S1 – 7: She Is One Of Us

It's easy for a community to turn on the outsiders among them. The Salem witch trials had become a textbook example of this over the first few months. But in July of 1692, all of that changed. As the Court of Oyer and Terminer rolled full speed ahead, it seems anyone could be a witch.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
The body of Bridget Bishop was left hanging from the
gallows for days. It was standard practice for the execution
of felons. By leaving the results of their crime out
in the public for everyone to see, it was thought
that fewer people would be tempted to follow the same
immoral path. We don't have any records about when Bridget's

(00:32):
body was cut down or where it was buried, but
executed criminals were usually buried near the place of death.
It wasn't respectful or sacred, and that was the point
in the Puritan mind. People evil enough to do horrible things,
they didn't deserve a proper burial. Bridget's death might not
have left a physical trace, but it certainly had a

(00:54):
social impact. In the two weeks that followed her execution,
reports of a flictions almost stopped entirely. Yes, there were
a handful of exceptions, but the overall effect was like
pulling the emergency brake on a speeding car. People took
notice of how deadly the game had become, but nothing

(01:15):
lasts forever. However nice it would have been for everything
to grind to a permanent halt. I think all of
us are very aware that no such thing was about
to happen, and one of the few instances where people
still reported afflictions from a witch. A community even deepens
its roots into the soil of insanity and chaos, they
find themselves a witch detective. Weeks earlier, when Bray Wilkins

(01:41):
and his grandson Daniel were sick and witchcraft was suspected,
Mercy Lewis offered to come and help. She was the
refugee from Maine that had moved to sale In village
years before along with George Burrows, but in she lived
and worked in one of the Putnam households, and if
you remember, it was she who pointed the finger at

(02:01):
John Willard, the village deputy constable and husband of wilkins granddaughter,
as the suspect. So when new afflictions were reported inside
a Putnam house, Mercy Lewis was called in to offer
her observations. She immediately identified two witches at work, Rebecca
Nurse and Martha Carrier, and while both of these women

(02:24):
were already in jail, these new accusations would simply be
added to their records for when their own trials began.
But the momentary pause was only localized to Salem far
to the north. On the day after the execution of
Bridget Bishop, the French and Wabanaki launched an attack on
the town of Wells. Garrison and ships in the harbor

(02:46):
were able to repel the attack, but the enemy managed
to capture a prisoner, who was then tortured to death
in full view of the defenders. Observant participants in the
Salem situation couldn't help but see the symbolism. They had
struck a blow against the devil on June tenth, only
to be hit back the following day. I can imagine

(03:09):
it was frustrating to the powers that be, but also
more than frightening to the rest of the community who
were waiting with bated breath for it all to end.
But the attack on Wells, along with the subsequent torture
and murder of that single captive, also sent a powerful
message to the people of Salem that was difficult to ignore. Monsters,

(03:32):
it seems, could be found anywhere. This is unobscured. I'm
Aaron Manky. While Bridget Bishop had been executed for capital crimes,

(04:18):
she wasn't the first to die. If you remember, it
was Sarah Osborne who passed away first. While waiting in
jail for her own trial, And even though the community
slipped into a two week pause in the chaos on
June tenth, that didn't mean more deaths weren't coming. On June,
a prisoner named Roger tooth Acker died while sitting inside

(04:40):
the Boston Jail, adding one more name to a list
that was just beginning to grow. Tooth Acker was Martha
Carrier's brother in law, but had also worked as a
folk healer throughout Essex County. If people needed help with
a sitcow or a mysterious ailment, they would call on
him to use whatever tools he had at his disposal.

