S1 – 8: King and Queen

As the trials continued to roll forward in Salem, crushing more and more lives beneath its wheels, the panic began to spread outside its borders. In the community of Andover, those old fears found a new home—and the results would defy all expectations.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
The sun was warm and bright in the sky as
the wagons slowly rolled down the road to and Over.
It was a community about fifteen miles northwest of Salem Town,
then one of the earliest settlements to get its own
church and autonomy from Salem. But on this particular July morning,
someone in and Over needed Salem's help, not that Salem

(00:33):
didn't need help as well. The official Oyer and Terminer
trials had been rolling along, but it was far from smooth.
After the first session, one of the nine magistrates resigned
his position on the trial. After the second trial, one
that convicted five more witches and scheduled them for execution
on July, the Attorney General himself, Sir Thomas Newton, also

(00:56):
resigned his post. But despite those setbacks, things weren't slowing down.
So when Joseph Ballard sent a message to Salem asking
for help, they were happy to assist. Joseph's wife, Elizabeth,
had been sick for a while and no one seemed
to be able to help her, and as the weeks
went by, she was looking worse and worse off. Most

(01:19):
of the people around her, her husband included, expected her
to pass away sometime very soon, but they also began
to wonder if there might be darker reasons for her
illness witchcraft. Knowing what the people of Salem had been
dealing with and the sorts of experts that had come
out of the woodwork, Joseph Ballard decided to take a chance.

(01:42):
He sent word to the neighboring town that he suspected
his wife had been bewitched and asked if they might
be able to send someone to help find the person
or people responsible. So the wagon heading to end Over
on that bright July morning held someone special, two people actually,
two young women who had become known and trusted as

(02:03):
witch finders, and their task was simple, go to and
Over and find the witches who were killing Elizabeth Ballard.
Now I need to pause and make something clear. We
don't know who these two young women were. We have guesses,
but those guesses vary from historian to historian. All of

(02:24):
them pull from the same pool of accusers that sat
at the center of the Salem trials, but the two
names will differ depending on who you read. The best
hints we have are the records of other witch finding events,
and most of those were carried out by Mercy Lewis
and Elizabeth Hubbard, so that's who we're going to go with.
But I think it also illuminates just how easy it

(02:45):
is to forget now. Their activity in and Over certainly
wouldn't be the first. Martha Carrier, an abrasive and stubborn
mother of five in her mid thirties, had been arrested
nearly two months before, back at the end of May,
and she still sat in a Salem jail, and her
family connections had already landed her brother in law, Roger Toothaker,

(03:07):
in jail, where he died at the end of June.
But this witch finding expedition was something new and different,
something deadly, because it wasn't going to be a one
off that would happen and then be forgotten. Now, if
the Salem events were like a giant cistern holding millions
of gallons of water, this little trip to and Over

(03:30):
was a breach. The hole was being punctured in the
side of the cistern and a leakue had sprung, and
and Over was about to be swept away in the flood.
This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. The Ballards were an

(04:22):
old family. The city of Andover is listed as first
settled in six fifty years before the events in Salem,
but the Ballards arrived a year before that. They were
part of that first wave of risk takers who packed
up and planted their lives farther inland from the safety
of the Atlantic. As far as I can tell, the

(04:43):
original Ballard family had three sons, John, William, and Joseph. Remember,
in those days, there weren't a lot of people living
in the area, so apparently the ratio of men to
women was slightly off and over constable. Joseph Ballard managed
to find a wife, a Elizabeth, the woman who was
sick and dying, but his brothers weren't so lucky. It

(05:05):
wasn't until around six eight that all of that changed.
That's when Samuel Wardwell moved to town. He was roughly
the same age as the Ballard boys, and his household
included not only his wife and children, but his wife's sister, Rebecca.
Soon enough, Rebecca married John Ballard and the family had
grown a little larger. But in the summer of six

(05:30):
Joseph's wife, Elizabeth took sick, and no one knew what
was causing it. Medical science was barely more than folklore
and herbs at the time, especially miles from a trained physician,
so it was common for minds to wander towards unusual suspicions,
and one of those ideas apparently popped into Samuel Wardwell's head.

(05:50):
He claimed to have heard through the grape vine that
Joseph suspected Samuel of bewitching his wife. He was a
bit embarrassed by the idea, though, so rather than confront
Joseph directly, he approached John Ballard instead. Had Joseph, ever
voiced a suspicion that Samuel was a witch, he asked him.
John Ballard shook his head, answering with an honest denial.

