August 20, 2025 • 33 mins
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 escalating choices transformed a local crisis into colonial America's most notorious legal disaster. We'll meet the key players who either fanned the flames or tried to douse them—including Cotton Mather's mixed messages and Governor Phips' late-in-the-game reality check.
Join us as we dissect the moments when cooler heads could have prevailed and discover how 45 residents of unlucky Andover got swept up in accusations that would make even the devil blush. Sometimes it takes a village—or several villages—to create a catastrophe.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
While it often seems as though the Salem witch hunt was an
unstoppable force, there were several times when the whole
thing could have come to a screeching halt.
The wheels within wheels could have come off several times if
(00:22):
only one thing had been a littlebit different.
More importantly, these pivotal moments hinged upon the choices
of individuals. Despite the reputation for
hysteria, the participants in the witch trials were capable of
rational decisions and could have stopped the process through
a number of means. To travel back to the beginning
(00:45):
of the whole affair, in the beginning there were
afflictions. Just two girls were afflicted.
Then an inciting incident happened.
The men decide the girls aren't sick, they're under an evil
hand. Suddenly people fear witchcraft
is at work. Suddenly people need to find the
(01:08):
witches at work. Suddenly the affliction spread.
Now a witch cake must be baked. Now 4 girls are afflicted,
bewitched even. Next warrants are issued.
People are arrested. What would the Salem witch
(01:28):
trials have been if all of thesethings hadn't added up?
What if the doctor had never diagnosed the girls as under an
evil hand? Would witchcraft have been
suspected for their illness? Would they still have continued
to look for natural causes? Today we're going to highlight
(01:51):
some of the most interesting escalation points during the
sandwich trials. The evil hand kind of got the
whole thing rolling and then we had these arrests and the first
examinations happened. Initially those accused denied
being involved in witchcraft, but then a confession.
(02:15):
Tituba is the first to confess, and when she confesses, she
implicates 9 total witches in the area, not the three of them
that had been accused and were undergoing examination.
So those pursuing the witches had more to find had to look
(02:39):
elsewhere. Who else is a witch in our
community? So they kept looking.
They went looking for witches. And they found a few more,
including church members. Now they're accusing church
members like Martha Corey. And three days after they arrest
(03:00):
Martha Corey, they arrest Rebecca Nurse and a little baby.
4 year old girl child not yet ofage to be in kindergarten by our
standards today. Just probably clinging to her
much frayed Dolly and crying as she's yanked away from her
(03:20):
father, gone to be with her mother, Sarah Goode in the
festering dungeon. Little Dorothy Goode has tiny
shekels fitted for her wrists and ankles.
The Salem Witch trials were no longer looking for the usual
suspects. If church members could be
arrested, If tiny girls could bearrested.
(03:43):
Anybody was in play. A few weeks later, the Salem
magistrates reached out to theirpeers in Boston for some help,
and a delegation from the colonial government came to
Salem to hear a special session of the Governor and Council of
(04:07):
Assistance. Now the interim governor didn't
go himself. He sent Deputy Governor Thomas
Danforth to go along with six ofthe assistants from the upper
House of the colonial legislature, including Samuel
Sewell and John. Hatherine and Jonathan Corwin,
who had done the initial examinations of the Salem
(04:32):
accused, were also present and this special counsel heard the
examinations of Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Kloice Wolf of
Salem Village. Elizabeth Proctor's examination
her husband John was present in the session and he spoke up at
(04:52):
one point which resulted in him being arrested for witchcraft.
He became the first male suspectof witchcraft in the Salem witch
trials, and by the end of the witch hunt, some 39 men had been
accused and five had been hanged.
(05:12):
One had been pressed to death and one had died in jail.
During this phase of April, Deputy Governor Danforth could
have instructed Hathorne and Corwin to require bond payments
by plaintiffs. They could have had the Salem
magistrates conduct examinationsin private with only the suspect
present, not the afflicted or the other accusers.
(05:36):
The way Hawthorne and Corwin were proceeding was unusual.
And yet this council meeting, this examination of the proctors
and close was conducted just like the other examinations that
Hathorne and Kerwin did on theirown.
And it appears that they were actually the ones leading the
(05:59):
questioning of the suspects in this hearing.
Even though Danforth was presiding over the meeting.
We mentioned the confession of Tituba earlier.
Confessions continue to escalateduring 1692.
Another confession occurred April 19th when Abigail Hobbs of
(06:20):
Topsfield was examined. She being from a neighboring
town of Salem Village expanded the search radius for the
witches. So remember, Tituba had said
there were 9 witches and they'restill finding more and more
people to accuse in Salem. But this LED beyond the town
(06:41):
boundaries and it also was the first confession since instead
of us. This is only the second time in
the witch trials that anybody confesses.
It seems like it's voluntary. We don't read of any signs of
coercion or badgering, though the record is very short, I have
(07:03):
to say. So we don't know what happened
before Abigail talked, but she seems to just volunteer that
she's working with the devil. Abigail and her stepmother,
Deliverance Hobbs, who were bothaccused witches, filled in key
details about the Diabolical Pact and the Witch's Sabbath
(07:25):
that was happening in the community.
