October 17, 2018 • 45 mins
As the first suspects are rounded up and questioned by the biased and partisan officials, their confessions unleash more trouble than relief. And as the number of witches multiplies, so too does the number of accusers. In an increasingly uncertain time, the Village leans on its faith.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
If what happened in the meeting house on the first
day of examinations was an explosion, the after shock echoed
far and wide. In fact, a number of reverberations can
still be found in the pages of history. That evening,
the three women were carted off to jail where they
could be held for further questioning and an actual trial.
(00:33):
Sarah Osburne and Tituba were taken to the Salem jail,
while Sarah Good was transported to the nearby Ipswich Jail,
where Constable Joseph Herrick, a relative of hers, could keep
an eye on her. After the magistrates and accused left
the meeting house, though, that's when the shock waves began
to spread. The place had been packed. Some estimates placed
(00:57):
the crowd at nearly six d people, more than the
real population of Salem Village itself. Those people left for
homes and taverns, taking the news of what they had
witnessed out into the world, and news, as we all know,
has a way of spreading like a wildfire. Some of
them stayed behind, though a small group of Salem village
(01:19):
men remained in the meeting house to discuss the matter
in a more official capacity. Among them were two Putnam's,
the uncle and cousin of Thomas Jr. Father of one
of the afflicted, and they decided to send these two
men south to Boston for help. The most significant gathering
happened over at the home of Dr William Griggs. He
(01:39):
was the closest thing the village had to a medical doctor,
and was a good friend of the Reverend Samuel Paris.
He was a devout Puritan, an educated man, and a
rational thinker, but he also suspected something less natural was
behind the events of the past few days. He and
a number of neighbors huddled together that evening inside griggs
(02:00):
house to discuss what they had learned. They arrived at
the meeting house that day believing that there might be
three witches in Salem Village, and left with news that
there were in fact five of them. Three were in custody, sure,
but there were still two at large, hiding in plain
sight and continuing their dark, dangerous attacks. Those attacks were
(02:22):
still hitting home too, quite literally. Living in the home
of William Griggs was his niece, Elizabeth Hubbard, who was
one of the four girls making all of the accusations.
So while the gathering was mostly a moment for everyone
to process and regroup. They were also watching over her,
making sure the witches left her alone. When the attacks
(02:43):
began again, there were fresh eyes packed inside the house
to witness it. This time, Elizabeth began to cry out
in pain. She claimed someone invisible was pinching and stabbing
at her with the sharp object. Everyone could see it too.
The girl was writhing in pain and flinching away from
an unseen attacker. It must have been horrifying to watch.
(03:06):
And then the girl froze and pointed toward the table
everyone had gathered around. There, she shouted, there stands Sarah Good.
Elizabeth described how the invisible witch was standing naked on
the table. Her feet and legs were bare, as was
her chest. Oh, nasty slut, the girl cried out. If
(03:28):
I had something, I would kill you. Samuel Sibley was
seated at the table and watched it all in horror.
His wife was Mary Sibley, the woman who had instructed
Tituba and John Indian on how to make the witch
cake just days before. Maybe he felt a need to
atone for his wife's sins, or perhaps he was just
so gripped with fear that he simply fell in line.
(03:51):
Whatever the reason was, he stood up and swung his
walking stick at the empty air above the table. You
have hit her right across the back, Elizabeth declared, you
have almost killed her. Miles away in Ipswich, unaware of
what was transpiring inside the Grigs home, one of the
(04:11):
guards standing outside Joseph Herrick's barn glanced inside the check
on Sarah Good and felt the hair on the back
of his neck. Stand up. She was gone, vanished into
the night, as if she had magically melted into the air,
and all that was left of her or her shoes
and her stockings. When they found her the next morning,
(04:32):
everyone held their breath. There was blood on her arm,
as if she had been struck. This is unobscured. I'm
Aaron Manky. The night of the gathering at Dr William
(05:18):
Griggs house, that moment of reflection and panic. After a
day of examinations inside the meeting house, everyone dispersed to
go home. Two of those men were William Allen and
John Hughes, who lived in the same direction. They bundled
up against the cold and then walked off into the
night down the road. After a few minutes of brisk,
(05:40):
silent walking. Both of the men claimed they heard a
noise ahead of them down the road. It wasn't the
sound they could identify, and it kept repeating itself over
and over, but they needed to get home, so they
pressed on. That didn't mean it was easy, though. Soon
a dark shape began to materialize in the darkness ahead.
(06:00):
They slowed their pace, believing there was some sort of
animal hunched over beside the road. A moment later, that
shape exploded upward, and as it did, it unraveled into
the forms of three people women. If the men had
to guess, they vanished almost as quickly as they had appeared.
But as they did, both men were certain they recognized
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all three of them, Sarah Good, Sarah Osburne, and Tituba.
Sarah Good, however, was miles away in an Ipswich jail
along with her baby. Actually that jail was the barn
belonging to her relative Joseph Herrick and his brother Zachariah,
and there was a bit of irony in her new situation. Remember,
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Sarah and William Good weren't doing so well financially. They've
lost all of their land and had no way to
provide for themselves. Life was hard for them, to say
the least. Two years prior to the events of six two,
Sarah had approached Zachariah and asked if she and her daughter,
Doroth the might sleep in the barn for a few nights.
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Sarah's sister had married into the Herrick family many years before,
and I have to imagine she felt that if anyone
was going to say yes, it would be the Herrick brothers. Instead,
they turned her away. That's when things got weird. Sarah,
known around the village to be a grumbler and all
around bitter woman, told Herrick that his heartlessness would cost
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him dearly. Perhaps she hinted one of his best cows
might suffer. Zachariah's teenage sons escorted Sarah off their property,
and a short time later two of Herrick's best cows disappeared.
This night, though the Herricks had no choice. Joseph was
a constable for Salem and had been instructed to bring
(07:47):
Sarah Good and her infant back to his farm, where
she would be locked in the barn overnight. As the
gathering at Dr Grigg's house took place, complete with Elizabeth
Hubbard's claim of an invisible Sarah Good. The Herrick settled
in for what they assumed would be a calm, quiet night,
but something went wrong. Sarah Good escaped. For whatever reason,
(08:10):
she slipped out of her shoes and stockings and carried
her infant out into the cold night air. Most historians
think that she was out looking for a place to hide,
but walking barefoot through the cold, snow and mud of
early March would have been painful. The guards noticed she
was gone, but by the time they summoned the courage
to inform Joseph Herrick, the sun had already come up
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and Sarah Good had returned to her makeshift prison cell.
Joseph checked on her, found her arm covered in blood,
and probably wondered aloud about what the woman had done
to herself, And then he began his day. That new
day came with new news. Word reached Herrick about the
events at Dr Grigg's house the night before, and of
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the appearance of Sarah Good without her shoes and stockings,
and of how Samuel Sibley had struck her with his
walking stick. And I realize we look back on this
today with a bit of incredulity, But put yourself in
the mindset of a superstitious, fearful puritan in the middle
of a community at the beginning of a witch hunt.
This was a red flag and a sure sign that
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something evil was at work. Most people probably trying to
get on with their normal lives that morning. There was
always a lot to do to make sure your family
and livestock were taken care of, after all, but magistrates
John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin had servants for all of that. Instead,
they paid a visit to the Salem Town Jail. They
(09:34):
had some questions for one of the prisoners. Here's Pulitzer
Prize winning author Stacy Chief. The conditions in the jail
were really deplorable. New England jails had not been built
for long term stays. This was a culture that essentially
dealt with malefactors quickly and effectively. No one was really
mental to live in a jail the way these people
ended up staying in these jails. The Salem jail is
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described as a suburb of Hell, and from the Boston
jail was described as a grave for the living. So
I think there you have it. Between the two, their
tiny spaces unventilated. An earlier prisoner had talked about the
fact that he couldn't breathe for the pestiferous stink. As
he puts it, the air is fitted their armies of life.
And to add insult to injury, in colonial New England,
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you paid for your keep in jail, So you paid
for your straw, you paid for your food, and you
paid for your shackles. This was the place Tituba found
herself the night after her examination in the meeting house.
She probably awoke the next morning full of uncertainty and fear.
Would they hang her without a trial? Would they drag
her back for more questions. Instead, Hawthorne and Corwin visited
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her and began a new interrogation behind the closed doors
of the jail, But the magistrates were in for a
shock when they arrived. Titsuba began to writhe and convulse
in much the same way the four girls had done
so in front of everyone in the meeting house the
day before. When she could speak, she blamed the attacks
on Good and Osbourne, which gave Hawthorne an idea they
(11:04):
now had a direct line to the truth. They asked
Tituba about how the witches were attacking her, and she
described it in detail. Then, almost as an assigne, she
mentioned that the tall man had urged her to write
in his book, which struck a chord with the two men.
