2038 Salem which Trials

Jerry and Tracy discuss the Salem Witch Trials in detail

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome Hbili nation. I trust you all had
a great week and I hope a better weekend.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
If not.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You know what, here's a little advice I once got
to some It might not make much sense to those
who really need to hear it, it will make perfect sense.
That advice is simple to simply wait five more minutes.

(00:29):
That's it. Wait five more minutes. When that five minutes
is up, wait another five. In other words, hang on,
don't give up, Wait another five minutes, that's it. I

(00:54):
really hope that does help somebody, and like I said,
the right person will fully understand what that means. Now
to some of y'all's joy, I'm going to keep this
short this week. My lovely bride or as I call her,
my Luna, are getting ready to go on vacation for

(01:15):
the next two weeks, but I am planning ahead. I
will have a special guest on next week to fill
in for me, and I want to apologize now. He
insisted on doing this, and I can't promise anything. That's

(01:35):
all I can say. You'll left your tune in next
week to find out who it is. And let's not
forget if you have a podcast and you would like
to be part of this year's Halloween special. Please message
me on Facebook or email me. My email address is
Tim Mallins t I M m U lll I n

(02:01):
s at gmail dot com. And whatever you do, do
not email the Heavily Horror Stories or Jerry's email. I
don't have access to that, so I'll never see it.
Let's make this a great Halloween special, something that Jerry
would be proud of. And speaking of Jerry, this week's episode,

(02:23):
Jerry and Tracy discussed the Salem witch trial in detail,
So let's see what they have to say. Enjoy.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
You don't fail right down, dad, Brad and wholesome reality
is questionable, Tray, but you just can't let it. Goldie
through right here, pulling on the show with them normal
below with Southern hospitality, hunt and murder may have him
when discuss in them mortality lot cases with a North
past hits the read it comes to light Hill Billy's
with at nack or happy Day goes.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
On Think tonight ho but they get to be my
dumpty too?

Speaker 3 (03:15):
What hap he turned on the light? Fixed it in
a little comedy to make sure it all fifteens just right?

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Hey, we'll come to a new Billy horror story. Now
here's your whole Jerry, your breath, Oh, Tendler's golf issue.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
And sometimes they're Tad Freddy, but never the ferrets. All right, everybody,
and welcome to episode forty three of Hillbilly Horror Stories.
I I'm Jerry and this is Tracy. Hey.

Speaker 5 (03:43):
So right off the bat, I need somebody to tell
me what that song means. I must pick up every stitch.
What does that mean? I don't get it.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
That's because you obviously don't sew. Well.

Speaker 5 (03:55):
I thought that had to do with it, but then
I'm like, well, what's dumb? What's it gonna be sowing
and talking about it?

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Wing he has to do that cartoon at Leelo and
Stitch cartoon, because like if Leelo was or I don't
know which is which Stitch eltho either.

Speaker 5 (04:10):
I don't know what that song means if anybody knows,
because I'm you know, I just don't know. So it
don't make no sense to me. But what else is new?

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Okay? But hey, guys, so we are excited to be
back with you guys, and we've got an awesome story
for you. Also a little earlier today, I was on
the podcast for Don't Break the Oath that'll be coming
out next week, so if you guys listen to them,
you'll hear me on there next week talking about spring
Hill jack I got to make one of my famous
jokes on their because they said, h he only attacked women,

(04:40):
and I said, well, if he attacked whom are men?
That he would be high held jack.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
Us made that up on the flight, didn't you?

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (04:47):
I did.

Speaker 5 (04:49):
So anyways, don't you think they hear enough of you
as it is?

Speaker 2 (04:53):
You would think, you would think, but apparently not. All right,
go ahead, So that's cool. We got we finished our
released our first Listeners episode for Patreon, so we had
Sarah Roscoe on, we had Jackie Getz, we had Molly Frius,
and we had Gene. I always mispronounced his name. I
think it's high, but we had Gene on and so
far everybody who's heard it said it was a fantastic episode.

(05:15):
So we're already getting started on the next one. So
if you guys have any stories that you would like
to tell on air, or if you just want to
send it to us and don't want to be on
the air but want us to read it, send it
to our email or send it to our Facebook page
on our messenger on there, and we'll be sure to
get back in touch with you because we're going to
start recording those in the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 5 (05:33):
And if you send it by a story Jerry never
lets me read? Why you don't let me read?

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Have you heard your acting or your reading?

Speaker 5 (05:40):
I can read.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Did you hear the commercial that we put out and
that we gave to just a story podcast? What do
you mean, well, it sounded like you know one of
these Oh yes, I do remember. Don't mean you have
to tell these people about your act your acting experience.

Speaker 5 (05:58):
I'll come a long way. Oh yeah, I remember. See
that was better, right, I got you moove absolutely.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Anyways, so I want to give a couple of quick
shout outs, first and foremost to our military and everybody
across the world that does civil service type work policemen,
fire department, MS, Thank you guys for what you do.

Speaker 5 (06:21):
And prayers. Our prayers are with all you guys in London.
I'm telling you this is so ridiculous, but we are
saying prayers for you guys. And I just want to
go punch somebody in the face over there whoever's doing that,
because come on now, you.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Guys, you guys have really been hit hard over the
past month, so keep your heads up and hopefully everybody
can start getting these things straight across the globe. A
couple quick shoutouts Lily or Doniez. I know she thinks
I'm pronouncing her name wrong, but I guarantee him not. Well,
how do you know? No, I think she thought I
was gonna pronounce it wrong, but I think I got it.
I think I got that one. Dean Carrington in Utah,

(06:57):
Missy Davana in Louisville, Cherie Hester Jackson, and Matthew Cherie
aka Cameltoe. Some iTunes reviews we had, Uh, Paula sent
us one, Tony t Les libb. I'm not sure if
I'm reading too much into that cal sixty six. Uh

(07:21):
Chelsea Carter, Chelsea de Leon. Yeah, she's a Patroon supporter.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (07:27):
No, I think I know somebody named that though, seriously.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Not her though Chelsea Patreon supporter. No, No, I mean
I know her. Unless the other person donates money to us,
she's dead, does just.

Speaker 5 (07:38):
That was a little rude.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
DeLeon five one five? Uh kay? Hager forty three, forty three,
So let's Seymour, Kay Lucille. I don't know if I'm
gonna pronounce this right Blankenney Co two one three, and
they're actually, uh they're in the maybe I believe so nice.

Speaker 5 (08:01):
Thank you guys for protecting us. We appreciate you all.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
Got bless you Southern Heathen. That's another one that's a
my kind of person.

Speaker 5 (08:09):
I was gonna say, I know a lot of those.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
And real quick for Patreon, here's the new Patreon sports
we have for the week. Tina Aller, Lisa, Marie Nietto,
Julie Coleman, Darren Berry, Chelsea Carter, and Julie Bernard. Thank
you guys so much for you guys than you uh we.
I kind of left off in iTunes review because this
one's kind of important, but I'm gonna revisit it now.

(08:34):
Debris Hut, we had a lot of fun with that
one last week. That was the infamous three star rating
that said Tracy was ignorant, and though I tend to
agree in most cases, I did not think that that
was completely warranted, and so we had fun with it.
The entire podcast actually heard from miss Hut. That's not
really her name, but for the sake of this real color,

(08:54):
miss Hut, super super nice. We talked about and forth
on email for probably a couple of hours, and she
explained herself. I explained myself, and when it was all
said and done, it was a big kumbaya, and you know,
she she didn't mean any harm and it like we knew.