One of the significant things from Abigail's testimony is that
she chose to give the devil her permission to afflict,
suggesting that a specter of herwas used by the devil to torment
afflicted individuals, and it was because the accused had
(07:49):
willingly permitted the devil touse their form that alarms were
raised. Few weeks later, a big change
happens in the Massachusetts BayColony.
It actually becomes the provinceof Massachusetts Bay, and it's
(08:11):
governed for the first time by aroyally appointed governor.
Under the old 1629 charter that had originally allowed
Massachusetts to set up a government.
Voters in Massachusetts had beenable to select their own
leaders, including their own governor.
(08:33):
But that charter was revoked by King James the Second in 1684.
He just took it away and said you don't have a charter anymore
and left them to their own devices.
So an interim government took over and governed for a while.
Massachusetts had been part of something called the Dominion of
(08:53):
New England, with a royal governor called Sir Edmund
Andrews that ruled over several colonies at once.
That government was ousted in 1689 when King William and Queen
Mary came to power in England. And Massachusetts had been under
an interim government from 1689 till Here we are in the middle
(09:15):
of 1692 and it's the middle of May.
Finally, after years of negotiations by the Reverend
Increase Mather, one of the colonies leading ministers and
other individuals, the new charter comes across the sea to
Boston along with the royally appointed governor Sir William
(09:40):
Phipps, a treasure hunter from Maine and New England's first
homegrown knight. And he's the first royal
governor of the newly titled province of the Massachusetts
Bay. So I'm sure no more escalations
happened. This sounds really official and
(10:00):
great. There's a new charter.
No more ridiculous. Got a new charter?
The King's personally appointed person is in charge.
You think there's new law and order in town and things are
going to work out, but what doesthe governor do when he comes?
(10:21):
He creates the special court of lawyer interpreter.
As we were saying, there was this interim government and
well, the colony didn't have anylegitimate courts during this
interim period. They really didn't have any
document. There's no constitution, there's
(10:42):
no charter saying how courtship were.
So the people being accused of witches are basically being
processed by magistrates, local like justices of the peace, and
just put into the local jails and held for an indeterminate
amount of time. And they're in there with all
(11:03):
the other criminals who've been arrested over the past few years
and not processed. So the jails are getting very
crowded. Normally, felony charges like
witchcraft were handled in Boston by the Court of
Assistance, comprised of the Governor and his Counsel of
Assistance, the upper House of the Legislature.
(11:24):
And if you consider how many witch trials had been happening
coming out of the courts of Boston, the last conviction had
been Goody Glover in 1688, and she was a usual suspect.
Yeah, there had been actually dozens of people accused of
witchcraft and many tried in Boston by this court of
(11:48):
assistance between 1648 and 1691.
So this court of Warrior and Terminer, which by the way sat
in Salem, was very out of the ordinary.
This is a specific list of nine people that the governor
(12:09):
handpicks to be the judges, and they're trying people away from
Boston. This is not done.
Your jury pool ends up being different because they draw
people from mostly Essex County instead of the Boston area and
(12:30):
things just turn out different. The judges he appointed are
names that you know and love. William Stoughton, Bartholomew
Gedney, John Richards, NathanielSaltonstall.
Wait Still Winthrop, Samuel Sewell, John Hathorne, Jonathan
Corwin, and Peter Sargent. And they held their first
(12:53):
session in Salem on June 2nd. Finally, trials began after
months of waiting. What would the Salem Witch
Trials have been if this didn't happen?
Here we are in June of 1692, andas we noted when we started
(13:16):
chatting about the escalations of the Salem Witch Trials,
individuals thinkers were pondering what was going on and
the spiritual leaders of the communities were talking about
it and writing about it and weighing what was just and if
(13:37):
things that were happening were appropriate.
Yes, and Governor Phipps himselfdidn't know how to handle He had
never handled the witchcraft trial before.
So he asked for some advice fromthe ministers in the Boston
area, and on June 15th they presented a report called The
(14:02):
Return of Several Ministers, which was written by the famous
minister Cotton Mather out of Boston.
In this report, the ministers warned the justices about
relying upon evidences such as spectral evidence and urged them
to avoid folk tests for witchcraft, and suggested that
(14:24):
the justices follow the guidelines set forth in books by
English Puritans Perkins and Bernard.
The ministers also recommended that justices hold their
proceedings in calm environments.
So not the show that they were putting on of the afflicted
people having fits in an open courtroom, but individual
(14:46):
questionings of the suspects in a nice calm place and some
regulation over the trial proceedings that were in open
court to keep the crowd calm andnot have them prejudice the
jury. So they asked to hold in calm
environments. And they also caution against
(15:08):
considering spectral visions to be proof of guilt, because they
said that demons could actually assume the image of innocent
people. So they're not questioning
whether these spectral creatureswere causing havoc in the
community. They aren't questioning whether
(15:30):
they're real, whether they neverquestion whether the afflicted
people who are seeing them are serious, whether they've
actually had any kind of encounter.
So they're just assuming that the girls and other people with
afflictions are telling the truth and saying that yes, we
(15:50):
saw these people. But can the accused be blamed?
As the spectres, they are sayingthat's too risky.