(05:00):
Here's historian Maryland k Roach. Some people did practice a
lot of folk magic, maybe more in England because they
weren't all Puritans. Well, they weren't all Purans hereies. They
were white witches, a blessing witches so called, meaning they
did only the good magic. But if you have the

(05:20):
idea that the source of it is really only pretending
to do good for a while, until you're really thoroughly
caught in this clutches, it's not something you should be
fooling around with. Understandably, that gray area between witchcraft and
Puritan piety was an unsettling place to be for many
of the people in the area. Roger Toothaker was essentially

(05:43):
dabbling with magic as far as they were concerned, and
that was the devil's work. Yes, he thought of himself
to be one of the good guys, but enough people
disagreed that he was arrested, examined, and in jail. By May,
I have a feeling tooth Acker new it was coming. Though.
Back in February, if you remember from episode one, the

(06:04):
Paris family's neighbor, Mary Sibley, had baked a witch cake
to try and cure the first two afflicted girls, but
the results were disastrous. Reverend Paris and his peers viewed
the use of magic, even white magic meant to help others,
as an invitation to the devil. By May of Roger

(06:26):
Toothaker found himself in jail, but the long wait for
his own trial only brought him sickness and death. Like
Sarah Osburne before him, his life was snuffed out by
the grinding gears of the witch hunt, long before he
would ever have a chance for freedom and justice. As
you might expect, people were beginning to have doubts it

(06:47):
was one thing to throw accusations around the village, but
when those words began to draw real blood and take lives, well,
it felt like a bridge too far for many people.
Most of that doubt manifested as murmurs and whispers around
the community, but it had official representation too. Immediately after
the trial and conviction of bridget Bishop, one of the

(07:10):
nine judges, resigned his post. For anyone concerned about the
trials getting out of hand, Nathaniel salt Install had been
their source of hope, but he took that pipe dream
with him when he quit, and the road ahead looked
a lot less promising As a result. What happened in
the days to come was a battle of wills between
those with spiritual authority and those with legal power. Religious

(07:33):
leaders like Cotton Mather, Samuel Willard, and William Millbourne all
came forward with concerns for how the trial should be
handled and laced throughout. All of their arguments were liberal
amounts of theology. So when the Governor's Council met three
days after the first public execution, Phipps and a handful
of the magistrates reached out to the ministers, then asked

(07:54):
for their full official response. Gathered together, they told them
and discussed the challenges we all face. Then, when you're ready,
bring them to us for a discussion. What they came
back with was a written response known as the Return
of Several Ministers. It was polite and supportive of the
overall mission of the Oyer and termin Or trials, but

(08:16):
the letter addressed a bigger concern, namely, Chief Judge William
Stowton believed that specters could not impersonate innocent people, and
the ministers disagreed. There's a lot of theology at play here,
and I don't want to get too deep into the
nitty gritty of it all, but essentially, people were worried
about wrongful accusations and convictions. Thanks to the trust the

(08:40):
authorities replacing in the accusations of the afflicted girls, as
well as allowing Mercy Lewis to serve as a witch finder,
it had become all too easy to imagine that innocent
people might get caught in the crossfire. Stoton believed that
if someone witnessed the spectral image of a witch, then
the person they saw was the person to laim. The ministers,

(09:01):
though disagreed, they believed that the devil could impersonate innocent people,
literally putting on their appearance as a disguise, just to
get those people in trouble. So obviously, the next question
was even trickier, how can you tell? It was bad
enough that no one except a handful of the accused
could actually see the specters of their attackers, but now

(09:24):
they had to play detective and figure out which ones
were the devil in disguise and which ones were real witches.
And the solution, according to the ministers, was to avoid
prosecuting virtuous people, people with blameless reputations and no history
of any wrongdoing. It was a cop out answer, though,

(09:44):
because Stoton believed that very few people were actually of
unblemished reputation. He and his fellow judges were part of
that select few, naturally, But outside of that, it was
difficult to imagine anyone without a sordid path, even Rebecca Nurse,
who was a full member of the Salem Village Church

(10:05):
and well respected, and as she was about to find out,
when your fate rested on invisible evidence, it was hard
to see anything other than darkness. Ask most people today
if they know anything about the Salem Which Trials, and

