December 19, 2018 • 52 mins
How does a community recover from a tragedy that claims over two dozen lives? How do they even begin to pick up the pieces and make things right again? And when it's all said and done, what can the rest of the world learn from the 300-year old mistakes of colonial New England village? The answers aren't as easy as they might appear.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
It wasn't over yet. As powerful as the reprieve from
Governor Phipps had been, it didn't close the books on
the trials immediately. I wish it had. I wish all
the fear and uncertainty and frustration just sort of evaporated
into the wind like a puff of smoke. But it didn't.
(00:30):
In the days between Stowton's signing of her death warrant
on January and the February one message from the Governor
that canceled it, Elizabeth Proctor gave birth to the baby
she had carried throughout the ordeal. It was her pregnancy
that had kept her alive the day her husband John
had been led to the gallows and hanged, and now
that safety net was gone, it can't have been an
(00:55):
easy delivery. Months earlier and Procter, wife of Thomas and
one of the afflicted who put so many others in jail,
had delivered her own baby. She would have prepared groaning
cakes and groaning beer, the traditional provisions laid out to
refresh the women of the community as they gathered by
her side, coaching and supporting her through the process of
(01:17):
labor and birth. New clean linens would have been ready
nearby as well to wrap the newborn. A family cradle
would be in the room. Thomas Putnam would have stepped
in among the women of the Salem Village church to
bless his new child with a father's love, to share
pride and joy with the weary mother, to receive the
warm smiles and congratulations of his neighbors. Not for Elizabeth Proctor.
(01:42):
Though her birthing experience that January was as cold and
unfriendly as the jail cell she sat in, she more
than likely would have labored on the bare dirt floor,
and unless the people around her were no longer bound
by leg irons and chains, she would have had to
labor alone. There were no fresh linens to swaddle her
(02:03):
newborn son, and her husband John was never going to
walk through that door and share in her joy. He
was gone now, so too was her protection from execution.
There was little to look forward to, so she named
him with an eye on the past, John, just like
his father. Even though John would need his mother now
(02:27):
more than ever, his birth signaled her death. Stoughton's death
warrant now had power over her, and when the first
session of the Superior Court convened on February one. She
fully expected to be led away and never see him again.
But then, of course, Phipps stopped all of that. But
the governor's message didn't stop everything. After Stoughton abandoned the
(02:50):
courts in an angry huff, Thomas Danforth took over and
shouldered the unsavory task of wrapping up all the remaining
open cases. He took over as Chief Justice and began
to methodically work through them, And the most talked about
of them all was that of Lydia Dustin. She was
one of those individuals who had been hounded for years
(03:11):
by accusations of witchcraft. When she was pulled into the
chaos of she said very little in her own defense,
which gave her the appearance of guilt in the eyes
of the magistrates. But all of the evidence against her
had been spectral. Tales of ghostly visitations were invisible attacks,
and that was no longer permissible in the trials. The jury,
(03:34):
of course, acquitted her, and she was ordered to pay
her jail fees and go home. And one would hope
that by now the community around her would have caught
on and recognized an innocent woman when they saw one.
But there were a number of complaints about the verdict,
so many that Dan Fourth actually begged her to confess
if she was truly guilty. She did not. She returned
(03:58):
to the jail in Cambridge, where she had been staying
and waited for her family to gather the necessary funds
to purchase her freedom. While she was there, though, she
became sick, and even after being brought home to be
cared for, she was too old and frail to fight
it off. She died on March tenth, the final victim
(04:21):
of the Salem which trials. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(05:01):
One other death that happened that winter was that of
and Over rapist Timothy Swan. He had been one of
the men to start the and Over accusations, claiming that
he had been bewitched by some of the women in town,
causing him to become sick. When he passed away on
February second, it was the day after those women were
released and sent home six months earlier. That sort of
(05:23):
coincidence would have landed those women back in jail, but
the tide had shifted. Most people saw his death as
natural and expected. There were still doubts in the air
in Salem, though yes, Lydia Dustin had been acquitted, but
there were a handful of others still being held for trial,
and everyone wondered if they would receive the same open
(05:44):
minded treatment or if criminal charges awaited them, But they
would have to wait because the Superior Court was needed
in Boston to handle other matters of governance. On February six,
just five days after Governor Phipps reprieve, Salem village minister
Samuel Paris led a small committee of members from his
(06:05):
congregation along the Ipswich Road to the home of Francis Nurse,
husband of Rebecca, who had been executed months before. Along
the way, they stopped at the home of their son,
Samuel Nurse, as well as John Tarbell, Rebecca's son in law.
The committee consisted of Reverend Paris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, Old Bray Wilkins,
(06:25):
and three Putnams, although not Chief Instigator Thomas Putnam. They
made the trip out to the Nurse farm to make
a complaint about the behavior of those families. Specifically, they
were upset that the men had refused to come to
church or partake in Holy communion, and if Reverend Paris
was to be able to do his job as shepherd
of the flock. They needed to come back. From what
(06:49):
we know, each of the men received the message in
stony silence. They didn't make excuses or explain themselves, probably
because the reasons should have been clear enough. Paris helped
stoke the community fears that led to the deaths of
Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty, and they owed him no
excuse for being angry about that. But they all did
(07:10):
agree to come into the village the following day to
meet the whole committee and discuss the matter. They extended
the offer to Bray Wilkins grandson Thomas as well, and
to Peter Klois, whose wife Sarah had somehow managed to
outlive her sister's Rebecca and Mary. John Tarbell arrived two
hours early and headed straight for the minister's parsonage. Paris
(07:33):
led him upstairs to his study, where Tarbell raged at
him for over an hour. He took months of frustration
and pain and anger and swung it like a club,
pointing all of the blames squarely on Paris. If not
for the words and actions of Paris, he claimed, Rebecca
Nurse would still be alive, as would so many others
(07:56):
After he left, Samuel Nurse climbed the minister's stairs and
did the act same thing. The only thing that saved
Paris this time was the start of the one pm
committee meeting, so both men left and walked over to
the meeting house. Imagine they didn't walk together, though there
would have been tensioned in the air between Paris and
the others that borderlined on tangible. The group meeting was
(08:19):
just as rough for Paris. They blamed him for everything,
calling him the instrument of our miseries and the beginning
and procureur of the sorest afflictions, not of this village only,
but to this whole country. But Paris was quick to
shift all the blame to God. It was God who
sent the evil into their community to test and refine them,
(08:41):
so Paris should be off the hook. Peter Cloy's didn't
come to that meeting, but he did make a trip
to Paris's house the following day. Once upstairs in the
minister's study, he did the same thing as the others. Paris,
he said, helped drive a community witch hunt that had
claimed the lives of both of his wife's sisters. Was
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it any wonder that he and the others had refused
to attend church and sit under his teaching and leadership.
There would be more meetings, just like the first. Paris
and the men of the Nurse family met again two
weeks later, and then twice in March, twice in April,
and then once again in May. Multiple meetings did nothing
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to calm their anger, though in fact, those same men
began to lobby for the removal of Samuel Paris from Salem,
and whether it was by their influence or the powers
of other angry villagers, the rates committee continued to refuse
to collect his salary, just as they had done for
the previous two years. Things had changed in Salem. During
(09:44):
March and April of a full year after the first
afflicted girls frightened the village with their unusual fits, a
fifteen year old servant girl named Mercy Short began to
have her own seizures. Cotton Mother actually took the girl
into his own home and cared for her, recording her
condition and behavior, where she claimed that forces were pinching her,
(10:05):
choking her, and tempting her with unheard whispers. But Mercy
Short was the orphaned daughter of a family from Maine,
where her parents had been killed in the violence of
King William's War. She had been taken captive during the fighting,
but when she was finally released, she moved south to Salem.
Today we can see her as a grief stricken young
(10:26):
woman dealing with the trauma of her past. But Mather
diagnosed her with something different, demonic possession. That didn't stop
the stories, though. Some people who visited her during her
illness claimed they could smell brimstone in the room. Others
said they could feel the air move, hinting at invisible
spirits at work in the house. It was the typical
(10:48):
spectral evidence we have all come to expect from Salem.
But nothing ever came of it. No one took anyone
to court over her sufferings. No names were named. Neither
even wrote about her ordeal in a new pamphlet called
A Brand Plucked out of the Burning, where he stated
that Mercy's real recovery would happen when she learned to
find safety and protection inside her new home in Salem.
(11:12):
In other words, her torment wasn't the work of witches
or spirits. It was nothing more than the cruelty of life.
The Superior Court met again on May tenth of to
hear the final cases against the last remaining which suspects.
(11:34):
Danforth was back as Chief Justice, with no sign of
William Stoughton. Thankfully, the majority of the cases were dismissed
by the grand jury. While five of them went to trial.
All of them were found not guilty and ordered to
be released upon payment of their jail fees. One of
the dismissed cases was that of the Paris family slave Tichiba.
(11:56):
She'd been in jail for over a year, but unlike
everyone else, he had yet to actually be indicted with
a specific crime. But Paris, showing his true colors, once again,
refused to pay her jail fees and secure her release.
Here's Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stacy Schiff, you can't leave
until you've paid your jail fees, and no one is willing,
(12:18):
it seems to pay titibus until later. I think she's
in jail for a year altogether. I don't know what
the what the law would have been for a slave.
They certainly didn't want her back, and we have very
little sense of where she could have gone after that.