Demons could be impersonating them.
Yes, now they say all of these wonderful things about using
caution, but then they close with a recommendation for the
(16:14):
speedy and vigorous prosecution of the witches.
Cotton Mather throws in that last line.
That and the judges disregard all of the caution and say we're
going to use spectral evidence, and they continue to use
spectral evidence. The next big phase happens with
(16:37):
another expansion of the geography of the Salem witch
trials. In mid-july.
Things eat up in the town of Andover, which also borders
Salem. These things start heating up
because a woman named Elizabeth Phelps Ballard gets sick and her
(16:57):
husband decides I need the afflicted girls to come and look
at her and determine who is making her sick.
So unnamed girls from Salem Village come up and they have
their spectral visions again andthey see people attacking
Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. So that leads to an accusation
(17:22):
against Mary Lacey Senior, Mary Lacey Junior, which leads to
more accusations against other people, and by the end, the town
has more witchcraft accusations than any other community,
including Salem. And isn't it interesting that
the sick woman, Elizabeth PhelpsBallard, isn't the one naming
(17:44):
witches? It is.
She must have been very sick because we don't have a
deposition from her. There's nothing in her words.
It's all through her husband andher brother-in-law that we'd
find out anything about what's going on with her.
So July 19th, Joseph Ballard goes and files a complaint
(18:06):
against Mary Lacey Senior and Mary Lacey Junior, who I
mentioned. This marked a renewal of arrest
because there hadn't been any arrest warrants issued since
June 6th all the way June 6th toJuly 19th.
That's about six weeks of calm ish in Salem as far as new
(18:29):
accusations going. But executions were happening,
trials were happening. They were focused on the court
phase of proceedings for a whileuntil Andover just erupted.
As with the two confessions thatreally escalated things to Tabas
(18:53):
and Abigail Hobbes on the 21st of July, Ann Foster confessed
that the main aim of the witcheswas to replace Christ's Kingdom
with Satan's Kingdom. So this diabolical takeover is
being warned about and described.
(19:13):
She's warning them of a diabolical takeover.
Anne Foster was the mother of Mary Lacey Senior, so
grandmother of Mary Junior and she, well Mary Lacey Junior
seems to be responsible for manyinnovations on how the witches
(19:35):
were setting up Satan's Kingdom instead of Christ's Kingdom.
Mary Lacey Junior comes up with a lot of that material, but her
grandmother Ann had said that one thing.
The next day, July 22nd, Mary Lacey Junior, Mary Lacey Senior,
Ann Foster, Andrew Carrier and Richard Carrier are all examined
(19:56):
together. Mary Lacey Junior says that
Martha Carrier and George Burroughs were going to be the
Queen and King in Hell. The accusers were still claiming
that the devil only used the shapes of the accused to hurt
with their permission. So here we're saying that
(20:19):
basically the specter of your grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, that
Anne Putnam Junior saw sitting in her grandmother's Pew at the
Salem Village meetinghouse, and who supposedly wrestled with
Anne Putnam Senior, debating herfor two hours over Scripture,
(20:40):
that that had to have really been Rebecca Nurse, by her own
permission, doing that. Not that the Putnams were seeing
things or could have been wrong about the identification.
This is actually Rebecca Nurse, not the devil impersonating her.
That kind of thing. So all this has exploded in
(21:03):
Andover and very sadly, Elizabeth Ballard dies on July
27th. Sadly, that reinforces the
notion that witches bewitched her.
And people think that witches are very active in Andover. 45
residents of that town get accused of witchcraft By the end
(21:27):
of 1692. It's almost a tenth of the
population. We've talked a little bit about
the executions, but we think theSeptember 22nd execution is
significant. Yeah, the September 22nd
executions are significant because it seems like perhaps
(21:50):
the Salem witch trial conflagration is burning itself
out, maybe by reaching a critical mass of accusations and
convictions and executions throughout the summer and into
the fall. There's been some shifts in
opinion. Perhaps there been petitions to
(22:14):
try to save the lives of people who are accused.
There's been petitions to try tochange the way that the court
runs or just to say stop this. There's been a lot of
resistance. And here we come into September.
One of the interesting things that happens is Giles Corey is
(22:35):
slated to be tried in the same slew of people the September
round that his wife Martha is tried in, but he refuses to say
that he will be tried by God andcountry, so he gets pressed to
death with stones. They're adding weight to his
(22:57):
chest, piling stones on him, trying to get him just to stand
trial. And so that happened September
19th that he's pressed to death.And then September 22nd, 8
people are hanged. We're talking about the opinions
changing. And well, the court decides that
(23:19):
they've had a busy summer and that they want to take a break
in October. They just want a little rest.
So the court adjourned from September 22nd.
They were going to meet again inNovember, but in the interim,
people are raising their voices and starting to actually put
(23:39):
their names to their complaints and say openly, this court is
wrong. One of those people who raises
his voice is a very important person in the colony.
The Reverend Increase Mather, the minister from Boston who's
(24:00):
the father of Cotton Mather. He's probably the most trusted
ministerial authority in New England, and he's responsible
for obtaining the 1691 charter that has just arrived in Boston
in May 1692. He writes a book called Cases of
(24:21):
Conscience. He doesn't really directly
challenge the court and tell them directly they're doing a
bad job, but he questions their procedures.
