September 19, 2025 • 13 mins
he panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.
Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.
The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled--in crackling detail and lyrical prose--by one of our most acclaimed historians.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/quantum-akashic-network--6730906/support.
Thank you for Listening
Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.
The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled--in crackling detail and lyrical prose--by one of our most acclaimed historians.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/quantum-akashic-network--6730906/support.
Thank you for Listening
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. We're your shortcut to understanding
complicated history, really getting under the surface.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
And today our subject is the Salem witch trials of
sixteen ninety two, who ought to go way beyond the
usual story of just mass hysteria exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
We're looking at the well the toxic mix of politics,
religion and social anxiety that basically made the whole thing
almost inevitable.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Our sources, and we're drawing a lot from Stacy Shift's
work here she was Salem wasn't simple at all.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
No, it was a complex, fragile world. You had these huge,
unanswerable questions about life and God meeting a set of absolute,
totally unquestioned answers from their theology, a dangerous combination.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And the political side. That's huge too, isn't it. Massachusetts
was in a real state of flux.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Oh. Absolutely. It was this intercharter period after the Andros
coup in eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Which sounds technical, but for the people living.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
There right for you, the colonists on the ground, intercharter
meant the government was well fairly functioning, no stable recognize
legal framework.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
So total uncertainty, total uncertainty, and this led people to
believe that every problem, political chaos, disease, outbreaks, and yeah,
witchcraft does, assigned God was angry with them.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
They felt they had to find the source of that
anger to fix it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Precisely, to restore order, they needed someone or something to blame.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
So political chaos feeds this deep religious fear. We're going
to trace how that fear plus local grudges, plus these
really specific beliefs about the devil being right there, you know,
physically present.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Created this perfect tinder box ready to ignite.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Okay, let's unpack this. Then. What were the exact conditions
inside Salem that led a few young afflicted girls suddenly
hold all the power, like become the central authority in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, it really starts with the community itself. Salem Village
modern Danvers was small, maybe five hundred and fifty people. Tiny, tiny, yeah,
and absolutely riddled with conflict. The source material, says Hearsay,
had a really long life there, just kept alive by
gossip and repetition.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
And it wasn't just abstract gossip, right, it was about
real things.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Land power exactly, deep grudges between brother and neighbor, often
going back years, usually over land think about that massive
feud between the Putnam and Nurse families that had been
simmering for decades.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So these existing fall lines.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
They made the community incredibly vulnerable when the accusation started.
Those old resentments basically provided a map of who to target.
It wasn't random.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
You went after your enemy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
You went after people you already had issues with, yeah,
or people who didn't fit them old yeah, poor women,
older women who spoke their minds like Rebecca Nurse, people
who challenged that strict Puritan hierarchy.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And then you layer the external terror on top of
that internal mess.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Puritan society felt constantly under siege. They saw the world
as this battleground, always vulnerable to demonic attack.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And the devil wasn't some abstract evil, not at all.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
He worked through real agents, horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers,
and they specifically linked him to their enemies, like well,
Native Americans, the French on the frontier. They were seen
as the princes of darkness, literal agents of Satan, lurking
just beyond the settlements. That sense of invisible enemies.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Was palpable, so besieged from without, fractures from within, and then.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The spark finally hits right in Reverend Samuel Parris's house.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
But what's really interesting here, as our sources point out,
is this wasn't maybe spontaneous.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, yeah, Paris had moved to Salem right around the
time Cotton Mather published his Memorable Providences.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That's the book about the Goodwin children in Boston back
in sixteen.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Eighty nine exactly. And Mather's book described in detail children's suffering, convulsions,
foaming at the mouth, barking like dogs, all these very
specific physical manifestations.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So Paris, knowing this popular, well documented.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Case, essentially had a script, a published theologically approved script
for the agitations writing tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings that suddenly
broke out in his own home with his daughter and niece.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It gave everyone a framework, a way to understand these
otherwise bizarre symptoms.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
A recognized framework, yeah, which leads us straight into the courtroom.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And what's striking is that everyone involved, the judges, the accused,
the accusers, they all basically agreed on what a witch was.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Right. They were drawing from English scholars like Joseph Glanville.