By the way, I mean, it's interesting because she's so
completely at the heart of this and therefore would have
been very much spoiled goods. It turns out Titchiba was
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essentially confiscated by the state, like an abandoned piece of property.
She would have been sold off to the highest bidder,
although we have no record of that transaction, but the
full picture of the dehumanization of a slave in colonial
New England couldn't be more clear. Meanwhile, the conflict continued
between Paris and the villagers who remembered his role in
(13:02):
fanning the flames of fear. Let's be clear, Samuel Paris
did not deliberately drive the chaos forward, and he didn't
create the tension between feuding families in the area. But
he did use his position to poke at those sore
spots and draw attention to them. He didn't create the fear,
but he certainly wielded it like a tool to advance
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his own causes. These people confronted Paris about his failures
for over two years. Finally, in November of six Paris
wrote an apology of sorts and read it out loud
during a Sunday service. But it was too little, too late,
and far from an actual apology. In fact, it was
more of the same old blame shifting that he loved
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to engage in. This wasn't really his fault, he said.
The events of six two had been a rebuke by
God for events that had begun inside his house. Titchuba
and John Indian were both to blame because they had
helped Mary Sibley make the Yearine cake to ward off
the devil. Magic had been used in his house to
fight magic, and God was angry about that. In the end,
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his apology was really just a lot of excuses about
why he wasn't to blame. It took two more years
before Samuel Paris grew weary of the countless meetings and
conversations about his failures in sixteen ninety two. In April
of sixteen ninety six, he informed the village elders that
he would be leaving his position as minister, much to
(14:29):
the relief of many families in the area, but he
held onto the parsonage until early sixteen ninety seven, when
the church finally gave him his unpaid salary as a
bribe to pack up and leave. He moved to Stowe,
Massachusetts to take a position in a church there, but
was quickly caught up in a dispute with the elders
(14:49):
the issue his salary. Of course, another church experienced some
change in January of sixty seven. As Samuel Willard was
walking up the center aisle of Boston's Third Church, a
hand reached out and handed him a letter. It was
Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the men to sit on
both the Court of Oyer and Terminer and the Superior Court,
(15:12):
and the letter came with instructions to be read aloud immediately.
It was an apology, not from the collective judges, just
from him. But it was a real apology, standing in
sharp contrast to the blame shifting that Paris had engaged in.
Sewell expressed his deep regret for what had taken place
under his supervision. He asked for the blame to fall
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on his shoulders, and begged for prayers of forgiveness. And
he used a word that had been spoken seldom in
regards to the actions of the Court sin. It wasn't
just that they had made mistakes, but that they had
committed crimes against God. Sewell's prayer was that the punishment
for his own sin would stop with him, rather than
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spilling out onto the community and his own family. No
other judges ever made the same sort of public apology,
but others from different parts of the system joined him later.
Thomas Fisk had been the foreman of the jury during
the Oyer and Terminal trials, and he released a statement
along with eleven other jurymen. They acknowledged that they had
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been led on by the judges to do horrible things
that resulted in innocent blood spilled, and they begged for forgiveness.
The public was beginning to feel more and more bold
with their anger about the handling of the trials. In seven,
Boston merchant Robert Caliph published a collection of papers from
the trial that only he could have put together. Not
(16:39):
only had he been a wealthy merchant, but he also
served as a constable for a time, and that gave
him access to documents and people that otherwise would have
been out of reach. He titled his publication More Wonders
of the Invisible World, a direct attack against Cotton Mather's
own book of a similar title that had been written
as a pr tactic defense of the trials. Half pulled
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no punches, making sure the utter failure of the Massachusetts
leadership was on full display. He even took another stab
at Cotton Mother by naming one of his chapters another
brand plucked out of the Burning, referencing Mathers report on
Mercy Short that I mentioned earlier. The book features interviews
with Captain John Alden, Nathaniel Carey, and George Jacobs Jr.
(17:25):
All of whom had escaped Salem in the chaos of
the Fall of six two but had since returned, and
he made it clear just how widely it was known
that Sheriff Corwin was skimming from the confiscations, but in
the midst of his attack on the judges and leadership,
Caleff gives us one last glimpse into the story of Tichiba.
(17:46):
In his book, Califf reveals her own testimony about what
happened in six She confirmed that Paris had indeed beaten
a confession out of her, and that he coached her
on what to say and how to say it. The
most surprising part of her interview with Caliph is that
it takes place after she was sold by the state
to pay for the jail fees. We still don't know
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the specifics of that sale or where she ended up,
but apparently Caliph knew enough about it to track her
down and speak with her. She might have been treated
like a piece of property by many of the people
in power, but to Robert Caliph, Titchiba was just one
more reliable witness, a human being who had lived through
hell and had valuable information to share. But it was
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nothing more than a snapshot of a wisp of smoke.
After her brief mention in Caliph's book, that's the last
we ever hear from her, Pitchiba has vanished from the
public records forever. After every tragedy, community has to learn
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to stand back up and rebuild. We see this today
after natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. We see it
happen in war torn countries. We see it happen in
our own lives. Storms bring damage, and that damage needs repaired.
Salem Village wasn't unique in that regard. Yes, their storm
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was unusual and unique among the pages of American history,
and yes it was a storm crafted by the people
who lived there. But regardless of all of that, they
still had work to do if they wanted to move on.
The departure of Reverend Samuel Paris left the position of
Minister vacant in Salem Village, but they soon filled it
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Joseph Green was a brand new graduate from Harvard and
a baby at just twenty two. Reports describe him as
socially outgoing and gregarious, and apparently a bit more open
minded than the former minister. One of the first things
he did was institute the Halfway Covenant in the village
church that meant people could become full members without the
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humiliation of public confession. He baptized the families that Paris
had pushed out of the church, and even rearranged the
seating chart for the Sunday service to place the Putnam's
and the nurses on the same bench. By the early
seventeen hundreds, the church in Salem Village was on the men.
Reverend Green led the church in removing Martha Corey's excommunication.
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They founded a community school, built a brand new, larger
meeting house, and instituted an annual Thanksgiving fundraiser to support
the needy among them. They had transition from selfish, inward
looking people to a community that cared about the outsider. Then,
in August of seventeen o six, something amazing happened. Annie Putnam,
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daughter of Thomas and Ann Putnam, and one of the
chief instigators of the spectral evidence, approached Reverend Green and
asked to become a full member of the church. Here
is one of the girls responsible for setting the village
on fire with fear that took the lives of over
two dozen people, and she wanted to sit beside her
neighbors in church and be a part of the community.
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And Green agreed. He helped her craft her apology, which
he then wrote down in the Minister's Record Book, a
book that historian Richard Trask allowed me to hold. I
see some like modern edges to the page. Know what
this is is called leaf casting. What they did was
they cast on new new paper on the old. And
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then this is the confession of and Putnam in the
early seventeen hundreds. And she says, basically, I desire to
be laid low in the dust of humility for accusing
people that I now believe we're innocent. And it was
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her way of trying to give amends so that she
could become a full church member. Is there is the
confession that's in the book. Here's this in her handwriting,
special signature dictated by her into the book, and then
she signs it herself. That confession was also delivered to
the congregation by Anne herself. She stood in her place
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in the meeting house on August and read the confession
out loud. Here's historian Stacy Schiff. She says she was
essentially led us stray right. It's a little bit the
devil made me do it kind of excuse, but she
does indicate that she was. She doesn't address how she
came up with these spectral images. She simply says that
she was misguided and deluded, and the congregation accepted her.
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She became a full member in the church and attended
right alongside the families of the people she helped execute.
It was a powerful symbol of the healing that needed
to happen, but it also belies a darker undercurrent. The
families of the victims were still in agony, and they
were out to cry out for justice. The first place
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to start, in the minds of many was for the
government to reverse the charges against the people who had
been tried and convicted in Sixto, to restore their innocency,
as they said, But they also wanted financial restitution. Remember,
many of the people who were executed and convicted lost everything.
If the husband was executed, every piece of his property
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was confiscated by the states, even if there was a
widow and children left behind. Single women faced the same devastation,
and many others experienced death blows to their business or
personal finances. Something had to be done to fix it.
In seventeen oh three, the convictions of Abigail Faulkner, Sarah Wardwell,
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and Elizabeth Proctor were reversed, and then in seventeen ten,
the Massachusetts legislature set up a committee to investigate what
else they might be able to do. The members of
that committee arrived in Salem in September of that year,
and during their six day visit they received forty five
petitions for restitution. Every one you might have expected was
(24:08):
part of that list. Sarah Good's husband, William, the nurses
and stes and carriers. Charles Burrows, the oldest son of
the executed minister from Maine, added his name to the list,
as did Philip English. In fact, he submitted a list
of items stolen by Sheriff George Corwen and filed suit
against the man. George Jacobs Jr. Who had returned from
(24:31):
hiding elsewhere, also submitted a list. His included cows and pigs,
sixty bushels of corn, a quantity of pewter bed rugs, blankets, pillows,
and other furniture, all taken by Corwen. It took the
committee more than a year to hand over a decision,
but when they did, the General Court acted on it immediately.
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They reversed the property seizures of twelve executed witches, along
with Jihles Corey and seven others who had been convicted
but not killed. But if you're trying to do the
math in your head to keep up, you might have
noticed a gap. Seven convictions for witchcraft still remained in place,
bridget Bishop Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, and pudiator Wilma Reid,
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Margaret Scott and Elizabeth Johnson, and while attempts were made
over the years to address their cases, it wasn't until
two thousand one that their convictions were finally reversed. Yes,
I said two thousand one, three hundred years after the
trials ended. Apologies and reparations aside, there was a lot
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of silence from the people who should have spoken out.
