November 28, 2018 • 44 mins
The witchcraft panic had been gathering victims for months by the time George Burroughs was hanged, and many of them were still in jail. With nothing but torture and certain death awaiting them at the end of their imprisonment, many of the accused in Salem began to plot a more hopeful conclusion to their story.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Giles Corey was furious, partly at himself, but mostly at
the rest of the community. He had let slip a
small piece of information about his wife Martha's past, and
now that had snowballed into a massive attack on her character,
and he was going to stop it. Martha and Giles
Corey hadn't been married for a long time, and he
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wasn't even her first husband, although that wasn't unusual in
a day and age when people died often and quickly
from any manner of illness. No, her first husband had
been a man named Henry rich and together they had
raised one son named Thomas. But Martha had a secret.
She had another son, one that was born three years
(00:56):
before her marriage to Henry rich In, born out of wedlock,
mind you, and fathered by a local slave. And while
she and Henry raised Thomas, their white and proper son,
inside the Rown home, this older son, Ben, lived in
a local boarding house where Martha would visit each day
and see to his needs. So when the very first
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examinations took place back in early March and Tituba, Sarah
Good and Sarah Osborne were dragged into the meeting house
to account for the accusations leveled against them. Jiles Corey
knew that it was only a matter of time before
they came for his wife. Witch Hunts always began with
the outsiders and the rule breakers, after all, So he
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stormed out of his house that very same day, ready
to go defend his wife's name in the meeting house
if it ever crossed someone's lips. He was an outspoken man,
known to be rough and cantankerous, and he was not
about to let his wife be thrown into the mix.
Martha rushed out to stop him. They worked well together
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as a couple because she was just as strong willed
as he was. While he was grabbing whatever he might
need for his ride to the meeting house, she was
unbuckling his saddle. When it was loose, she tossed it
into the dirt. That was months ago. The little storm
that had blown in back in late winter had blossomed
into a September tempest, and it was threatening to devastate
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countless lives in Salem. But this time Giles Corey wasn't
able to stomp out of his house and saddle his
horse for another ride to the meeting house. He couldn't
because he was in jail, along with a fresh crop
of newcomers, each with their own cloud of accusations hovering
over them. On the upside, Giles was finally reunited with Martha.
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But that's about all the silver lining I can find.
Anything else hinted at a darker future. The Court of
Oyer and Terminer had already met three times, and each
time had ended with the sentencing and execution of almost
everyone involved. The Corey's names were on the list for
the fourth session, and even though their trial had yet
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to begin, they already knew how it would end, with
countless whispers and rumors swirling around them and no one
willing to step forward and defend them. They could see
no other way out, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't try.
This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. As August gave way
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to September, the wreckage of the trials was already beyond unbearable.
Eleven people had been executed for the crime of witchcraft,
and others had died in jail waiting for justice. One
didn't have to look far to see the effects of
the trials. I can't help but wonder if many were
full of regret for remaining silent. Silence in the face
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of injustice has a way of acting like a stamp
of approval. What was happening there in Salem must have
felt less and less like justice with each passing day.
Some of the people in the community had to have
been worried the magistrates and their supporters, However, they didn't
see it that way. The King and Queen of Hell
had been defeated, and they had new leads for yet
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more witches hidden within their community and the wider area.
Samuel Wardwell, the andover man who had defended himself against
accusations that he had somehow bewitched Joseph Ballard's wife Elizabeth,
was arrested and thrown in jail, and the rumors were
pretty damning. Wardwell had a reputation for fortune telling and divination,
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to activities that many people viewed as the skills of
a witch. He was proud of these skills too, and
bragged about them freely. He once shouted the devil take
you at another farmer who allowed his cattle to graze
on his land, and he even admitted to being baptized
by the devil himself in a local river, being careful
to wash away every bit of his earlier Christian baptism.