(06:12):
But John told Joseph about the conversation, and that put
a bug in Joseph's head. Why would Samuel ask such
a question? Why would he believe in such nonsense? Why?
But then the obvious answer struck him right between the eyes.
Samuel was asking because he was trying to see if
anyone suspected him of something he knew he was doing.

(06:35):
Thanks to Samuel's own initiation, Joseph now believed the man
was a witch, so he sent one of his employees
to Salem to bring back a witch finder. It's ironic,
I know. The man with crazy ideas decided to be
as logical as possible, and that logic included employing the
services of young women who claimed to be able to

(06:56):
track down witches. It was almost comical in its addy,
but to Joseph Ballard it made perfect sense. Days before
Rebecca Nurse and the other four women convicted in the
second trial would hang. Mercy Lewis and Elizabeth Hubbard arrived
in and Over and got to work. But when they did,

(07:16):
they discovered that Samuel Wardwell wasn't the only suspicious person.
There was also Timothy Swan. Swan moved to the area
from the neighboring town of haverl years before. In five though,
Swan was accused of attacking and raping his neighbor's daughter, Elizabeth,
the proof, as presented in court, was that Elizabeth was pregnant.

(07:37):
The court decided to force Swan to pay child support,
but leveled no other punishment against him, which obviously upset
the community around him thanks to his reputation as a
rapist and abuser. Timothy Swan never married, He never even
made friends. He just lived alone with his brother seething
with bitterness about the way he had been treated and

(07:59):
feeling welcome everywhere he went, and rightly so, because the
people of andover hated him. So when the girls from
Salem got to work, Timothy Swan and Samuel Wardwell were
both likely suspects. They were both outsiders, and both had
reputations that placed them outside the norms of the Puritan society.

(08:19):
But there was one problem. Swan was definitely ill when
they arrived, and he was pointing the finger at someone else,
someone he believed who had bewitched him with crippling sickness.
And Foster, with a lead to follow up on, the
witch finders got to work digging into the stories and accusations,

(08:40):
but as they did, they encountered a problem. The pit
was much deeper and far more dark than they ever
could have imagined. I realized that I've thrown a lot
of names at you, and it's easy to get confused me.
I'm right there with you. Although I thankfully have hundreds

(09:03):
of pages of research outlines and notes to lean on.
Still I want to take a moment to point out
that the Unobscured website has a resources page that will
continue to grow over the next couple of months. You
can find that over and history unobscured dot com slash resources.
There are a lot of fantastic books listed there that
you can use to look up names and keep all

(09:25):
of the families straight. The Salem witch Trials is a
complex network of families and neighbors, and there's nothing I
can do through audio to completely simplify that mess, but
I'll do my best. The Fosters were another of those
old and over families. Ann's husband had been one of
the earliest to arrive in the area, right alongside the

(09:46):
Ballard's patriarch, but after he passed away in trouble started
calling at the Foster family door and for a widow
in her seventies who was too frail to even walk
around town anymore. It was a bit overwhelming. First, there
was the murder. Four years earlier. One of Ann's daughters, Hannah,
was murdered by her husband, Hugh Stone, and on the

(10:09):
scale of bad to worse, this crime was horrid. Ann's
daughter had been pregnant at the time with what would
have been their eighth child, and Hugh didn't commit the
crime in private. Now he killed her in cold blood
right in the middle of town. It was a horrifyingly
tragic moment in and over his young history, and went
on the record books as the first murder in their community.

(10:33):
Ann's son in law hanged for the crime, but from
the gallows he had shouted out that it was all
the fault of the Foster family. His wife had been
contentious and because of that it was her fault that
he had murdered her. Exactly a century before William Murdoch
became the first person to use flammable gas as a
lighting source, and two d and fifty years before the

(10:56):
film that established the concept, Hugh Stone was gassing his
victims from the gallows. Some thing's never change. I guess
The murder wasn't the end for Anne Foster's problems, though.
Her teenage granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. Ran away from home
for a time, and that seemed to echo Hugh Stone's
claims from his execution day that the family was wild

(11:19):
and unruly through and through. So when Timothy swan known
rapist and unwelcome outsider, pointed his finger at her and
claimed she was a witch, those rumors had enough weight
to make him believable, and Foster was carried before the
magistrates in Salem. Literally, she wasn't strong enough to walk,

(11:40):
so they carted her to town and carried her inside
the meeting house. It was only an examination, not an
official trial, but there was very little to separate them
in the minds of the community as of late. It
was the beginning of a journey that could not end
well for the seventy five year old and over widow.
The Ray of Hope. Was the newcomer to the team

(12:01):
of magistrates, taking the place of Nathaniel Saltonstall, was John
Higginson Jr. The respected son of the Salem Town minister.
In fact, John's father, John Sr. Had been one of
the biggest advocates for the more liberal Halfway Covenants years before,
and almost gave up his job for it. Reverend Higginson
in Salem Town nearly left. He was willing to leave