What book, they asked, Was it big or small? Titsiba
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shook her head. He did not show it to me,
she replied, but had it in his pocket. After that,
the questions flowed like a river, and Titchiba did her
best to keep up with the current. Did he make
you sign it? No, my mistress called me from another room.
What did he say you needed to do with the book?
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He told me to sign my name in it, she said,
And did you do that? They asked, yes. One time
I made a mark in the book with a red ink,
red like blood. Did he take that red ink from
your own body? No, but he said he would get
it out of me the next time he visited. And
(12:08):
then the magistrates dug deeper. They believe that Tituba had
seen the Devil's Book, his tool for recruiting humans into
his evil mission among them. So he asked about that.
Did you see any other marks in this book? They asked, yes,
she said, a great many, some in red, some in yellow.
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He held it wide open and showed me a great
many marks in it? What names were in the book,
they asked? Did he tell you Good and Osbourne? She answered,
but they were more I couldn't read. Hawthorne and Corwin
must have felt a chill run down their spines. More
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names meant more witches. They had already found three, which
felt overwhelming as it was, But now they had learned
that there were more among them. They aid, it wasn't
an insurmountable number. How many marks do you think there were,
they asked her. Tituba looked at them both with fear
in her eyes. Perhaps she was afraid of her current circumstances,
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or maybe she was afraid of what her answer might mean.
I imagine she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Then finally she answered them. Nine, she said, there were
nine marks. Hawthorne and Corwin were stunned. They had believed
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all of the witches affecting the girls had been identified
and captured, and yet here was a frightening new revelation.
There were nine names in the book, Nine witches to
torment them, Nine individuals who had signed on to help
the devil destroy their great Puritan experiment in the New World.
Of course, they wanted to know who those other witches were,
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and they asked it, but to name them she shook
her head, though she claimed they had only made marks
rather than writing their own names down, so she didn't
know who they were. But there's something else going on
here that needs to be pointed out. You see, Puritans
were absolutely obsessed with books. Jane Kaminsky, Professor of American
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History at Harvard University. I did a piece of work
at one point that I never published, about the image
of the Devil's book in the Salem, which trials looking
at the book trades in New England at the time.
You know, what does it look like. Oh, it's small
and they hide in it's red, it's not read. This
is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and early
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sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, you know, histories, geographies, satires,
joke books, playing cards are coming into the bookstores and
the ports cities. So yeah, this idea of a book
used by the devil to establish contracts with human helpers
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was a big deal. It spoke to the very nature
of Puritans as book people. Reading was central to their faith,
reading the Bible, reading sermon notes, reading educational books, and
while most of the women in Salem were unable to write,
they could certainly read. Here's Kaminski again. Women in Puritan
New England have an unusually high level of reading literacy
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because it's thought to be so important for everybody to
be able to read the Bible, and for mothers to
be able to read the Bible to their children. But
they have a pretty low level of what's called sign literacy.
So she can sign her name. She has some rudimentary
written literacy, but probably not the fluency to write an
entire document. The last detail these questions about the Devil's
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Book revealed to us is the seriousness of the accusations
to a Puritan. Membership in the church was about confession.
She or the Halfway Covenant loosened those requirements a bit,
But whether you were confessing your sins and story to
a minister in private or while standing in front of
the entire congregation, you knew the final step was to
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sign a covenant with your church. So the Devil's Book
was meant to be a shadow of all of that,
the dark opposite to the light of God. If the
Puritans believe that you were a witch, it just made
sense that you had also signed a covenant with the devil.
You had switched sides after all. Now, one of the
books that would have been familiar to Hawthorne and Corwin
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was a sixty seven witchcraft reference work called Guide to
Grand Jury Men. It offered a lot of advice to
help the authorities properly examine accused witches, and one of
those pieces of advice was that someone of spiritual authority
must help the accused prepare for their examination. For Tituba,
that person had to have been her master, the Reverend
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Samuel Paris. It would be a fair guest to assume
that preparing Tituba involved asking her questions and testing her
knowledge of the Bible, but not for Paris. The day
before her examination, he chose instead to simply beat her.
It wasn't justified, of course, but I have to wonder
if he did it out of anger over the witch
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cake incidents and a bit of urgency from her living
under his roof and responsibility. So Paris beat her, Perhaps
that explains her wild stories the next day in the
meeting house, where she accused Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne
of being in league with the Devil. It certainly explains
her eagerness to please, to paint elaborate pictures full of rich,
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powerful detail. He had asked for her cooperation at the
end of a painful switch, and Titsuba clearly delivered. I
think it's safe to say that we can look back
today on the interrogation and see the men essentially leading
the witness. They never said did you experience anything odd
the other day? Instead they asked estions out of the blue,
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like was there a book and why did you sign it? Tituba,
female heathen slave, the lowest of the low in their society,
was already in jail. So she would have done anything
or said anything to prevent execution. Any of us would have.
And you can see them guide her answers over time.
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First she never saw the book, and then the tall
man showed it to her. That evolved into holding it
and then reading it. It wasn't that she was slowly
remembering more and more detail. It's that she was paying attention,
listening to Hawthorne and Corwin as if her life depended
on it, and giving them the answers they were looking for.
Emerson Baker, one of our guest historians throughout this season,
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of Unobscured discusses this in his book A Storm of
Witchcraft One wonders. He wrote, what would have happened had
Paris and the judges not coerced Tituba into confessing the
Salem witchcraft outbreak might conceivably have been limited to three people,
a fairly typical case of no particular note, and certainly
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not a pivotal moment in American history. But that's not
what they did. Instead, they approached a volatile situation and
steered it in a different and arguably worse direction. It
would be the first of many wrong turns that would
get them lost in a dark forest of fear and panic.
Peace it seems would be a lot more difficult to
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track down. At this point, It might be helpful to
step back and ask the question why why did the
people of Salem village believe the devil had singled them
out and made them the focus of his evil mock nations?
And the answer comes back to us from that vision
of Salem being a city on the hill. Historian Richard Trask,
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the whole purpose of it was to bring down the
Puritan commonwealth of Massachuset sits they looked at themselves as
being the elect of God. The new Israelites of old,
who were establishing a city upon the hill. The devil
obviously would want to combat that type of thing, and
that's why they believe that the devil was coming to
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Salem Village into all of mass Bay to bring God's
Kingdom on Earth down. To that end, Samuel Paris called
on all of Salem Village to fast and pray. He
held private gatherings at his house of the most devout
among them, and other neighboring ministers joined them, including John
Hale from Beverly. Even Paris's daughter Betty and her cousin Abigail,
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the two original afflicted girls who had started everything, joined
them for these prayer meetings. Not long after, though, Paris
had Betty sent to Salem Town to stay at the
home of a distant relative named Stephen Sewell. Betty was
only nine years old, and while her affliction didn't stop
right away, she does seem to vanish from the court
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documents after this. Some historians think it was a rare
moment of sanity when the community honored the tradition of
only allowing adults to testify. After Betty, Paris was moved
to a safe home in Salem Town. The three accused
witches were transferred to a jail in Boston, where they
would await a full criminal trial. The three remaining afflicted
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girls seemed to become more calm, but then on March three,
Annie Putnam claimed she was tormented yet again, and this
time the attackers were new to her. One, she said
was a woman she couldn't see clearly, but the other
was clear. She claimed it was Dorothy Good, the five
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year old daughter of Sarah Good. The little girl, according
to Annie Putnam, was holding the Devil's Book out to
her and demanding she signed it. Sadly, the people around
her took her seriously. A week later, she managed to
put a name to that other attacker, Elizabeth Procter. Elizabeth
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was the forty one year old mother of five children
and pregnant with her sixth. She and her husband, John
Procter owned a tavern north of the village at the
intersection of two busy roads. They were part of the
wealthy Procter family, members of the church, and owners of
a lot of land. There was a lot to respect
about Elizabeth, but there were other details about her that
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might have made her an easy person to accuse of witchcraft.
The biggest of those was that her grandmother, goody Bert's
had been accused and tried for witchcraft roughly three decades earlier.
The assumption was that if wealth and godliness could run
in families, then so too could allegiance to the devil.
Her husband, John was twenty years older than her and
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had inherited all of his land from his parents, who
had moved to Massachusetts in the sixteen thirties. By sixteen
seventy four, he'd lost two wives and a number of children.
But Elizabeth seemed like the perfect balm for those wounds.