A witch was someone who made a pact, a confederacy
with evil spirits to gain supernatural power, and there were
specific signs they looked for, Oh yeah, signing the Devil's
book in blood, having a witch's mark, which could be
almost anything, a mole, a nipple, even a flea bite,
(04:44):
using charms, poppets, those little dolls.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The source mentions the literature was thick with toads. Sounds
almost absurd now it does.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
But they took it deadly seriously. The big problem for
the court, though, was proving that invisible pact.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
How do you prove a deal with the devil exactly?
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And that's where the court, led by Justices Hathorne and Corwin,
lean so heavily on spectral evidence.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Which is basically testimony about ghosts.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Essentially, yes, it's the victim saying I saw the spirit
the specter of the person you're accusing tormenting me, invisible
to everyone else.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Of course, that's just mind blowing legally, Suddenly, the word
of these young girls or Paris's slave.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Tteeople at the absolute bottom of the social ladder.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Their testimony about something unseen could condemn respected church members.
It completely flipped the power dynamic, it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Really did, and Tituba. She seemed to grasp the mechanics
of this new reality faster than anyone.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Her confession was kind of the cornerstone, wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
It was foundational because she gave the magistrates exactly what
they wanted, what they expected to hear, based on their readings.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Described as a terrifying, psychedelic confession full of.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
These vivid details, the tall man in the black hat,
the red book she was forced to sign. It perfectly
matched the Puritan script.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So the popular idea about her bringing voodoo from the.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Caribbean, that's largely legend. What mattered was how perfectly her
confession likely coerced responded to the judges leading questions and
confirmed their existing beliefs about English witchcraft. It's set the pattern, and.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Others followed that pattern, like Ban Foster.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Anne Foster, an elderly widow, coerced into confessing. She described
flying to a witch's meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
On a pole, flying on a pole, lying on.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
A pole, yeah which supposedly snapped, causing her to fall
and injure her leg. And then she actually pointed to
her injured leg and court as proof of her supernatural journey.
It's tragic logic.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So confession was the way out, or at least the
way to potentially survive longer. But what about those who refused,
who stood their ground.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
That's where you see the court's frankly terrifying inflexibility, especially
under Chief Justice William Stoughton. He was relentless.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Rebecca Nurse is the prime example here, isn't.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
She absolutely seventy one years old, a deeply respect church member.
She just calmly maintained her innocence, said she was as
innocent as the child unborn, and.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The jury initially believed her.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Question properly sent the jury back and they changed their verdict.
They came back with guilty and then adding insult to injury.
She was formally excommunicated from her church before they hanged her.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Just brutal. And then there were those who defied the
courts process itself, like George Jacobs.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Right. Jacob's just flat out refused to play along, famously
said he was no more a wizard than a buzzard.
He wouldn't enter a plea guilty or not guilty.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Why I refuse to plead Because.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Under the law at the time, if you refuse to plead,
you couldn't technically be tried, but the penalty for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Refusing was horrific.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Pressing yes, pinfort de dur, he was crushed to death
under heavy stones, slowly over days, an agonizing way to die.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Why do that instead of just please not Kilsey?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
By dying without a conviction, his estate couldn't be automatically
confiscated by the governor. He died protecting his family's inheritance.
It shows how even in this madness, legal technicalities and
property still mattered, and.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Even simple things became tests. Like the lord's prayer.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, that was a common test. The belief was a witch.