(12:23):
Salem if they didn't loosen up those rules and adopt
the Halfway Covenant by the way, as had people like
Bartholemew Gedney and John Haythorn were two of the first
members to command under Higginson's loosened rules in Salem Town.
He had the potential to be the voice of common
sense over piety. Added to that, just the month before,

(12:43):
John's own sister had been arrested on suspicion of witchcraft
and was sitting inside a filthy jail awaiting a trial
of her own. He had more than enough reason to
approach this new examination with caution and logic, and Foster
ruined of that though when she did the unthinkable she
confessed to being a witch. She told the magistrates that

(13:06):
the devil had appeared to her in the shape of
a colorful bird, something that echoed the imagery used by
the Paris slave Tichiba. The devil had offered her prosperity
and instructed her to harm people as part of the deal.
One of the witches who came with the devil to
recruit her was none other than Martha Carrier. As I've
mentioned before, she was the first andover resident to be

(13:29):
accused and thrown in jail, but for six long years
Martha Carrier had been training her, teaching her to make
poppets and how to squeeze them and stick them with
pins to inflict pain on others. Over the course of
three days of examination, and Foster unloaded a treasure trove
of confessions. They held witch meetings with hundreds of their

(13:50):
kind and flew from all over on wooden sticks. Martha
Carrier was there, as was the minister George Burrows, leading
the evil Congregation, which earned them the nicknames the King
and Queen of Hell. Here's Stacy Schiff, historian and author
of the Witches. That's an expression of Cotton Mathers. I
think he kind of makes that up. To be honest

(14:11):
with you, I don't think there's a King and Queen
of Hell. I don't know. I think that was just,
you know, Mother trying to make the whole thing a
little bit more dramatic. He really goes to great lengths
to paint Martha Carrier in the most wretched terms and
con mother would have been at the trials, and he
bases his portraits there loosely on the testimony. If you

(14:33):
look at it, you see he's taken some liberties with
the testimony. He's left out a great number of things.
He's left out things that were to people's credit. He's
injected things that weren't actually in the testimony, and my
senses that would for whatever reason, Martha Carrier rubbed him
the wrong way. And that's why she gets promoted to
Queen of Hell. I also want to point out something intriguing,

(14:53):
and Foster, through her stories, actually painted herself in the
stereotypical image of a witch that most modern people have
in their heads today, an old, decrepit woman riding through
the night sky on a wooden broom handle. In the
midst of all of this, Mercy Lewis and Elizabeth Hubbard
reached the conclusion of their own witch finding investigation back

(15:16):
in and Over. Despite the clear suspects that Samuel Wardwell
and Timothy Swan presented, the two women seemed to follow
the excitement out of and Over and back home. In
their minds, the witch is responsible for Elizabeth Ballard's illness
were obvious, and Foster her daughter Mary Lacey Sr. And

(15:37):
her granddaughter Mary Jr. With actual names from official witch finders.
Joseph Ballard had a case and a chance to save
his dying wife. He traveled to Salem on July and
filed his complaint the same day. By the way that

(15:57):
Rebecca Nurse and the others were carded out to the
execution site and hanged. It's interesting to note that Joseph
Ballard's legal complaint represents the first time in the entire
months long event that anyone actually paid the bond that
was supposed to accompany such serious charges. Maybe it was
because he was from out of town, or perhaps having

(16:19):
John Higginson on the court brought a refreshed view of
proper procedures. All we know is that he paid the
one pound fee. On July and and over, Constable, although
not Joseph Ballard, arrested Mary Lacey Senior and Mary Lacey Jr.
And brought them to Salem. Another person searched their home

(16:39):
for proof of witchcraft, but all they managed to find
was a bundle of sticks and some yarn, nothing that
would scream diabolical plots and devil worship. Much like a
number of the previous cases, Mary Lacey Senior was questioned
thoroughly before she ever stepped foot into her formal examination
later that day. Records of the conversation no longer exist,

(17:03):
if they were ever written down at all, but we
do know that she confessed and the details she revealed
were swallowed whole by the magistrates. I want to point
out that we also have a new type of person here.
In the beginning, we just had the afflicted Those were
the people who appeared to be victims of attacks by
the witch, and the afflicted had driven much of the

(17:25):
proceedings for months. Then there's the accused. I think that
one makes more sense, right. These are the people who
the afflicted pointed at and declared to be a witch.
The accused had been rounded up through scores of warrants,
examined in front of the magistrates prior to a trial,
and then housed in one of a handful of jails
around the area until their day in court would arrive.