(10:26):
the most common answer you'll get from non historians is
that it was really just one big mess that revolved
around property line disputes. And hopefully over the last few
episodes I've put that rumor to rest for you at least.
But here's where I'm going to contradict myself for a moment.
When we talk about Rebecca Nurse, we have to talk

(10:47):
about property lines. Keep in mind, these Puritan settlers were
certainly focused on the mission of establishing God's kingdom in
the New World. They were deeply religious people, but they
were also a notoriously difficult to get along with. That's
one of the reasons they left England after all. So
you can imagine living in a community in a strange place,

(11:09):
constantly afraid of the world around them, that these settlers
were on the edge and cranky about a lot of things.
Back in episode one, we talked about the differences between
the Putnam's and the Porters, and I don't want to
repeat myself here, but let me sum it up by
saying that the Porters were the wealthy family that lived
on the edge between Salem Town and Salem Village. They

(11:31):
figuratively rode the fence, so to speak. They benefited from
the high society of the town, but also benefited from
the resources and expansive land of the village. Keeping the
two communities together as a single legal entity was in
their best interest. But inside Salem Village was another family,

(11:51):
the Putnam's, who didn't have a vested interest in the town.
They wanted autonomy and a break from the wealthier Port community.
So there is this tug of war between the two families,
and then the town family showed up. They were a
family from England with seven children, three daughters and four sons,
and when they arrived they purchased a tract of land

(12:12):
along the western edges of Salem Village, or maybe it
was the eastern edges of tops Field, because that's where
the conflict began five decades before the Salem which trials
a sloppy Massachusetts clerk, as Stacy Shift puts, it, drew
part of tops Fields boundary lines right over the existing
lines for Western Salem. It created a small bubble of

(12:35):
land between the two communities that technically belonged to both,
and that's the land that the Town's bought. Now, as
the conflict went on and grew between the Porters and
the Putnam's. The Putnam started to feel the need to
expand farther west and get away from the porters. The
trouble was the towns were there, sort of walling them in,

(12:56):
and as a result, the Putnam's resented them, and this
led to all sorts of conflict. There was a horse
theft that forced the towns to sue the Putnams. They
fought over firewood, something that every family needed an abundance
to survive the cold New England winters, and they bickered
about where each family might grace their livestock. Honestly, anything

(13:18):
that could have been fought over probably was, and it
went on for years. All the town kids grew up,
of course, and married into the surrounding community. Daughters, Mary,
Sarah and Rebecca became Mary sty Sarah Klois, and Rebecca Nurse,
all three names that should ring a bell by now,
because by June of they were all in jail and

(13:41):
no wonder. Up until July, more than half of all
the witchcraft accusations had originated from a Putnam house. You
don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why Rebecca
was particularly annoying to the Putnam's. Because she married into
a Salem Town family, aligning herself with the wealthier reporters
by association. Her husband, Francis, was an artist there, but

(14:05):
years after their marriage they leased a large three acre
farm in the middle of Salem Village, pushing the thorn
right back into the heel of the Putnams. By the
time the witch trials had ramped up, Rebecca was an
old woman in her seventies. But despite doing well for
herself and building a reputation as an upstanding member of
the local church and an elder in the community, Rebecca

(14:29):
was still accused of witchcraft. Why while outside of the
decades long feud between her own family and the Putnams
of Salem Village, there might be two other reasons for
the way some in the community turned on her. Here's
Emerson Baker Rebecca Nurse. Her case is another key turning point.
Why would this wonder this, this elderly sainted grandmother who's

(14:52):
a member of the Salem Town Church up here in
Saint why would she be accused of witchcraft? Well, again,
note she's a member of the Salem Town Church, not
the Salem Village church. In other words, Rebecca didn't go
through the rigorous membership gauntlet that the strict conservative Salem
Village Church required. Instead, she had become a full member