(09:14):
We knew she did, and that's why we had fun
with it on the episode. But in the in the end,
she got a chance to voice what she thought her
concerns were and she reposted her review to a five
star review. So we greatly appreciate that.

Speaker 5 (09:28):
Yes, thank you, doll. We appreciate you, and.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
You know, thank you for being a good sport. Yeah,
you said, we were just having some fun with it.
That's what we do sometimes.

Speaker 5 (09:36):
She is full of himself in case y'all did not
notice that, so stop it. No, it's hardly but.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
I can't remember what next week's episode's about. But it's
unimportant because the important thing about next week's episode is
that the girls from and that's why we drink are
going to join us. Oh cool, So we'll have some
fun with Christine and them next week.

Speaker 5 (09:57):
Nice. I can't wait this week's.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Story, and and I'm in the process. If you guys
have stories that you want us to kind of look into,
I've got a boat load of stories already, so that's
not that big a deal. But if you guys have
something and I find it super interesting, I kind of
move it to the front of the list. So if
you got some ideas you want us to check on,
or some stories that we may not have heard from
from your negative woods, throw it to us and I'll
start doing some investigating on it.

Speaker 5 (10:21):
You say boats and hose.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
I did not say boats and hoses. I said boat loads.

Speaker 5 (10:26):
Oh, boats and hose.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
I guess technically that could be like, if it's a yacht,
that's a whole bunch of stories. If it's like a
row boats, not there as many stories.

Speaker 5 (10:34):
Yeah, we can hardly wait. If you guys want to
send us some stories, that would be great.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
So we're going to jump right into this story because
there's a lot of details to go on. And I
think with this story what's going to be the most
interesting is I think everybody knows about the Salem witch
trials that as far as they exist, I don't think
a lot of people have many details on it. Yeah,
interested for example, and I'll throw this out your way,

(11:03):
how in your opinion from everything you've ever heard, how
do most witches get killed?

Speaker 5 (11:09):
My assumption is they were burned at the steak.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
And that's probably gonna be most people's assumptions. And with
the whole Salem witch trial, not one person was burned
at the.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Stake, Thank you Lord, because that's horrible.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Well how they died would much less horrible. But at
the same time, I will get into that a little bit.
But there were witches that were burned at the steak,
and some pagans and stuff like that. We'll get into that,
but for this actual situation in Salem, there were no
witches burned at the steak, but they did burn them
at the steake in England and some of the other
witch hunts that went on, but not a next one.

(11:42):
So let's talk about what a witch is. And I
know most people think they know what a witch is.
They think they probably have striped socks hanging out from
underneath the house. But that's uh. You know, you got
that opinion of a witch, and everybody sees the Halloween witches,
and then you've got today's version of witches, which are

(12:03):
like the wickens and stuff like that that practice white magic,
or the pagans, which pretty much are into nature more
than they are actual gods and stuff. They're just more
of the land and the earth. But for all all
the reasons for this story, we're going to talk about

(12:23):
what witchcraft was back in basically the seventeenth century. So
witchcraft has seen during this time got its roots in
folk magic. And you know, this goes all the way
back to since before prehistoric time. People believe that you
could use spells and charms and that would help your crops,
and it was help in fertility situations, help hill the sick,

(12:46):
and you could use to even take revenge on somebody.
And the early pagan god, one of them was half man,
half goat, and early Christians decided they were going to
add the wings of a fallen angel to them, and
that's how you get the image that Christians used early
on as Satan.

Speaker 5 (13:02):
So that's for real, half man half goat.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, that's one of the early pagan gods. Wow, that's
what it was. And it's the same thing we've talked
about before, like in the rock and roll the occult
shows and stuff like in like Pan and all of
them the half man, half goat. But you'll see the
image of Satan all the time most of the time,
as you know, the goat hoofs and the horns and
the wings, and that's where this came from. So you're

(13:27):
kind of go back, Like I said that the Christians
did that because they really had a problem with the
Pagans and they felt like that, you know, what the
Pagans did was Satan worshipmen to them, even though that
may not have been the case, that's the way the
Christians felt because it wasn't the way they believed. They
felt like Satan needed several people to do his evil bidding.

(13:47):
And what he would do is he would recruit young
women to become witches. He would basically approach them and
he would offer them worldly possessions or sometimes sexual favors
to sell their soul over to him, and then he
would have them sign their name in his book in
their blood, and that's how they became a witch.

Speaker 5 (14:10):
I guess you just left out the bad part. What
bad part, all like bad things that would happen if
you were found out that you were a witch?

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Well, I mean, I guess that's just like anything else.
If you're going to sell, you're sold to double you
probably aready know the bad part you're selling. You're sold
to the doub Well, I mean, I.

Speaker 5 (14:25):
Guess, so that's stupid. They were dumb.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
So in the fourteen hundreds, this goes we're going way back,
but we'll kind of catch up to where we're at.
But in the fourteen hundreds, the Christian churches began a
big push against the Pagans and they decided they were
going to destroy paganism altogether. Over the next one hundred
and fifty years, over fifty thousand Pagans were burned at

(14:50):
the steak and hanged them. But by the late sixteen hundreds,
roughly everything was kind of taking a change. It was
becoming more science related, and all these kind of witch
hunts and the pagan hunts and all that just kind
of started slowing down a little bit.

Speaker 5 (15:05):
Dang, they took it to the extreme when they said
they were going to destroy I thought you was going
to be like, hey, no more pagan club.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
No they were club.

Speaker 5 (15:15):
Now.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
They were tearing up the churches, they were destroying all
the statues or any idols ahead. So everything's changing now
more scientifically, but not everybody was happy with that. The Puritans,
who got their name from the fact that they wanted
to live by the purest of values, they followed the

(15:36):
Bible to a t. What was written in the Bible
was fact as far as they were concerned, and every
word of it was meant to be taken it exactly
it was written. There was no well this meant that
or that. What it said is what it says.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yeah, So the.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Puritans, obviously they're highly conservative. A lot of people are
more familiar with the Amish today or the the Pilgrims
back in the day, and those were basically all purity.
So that again kind of give you an idea. They
founded the Massachusetts Bacony in sixteen twenty eight. It was
run on strict religious principles, as we stated, and based

(16:15):
on the whole purification method. Now, the Bible clearly states
thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, which basically
means if there's a witch, kill them. And since they
take things exactly the way that the Bible says, that's
the way it was set up. In their laws. It
was against the law to be a witch and it
was punishable by death.

Speaker 5 (16:35):
Whether you're a good witch.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
There were no good witches. If you were a witch,
you got your dealings from the devil, and that was
that's a no.

Speaker 5 (16:42):
No.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Witches were believed to be able to send an unseen
shape or as we're going to hear more and more
in this term specter. I think they sent a specter
after me. Witches don't want us to get this podcast out,
I think, so.

Speaker 5 (17:03):
All right, continue on.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Okay, so that word should have been specter and not
a Peter Brady version. So they would send out a
specter to basically do their evil bidding. And so even
though that person wasn't there, it was like a like
a ghost type likeness of them that would torment you.

(17:25):
So it didn't have to be the person themselves. It
could just be their entity, so to speak, like.

Speaker 5 (17:30):
A bully today. Yeah, I guess it's not that drastic, but.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, it wouldn't be nearest drastic having a ghost and
evil ghost under your house, and yeah, torment, you wouldn't
be near at drastic as a bully on Facebook just
calling you mean name.