She was smart, rugal, and a formidable presence, and both
of them were a bit more progressive than their neighbors.
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They were known to allow the local Native Americans to
drink in their tavern, which was a huge deal in
those days. The Native Americans were seen as agents of
the devil. They were the enemy who stood opposed to
the Puritan mission, and yet John and Elizabeth served them beer.
Hatred ran so hot that at one point someone took
them to court over it. The angry man Giles Corey,
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had a bit of a reputation for being a hothead, though.
Here's Emerson Baker. He had been accused of setting for
arson on the house of his neighbor, John Proctor, and
he had also been convicted really of manslaughter back in
the sixteen seventies, of beating his simple minded teenage servant
to within an inch of his life. And then the fellow,
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poor fellow dies several days later, and they say, well,
it isn't murder, but you know, okay, pfine, Pfine. Proctor, however,
won the case and business stayed brisk at their tavern,
always busy helping patrons there. Elizabeth needed help around the house,
so she hired a young local woman named Mary Warren.
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She had lost her entire family to tuberculosis years before,
so the proctors were all she had. That said, they
weren't exactly kind to her, which is why when rumors
of Annie Putnam's accusations reached Mary Warren's ears, she might
have seen an opportunity. On March twelve, Mary claimed to
see a specter floating through the house, which eventually landed
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on her lap. When she could make out a face,
she was shocked to see it had taken the form
of her employer, John Procter, The real man, however, was
not amused. He essentially told her to cut it out
and if she didn't, she'd receive a severe beating for
her behavior. Then she did stop for a while, but
when John left town a day or so later, her
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nightmarish visions miraculously returned, this time in the form of
a woman. It wasn't Elizabeth Proctor though. No this witch's
name was new to the growing list of the accused,
yet at the same time it felt like a natural fit.
Mary identified her attacker as none other than Martha Corey,
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Giles Corey's wife. To understand exactly why the people of
Salem Village might not like the Corries and Martha in particular,
we have to go back to the halfway Covenant. Membership
in the church in Puritan times was a huge deal.
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Only full fledged members could take communion and have their
children baptized, two key rights for Christians. But that level
of membership required standing in front of the entire congregation,
confessing your whole sinful life to them and then waiting
for their answer. It was strict then. As a result,
many churches were shrinking rather than growing. The halfway Covenant
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was supposed to change all of that. Instead of a
public confession, churches that adopted the more liberal Halfway Covenant
allowed prospective members to simply meet with their minister privately.
And here's the other important detail about membership. Once you
were a full member in one church, you could visit
any other and receive the same benefits you would back home,
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whether or not they were a halfway Covenant church. Here's
Emerson Baker again, the Corries used that loophole. Giles Corey
becomes a member of the Salem Town Church and even
though they say, basically despite his his reprobate past, he's
acknowledged his past as a center and we accept him
into our fellowship, into our covenant. So then imagine, here's
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this fellow who people know to be who he is,
and he's sitting right there and partaking of the Lord's
suffer with the other members of the Salem Village Church.
Because as a member of the Salem Town Church, you
can attend and you have full rights really to receive communion.
Oh really, isn't that interesting? This trophy hunting, social climbing
wife who claims she's a gospel woman, and look how
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she managed to get her husband, Giles Corey, arsonist, beater
of servants. We've managed to get him into the church.
Something's wrong here. Obviously they had the reasons for accusing
Martha Corey, but it certainly set a new precedent. This
was a full fledged member of the church. She was
part of the inner circle, one of their own, in
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a special position of respect, and by disregarding all of that,
they opened the door for similar accusations to be leveled
at other unlikely suspects. One of those was Rebecca Nurse.
Rebecca Nurse was older than middle age. That's Marylyn k Roach,
author and historian. She had a large family of grown
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children with grandchildren, so it's an extant family. That's not
a lot of death in infancy in her family. Her
husban than it's still alive, so she's not a widow.
Pretty much on her own. She has a good support network,
and she's a full member of the Salem Town Church.
She seems to be well respected, but she's accused. Rebecca
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was actually a sickly, nearly deaf, seventy one year old grandmother,
which sounds incredibly harmless, right, But she also had enough
social baggage to at least give the accusation some level
of credibility in their eye. If you think about it,
one of the first people they might attack would be
a woman like Rebecca Nurse who attends Salem Village But
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as a member of Salem Town Church, aren't we good
enough for you? Why not? Could it be the fact
that you and your husband a few years ago took
in a Quaker orphan when his parents died and they
were friends of the Nurses. Wow, we know your charitable
could Puritan godly folk, but but why why a Quaker child?
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Why not joined Salem Village Church? Why does your husband
friend sist nurs Why is he one of the leaders
of the faction that is trying to get Samuel Paris
thrown out his minister in Salem Village. So there with
Rebecca Nurse, even though she's a god fearing Puritan, there
are some questions about her orthodoxy. One more odd detail.
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During this new wave of accusations, when women like Elizabeth
Procter and Rebecca Nurse were being swept into the flood
that was washing over the community, a new unexpected accuser appeared.
Up until this point, all of the afflicted were young women,
girls really, ranging from nine to sixteen. But it was
in the midst of this new way that twelve year
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old Annie Putnam's own mother and Putnam Senior, began to
report her own torment at the hands of these witches.
And Putnam wasn't a girl. She was a thirty year
old mother, pregnant with another child, and a well respected
member of the Putnam family. So, as you can imagine,
the gathering that Sunday in the meeting house for a
sermon by guest sister Dao Dat Lawson, was quite the
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tense moment. Lawson, if you remember, was one of the
former ministers of Salem Village, so everyone knew him. Oh,
and the Putnams were there, and so was Martha Corey.
Lawson had barely managed to start his sermon before all
hell broke loose. The afflicted girls fell to the floor
as he was preaching, their bodies twisting and writhing as
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they cried out in pain. Abigail Williams pointed up into
the empty air above their heads and claimed to see
Martha Corey flying around the room. And while Martha Corey
spoke up and denied all of it, her fate seemed
to be sealed. Martha was arrested the following day, and
Rebecca Nurse was brought in three days later. Their examination
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was much like you might expect. Hawthorne and Corwin were
among the presiding magistrates, and they returned to their obsession
with the Devil's Book. Martha Corey was indignant what book?
She spat back at them. Where should I have seen
a book? I showed these girls none, nor have none,
nor brought none. But defending herself wasn't the best thing
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to help her case. The judges saw her as too
confident and forward, and that she was stepping out of line.
Immediately after the examination, she was carted off to the
Salem jail to wait for her official trial. Rebecca Nurse
experienced a lot of the same treatment during her examination.
She professed her innocence, of course, but in the middle
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of it, Anne Putnam Senior started shouting at her, accusing
her of doing the work of the devil. Anne said
that Rebecca had tried to get her to sign the
mysterious read book and had sent her spirit to attack
her more than once. Then she went stiff and had
to be carried from the room by her husband. Paris
must have found himself in quite a difficult place. On
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one hand, the whole idea behind full membership in the
church was that these were the elect of God, the
chosen ones, the best of the best, and the truest
of true. They had passed through the fire of communal
judgment and reached the other side safely. And yet members
of the church were in jail. Now, how could he
explain that? How could his theology keep pace with the
(32:13):
events that were unfolding? And then it struck him, even
among the twelve Disciples of Jesus there had been one
secret agent, Judas, who had been working with the devil.
Speaking from the pulpit the following Sunday, he explained how
tricky this all was to his parishioners. If it could
happen to Jesus, he said, then perhaps even someone like
(32:35):
Rebecca Nurse could be more than she appears. Have I
not chosen you? Twelve Paris read aloud from the Book
of John, and one of you is a devil. It
wasn't just one, though, Tituba had told the magistrates that
(32:57):
she'd seen nine marks in the devil's book Buck, so
at the moment the village was a little short of suspects.
The first five were now in jail, along with Sarah
Goods five year old daughter Dorothy, But that had left
the community on edge. How could they look at any
of their neighbors without wondering are they a witch? As well?
