Bewitched and Bothered: The Real Witch’s Brew of Salem

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 Tensions: The deadly mix of wealth gaps, frontier trauma, and religious conflict

• The Spark: What actually triggered the first accusations in January 1692

• Modern Relevance: Why these lessons matter for recognizing witch hunts today

Key Topics Explored

✓ Belief systems that made witchcraft accusations believable

✓ Political upheaval following the revocation of Massachusetts' Royal Charter

✓ Controversial judicial decisions like allowing "spectral evidence"

✓ Economic anxieties from King William's War and previous conflicts

✓ European witchcraft beliefs that influenced New England thinking

✓ The snowball effect that made accusations spiral out of control

Why This Episode Matters

Learn the complex, interconnected causes behind one of history's most misunderstood events. Discover how fear-mongering, scapegoating, and abandoning rational thinking can lead entire communities astray—and why these patterns still matter today.

Perfect for history buffs, true crime fans, and anyone who wants to separate Salem facts from fiction in just 15 minutes.

Tags: #SalemWitchTrials #AmericanHistory #TrueCrime #HistoryPodcast #Massachusetts #Colonial #WitchHunts

Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project

Massachusetts Court of Oyer and Terminer Documents, ⁠The Salem Witch Trials Collection, Peabody Essex Museum

Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

The Thing About Salem Website

⁠The Thing About Salem YouTube

⁠The Thing About Salem Patreon

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts YouTube

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts Website

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, here's a question that's been asked for the last 333
years. How could the Salem Witch trials
actually happen? It wasn't moldy bread.
It wasn't hysteria. It wasn't a circle of girls
playing with magic. So did get the Salem witch
trials going and what caused things to get so out of control?

(00:24):
Welcome to the thing about Salem.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
Our ancestors experienced the Salem witch trials.
So next time someone tries to tell you how the Salem witch
trials happened, you can tell them how it really was in 15
minutes or less. Salem wasn't the peaceful place

(00:48):
its name implies. There were many pressures going
on and many other factors all added together acting like
gunpowder overstuffing a powder keg.
The first ingredient overstuffing that powder keg was
the belief in witchcraft. The belief in witchcraft, like

(01:10):
just about everybody believed inwitchcraft.
The ministers, the magistrates, the common folk, they all
believed very deeply in this. It was entrenched in their
everyday world as part of their view of there being a visible
world and an invisible world that sometimes ran together.

(01:32):
And you could see the invisible in this world.
And witchcraft was just part of how that world operated, with
magic being an everyday concern.But what was of the utmost
concern was the diabolical. So magic that could have been

(01:52):
diabolical was feared and condemned.
There was a deep belief that witches made a covenant with the
devil, that they signed his bookin exchange for getting powers
to do magic and better themselves or hurt their
enemies. In part of this diabolical pact
brought along with it this fear that there was a conspiracy

(02:16):
between Satan and the witches tooverthrow Christchurch and the
government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to establish
the Devil's own Kingdom in Christ Kingdom's place.
And something you may be familiar with, magical

(02:39):
explanations were used to understand misfortune, and the
ministers gave sanction to thesefears about misfortune or why
they seem to be under punishment.
And the ministers, they talked about, you had to be wary of the
devil. He was around prowling like a

(03:01):
lion and you never knew where hewas going to turn up and you had
to be ready to turn him away. The next ingredient in that
powder keg was the political instability.
In 1684, King James the Second revoked the royal charter that

(03:21):
authorized the Massachusetts BayColony to govern itself.
While there was not this official chartered government,
the afflicted girls fell ill andall hell was breaking loose.
And that hell was breaking loosein the household of Salem
Village Minister Samuel Paris, one of these ministers, who was

(03:46):
talking about the devil prowlingaround his community.
So he was really stuffing that powder keg full of the
gunpowder. And this interim government was
in place until May 1692, when the newly appointed royal
Governor, Sir William Phipps andReverend Increase Mather

(04:10):
returned to Boston from London, where they had been lobbying for
this new charter. By then the jails were
overcrowded and there were no courts to handle the witchcraft
cases. So the governor he established a
special court of lawyer and terminer, which means to hear
and determine. On May 26th he established this

(04:32):
court with 9 judges and a King'sattorney appointed to prosecute
those who were waiting in jail. What was going on in those
courts had everything to do withthe turn out of the Salem witch
hunt, starting with evidence. One evidence that they were
using was spectral evidence. It was questionable, yet

(04:56):
reliable. How did that work, Josh?
It works because there's people like Cotton Mather who are
straddling the fence on what to do about spectral evidence.
Is it proof that somebody has committed witchcraft if somebody
else has seen their specter doing something?