Speaker 5 (17:45):
Okay, all right, so.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Let's get back up to speed all the way to
the current year of sixteen ninety two, and that's when
all this took place. So we're gonna start off in January,
and we're in Salem Village. Most people don't realize that
there was Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Village was
the newer It was kind of like a suburb of
just you know, five miles or so past the actual

(18:11):
city or the town of Salem, and all this mainly
took place in the village. So that's where we're going
to focus on now. First and foremost. This was a
new town. There was a new church, and there was
definitely some contractual dispute over the pastor's salary. Pastor Paris

(18:32):
would berate his congregation and try to shame them into
paying his salary. And yeah, so he didn't know during
all this that his daughters were actually a daughter and
niece were actually going to be the center of this
whole thing. Oh man, So what happens is is Minister
Paris's daughter, Betty, she was nine years old, and his

(18:55):
niece Abigail, who was eleven, lived with him. They started
to expperience in these kind of crazy illness gyrations. They
were shaken and they were throwing little fits. They were.
I mean, it almost seemed like when you see the
cartoons and stuff, how people have itching powder poured down
their back and they just something that's just really you

(19:17):
can't explain. It's like they're bending in ways that you
shouldn't be able to be, like when you dance.

Speaker 5 (19:22):
I'm telling you are a hater of my dancing, don't
be jelly.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
But that's what was happening. So they called the doctor
and to find out what's going on. And back in
these days, if the doctor couldn't figure out what the
illness was, which was the case here, he couldn't find
anything wrong. The automatic diagnosis was witchcraft.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
Man, that's a bummer.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
And like I said, you know, there were laws against that,
so that was a major deal.

Speaker 5 (19:53):
Now, but wait, who decided that. Did one person certain
person have to decide, Okay, well they're witches or does
this like you know what I'm saying to you.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
No, Well, it's kind of funny because anybody could claim
witchcraft and then you would have to have a trial
and go through that whole process. The only way that
you could do a trial, and in order to convict,
you have to have a confession. The only way you
can convict somebody without a confession. Is if two people
saw the actual act of witchcraft take place.

Speaker 5 (20:26):
I was going to say, because that's that's some horsecraft.
Because if somebody was just pissed at you that day,
Oh man, oh she's a witch.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
And that's what you're going to find out happened here?
That's yeah to see by not knowing the story. You
didn't know the story, but I'm used to. So anyways,
much like you're dancing, you're stepping all over my feet.
So what happens is we're trying to find out who
the witch is. And a neighbor suggests an old folklore

(20:55):
method for finding a witch, and Paris's slave woman and Teachaba.
She decided that she was going to follow the directions
to find this out. Now, what the directions was. She
had to take some meal and some urine from one
of the girls.

Speaker 5 (21:10):
What is meal?

Speaker 2 (21:11):
You know, like corn mill? Oh?

Speaker 5 (21:13):
Corn mill and urine? Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
And she had to take urine from one of the girls,
and she made a witch cake.

Speaker 5 (21:19):
Oh that sounds tasty.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Well, then what you do is you feed it to
a dog and then the dog should be able to
point out the witch get out of here. Well, that's
what they said. Now, obviously this is not within the
specter of Puritan belief. This came from folklore of magic,

(21:41):
which is definitely not something the Puritans believe in. So
when Pastor Paris found out about it, he was pissed
and he went on to the congregation. He had a
big meeting about it, and he told the church that,
you know, somebody went to the devil for help against it,
and that he ordered prayer and fasting to help against

(22:05):
the witchcraft. It makes sense.

Speaker 5 (22:08):
What's fasting due?

Speaker 2 (22:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (22:10):
I mean, what does that prove?

Speaker 2 (22:11):
As long as they don't have to eat that witch cake?
I guess it's well.

Speaker 5 (22:13):
I mean I played fast too. Dang what that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
So then Pastor Paris, and by the way, let's talk
a little bit about him. He's thirty nine years old.
He was a failed businessman, and all this is gonna
make sense in little bit. He's a failed businessman. He
just recently he had become a pastor. And you know,
I mentioned that there was a contract dispute and all
that stuff, and some of that all comes into play
here because what happened was and I mentioned a lot

(22:39):
of stuff. All this stuff that I'm telling you, for
the most part, a gentleman by the name of Cotton
Mathers who wrote a book three years earlier on witchcraft.
He was kind of commissioned by the governor to write
all this stuff down, so he basically chronicled everything that happened.
So everything that we know about the Salem witch trials
all came from him. Yeah, so we've got some pretty

(23:01):
good documentation of what went on. So let's talk about
him real quick. Cotton Matters. Cotton Matters was twenty nine
years old. He was asked to write this, obviously by
the governors, just to find out what went on. Now,
he had had a situation where he had similar behavior
with some the Good One Kids back three years earlier,

(23:21):
and he wrote a book about it. Now, the Good
One Kids, there was four of them. They said that
they were bewitched by a woman by the name of
Goodie Glover. And you're gonna love this. She was brought
to trial and she was Irish, though she only spoke
a language called Gaelic, she didn't speak English. They asked
her to recite the Lord's Prayer and no matter how

(23:43):
many times she tried, she couldn't do it. They took
that as a sign she was a witch, because no
way that a witch could recite the Lord's prayer had
nothing to do with the fact that she didn't speak
the language man in nineteen or sixteen eighty, they hunger
for being.

Speaker 5 (24:01):
A witch, I want to say at all.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
And the thing of it is, it is the same
problem that these good when kids were having. It's the
same problems, the twitch and the gyrating and the screaming out.
It was the same thing that's happening to these two
young girls and Salem. So that's one of the reasons
why they got him involved.

Speaker 5 (24:20):
They should have had an interpreter.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Now, under the pressure of Pastor Paris to name who
was bewitching the girls, they named the most obvious person
they could, their slave, Tichabo. Now, her and her husband
were described as slaves from Barbados, so they're dark skinned,

(24:43):
much like the Indians that the Puritans were. That was
their natural enemy when they moved here, because remember they
came here and they took the land from the Indians. Yeah,
and we'll get into a little bit of that, but
it's a specific, specific tribe that they had problems were
the Wabanakis. They were the ones that were right there. Now,
Puritans looked at Native Americans as devil worshippers. They felt

(25:06):
that they didn't have a right to the land because
they didn't cultivate it. So if they didn't cultivate it,
it was pretty much freeland and they should come in
and take it, and that's what they did. This obviously
didn't set well with the Wabonaks because this was their land,
they'd been there. They didn't want to cultivate it. They
just wanted to have They wanted to open land. So
one time, when the Wabonakis came to town to trade,

(25:28):
which they would come in and trade, you know, they
had that relationship, there was a militia group that basically
captured them and sold them into slavery. And this really
pissed off the people in the tribe because this was
a lot of their women and children that they captured
and sold off. So in sixteen seventy five, the Wabonaki
started a series of really kind of heinous and bloody

(25:51):
wars against the Puritans and any English that were in
that area. In sixteen seventy six, they attacked a little
camp and found with Maine, and twenty three women and
children were killed. Eleven men were killed. Some of them
were captured, so they weren't all killed, but twenty three
women and children were killed or captured. And then, like

(26:12):
I said, eleven men. There was a three year old
girl there that survived by the name of Mercy Lewis.
Now this is sixteen years before all this stuff happened.
So she was three years old back then, and most
of her relatives were killed during this Indian attack. Her mom, dad,
cousin's grandpa, all of them were killed. Now we're going