(33:18):
The spotlight briefly drifted over towards the two younger sisters
of Rebecca Nurse. One of them, Sarah Klois, had actually
been into gathering that Sunday in the meeting house for
the sermon by Reverend Paris, and when he stated how
possible it was for someone as devout as Rebecca to
be an agent of the devil, Sarah had stormed out
and discussed to the rest of those in the room,
(33:39):
though it was difficult to not see it as the
flight of a guilty woman. Another person under scrutiny was
Elizabeth Procter's husband John. The day after the examination of
Rebecca Nurse, John encountered Samuel Sibley, husband of the woman
who had baked the witch cake in the Paris home
weeks before. John casually asked Samuel how things were going
(33:59):
in village, and Sibley replied very bad. Proctor told Sibley
that he was on his way to pick up his
servant Mary Warren, and used a few choice words about
her in connection to the events that were unfolding. I'd
rather given up money than get her involved in these examinations,
he said, and then added that he should just beat
(34:20):
the devil out of her. Sibley raised an eyebrow. First
Proctor's words had been violent and in discreet, referring to
the young woman as a jade, a seventeenth century term
for a worn out horse, but there was also the
apparent dismissal of the seriousness of the examinations. John Proctor
didn't seem happy that they were taking place. Samuel Sibley
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couldn't help but wonder why. Proctor picked up Mary Warren
a short while later and then carted her back home,
where he beat her for speaking out when he wasn't
physically abusing her. She convulsed and writhed under the torment
of an invisible attacker, but John Procter wasn't pleased with
what he perceived to be an act. He told her
(35:03):
that if she somehow managed to roll herself into the fire,
he wouldn't try to stop her. A few days later,
on April second, Mary made her way back into town.
Her fits had miraculously stopped, more than likely thanks to
the threats of violence from John Proctor, but she chose
to give credit to God. She could apparently write well
(35:24):
enough that she'd penned a request for prayers of gratitude
and then tacked it to the notice board of the
meeting house. The following day, Samuel Parris stood before his
congregation and read the note aloud, but rather than being thankful,
he expressed doubt. The afflicted girls had told everyone that
the devil promised to end their pain if they would
only switch sides and join him in his mission to
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destroy the community. If Mary no longer suffered, he told them,
it might not be cause for celebration soon enough, though
there were other things for the community to talk about.
Former say and village minister Daodete Lawson had been writing
down his account of the past two months and then
hurried to get it published. His ten page pamphlet was
(36:09):
given the incredibly long title of A Brief and True
Narrative of some remarkable passages relating to Sundry Persons afflicted
by witchcraft at Salem Village. It's a mouthful, I know,
but it also spread the word about what had been happening,
casting the net over a wider area and snagging more
and more attention for the trials. And while I'm sure
(36:31):
the members of the Governor's Council of Assistants had heard
the news of the Salem events weeks earlier, this was
the nudge they needed to take action, and they committed
to attend the next examination to take place. For Hawthorne
and Corwin, this was the legitimacy they've been looking for.
Real representatives from Boston, from the Governor himself were about
(36:52):
to travel north and sit among them and hear for
themselves what was going on. Emboldened and seeing a light
at the end of the tunnel, Hawthorne issued the arrest
warrants for two more suspects, Elizabeth Procter and Sarah Klois.
But two more arrests weren't going to satisfy a community
that was becoming more and more hungry to find all
(37:13):
the witches in their midst. In the days leading up
to the examinations of Procter and Klois, the Putnam women,
both Anne Senior and her daughter Annie, claimed that John
Procter's invisible form attacked them. Tituba's husband, A man that
all the records simply referred to as John Indian, claimed
that he was attacked as well. But it was Abigail Williams,
(37:35):
niece of Samuel Parris, who painted the most disturbing picture
of all. According to her, a group of witches invaded
her uncle's parsonage and held a devil's supper, complete with
wine and red bread. It was an imitation of the
Christian sacrament of Communion, and it was a slap in
the face of the devout Puritans who felt threatened. Worse yet, though,
(37:58):
was the number of witches Abigail claimed to have seen
in the house. According to her, it wasn't just the
seven identified suspects, or even the full nine they had
been told of. No, she said this gathering was much larger.
There were, by her account, at least forty witches inside
the Paris home that night. Thankfully, there was hope on
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the horizon. The highest authorities in the land had arrived
in Salem Village to help. Finally there would be justice.
The governor himself, Simon Bradstreet, didn't make the trip north.
The man was eight years old and the travel just
(38:41):
wasn't something he was up for, which was a shame.
Brad Street had been involved in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
since it was nothing more than an idea on paper,
and had been on that first expedition that founded the
city of Boston. He was a powerful figure and his
absence would be felt. In his place, Deputy Governor Thomas
(39:01):
Danforth was sent along with four assistants. They were important guests,
so the examinations were moved to a more important location,
Salem Town. But rather than sit up front and serve
as judges, the five men simply took seats in the
crowd and observed. Hawthorne and the others must have felt
awkward about that. They began by speaking with some of
(39:23):
the victims, including John Indian and Mary Walcott, the sixteen
year old daughter of a local militia captain. She'd been
living with the Putnam's, who were her cousins, and that
put her in the middle of a household under fire
by the evil forces that were at work. Elizabeth Hubbard
and Abigail Williams, two of the original accusers, also added
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their own stories, tales of that red Devil's book, of
invisible attackers and of painful torture. Some of the accusers
actually fell to the floor in fits of pain, while
others found they couldn't speak at all. It became so
tense in the room that Sarah Klois actually fainted. John
Indian claimed that Elizabeth Procter had come to him and
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asked him to sign the Devil's book. John Procter, sitting
in the crowd, stood up and shouted that if he
got his hands on John Indian, he would beat the
devil out of the slave. John, as we've seen so far,
had an anger management problem, and it was beginning to
get noticed. When Elizabeth Procter finally had a chance to
(40:26):
speak for herself, she didn't face the judges or even
the visitors from Boston. Instead, she faced the small group
of accusers and warned them that lying before God was
much worse than lying before the court. Judgment awaited them,
she said, and they should correct their behavior instead. Many
of the accusers began to shout out that John Procter
(40:48):
was attacking them. Almost immediately, John was grabbed from his
seat in the crowd and dragged forward to stand before
the judges. When they asked him what he had to
say for himself, Procter shook his head. I know not,
he replied, I am innocent. As a test, they asked
him to recite the Lord's Prayer, believing that no which
(41:09):
would ever be able to say it perfectly from memory.
John was recorded as saying hollowed be thy name rather
than hellowed, something that could have been a slip of
the tongue or a product of a noisy room, but
it was enough to draw suspicion from the magistrates. Order dissolved.
In the room, Abigail Williams claimed to see John Proctor
(41:30):
attacking a woman named Sarah Biber, and in response, Biber
fell to the floor and began to convulse. Annie Putnam
backed away from an invisible Elizabeth Procter, who she said
was trying to hit her, and then fought back by
swinging her fist at the empty air. Halfway through the punch,
her arms stopped, as if someone or something had repelled
(41:51):
the blow. Salem town Minister John Higginson shouted for silence
and then uttered a loud and ominous prayer over the
room full of people. When he was done, a team
of constables swept in and led each of the accused
out of the room and off to jail. And just
like that, the madness was over. Mary Warren, that willful
(42:13):
servant girl who suffered under the abusive reign of the Proctors,
left Salem Town and headed straight back to the Procter farm.
Once there, she gathered all of the children together to
share the news. News that would have been horrible for
them to hear, but I have to imagine she took
a lot of joy in sharing with them. Your parents
(42:34):
will not be returning home tonight, she told them, and
I don't know when they will. That's it for this
week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor
break for a preview of what's in store for next week.
Next time, on Unobscured, Standing before the Magistrates, Abigail Hobbes
(42:59):
spoke before they could ask her any questions. I will
speak the truth, she said. I have seen sights and
have been scared. I have been very wicked. I hope
I shall be better if God will help me. What
sites did you see? Hawthorne asked, I have seen dogs
and many creatures. What dogs do you mean, Hawthorne asked,
(43:24):
ordinary dogs. Abigail shook her head, I mean the devil.
The magistrates pressed on where had she seen them? They asked,
Abigail replied that her encounter had taken place in the
woods in the middle of the day years ago, back
when she lived at Casco Bay. That was where she'd
(43:44):
put her hand on his book. When they carried her
off to jail a short while later. The name Cascoe
Bay still hung in the air like a neon sign,
pointing at the danger that lurked the north. But Abigail
had also made it clear that it was spreading health
and might already be among them. She claimed that a
shape shifting man had visited her at her home here
(44:07):
in Topsfield. He had alternated between the form of a cat,
a dog, and a black man with a black hat,
and this man, she claimed, had offered her fine clothes
and the power to harm others in town, a power
that she had readily accepted. Unobscured was created and written
(45:24):
by me Aaron Mackey 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.
(45:46):
Until next time, Thanks for listening,
If what happened in the meeting house on the first
day of examinations was an explosion, the after shock echoed
far and wide. In fact, a number of reverberations can
still be found in the pages of history. That evening,
the three women were carted off to jail where they
could be held for further questioning and an actual trial.