(17:49):
But the confessors, these were new. Sure, there were a
few random cases earlier, accused women who spoke freely about
their interactions with the Devil and his book and the
Red Communion and witches gatherings, but it always came in
small pieces, requiring the magistrates to put it all together
over time. The confessions, though, we're different. Looking back, it's

(18:13):
easy to wonder why anyone would do something like that.
Here's Mary Beth Norton, professor of American History at Cornell University,
an author of In the Devil Snare. The question of
why people confessed has always been something that people have
been wondering about. But when it became clear as it

(18:35):
became clear later in the trials that if you confessed,
you would be kept alive so you could testify against
other people. Is when more and more people started to confess.
And one of the things I noticed was that when
adults confessed late in the sequence of the trials, they

(18:59):
accused only people who were already dead, who had already
been hanged, or they accused people who had been accused
by other people. They did not name new people. It
seemed clear to me that it was very strategic when
they confessed. They did not want to hurt anyone who
wasn't already hanged or already had been accused of others.

(19:23):
These were people who stood before the authorities and when
they were asked if they were a witch, they answered yes,
and then they detailed every single moment of their diabolical lifestyle.
Step by step, they exposed themselves as the enemy, and
oftentimes pulled their own family into the fire with them.
Mary Lazy Sr. Was one of those people. She freely

(19:46):
confessed on julye giving the magistrates powerful tools to use
on her mother and her daughter. When they brought Anne
Foster back into the examination room and told her that
her daughter had confessed and didn't freak out and deny it.
She seems to have accepted it as fact and then
added her own details to the story. Then they brought

(20:07):
Mary Lacey Sr. Back in to see Anne, right in
front of the magistrates. When Mary saw her, she cried out, Oh, Mother,
we have left Christ and the devil hath got hold
of us. How shall I get rid of this evil one?
When their moment was over, both of the women were
escorted back out of the room, and young Mary Lacey Jr.

(20:30):
Was brought in alone. At first, she denied everything, even
when one of the afflicted girls started convulsing and fits
on the floor, But when the judges told her that
her mother and grandmother had already confessed, she crumbled. She
told them that she had seen a horse just a
week before and now wondered if that horse had been
the devil in disguise. The magistrates told her that her

(20:52):
only chance to obtain mercy and be saved by Christ
was to freely and openly confess, and with that ultimatum
hanging over her head, she gave in, adding even more
details to the stories told by her mother and grandmother.
All three of the women did something unusual too. You

(21:12):
would expect them to name the less savory people in
their community as witches, but instead they pointed their fingers
at family. Here's Mary Beth Norton. Once again, it's very interesting.
It's a completely different pattern in and over. Then you
get in Salem Village. Salem Village, people accuse their enemies,
and and over people accuse their friends and their relatives.

(21:35):
There's this one family where five sisters and the mother
all confess and basically accuse each other and say they're
all working together. So it's a very different pattern. It
was easy to believe them though. When questioned individually, they
each told stories about the same event, and many of
the details seemed to line up. It was as if

(21:57):
the things they described were real. I asked Stacy Scheff,
author of The Witches, why is she thought that was
the case. The answer to your question really is when
you when you get toward and over the sale and
witchcraft of ultimately will will migrate to and over, and
by that time all the imagery has really changed. It's
less about the enchanted hey and the Satanna cat, and

(22:17):
it's more about this diabolical meeting to which people have
flown from all over New England, and there most of
the testimony is utterly on point. It's extremely as as
if everyone compared no swall in prison. Everyone has. Everyone
talks about precisely the same sound to call the people
to the field. They talk about the same person presiding
over this dark sabbath. They mentioned the same guest list

(22:38):
of who was there. Every detail corroborates each detail, and
that's obviously because they're being told either by their friends
in prison, or their family who think they're guilty, or
the ministers in charge what to say. Looking back, it's
easy to see countless examples of the authorities leading the witness.
They suggest answers with their questions and give the accused

(22:59):
just enough detail to reply with answers that fit their expectations.
Maybe these men were just really bad at interviewing the accused,
or perhaps they allow their bias to steer the ship.
We might never know. But something else came out of
the examination of Anne Foster and her family New names
from andover. Mary Lacey Sr. Mentioned two of Martha Carrier's

(23:23):
own children as one of their own, sending the court
into a frenzy. The following day, eighteen year old Richard
and sixteen year old Andrew were arrested and brought to town.
What awaited them, however, was not the usual examination we
have come to expect. Their fate would be much more
painful than anyone thus far torture. The Carrier boys were

