A tale of the last pardoned witch

The witch trials in Salem Massachusetts ended over 300 years ago. In Europe, the last witch was executed in 1782. But in both cases, the last of those accused weren't exonerated until as recently as a year ago.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay. At the Salem witch trials, twenty people were executed,
and at the witch trials in Europe fifty thousand were killed.
But crazy enough, some of the accused were only cleared
in the last few years, including a Salem witch cleared
just last year with the help of some eighth graders.
I'm Patty Steele. The witch trials are finally over. Next

(00:21):
on the backstory. The backstory is back. Hard to believe it,
but accusing an enemy of witchcraft has a long history
in Europe and of course in our neck of the woods.
At the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials. In Salem, the witch
hunt lasted two years and the trials just four months

(00:43):
in the summer in autumn of sixteen ninety two. More
than two hundred people were accused of witchcraft and twenty
were executed. All but one were hung. The last a
man was pressed to death with large stones. At least
six others died in prison or while being tested for
being a witch. Now what's amazing is that it was
over three hundred years ago, but the last person accused

(01:06):
only had her name cleared last year. Eventually, all the
accused were exonerated, but it was taken case by case,
and somehow Elizabeth Johnson Junior slipped through the cracks. She
was accused and imprisoned, She wasn't executed, and it's now
thought that she was intellectually disabled and more apt to
make a false confession. She was finally released from prison,

(01:29):
but her name was never cleared. So last year a
group of eighth graders from Danvers, Massachusetts, went to bat
for her with the state legislature, and finally, in June
of twenty twenty, Elizabeth's name was officially cleared. The Salem
witch trials began when the town was experiencing some upset
over church politics, family feuds, financial upset, pretty much typical stuff,

(01:53):
and folks wanted to blame something, so they blamed the devil.
Always got to find escapegoat, right anyway. Three girls aged nine, eleven,
and twelve started it all off by throwing fits, as
tweens do, but they blamed their upset on three poor
elderly women in Salem. The three women were brutally questioned
and pressured to confess, but only one of them did.

(02:16):
The one that did was a slave from the Caribbean
named Tituba. She had dabbled in voodoo a bit, and
she said the devil came to me and bid me
serve him. She said there were other witches in the
town as well. All this so she might get off
a little bit easier. Several accused witches confessed and then
named others. You can imagine the frenzy this all set off.

(02:37):
As the months went by, dozens more were accused. They
were tested, but witch tests were actually almost impossible to pass.
Take the swimming test, the judge said, if the accused floated,
they were guilty because the water would reject evil. If
the person sank, they were innocent, but of course they
often drowned. And then there was the test. The accused

(03:01):
had to touch their victim, and if that person felt
pain and screamed out, the accused was guilty. Of course,
the hysterical accusers could easily lie and scream anyway. Finally,
the governor ordered a special court to be set up
and the trials began. Within several weeks, the first execution
took place, and nineteen more followed over the course of

(03:22):
the four month trials. How did the craziness end? When
the governor's own wife was called in to be questioned
as a possible witch. He immediately dissolved. The court pardoned
those accused witches that were still in jail, and it
was almost twenty years later, in seventeen eleven, the colonial
authorities pardoned some of the accused who'd been executed and

(03:44):
paid off their families. But again it took three hundred
and thirty years to get the final person, Elizabeth Johnson, cleared.
Same thing happened in Europe, where the numbers were staggering.
Hundreds of thousands were accused over a three hundred year peace,
as many as fifty thousand executed, and as in Salem,
the vast majority of those accused and executed were women.

(04:08):
Executions in Europe involved hanging, drowning, beheading, being burned at
the stake, and stoning. Now one of the last witch
trials in Europe ending in execution involved a woman named
Anna Goldie. Happened in Switzerland in seventeen eighty two, almost
one hundred years after the Salem witch trials. Anna, a housemaid,
was beautiful at sort of a mysterious aura around her,

(04:30):
which was obviously very enticing to men, including the wealthy
guys she worked for. There were some shenanigans between them,
but eventually Anna also got involved with the guy's much
hated brother in law, so suddenly needles were showing up
in loaves of bread in the house and the employer's
little girl started having fits. Anna was accused of bewitching

(04:53):
the child by her spurned lover employer. Of course, the
brother in law was also accused by the same god
and executed with his tremendous wealth then passing to his accuser.
Anna was tortured until she confessed to being a witch,
but after the torture stopped, she took back her confession. However,
the execution took place once again. Her exoneration was a

(05:17):
long time coming. The Swiss government officially cleared Anna Goldie
in two thousand and seven when a local official went
to bat for her, two hundred and twenty six years
after her death. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a

(05:39):
production of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is
Doug Fraser. Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplified Media.
We're out with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for
listening to the Backstory. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know. M