Part of that was pride. William Stoughton, for example, never
apologized and continued to believe for the rest of his life,
that he had done everything right. Others might have felt shame,
but they atled it up and kept quiet to avoid
the attention. But there were others who began to do
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something more sinister. They covered up their tracks. Here's Stacy
shifted once again. There's deafening silence all around, and it's
almost a conspiracy. And when you look at when you
begin to look at the record, the diaries have been
purged from those years. The congregations book, as you know,
Paris pulls out those entries for those months, so that
(26:26):
we don't have those entries. The court records are missing.
Even Samuel Willard, who is one of the great Boston ministers,
we have his compendium of sermons, which is an enormous volume,
but missing are the sermons from that summer. So there's
clearly a sense of shock to the system and a
sense of regret, and I think of tremendous guilt at
what has happened. There seems to be a realization that
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no one really articulates until Samuel Sewell, one of the judges,
finally does, But there does seem to be this Could
we cover this up as quickly as possible? Could we
make it go away feeling. And it wasn't just personal
records that went missing. There were more than thirty witchcraft
trials held by the Superior Court in early and we
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have all of those court records. But it's the Oyer
and Terminer, the court that ran through most of six
that seems to have fallen off the books, and what's
happened to them has never been discovered. Of course, researchers
stumble upon new items from time to time. That's the
sort of thing that historian Richard Trask keeps his eye
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out for. Once in a while. Um, we find some
of the documents. Often we've just not looked hot enough
within the traditional sources that they located there. Other times
something pops up that became an archival astray centuries ago
and it comes back in when the witchcraft was over.
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Many of these documents Scott Scattered that was a governor
of Massachusetts during the pre Revolutionary period, Thomas Hutchison who
wrote a history of Massachusetts, and he actually was given
a whole bunch of these very important documents. And Hutchison
was a Tory and during the Stamp Act Crisis of
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seventeen sixty five, when the American provincials were mad at England.
They attacked his house, and they scattered all of his
papers outside on the ground, and so forth. Some historians
have seen the missing documents as an attempt to erase
a terrible mistake, to save the leadership of Massachusetts from
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the shame that came with the aftermath. Nineteenth century author
Charles W. Upham wrote the book Salem Witchcraft in eighteen
sixty seven that pushes just such a notion, and it's
a popular take on a historical mystery. These missing records
weren't lost, they say they were deleted. We also have
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three centuries of descendants involved with a lot of these cases.
One of the judges in both the Oil and Terminer
and the Superior Court was wait Still Winthrop. He was
a prolific letter writer who traded correspondence with his brother
fitz John Winthrop all through the sixteen eighties and nineties,
But letters from sixteen ninety two and ninety three are missing,
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and many historians believe that was the work of later
generations who wanted to hide their family shame. Even Samuel
Parris did a bit of track covering. He kept extensive
notes of his observations of the afflicted girls and their
spectral visions, as well as records of other witness testimony.
And yet only one page from one of those notebooks
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still exists, suggesting that Paris destroyed the collection before it
could be seized or found. But of course, time went
on in Salem Village. In the seventeen fifties, nearly a
century after they began to ask for their independence from
Salem Town. That freedom was granted. They changed their name
to Danvers and have become a very distinct community from
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their neighbors in Salem over the past two and a
half centuries, and they're very proud of that. Some people
who suffered through the events of sixteen ninety two were
less proud, though. Sarah Klois had lost both of her sisters,
Mary st and Rebecca Nurse, and couldn't bear to stay
in the village. Afterward, she and her husband Peter moved
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south towards modern day, framing him setting off a sort
of minor exodus. My seventeen hundred, just eight years after
they'd left, they found themselves in the center of a
community of roughly fifty former Salem neighbors. Peter and Sarah
became central figures in this new neighborhood of framing him
known as Salem end one more interesting side note that
(30:38):
I just can't leave out of the story. Historian Richard
Trask is a Danvers native and descended from multiple victims
of the sixteen ninety two which trials. He's lived within
this historical narrative his entire life, but also with the
unique perspective of literally living in the neighborhood where much
of it began. According to him, even up until in
(31:00):
eighteen fifties, there was an isolated group of neighbors in
the area of Center Street and Danvers that had held
onto the old Salem village accent. Trask refers to it
as the Center Street Twang. Just one little artifact among
so many others that gives texture and character to what
took place there over three d twenty five years ago.
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But the Salem witch Trials could never stay local. The
events were immediately attractive to writers and historians, and word
about the tragedy spread. In seventeen twenty, the first regional
history of New England to include the witch trials was
published in London by Daniel Neil. It gave prominence to
the events and helped a wider audience learn about what
(31:43):
took place in sixte Neil does an admirable job of
helping people see logic over superstition. The Trials happened because
of human error and misjudgments, not a satanic plot to
overthrow a Puritan community. But he also put on paper
of view that has clouded the public perception of the
Trials ever since, that it was purely a battle between
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credulous bigots on one side and the advance of reason
and science on the other. But Neil's approach paints in
black and white a picture that had a lot more
nuance than he would admit. Those anti science religious leaders
were actually very pro science. Sure, there were a few
who muddied the water men like Cotton Mother come to mind,
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of course, but most of the ministers in Massachusetts were
also the most interested in modern science. Here's historian Maryland
k Roach. I think people generally see the sale in
which trials is something so bizarre they can't really identify
with it. That it's something foolish people did because they
didn't know any better. They didn't have computers, they didn't
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have this, They didn't know that. And we're smarty than there.
But they were educated people and well intentioned people who,
even by the lights of their own philosophy in their
own time, include to have figured out that things were
not proceeding as they should without converting to twenty one
century skepticism. For example, the Harvard Professor of American History
(33:11):
Jane Kamensky agrees and sees the truth as a call
to humility. These are the best minds of their generation.
These are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists,
the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and
ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically
(33:35):
in their universe. They cannot be laughed off. They are
the smartest, most privileged people of their times. Confronted with
something that is awful to them, and they act in
ways that come to seem, even within a couple of years,
almost miraculously terribly um and yet they do it with
(33:59):
the best of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If
that doesn't encourage a kind of radical humility and second
guessing and checking in with each other about who's doing
what to when, whom, why, I don't know what? Does
it might sound like I'm making a big deal out
(34:20):
of a little thing. But Neil's position influenced almost two
centuries of public opinion, which contributed to how the events
had become so misunderstood over time. Even more dangerous, though,
his attitude about Salem lulls us into a false sense
of safety, because if Neil was correct, then the events
in Salem were a product of an earlier time when
(34:43):
superstition ranked higher than reason. And since we've grown up
since then, and science has brought new advancements and pushed
away the shadows of superstition, it would be easy to
think that we as a culture have outgrown such a
tragic failure. But oh how wrong we would be. Technology
and advancements and science only gives us tools. How we
(35:05):
use those tools is guided by human nature. It's important
to remember that advancements in ship building and cartography allowed
the exploration of the New World, but also empowered the
Transatlantic slave trade. Social media connects us, but it also
poisoned the well. Science alone can't save us again. We
(35:25):
are very hard in the people of I think if
you look back on on our on our perspective, in
three years, people may be heard on us and again,
despite the best intentions of people to create a good, orderly,
godly society. Bad things happen, and I think the lesson
is if we can just try to be understanding you
kind of people, you know, and try to get through
(35:46):
it as best we can, and try to look towards
the good and human nature and try to avoid those
sort of base reflexes as much as possible. You know,
it's not a happy ending, and we just hope people
learn from it. Historians might have spent centuries dissecting the
Salem which trials and placing the blame at the feet
(36:08):
of various notions, but there's one thing everyone can agree on.
Popular culture loves to retell the story. Arthur Miller's The
Crucible immediately comes to mind for many, and it's certainly
a powerful piece of entertainment. Here's Marilyn kay Roach once
again atha Miller's play, which is creative fiction, but definitely
(36:32):
on the part about not being believed when you're telling
the truth, so you lie and then they believe you.
That's that hits the nail on the head. Yes, Miller
helped bring attention to the Salem events, but he also
borrowed fictional elements from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,
treating legend as fact. He even blended individual details from
(36:54):
the trials into new chimera, like moments that didn't actually
take place and details are just playing wrong. In The Crucible,
Miller portrays Dan Fourth as the chief Justice hell bent
on executing as many which is as possible, while in
truth that man was William Stowton. Of course, Dan Fourth
(37:17):
and Stowton aren't the only figures from Salem to receive
a massage treatment from storytellers and historians over the years.