(05:17):
Or is it totally unreliable because maybe the devil can fake
it? And since they weren't sure,
they just went ahead and used the evidence.
They just barreled right ahead. And under normal circumstances,
the legal system of the time required people lodging

(05:38):
complaints, criminal complaints,especially felony complaints,
which could result in somebody'sexecution.
They were requiring the accusersto post a significant bond of
money. And if it was proven that they
were making things up, or if they weren't going to see it

(05:59):
through and come up as a witnessagainst the person that they're
accusing, then the charge could be thrown out and they could
find themselves on the wrong side of the bars.
So in Salem, the magistrates very early on, John Hathorne and

(06:21):
Jonathan Corwin of Salem, when they started doing the taking
these complaints from the very first one, they waived this bond
requirement. They did not require a bond to
accuse Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne and Zichiba.
This next part of the powder kegis something we can really

(06:41):
relate to. There was great socio economic
anxieties and community tensions.
There was a large wealth gap between the prosperous merchants
and everyone else in the colony,and that just caused some
tension. And the population of Essex

(07:02):
County, Massachusetts, where Salem is, was strained at this
point in time because there was a war going on on the frontier
with the Native Americans and their French allies.
And so refugees were flooding infrom Maine and New Hampshire to
Essex County to be safer. There were also great tensions

(07:25):
over religious doctrines, such as the prolonged debate over the
theology of membership called the Halfway covenant.
Membership in the churches declined from the first
generation of settlers to the second to the third, and the
ministers bemoaned this. They were so worried for the

(07:49):
spiritual state of the colony. The churches had this
requirement that to become a full communing member, you had
to get up before the whole church and talk about your
conversion experience, how you found God and developed this

(08:10):
relationship that makes you confident that you're worthy of
being a member, that you think that you're one of the elect
that's been chosen to live in heaven for eternity.
And so some of the ministers were a little more progressive
about membership, and they said,let's make this halfway
covenant. We'll amend the rules so more

(08:32):
people can join the church. Salem Town, the port city, they
accepted the halfway covenant inthat church.
But in Salem Village, where the farmers lived, Samuel Parris did
not accept the halfway covenant.He wanted a very rigid standard

(08:53):
of membership that everybody wasproperly screened before they
could come on board and take communion.
He not only like to make it really hard to get it, he made
it really hard to keep it because he loved to take
membership away from accused witches.
So this powder keg that we've been going through, it also

(09:16):
included these refugees from King William's War that were so
very traumatized from the violence and the fear that they
were experiencing. And there was a lot of economic
calamity from the war as well. And another factor that we
touched on earlier was this belief in witchcraft and what

(09:38):
happened with Salem that was a little different than previous
witch trials in Connecticut and in Boston was this European
influence, This continental witch came to Salem and attended
the witch's Sabbath and flew on poles.

(10:01):
What do you mean this continental witch came?
It was different than the English witch.
The English witches didn't really fly on brooms or bulls,
and they didn't have Sabbaths. They had familiars, which we see
in Salem. But otherwise, some of these
things, these stories that the afflicted people and the

(10:22):
accusers and the confessors L come from tales that have been
spread through writing and then word of mouth about Swedish
witch trials and other witch trials across Europe.
And we've been talking about this powder keg.
It's been overstuffed. So it's bulging and it's ready

(10:46):
to just explode and ignite the whole colony in a firestorm.
It just needs a spark. So in come Abigail Williams and
Betty Paris. They get afflicted in January
1692 in the household of the Reverend Samuel Paris of Samuel
Village. In February, a doctor diagnosed

(11:09):
them as being under an evil hand, meaning that witchcraft
was at work. After this evil hand diagnosis,
a neighbor decides that she wants to identify who is
bewitching the girls. She uses an English method
rarely used even in England. There's only a couple of cases

(11:31):
of this happening. This cake she bakes from rye
meal and the urine of the afflicted girls and feeds to a
dog and the dog. Somehow something's supposed to
happen and the witch is supposedto be revealed, supposedly.
So the next day, the girls claimthat Tituba is bewitching them,

(11:55):
and then they claimed that SarahGood and Sarah Osborne are also
afflicting them. And so you've got these three
people accused. And that's not an extreme witch
hunt. It's more of a typical case of a
witch trial in New England whereone or two, in this case, three
people are accused. And it could have just ended up

(12:18):
that, but things escalated. That isn't the end of it because
under all this duress and stressand love for these girls that
are suffering, Tituba decides tosay she was coerced by the devil

(12:38):
to hurt the girls. But it wasn't just her, she
says. There are nine other witches.
And now since there's 9 witches instead of three, the officials
have to look for these other witches.
People in the community start seeing witches all around them
and just start piling on complaints.
More confessions happen and things just snowball.

(13:01):
So you get to a point where it'snot just the usual suspects
being accused, there's indiscriminate accusations
against pillars of the community.
It's so evident that this was a very complicated event.
There's not a silver bullet 1 cause of the Salem witch trials.

(13:23):
Like Sarah's saying, it's not just explained by ergot or Lyme
disease or encephalitis or any other one thing.
It's all these things coming together to create what
Professor Emerson Baker calls the perfect storm of ingredients

(13:48):
that was needed to be in place to create the environment for
the sandwich trials to happen. We're here to invite you to two
special events. Partnership of Historic Boston's
has put us in their fall lineup with Professor Emerson Baker.
You'll love these wide-ranging discussions of New England witch

(14:10):
hunts. The first happened September 8th
at 7:00 PM Eastern. It's online and it's about the
other understanding witch hunts.Then you can come back on the
22nd of September where we'll bediscussing resistance stopping
witch hunts. Don't miss these really engaging
discussions that we're going to have with renowned historian

(14:32):
Emerson Baker. Yeah, and if you want to hear us
talk to Emerson Baker in the meantime, check out our podcast,
The Thing About Witch Hunts. We've done 2 episodes with them
and they're quite informative. Come learn about these events at
historicbostons.org. Ucoming Events.