(00:33):
Sarah Osburne and Tituba were taken to the Salem jail,
while Sarah Good was transported to the nearby Ipswich Jail,
where Constable Joseph Herrick, a relative of hers, could keep
an eye on her. After the magistrates and accused left
the meeting house, though, that's when the shock waves began
to spread. The place had been packed. Some estimates placed
(00:57):
the crowd at nearly six d people, more than the
real population of Salem Village itself. Those people left for
homes and taverns, taking the news of what they had
witnessed out into the world, and news, as we all know,
has a way of spreading like a wildfire. Some of
them stayed behind, though a small group of Salem village
(01:19):
men remained in the meeting house to discuss the matter
in a more official capacity. Among them were two Putnam's,
the uncle and cousin of Thomas Jr. Father of one
of the afflicted, and they decided to send these two
men south to Boston for help. The most significant gathering
happened over at the home of Dr William Griggs. He
(01:39):
was the closest thing the village had to a medical doctor,
and was a good friend of the Reverend Samuel Paris.
He was a devout Puritan, an educated man, and a
rational thinker, but he also suspected something less natural was
behind the events of the past few days. He and
a number of neighbors huddled together that evening inside griggs
(02:00):
house to discuss what they had learned. They arrived at
the meeting house that day believing that there might be
three witches in Salem Village, and left with news that
there were in fact five of them. Three were in custody, sure,
but there were still two at large, hiding in plain
sight and continuing their dark, dangerous attacks. Those attacks were
(02:22):
still hitting home too, quite literally. Living in the home
of William Griggs was his niece, Elizabeth Hubbard, who was
one of the four girls making all of the accusations.
So while the gathering was mostly a moment for everyone
to process and regroup. They were also watching over her,
making sure the witches left her alone. When the attacks
(02:43):
began again, there were fresh eyes packed inside the house
to witness it. This time, Elizabeth began to cry out
in pain. She claimed someone invisible was pinching and stabbing
at her with the sharp object. Everyone could see it too.
The girl was writhing in pain and flinching away from
an unseen attacker. It must have been horrifying to watch.
(03:06):
And then the girl froze and pointed toward the table
everyone had gathered around. There, she shouted, there stands Sarah Good.
Elizabeth described how the invisible witch was standing naked on
the table. Her feet and legs were bare, as was
her chest. Oh, nasty slut, the girl cried out. If
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I had something, I would kill you. Samuel Sibley was
seated at the table and watched it all in horror.
His wife was Mary Sibley, the woman who had instructed
Tituba and John Indian on how to make the witch
cake just days before. Maybe he felt a need to
atone for his wife's sins, or perhaps he was just
so gripped with fear that he simply fell in line.
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Whatever the reason was, he stood up and swung his
walking stick at the empty air above the table. You
have hit her right across the back, Elizabeth declared, you
have almost killed her. Miles away in Ipswich, unaware of
what was transpiring inside the Grigs home, one of the
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guards standing outside Joseph Herrick's barn glanced inside the check
on Sarah Good and felt the hair on the back
of his neck. Stand up. She was gone, vanished into
the night, as if she had magically melted into the air,
and all that was left of her or her shoes
and her stockings. When they found her the next morning,
(04:32):
everyone held their breath. There was blood on her arm,
as if she had been struck. This is unobscured. I'm
Aaron Manky. The night of the gathering at Dr William
(05:18):
Griggs house, that moment of reflection and panic. After a
day of examinations inside the meeting house, everyone dispersed to
go home. Two of those men were William Allen and
John Hughes, who lived in the same direction. They bundled
up against the cold and then walked off into the
night down the road. After a few minutes of brisk,
(05:40):
silent walking. Both of the men claimed they heard a
noise ahead of them down the road. It wasn't the
sound they could identify, and it kept repeating itself over
and over, but they needed to get home, so they
pressed on. That didn't mean it was easy, though. Soon
a dark shape began to materialize in the darkness ahead.
(06:00):
They slowed their pace, believing there was some sort of
animal hunched over beside the road. A moment later, that
shape exploded upward, and as it did, it unraveled into
the forms of three people women. If the men had
to guess, they vanished almost as quickly as they had appeared.
But as they did, both men were certain they recognized
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all three of them, Sarah Good, Sarah Osburne, and Tituba.
Sarah Good, however, was miles away in an Ipswich jail
along with her baby. Actually that jail was the barn
belonging to her relative Joseph Herrick and his brother Zachariah,
and there was a bit of irony in her new situation. Remember,
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Sarah and William Good weren't doing so well financially. They've
lost all of their land and had no way to
provide for themselves. Life was hard for them, to say
the least. Two years prior to the events of six two,
Sarah had approached Zachariah and asked if she and her daughter,
Doroth the might sleep in the barn for a few nights.
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Sarah's sister had married into the Herrick family many years before,
and I have to imagine she felt that if anyone
was going to say yes, it would be the Herrick brothers. Instead,
they turned her away. That's when things got weird. Sarah,
known around the village to be a grumbler and all
around bitter woman, told Herrick that his heartlessness would cost
(07:25):
him dearly. Perhaps she hinted one of his best cows
might suffer. Zachariah's teenage sons escorted Sarah off their property,
and a short time later two of Herrick's best cows disappeared.
This night, though the Herricks had no choice. Joseph was
a constable for Salem and had been instructed to bring
(07:47):
Sarah Good and her infant back to his farm, where
she would be locked in the barn overnight. As the
gathering at Dr Grigg's house took place, complete with Elizabeth
Hubbard's claim of an invisible Sarah Good. The Herrick settled
in for what they assumed would be a calm, quiet night,
but something went wrong. Sarah Good escaped. For whatever reason,
(08:10):
she slipped out of her shoes and stockings and carried
her infant out into the cold night air. Most historians
think that she was out looking for a place to hide,
but walking barefoot through the cold, snow and mud of
early March would have been painful. The guards noticed she
was gone, but by the time they summoned the courage
to inform Joseph Herrick, the sun had already come up
(08:32):
and Sarah Good had returned to her makeshift prison cell.
Joseph checked on her, found her arm covered in blood,
and probably wondered aloud about what the woman had done
to herself, And then he began his day. That new
day came with new news. Word reached Herrick about the
events at Dr Grigg's house the night before, and of
(08:52):
the appearance of Sarah Good without her shoes and stockings,
and of how Samuel Sibley had struck her with his
walking stick. And I realize we look back on this
today with a bit of incredulity, But put yourself in
the mindset of a superstitious, fearful puritan in the middle
of a community at the beginning of a witch hunt.
This was a red flag and a sure sign that
(09:14):
something evil was at work. Most people probably trying to
get on with their normal lives that morning. There was
always a lot to do to make sure your family
and livestock were taken care of, after all, but magistrates
John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin had servants for all of that. Instead,
they paid a visit to the Salem Town Jail. They
(09:34):
had some questions for one of the prisoners. Here's Pulitzer
Prize winning author Stacy Chief. The conditions in the jail
were really deplorable. New England jails had not been built
for long term stays. This was a culture that essentially
dealt with malefactors quickly and effectively. No one was really
mental to live in a jail the way these people
ended up staying in these jails. The Salem jail is
(09:55):
described as a suburb of Hell, and from the Boston
jail was described as a grave for the living. So
I think there you have it. Between the two, their
tiny spaces unventilated. An earlier prisoner had talked about the
fact that he couldn't breathe for the pestiferous stink. As
he puts it, the air is fitted their armies of life.
And to add insult to injury, in colonial New England,
(10:16):
you paid for your keep in jail, So you paid
for your straw, you paid for your food, and you
paid for your shackles. This was the place Tituba found
herself the night after her examination in the meeting house.
She probably awoke the next morning full of uncertainty and fear.
Would they hang her without a trial? Would they drag
her back for more questions. Instead, Hawthorne and Corwin visited
(10:40):
her and began a new interrogation behind the closed doors
of the jail, But the magistrates were in for a
shock when they arrived. Titsuba began to writhe and convulse
in much the same way the four girls had done
so in front of everyone in the meeting house the
day before. When she could speak, she blamed the attacks
on Good and Osbourne, which gave Hawthorne an idea they
(11:04):
now had a direct line to the truth. They asked
Tituba about how the witches were attacking her, and she
described it in detail. Then, almost as an assigne, she
mentioned that the tall man had urged her to write
in his book, which struck a chord with the two men.
What book, they asked, Was it big or small? Titsiba
(11:28):
shook her head. He did not show it to me,
she replied, but had it in his pocket. After that,
the questions flowed like a river, and Titchiba did her
best to keep up with the current. Did he make
you sign it? No, my mistress called me from another room.
What did he say you needed to do with the book?