(23:53):
brought to a tavern in Salem Town owned by Thomas Beadle.
The end Over constable who delivered the warrant and brought
them there was none other than Joseph Ballard. There were
magistrates waiting for the boys when they arrived. The authorities
asked Richard and Andrew a whole slew of questions, but
they refused to answer. Maybe it was because they weren't

(24:14):
alone in the tavern. Seated around them were some of
the afflicted girls, along with Mary Lacey Senior and junior.
Those two women would eventually cry out that the spirit
of Martha Carrier and the devil himself were standing among them,
preventing the boys from answering. It can't have been a
pleasant experience, so they refused to talk. In response, the

(24:37):
magistrates had the boys removed from the main room and
taken elsewhere in the tavern, where the questions picked up
speed and urgency. Still they remained silent, and that's when
the authorities moved on to a new method of extracting information.
The English called it neck and heels, and it was
an old military punishment. A person would have one bore

(25:00):
strapped across the backs of their knees and another across
the back of the neck. Then rope was looped around
both boards, one on each side, and slowly tightened. The
result was that as the boards were pulled closer and
closer together, the person would be bent forward, essentially folding
in half. It was cruel and painful too. There are

(25:23):
stories of victims bleeding from their mouth, ears, and nose
as the pressure inside their body built up. Some people
actually died from the technique. And here we have military
level torture being used on two teenage boys simply because
they refused to answer questions. It worked, too, Both young

(25:44):
men agreed to tell the magistrates everything they wanted to hear.
They began to reveal details that would have sounded very
familiar to anyone familiar with the accusation so far. The
dark man in a black hat, the Devil's book of Names,
even the gathering of local witches outside Reverend Paris's House,

(26:05):
Richard actually named names. He named his mother Martha, who
had been in jail for months, as well as his
uncle Roger Toothaker, although he had passed away in jail
weeks before. He listed Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, and Bridget Bishop,
all of whom had been executed already. He also named
others who were still alive and awaiting their trial from

(26:28):
within a hot, dirty jail cell escaped Constable John Willard,
John and Elizabeth Proctor, Giles, and Martha Corey and Mary Bradberry.
When word about his confession reached their ears, they were enraged.
They had been doing all they could to deny the accusations,
and now Richard had spoiled everything by contradicting them. John

(26:50):
Proctor wrote a note to the local ministers, including Cotton,
Mother and Samuel Willard, begging for more objective trials, and
he asked the ministers to take his quest to Governor
Phipps himself. The trouble was Phipps was no longer in
Massachusetts now. He had gone on a sort of victory
tour to the places where he had seen the most success.

(27:12):
Despite the fact that the very foundation of their government
was under assault. Phipps had chosen to abandon his worn
duties and head north to Maine to watch his troops
defend the land from invaders by building new fortifications, walls,
and structures designed to keep the devil out. William Stoughton
was next in command, but he already sat on the

(27:34):
court of Oyer and Terminer, making it a lost cause.
Richard Carrier's confession was accepted as evidence, and when it
was it was as if gasoline had been thrown on
the fire. A week later, Joseph ballard sick wife Elizabeth,
passed away. Three days later, on j Martha Carrier's sister,

(27:55):
Mary Toothaker, from the town of bell Rica, was arrested
and questioned. Her husband, rod Your had already died in
jail awaiting his trial. And I can't help but wonder
if she worried about the same fate for herself. And then,
on August one, with the entire community of Salem petrified
that the devil was winning, that he was driving deeper

(28:15):
into their safe territory, a Native American raid struck a
bit too close to home. Here's Marybeth Norton once again.
Bill Rick is only twenty miles away. Now, that was
the closest attack that I know of to Salem. But
remember all these people had relatives in Maine and New Hampshire,
and the people in Maine and New Hampshire were constantly

(28:36):
under threat. Even in the most southern parts of Maine
and New Hampshire in um West now Portsmouth, which was
then called Strawberry Bank, what was Wells Main, there were
attacks nearby all the time. The people felt under constant threat,
shall we say so? The attack in bill Rico was
the closest, but eventually later in the war, actually after,

(28:57):
there was a big attack on and over, so it's
not as though the war wasn't right there. Ironically, Mary
tooth Picker's arrest saved her life. When the Wabanaki raided Belrica,
they killed every single resident of the homes on either
side of Mary's. Had she not been in jail, she
would have died in the attack. But of course that

(29:17):
didn't mean her life was any safer just because she
dodged that bullet. There were plenty more rounds in the chamber,
and they were all aimed at her. The man who
would do the metaphorical shooting was the newly appointed attorney
general for the trial, Sir Thomas Newton, if you remember,
had resigned after convicting Rebecca Nurse and the others. Taking

(29:38):
his place was a newcomer, Anthony Checkley, and he was
ready to get to work. The third Oiler and Terminer
session would begin two days later on August three, and
it was the event everyone had been waiting for because
they were about to witness something completely unheard of, the
witchcraft trial of an actual minister of God. Like a

(30:07):
lot of the pieces of the Salem witch trials, we're
not exactly sure when some of the trials happened. What
we know is that the third official session of the
Oyer and Terminer was called to order on August two
and ran through the end of August five. We even
know what days certain cases were heard, but we're not
sure about others. The Proctors are one of those mysteries.