And the report on this work is read to the Cambridge Assembly
of Ministers at their monthly meeting at Harvard College on
October 3rd. And then those ministers go to
(24:43):
their congregations the following Sunday, October 9th.
And they read excerpts, They read the conclusions that
Increase Mather came to. And of course this is a big
change because now you've got all these voices raising up and
saying things like spectral evidence, don't trust it,
(25:09):
Bewitch men, don't trust it. Specifically, Increase states
that bewitched persons are many times really just possessed with
evil spirits and there's not a human culprit to it.
It's a spiritual attack only from the evil spirits.
(25:30):
And on spectral evidence, Matherwrote.
The devil may by divine permission appear in the shape
of innocent and pious persons. So not only are they saying the
devil can appear, so maybe it wasn't Rebecca Nurse arguing
with Anne Puttnam Senior, It could have been the devil.
(25:53):
He's saying God is giving him the permission, not the accused.
Increase wrote it were better that 10 suspected witches should
escape than that one pious person should be condemned.
It is better that a guilty person should be absolved then
(26:14):
that he should, without sufficient ground of conviction,
be condemned. I had rather judge a witch to be
an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.
That's specifically gendered. Yes, he specifically is saying
that witches are women and womenare witches.
That's what it sounds like to me.
(26:35):
But at least he would rather judge a witch to be an honest
woman than judge an honest womanto be a witch.
Yeah, so he's saying here very clearly that there are innocent
people. He's kind of beating around the
Bush, not directly saying that you judges you have killed
innocent people, but he's sayingthat in this type of situation,
(26:58):
innocent people get hurt, and wedon't want you to hurt innocent
people. So stop using this spectral
evidence and this other BS that you're accepting.
So here we are in October 1692, and the Salem witch trials start
to actually wind down. There's debate in the
(27:20):
legislature and with the governor about whether the court
of Warrior and Terminer should continue or whether they should
let the new court system take responsibility for the witch
trial proceedings. And new courts are going to be
established in November. So October 29th, one of the
(27:43):
assistants in the upper House ofthe legislature named James
Russell, he decides to directly ask Governor Sir William Phipps
if the court of lawyer and terminer will stand or fall.
And Phipps says it must fall. Now, there's no elaboration with
(28:03):
the reports of this. Why did Phipps say it must fall
is a matter of speculation. You could read into some of his
letters that he wrote about the witch trials, but it's hard to
know exactly why he was motivated.
It's possible that because Increase Mather was the one who
(28:26):
got him appointed as governor ofthe colony, maybe he he did what
Increase said about the spectralevidence in the other types of
evidence that they were using and said that this court is
done, we're going to start over.So the cases were indeed shifted
to the newly established Superior Court of Judicature in
(28:50):
1693. The sessions were held in Salem,
Charlestown, Boston, and Ipswichbeginning in early January.
So no more spectral evidence wasbeing allowed.
That court was not looking at spectral evidence.
And so the Superior Court is hearing cases now and
(29:12):
disregarding spectral evidence, but they're still receiving
evidence from witnesses, supposed witnesses to witchcraft
threats that were then followed by strange happenings with their
livestock or children or illnesses.
(29:34):
And so three women in January actually do get convicted and
they are condemned to die along with five women who had been
condemned back in September but not yet executed.
The eight are scheduled to be executed February 1st, 1693, but
(29:56):
Governor Phipps jumps in last minute January 31st, reprieves
them, says there's not going to be any more executions here.
William Stoughton, the chief, just as he gets really steamed
and threatens to leave the court, but he comes crawling
(30:17):
back later. So anyways, that happens.
But otherwise, they went throughdozens of indictments and a few
trials, and everybody else gets cleared.
Some witnesses don't even come against some of the people, like
Captain John Alden. So they get cleared by
(30:39):
proclamation without having to go before a grand jury at all.
And by the end, you know, everybody's trickling out of
jail as they pay their fees, they're released and may the
last ones are getting out and the trials are over.
I just wanted to point out, as we talked about the jail's
(31:00):
clearing when fees were paid, there's one woman who did not
have the option to pay her own fees and just leave.
And that's the enslaved woman, Tituba, who's been in jail
through this entire story. And her fees were paid and she
(31:23):
was sold. And there's another woman I want
to mention, Lydia Dustin, who she cannot afford to pay her
fees when she's cleared and she sadly dies in the jail waiting
for somebody to get her out. She was a grandmother.
(31:44):
She was. Inland witch trials really stand
out from the other witch trials in the American colonies, and
these are the reasons that it does.
It took all of these things happening to make the Salem
witch trials what they ultimately became.
(32:05):
And it just really gets me thinking that at each of these
turning points, these pivotal moments, the whole thing could
have turned around. It could have stopped at any
moment, or in a few of these cases, it could have gotten
worse. It just gets you thinking about,
(32:27):
you know, what could have been different about the witch
trials? If, like we're saying, if
individual people had made individual choices differently,
the collective outcome could have been much different.
Thank you for joining us today. Please consider supporting our
nonprofit End Witch Hunts at EndWitch hunts.org/donate.