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He told me to sign my name in it, she said,
And did you do that? They asked, yes. One time
I made a mark in the book with a red ink,
red like blood. Did he take that red ink from
your own body? No, but he said he would get
it out of me the next time he visited. And
(12:08):
then the magistrates dug deeper. They believe that Tituba had
seen the Devil's Book, his tool for recruiting humans into
his evil mission among them. So he asked about that.
Did you see any other marks in this book? They asked, yes,
she said, a great many, some in red, some in yellow.
(12:29):
He held it wide open and showed me a great
many marks in it? What names were in the book,
they asked? Did he tell you Good and Osbourne? She answered,
but they were more I couldn't read. Hawthorne and Corwin
must have felt a chill run down their spines. More
(12:50):
names meant more witches. They had already found three, which
felt overwhelming as it was, But now they had learned
that there were more among them. They aid, it wasn't
an insurmountable number. How many marks do you think there were,
they asked her. Tituba looked at them both with fear
in her eyes. Perhaps she was afraid of her current circumstances,
(13:13):
or maybe she was afraid of what her answer might mean.
I imagine she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Then finally she answered them. Nine, she said, there were
nine marks. Hawthorne and Corwin were stunned. They had believed
(13:37):
all of the witches affecting the girls had been identified
and captured, and yet here was a frightening new revelation.
There were nine names in the book, Nine witches to
torment them, Nine individuals who had signed on to help
the devil destroy their great Puritan experiment in the New World.
Of course, they wanted to know who those other witches were,
(13:59):
and they asked it, but to name them she shook
her head, though she claimed they had only made marks
rather than writing their own names down, so she didn't
know who they were. But there's something else going on
here that needs to be pointed out. You see, Puritans
were absolutely obsessed with books. Jane Kaminsky, Professor of American
(14:19):
History at Harvard University. I did a piece of work
at one point that I never published, about the image
of the Devil's book in the Salem, which trials looking
at the book trades in New England at the time.
You know, what does it look like. Oh, it's small
and they hide in it's red, it's not read. This
is a moment in the late sixteen eighties and early
(14:42):
sixteen nineties where small secular print materials, you know, histories, geographies, satires,
joke books, playing cards are coming into the bookstores and
the ports cities. So yeah, this idea of a book
used by the devil to establish contracts with human helpers
(15:03):
was a big deal. It spoke to the very nature
of Puritans as book people. Reading was central to their faith,
reading the Bible, reading sermon notes, reading educational books, and
while most of the women in Salem were unable to write,
they could certainly read. Here's Kaminski again. Women in Puritan
New England have an unusually high level of reading literacy
(15:29):
because it's thought to be so important for everybody to
be able to read the Bible, and for mothers to
be able to read the Bible to their children. But
they have a pretty low level of what's called sign literacy.
So she can sign her name. She has some rudimentary
written literacy, but probably not the fluency to write an
entire document. The last detail these questions about the Devil's
(15:51):
Book revealed to us is the seriousness of the accusations
to a Puritan. Membership in the church was about confession.
She or the Halfway Covenant loosened those requirements a bit,
But whether you were confessing your sins and story to
a minister in private or while standing in front of
the entire congregation, you knew the final step was to
(16:11):
sign a covenant with your church. So the Devil's Book
was meant to be a shadow of all of that,
the dark opposite to the light of God. If the
Puritans believe that you were a witch, it just made
sense that you had also signed a covenant with the devil.
You had switched sides after all. Now, one of the
books that would have been familiar to Hawthorne and Corwin
(16:34):
was a sixty seven witchcraft reference work called Guide to
Grand Jury Men. It offered a lot of advice to
help the authorities properly examine accused witches, and one of
those pieces of advice was that someone of spiritual authority
must help the accused prepare for their examination. For Tituba,
that person had to have been her master, the Reverend
(16:56):
Samuel Paris. It would be a fair guest to assume
that preparing Tituba involved asking her questions and testing her
knowledge of the Bible, but not for Paris. The day
before her examination, he chose instead to simply beat her.
It wasn't justified, of course, but I have to wonder
if he did it out of anger over the witch
(17:17):
cake incidents and a bit of urgency from her living
under his roof and responsibility. So Paris beat her, Perhaps
that explains her wild stories the next day in the
meeting house, where she accused Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne
of being in league with the Devil. It certainly explains
her eagerness to please, to paint elaborate pictures full of rich,
(17:38):
powerful detail. He had asked for her cooperation at the
end of a painful switch, and Titsuba clearly delivered. I
think it's safe to say that we can look back
today on the interrogation and see the men essentially leading
the witness. They never said did you experience anything odd
the other day? Instead they asked estions out of the blue,
(18:01):
like was there a book and why did you sign it? Tituba,
female heathen slave, the lowest of the low in their society,
was already in jail. So she would have done anything
or said anything to prevent execution. Any of us would have.
And you can see them guide her answers over time.
(18:22):
First she never saw the book, and then the tall
man showed it to her. That evolved into holding it
and then reading it. It wasn't that she was slowly
remembering more and more detail. It's that she was paying attention,
listening to Hawthorne and Corwin as if her life depended
on it, and giving them the answers they were looking for.
Emerson Baker, one of our guest historians throughout this season,
(18:45):
of Unobscured discusses this in his book A Storm of
Witchcraft One wonders. He wrote, what would have happened had
Paris and the judges not coerced Tituba into confessing the
Salem witchcraft outbreak might conceivably have been limited to three people,
a fairly typical case of no particular note, and certainly
(19:06):
not a pivotal moment in American history. But that's not
what they did. Instead, they approached a volatile situation and
steered it in a different and arguably worse direction. It
would be the first of many wrong turns that would
get them lost in a dark forest of fear and panic.
Peace it seems would be a lot more difficult to
(19:29):
track down. At this point, It might be helpful to
step back and ask the question why why did the
people of Salem village believe the devil had singled them
out and made them the focus of his evil mock nations?
And the answer comes back to us from that vision
of Salem being a city on the hill. Historian Richard Trask,
(19:54):
the whole purpose of it was to bring down the
Puritan commonwealth of Massachuset sits they looked at themselves as
being the elect of God. The new Israelites of old,
who were establishing a city upon the hill. The devil
obviously would want to combat that type of thing, and
that's why they believe that the devil was coming to
(20:17):
Salem Village into all of mass Bay to bring God's
Kingdom on Earth down. To that end, Samuel Paris called
on all of Salem Village to fast and pray. He
held private gatherings at his house of the most devout
among them, and other neighboring ministers joined them, including John
Hale from Beverly. Even Paris's daughter Betty and her cousin Abigail,
(20:41):
the two original afflicted girls who had started everything, joined
them for these prayer meetings. Not long after, though, Paris
had Betty sent to Salem Town to stay at the
home of a distant relative named Stephen Sewell. Betty was
only nine years old, and while her affliction didn't stop
right away, she does seem to vanish from the court
(21:01):
documents after this. Some historians think it was a rare
moment of sanity when the community honored the tradition of
only allowing adults to testify. After Betty, Paris was moved
to a safe home in Salem Town. The three accused
witches were transferred to a jail in Boston, where they
would await a full criminal trial. The three remaining afflicted
(21:23):
girls seemed to become more calm, but then on March three,
Annie Putnam claimed she was tormented yet again, and this
time the attackers were new to her. One, she said
was a woman she couldn't see clearly, but the other
was clear. She claimed it was Dorothy Good, the five
(21:43):
year old daughter of Sarah Good. The little girl, according
to Annie Putnam, was holding the Devil's Book out to
her and demanding she signed it. Sadly, the people around
her took her seriously. A week later, she managed to
put a name to that other attacker, Elizabeth Procter. Elizabeth
(22:05):
was the forty one year old mother of five children
and pregnant with her sixth. She and her husband, John
Procter owned a tavern north of the village at the
intersection of two busy roads. They were part of the
wealthy Procter family, members of the church, and owners of
a lot of land. There was a lot to respect
about Elizabeth, but there were other details about her that
(22:28):
might have made her an easy person to accuse of witchcraft.
The biggest of those was that her grandmother, goody Bert's
had been accused and tried for witchcraft roughly three decades earlier.
The assumption was that if wealth and godliness could run
in families, then so too could allegiance to the devil.
Her husband, John was twenty years older than her and
(22:50):
had inherited all of his land from his parents, who
had moved to Massachusetts in the sixteen thirties. By sixteen
seventy four, he'd lost two wives and a number of children.
But Elizabeth seemed like the perfect balm for those wounds.
She was smart, rugal, and a formidable presence, and both
of them were a bit more progressive than their neighbors.