(15:13):
in the less strict Salem town where the halfway Covenant
was accepted. Despite that she was enjoying all the benefits
of full membership right there in Samuel Paris's congregation. To
a lot of people, it didn't seem fair. The second reason, though,
was rooted in bigotry. If you remember, it was known
that Rebecca had taken in an orphaned Quaker neighbor out

(15:35):
of the goodness of her heart, but that child represented
something evil in the minds of her accusers. That's because,
in pursuit of their mission to build a Puritan Kingdom
of God in the New World, any other version of
Christianity was the enemy. Catholic, Quaker, it didn't matter. They
were forces of the devil. So Rebecca, through her Christian charity,

(15:58):
had done something that many in the commune nity equated
with being a traitor. Add to this the fact that
her husband, Francis, was part of the committee that was
trying to remove Reverend Paris from his job as village minister.
And we have a recipe for division and in fighting
it was a bigger version of the story that most
of the victims were living through that spring and early summer.

(16:21):
But Rebecca had a few advantages over her fellow jail mates.
Her family had decades of experience fighting back, they were
well connected, and they were tenacious. Unfortunately, they were going
to need every bit of that in the coming weeks.

(16:45):
The pump had been primed. If anyone was to blame
for getting the community in an uproar about Rebecca Nurse
and her sisters, it was Reverend Samuel Paris. Of course,
he felt threatened. Rebecca and the others didn't care for
his highly concern port of hand on the rudder, and
they wanted him gone. Paris responded with scathing sermons from

(17:06):
the pulpit through March, April and May. Paris used his
position at the head of the congregation to so discontent
and fear. He preached about the devil among them, and
about how anyone might be working for the enemy, even
the neighbors they had known for so long. So when
the Oyer and Terminer moved on from bridget Bishop and

(17:27):
began to hear testimony and depositions in regards to Rebecca Nurse,
there were plenty of people to come forward. Mercy Lewis
reported seeing Rebecca's specter attacking a Putnam boy, then another Putnam,
John Jr. Claimed that his infant son died just three
days after he had a public disagreement with the old woman.
Thomas Putnam, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and Reverend Paris were among the

(17:50):
respected adults who put pen to paper and wrote out
their testimony against Rebecca. They were bringing out the big guns,
so to speak, with the aim of damn the old
woman in the eyes of the judges and jury. But
they were in for a surprise. Maryland k roach once again.
The nurse family circulated a petition among neighbors, and lots

(18:12):
of people signed it. It wasn't just them, so people
put their names on it. This was incredibly significance. Here's
historian Richard Trask on exactly why. Of the documents that survive,
we have maybe about twenty of them in which either
one person, a couple, or a bunch of people would

(18:36):
send in a deposition or a petition saying that we've
known her all of our life and she never looked
like she was a witch. Er, never deported her any
more than a good Christian. Forty people signed the one
to Rebecca Nurse. The judges went into the official Oyer
and Terminator trial for Rebecca Nurse, assuming she would play

(18:57):
along like everyone else, but backfired. If they were going
to have a cloud of witnesses to her evil nature,
then Rebecca's family would bring an army of their own,
and they made huge advances too. Some of the character
witnesses who stepped forward to defend Rebecca Nurse also brought
unusual stories that cast doubt on the testimony of the

(19:18):
afflicted girls. Much of it centered around Elizabeth Hubbard, the
teenage girl who had seen that wolf following her that
cold winter night many months before. One man claimed that
during a visit to the home of Elizabeth's uncle, Dr Griggs,
the girl had talked about denying the Sabbath. Another man,
sixty year old farmer named Clements Coldham, recalled giving Elizabeth

(19:41):
a ride home on his horse when the girl claimed
that they were being followed by the devil. After a while,
she told Coldham that she wasn't afraid because she and
the devil were on good speaking terms. A similar story
with a similar message was told about one of the
other afflicted girls, ab Gail Williams and a farmer named