In fact, it maybe the most mysterious one of them
all that has received the most attention. Tichiba. The most
obvious transformation we see in modern retellings of the Salem
events happens when storytellers saw that Tichiba was a slave,
(37:38):
and because they identify slavery with blackness, she was pushed
into that mold. In the process, the role of indigenous
people's in the tale are reduced or removed completely. Other
layers have been added over the years as well, giving
Tichiba actual powers of witchcraft or voodoo, sometimes going as
far as to put the full responsibility for what happens
(37:59):
square early on her shoulders. I remember hearing the story
of the Salem witch trials for the first time decades ago,
and whoever it was that recited it to me did
just that, stating as a fact that it was all
Titchuba's fault. After twelve episodes, though, I think all of
us know just how wrong that was. But the most
common question historians are asked, hands down, is what they
(38:23):
think the real cause was for the witchcraft panic. It's
a good question, and it comes from a place of
genuine interest, but it also hints at the misconception that
the events in Salem can be boiled down to one
single reason, like a magic pill that covers all the symptoms. Sadly,
there is no such simple answer. A lot of people
(38:44):
like to bring up the hypothesis that the entire community
fell victim to ergot poisoning. Ergot, you see, is a
fungus and under the right conditions, it can grow on
rye and other grains. If humans ingest the erga with
the grains, it can cause medical conditions such as convulsions
and fits. But history professor Mary Beth Norton disagrees. I
(39:07):
don't see or good even if it's possible, um, which
I think is very unlikely, is a real explanation. I
researched for my book cases in England and America before
six in which young children began to have what were
described as fits that were then attributed to witchcraft, and
(39:31):
I discovered that it was a not unusual pattern. It
was it wasn't necessary, it was common, but it was known.
It was a known pattern, and it was a pattern
when children were in intensely religious households, as indeed they
were in the household of Samuel Paris. Social and cultural
(39:51):
norms aside. There are even medical reasons why er goot
poisoning misses the target, because urgotism presents with certain symptoms
depending on whether or not the patient has a vitamin
A deficiency. If they lack vitamin A, they might have convulsions.
If not, it's most likely to present as gang green
and a great source of vitamin A, it turns out,
(40:12):
is fish. Considering the fact that Salem was a support
community and many of the afflicted were from wealthy families,
it's unlikely that their diets lacked vitamin A, so no
no matter how attractive the idea might be, er goot
poisoning was not involved. Others have suggested encephalitis, which is
(40:33):
an infection in the brain that causes inflammation. Honestly, there
have been a lot of theories. Tomorrow someone might suggest
a different illness altogether, but all of them fail to
explain the actual experience of the afflicted girls. Nothing covers
the hallucinations and the convulsions, all while the girls were
observed by countless people around them to be healthy and fit.
(40:56):
The less sexy answer is that the afflicted girl, and
to a lesser extent, the rest of their community, we're
all suffering through the intense fear and trauma of a
war that was creeping closer to their homes. They lived
in a world where politics and religion were creating bitter
rivalries and driving wedges between neighbors, where the line between
truth and lies was becoming increasingly blurry. In the end,
(41:21):
people were just really scared. Don't get me wrong, There's
nothing inherently bad about bringing fresh eyes and new perspectives
to the table. New questions about the problems inside Salem
help us move the study of it all forward. That's
why we now consider King William's War to be an
essential component of the Salem story, but we have to
(41:42):
be careful to not become clouded by popular ideas that
ignore the real facts. Today, if you mentioned the sale
in which trials most people conjure up images of victims
burning at the stake, of women being tied to stones
and tossed into water to see if they'll float. We
imagine crowds of villagers with pitchforks and torches, and people
(42:03):
pulled out of their beds in the middle of a night.
And none of that ever happened in Salem. At the
same time, what did happen in Salem, to some degree,
keeps happening in our own world over and over again.
They might not always involve accusations of witchcraft, but we've
come to think of them all as witch hunts. Nonetheless,
(42:23):
here's Richard Trask. You have to confront your own period
of witch hunts with clear vision and bravery, because this
is not something that happened back in It's almost always
with us. From the interment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps,
to the Army McCarthy hearings, the Red Scare to time
(42:47):
and time again, these kinds of things happen. We can
spend the story of Salem however we want. We can
look for outside forces like illness or drug induced to
lucin nations, or point to the age old battle between
superstition and science. We can invent any number of excuses,
but none of it comes close to the most obvious
(43:08):
answer on the table, the Salem which trials happened because
humans were involved, and we have a very long track
record of making a mess of things. History is safe
because it sits in the past. It happened, and now
(43:30):
there's distance between us and the tragedy. After over five years,
we talked more about witch hunts in the metaphorical sense
than the literal, But the truth is long after Salem,
real witch hunts were still threatening innocent lives. In seven
there was a case in Philadelphia involving a woman who
(43:51):
was accused by her neighbors of being a witch. An
angry mob brutally murdered her out of fear. In seventeen nine,
another woman was suspected of being a witch in York, Maine,
and she was viciously attacked because of it. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, a Methodist minister named
James Monroe Buckley traveled across the United States and interviewed
(44:14):
people about their beliefs, and witchcraft was a common feature
of many of their tales. According to Buckley, there were
more than fifty lawsuits involving witchcraft in the eighteen eighties.
Old beliefs. It seems we're far from gone. Those later
witchcraft accusations were always pointed at the usual suspects, the
(44:35):
outsiders in society. Irish Americans accused their New Scottish immigrant neighbors,
German American communities accused immigrants from Eastern Europe, and most
common of all, white colonizers and settlers accused the Native
Americans around them. But Salem still sits on the pedestal
for most people. It's become the popular icon of witch
(44:58):
hunts in most people's minds. Then Professor of history Emerson
Baker sometimes wonders why that is why Salem, Because by
European standards, Salem unfortunately is a fly speck. You know,
in the Great Age of witch hunts over several hundred
years in Europe, we know that about a hundred thousand
people were prosecuted and about half of them were executed
for witchcraft, you know, in in in in Cologne, Germany.
(45:20):
There was a tenure witchcraft outbreak from the sixteen twenties
to the sixteen thirties where hundreds and hundreds of people
lost their lives. And I've been I don't know if
you've been a clone. It's a beautiful city, but no
one calls it the witch city. So and you know,
why is it that that's that? Salem, right is the
witch city? So? And again to me, I think it's live.
It has to do with this confluence of of things
(45:41):
coming together in this supposedly utopian Puritan place and that
we're we're sort of living, still living in many ways
in the aftermath of the the attraction to Salem is undeniable.
If there were a disneyland devoted to witchcraft, Salem, Massachusetts
would be it. Museums and tours and list shops and
monuments all devoted to the idea of witchcraft. But outside
(46:05):
of Salem, that phrase witch hunt has an altogether different meaning.
In the run up to the Civil War, when Northern
politicians were condemning slavery as evil and a curse, their
Southern counterparts used the events in Salem in their defense
of it. According to them, it was the ancestors of
the North that burned witches by the cord. They claimed
(46:27):
that Northern abolitionism was just another version of that same misguided,
fanatical movement, and said the witch hunt had simply shifted
to slave owners, Setting aside the fact that no victims
were ever burned in Salem. Those Southern politicians demonstrated just
how easy it was to take a specific concept and
apply it to anything we want. But just because someone
(46:50):
claims to be the victim of a witch hunt doesn't
make it true. Even today, the term which is still
used as a slur, although there are some who wear
it proudly as a badge of honor. But it's the
underlying concept that's the most common, the belief that there
are people in society who prey on our fears, who
represent that dreaded insider threat. We don't always do it intentionally,
(47:14):
but labeling someone the enemy is a lot easier the
more diverse the world around us becomes. Historical witch hunts
targeted the other in society, the people who didn't tow
the line or play by the rules. It singled out
the newcomers and the foreigners, the irreligious, and the poor.
It always happened in places where communities felt as if
(47:35):
their worldview and identity were under attack, and when humans
feel threatened, we look for scapegoats to target. If only
there was a way for us to leave the darkest
parts of our past behind us, or find some magical
elixir that would create the kind of well ordered, critical
thinking society that we all idealize. But if all the
(47:56):
lessons that Salem teaches us that one is the most bitter,
there is no easy solution. The events in Salem ended
over three years ago, but the reasons behind them have
never really gone away. They've never let go or lost
their powerful hold over us. The forces that led a
(48:17):
community to kill twenty innocent people and allow five others
to die in jail will never go away because they're
inside each and every one of us. In the end,
all we can hope to do is remember and learn
from the past. Nothing is guaranteed, but perhaps with a
(48:38):
bit of humility and compassion, we can be better. And
that's it for Season one of Unobscured. I hope you've
enjoyed the journey as much as my team and I
have enjoyed creating it for you. If you love the show,
don't forget to head over to Apple Podcasts dot com
slash Unobscured to leave a written review and a star
(49:00):
rating to tell the world why they need to be
listening to this show. But we're not finished just yet.
First season two is already in development, so be sure
to stay subscribed to the show so you don't miss
any announcements about that. Second, our six historians had a
lot more to say than we were able to fit
into the storytelling this season, and I really want to
(49:23):
share those conversations with you. Thankfully, we recorded all of
them and we're turning them into bonus episodes as I speak.
Starting on January second, we'll begin to publish those full,
complete interviews for you to listen to, one interview each week,
always on Wednesdays, just like the main show, and you're
gonna learn so much from them. In fact, if you
(49:43):
stick around after this brief sponsor break, I'll give you
a taste of what's to come next time on Unobscured,
you'd get these heroic words from these average people. And
to me, that's so important. That is how this goes
off the rail is so quickly. Really, is that no
one is willing to raise his hand and say, but wait,
(50:06):
have you considered? Or but wait, that doesn't make sense.
People tend to think of it as spooky Halloween stuff,
especially in October. I like Halloween, but this is not that.
How does the community heal after a period of mutual recrimination,
profound upheaval. It's not as though, especially in the wake
(50:28):
of nine eleven, that we are free from fears of
the mysterious unknown. How much of our liberties of our
faith are we willing to sacrifice to try to save
everything that we believe in? Unobscured was created and written
(51:42):
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.
(52:04):
Until next time, thanks for listening, m HM.