(23:12):
They were known to allow the local Native Americans to
drink in their tavern, which was a huge deal in
those days. The Native Americans were seen as agents of
the devil. They were the enemy who stood opposed to
the Puritan mission, and yet John and Elizabeth served them beer.
Hatred ran so hot that at one point someone took
them to court over it. The angry man Giles Corey,
(23:34):
had a bit of a reputation for being a hothead, though.
Here's Emerson Baker. He had been accused of setting for
arson on the house of his neighbor, John Proctor, and
he had also been convicted really of manslaughter back in
the sixteen seventies, of beating his simple minded teenage servant
to within an inch of his life. And then the fellow,
(23:55):
poor fellow dies several days later, and they say, well,
it isn't murder, but you know, okay, pfine, Pfine. Proctor, however,
won the case and business stayed brisk at their tavern,
always busy helping patrons there. Elizabeth needed help around the house,
so she hired a young local woman named Mary Warren.
(24:17):
She had lost her entire family to tuberculosis years before,
so the proctors were all she had. That said, they
weren't exactly kind to her, which is why when rumors
of Annie Putnam's accusations reached Mary Warren's ears, she might
have seen an opportunity. On March twelve, Mary claimed to
see a specter floating through the house, which eventually landed
(24:39):
on her lap. When she could make out a face,
she was shocked to see it had taken the form
of her employer, John Procter, The real man, however, was
not amused. He essentially told her to cut it out
and if she didn't, she'd receive a severe beating for
her behavior. Then she did stop for a while, but
when John left town a day or so later, her
(25:01):
nightmarish visions miraculously returned, this time in the form of
a woman. It wasn't Elizabeth Proctor though. No this witch's
name was new to the growing list of the accused,
yet at the same time it felt like a natural fit.
Mary identified her attacker as none other than Martha Corey,
(25:21):
Giles Corey's wife. To understand exactly why the people of
Salem Village might not like the Corries and Martha in particular,
we have to go back to the halfway Covenant. Membership
in the church in Puritan times was a huge deal.
(25:44):
Only full fledged members could take communion and have their
children baptized, two key rights for Christians. But that level
of membership required standing in front of the entire congregation,
confessing your whole sinful life to them and then waiting
for their answer. It was strict then. As a result,
many churches were shrinking rather than growing. The halfway Covenant
(26:07):
was supposed to change all of that. Instead of a
public confession, churches that adopted the more liberal Halfway Covenant
allowed prospective members to simply meet with their minister privately.
And here's the other important detail about membership. Once you
were a full member in one church, you could visit
any other and receive the same benefits you would back home,
(26:27):
whether or not they were a halfway Covenant church. Here's
Emerson Baker again, the Corries used that loophole. Giles Corey
becomes a member of the Salem Town Church and even
though they say, basically despite his his reprobate past, he's
acknowledged his past as a center and we accept him
into our fellowship, into our covenant. So then imagine, here's
(26:48):
this fellow who people know to be who he is,
and he's sitting right there and partaking of the Lord's
suffer with the other members of the Salem Village Church.
Because as a member of the Salem Town Church, you
can attend and you have full rights really to receive communion.
Oh really, isn't that interesting? This trophy hunting, social climbing
wife who claims she's a gospel woman, and look how
(27:10):
she managed to get her husband, Giles Corey, arsonist, beater
of servants. We've managed to get him into the church.
Something's wrong here. Obviously they had the reasons for accusing
Martha Corey, but it certainly set a new precedent. This
was a full fledged member of the church. She was
part of the inner circle, one of their own, in
(27:31):
a special position of respect, and by disregarding all of that,
they opened the door for similar accusations to be leveled
at other unlikely suspects. One of those was Rebecca Nurse.
Rebecca Nurse was older than middle age. That's Marylyn k Roach,
author and historian. She had a large family of grown
(27:52):
children with grandchildren, so it's an extant family. That's not
a lot of death in infancy in her family. Her
husban than it's still alive, so she's not a widow.
Pretty much on her own. She has a good support network,
and she's a full member of the Salem Town Church.
She seems to be well respected, but she's accused. Rebecca
(28:14):
was actually a sickly, nearly deaf, seventy one year old grandmother,
which sounds incredibly harmless, right, But she also had enough
social baggage to at least give the accusation some level
of credibility in their eye. If you think about it,
one of the first people they might attack would be
a woman like Rebecca Nurse who attends Salem Village But
(28:34):
as a member of Salem Town Church, aren't we good
enough for you? Why not? Could it be the fact
that you and your husband a few years ago took
in a Quaker orphan when his parents died and they
were friends of the Nurses. Wow, we know your charitable
could Puritan godly folk, but but why why a Quaker child?
(28:55):
Why not joined Salem Village Church? Why does your husband
friend sist nurs Why is he one of the leaders
of the faction that is trying to get Samuel Paris
thrown out his minister in Salem Village. So there with
Rebecca Nurse, even though she's a god fearing Puritan, there
are some questions about her orthodoxy. One more odd detail.
(29:17):
During this new wave of accusations, when women like Elizabeth
Procter and Rebecca Nurse were being swept into the flood
that was washing over the community, a new unexpected accuser appeared.
Up until this point, all of the afflicted were young women,
girls really, ranging from nine to sixteen. But it was
in the midst of this new way that twelve year
(29:38):
old Annie Putnam's own mother and Putnam Senior, began to
report her own torment at the hands of these witches.
And Putnam wasn't a girl. She was a thirty year
old mother, pregnant with another child, and a well respected
member of the Putnam family. So, as you can imagine,
the gathering that Sunday in the meeting house for a
sermon by guest sister Dao Dat Lawson, was quite the
(30:02):
tense moment. Lawson, if you remember, was one of the
former ministers of Salem Village, so everyone knew him. Oh,
and the Putnams were there, and so was Martha Corey.
Lawson had barely managed to start his sermon before all
hell broke loose. The afflicted girls fell to the floor
as he was preaching, their bodies twisting and writhing as
(30:23):
they cried out in pain. Abigail Williams pointed up into
the empty air above their heads and claimed to see
Martha Corey flying around the room. And while Martha Corey
spoke up and denied all of it, her fate seemed
to be sealed. Martha was arrested the following day, and
Rebecca Nurse was brought in three days later. Their examination
(30:46):
was much like you might expect. Hawthorne and Corwin were
among the presiding magistrates, and they returned to their obsession
with the Devil's Book. Martha Corey was indignant what book?
She spat back at them. Where should I have seen
a book? I showed these girls none, nor have none,
nor brought none. But defending herself wasn't the best thing
(31:08):
to help her case. The judges saw her as too
confident and forward, and that she was stepping out of line.
Immediately after the examination, she was carted off to the
Salem jail to wait for her official trial. Rebecca Nurse
experienced a lot of the same treatment during her examination.
She professed her innocence, of course, but in the middle
(31:29):
of it, Anne Putnam Senior started shouting at her, accusing
her of doing the work of the devil. Anne said
that Rebecca had tried to get her to sign the
mysterious read book and had sent her spirit to attack
her more than once. Then she went stiff and had
to be carried from the room by her husband. Paris
must have found himself in quite a difficult place. On
(31:51):
one hand, the whole idea behind full membership in the
church was that these were the elect of God, the
chosen ones, the best of the best, and the truest
of true. They had passed through the fire of communal
judgment and reached the other side safely. And yet members
of the church were in jail. Now, how could he
explain that? How could his theology keep pace with the
(32:13):
events that were unfolding? And then it struck him, even
among the twelve Disciples of Jesus there had been one
secret agent, Judas, who had been working with the devil.
Speaking from the pulpit the following Sunday, he explained how
tricky this all was to his parishioners. If it could
happen to Jesus, he said, then perhaps even someone like
(32:35):
Rebecca Nurse could be more than she appears. Have I
not chosen you? Twelve Paris read aloud from the Book
of John, and one of you is a devil. It
wasn't just one, though, Tituba had told the magistrates that
(32:57):
she'd seen nine marks in the devil's book Buck, so
at the moment the village was a little short of suspects.
The first five were now in jail, along with Sarah
Goods five year old daughter Dorothy, But that had left
the community on edge. How could they look at any
of their neighbors without wondering are they a witch? As well?