(20:02):
Robert Molton believed that Susannah Sheldon had lied to the
court when she told them that the devil had dragged
her over a stone wall, because he was there that
day and he watched her climb the wall all on
her own. Rebecca's own daughter, Sarah Nurse, testified that she
had watched another of the accusers, Sarah Biber, actually pulled
straight pins out of her clothing and then prick herself

(20:24):
in the knee before crying out that Rebecca had attacked her.
It was all a farce, she said, and in a
shocking move against her own family, John and Rebecca Putnam
stood up in her defense as well. One of the
charges against Rebecca Nurse had been that she had killed
their daughter and son in law, but the grieving parents
made it clear that the younger couple had died from

(20:47):
a fever and not witchcraft. It was amazing, really, in
the face of the frightful charge of witchcraft, Rebecca's family
not only mounted a solid defense of her character, but
they attacked the very truth of the accusers at the
same time. It was a one to punch that was
sure to set their friend and matriarch free. Armed with

(21:09):
all of that testimony, the jury was sent away to
make a decision. Here's Richard Trask once again. At first
the jurors came back with a not guilty, and it
was pandemonium in the courthouse. The afflicted children who were there,
and also some older afflicted ones started going into profound

(21:32):
fits and so forth. WILLIAMS. Stouton, he was the chief
justice of the panel, He said, um, have you considered
some testimony of someone who said this of that? And
the jurors asked Rebecca Nurse a question I confessed, which
had given testimony that she was one of us. Rebecca

(21:52):
said why she is one of us? And she was
asked what did that mean? And she didn't say anything,
and because she couldn't hear, she was almost deaf. After
what must have seemed like an eternity, the members of
the jury slowly walked back into the courtroom. I can
imagine the room was blanketed with a tense silence as

(22:15):
each of them took their seat, and then they announced
that they had made their decision. Rebecca Nurse. They said
it was guilty. Jun was a busy day for the
court of Lawyer and Terminer. Not only had they heard
the case against Rebecca Nurse, but others were brought to

(22:37):
trial as well. One of them was Sarah Good, the grumbling, homeless,
pipe smoking woman that everyone loved to hate. She'd been
in jail for months, her infant child had died, and
her five year old daughter, Dorothy, was still in a
Boston jail, the same jail that had already claimed the
lives of Sarah Osburne and Roger Toothaker. But her trial

(23:00):
couldn't have been a stronger contrast to that of Rebecca Nurse.
There was no large collection of friends and family mounting
a passionate defence. There were no prominent members of the
community calling the accusations of the afflicted girls. Into question.
It was just Sarah Good against the court, and she
can't have felt a lot of hope about that. One

(23:22):
of the witnesses brought to the courtroom that day was
none other than Tituba, the slave woman from the Paris household.
She was asked to repeat for the benefit of the jury,
of course, the story she told that first examination months earlier,
on March one. Of course, she had been given plenty
of opportunities to keep her story straight thanks to the
repeated visits from the magistrates over those long months in jail.

(23:47):
Thomas Newton, the Attorney General overseeing the trial, even submitted
a document as evidence that came straight from Sarah's little girl, Dorothy.
Despite her young age, someone had managed to convince the
child to give to stimony against her own mother, and
as the court proceeded, Sarah had to listen to those
words as they were read aloud. Local heavyweights contributed their

(24:10):
own testimony against her too. Thomas Putnam and Ezekiel Chiever
reaffirmed their earlier testimony, and Reverend Samuel Paris described the
torment that his daughter and niece had gone through, and
by doing so, Paris gave the courtroom clear permission from
the church to view Sarah Good as the enemy. She
was found guilty and charged with three separate counts of witchcraft,

(24:33):
but she wouldn't be the only one that day. A
woman named Susannah Martin was also brought to the trial,
and there were plenty of witnesses available to paint her
in a dark light. She was like Sarah Good in
many ways. She was poor and alone, but she was
also an old widow from Amesbury, a community far to
the north. When she was led into the courtroom, the