(26:34):
to jump back ahead. Mercy is now eighteen years old
and she's living as a servant in Salem, and she's
going to become a key figure of this whole trial thing.
And we'll get into that little more. It's a teaser, okay.
Mercy Lewis now works for the Putnam family and she's

(26:54):
starting to act be witched along with Anne Putnam, who's twelve,
Ann Putnam Junior. It's funny back in these days they
would name juniors after the women too. Oh well, so
you had, you know, Anne Putnam Junior, she was twelve,
and then you had the mom, which was just Anne Putnam,
she's thirty. And then you had Mary Walcott, which is

(27:15):
her cousin, she was seventeen. They all started acting bewitched,
so they were having Now they're having the same symptoms. Yeah,
the jerking around the gyreat and all that. This starts
spreading like wildfire all over the place. This is like,
now everybody not air bad. It's kind of stretch. But
a bunch of the women, some of them married, some

(27:36):
of them kids, some of them in between, they all
started having these problems and they all blamed Techabo. So
this girl now is ready for legal action. They arrest her.
The girls though, the original girls, the Abigail and the
other little girl's daughter, they were both too young to

(28:00):
be able to I guess cause legal action because they're miners.
But now you've got eighteen, nineteen twenty year old women,
so now they can actually go ahead and arrest this girl.
So in March sixteen ninety two, seven people claim to
be bewitched, and it was all Teachaba. Federal formal complaints

(28:20):
were charged and the governor sent down two magistrates from
a nearby Salem town, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Both
of them were from the town of Salem, and they
wanted to do a preliminary exam to see if a
trial was actually warranted. Now, the accusers are asked during

(28:42):
this time to point out the witch. All of this
is from actual courtroom records. Okay, so this is they
asked Teachaba the kind of pull her up, and she's
understand and they said, what spirit have you become familiar
with that would cause you to hurt these children? And

(29:03):
she was like, I'm not hurting these children. Well, once
she says that, all the people that were accusing her,
they just all of a sudden just kind of start
falling on the ground and it's like almost like in unison,
and it's like, okay, what's up? And in the moment,
and then every time they would ask her, you know

(29:24):
something else, they're like, see, why do you hurt these kids?
And she's like, I'm not hurting them, And then they
would just get louder. You know, in today's courtroom, they
would throw them out. Well, yeah, they wouldn't just allow
them to do that stuff. And she's like, you know,
I don't hurt them at all, and I've done nothing
to cause them any kind of hurt. Well, these guys

(29:44):
were good at what they did, these magistrate guys, and
what they decided that they were going to do was
they get confessions. That's what they do. So they kept
hammering her, and finally she confessed to being a witch.
And she not only confess, but then she says, I'm
gonna be a witch. I guess I'm gonna name some

(30:05):
other people too. So this was like, well, it's kind
of like what you said earlier about when you got
problems with people. Yeah, And it was not so much
her throwing them one of the buses. I think she
was trying to save her own ass. So she not
only confessed, she starts telling these other people. She says,
there was a tall man in black clothing and he
came to me sometimes he appeared as a dog and

(30:30):
basically told me that he wanted me to be a
witch and to sign his book. And at this point time,
and she's telling the story, now, all the people out
in the audience that are accused her, they're kind of
like they're in a trance, you know, they're just like
sitting there, blank facism, you know. And she said there

(30:51):
was others she named Goodie Osborne and Sarah Good, and
she said that she had seen the Devil's Book and
there were other names in it. Now, well, this was
an examination, not a trial, so they couldn't convict, but
they could arrest, So they arrested Techava, Sarah Good. And
Sarah was a was basically a beggar who had a
very bad temper, so you can kind of see where

(31:13):
she was named. And then you had Osborne, who was
also kind of like Townhore because well they said she
was of loose morals. What do you expect. Now, Obviously
both of these young women say they weren't witches. So

(31:36):
she goes on to name nine witches all together, and
so they've got two of them, so there's seven more
left that they still got a track down. Now here's
the kicker to this whole thing. They she names Martha Corey. Now,
Martha Corey is a sixty year old woman who is

(31:57):
a very well known church member, and she was, by
all accounts of, you know, one of the upright citizens
in the community. So the fact that she could be
a witch meant anybody could be a witch. Now, the
only negative she had to hear that anybody can point
a finger two is she had an uneducated husband who
was a pretty profitable farmer and could be a little

(32:20):
bit argumentative. And you're going to find out how argumentative
a little later in the story. Now, the first three people, obviously,
like I said, they named, were kind of outcast. You know,
you had the slave girl, and you had the beggar woman,
and then you had the woman that was the whore.
But like I said, when you named Martha Man, that's
now that's a whole different level. Now, Anne Putnam Junior,

(32:43):
we talked about the Putnams earlier and Mercy Lewis. Mercy Lewis,
keep in mind, was the three year old that survived
the Indian attack. They claimed that Martha's specter tormented them. Now,
remember we suspected earlier was basically she would hadn't had
to be there. She just basically sent a likeness of herself. Obviously,
the devil could take the form when you signed your

(33:05):
name in that book, the devil could then take your
form if that's what he wanted to do. So that's
how all that works. Now, during Martha's question, she denied
being a witch, of course, and the kids were falling
on the ground as she was saying this and acting crazy,
acting a fool, as people would say this day, they
was acting off. They've fallen out Jim, And she said

(33:30):
that she had nothing to do with their actions. And
she asked to go pray, which was denied, and she
asked she just kind of stood there and she just
asked the lord to kind of open the magistrate's eyes
so they could see what was going on. That basically,
these girls were full of shit and you know, they
shouldn't be trusted. Unfortunately, back in the day, the magistrates

(33:50):
actually relied on spectral evidence, and they would if somebody
said that your spectral came to them, that was as
good having a witness. Wow. So yeah, like you said earlier,
you could just get pissed off at somebody, yeah, and
point the finger at them. And that's the kind of
stuff that happened. You know, at one time time during
her appearance in the courtroom, she kind of bit her

(34:14):
lip a little bit, you know, you know you'll do
kind of during the time of stress. Well then when
she did that, all the other girls out there started
biting their lips, and then you know, the Magistrate's like,
quit biting your lip. And then all of a sudden
she got mad and clenched her hands, and then all
the girls started clenching their hands and moaning, and it
was like the frustration level had to be so crazy,

(34:34):
But you know that's what was going on this thing.
You know, you got to realize once this thing started,
it was like a steam rolling you know, train going
down the tracks downhill. Yeah, there was no stopping it
because it's just like anything else. You get that terror
into town and then it's like a plague. Now there's
a panic that's broke out. Now you got everybody, and

(34:57):
then you got people just because it's the hip thing
do now you know a little I want to be
I'm wanna have to be you know, kind of witchcraft too.
I want to bewitched or whatever the term is, you know,
I want to have that same situation. And so then
you got all these other people jumping on the bandwagon.
So the reality is probably, you know, most of these
people had nothing going on. And there's plenty of people
that speculate that even the first two girls were just

(35:17):
full of shit to begin with, trying to get attention,
and it was a joke. It went too far, oh wow,
you know, but we'll get into that a little more right,
So we're gonna jump ahead to April of sixteen ninety two.
We're still at Salem Village. Any sign of anything strange
going on at all was which witchcraft. That's just the
way that was. Now, wild stories were used as legal evidence.