(33:18):
The spotlight briefly drifted over towards the two younger sisters
of Rebecca Nurse. One of them, Sarah Klois, had actually
been into gathering that Sunday in the meeting house for
the sermon by Reverend Paris, and when he stated how
possible it was for someone as devout as Rebecca to
be an agent of the devil, Sarah had stormed out
and discussed to the rest of those in the room,
(33:39):
though it was difficult to not see it as the
flight of a guilty woman. Another person under scrutiny was
Elizabeth Procter's husband John. The day after the examination of
Rebecca Nurse, John encountered Samuel Sibley, husband of the woman
who had baked the witch cake in the Paris home
weeks before. John casually asked Samuel how things were going
(33:59):
in village, and Sibley replied very bad. Proctor told Sibley
that he was on his way to pick up his
servant Mary Warren, and used a few choice words about
her in connection to the events that were unfolding. I'd
rather given up money than get her involved in these examinations,
he said, and then added that he should just beat
(34:20):
the devil out of her. Sibley raised an eyebrow. First
Proctor's words had been violent and in discreet, referring to
the young woman as a jade, a seventeenth century term
for a worn out horse, but there was also the
apparent dismissal of the seriousness of the examinations. John Proctor
didn't seem happy that they were taking place. Samuel Sibley
(34:43):
couldn't help but wonder why. Proctor picked up Mary Warren
a short while later and then carted her back home,
where he beat her for speaking out when he wasn't
physically abusing her. She convulsed and writhed under the torment
of an invisible attacker, but John Procter wasn't pleased with
what he perceived to be an act. He told her
(35:03):
that if she somehow managed to roll herself into the fire,
he wouldn't try to stop her. A few days later,
on April second, Mary made her way back into town.
Her fits had miraculously stopped, more than likely thanks to
the threats of violence from John Proctor, but she chose
to give credit to God. She could apparently write well
(35:24):
enough that she'd penned a request for prayers of gratitude
and then tacked it to the notice board of the
meeting house. The following day, Samuel Parris stood before his
congregation and read the note aloud, but rather than being thankful,
he expressed doubt. The afflicted girls had told everyone that
the devil promised to end their pain if they would
only switch sides and join him in his mission to
(35:47):
destroy the community. If Mary no longer suffered, he told them,
it might not be cause for celebration soon enough, though
there were other things for the community to talk about.
Former say and village minister Daodete Lawson had been writing
down his account of the past two months and then
hurried to get it published. His ten page pamphlet was
(36:09):
given the incredibly long title of A Brief and True
Narrative of some remarkable passages relating to Sundry Persons afflicted
by witchcraft at Salem Village. It's a mouthful, I know,
but it also spread the word about what had been happening,
casting the net over a wider area and snagging more
and more attention for the trials. And while I'm sure
(36:31):
the members of the Governor's Council of Assistants had heard
the news of the Salem events weeks earlier, this was
the nudge they needed to take action, and they committed
to attend the next examination to take place. For Hawthorne
and Corwin, this was the legitimacy they've been looking for.
Real representatives from Boston, from the Governor himself were about
(36:52):
to travel north and sit among them and hear for
themselves what was going on. Emboldened and seeing a light
at the end of the tunnel, Hawthorne issued the arrest
warrants for two more suspects, Elizabeth Procter and Sarah Klois.
But two more arrests weren't going to satisfy a community
that was becoming more and more hungry to find all
(37:13):
the witches in their midst. In the days leading up
to the examinations of Procter and Klois, the Putnam women,
both Anne Senior and her daughter Annie, claimed that John
Procter's invisible form attacked them. Tituba's husband, A man that
all the records simply referred to as John Indian, claimed
that he was attacked as well. But it was Abigail Williams,
(37:35):
niece of Samuel Parris, who painted the most disturbing picture
of all. According to her, a group of witches invaded
her uncle's parsonage and held a devil's supper, complete with
wine and red bread. It was an imitation of the
Christian sacrament of Communion, and it was a slap in
the face of the devout Puritans who felt threatened. Worse yet, though,
(37:58):
was the number of witches Abigail claimed to have seen
in the house. According to her, it wasn't just the
seven identified suspects, or even the full nine they had
been told of. No, she said this gathering was much larger.
There were, by her account, at least forty witches inside
the Paris home that night. Thankfully, there was hope on
(38:19):
the horizon. The highest authorities in the land had arrived
in Salem Village to help. Finally there would be justice.
The governor himself, Simon Bradstreet, didn't make the trip north.
The man was eight years old and the travel just
(38:41):
wasn't something he was up for, which was a shame.
Brad Street had been involved in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
since it was nothing more than an idea on paper,
and had been on that first expedition that founded the
city of Boston. He was a powerful figure and his
absence would be felt. In his place, Deputy Governor Thomas
(39:01):
Danforth was sent along with four assistants. They were important guests,
so the examinations were moved to a more important location,
Salem Town. But rather than sit up front and serve
as judges, the five men simply took seats in the
crowd and observed. Hawthorne and the others must have felt
awkward about that. They began by speaking with some of
(39:23):
the victims, including John Indian and Mary Walcott, the sixteen
year old daughter of a local militia captain. She'd been
living with the Putnam's, who were her cousins, and that
put her in the middle of a household under fire
by the evil forces that were at work. Elizabeth Hubbard
and Abigail Williams, two of the original accusers, also added
(39:44):
their own stories, tales of that red Devil's book, of
invisible attackers and of painful torture. Some of the accusers
actually fell to the floor in fits of pain, while
others found they couldn't speak at all. It became so
tense in the room that Sarah Klois actually fainted. John
Indian claimed that Elizabeth Procter had come to him and
(40:06):
asked him to sign the Devil's book. John Procter, sitting
in the crowd, stood up and shouted that if he
got his hands on John Indian, he would beat the
devil out of the slave. John, as we've seen so far,
had an anger management problem, and it was beginning to
get noticed. When Elizabeth Procter finally had a chance to
(40:26):
speak for herself, she didn't face the judges or even
the visitors from Boston. Instead, she faced the small group
of accusers and warned them that lying before God was
much worse than lying before the court. Judgment awaited them,
she said, and they should correct their behavior instead. Many
of the accusers began to shout out that John Procter
(40:48):
was attacking them. Almost immediately, John was grabbed from his
seat in the crowd and dragged forward to stand before
the judges. When they asked him what he had to
say for himself, Procter shook his head. I know not,
he replied, I am innocent. As a test, they asked
him to recite the Lord's Prayer, believing that no which
(41:09):
would ever be able to say it perfectly from memory.
John was recorded as saying hollowed be thy name rather
than hellowed, something that could have been a slip of
the tongue or a product of a noisy room, but
it was enough to draw suspicion from the magistrates. Order dissolved.
In the room, Abigail Williams claimed to see John Proctor
(41:30):
attacking a woman named Sarah Biber, and in response, Biber
fell to the floor and began to convulse. Annie Putnam
backed away from an invisible Elizabeth Procter, who she said
was trying to hit her, and then fought back by
swinging her fist at the empty air. Halfway through the punch,
her arms stopped, as if someone or something had repelled
(41:51):
the blow. Salem town Minister John Higginson shouted for silence
and then uttered a loud and ominous prayer over the
room full of people. When he was done, a team
of constables swept in and led each of the accused
out of the room and off to jail. And just
like that, the madness was over. Mary Warren, that willful
(42:13):
servant girl who suffered under the abusive reign of the Proctors,
left Salem Town and headed straight back to the Procter farm.
Once there, she gathered all of the children together to
share the news. News that would have been horrible for
them to hear, but I have to imagine she took
a lot of joy in sharing with them. Your parents
(42:34):
will not be returning home tonight, she told them, and
I don't know when they will. That's it for this
week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor
break for a preview of what's in store for next week.
Next time, on Unobscured, Standing before the Magistrates, Abigail Hobbes
(42:59):
spoke before they could ask her any questions. I will
speak the truth, she said. I have seen sights and
have been scared. I have been very wicked. I hope
I shall be better if God will help me. What
sites did you see? Hawthorne asked, I have seen dogs
and many creatures. What dogs do you mean, Hawthorne asked,
(43:24):
ordinary dogs. Abigail shook her head, I mean the devil.
The magistrates pressed on where had she seen them? They asked,
Abigail replied that her encounter had taken place in the
woods in the middle of the day years ago, back
when she lived at Casco Bay. That was where she'd
(43:44):
put her hand on his book. When they carried her
off to jail a short while later. The name Cascoe
Bay still hung in the air like a neon sign,
pointing at the danger that lurked the north. But Abigail
had also made it clear that it was spreading health
and might already be among them. She claimed that a
shape shifting man had visited her at her home here
(44:07):
in Topsfield. He had alternated between the form of a cat,
a dog, and a black man with a black hat,
and this man, she claimed, had offered her fine clothes
and the power to harm others in town, a power
that she had readily accepted. Unobscured was created and written
(45:24):
by me Aaron Mackey 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.
(45:46):
Until next time, Thanks for listening,
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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