuba as their attacker. Naturally, Samuel pulled the woman
aside and asked her about it. He'd known Tichuba for years,
long before his time in England, and he thought he
could trust her. His faith was deeper, though, causing him
to believe the girl's claim. Tichuba denied it, of course,
(30:19):
but she also revealed what had happened while they were gone,
and what Mary Sibley had done. Samuel exploded in rage.
Someone had dared to come into his home, the home
of Salem Village's ordained servants of God, and use magic.
They had called upon the powers of the Devil himself
to save the girls, thereby making the situation worse, not better.
(30:44):
The increase in the symptoms of both girls was irrefutable
proof of just how bad an idea that had been.
What he did in response after his guests had left
for the evening would only come to light later on.
As the ministers and town of issials went back to
their homes and families, they carried a dark rumor with them.
(31:06):
There was a witch in Salem and no one was safe.
It's easy to lose perspective on history. The events of
Salem took place over three centuries ago. That's three hundred
(31:27):
years of looking back, three years of storytelling, and three
hundred years of preconceived notions about what we think happened.
From where we stand today, we've forgotten more about Salem
than we ever remembered. Time has taken it from us.
That's why this series exists. Over the centuries, the Salem
(31:50):
witch trials have become obscured by time and distance. It's
mysterious and misunderstood by most people. I want to clean
that foggy window, to leave it clear and understandable, unobscured,
So keep that in mind as we dive deeper. These
seemingly unimportant details, the religious divisions, the competing families, and
(32:13):
the small town politics all of them are essential pieces
in a larger puzzle that my team and I want
to assemble for you over the course of this season.
Along the way, we'll hear from historians and experts in
the study of the Sale and witch trials. Their insight
will prove to be invaluable tools for our journey. That
(32:36):
Thursday experiment by Mary Sibley and the aftermath it took
place the following day were flashpoints. All of the background
information and context came together like that yurine and flower biscuit,
and after it baked in the heat of Samuel Paris's
rage and his neighbor's fear, it got to work. On
February six, two, the day after Samuel Paris and his
(33:01):
friends learned of the witch cake experiment, young Elizabeth Hubbard
was walking through the snow toward her home. She was
on an errand for her uncle, William Griggs, who also
happened to be the physician Samuel Paris had been consulting
with for weeks. It had been Griggs that suggested that
Betty and Abigail weren't suffering from a physical illness, but
(33:22):
a spiritual one. Elizabeth trudged along the path that cut
through the snow and tugged her coat tighter to her body.
The winds had picked up and it was throwing daggers
of bitter cold. But as she walked, she had the
overwhelming feeling that something was following her. She glanced back
a few times, but didn't see anything until she was
(33:43):
very close to her home. That's when she caught a
glimpse of what she believed to be a wolf. It
had been following her the entire time, stalking her through
the wind and snow, but there was something wrong about
that wolf, something different. Elizabeth Bubbard believed it was a familiar,
an animal under the control of a witch acting as
(34:05):
a servant and helper. And while I have no idea
how she made this next leap in logic, she told
her uncle that the wolf served one which, in particular
Sarah Good, the grumpy beggar who went door to door
for handouts. Later that day, she claimed that another woman,
Sarah Osburne, was also tormenting her. Elsewhere in Salem Village,
(34:29):
another family was encountering their own problems. Thomas Putnam Jr.
Was a veteran of the wars on the main Frontier,
so he had seen a lot of evil in his life.
He was also most likely one of the friends who
witnessed Betty and Abigail's new symptoms on Friday, and in
the middle of all of that, at the same time
Elizabeth Hubbard was seeing demonic wolves. Thomas's twelve year old
(34:51):
daughter Annie began to convulse and writhe on the floor.
A storm blasted Salem that Sunday, pinning most people down
inside their homes. When it lifted on Monday morning, though,
Thomas and three other local men made their journey to
Salem Town, where they requested to speak with the local
magistrates there, John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin. They told the
(35:14):
magistrates about the events of the past two months of
Tituba and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. They told them
about the fear that was creeping into the village, and
that was enough for Corwin and Hawthorne. They called two
constables to assist them and drafted the arrest warrants for
the accused witches before setting an examination time for the
(35:36):
very next day. They were hoping to stop the evil
before it spread, to contain it and remove it from
the village, but they started something else entirely, something that
would leave a mark on history that we can still
see today. The Salem witch trials had begun. That's it
(36:00):
for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this
short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store
for next week. Next time on Unobscured, Have you made
no contract with the devil? John Hawthorne began, No, she replied, then,
(36:20):
pointing toward the four girls who had begun the entire ordeal,
Hawthorne continued, why do you hurt these children? I do
not hurt them, she replied. In response, Hawthorne asked the
girls to look at Sarah Good and say whether or
not she was the person who had been tormenting them.
They replied that Good was one of the people responsible. Yes.
(36:43):
A moment later, all four of them began to convulse
and cry out in pain. For the first time, all
of the torment and despair that had been kept behind
the closed doors of the Paris home was on full display,
laid bare to the eyes of everyone in the galleries.
If their accusations of witchcraft had begun as a private matter,
(37:03):
left to the realms of whispers and rumor, this was
the moment it transformed a cat as black and evil
as it was was finally out of the bag. Unobscured
(38:09):
was created and written by me Aaron Mankey and produced
by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams in partnership with How
Stuff Works, with research by Carl Nellis and original music
by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians further
reading material, resource archive and links to our other shows
at History unobscured dot com. Until next time, thanks for listening.
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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