Someone in league with the devil couldn't recite it perfectly,
they'd stumble or miss a word, So.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Jacobs and others were asked to recite it.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
And when they faltered, maybe out of fear or age
or just nerves, it was taken as absolute proof, irrefutable
evidence of their guilt.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So for a while there, if you didn't confess, your
chances were basically zero.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Pretty much, the conviction rate was terrifyingly effective.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So things were peaking. Around August September sixteen ninety two,
what finally started to turn the tide, What broke the.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Fever, doubts started creeping in. A key moment was the
execution of Reverend George Burrows.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
He was accused of being the ringleader, right the head
wizard exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But at the gallows he prayed eloquently and then recited
the Lord's prayer perfectly, flawlessly. This visibly unsettled the crowd.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
It didn't fit the narrative.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Not at all. It made people think, wait a minute,
maybe some of these condemned people really are innocent. It
cracked the certainty, and that.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Created space for intellectual criticism.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
It did people like Thomas Braddle, a merchant and scientist,
started speaking out. He made this incredibly sharp logical point,
which he argued, if the court is condemning people based
only on the afflicted girl's claims, and everyone agrees the
devil can trick the afflicted or even impersonate innocent people,
then by relying solely on that spectral evidence, the judges
(09:38):
themselves are basically doing the devil's work. They're letting the
devil dictate who gets condemned.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's a powerful argument, turning their own logic.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Against them, devastatingly effective. And then you had key figures
in the church establishment weighing in too.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Like increase Mather Cotton, Mather's father, Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
The influential increase. Mather published Cases of Conscience. He didn't
deny which craft existed, but he argued strongly against relying
only on spectral evidence for convictions. He worried intensely about
condemning the innocent, because the devil could impersonate good people.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So intellectual and theological pressure building right, But ultimately the
thing that shut it down was politics.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Governor Phipps returned to the.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Colony, found this absolute chaos.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Widespread condemnations, instability threatening his brand new administration. He made
a political calculation, protect the government, protect the government's stability.
He paused the trials, then formally dissolved the Special Court
of Oyer and Terminer. The wish hunt was officially over,
more due to political expediency than a sudden dawn of reason, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But the damage was already done for the survivors, for
the whole community.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
It was permanent, Absolutely profound and permanent. Think about Dorothy Good,
accused at five years old, spent over eight months chained
in a dungeon. She was physically and mentally scarred for life,
went insane, disrifying or Philip English, he was Salem's richest merchant.
He fled, but when he came back he found his
house completely looted by the sheriff himself. Furniture goods, even
(11:07):
family portraits all gone.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And then there's the silence afterwards.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yes, this thundering reticence, as Schiff calls it. The Puritans
were usually obsessed with record keeping, but for sixteen ninety
two diaries, Vanish Reverend Paris deleted entries from the church records.
Salem Village later even renamed itself Danvers, trying to erase it,
trying to bury what they called that dark and mysterious season,
(11:31):
a collective trauma they couldn't face.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
So when you step back and look at it all,
what does it really mean for us?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
For you listening, well, the Salem witch trials fundamentally look
like a kind of societal autoimmune disorder. The community turned
its deepest fears inward, attacking itself.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Wow, that's a powerful way to put it.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And the court's actions they seem less about finding actual witches,
less about justice, and more about the fragile new government
needing to prove it could fight an enemy, even an
invisible one. It became a performance of authority.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Right. We saw how all these factors came together, the
social tensions, the economic worries, the political chaos, those intense
religious beliefs about the devil being right next door.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
It all merged to create this perfect storm of hysteria,
and for a time, maintaining authority trumped everything else, leading
to that terrifying conviction rate.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Do process just went out the window completely, And.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It's important to look at who had the power to
stop it, or at least slow it down. Chief Justice Stoton, Yes,
our sources suggest he was really the one figure who
could have applied the brakes, who could have seriously questioned
the spectral evidence earlier, But he didn't. He clung to
its validity long after others started having serious.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Doubts, Which leaves us with the final thought, doesn't it
something for you to consider?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, in times of great fear, when things feel uncertain
and the threats seem maybe confusing or invisible.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
How often does that urgent need for leaders to look strong,