(24:54):
afflicted girls fell into terrible fits. Former sale and village
minister Dale Debt Lawson would later record that some of
them even vomited blood. It was sometime during this chaos
that one of the afflicted shouted out to the courtroom
that they were being attacked by someone new, Samuel Willard.
There must have been a sharp intake of breath at

(25:16):
the sound of his name. Willard was not someone they
would have suspected of witchcraft. Not only was he the
minister of the Boston First Church, but he was a
close friend and adviser to many of the judges in
the trial. Thinking quickly on his feet, Stoughton suggested to
the girl that she was mistaken, that she had confused
John Willard with the good reverend. She was quickly removed

(25:39):
from the courtroom, while word was passed among those seated
in the crowd that it had been a mistake. It
seems they were just as quick to dismiss charges against
one of their own as they were to declare women
like Sarah Good as guilty. Two other women were put
on trial during the same session as the others. Elizabeth
Howe and Sarah Wild's I'd have seemed like disconnected players

(26:01):
in the drama, but that was far from true. In fact,
they were both deeply connected to the woman whose conviction
began the day, Rebecca Nurse. Elizabeth Howe was Rebecca's sister
in law, as well as being close friends with her
sister Mary Esty. And if you remember that old property
line issue between tops Field and Salem Village, it was
Sarah Wild's husband that had drawn it up. While both

(26:25):
of the women had accusations of witchcraft hovering over them,
it's clear looking back that there were other issues at
play as well. Both were declared guilty, putting the final
count for the session at five convicted witches. But the
family of Rebecca Nurse wasn't ready to quitch just yet.
After the court adjourned, they approached one of the jurors,

(26:45):
a man named Thomas Fisk, and pleaded their case. Amazingly,
they managed to get a collection of documents along with
a written statement from Fisk that might serve to free
Rebecca from the charges. With that precious cargo of paper
an ink in hand, they saddled their horses and rode
hard for Boston. It was time to confront the governor.

(27:20):
They must have had connections. Perhaps the Nurse family brought
along some of their wealthy porter allies, or maybe they
already had a history with the governor. Whatever the reason was,
they managed to get access to William Phipps just as
they had hoped. They confronted him inside his Boston home
and then spread out all of their documents for him
to look over. They explained the issue at hand and

(27:42):
how the spectral evidence and pins and lies had all
been disproven, And then they told Phipps about the not
guilty verdict that came before the guilty They explained the
confusion that had led to the guilty verdict, how her
lack of hearing and a misunderstanding about a question led
them to doubt her character, and all they wanted was

(28:03):
a fair decision. Bipps was instantly sympathetic. He reviewed the
documents and listened to their testimony, and right there inside
his Boston home, he reversed the court's ruling, issuing a reprieve.
Rebecca Nurse was free for a moment, anyway. When the
news of the reprieve made its way to Salem, the

(28:25):
afflicted and their support network exploded in anger. Robert Califf
was a Boston merchant whose record of the trials has
come to be an essential document for understanding what happened
off the books and behind the scenes. He later wrote
that when the news of the reprieve became known, the
accusers renewed their dismal outcries against her, insomuch that the

(28:47):
Governor was by some Salem gentleman prevailed with to recall
the reprieve. In the clinical, detached tone of the time,
we can see Rebecca's last hope for justice slip away.
On July nine, Sheriff George Corwin headed to the execution
site for the second time in five weeks. Sarah Good,

(29:10):
Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wilds, and Rebecca Nurse all
rode in the back of his wagon, all hope for
salvation driven from their minds. They were lost and they
knew it. Beneath the gallows, each of the women had
their skirts tied around their legs, and then the Salem

(29:31):
town minister, Nicholas Noys, spoke with each of them in turn.
When he reached Sarah Good, though, he used the moment
to lecture her and beg for a confession. Here's Emerson Baker.
She says, you know, basically, come come, women. You know
you're gonna die, but you might as well clear your conscience.
She says, you know, I'm no more which than you are,
and if you kill me, God will give you blood