(35:38):
There was panic everywhere. By the end of April, there
were six more accutes. So now there's ten people in jail.
And this is an old like wooden barn type jail.
I mean, this is not really a jail. It wouldn't
meant for that. It was meant to just kind of
hold people for a couple of days. It wouldn't meant
for a long term. So during the wintertime, so this
all started in January, it was freezing in there. I

(35:59):
mean it was just there was no heat, so it
was freezing, and if it got to the summertime, it
was going to be sweltering in there during that time.
So now you've got the whole thought process that if
you're a witch, your family's probably a witch too. So
Sarah Good was not only in jail, her four year
old daughter, Dorkins. I swear that's her name, Dorkins. Her

(36:25):
four year old daughter Dorkins was there and after eight months,
she went mad.

Speaker 5 (36:30):
What I don't understand how a four year old can that.
I don't understand that.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Well, because you're eight months in a dark room.

Speaker 5 (36:40):
No, I mean I understand that, But I don't understand.
How could they have just assume that she was gonna
be a witch?

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Because well, I could assume any of this stuff.

Speaker 5 (36:47):
I don't know. They're all crazy. So she went mad.
And what happened, Oh the little girl did.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
If you were charged, uh, and you were, you know,
you were basically as a witch. If you were charged
of the witch, you were guilty until proven innocent. And
how they would test some of these people is and
they didn't, you know, through witchcraft, not just in this
situation because they none of these really went through that,
but a lot of the witch hunts after the fact,
or in other parts of the country, they would actually

(37:18):
tie a bolder to you and put you in the
water and if you drowned, you were innocent. You weren't
a witch.

Speaker 5 (37:27):
Oh my god, that is not a shit. So that
was not a win win situation at all.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
So you were danged if you if you don't, but
at least your name was cleared.

Speaker 5 (37:36):
Well, that's dumb. I was wondering how they how how
could they prove their innocence if they're locked them in
a barn somewhere.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Now the accused are stripped, naked and interrogated. Obviously, Now
what they were looking for, and I swear this is true,
or witch's teats. They they're looking for teats because you remember, well,
I guess you don't remember because I didn't tell this part.
But what ends up happening. Supposedly, if you're a witch,

(38:06):
you have other animals that are really familiar to you
that are also Satan's little varmints, so to be. You know,
they could be birds, it could be mice, It could
be cats, dogs, But they would come up to you
and suck on your teeth. And but it's not necessarily
where you think it is. It could be anywhere on
our body. It could be just like a little nipple

(38:26):
or random nipple anywhere.

Speaker 5 (38:28):
Is that where that one? What do you call that fetish?

Speaker 2 (38:32):
A teat fetish?

Speaker 5 (38:33):
No? Or people do with animals?

Speaker 2 (38:38):
No, I think that's called betal. That's not a fetish.
That's just a good time on a Saturday night.

Speaker 5 (38:42):
That's so gross. Okay, So they would like literally walk
up to the person and just start sucking on their teeth.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, wherever that teat may be. So that's why they
would strip them because they wanted to see where it
would be.

Speaker 5 (38:55):
How embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Then also while they were in jail, they got charged
for room and board. So if you want it, so
if you wanted like your hay that you slept on
to be traded out every week or so, you had
to pay for it. If you wanted food and water,
you had to pay for it. And you know, so
what happened is basically the jerk off sheriff that they had.

(39:18):
His name was George Corwin. He was actually one of
the nephews of that Magistrate Corwin.

Speaker 5 (39:24):
But he.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
He would very corrupt type of guy. He would as
soon as these people would be put in jail, he'd
start going and getting all their merchandise and stuff in
their house and all their belongings, and you know, it
was almost like he was getting rich off this stuff.
And so he would confiscate their property. And like I said,
almost immediately he had no legal right to be able
to do this, but they did. And some think that

(39:48):
the core ones actually started this whole witch Hunter pursued it.
I guess they didn't start it, but they started pursuing
it just align their own pockets.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
And yeah, but wouldn't they be afraid if they were
witches they would do something to them for taking their stuff?

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Well, I mean you would think they would, but they didn't.
And then there was a bunch of other people that
felt like that this was just a way to kind
of settle the store, our score with people. Yeah, like
you said, just blaming people. You got to remember in
seventeenth century New England. Lawsuits were really big right at
the time, and because these people were kind of hands
on type people, they would they rent a lot of

(40:20):
fighting and a lot of you know, pushing and screaming.
That's how they settled everything. So they were kind of
pushed into doing you know, let's do lawsuits instead. Well
there was tons of lawsuits all the time. So since
you couldn't really push anybody and fight anybody and you
can only do lawsuits, you could imagine how this would
be a good way to get even with people, if
you could just start accusing people of being a witch.

(40:43):
Was there, I don't think they were, and I think
outside of Lexington nobody will get that. Oh but the
most common name that were on the lawsuits were the Putnams.
If you remember, the Putnams were the ones that we
talked about earlier that Mercy Lewis now works for and

(41:03):
that whole family of women were bewitched and they were
the one that accused Martha Corey. So you've got the
Putnam family. Thomas Putnam, his wife, Ann, his daughter, and
then Mercy and then his niece lived there. They were devoted,
devoted churchgoers, and they're also really big supporters of Pastor Paris.

(41:24):
Now that's going to really come into play because Pastor
Paris had a lot of people who actually didn't like him,
and he had his powerful supporters, but he had people
that didn't really like him. Now, Thomas and the other Putnams,
which pretty much ran things into town politically. They supported
Salem Village having its own church while some of the

(41:44):
other people would rather walk five miles to Salem Town
and go to church there. Remember I said there was
a big dispute about paying yeah pastor, and that's the
whole thing. Now, the reason they don't these people didn't
want to pay the pastor because by having his new
church and by paying the pastor, they were going to
have twice the taxes, and I have twice the taxes

(42:05):
when you could just yeah, you know, when just walked
out a short easy five miles up and back to
church on Salem. Now, people who did the Putnam's wrong
were basically drugg into this witchcraft hunt. Oddly enough, now
Salem sixteen eighty to sixteen eighty three, before Pastor Paris

(42:26):
came in, there was a minister by the name of
George Burrows. He is forty two years old. He was
had been married three times, and like I said, he
was the pastor there, and the village started to withhold
his salary. She can see kind of a you know
pattern here. Therefore, he couldn't pay his debts. Now, when
he couldn't pay his debts, they arrested him because he

(42:48):
owed money to Puttnam. So they arrested him for not
being able to pay his debts. So he went to
court over and he's like, how can I pay my
debts if the town stopped paying me? Yeah, you know,
and he said, I can. You know, when the town
pays me, I can repay my debts. And eventually that's
what happened. He repaid his debts. And he got out.
But the Putnams felt pretty damn embarrassed over that whole situation.