to take a stand end up overriding careful thought, overriding justice.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
How often does it lead to this kind of collective
failure of reason? Where innocent people pay the price. Salem
is a tragedy, but it's also a perpetual warning
Welcome to the deep dive. We're your shortcut to understanding
complicated history, really getting under the surface.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
And today our subject is the Salem witch trials of
sixteen ninety two, who ought to go way beyond the
usual story of just mass hysteria exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
We're looking at the well the toxic mix of politics,
religion and social anxiety that basically made the whole thing
almost inevitable.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Our sources, and we're drawing a lot from Stacy Shift's
work here she was Salem wasn't simple at all.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
No, it was a complex, fragile world. You had these huge,
unanswerable questions about life and God meeting a set of absolute,
totally unquestioned answers from their theology, a dangerous combination.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And the political side. That's huge too, isn't it. Massachusetts
was in a real state of flux.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Oh. Absolutely. It was this intercharter period after the Andros
coup in eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Which sounds technical, but for the people living.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
There right for you, the colonists on the ground, intercharter
meant the government was well fairly functioning, no stable recognize
legal framework.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
So total uncertainty, total uncertainty, and this led people to
believe that every problem, political chaos, disease, outbreaks, and yeah,
witchcraft does, assigned God was angry with them.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
They felt they had to find the source of that
anger to fix it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Precisely, to restore order, they needed someone or something to blame.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
So political chaos feeds this deep religious fear. We're going
to trace how that fear plus local grudges, plus these
really specific beliefs about the devil being right there, you know,
physically present.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Created this perfect tinder box ready to ignite.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Okay, let's unpack this. Then. What were the exact conditions
inside Salem that led a few young afflicted girls suddenly
hold all the power, like become the central authority in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, it really starts with the community itself. Salem Village
modern Danvers was small, maybe five hundred and fifty people. Tiny, tiny, yeah,
and absolutely riddled with conflict. The source material, says Hearsay,
had a really long life there, just kept alive by
gossip and repetition.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
And it wasn't just abstract gossip, right, it was about
real things.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Land power exactly, deep grudges between brother and neighbor, often
going back years, usually over land think about that massive
feud between the Putnam and Nurse families that had been
simmering for decades.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So these existing fall lines.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
They made the community incredibly vulnerable when the accusation started.
Those old resentments basically provided a map of who to target.
It wasn't random.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
You went after your enemy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
You went after people you already had issues with, yeah,
or people who didn't fit them old yeah, poor women,
older women who spoke their minds like Rebecca Nurse, people
who challenged that strict Puritan hierarchy.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And then you layer the external terror on top of
that internal mess.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Puritan society felt constantly under siege. They saw the world
as this battleground, always vulnerable to demonic attack.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And the devil wasn't some abstract evil, not at all.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
He worked through real agents, horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers,
and they specifically linked him to their enemies, like well,
Native Americans, the French on the frontier. They were seen
as the princes of darkness, literal agents of Satan, lurking
just beyond the settlements. That sense of invisible enemies.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Was palpable, so besieged from without, fractures from within, and then.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The spark finally hits right in Reverend Samuel Parris's house.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
But what's really interesting here, as our sources point out,
is this wasn't maybe spontaneous.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, yeah, Paris had moved to Salem right around the
time Cotton Mather published his Memorable Providences.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That's the book about the Goodwin children in Boston back
in sixteen.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Eighty nine exactly. And Mather's book described in detail children's suffering, convulsions,
foaming at the mouth, barking like dogs, all these very
specific physical manifestations.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So Paris, knowing this popular, well documented.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Case, essentially had a script, a published theologically approved script
for the agitations writing tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings that suddenly
broke out in his own home with his daughter and niece.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It gave everyone a framework, a way to understand these
otherwise bizarre symptoms.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
A recognized framework, yeah, which leads us straight into the courtroom.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
And what's striking is that everyone involved, the judges, the accused,
the accusers, they all basically agreed on what a witch was.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Right. They were drawing from English scholars like Joseph Glanville.