(32:52):
And join us on our Patreon. It's patreon.com/about Salem and
you get both shows The Thing About Salem and The Thing About
Witch Hunts together with extra content.
Join us and have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
While it often seems as though the Salem witch hunt was an
unstoppable force, there were several times when the whole
thing could have come to a screeching halt.
The wheels within wheels could have come off several times if
(00:22):
only one thing had been a littlebit different.
More importantly, these pivotal moments hinged upon the choices
of individuals. Despite the reputation for
hysteria, the participants in the witch trials were capable of
rational decisions and could have stopped the process through
a number of means. To travel back to the beginning
(00:45):
of the whole affair, in the beginning there were
afflictions. Just two girls were afflicted.
Then an inciting incident happened.
The men decide the girls aren't sick, they're under an evil
hand. Suddenly people fear witchcraft
is at work. Suddenly people need to find the
(01:08):
witches at work. Suddenly the affliction spread.
Now a witch cake must be baked. Now 4 girls are afflicted,
bewitched even. Next warrants are issued.
People are arrested. What would the Salem witch
(01:28):
trials have been if all of thesethings hadn't added up?
What if the doctor had never diagnosed the girls as under an
evil hand? Would witchcraft have been
suspected for their illness? Would they still have continued
to look for natural causes? Today we're going to highlight
(01:51):
some of the most interesting escalation points during the
sandwich trials. The evil hand kind of got the
whole thing rolling and then we had these arrests and the first
examinations happened. Initially those accused denied
being involved in witchcraft, but then a confession.
(02:15):
Tituba is the first to confess, and when she confesses, she
implicates 9 total witches in the area, not the three of them
that had been accused and were undergoing examination.
So those pursuing the witches had more to find had to look
(02:39):
elsewhere. Who else is a witch in our
community? So they kept looking.
They went looking for witches. And they found a few more,
including church members. Now they're accusing church
members like Martha Corey. And three days after they arrest
(03:00):
Martha Corey, they arrest Rebecca Nurse and a little baby.
4 year old girl child not yet ofage to be in kindergarten by our
standards today. Just probably clinging to her
much frayed Dolly and crying as she's yanked away from her
(03:20):
father, gone to be with her mother, Sarah Goode in the
festering dungeon. Little Dorothy Goode has tiny
shekels fitted for her wrists and ankles.
The Salem Witch trials were no longer looking for the usual
suspects. If church members could be
arrested, If tiny girls could bearrested.
(03:43):
Anybody was in play. A few weeks later, the Salem
magistrates reached out to theirpeers in Boston for some help,
and a delegation from the colonial government came to
Salem to hear a special session of the Governor and Council of
(04:07):
Assistance. Now the interim governor didn't
go himself. He sent Deputy Governor Thomas
Danforth to go along with six ofthe assistants from the upper
House of the colonial legislature, including Samuel
Sewell and John. Hatherine and Jonathan Corwin,
who had done the initial examinations of the Salem
(04:32):
accused, were also present and this special counsel heard the
examinations of Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Kloice Wolf of
Salem Village. Elizabeth Proctor's examination
her husband John was present in the session and he spoke up at
(04:52):
one point which resulted in him being arrested for witchcraft.
He became the first male suspectof witchcraft in the Salem witch
trials, and by the end of the witch hunt, some 39 men had been
accused and five had been hanged.
(05:12):
One had been pressed to death and one had died in jail.
During this phase of April, Deputy Governor Danforth could
have instructed Hathorne and Corwin to require bond payments
by plaintiffs. They could have had the Salem
magistrates conduct examinationsin private with only the suspect
present, not the afflicted or the other accusers.
(05:36):
The way Hawthorne and Corwin were proceeding was unusual.
And yet this council meeting, this examination of the proctors
and close was conducted just like the other examinations that
Hathorne and Kerwin did on theirown.
And it appears that they were actually the ones leading the
(05:59):
questioning of the suspects in this hearing.
Even though Danforth was presiding over the meeting.
We mentioned the confession of Tituba earlier.
Confessions continue to escalateduring 1692.
Another confession occurred April 19th when Abigail Hobbs of
(06:20):
Topsfield was examined. She being from a neighboring
town of Salem Village expanded the search radius for the
witches. So remember, Tituba had said
there were 9 witches and they'restill finding more and more
people to accuse in Salem. But this LED beyond the town
(06:41):
boundaries and it also was the first confession since instead
of us. This is only the second time in
the witch trials that anybody confesses.
It seems like it's voluntary. We don't read of any signs of
coercion or badgering, though the record is very short, I have
(07:03):
to say. So we don't know what happened
before Abigail talked, but she seems to just volunteer that
she's working with the devil. Abigail and her stepmother,
Deliverance Hobbs, who were bothaccused witches, filled in key
details about the Diabolical Pact and the Witch's Sabbath
(07:25):
that was happening in the community.
One of the significant things from Abigail's testimony is that
she chose to give the devil her permission to afflict,
suggesting that a specter of herwas used by the devil to torment
afflicted individuals, and it was because the accused had
(07:49):
willingly permitted the devil touse their form that alarms were
raised. Few weeks later, a big change
happens in the Massachusetts BayColony.
