The Thing About Salem

The Thing About Salem continues our exclusive conversation with Ben Wickey in Part 2 of our three-part series about his groundbreaking graphic novel "More Weight: A Salem Story," releasing next week. This installment focuses on the heart of Wickey's narrative: the psychological transformation of Giles Corey.

We explore Corey's devastating journey from testifying against his wife Martha to his defiant final moments ...

The Thing About Salem presents an exclusive three-part series with Massachusetts-born author Ben Wickey, whose highly anticipated debut graphic novel "More Weight: A Salem Story" releases next week. This Alan Moore-praised "appalling masterpiece" tells the harrowing tale of Giles Corey, the only person pressed to death under stones during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

In Part 1, we dive into Wickey's extraordi...

Episode Summary

Not all witch trials were the Salem Witch Trials. To truly understand the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, we must examine the broader context of witch hunting that swept through colonial America. This episode explores the extensive history of witch trials in British North America that preceded and influenced the Salem events, revealing how witch hunts affected dozens of communities across New England and be...

Episode Overview

It wasn't moldy bread, mass hysteria, or girls dabbling in magic. Join hosts Josh and Sarah (whose ancestors lived through these events) as they uncover the real forces that created one of America's darkest chapters.

What You'll Discover

• The Real Causes: Multiple explosive factors that turned Salem into a powder keg

• Political Chaos: How governmental instability set the stage for tragedy

• Community Tension...

What happens when your only defense against a death sentence is a handwritten letter? In 1692 Salem, petitions became lifelines for the accused, their families, and entire communities caught in the witch trial hysteria.

In this episode, we explore:

• Mary Esty's remarkable final petition that prioritized saving others over herself

• The creative legal strategies colonists used to challenge "spectral evidence"

• How torture ...

The thing about witch hunts is what happens after can be just as revealing as the hunt itself. After 20 executions and over 150 arrests, Salem had a serious PR problem on its hands. How do you explain away one of colonial America's most notorious legal disasters? Simple: you control who gets to tell the story.

But here's the thing about cover-ups—they rarely go according to plan. Join us as we dive into Salem's messy aft...

What if history's most infamous witch hunt could have been stopped with just a few different decisions? We're examining the pivotal moments between January 1692 and May 1693 when someone—anyone—could have pumped the brakes on Salem's runaway train of accusations.

From the shocking arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good to Martha Carrier's unfortunate promotion to "Queen of Hell," we'll explore how escalat...

Josh and Sarah tell the TL;DR version of the story of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, where 156 people faced formal accusations and over 1,000 became entangled in a legal system that had lost its moral compass. They examine what transformed a small Massachusetts community into the epicenter of mass persecution, from the unprecedented scale of the proceedings to the types of people targeted. This wasn’t just colonial paranoia—it ...

Sarah Good's final words to the minister who demanded her confession—"God will give you blood to drink"—would echo through Salem long after her death. In a community where everyday foods like butter, bread, and pudding became evidence of witchcraft, the line between nourishment and damnation blurred beyond recognition. Explore how Salem's fears transformed the most basic human need into suspicions of a pact with t...

What if we told you that one of Hollywood's most beloved superheroes has a direct connection to Salem's darkest chapter? In this fascinating episode, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack explore the surprising link between Superman actor Christopher Reeve and a Salem Witch Trials victim who pulled off history's most daring escape.The conversation takes a deeply personal turn as both hosts share their own ancestral conne...

Move along folks, the Salem Witch Trials were the product of hysteria, and that's all you need to know. . .

or NOT

We kick off with a midnight ride that would make Paul Revere jealous—except instead of warning about the British, townspeople were frantically summoning help for a girl supposedly being tortured by a witch's specter. But before you roll your eyes and mutter "mass hysteria," consider this: What if the S...

We look at the reported use of oomancy—egg divination—allegedly preceding the Salem Witch Trials. The discussion centers around a haunting account from Reverend John Hale about an afflicted girl who used an egg and glass to divine her future, only to see a coffin appear in the reflection. This ominous vision allegedly led to her eventual death, serving as what Hale callously called "a just warning" about dabbling with div...

You've heard the theory: ergot-poisoned rye bread caused hallucinations that sparked the Salem witch trials. It sounds so logical, so scientific, so... wrong.

When the afflicted girl Elizabeth Hubbard accused alleged witch Sarah Good of witchcraft through spectral torture - pinching, pricking, and demanding she sign the devil's book - was she describing a fungal poisoning? Or something far more complex?

Join Josh Hutchinson and Sarah...

In Salem, people were hanged based on crimes no one else could see.

In Salem, accusers claimed to see the ghostly “shapes” of their neighbors tormenting them from miles away. These spectral attacks left real bruises, real terror, and real questions: Could the Devil impersonate innocent people? Why did Connecticut reject this evidence decades earlier while Salem embraced it with deadly consequences?

From midnight visitations to courtr...

What happens when a few cryptic accusations transform into elaborate tales of midnight gatherings with the Devil himself? In Salem, the introduction of witches' sabbath stories didn't just add fuel to the fire—it created an inferno that would consume an entire community. These stories reveal how panic spreads and conspiracies grow, transforming neighbors into enemies and turning familiar landscapes into theaters of supernat...

Arthur Miller's timeless play, The Crucible, transformed the Salem witch trials into America's most powerful allegory for McCarthyism. When The Crucible premiered in 1953, Miller—who would later marry Marilyn Monroe—created a dramatized version of Salem that exposed the dangerous parallels between witch hunts and communist hysteria.

Hosts Josh and Sarah explore Miller's deliberate historical changes and why he chose fict...

Explore one of the more bizarre forms of evidence used to convict witches in colonial America. When the Salem Witch Trials judges accepted poppets as deadly proof of witchcraft, they turned dolls and rags into evidence that cost innocent people like Bridget Bishop their lives. The judges admitted all kinds of evidence that wouldn't survive five minutes in a modern courtroom, including poppets—dolls crafted with malicious intent—tha...

In the inaugural episode of The Thing About Salem, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack take you inside the Salem Witch Trials, focusing on the early events that triggered the infamous witch-hunt. Discover how Tituba became the unwitting catalyst for America's most infamous witch hunt. This isn't the sanitized version you learned in school or saw in The Crucible—this is the raw, documented truth about three pivotal days that change...

Are you curious about the Salem Witch Trials? Fascinated? Intrigued? Maybe even fully obsessed? Josh and Sarah from Witch Hunt podcast bring you The Thing About Salem, a podcast dedicated to uncovering all things about the Salem Witch Trials. Each week, in 15 minutes or less, we go through all the feels as we share a story and a discussion. Together, we will cry, rage, and even laugh a little about some of the silliness, like the w...