A witch was someone who made a pact, a confederacy
with evil spirits to gain supernatural power, and there were
specific signs they looked for, Oh yeah, signing the Devil's
book in blood, having a witch's mark, which could be
almost anything, a mole, a nipple, even a flea bite,
(04:44):
using charms, poppets, those little dolls.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The source mentions the literature was thick with toads. Sounds
almost absurd now it does.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
But they took it deadly seriously. The big problem for
the court, though, was proving that invisible pact.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
How do you prove a deal with the devil exactly?
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And that's where the court, led by Justices Hathorne and Corwin,
lean so heavily on spectral evidence.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Which is basically testimony about ghosts.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Essentially, yes, it's the victim saying I saw the spirit
the specter of the person you're accusing tormenting me, invisible
to everyone else.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Of course, that's just mind blowing legally, Suddenly, the word
of these young girls or Paris's slave.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Tteeople at the absolute bottom of the social ladder.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Their testimony about something unseen could condemn respected church members.
It completely flipped the power dynamic, it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Really did, and Tituba. She seemed to grasp the mechanics
of this new reality faster than anyone.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Her confession was kind of the cornerstone, wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
It was foundational because she gave the magistrates exactly what
they wanted, what they expected to hear, based on their readings.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Described as a terrifying, psychedelic confession full of.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
These vivid details, the tall man in the black hat,
the red book she was forced to sign. It perfectly
matched the Puritan script.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So the popular idea about her bringing voodoo from the.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Caribbean, that's largely legend. What mattered was how perfectly her
confession likely coerced responded to the judges leading questions and
confirmed their existing beliefs about English witchcraft. It's set the pattern, and.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Others followed that pattern, like Ban Foster.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Anne Foster, an elderly widow, coerced into confessing. She described
flying to a witch's meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
On a pole, flying on a pole, lying on.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
A pole, yeah which supposedly snapped, causing her to fall
and injure her leg. And then she actually pointed to
her injured leg and court as proof of her supernatural journey.
It's tragic logic.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So confession was the way out, or at least the
way to potentially survive longer. But what about those who refused,
who stood their ground.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
That's where you see the court's frankly terrifying inflexibility, especially
under Chief Justice William Stoughton. He was relentless.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Rebecca Nurse is the prime example here, isn't.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
She absolutely seventy one years old, a deeply respect church member.
She just calmly maintained her innocence, said she was as
innocent as the child unborn, and.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The jury initially believed her.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Question properly sent the jury back and they changed their verdict.
They came back with guilty and then adding insult to injury.
She was formally excommunicated from her church before they hanged her.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Just brutal. And then there were those who defied the
courts process itself, like George Jacobs.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Right. Jacob's just flat out refused to play along, famously
said he was no more a wizard than a buzzard.
He wouldn't enter a plea guilty or not guilty.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Why I refuse to plead Because.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Under the law at the time, if you refuse to plead,
you couldn't technically be tried, but the penalty for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Refusing was horrific.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Pressing yes, pinfort de dur, he was crushed to death
under heavy stones, slowly over days, an agonizing way to die.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Why do that instead of just please not Kilsey?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
By dying without a conviction, his estate couldn't be automatically
confiscated by the governor. He died protecting his family's inheritance.
It shows how even in this madness, legal technicalities and
property still mattered, and.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Even simple things became tests. Like the lord's prayer.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, that was a common test. The belief was a witch.