(43:10):
They felt like that he kind of got over on them, yeah,
just because you know, even though he was right, they
felt like that they were made to look bad. So
they never really got over that. So now we're back
in sixteen ninety two. He's a minister in Maine. He's
not even in the same state, and he survived at
this point in time, he survived like three or four
different Indian attacks. Oh wow, So he's been a pretty

(43:33):
lucky guy. So in April twenty and sixteen ninety two,
and Putnam Junior the little girl. She says that the
invisible specter of George Burrows came to visit her, and
he said that he was the leader of the witches.
He killed his first two wives as well as his
predecessor's wife and daughter, and you know, and then he'd

(43:56):
bewitched the soldiers that are actually fighting on the front
line right now against the Indian Oh wow, So well
they do they go up there and they grab him,
they said, George, they go all the way up to
Maine where they don't live. They've got a right to
go up there and just grab him. Now we're five
months in. Now we're in May of nineteen sixty. George
has been brought to Salem, and he's kind of a

(44:17):
smart ass if you just kind of read the things
about him. He's kind of a likable guy. So he's
asked about communion. They ask him, when's the last time
he basically has taken partaking in the Lord's Supper, which
is communion, And he was like, well, I don't know.
A couple of times in the past. You know, one

(44:38):
time I went to this church and they had it
there and I didn't partake. And then, you know, a
couple of weeks ago, I was at a service and
they had it there and I didn't partake. And then
they said, well, is it true that your house is haunted?
It overran by toads, toads, toads. Oh, And He's like, no,
my house isn't haunted, but we do have toads in
the summertime. We so they kind of didn't like the

(45:01):
fact that he was The whole town was fascinated by
this whole I guess the arrest of George boroughs now
Cotton matter. We talked about him earlier he's a guy
that wrote the book and he's documenting all this. Now,
Cotton was a minister as well, so he kind of
knew that George was a renegade and he'd not been

(45:23):
formally ordained. Now this is something that's kind of interesting.
To be formally ordained by the Puritan Church, you must
have an organized congregation and then actually have a formal
delegation that follows you, and he didn't have that. So
even though he was at the church, because it wouldn't
technically an organization and it wasn't a formal allegiance of

(45:47):
people signed there, he technically wasn't ordained, so they didn't
really look at him as a minister, even though he
was a minister. So the magistrates, once again, they could
examine Borrow, but they couldn't convict or anything like that.
May twenty seventh, the governor ordered a spectral court and
the point of a jury of men that were mainly

(46:08):
just from the next town over, and then he had
a group of judges. There were three judges, but none
of them had any kind of legal training. They were
just businessmen too, so they're just okay, you get to
be judge today.

Speaker 5 (46:23):
How come there was no women on the jury.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
You know, women weren't allowed to do anything back then.
They're barely allowed to do anything to keep bonnets on
their heads.

Speaker 5 (46:30):
And oh, I guess that's true. That's what's wrong with
this whole situation.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
So the chief justice was a guy named William Stoutman,
and like I said, he was a lieutenant governor of
the colony, a very strict Puritan. And at this time
the courts were way different than like today, because like
I was saying that, you know, you couldn't kick people out.
They didn't have a defense attorney, so the people had

(46:54):
to represent themselves. Yeah, so there were you know, and
then you've got to try to represent yourself against what
they caused, spectral evidence of somebody just saying they saw
you come in a dream or something. Yeah, you know,
that's kind of her lost pause.

Speaker 5 (47:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
So the first case that heard was Bridget Bishop. She
was fifty years old. Twelve years earlier she was accused
of being a witch, but she beat that rap and
got out. One of the witnesses against her was a
thirty two year old man named John Louder. Now, John
claimed that that about a year before that, Bridget came

(47:28):
to him in his bedroom, sat on his chest and
it was pretty much like a sleep paralysis thing. He said.
There was a bright full moon outside and the reflection
of the light coming through was on her face, so
he could tell that it was her. And the courtroom
was disrupted by people saying that Bridget is tormenting them

(47:49):
and they were getting stuck by pins. Actually some of
them were actually bleeding, so it's obvious they had done
it to themselves. And in today's court, like I said,
they would have been kicked out.

Speaker 5 (48:00):
But they were blaming in the core room.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah, oh gosh, but you know they didn't kick him out.
They actually looked at it as more as evidence. So
on June second of sixteen ninety two, the first death
sentence was actually issued. On June tenth, the Bridget bishop
was hanged. Now hanging, no, it's hanged. Has to learn

(48:22):
your past participles. It's have hung, have been hung. You
gotta use like ben in order to use hung. That's
your English lesson today from heavily horror stories, because you
know that we're the ones that need to be teaching English.
Hanging was way different back then than what you would
have met.

Speaker 5 (48:40):
Don't sorry, in his mouth. Again.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
The taco bell hanging was way different back then than
what you probably think of with hanging. In most cases
with hanging, you see somebody up on the gallows, a
trapdoor drops, their body drops, their neck snaps, and that

(49:13):
pretty much does most of the work. Back in these days,
they didn't have any setup like that. They would have
the person climb up on the ladder, put the noose
out there, and then they would basically just pull their
legs away from the ladder, so they would technically just
sit there and slowly strangle to death, and depending on

(49:34):
how heavy they were, made the decision of how quick
they strangled. Wow, so yeah, it was. It was really
a gross situation compared to you know, if all hanging
is kind of bad, but this was this was even
worse because there was no snap in a deck. It
was basically a rope just sitting there strangling.

Speaker 5 (49:51):
Yeah, that's not good.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
So disgusted by the hanging, one of the judge judges
he resigned and he said, you know, this is you know,
in protest, and just said, hey, this is not something
that should be going on. But they went on and
they continued and they didn't skip a beat.

Speaker 5 (50:10):
So the judge's opinion meant nothing.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Apparently, July nineteenth, five more women were executed, Sarah Good,
Rebecca Nurse, and three more that were from the village,
a neighboring village so it wasn't even from their town.
His thing was really starting to stretch out because they
would not confess to being a witch, or they wouldn't

(50:33):
give up names of other witches. So these women were
actually they went to their deathbed basically knowing that they
did the right thing. They wouldn't throw anybody else under
the bus. Now, what you're going to start seeing is
there was a strange pattern occurring. People liked teach of
us who confessed and told names. They weren't convicted, so

(50:54):
they wanted more confessions. So they said, hey, basically, you
give us as many names as possible and we're not
going to execute you. But obviously this had to start
changing at some point in time. Now, George Burrow's trial,
he was the first person to speak against the putmans.

(51:16):
Now that he would basically say that he thought it
was bullshit and they were just trying to settle a score. Now,
their servant, Mercy Lewis remembered, I said she was going
to be a central figure in this whole thing. She
says that he came to her as a specter and
urged her to write in his book or he would

(51:38):
kill her. I remember Mercy was three years old and
part of this Indian attack that she made it out
from where most of her family was killed, and she
was later a servant for mister Burrows, So she was
his servant. Now why is that important? Because he is
described as having dark skinned Many wondered how he was
able to escape all these Indian attacks unscathed. Basically, Abigail

(52:02):
Williams she called him the little black minister, black like
the Indians. So most of the Putmans and the Puritans
especially saw Indians as the devil. So keep in mind,
her whole family was murdered by Indians. He was the
same color as these Indians, and she worked for him

(52:23):
and didn't like him. So now you've got this three
year old who lost everybody in her family to Indians,
and now she's got a chance to have another dark
skinned guy, and she pretty much lowered the hammer on.
So the court was crowded. Eight people accused Burrows of
tormenting them, and Burrows basically said that he was innocent

(52:47):
and that you know, they could say, you know what
they want, but he's not a witch. And as far
as he's concerned, whiches don't even exist.

Speaker 5 (52:55):
So he basically just said, hey, I'm not bad and
I got that food.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Yep. Wow, No we didn't fly, but that's what he said.

Speaker 5 (53:03):
Yah.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
August nineteenth, Burrows was due to be executed. So Cotton Mathers,
who was in Boston, he made the trip up and
just as Burrows had the noose around his neck, he
started reciting the Lord's Prayer. What was it that Cotton
Mathers said before, which couldn't say the Lord's Prayer? He

(53:25):
said it over and over and the crowd was like gasping,
and you know, they were like oh my, and they're
actually engined towards him to like get down, get him down.
Well it's about that time the Cotton Mathers kind of
stopped it, and he reminded them that the devil could
take on any shape that he wanted, and he could
pretty much do anything, and he and you know, the
devil can present himself as lies.