(30:32):
They remind me a lot of Rebecca Nurse. While most
of the accused were outsiders or people with very few
friends and family to lean on, the Proctors were a
well connected family. They ran that busy tavern on the
northern edge of the village, and that had a way
of putting them into a lot of people's lives. So
when their trial date arrived, they brought two separate petitions

(30:53):
with them. One of them included the names and signatures
of nineteen neighbors and friends, including George Locker, the constable
who had been responsible for arresting Sarah Good all the
way back on March first. I can't help but wonder
if Lockers work with the trial had begun to soften
his heart. The second was most likely started by Ipswich

(31:14):
minister John Wisse and included thirty one other names on
that list, and Wise, being a trained minister, used the
petition to also make an important theological point. He referenced
the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor and
how Satan had once counterfeited a specter of the Holy
Prophet Samuel. In other words, just because people have claimed

(31:38):
to see John Procter's specter doesn't mean it actually was
John Procter. But it didn't work. As we've been discussing
for a number of episodes, Salem wasn't inside a safe
little bubble. It was a community on the edge of
a great dark wilderness where the agents of the devil
were prowling through the shadows looking for a way to

(31:58):
tear them down. One minister speaking out with common sense,
was not about to alter their perception of the world.
As sad as that sounds, sometimes the crowd lets their
fears propel them down terrifying roads. Sometimes their leaders encourage it.
After the Proctor's case was heard, it was time for

(32:20):
the Queen of Hell herself, Martha Carrier. We don't have
the official court records for her trial, but Cotton Mather
was there and he wrote down all his observations of
the day. His simple words, it followed the standard pattern,
are all we really need to know. Thomas Putnam was
said to have sworn an oath that had the judges
not required Martha to be bound by rope, she might

(32:43):
have broken loose and killed them all. And he had
good reason to be afraid, because the rumors were powerful.
Curses and illness and death were on every whisper. Some
of her neighbors in andover had gone on record to
claim that Martha had often cursed them after disagreements. Once
several of Benjamin Abbott's cows mysteriously died, and later his

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foot became infected and needed treatment from a doctor. Two
other neighbors, John Rogers, and Samuel Preston both claimed that
Martha had killed some of their livestock after an argument.
Even family got involved in her trial. Alan Toothaker was
her nephew and also the son of Mary and Roger.
With his father dead and his mother awaiting her turn

(33:27):
in court, maybe Allan saw darkness closing in around him
and wanted away out, so he joined the accusers and
blamed the death of his own cattle on his aunt.
Other victims were brought to trial that week as well.
George Jacobs and John Willard both stood before the magistrates
to make their case and have evidence against them be presented.

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If you don't remember, John Willard was the thirty year
old outsider who had married into the Wilkins family, but
had fled the area when accusations had been hurled against him.
To make matters worse, young Daniel Wilkins had mysteriously died,
and everyone seemed to suspect Willard had bewitched him to death.
John had been an abusive husband too, giving his reputation

(34:11):
just enough of a tarnish that it was easy for
most people to consider him a witch. His trial was
over in just a few hours, and he was taken
back to jail to await the verdict. George Jacobs was
a rough spoken, illiterate farmer with a wild sense of humor,
but none of that was going to help him. Before
the magistrates. Some of the original afflicted girls, including Annie

(34:35):
Putnam and Elizabeth Hubbard, came forward to swear that Jacob's
spirit was tormenting them. Even there during the trial, they
could see it flying about, trying to attack them and
disrupt the proceedings. Jacob's own granddaughter, Margaret, had previously been
accused by others and saved herself by confessing and pledging

(34:55):
to help name other witches. Here at her grandfather's trial.
She made good on that promise, pointing a finger at
him and adding her voice to the accusations. Poor George Jacobs,
they didn't stand a chance. These were all difficult cases
to watch, I'm sure prominent respected people who were being

(35:16):
dragged before the court and accused of witchcraft. And despite
the ridiculousness of it all to us today, the evidence
presented was damning for each and every one of them.
But that's not why. Most of the people in the
courtroom had traveled from so far and wide. They weren't
there to see widowed farmers and tavern owners raked over

