What's a Witch's Teat: The Bizarre Body Searches of Salem

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Thing about Salem.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
Our ancestors were examined for witch marks.
In 1618, English legal writer Michael Dalton published A
handbook for magistrates instructing them that devil's
marks would be found in their secretive parts and therefore

(00:23):
required diligent and careful search.
Cotton Mather explained that familiar spirits were devils and
bodily shapes that gave responses or receive orders for
doing mischief. These ideas crossed the Atlantic
and became practice in Salem in June 1692.

(00:44):
Women like Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth Proctor were stripped
and examined. Today, we're looking at the
dehumanizing practice of searching for which Marks and
how it was used to convict innocent people in Salem.
So where did these ideas about witches, Marks and familiar
spirits actually come from? Let's look at the men who

(01:06):
created the so-called evidence. Many of the ideas used to
prosecute the Salem Witch Trialscame from English legal texts.
Texts by people like William Perkins and Richard Bernard and
Michael Dalton who we quoted at the top and they laid out what

(01:28):
witches marks were and familiar spirits and how to identify
witches marks. William Perkins in A Discourse
of the Damned Art of Witchcraft laid out seven types of evidence
that could be used to try someone for witchcraft.
One of those evidences was to find a witch's mark or its eat.

(01:50):
We mentioned Michael Dalton and his country Justice.
He said that witch's marks were like blue or red spots, flea
bites or with the flesh sunk in and hollow.
So it's a really broad description.
It sounds like the human body tome.
He says. Quote these.

(02:11):
The devil's marks, being sensible and being pricked, will
not bleed and be often in their secretest parts, and therefore
require diligent and careful search.
And Richard Bernard in The Certainty of the World of
Spirits, says this where many witch marks have been found in

(02:32):
witch trials in England. They've been found on the crown
of the head, on the breasts, on the thighs, on the butt, on the
neck, on the chin, on the shoulder, on the flank, under
the ear, under the flank, under the eyebrows, under the armpits,
within the lips and in the secret parts.

(02:53):
He tells us the various marks were left, ranging from spots to
perturbances like small nipples.These English writers laid out
detailed instructions about whatto look for and where to search.
But was any of this actually in the Bible?
No, it was not laid out in the Bible.

(03:13):
Robert Kalos, a critic of The sandwich trials, published More
Wonders of the Invisible World, and in that book he points out
that the evidences that the men in court are using to identify
witches are not spelled out in the scripture.

(03:34):
But the search for witches markswasn't the only test authorities
used. Let's look at some of the other
methods they employed to identify witches.
Yeah, there were several. As we mentioned, William Perkins
had listed 7 things to test. Three of these were used in the
Salem Witch Trials. Witches were supposed to not be

(03:57):
able to recite the Lord's Prayer.
You may. Remember that Reverend George
Burrows is reported to have given the Lord's Prayer at the
gallows, but it didn't save his life.
Another test that they did that specifically related to witches

(04:18):
marks was called watching. They would keep a person awake
for a couple of days, maybe a few days and they would just
watch to see if a familiar or animp came to feed from a witch's
mark. And then a third test that was
often done in the courtroom was called the touch test.

(04:43):
And basically what would happen was if an afflicted person who
had been bewitched allegedly wastouched by the witch, the curse
or spell that had gone into the afflicted person would go back
into the witch. And so if somebody who was

(05:05):
having a fit stopped and became well upon touch, then the person
who touched them was a witch. The authorities, Perkins and
Bernard, actually said what the teats were supposedly for.
The teats were practical in nature in that they offered

(05:27):
nourishment for the familiar spirit or imp that accompanied
the witch. So I know there is a case in
Salem where a woman fed her familiars directly through her
actual breasts. There's also there for the
devil's sake to use as his brand.

(05:48):
He put his mark on the people that served him.
You, once you signed a contract with them, basically you were
his for the length of that contract.
And so he or his devils would leave a little mark on your body
in the absence of somebody actually bringing in the book to
show that there was a contract signed with the devil, that mark

(06:12):
on their body some place was theproof that they were working
with the devil. So the supposed mark was also
the proof that there was a contract that there was a
devil's book, that an alleged witch had signed their name in
the supposed devil's book because something on their body

(06:33):
was identified as a witch Mark bun.
Bun. But this raises the question,
knowing what the witch teat is for, what is a familiar spirit
actually? As we opened with a familiar

(06:55):
spirit is to be able to cause a devil to take bodily shapes.
The community would identify familiars as any kind of animal
that they imagined they were seeing too.
So a devil would take the form of something we might be
familiar with, like a cat or a bird, and then it can give
responses and it can receive orders to do mischief.