Speaker 4 (53:47):
Mmm.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
So they hung him.

Speaker 5 (53:50):
Oh man, he was so close, and.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
It was all due to Cotton Mathers basically coming in
for the hanging and then you know, proclaiming that the
devil could do what he wanted to do. So yeah,
I mean, otherwise, of Cotton hadn't came in, they would
have spared his life. Yeah. You know, it's now September
sixteen ninety two, and this is going to be the

(54:17):
final and the bloodiest chapter. Nine more people are going
to die by the end of the month. But we
got Giles Quary. Remember we had Martha Qurey that I
said was the fine outstanding set us into the church,
and I said she had a husband that was a
little bit argumentative and we would find out why. Well,
Charles was actually now brought up on charges. Abigail Hobbs

(54:41):
said that he was a warlock. Mercy lewis of course,
or she is again she also testified in court against him.
Now he was Giles was eighty one years old. So
he gets into the court room and like I told you,
he's kind of argumentative and they tell him they you
need him to plead guilty or innocent. He refuses to

(55:03):
plead either.

Speaker 5 (55:05):
How you do that?

Speaker 2 (55:06):
He just says, I'm not going to plead period, And
they ordered him to plead, and he said no. Well,
according to the law back then, they can't convict you
or continue on to trial if you don't plead.

Speaker 5 (55:22):
No good grief.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
So what they decided to do they had a little
trick that they would use back then called pressing. Pressing
is the act of basically laying you down and laying
a board or a plank on you and then putting
heavy rocks on top of you until you finally just
gave in and said what they wanted to say. WHOA.

(55:45):
So that's what they did. They ordered him to be pressed.
What happened was they would, like I said, they strip
them down and do all that stuff. So what happened
was when he refused. On September seventeenth, Sheriff Corp. When
he's the prick we talked about earlier, he let Corey
down to a pit in an open field, placed a
board on his chest, and he had six different men

(56:06):
start laying heavy stones on him, one by one on
his stomach and his chest area. Corey never made a sound.
Eighty one years old. They're laying all these heavy things.
He don't make a peep, and it's funny. This went
on over the course of two days. And over the
two days there was three different times when they would

(56:27):
basically say plead, and every time he answered the same thing,
more weight, Oh my gosh, And like I said, this happened.
And then on the second day he actually passed away,
but before he did, he cursed Corwin and the whole town.

Speaker 5 (56:47):
He cursed, like cursed and put a curse on that.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Yeah, which people in the which I guess that was
just his final way of sin. Yeah, this will be fine.

Speaker 5 (56:57):
Let him worry the rest of your life.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Three days ys later, Martha Corey was hung and several
others that same day. Now in moston several people started
kind of seeing this situation and criticizing the whole witch hunt,
so some of the confessed witches even started containing even Teachaba.

(57:19):
She went back and said, now I lied about all
that though, you know, she she you know, I named
all these people and half of them been killed. Now,
but you know the bottom line is that when Marquette Jacobs,
she actually is one of the ones who sent Burroughs
and even her own grandfather to the gallows.

Speaker 5 (57:42):
What a hefer?

Speaker 2 (57:43):
And she went back and said, look, I'd rather you know,
I said this stuff just to save my own life.
But I'd rather die than to keep living a lie.
She wrote that in an actual letter that she sent.
So a judge just kind of started to cooperate, and
he's since these people were now recanting their confessions, he

(58:06):
just said, well, fine, I'll just start convicting every one
of them, and that's what he started doing. By the
end of October, the governor did away with the court,
the special court that he had had set up. Trials
resumed in a regular court. But this is key. Spectral
evidence now was no longer used, so you couldn't use Ah,
somebody came in my dream or their image of them

(58:27):
came and that was huge because that's what got most
of these people convicted. There were three more convicteds, but
the government pretty much reprieved all of them.

Speaker 5 (58:36):
So he didn't know, are you not gonna sit there
and tell me that that woman that lied about all
those people didn't get anything.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
No, she ended up getting freed, but book we'll talk
about that later. That's later story. So when judge stouton
he was the guy from earlier here, is that the
judges reprieved all these people. He is pissed. And he
starts raging that Satan has you know, won and he's
advanced in their And so three months later, forty nine

(59:04):
people that had been accused are now released. Three people
died in jail waiting during this that didn't you know,
Tichaba is released. She's the one that was the start
of all this as far as the first one accused.
A year after her arrest, and she got released to
a new master because her master Paris Pastor Paris Master
Pastor Paris, he refused to pay any of her jail expenses.

(59:28):
So she got bought basically by somebody else, by them
just paying her jail expenses because I told you they
had to pay. When it was all said and done,
twenty four people were executed from January till October sixteen
ninety seven. Samuel Sewell, he was a judge. He asked
for the people's prayers and he said that, you know,

(59:52):
the hopefully their past sins will not damage the future USA.
You know, So what happened is you started realizing, started
realizing after the fact that they kind of screwed up.
So the people that were involved, they all started kind
of stepping up. And this went on because maybe This
was sixteen ninety two, so it took sixteen ninety seven,
five years later, before one of the judges stepped up

(01:00:15):
and said, hey, you know, let's learn from this and
let's move on. In seventeen oh three, most of the
evidence was thrown out by the actual court right there
in the Colony Bay, Massachusetts, of what they were used
to convicted. They threw most of that stuff out. I mean,
it's too little, too late. People are already dead but

(01:00:36):
stricken from the record books as evidence. In seventeen oh six,
twenty four year old and Putnam now junior, well, she
was only twelve at the time, she makes a formal
apology to the church and to the families of the
ones she helped execute. She said that I did it
not at a malice, anger, or ill will towards any person.

(01:00:59):
What I did was done strictly because my morality was
deluded by Satan. It was nice, ever step up. Only
several people died because of her doings whatever. In seventeen eleven,
the colony pays monetary payment and compensation to the families

(01:01:19):
of those The sheriff, though he stole all that stuff,
he never even had to pay anything back. No, no
kind of disciplinary actions. And Hawthorne, who was the first
magistrate that was in town, that was all this. He
continued to live in Salem and never had anything else
to say about the trial, never apologized, never said it
was wrong.

Speaker 5 (01:01:39):
Okay, okay, well I'm still waiting to hear what happened
to Deshiba or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
She was released to another master and that's how she got.
That's all she got, Oh my lord. Now, Cotton Mathers
eventually did say that he regretted the incident and the
lives that had been taken, but he said, you know
who is to blame? Is it the Puritans or is
it Satan? So he kind of left it kind of

(01:02:05):
open ended for that. But hole. Now, so with this
being said, what do you think really happened in this
case with the whole witch trials? I mean, what do
you think started it? Do you think it's something that
got just completely out of hand? Do you think it

(01:02:25):
was all a bunch of bs? I mean, what is
your take on the situation.

Speaker 5 (01:02:30):
I mean, I feel like it really happened, and I
think it's a bunch of crab that you can just say, oh,
she she, she, and she did you know are witches
as well. And in the end, I'm kind of pissed
because nothing happened to Tashiva.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
She's not a TV.

Speaker 5 (01:02:47):
Whatever her name is.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
I mean, that's crap.

Speaker 5 (01:02:50):
So many people lost their lives if that it's the case.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Or do you think there was actual real witchcraft going
on or do you think these girls actually had something
medical going on with.

Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
I think they had boys and ivy, That's what I think.
And they were gyrating all around. Maybe that was a
new dance move.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
I don't know if they didn't even let them dancing,
like what was footloose? I mean, what do you think
dancing would be looked at in this area?