(35:36):
the coals of justice. No, they had come to see
a bigger trial, one with more weight and importance, the
trial of the rumored leader of those lesser witches, the
King of Hell himself, George Burrows. There was something undeniably

(35:59):
extra ordinary about George Burrows. Here's Stacy Schiff. Once again,
it's conjectural, but I think it's something a little bit different.
I think with Burrows. Burrows goes to Maine and protects
his parishioners in a very small community against a hideous
and very savage Indian assault. And he's forced to do
that because the Massachusetts authorities have essentially stopped protecting those

(36:22):
communities because they don't have the funds to do it,
and they're trying to cut back. And I feel as
if it might have been a piece of residual guilt
there for having left those communities unprotected. Burrows would have
had every reason to chastise them for kind of cutting
off those settlers who are really at the very forefront
of the really at the edge of the frontier there
and are getting no protection. And he'll write the one

(36:43):
document we have of his which is really extraordinary is
an account of an Indian raid on the community where
he's protecting his parishioners inside a barricade, And you know,
he writes a bit in biblical terms. It's an astonishing
document in which he proves to be a very courageous
and ingenious man. But if Burrows was painting himself in
a biblical light and perhaps adding in embellishments about his

(37:05):
prowess and cunning, those traits might have backfired. And the
other interesting thing about Burrows is that he's very strong,
and he's very canny, And a lot of the testimony
against him will be testimony about his somehow magical strength.
How did he lift that barrel? How did he fire
that very long musket? How is it possible that he

(37:25):
heard that conversation from that distance? How did he get
to be two places at once? Not everything about Burrows
was a rumor about his strength or brilliance. There were
some who viewed parts of his life, or at least
the rumors about them, as less than savory. To them,
that nickname of King of Hell made a lot of sense.
Here's Mary Beth Norton. Burrows is the right person to

(37:49):
be the leader of the witches, because he's a minister,
and because he's a kind of a weird minister. That is,
he's never been ordained, he's been educated at Harvard, and
because there's all kinds of gossip about him, which I
explore in my book. He has a very peculiar relationship
with his wives. It's hard to know a lot about
the details, but he seems to have been quite brutal

(38:10):
and quite an aggressive husband. He at least is accused
of beating them or at least being very controlling of them.
He wants them to quote keep his secrets, and so
the question becomes, what are those secrets he wants them
to keep. So when Burrows began his trial on August five,
the courtroom was packed. Even ministers from up and down

(38:33):
the coast had made the journey to see one of
their peers stand trial. Maybe they were there to silently
root for one of their own, or perhaps they were
nervous about their own safety and saw Burroughs trial as
a canary in the mind for their own future. Burrows
supernatural strength was a topic of discussion, as it was
his unnatural cunning. Never mind the fact that both of

(38:56):
those characteristics had been exaggerated in descriptions of the Native
American raid on his community in Maine, and he used
that cunning in the courtroom too. His life was on
the line, after all, I'm not sure any of us
would have done it any other way. He knew the
court system better than almost all of the accused. He
knew the rules and procedure. He knew what his rights

(39:18):
were and what the magistrates had to accommodate. For example,
he began his defense by exercising his right to challenge
the perspective jurors. After discussing each of them, he requested
that a few of them be replaced. It was smart
and logical. He was trying to bring order to the
chaotic trial that was sweeping innocent people along in the flood.

(39:40):
But from the outside looking in, it also looked like trickery.
No one else played the system so well, so naturally
people assumed that this was the sort of thing you
might expect from the reputed wizard known as the King
of Hell. There were witnesses with stories about him tormenting them,
stories about him leading the coven of witches in their

(40:01):
plot to destroy the Puritan experiment. Even courtroom, theatrics, as
some of the afflicted bell into trances and seizures at
the sight of him. It was all what you might
expect at this point, and yet all somehow worse. Burrows
put up a mighty fight, but in the end even
he failed to beat the magistrates at their game. Even

(40:22):
the ministers who had gathered there for the trial walked
away believing in his guilt. The great and respected Increase
Mather later wrote that had I been one of the judges,
I could not have acquitted him. Burrows, along with Martha Carrier,
George Jacobs, John Willard, and John and Elizabeth Proctor, we're

(40:44):
all convicted on charges of witchcraft. Each of them was
sentenced to death by hanging, and the date of their
execution was set and announced. Despite their best efforts to
save themselves, their time had run out. On August four,