It actually becomes the provinceof Massachusetts Bay, and it's
(08:11):
governed for the first time by aroyally appointed governor.
Under the old 1629 charter that had originally allowed
Massachusetts to set up a government.
Voters in Massachusetts had beenable to select their own
leaders, including their own governor.
(08:33):
But that charter was revoked by King James the Second in 1684.
He just took it away and said you don't have a charter anymore
and left them to their own devices.
So an interim government took over and governed for a while.
Massachusetts had been part of something called the Dominion of
(08:53):
New England, with a royal governor called Sir Edmund
Andrews that ruled over several colonies at once.
That government was ousted in 1689 when King William and Queen
Mary came to power in England. And Massachusetts had been under
an interim government from 1689 till Here we are in the middle
(09:15):
of 1692 and it's the middle of May.
Finally, after years of negotiations by the Reverend
Increase Mather, one of the colonies leading ministers and
other individuals, the new charter comes across the sea to
Boston along with the royally appointed governor Sir William
(09:40):
Phipps, a treasure hunter from Maine and New England's first
homegrown knight. And he's the first royal
governor of the newly titled province of the Massachusetts
Bay. So I'm sure no more escalations
happened. This sounds really official and
(10:00):
great. There's a new charter.
No more ridiculous. Got a new charter?
The King's personally appointed person is in charge.
You think there's new law and order in town and things are
going to work out, but what doesthe governor do when he comes?
(10:21):
He creates the special court of lawyer interpreter.
As we were saying, there was this interim government and
well, the colony didn't have anylegitimate courts during this
interim period. They really didn't have any
document. There's no constitution, there's
(10:42):
no charter saying how courtship were.
So the people being accused of witches are basically being
processed by magistrates, local like justices of the peace, and
just put into the local jails and held for an indeterminate
amount of time. And they're in there with all
(11:03):
the other criminals who've been arrested over the past few years
and not processed. So the jails are getting very
crowded. Normally, felony charges like
witchcraft were handled in Boston by the Court of
Assistance, comprised of the Governor and his Counsel of
Assistance, the upper House of the Legislature.
(11:24):
And if you consider how many witch trials had been happening
coming out of the courts of Boston, the last conviction had
been Goody Glover in 1688, and she was a usual suspect.
Yeah, there had been actually dozens of people accused of
witchcraft and many tried in Boston by this court of
(11:48):
assistance between 1648 and 1691.
So this court of Warrior and Terminer, which by the way sat
in Salem, was very out of the ordinary.
This is a specific list of nine people that the governor
(12:09):
handpicks to be the judges, and they're trying people away from
Boston. This is not done.
Your jury pool ends up being different because they draw
people from mostly Essex County instead of the Boston area and
(12:30):
things just turn out different. The judges he appointed are
names that you know and love. William Stoughton, Bartholomew
Gedney, John Richards, NathanielSaltonstall.
Wait Still Winthrop, Samuel Sewell, John Hathorne, Jonathan
Corwin, and Peter Sargent. And they held their first
(12:53):
session in Salem on June 2nd. Finally, trials began after
months of waiting. What would the Salem Witch
Trials have been if this didn't happen?
Here we are in June of 1692, andas we noted when we started
(13:16):
chatting about the escalations of the Salem Witch Trials,
individuals thinkers were pondering what was going on and
the spiritual leaders of the communities were talking about
it and writing about it and weighing what was just and if
(13:37):
things that were happening were appropriate.
Yes, and Governor Phipps himselfdidn't know how to handle He had
never handled the witchcraft trial before.
So he asked for some advice fromthe ministers in the Boston
area, and on June 15th they presented a report called The
(14:02):
Return of Several Ministers, which was written by the famous
minister Cotton Mather out of Boston.
In this report, the ministers warned the justices about
relying upon evidences such as spectral evidence and urged them
to avoid folk tests for witchcraft, and suggested that
(14:24):
the justices follow the guidelines set forth in books by
English Puritans Perkins and Bernard.
The ministers also recommended that justices hold their
proceedings in calm environments.
So not the show that they were putting on of the afflicted
people having fits in an open courtroom, but individual
(14:46):
questionings of the suspects in a nice calm place and some
regulation over the trial proceedings that were in open
court to keep the crowd calm andnot have them prejudice the
jury. So they asked to hold in calm
environments. And they also caution against
(15:08):
considering spectral visions to be proof of guilt, because they
said that demons could actually assume the image of innocent
people. So they're not questioning
whether these spectral creatureswere causing havoc in the
community. They aren't questioning whether
(15:30):
they're real, whether they neverquestion whether the afflicted
people who are seeing them are serious, whether they've
actually had any kind of encounter.
So they're just assuming that the girls and other people with
afflictions are telling the truth and saying that yes, we
(15:50):
saw these people. But can the accused be blamed?
As the spectres, they are sayingthat's too risky.
Demons could be impersonating them.
Yes, now they say all of these wonderful things about using
caution, but then they close with a recommendation for the
(16:14):
speedy and vigorous prosecution of the witches.
Cotton Mather throws in that last line.