It wasn't over yet. As powerful as the reprieve from
Governor Phipps had been, it didn't close the books on
the trials immediately. I wish it had. I wish all
the fear and uncertainty and frustration just sort of evaporated
into the wind like a puff of smoke. But it didn't.
(00:30):
In the days between Stowton's signing of her death warrant
on January and the February one message from the Governor
that canceled it, Elizabeth Proctor gave birth to the baby
she had carried throughout the ordeal. It was her pregnancy
that had kept her alive the day her husband John
had been led to the gallows and hanged, and now
that safety net was gone, it can't have been an
(00:55):
easy delivery. Months earlier and Procter, wife of Thomas and
one of the afflicted who put so many others in jail,
had delivered her own baby. She would have prepared groaning
cakes and groaning beer, the traditional provisions laid out to
refresh the women of the community as they gathered by
her side, coaching and supporting her through the process of
(01:17):
labor and birth. New clean linens would have been ready
nearby as well to wrap the newborn. A family cradle
would be in the room. Thomas Putnam would have stepped
in among the women of the Salem Village church to
bless his new child with a father's love, to share
pride and joy with the weary mother, to receive the
warm smiles and congratulations of his neighbors. Not for Elizabeth Proctor.
(01:42):
Though her birthing experience that January was as cold and
unfriendly as the jail cell she sat in, she more
than likely would have labored on the bare dirt floor,
and unless the people around her were no longer bound
by leg irons and chains, she would have had to
labor alone. There were no fresh linens to swaddle her
(02:03):
newborn son, and her husband John was never going to
walk through that door and share in her joy. He
was gone now, so too was her protection from execution.
There was little to look forward to, so she named
him with an eye on the past, John, just like
his father. Even though John would need his mother now
(02:27):
more than ever, his birth signaled her death. Stoughton's death
warrant now had power over her, and when the first
session of the Superior Court convened on February one. She
fully expected to be led away and never see him again.
But then, of course, Phipps stopped all of that. But
the governor's message didn't stop everything. After Stoughton abandoned the
(02:50):
courts in an angry huff, Thomas Danforth took over and
shouldered the unsavory task of wrapping up all the remaining
open cases. He took over as Chief Justice and began
to methodically work through them, And the most talked about
of them all was that of Lydia Dustin. She was
one of those individuals who had been hounded for years
(03:11):
by accusations of witchcraft. When she was pulled into the
chaos of she said very little in her own defense,
which gave her the appearance of guilt in the eyes
of the magistrates. But all of the evidence against her
had been spectral. Tales of ghostly visitations were invisible attacks,
and that was no longer permissible in the trials. The jury,
(03:34):
of course, acquitted her, and she was ordered to pay
her jail fees and go home. And one would hope
that by now the community around her would have caught
on and recognized an innocent woman when they saw one.
But there were a number of complaints about the verdict,
so many that Dan Fourth actually begged her to confess
if she was truly guilty. She did not. She returned
(03:58):
to the jail in Cambridge, where she had been staying
and waited for her family to gather the necessary funds
to purchase her freedom. While she was there, though, she
became sick, and even after being brought home to be
cared for, she was too old and frail to fight
it off. She died on March tenth, the final victim
(04:21):
of the Salem which trials. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(05:01):
One other death that happened that winter was that of
and Over rapist Timothy Swan. He had been one of
the men to start the and Over accusations, claiming that
he had been bewitched by some of the women in town,
causing him to become sick. When he passed away on
February second, it was the day after those women were
released and sent home six months earlier. That sort of
(05:23):
coincidence would have landed those women back in jail, but
the tide had shifted. Most people saw his death as
natural and expected. There were still doubts in the air
in Salem, though yes, Lydia Dustin had been acquitted, but
there were a handful of others still being held for trial,
and everyone wondered if they would receive the same open
(05:44):
minded treatment or if criminal charges awaited them, But they
would have to wait because the Superior Court was needed
in Boston to handle other matters of governance. On February six,
just five days after Governor Phipps reprieve, Salem village minister
Samuel Paris led a small committee of members from his
(06:05):
congregation along the Ipswich Road to the home of Francis Nurse,
husband of Rebecca, who had been executed months before. Along
the way, they stopped at the home of their son,
Samuel Nurse, as well as John Tarbell, Rebecca's son in law.
The committee consisted of Reverend Paris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, Old Bray Wilkins,
(06:25):
and three Putnams, although not Chief Instigator Thomas Putnam. They
made the trip out to the Nurse farm to make
a complaint about the behavior of those families. Specifically, they
were upset that the men had refused to come to
church or partake in Holy communion, and if Reverend Paris
was to be able to do his job as shepherd
of the flock. They needed to come back. From what
(06:49):
we know, each of the men received the message in
stony silence. They didn't make excuses or explain themselves, probably
because the reasons should have been clear enough. Paris helped
stoke the community fears that led to the deaths of
Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty, and they owed him no
excuse for being angry about that. But they all did
(07:10):
agree to come into the village the following day to
meet the whole committee and discuss the matter. They extended
the offer to Bray Wilkins grandson Thomas as well, and
to Peter Klois, whose wife Sarah had somehow managed to
outlive her sister's Rebecca and Mary. John Tarbell arrived two
hours early and headed straight for the minister's parsonage. Paris
(07:33):
led him upstairs to his study, where Tarbell raged at
him for over an hour. He took months of frustration
and pain and anger and swung it like a club,
pointing all of the blames squarely on Paris. If not
for the words and actions of Paris, he claimed, Rebecca
Nurse would still be alive, as would so many others
(07:56):
After he left, Samuel Nurse climbed the minister's stairs and
did the act same thing. The only thing that saved
Paris this time was the start of the one pm
committee meeting, so both men left and walked over to
the meeting house. Imagine they didn't walk together, though there
would have been tensioned in the air between Paris and
the others that borderlined on tangible. The group meeting was
(08:19):
just as rough for Paris. They blamed him for everything,
calling him the instrument of our miseries and the beginning
and procureur of the sorest afflictions, not of this village only,
but to this whole country. But Paris was quick to
shift all the blame to God. It was God who
sent the evil into their community to test and refine them,
(08:41):
so Paris should be off the hook. Peter Cloy's didn't
come to that meeting, but he did make a trip
to Paris's house the following day. Once upstairs in the
minister's study, he did the same thing as the others. Paris,
he said, helped drive a community witch hunt that had
claimed the lives of both of his wife's sisters. Was
(09:02):
it any wonder that he and the others had refused
to attend church and sit under his teaching and leadership.
There would be more meetings, just like the first. Paris
and the men of the Nurse family met again two
weeks later, and then twice in March, twice in April,
and then once again in May. Multiple meetings did nothing
(09:22):
to calm their anger, though in fact, those same men
began to lobby for the removal of Samuel Paris from Salem,
and whether it was by their influence or the powers
of other angry villagers, the rates committee continued to refuse
to collect his salary, just as they had done for
the previous two years. Things had changed in Salem. During
(09:44):
March and April of a full year after the first
afflicted girls frightened the village with their unusual fits, a
fifteen year old servant girl named Mercy Short began to
have her own seizures. Cotton Mother actually took the girl
into his own home and cared for her, recording her
condition and behavior, where she claimed that forces were pinching her,
(10:05):
choking her, and tempting her with unheard whispers. But Mercy
Short was the orphaned daughter of a family from Maine,
where her parents had been killed in the violence of
King William's War. She had been taken captive during the fighting,
but when she was finally released, she moved south to Salem.
Today we can see her as a grief stricken young
(10:26):
woman dealing with the trauma of her past. But Mather
diagnosed her with something different, demonic possession. That didn't stop
the stories, though. Some people who visited her during her
illness claimed they could smell brimstone in the room. Others
said they could feel the air move, hinting at invisible
spirits at work in the house. It was the typical
(10:48):
spectral evidence we have all come to expect from Salem.
But nothing ever came of it. No one took anyone
to court over her sufferings. No names were named. Neither
even wrote about her ordeal in a new pamphlet called
A Brand Plucked out of the Burning, where he stated
that Mercy's real recovery would happen when she learned to
find safety and protection inside her new home in Salem.
(11:12):
In other words, her torment wasn't the work of witches
or spirits. It was nothing more than the cruelty of life.
The Superior Court met again on May tenth of to
hear the final cases against the last remaining which suspects.
(11:34):
Danforth was back as Chief Justice, with no sign of
William Stoughton. Thankfully, the majority of the cases were dismissed
by the grand jury. While five of them went to trial.
All of them were found not guilty and ordered to
be released upon payment of their jail fees. One of
the dismissed cases was that of the Paris family slave Tichiba.
(11:56):
She'd been in jail for over a year, but unlike
everyone else, he had yet to actually be indicted with
a specific crime. But Paris, showing his true colors, once again,
refused to pay her jail fees and secure her release.
Here's Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stacy Schiff, you can't leave
until you've paid your jail fees, and no one is willing,
(12:18):
it seems to pay titibus until later. I think she's
in jail for a year altogether. I don't know what
the what the law would have been for a slave.
They certainly didn't want her back, and we have very
little sense of where she could have gone after that.
By the way, I mean, it's interesting because she's so
completely at the heart of this and therefore would have
been very much spoiled goods. It turns out Titchiba was
(12:39):
essentially confiscated by the state, like an abandoned piece of property.