Speaker 5 (01:03:14):
Well, come on now, I mean, I don't know. I
just think it's kind of hard if it feels like
it's far fetched. But again, you just you really don't know.
And I can't imagine, I mean imagine living back in
those times. I mean I would, honestly, I would just
stay my dang house, not ever come out in that way.

(01:03:35):
They couldn't accuse me of being a witch.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
People back then, We'll see, But the hermits were the
ones that were accused of being the witches. Oh, the
outcasts were the ones that were the first called oh
so you really could.

Speaker 5 (01:03:45):
I don't want to be a hermit. I just want
you to leave me along.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
And if you remember back from the mal Dyer go
fishing or something stories, she lived out in the town,
out in the woods all by herself and didn't bother anybody.

Speaker 5 (01:03:56):
And let's see, it's again it's a no win situation
in this this time. But I really feel bad. I mean,
for you know, like even today, people that might be
on death row may have had absolutely nothing to do
with whatever, but you just ever.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
Know, Well, here's my take on the whole thing, and
then I'm going to give you somebody else's take. I
basically think that it was just a bunch of a
couple of little young girls that had nothing better to
do with their time and wanted some attention. And then
it got out of hand, and once they started the
little deal, and then it started becoming oh my god,
now they're saying this wish oh we could be accused

(01:04:34):
of being witches. We got to name somebody, and I
think it just got out of hand.

Speaker 5 (01:04:38):
And I wouldn't even have looked at it that way.
That's so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
But let's let's talk about how Linda Caparell looks at it.
Linda Caperell is actually a college student in the early
seventies and she starts doing some research and she starts
talking about the afflictions that these girls had. Remember we
talked about the same thing happened with the girls three

(01:05:05):
years before that had caused that young the Irish lady
to be because of which and behung. It was a
similar symptoms. Well, what she found out when she was
doing some studying is that the symptoms they had, the hallucinations,
the the gyretting, the jerking, the quick sharp pains, mushrooms

(01:05:26):
sort of, it's actually a sign of similar to what
you would get from LSD oh wow. And what she
found out was that there was there was something called
ergot poisoning. Her got poisoning is a fungus that grows
on rye and other grains. But rye was the choice

(01:05:48):
of grain used in Salem, and the winter before that
it was actually a very wet winter, so that would
make sense that there would be more that this stuff
would grow on, and that's what they would have been
using at this time. It would have been that those crops.

(01:06:08):
And she seems to think that this is just a
situation of them eating the rye bread and having so
many people having these because they had ergot poisoning. Wow,
which is, like I said, it's it's pretty much the
same as the fact as taking LSD.

Speaker 5 (01:06:24):
Dang, that's like a whole other twist.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
On the whole because LSD is a derivative of ergot,
And like I said, it's it's just something that she
came up with. And it says here that toxicologists now
know that eating ergot contaminated food can lead to a
convulsive disorder characterized by violent muscle spasms, vomiting delusions, hallucinations, crawling,
sensations on the skin, and a host of other symptoms,

(01:06:50):
all of which were probably what they had. Oh man,
So it's like, you know, when you start looking at it,
it's like I said that the rye crop consumed in
the winter of sixteen ninety one ninety two, when the
first unusual sentence began to be reported, could easily have
been contaminated by large qualities of er god from the
summer of sixteen ninety two.

Speaker 5 (01:07:12):
So well, I mean I kind of understand that, but
why didn't it Well.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Well, they didn't know about that back then they would
see they would see the dark colors on the grain,
but they assumed that was just where it got baked
kind of out in the sun.

Speaker 5 (01:07:25):
Yeah, but wouldn't everybody eat the same thing? I mean,
if that's all they.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
Ate was the relbrary, Well, I see, that's that's a
good question, and that's what brings up That's why I
don't believe in this theory. I'm not saying something like
this couldn't happen, but yeah, why wouldn't more people affected?
Why was it primarily just the women that were affected?
And if you've got you can't even if that was

(01:07:49):
the case. Some of these instances, it was almost like
it was it would start and then it would stop
when they wanted. They would just make it start right there,
like in the courtroom, and then it would go away.
If you really had ergot r got poisoning, you couldn't
just stop it. But yeah, there's no way so, and
I think that's what most people's thoughts are on it
is that they controlled this way more than what you

(01:08:11):
could have done if it was an actual illness.

Speaker 5 (01:08:13):
Man, that's some scary stuff right there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
So how about that? So that's the story.

Speaker 5 (01:08:18):
Yeah, that's so interesting, and I just, oh, just to
think that somebody could just whatever, point a finger and say,
oh help, yep, she's a witch. Are you all out
there dangling off a limb somewhere?

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Yep? Absolutely. This was fun because, like I said, I
thought this was was going to be a lot of
information that most people probably hadn't heard about it and
give you some little tips on how they hung people
and stuff like that, and that's always good right before
you go to bed.

Speaker 3 (01:08:42):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
Yeah, we did contest last week where we told you
to go back and look at the Alistair Crowley Show
and I was we're going to give a trivia question
and we had two winners on that. So congrats to
you guys for winning the contest, and we're gonna do
it again this week. So what we're gonna do. I've

(01:09:03):
got another DVD of hill Billy Horror Show to give out.
That's our little sister friend show that just happened to
be named almost similar to us.

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
I know that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
But we got one more DVD to give out next week.
So we're gonna do this one this week and one
more next week. What I want you to do, I've
determined is we're gonna go back and have you listen
to episode nine, the first Rock and Roll and the
Occult show, And I'm gonna post a trivia question U
sometime tomorrow night. I'll probably do it later because I've

(01:09:33):
got We've got people all over the world and I
posted it, and the people that live like Australia and
in parts of Germany and stuff like that, that the
time difference didn't give them a chance. So I'll probably
started a little later. But we are going to release
that tomorrow night, and the first one who answers correctly
will win. Thank you, guys for the support of Patreon.

(01:09:56):
We did release that first listeners episode. Anybody who signed
up the rest of the month, obviously, we'll get that.
On the fifteenth. We are going to release another show
that's going to be part paranormal, part true crime. But
I have probably three, four or five stories in it.
That's what you guys had requested. Remember, on Patreon, all
you got to do is go to our He'll be

(01:10:17):
the Horror Story's website, go to the donate page. You
can make a one time donation if you'd rather do that,
or if you want to do Patreon. You get these
extra bonuses of a couple extra shows, and some of
them you get T shirts and stuff like that. You
can look at them on there. I won't bore you
with details. We appreciate everything you guys have done. We
had a bunch of people waterer T shirts and we're
excited about that. So remember, if you have gotten a

(01:10:38):
T shirt already, please take a picture and send it
to our Facebook page and then we'll share it around
social media.

Speaker 5 (01:10:43):
Yeah, please do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
We look forward to saying those once again. Keep all
the people in London and your prayers and your thoughts,
and we also Sarah or Rossco. She actually is a
fantastic fan of the show and she was just on
our first listener episode and she's actually going through some
medical situations right now. She got a little bit of
bad news yesterday. You guys, keep her in your thoughts

(01:11:06):
and prayers as well.

Speaker 5 (01:11:08):
Okay, sir, we're praying for you baby.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
All right. Thank you guys, and we'll see you next week.

Speaker 5 (01:11:12):
Love one another, have a great week, guys.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
And if you want to send a tweet out to
the girls from UH and that's why we drink and
tell them you're excited about having them on the show.
Thank you guys. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
Aye,