Someone in league with the devil couldn't recite it perfectly,
they'd stumble or miss a word, So.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Jacobs and others were asked to recite it.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
And when they faltered, maybe out of fear or age
or just nerves, it was taken as absolute proof, irrefutable
evidence of their guilt.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So for a while there, if you didn't confess, your
chances were basically zero.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Pretty much, the conviction rate was terrifyingly effective.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
So things were peaking. Around August September sixteen ninety two,
what finally started to turn the tide, What broke the.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Fever, doubts started creeping in. A key moment was the
execution of Reverend George Burrows.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
He was accused of being the ringleader, right the head
wizard exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But at the gallows he prayed eloquently and then recited
the Lord's prayer perfectly, flawlessly. This visibly unsettled the crowd.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
It didn't fit the narrative.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Not at all. It made people think, wait a minute,
maybe some of these condemned people really are innocent. It
cracked the certainty, and that.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Created space for intellectual criticism.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
It did people like Thomas Braddle, a merchant and scientist,
started speaking out. He made this incredibly sharp logical point,
which he argued, if the court is condemning people based
only on the afflicted girl's claims, and everyone agrees the
devil can trick the afflicted or even impersonate innocent people,
then by relying solely on that spectral evidence, the judges
(09:38):
themselves are basically doing the devil's work. They're letting the
devil dictate who gets condemned.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
That's a powerful argument, turning their own logic.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Against them, devastatingly effective. And then you had key figures
in the church establishment weighing in too.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Like increase Mather Cotton, Mather's father, Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
The influential increase. Mather published Cases of Conscience. He didn't
deny which craft existed, but he argued strongly against relying
only on spectral evidence for convictions. He worried intensely about
condemning the innocent, because the devil could impersonate good people.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So intellectual and theological pressure building right, But ultimately the
thing that shut it down was politics.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Governor Phipps returned to the.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Colony, found this absolute chaos.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Widespread condemnations, instability threatening his brand new administration. He made
a political calculation, protect the government, protect the government's stability.
He paused the trials, then formally dissolved the Special Court
of Oyer and Terminer. The wish hunt was officially over,
more due to political expediency than a sudden dawn of reason, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But the damage was already done for the survivors, for
the whole community.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
It was permanent, Absolutely profound and permanent. Think about Dorothy Good,
accused at five years old, spent over eight months chained
in a dungeon. She was physically and mentally scarred for life,
went insane, disrifying or Philip English, he was Salem's richest merchant.
He fled, but when he came back he found his
house completely looted by the sheriff himself. Furniture goods, even
(11:07):
family portraits all gone.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And then there's the silence afterwards.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yes, this thundering reticence, as Schiff calls it. The Puritans
were usually obsessed with record keeping, but for sixteen ninety
two diaries, Vanish Reverend Paris deleted entries from the church records.
Salem Village later even renamed itself Danvers, trying to erase it,
trying to bury what they called that dark and mysterious season,
(11:31):
a collective trauma they couldn't face.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
So when you step back and look at it all,
what does it really mean for us?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
For you listening, well, the Salem witch trials fundamentally look
like a kind of societal autoimmune disorder. The community turned
its deepest fears inward, attacking itself.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Wow, that's a powerful way to put it.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And the court's actions they seem less about finding actual witches,
less about justice, and more about the fragile new government
needing to prove it could fight an enemy, even an
invisible one. It became a performance of authority.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Right. We saw how all these factors came together, the
social tensions, the economic worries, the political chaos, those intense
religious beliefs about the devil being right next door.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
It all merged to create this perfect storm of hysteria,
and for a time, maintaining authority trumped everything else, leading
to that terrifying conviction rate.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Do process just went out the window completely, And.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It's important to look at who had the power to
stop it, or at least slow it down. Chief Justice Stoton, Yes,
our sources suggest he was really the one figure who
could have applied the brakes, who could have seriously questioned
the spectral evidence earlier, But he didn't. He clung to
its validity long after others started having serious.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Doubts, Which leaves us with the final thought, doesn't it
something for you to consider?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, in times of great fear, when things feel uncertain
and the threats seem maybe confusing or invisible.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
How often does that urgent need for leaders to look strong,
to take a stand end up overriding careful thought, overriding justice.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
How often does it lead to this kind of collective
failure of reason? Where innocent people pay the price. Salem
is a tragedy, but it's also a perpetual warning
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