She would have been sold off to the highest bidder,
although we have no record of that transaction, but the
full picture of the dehumanization of a slave in colonial
New England couldn't be more clear. Meanwhile, the conflict continued
between Paris and the villagers who remembered his role in
(13:02):
fanning the flames of fear. Let's be clear, Samuel Paris
did not deliberately drive the chaos forward, and he didn't
create the tension between feuding families in the area. But
he did use his position to poke at those sore
spots and draw attention to them. He didn't create the fear,
but he certainly wielded it like a tool to advance
(13:22):
his own causes. These people confronted Paris about his failures
for over two years. Finally, in November of six Paris
wrote an apology of sorts and read it out loud
during a Sunday service. But it was too little, too late,
and far from an actual apology. In fact, it was
more of the same old blame shifting that he loved
(13:44):
to engage in. This wasn't really his fault, he said.
The events of six two had been a rebuke by
God for events that had begun inside his house. Titchuba
and John Indian were both to blame because they had
helped Mary Sibley make the Yearine cake to ward off
the devil. Magic had been used in his house to
fight magic, and God was angry about that. In the end,
(14:07):
his apology was really just a lot of excuses about
why he wasn't to blame. It took two more years
before Samuel Paris grew weary of the countless meetings and
conversations about his failures in sixteen ninety two. In April
of sixteen ninety six, he informed the village elders that
he would be leaving his position as minister, much to
(14:29):
the relief of many families in the area, but he
held onto the parsonage until early sixteen ninety seven, when
the church finally gave him his unpaid salary as a
bribe to pack up and leave. He moved to Stowe,
Massachusetts to take a position in a church there, but
was quickly caught up in a dispute with the elders
(14:49):
the issue his salary. Of course, another church experienced some
change in January of sixty seven. As Samuel Willard was
walking up the center aisle of Boston's Third Church, a
hand reached out and handed him a letter. It was
Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the men to sit on
both the Court of Oyer and Terminer and the Superior Court,
(15:12):
and the letter came with instructions to be read aloud immediately.
It was an apology, not from the collective judges, just
from him. But it was a real apology, standing in
sharp contrast to the blame shifting that Paris had engaged in.
Sewell expressed his deep regret for what had taken place
under his supervision. He asked for the blame to fall
(15:35):
on his shoulders, and begged for prayers of forgiveness. And
he used a word that had been spoken seldom in
regards to the actions of the Court sin. It wasn't
just that they had made mistakes, but that they had
committed crimes against God. Sewell's prayer was that the punishment
for his own sin would stop with him, rather than
(15:56):
spilling out onto the community and his own family. No
other judges ever made the same sort of public apology,
but others from different parts of the system joined him later.
Thomas Fisk had been the foreman of the jury during
the Oyer and Terminal trials, and he released a statement
along with eleven other jurymen. They acknowledged that they had
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been led on by the judges to do horrible things
that resulted in innocent blood spilled, and they begged for forgiveness.
The public was beginning to feel more and more bold
with their anger about the handling of the trials. In seven,
Boston merchant Robert Caliph published a collection of papers from
the trial that only he could have put together. Not
(16:39):
only had he been a wealthy merchant, but he also
served as a constable for a time, and that gave
him access to documents and people that otherwise would have
been out of reach. He titled his publication More Wonders
of the Invisible World, a direct attack against Cotton Mather's
own book of a similar title that had been written
as a pr tactic defense of the trials. Half pulled
(17:02):
no punches, making sure the utter failure of the Massachusetts
leadership was on full display. He even took another stab
at Cotton Mother by naming one of his chapters another
brand plucked out of the Burning, referencing Mathers report on
Mercy Short that I mentioned earlier. The book features interviews
with Captain John Alden, Nathaniel Carey, and George Jacobs Jr.
(17:25):
All of whom had escaped Salem in the chaos of
the Fall of six two but had since returned, and
he made it clear just how widely it was known
that Sheriff Corwin was skimming from the confiscations, but in
the midst of his attack on the judges and leadership,
Caleff gives us one last glimpse into the story of Tichiba.
(17:46):
In his book, Califf reveals her own testimony about what
happened in six She confirmed that Paris had indeed beaten
a confession out of her, and that he coached her
on what to say and how to say it. The
most surprising part of her interview with Caliph is that
it takes place after she was sold by the state
to pay for the jail fees. We still don't know
(18:09):
the specifics of that sale or where she ended up,
but apparently Caliph knew enough about it to track her
down and speak with her. She might have been treated
like a piece of property by many of the people
in power, but to Robert Caliph, Titchiba was just one
more reliable witness, a human being who had lived through
hell and had valuable information to share. But it was
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nothing more than a snapshot of a wisp of smoke.
After her brief mention in Caliph's book, that's the last
we ever hear from her, Pitchiba has vanished from the
public records forever. After every tragedy, community has to learn
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to stand back up and rebuild. We see this today
after natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. We see it
happen in war torn countries. We see it happen in
our own lives. Storms bring damage, and that damage needs repaired.
Salem Village wasn't unique in that regard. Yes, their storm
(19:17):
was unusual and unique among the pages of American history,
and yes it was a storm crafted by the people
who lived there. But regardless of all of that, they
still had work to do if they wanted to move on.
The departure of Reverend Samuel Paris left the position of
Minister vacant in Salem Village, but they soon filled it
(19:39):
Joseph Green was a brand new graduate from Harvard and
a baby at just twenty two. Reports describe him as
socially outgoing and gregarious, and apparently a bit more open
minded than the former minister. One of the first things
he did was institute the Halfway Covenant in the village
church that meant people could become full members without the
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humiliation of public confession. He baptized the families that Paris
had pushed out of the church, and even rearranged the
seating chart for the Sunday service to place the Putnam's
and the nurses on the same bench. By the early
seventeen hundreds, the church in Salem Village was on the men.
Reverend Green led the church in removing Martha Corey's excommunication.
(20:25):
They founded a community school, built a brand new, larger
meeting house, and instituted an annual Thanksgiving fundraiser to support
the needy among them. They had transition from selfish, inward
looking people to a community that cared about the outsider. Then,
in August of seventeen o six, something amazing happened. Annie Putnam,
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daughter of Thomas and Ann Putnam, and one of the
chief instigators of the spectral evidence, approached Reverend Green and
asked to become a full member of the church. Here
is one of the girls responsible for setting the village
on fire with fear that took the lives of over
two dozen people, and she wanted to sit beside her
neighbors in church and be a part of the community.
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And Green agreed. He helped her craft her apology, which
he then wrote down in the Minister's Record Book, a
book that historian Richard Trask allowed me to hold. I
see some like modern edges to the page. Know what
this is is called leaf casting. What they did was
they cast on new new paper on the old. And
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then this is the confession of and Putnam in the
early seventeen hundreds. And she says, basically, I desire to
be laid low in the dust of humility for accusing
people that I now believe we're innocent. And it was
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her way of trying to give amends so that she
could become a full church member. Is there is the
confession that's in the book. Here's this in her handwriting,
special signature dictated by her into the book, and then
she signs it herself. That confession was also delivered to
the congregation by Anne herself. She stood in her place
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in the meeting house on August and read the confession
out loud. Here's historian Stacy Schiff. She says she was
essentially led us stray right. It's a little bit the
devil made me do it kind of excuse, but she
does indicate that she was. She doesn't address how she
came up with these spectral images. She simply says that
she was misguided and deluded, and the congregation accepted her.
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She became a full member in the church and attended
right alongside the families of the people she helped execute.
It was a powerful symbol of the healing that needed
to happen, but it also belies a darker undercurrent. The
families of the victims were still in agony, and they
were out to cry out for justice. The first place
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to start, in the minds of many was for the
government to reverse the charges against the people who had
been tried and convicted in Sixto, to restore their innocency,
as they said, But they also wanted financial restitution. Remember,
many of the people who were executed and convicted lost everything.
If the husband was executed, every piece of his property
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was confiscated by the states, even if there was a
widow and children left behind. Single women faced the same devastation,
and many others experienced death blows to their business or
personal finances. Something had to be done to fix it.
In seventeen oh three, the convictions of Abigail Faulkner, Sarah Wardwell,
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and Elizabeth Proctor were reversed, and then in seventeen ten,
the Massachusetts legislature set up a committee to investigate what
else they might be able to do. The members of
that committee arrived in Salem in September of that year,
and during their six day visit they received forty five
petitions for restitution. Every one you might have expected was
(24:08):
part of that list. Sarah Good's husband, William, the nurses
and stes and carriers. Charles Burrows, the oldest son of
the executed minister from Maine, added his name to the list,
as did Philip English. In fact, he submitted a list
of items stolen by Sheriff George Corwen and filed suit
against the man. George Jacobs Jr. Who had returned from
(24:31):
hiding elsewhere, also submitted a list. His included cows and pigs,
sixty bushels of corn, a quantity of pewter bed rugs, blankets, pillows,
and other furniture, all taken by Corwen. It took the
committee more than a year to hand over a decision,
but when they did, the General Court acted on it immediately.
(24:53):
They reversed the property seizures of twelve executed witches, along
with Jihles Corey and seven others who had been convicted
but not killed. But if you're trying to do the
math in your head to keep up, you might have
noticed a gap. Seven convictions for witchcraft still remained in place,
bridget Bishop Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, and pudiator Wilma Reid,
(25:16):
Margaret Scott and Elizabeth Johnson, and while attempts were made
over the years to address their cases, it wasn't until
two thousand one that their convictions were finally reversed. Yes,
I said two thousand one, three hundred years after the
trials ended. Apologies and reparations aside, there was a lot
(25:44):
of silence from the people who should have spoken out.