(07:19):
Yes, and in Salem, familiars didappear as almost every animal
that was familiar to the settlers.
There were birds, cats, rats, dogs, snakes, hogs, monstrous
creations that were amalgamations of different
creatures, and we'll get to moredetails on those in a little

(07:42):
bit. They're pretty fun to look at,
some of those monster. This evaluation of the body was
dehumanizing to the ultimate degree.
They were invasively searching bodies and the interpretation of
a witch mark was wide open. Yeah, these searches meant being

(08:07):
stripped, examined in private areas, having pins driven into
your flesh to test whether this which is marked would bleed or
whether you were sensitive when it got poked.
And this was systemic dehumanization.
So let's take a sampling of the teats and the familiars that are

(08:30):
in the records of the Salemich trials.
I want to look at the men and then the women, and I think
you'll notice a key difference in what happens with the men
versus the women. So I'll start with the men.
John Proctor, John Willard and George Burroughs were examined

(08:52):
for witches marks in jail and they were found to have none.
But when George Jacobs senior, who is either 2 or 83 years old
was examined for teats, he had three of them.
A pin was run through two of those and he did not feel it, so

(09:12):
they were insensible. He had one in his mouth on the
inside of his right cheek, had one in his right shoulder blade
that was drooping about 1/4 of an inch long when a pin was run
through it. No substance oozed out and no
blood, no pus, no bio, no nothing.

(09:36):
And then he had a third one on his right head.
The women were searched by women.
Let's look at what those experiences were like.
Titaba was examined for her, which is marked by Hannah
Ingersoll on March 1st. She was criticized by the
magistrates for holding her arm during that examination, and

(10:00):
according to Reverend Hale's writings after this, they said
Titba was again examined in prison, and being searched by a
woman, she was found to have upon her body the marks of the
devil's wounding of her. Sarah Good, who was executed
Later, her husband William askedHannah Ingersoll if she saw a

(10:21):
little wart or teeth below his wife's right shoulder.
And there's no record of whethershe saw it or not.
The other recorded search of women for witch's marks occurred
on June 2nd, 1692. A jury of women came into the
court in Salem and examined Alice Parker, Susanna Martin,

(10:46):
Sarah Good, Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Proctor, and Rebecca
Nurse. This was the first day of trials
in the actual Salem Witch Trials, so Alice Parker, Susanna
Martin, and Sarah Good at this point in June were found to have
no witch's marks. Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth
Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, on the other hand, all had a

(11:09):
preternatural excresence of flesh between ye pudendum and ye
Anus, and Bishops was gone though when researched 3 or 4
hours later. And Proctor's had also
disappeared by this time, where Nurses still was there, but
appeared as only senseless dry skin on the second search.

(11:33):
And Rebecca said that this mark was left after a difficult
childbirth. She also requested a
reexamination by qualified individuals who would recognize
that. Another person who was found to
have a witch's mark, but wasn't necessarily physically examined

(11:58):
with the same rigor that they gave to the adult women, was the
young child Dorothy Good. She was about four or five years
old in 1692, and according to Reverend Diadat Lawson, in his
book about the Sandwich Trials, a Brief and True narrative
quote, on the 26th of March, Mr.Hathorne, Mr. Kerwin and Mr.

(12:21):
Higginson were at the prison keeper's house to examine the
child Dorothy Good, And it told them there it had a little snake
that used to suck on the lowest joint of its forefinger.
And when they inquired where pointing to other places, it
told them not there, but there, pointing on the lowest point of

(12:42):
the forefinger, where they observed a deep red spot about
the bigness of a flea bite. They asked who gave it that
snake, whether the great black man?
It said no, its mother gave it. And Dorothy's supposed sake
wasn't the only bizarre familiardescribed What other creatures
did the accusers claim to see? Here's one of my favorite ones

(13:06):
comes to us through Tituba's examinations.
She described another thing, Harry, it goes upright like a
man. It hath only two legs.
Let's talk about John Louder's rooster thing that he saw
because it was a hybrid. He said that a black thing

(13:29):
jumped in out the window and came and stood just before my
face upon the bar. The body of it looked like a
monkey, only the feet were like a cock's feet with claws and the
face somewhat more like a man's than a monkey's.
Afflicted woman Susanna Sheldon claimed Good Wife Buckley had
been a witch for 10 years and that she'd opened her breast and

(13:53):
the black man gave her two little things like young cats,
and she put them to her breasts and suckled them and they had no
hair on them and had ears like aman.
Yeah, witch marks were ordinarily very incriminating
because like we said at the beginning, they were proof of
the covenant with the devil and therefore witchcraft.

(14:16):
But the Court of Order and Terminer that met in Salem in
1692 convicted everyone that wastried before it. 27 of 27 people
tried in the year 1692 by that court were convicted regardless
of the presence or absence of a witch's deep.
Whether it was George Jacobs senior with pins driven through

(14:39):
his flesh, Rebecca Nurse explaining postpartum scari, or
4 year old Dorothy Goods flea bite sized spot, the court
convicted everyone tried in 1692.

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What's a Witch's Teat: The Bizarre Body Searches of Salem

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