(29:53):
to drink. So take that. That's actually a quarter out
of revelation where one of the sort of plagues that
will come to the earth is the waters will turn
to blood and you'll have to drink it. So, on
the one hand, one initially saw that, I thought, Wow,
Sarah Good, that's pretty good. She was showing noise. You
know what, I'm a perfectly good purit and here i
am facing death and I'm going to quote scripture to you.
But it's more complicated than that, because, as it turns out,

(30:15):
back in this early sixteen sixties, when the Massachusetts government
is executing Quakers in Boston for simply trying to proselytize
the faith, an Englishman writes a book about their behaviors
and tells the magistrates that they have to stop what
you're doing or God will give them blood to drink.
So Sarah Good in that famous quote, was actually not
just wasn't a biblical quote. She was actually quoting from

(30:37):
a Quaker complaint against the magistrates of Massachusetts. So there
may be a lot of reasons why Sarah I'm not
even I'm not sure she was a Quaker necessarily, but
she certainly lived in that part of Salem that was
susceptible to where the Quakers lived. Um, so she certainly
would have known about them, might well have even a
Quaker sympathies. After their battle of words, Noise left Sarah

(31:00):
Good and the others to their fate. Each of them
was led up a ladder where a noose was tightened
around their necks. Then, from the safety of the ground below,
Sheriff Corwin began to push them off, one at a time.
I imagine the crowd was stunned by the violence of
it all. Execution by hanging was notoriously graphic, with sights

(31:22):
and sounds that could unsettle even the strongest among them.
These were women they had known for years, known and
trusted and spoken with, and now they were writhing at
the end of a rope as their lives slowly faded away.
Historian Stacy Schiff suggests that they probably didn't leave the
bodies up for long. It was July and far too

(31:44):
hot to leave a corpse out in the sun. They
would have been cut down a short time later and
hastily buried right there on the hill, although local legend
says that the families of those women, those who had
them at least returned under the cover of darkness to
take their love ones away for a proper burial. Rebecca
Nurse was carried back to the family homestead in Salem

(32:07):
Village and buried in an unmarked grave. The house and
property are still there today, and if you're ever in Danvers,
you can visit the museum that was once her home
and stand beside the graveyard that took its place. It's
a physical reminder of just how normal these people were
and how tragic their final days turned out to be.

(32:29):
Speaking of which, those words that Sarah Good tossed at
Reverend Noise, the ones where she promised blood for him
to drink, those words seemed to stick around. We know
Samuel Sewell remembered them, as did those who heard them
spoken prior to the execution, and I have to think
that Noise himself never forgot them. Years later, on December seventeen, seventeen,

(32:55):
Reverend Noise passed away. Legend says that he suffered a
hemorrhage in his head or throat, and as a result,
his mouth filled with his own blood. He drowned, just
as Sarah Good had promised. That's it for this week's
episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break

(33:18):
for a preview of what's in store for next week
next time on Unobscured. Looking back, it's easy to see
countless examples of the authorities leading the witness. They suggest
answers with their questions and give the accused just enough
detail to reply with answers that fit their expectations. Maybe

(33:41):
these men were just really bad at interviewing the accused,
or perhaps they allow their bias to steer the ship.
We might never know, But something else came out of
the examination of Anne Foster and her family New Names
From and Over. Mary Lacey Sr. Mentioned two of Martha
Carrier's own children as one of their own, sending the

(34:02):
court into a frenzy. The following day, eighteen year old
Richard and sixteen year old Andrew were arrested and brought
to town. What awaited them, however, was not the usual examination,
we have come to expect their fate would be much
more painful than anyone thus far. Torture Unobscured was created

(35:19):
and written by me Aaron Mankey and produced by Matt
Frederick and Alex Williams in partnership with How Stuff Works,
with research by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson.
Learn more about our contributing historians further reading material, resource
archive and links to our other shows at History unobscured

(35:40):
dot com. Until next time, thanks for listening.