Part of that was pride. William Stoughton, for example, never
apologized and continued to believe for the rest of his life,
that he had done everything right. Others might have felt shame,
but they atled it up and kept quiet to avoid
the attention. But there were others who began to do
(26:05):
something more sinister. They covered up their tracks. Here's Stacy
shifted once again. There's deafening silence all around, and it's
almost a conspiracy. And when you look at when you
begin to look at the record, the diaries have been
purged from those years. The congregations book, as you know,
Paris pulls out those entries for those months, so that
(26:26):
we don't have those entries. The court records are missing.
Even Samuel Willard, who is one of the great Boston ministers,
we have his compendium of sermons, which is an enormous volume,
but missing are the sermons from that summer. So there's
clearly a sense of shock to the system and a
sense of regret, and I think of tremendous guilt at
what has happened. There seems to be a realization that
(26:46):
no one really articulates until Samuel Sewell, one of the judges,
finally does, But there does seem to be this Could
we cover this up as quickly as possible? Could we
make it go away feeling. And it wasn't just personal
records that went missing. There were more than thirty witchcraft
trials held by the Superior Court in early and we
(27:07):
have all of those court records. But it's the Oyer
and Terminer, the court that ran through most of six
that seems to have fallen off the books, and what's
happened to them has never been discovered. Of course, researchers
stumble upon new items from time to time. That's the
sort of thing that historian Richard Trask keeps his eye
(27:27):
out for. Once in a while. Um, we find some
of the documents. Often we've just not looked hot enough
within the traditional sources that they located there. Other times
something pops up that became an archival astray centuries ago
and it comes back in when the witchcraft was over.
(27:47):
Many of these documents Scott Scattered that was a governor
of Massachusetts during the pre Revolutionary period, Thomas Hutchison who
wrote a history of Massachusetts, and he actually was given
a whole bunch of these very important documents. And Hutchison
was a Tory and during the Stamp Act Crisis of
(28:10):
seventeen sixty five, when the American provincials were mad at England.
They attacked his house, and they scattered all of his
papers outside on the ground, and so forth. Some historians
have seen the missing documents as an attempt to erase
a terrible mistake, to save the leadership of Massachusetts from
(28:30):
the shame that came with the aftermath. Nineteenth century author
Charles W. Upham wrote the book Salem Witchcraft in eighteen
sixty seven that pushes just such a notion, and it's
a popular take on a historical mystery. These missing records
weren't lost, they say they were deleted. We also have
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three centuries of descendants involved with a lot of these cases.
One of the judges in both the Oil and Terminer
and the Superior Court was wait Still Winthrop. He was
a prolific letter writer who traded correspondence with his brother
fitz John Winthrop all through the sixteen eighties and nineties,
But letters from sixteen ninety two and ninety three are missing,
(29:11):
and many historians believe that was the work of later
generations who wanted to hide their family shame. Even Samuel
Parris did a bit of track covering. He kept extensive
notes of his observations of the afflicted girls and their
spectral visions, as well as records of other witness testimony.
And yet only one page from one of those notebooks
(29:32):
still exists, suggesting that Paris destroyed the collection before it
could be seized or found. But of course, time went
on in Salem Village. In the seventeen fifties, nearly a
century after they began to ask for their independence from
Salem Town. That freedom was granted. They changed their name
to Danvers and have become a very distinct community from
(29:54):
their neighbors in Salem over the past two and a
half centuries, and they're very proud of that. Some people
who suffered through the events of sixteen ninety two were
less proud, though. Sarah Klois had lost both of her sisters,
Mary st and Rebecca Nurse, and couldn't bear to stay
in the village. Afterward, she and her husband Peter moved
(30:15):
south towards modern day, framing him setting off a sort
of minor exodus. My seventeen hundred, just eight years after
they'd left, they found themselves in the center of a
community of roughly fifty former Salem neighbors. Peter and Sarah
became central figures in this new neighborhood of framing him
known as Salem end one more interesting side note that
(30:38):
I just can't leave out of the story. Historian Richard
Trask is a Danvers native and descended from multiple victims
of the sixteen ninety two which trials. He's lived within
this historical narrative his entire life, but also with the
unique perspective of literally living in the neighborhood where much
of it began. According to him, even up until in
(31:00):
eighteen fifties, there was an isolated group of neighbors in
the area of Center Street and Danvers that had held
onto the old Salem village accent. Trask refers to it
as the Center Street Twang. Just one little artifact among
so many others that gives texture and character to what
took place there over three d twenty five years ago.
(31:23):
But the Salem witch Trials could never stay local. The
events were immediately attractive to writers and historians, and word
about the tragedy spread. In seventeen twenty, the first regional
history of New England to include the witch trials was
published in London by Daniel Neil. It gave prominence to
the events and helped a wider audience learn about what
(31:43):
took place in sixte Neil does an admirable job of
helping people see logic over superstition. The Trials happened because
of human error and misjudgments, not a satanic plot to
overthrow a Puritan community. But he also put on paper
of view that has clouded the public perception of the
Trials ever since, that it was purely a battle between
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credulous bigots on one side and the advance of reason
and science on the other. But Neil's approach paints in
black and white a picture that had a lot more
nuance than he would admit. Those anti science religious leaders
were actually very pro science. Sure, there were a few
who muddied the water men like Cotton Mother come to mind,
(32:26):
of course, but most of the ministers in Massachusetts were
also the most interested in modern science. Here's historian Maryland
k Roach. I think people generally see the sale in
which trials is something so bizarre they can't really identify
with it. That it's something foolish people did because they
didn't know any better. They didn't have computers, they didn't
(32:47):
have this, They didn't know that. And we're smarty than there.
But they were educated people and well intentioned people who,
even by the lights of their own philosophy in their
own time, include to have figured out that things were
not proceeding as they should without converting to twenty one
century skepticism. For example, the Harvard Professor of American History
(33:11):
Jane Kamensky agrees and sees the truth as a call
to humility. These are the best minds of their generation.
These are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists,
the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and
ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically
(33:35):
in their universe. They cannot be laughed off. They are
the smartest, most privileged people of their times. Confronted with
something that is awful to them, and they act in
ways that come to seem, even within a couple of years,
almost miraculously terribly um and yet they do it with
(33:59):
the best of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If
that doesn't encourage a kind of radical humility and second
guessing and checking in with each other about who's doing
what to when, whom, why, I don't know what? Does
it might sound like I'm making a big deal out
(34:20):
of a little thing. But Neil's position influenced almost two
centuries of public opinion, which contributed to how the events
had become so misunderstood over time. Even more dangerous, though,
his attitude about Salem lulls us into a false sense
of safety, because if Neil was correct, then the events
in Salem were a product of an earlier time when
(34:43):
superstition ranked higher than reason. And since we've grown up
since then, and science has brought new advancements and pushed
away the shadows of superstition, it would be easy to
think that we as a culture have outgrown such a
tragic failure. But oh how wrong we would be. Technology
and advancements and science only gives us tools. How we
(35:05):
use those tools is guided by human nature. It's important
to remember that advancements in ship building and cartography allowed
the exploration of the New World, but also empowered the
Transatlantic slave trade. Social media connects us, but it also
poisoned the well. Science alone can't save us again. We
(35:25):
are very hard in the people of I think if
you look back on on our on our perspective, in
three years, people may be heard on us and again,
despite the best intentions of people to create a good, orderly,
godly society. Bad things happen, and I think the lesson
is if we can just try to be understanding you
kind of people, you know, and try to get through
(35:46):
it as best we can, and try to look towards
the good and human nature and try to avoid those
sort of base reflexes as much as possible. You know,
it's not a happy ending, and we just hope people
learn from it. Historians might have spent centuries dissecting the
Salem which trials and placing the blame at the feet
(36:08):
of various notions, but there's one thing everyone can agree on.
Popular culture loves to retell the story. Arthur Miller's The
Crucible immediately comes to mind for many, and it's certainly
a powerful piece of entertainment. Here's Marilyn kay Roach once
again atha Miller's play, which is creative fiction, but definitely
(36:32):
on the part about not being believed when you're telling
the truth, so you lie and then they believe you.
That's that hits the nail on the head. Yes, Miller
helped bring attention to the Salem events, but he also
borrowed fictional elements from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,
treating legend as fact. He even blended individual details from
(36:54):
the trials into new chimera, like moments that didn't actually
take place and details are just playing wrong. In The Crucible,
Miller portrays Dan Fourth as the chief Justice hell bent
on executing as many which is as possible, while in
truth that man was William Stowton. Of course, Dan Fourth
(37:17):
and Stowton aren't the only figures from Salem to receive
a massage treatment from storytellers and historians over the years.