That and the judges disregard all of the caution and say we're
going to use spectral evidence, and they continue to use
spectral evidence. The next big phase happens with
(16:37):
another expansion of the geography of the Salem witch
trials. In mid-july.
Things eat up in the town of Andover, which also borders
Salem. These things start heating up
because a woman named Elizabeth Phelps Ballard gets sick and her
(16:57):
husband decides I need the afflicted girls to come and look
at her and determine who is making her sick.
So unnamed girls from Salem Village come up and they have
their spectral visions again andthey see people attacking
Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. So that leads to an accusation
(17:22):
against Mary Lacey Senior, Mary Lacey Junior, which leads to
more accusations against other people, and by the end, the town
has more witchcraft accusations than any other community,
including Salem. And isn't it interesting that
the sick woman, Elizabeth PhelpsBallard, isn't the one naming
(17:44):
witches? It is.
She must have been very sick because we don't have a
deposition from her. There's nothing in her words.
It's all through her husband andher brother-in-law that we'd
find out anything about what's going on with her.
So July 19th, Joseph Ballard goes and files a complaint
(18:06):
against Mary Lacey Senior and Mary Lacey Junior, who I
mentioned. This marked a renewal of arrest
because there hadn't been any arrest warrants issued since
June 6th all the way June 6th toJuly 19th.
That's about six weeks of calm ish in Salem as far as new
(18:29):
accusations going. But executions were happening,
trials were happening. They were focused on the court
phase of proceedings for a whileuntil Andover just erupted.
As with the two confessions thatreally escalated things to Tabas
(18:53):
and Abigail Hobbes on the 21st of July, Ann Foster confessed
that the main aim of the witcheswas to replace Christ's Kingdom
with Satan's Kingdom. So this diabolical takeover is
being warned about and described.
(19:13):
She's warning them of a diabolical takeover.
Anne Foster was the mother of Mary Lacey Senior, so
grandmother of Mary Junior and she, well Mary Lacey Junior
seems to be responsible for manyinnovations on how the witches
(19:35):
were setting up Satan's Kingdom instead of Christ's Kingdom.
Mary Lacey Junior comes up with a lot of that material, but her
grandmother Ann had said that one thing.
The next day, July 22nd, Mary Lacey Junior, Mary Lacey Senior,
Ann Foster, Andrew Carrier and Richard Carrier are all examined
(19:56):
together. Mary Lacey Junior says that
Martha Carrier and George Burroughs were going to be the
Queen and King in Hell. The accusers were still claiming
that the devil only used the shapes of the accused to hurt
with their permission. So here we're saying that
(20:19):
basically the specter of your grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, that
Anne Putnam Junior saw sitting in her grandmother's Pew at the
Salem Village meetinghouse, and who supposedly wrestled with
Anne Putnam Senior, debating herfor two hours over Scripture,
(20:40):
that that had to have really been Rebecca Nurse, by her own
permission, doing that. Not that the Putnams were seeing
things or could have been wrong about the identification.
This is actually Rebecca Nurse, not the devil impersonating her.
That kind of thing. So all this has exploded in
(21:03):
Andover and very sadly, Elizabeth Ballard dies on July
27th. Sadly, that reinforces the
notion that witches bewitched her.
And people think that witches are very active in Andover. 45
residents of that town get accused of witchcraft By the end
(21:27):
of 1692. It's almost a tenth of the
population. We've talked a little bit about
the executions, but we think theSeptember 22nd execution is
significant. Yeah, the September 22nd
executions are significant because it seems like perhaps
(21:50):
the Salem witch trial conflagration is burning itself
out, maybe by reaching a critical mass of accusations and
convictions and executions throughout the summer and into
the fall. There's been some shifts in
opinion. Perhaps there been petitions to
(22:14):
try to save the lives of people who are accused.
There's been petitions to try tochange the way that the court
runs or just to say stop this. There's been a lot of
resistance. And here we come into September.
One of the interesting things that happens is Giles Corey is
(22:35):
slated to be tried in the same slew of people the September
round that his wife Martha is tried in, but he refuses to say
that he will be tried by God andcountry, so he gets pressed to
death with stones. They're adding weight to his
(22:57):
chest, piling stones on him, trying to get him just to stand
trial. And so that happened September
19th that he's pressed to death.And then September 22nd, 8
people are hanged. We're talking about the opinions
changing. And well, the court decides that
(23:19):
they've had a busy summer and that they want to take a break
in October. They just want a little rest.
So the court adjourned from September 22nd.
They were going to meet again inNovember, but in the interim,
people are raising their voices and starting to actually put
(23:39):
their names to their complaints and say openly, this court is
wrong. One of those people who raises
his voice is a very important person in the colony.
The Reverend Increase Mather, the minister from Boston who's
(24:00):
the father of Cotton Mather. He's probably the most trusted
ministerial authority in New England, and he's responsible
for obtaining the 1691 charter that has just arrived in Boston
in May 1692. He writes a book called Cases of
(24:21):
Conscience. He doesn't really directly
challenge the court and tell them directly they're doing a
bad job, but he questions their procedures.