(41:07):
the people of Salem received terrifying news an earthquake had
rumbled off the coast of Jamaica and sent a tsunami
crashing over the island. It had happened on the seventh
of June, two months earlier, but of course news traveled
very slowly in the pre internet era. The city of
Kingston had been destroyed and over one thousand, seven hundred

(41:29):
people had been killed. And in the Puritan world view,
where nothing happened by chance, the people of Salem were
quick to assign meaning to the tragedy. Dark meaning. They
had just mounted an attack on the King and Queen
of Hell. They had fired a shot straight into the
heart of the witchcraft problem in their community, and that

(41:49):
was a direct attack on the devil himself. What if
the tragedy in Kingston was a retaliation for their own
advancement forward. It didn't help that just days before news
of the tsunami, Cotton Mother had preached from the Book
of Revelation, Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and
of the sea. He had read from chapter twelve, verse twelve,

(42:12):
for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath,
because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.
I can't help but wonder if the upcoming executions were
viewed with equal parts on easiness and relief. It was
their chance to strike back again. For those who had
been convicted, though it must have been torture to wait

(42:34):
for it. But not everyone had the same fears and
dread While all of them had been convicted and sentenced
to death, Elizabeth Proctor had a different path ahead of her.
You see, she was pregnant. Here's Mary Beth Norton. Once again.
Pregnancy was an excuse in England. It was in English law.

(42:54):
It was called pleading your belly. When a woman was
convicted of a capital offense, she could, as they said,
plead her belly. And if she was pregnant, if the
midwives confirmed that she was pregnant, then she wasn't hanged
until after she gave birth. So Elizabeth Proctor had to wait.
I can't imagine the darkness they must have felt. John

(43:14):
and Elizabeth knowing that he was about to die, and
she was only kept alive by the child inside her,
a child she would never get to hold and love
and see grow up. Her own life was simply borrowing
time until a new life arrived to take its place.
On August nineteen, the crowds returned to see the job completed.

(43:37):
All of those ministers and all of those curious onlookers
gathered to watch as John Proctor, George Jacobs, Martha Carrier,
John Willard, and George Burrows arrived at the site of
their execution in the back of a cart. Eyewitnesses claim
that some of them spoke up for themselves. John Willard
and John Proctor are both said to have forgiven their

(43:59):
accusers and prayed for forgiveness for whatever wrongs they themselves
might have committed. But when it was George Burrow's turn,
he broke that peaceful mood. He used his final moments
to declare his innocence one last time, and then with
the crowd gathered around to listen, he began to recite
the Lord's Prayer. Here's Stacy Schiff. Once again, it was

(44:21):
understood that a which could not recite the Lord's Prayer.
Burrows on the gallows is apparently a tremendously moving and
and troubling site, because he is, in fact a man
of great presence, and he clearly knows how to speak,
and he's delivered sermons that many of these people have heard.
And here he is, in that same it sounds deep voice,

(44:42):
reciting the Lord's Prayer. So here he is doing something
that which was understood, which would be proof in fact
that you were not a witch. And the crowd apparently
at that moment, has a moment of doubt and begins
to surge toward him as if to somehow bring the
proceeding to an end, bringing the hanging to an end,
and they're pushed back by the authorities, which does indicate
that it's the upper echelon really that has that's holding

(45:04):
the the anomous for for Burrows. In some way, Burrows
had declared his innocence. He had worked within the court system,
using their own rules and procedures against them. He had
explained his actions clearly and defended himself against his accusers
with cunning. He even stood before the crowd on his
execution day and recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly, and yet

(45:27):
none of it helped Burrows, along with all the others
standing around him that mid July morning, hanged for the
crimes the court said they'd committed for the people of Salem.
The message was clear. The chaos of the witchcraft trials
that swirled around them was a tempest that had no
care for the nuances between truth and lies. It was

(45:50):
a storm fueled by fear and panic and religious conviction,
and its indiscriminate path of destruction so far had only
taught them one key truth. Any one of them could
be next that's it for this week's episode of Unobscured.

(46:11):
Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview
of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured,
Historians today have no idea where Daniel Andrew and George
Jacobs Jr. Found shelter, but their stories tell us something
important about the culture they lived in and how similar

(46:33):
it is to our own world today. That when it
comes to the mocking nations of power, who you know
is often more important than what you know. That money
and status, those elusive tools of the elite, are useful
in avoiding the power of the law, And that ultimately,
while some people's connections might save them, vast majority faced

(46:56):
a less hopeful truth, who you know could get you killed.

(47:57):
Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron May and
Key and produced by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams in
partnership with How Stuff Works, with research by Carl Nellis
and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our
contributing historians further reading material, resource archive and links to
our other shows at History unobscured dot com. Until next time,

(48:22):
thanks for listening.