In fact, it maybe the most mysterious one of them
all that has received the most attention. Tichiba. The most
obvious transformation we see in modern retellings of the Salem
events happens when storytellers saw that Tichiba was a slave,
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and because they identify slavery with blackness, she was pushed
into that mold. In the process, the role of indigenous
people's in the tale are reduced or removed completely. Other
layers have been added over the years as well, giving
Tichiba actual powers of witchcraft or voodoo, sometimes going as
far as to put the full responsibility for what happens
(37:59):
square early on her shoulders. I remember hearing the story
of the Salem witch trials for the first time decades ago,
and whoever it was that recited it to me did
just that, stating as a fact that it was all
Titchuba's fault. After twelve episodes, though, I think all of
us know just how wrong that was. But the most
common question historians are asked, hands down, is what they
(38:23):
think the real cause was for the witchcraft panic. It's
a good question, and it comes from a place of
genuine interest, but it also hints at the misconception that
the events in Salem can be boiled down to one
single reason, like a magic pill that covers all the symptoms. Sadly,
there is no such simple answer. A lot of people
(38:44):
like to bring up the hypothesis that the entire community
fell victim to ergot poisoning. Ergot, you see, is a
fungus and under the right conditions, it can grow on
rye and other grains. If humans ingest the erga with
the grains, it can cause medical conditions such as convulsions
and fits. But history professor Mary Beth Norton disagrees. I
(39:07):
don't see or good even if it's possible, um, which
I think is very unlikely, is a real explanation. I
researched for my book cases in England and America before
six in which young children began to have what were
described as fits that were then attributed to witchcraft, and
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I discovered that it was a not unusual pattern. It
was it wasn't necessary, it was common, but it was known.
It was a known pattern, and it was a pattern
when children were in intensely religious households, as indeed they
were in the household of Samuel Paris. Social and cultural
(39:51):
norms aside. There are even medical reasons why er goot
poisoning misses the target, because urgotism presents with certain symptoms
depending on whether or not the patient has a vitamin
A deficiency. If they lack vitamin A, they might have convulsions.
If not, it's most likely to present as gang green
and a great source of vitamin A, it turns out,
(40:12):
is fish. Considering the fact that Salem was a support
community and many of the afflicted were from wealthy families,
it's unlikely that their diets lacked vitamin A, so no
no matter how attractive the idea might be, er goot
poisoning was not involved. Others have suggested encephalitis, which is
(40:33):
an infection in the brain that causes inflammation. Honestly, there
have been a lot of theories. Tomorrow someone might suggest
a different illness altogether, but all of them fail to
explain the actual experience of the afflicted girls. Nothing covers
the hallucinations and the convulsions, all while the girls were
observed by countless people around them to be healthy and fit.
(40:56):
The less sexy answer is that the afflicted girl, and
to a lesser extent, the rest of their community, we're
all suffering through the intense fear and trauma of a
war that was creeping closer to their homes. They lived
in a world where politics and religion were creating bitter
rivalries and driving wedges between neighbors, where the line between
truth and lies was becoming increasingly blurry. In the end,
(41:21):
people were just really scared. Don't get me wrong, There's
nothing inherently bad about bringing fresh eyes and new perspectives
to the table. New questions about the problems inside Salem
help us move the study of it all forward. That's
why we now consider King William's War to be an
essential component of the Salem story, but we have to
(41:42):
be careful to not become clouded by popular ideas that
ignore the real facts. Today, if you mentioned the sale
in which trials most people conjure up images of victims
burning at the stake, of women being tied to stones
and tossed into water to see if they'll float. We
imagine crowds of villagers with pitchforks and torches, and people
(42:03):
pulled out of their beds in the middle of a night.
And none of that ever happened in Salem. At the
same time, what did happen in Salem, to some degree,
keeps happening in our own world over and over again.
They might not always involve accusations of witchcraft, but we've
come to think of them all as witch hunts. Nonetheless,
(42:23):
here's Richard Trask. You have to confront your own period
of witch hunts with clear vision and bravery, because this
is not something that happened back in It's almost always
with us. From the interment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps,
to the Army McCarthy hearings, the Red Scare to time
(42:47):
and time again, these kinds of things happen. We can
spend the story of Salem however we want. We can
look for outside forces like illness or drug induced to
lucin nations, or point to the age old battle between
superstition and science. We can invent any number of excuses,
but none of it comes close to the most obvious
(43:08):
answer on the table, the Salem which trials happened because
humans were involved, and we have a very long track
record of making a mess of things. History is safe
because it sits in the past. It happened, and now
(43:30):
there's distance between us and the tragedy. After over five years,
we talked more about witch hunts in the metaphorical sense
than the literal, But the truth is long after Salem,
real witch hunts were still threatening innocent lives. In seven
there was a case in Philadelphia involving a woman who
(43:51):
was accused by her neighbors of being a witch. An
angry mob brutally murdered her out of fear. In seventeen nine,
another woman was suspected of being a witch in York, Maine,
and she was viciously attacked because of it. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, a Methodist minister named
James Monroe Buckley traveled across the United States and interviewed
(44:14):
people about their beliefs, and witchcraft was a common feature
of many of their tales. According to Buckley, there were
more than fifty lawsuits involving witchcraft in the eighteen eighties.
Old beliefs. It seems we're far from gone. Those later
witchcraft accusations were always pointed at the usual suspects, the
(44:35):
outsiders in society. Irish Americans accused their New Scottish immigrant neighbors,
German American communities accused immigrants from Eastern Europe, and most
common of all, white colonizers and settlers accused the Native
Americans around them. But Salem still sits on the pedestal
for most people. It's become the popular icon of witch
(44:58):
hunts in most people's minds. Then Professor of history Emerson
Baker sometimes wonders why that is why Salem, Because by
European standards, Salem unfortunately is a fly speck. You know,
in the Great Age of witch hunts over several hundred
years in Europe, we know that about a hundred thousand
people were prosecuted and about half of them were executed
for witchcraft, you know, in in in in Cologne, Germany.
(45:20):
There was a tenure witchcraft outbreak from the sixteen twenties
to the sixteen thirties where hundreds and hundreds of people
lost their lives. And I've been I don't know if
you've been a clone. It's a beautiful city, but no
one calls it the witch city. So and you know,
why is it that that's that? Salem, right is the
witch city? So? And again to me, I think it's live.
It has to do with this confluence of of things
(45:41):
coming together in this supposedly utopian Puritan place and that
we're we're sort of living, still living in many ways
in the aftermath of the the attraction to Salem is undeniable.
If there were a disneyland devoted to witchcraft, Salem, Massachusetts
would be it. Museums and tours and list shops and
monuments all devoted to the idea of witchcraft. But outside
(46:05):
of Salem, that phrase witch hunt has an altogether different meaning.
In the run up to the Civil War, when Northern
politicians were condemning slavery as evil and a curse, their
Southern counterparts used the events in Salem in their defense
of it. According to them, it was the ancestors of
the North that burned witches by the cord. They claimed
(46:27):
that Northern abolitionism was just another version of that same misguided,
fanatical movement, and said the witch hunt had simply shifted
to slave owners, Setting aside the fact that no victims
were ever burned in Salem. Those Southern politicians demonstrated just
how easy it was to take a specific concept and
apply it to anything we want. But just because someone
(46:50):
claims to be the victim of a witch hunt doesn't
make it true. Even today, the term which is still
used as a slur, although there are some who wear
it proudly as a badge of honor. But it's the
underlying concept that's the most common, the belief that there
are people in society who prey on our fears, who
represent that dreaded insider threat. We don't always do it intentionally,
(47:14):
but labeling someone the enemy is a lot easier the
more diverse the world around us becomes. Historical witch hunts
targeted the other in society, the people who didn't tow
the line or play by the rules. It singled out
the newcomers and the foreigners, the irreligious, and the poor.
It always happened in places where communities felt as if
(47:35):
their worldview and identity were under attack, and when humans
feel threatened, we look for scapegoats to target. If only
there was a way for us to leave the darkest
parts of our past behind us, or find some magical
elixir that would create the kind of well ordered, critical
thinking society that we all idealize. But if all the
(47:56):
lessons that Salem teaches us that one is the most bitter,
there is no easy solution. The events in Salem ended
over three years ago, but the reasons behind them have
never really gone away. They've never let go or lost
their powerful hold over us. The forces that led a
(48:17):
community to kill twenty innocent people and allow five others
to die in jail will never go away because they're
inside each and every one of us. In the end,
all we can hope to do is remember and learn
from the past. Nothing is guaranteed, but perhaps with a
(48:38):
bit of humility and compassion, we can be better. And
that's it for Season one of Unobscured. I hope you've
enjoyed the journey as much as my team and I
have enjoyed creating it for you. If you love the show,
don't forget to head over to Apple Podcasts dot com
slash Unobscured to leave a written review and a star
(49:00):
rating to tell the world why they need to be
listening to this show. But we're not finished just yet.
First season two is already in development, so be sure
to stay subscribed to the show so you don't miss
any announcements about that. Second, our six historians had a
lot more to say than we were able to fit
into the storytelling this season, and I really want to
(49:23):
share those conversations with you. Thankfully, we recorded all of
them and we're turning them into bonus episodes as I speak.
Starting on January second, we'll begin to publish those full,
complete interviews for you to listen to, one interview each week,
always on Wednesdays, just like the main show, and you're
gonna learn so much from them. In fact, if you
(49:43):
stick around after this brief sponsor break, I'll give you
a taste of what's to come next time on Unobscured,
you'd get these heroic words from these average people. And
to me, that's so important. That is how this goes
off the rail is so quickly. Really, is that no
one is willing to raise his hand and say, but wait,
(50:06):
have you considered? Or but wait, that doesn't make sense.
People tend to think of it as spooky Halloween stuff,
especially in October. I like Halloween, but this is not that.
How does the community heal after a period of mutual recrimination,
profound upheaval. It's not as though, especially in the wake
(50:28):
of nine eleven, that we are free from fears of
the mysterious unknown. How much of our liberties of our
faith are we willing to sacrifice to try to save
everything that we believe in? Unobscured was created and written
(51:42):
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.
(52:04):
Until next time, thanks for listening, m HM.
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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