And the report on this work is read to the Cambridge Assembly
of Ministers at their monthly meeting at Harvard College on
October 3rd. And then those ministers go to
(24:43):
their congregations the following Sunday, October 9th.
And they read excerpts, They read the conclusions that
Increase Mather came to. And of course this is a big
change because now you've got all these voices raising up and
saying things like spectral evidence, don't trust it,
(25:09):
Bewitch men, don't trust it. Specifically, Increase states
that bewitched persons are many times really just possessed with
evil spirits and there's not a human culprit to it.
It's a spiritual attack only from the evil spirits.
(25:30):
And on spectral evidence, Matherwrote.
The devil may by divine permission appear in the shape
of innocent and pious persons. So not only are they saying the
devil can appear, so maybe it wasn't Rebecca Nurse arguing
with Anne Puttnam Senior, It could have been the devil.
(25:53):
He's saying God is giving him the permission, not the accused.
Increase wrote it were better that 10 suspected witches should
escape than that one pious person should be condemned.
It is better that a guilty person should be absolved then
(26:14):
that he should, without sufficient ground of conviction,
be condemned. I had rather judge a witch to be
an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.
That's specifically gendered. Yes, he specifically is saying
that witches are women and womenare witches.
That's what it sounds like to me.
(26:35):
But at least he would rather judge a witch to be an honest
woman than judge an honest womanto be a witch.
Yeah, so he's saying here very clearly that there are innocent
people. He's kind of beating around the
Bush, not directly saying that you judges you have killed
innocent people, but he's sayingthat in this type of situation,
(26:58):
innocent people get hurt, and wedon't want you to hurt innocent
people. So stop using this spectral
evidence and this other BS that you're accepting.
So here we are in October 1692, and the Salem witch trials start
to actually wind down. There's debate in the
(27:20):
legislature and with the governor about whether the court
of Warrior and Terminer should continue or whether they should
let the new court system take responsibility for the witch
trial proceedings. And new courts are going to be
established in November. So October 29th, one of the
(27:43):
assistants in the upper House ofthe legislature named James
Russell, he decides to directly ask Governor Sir William Phipps
if the court of lawyer and terminer will stand or fall.
And Phipps says it must fall. Now, there's no elaboration with
(28:03):
the reports of this. Why did Phipps say it must fall
is a matter of speculation. You could read into some of his
letters that he wrote about the witch trials, but it's hard to
know exactly why he was motivated.
It's possible that because Increase Mather was the one who
(28:26):
got him appointed as governor ofthe colony, maybe he he did what
Increase said about the spectralevidence in the other types of
evidence that they were using and said that this court is
done, we're going to start over.So the cases were indeed shifted
to the newly established Superior Court of Judicature in
(28:50):
1693. The sessions were held in Salem,
Charlestown, Boston, and Ipswichbeginning in early January.
So no more spectral evidence wasbeing allowed.
That court was not looking at spectral evidence.
And so the Superior Court is hearing cases now and
(29:12):
disregarding spectral evidence, but they're still receiving
evidence from witnesses, supposed witnesses to witchcraft
threats that were then followed by strange happenings with their
livestock or children or illnesses.
(29:34):
And so three women in January actually do get convicted and
they are condemned to die along with five women who had been
condemned back in September but not yet executed.
The eight are scheduled to be executed February 1st, 1693, but
(29:56):
Governor Phipps jumps in last minute January 31st, reprieves
them, says there's not going to be any more executions here.
William Stoughton, the chief, just as he gets really steamed
and threatens to leave the court, but he comes crawling
(30:17):
back later. So anyways, that happens.
But otherwise, they went throughdozens of indictments and a few
trials, and everybody else gets cleared.
Some witnesses don't even come against some of the people, like
Captain John Alden. So they get cleared by
(30:39):
proclamation without having to go before a grand jury at all.
And by the end, you know, everybody's trickling out of
jail as they pay their fees, they're released and may the
last ones are getting out and the trials are over.
I just wanted to point out, as we talked about the jail's
(31:00):
clearing when fees were paid, there's one woman who did not
have the option to pay her own fees and just leave.
And that's the enslaved woman, Tituba, who's been in jail
through this entire story. And her fees were paid and she
(31:23):
was sold. And there's another woman I want
to mention, Lydia Dustin, who she cannot afford to pay her
fees when she's cleared and she sadly dies in the jail waiting
for somebody to get her out. She was a grandmother.
(31:44):
She was. Inland witch trials really stand
out from the other witch trials in the American colonies, and
these are the reasons that it does.
It took all of these things happening to make the Salem
witch trials what they ultimately became.
(32:05):
And it just really gets me thinking that at each of these
turning points, these pivotal moments, the whole thing could
have turned around. It could have stopped at any
moment, or in a few of these cases, it could have gotten
worse. It just gets you thinking about,
(32:27):
you know, what could have been different about the witch
trials? If, like we're saying, if
individual people had made individual choices differently,
the collective outcome could have been much different.
Thank you for joining us today. Please consider supporting our
nonprofit End Witch Hunts at EndWitch hunts.org/donate.
(32:52):
And join us on our Patreon. It's patreon.com/about Salem and
you get both shows The Thing About Salem and The Thing About
Witch Hunts together with extra content.
Join us and have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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