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So yeah, while many had already died and the community
was writhing with unease and remorse, their fear was just
a little bit stronger, and their superstitions were still in
the driver's seat. After all, how could you pump the
brakes when someone confesses to signing the Devil's book and
doing his evil work. That and over branch of the
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witchcraft trials had become a monster of its own too,
so many new accusations him to light that the magistrates
in Salem set up a separate examination location right there
in and Over. Anyone found worthy of participating in the
official oyer and Termina or trial would then be carted
off to one of the many area jails who were
helping Salem out. And the Oyer and Terminer was about
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to resume for its fourth session beginning on September six,
a new wave of accused would begin stepping into the
courtroom to stand before the magistrates and make their case.
One of those, of course, was Martha Corey, who had
been in jail longer than anyone else, but another was
a local woman named Alice Parker. Alice was the husband
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of John Parker, who worked as a fisherman just south
of what's referred to as Salem Neck, a peninsula of
land that pushes northeast from the rest of the city.
They rented a home there near the water, and, like
a lot of people in town, did their best to
just survive. Alice, though, was prone to seizures that were
refer to as catalepsy, a medical condition that was well
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known at the time. Those who suffered from it would
have seizures that resulted in their bodies becoming rigid and unmoving,
while they would appear to everyone else as if they
were asleep or unconscious. In a community frightened by a
rash of witchcraft stories, though Alice Parker made people uncomfortable,
it didn't help that she had a bit of a temper.
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One of her neighbors was the Warren family, whose daughter
Mary had become a well known member of the group
of afflicted girls doing much of the finger pointing, and
years before Alice had caused a scene at their home.
With her husband out on the water much of the time,
Alice had asked Mary Warren's father to help harvest the
grass on her meadow. He agreed to help but when
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the time came around, he never showed up. So Alice
paid them a visit and shouted at him, using threatening
words that seemed to take roots and hold on. And
Mary Warren remembered those words. She remembered them when her
sister became ill and lost her hearing. She remembered them
when her mother became sick and died. She remembered them
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when her father also died. Even after leaving her childhood
home and moving in with the Proctors as a helper,
she remembered those words. So when Alice Parker entered the
courtroom to hear the charges against her, those charges included
a description of that encounter years before and the detailing
of the fallout from that curse. According to Mary Warren,
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her entire family had been destroyed because of Alice Parker's
powers as a witch, and that was enough for the magistrates.
The jury considered the evidence and then returned with a verdict.
Alice Parker was guilty of witchcraft, but she wouldn't be
the last. Others stood before the court that week as well.
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After Alice Parker's conviction, Mary ste had her turn, hearing
the accusations and speaking for herself. Mary Esty, if you remember,
was the sister to Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Klois. And
while Sarah would have her own trial soon enough, Rebecca
was already dead, executed for the very same crime for
which her sister Mary now stood trial. And I can't
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imagine Mary not being acutely aware of that, still in mourning,
she was about to follow in her sister's footsteps. It
was to be expected, I suppose. Part of the evidence
that led to Rebecca's conviction was the fact that her mother,
Johanna Town, had been accused of witchcraft. Seeing as how
Rebecca and Mary shared that dark lineage, the court already
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had a head start. Added to this was the fact
that Mary ste had worked tirelessly to defend her sister,
something that made sense to a court that believed one
which would gladly support another. There was more. Mary was
the wife of tops Field farmer Isaac ste and mother
of twelve children, Being much younger than her sister, she
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was in her late fifties at the time of the trial.
But that's where the differences stopped. Mary and her husband
were just as connected to the wealthy Porter family and
just as hounded by accusations from the afflicted girls in
the area. Eight different men stood before the court that day,
validated the stories of Mercy Lewis, who claimed that Mary
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ste had attacked her in spectral form. But remember, Rebecca
Nurse had come prepared, armed with a petition. She had
used her position and connections to reach for more help
than most people could have managed, and here in early September,
her sister Mary did the same. Not only did she
show up for her trial with a signed petition in hand,
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but she also came with statements from her jailer swearing
to her good behavior and character. They spoke of her
unblemished reputation of Christianity, but all of it failed to
sway a jury and court of magistrates who were frightened
by the claims of the afflicted Mary Esty. Like her sister, Rebecca,
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was convicted after her. The court handled the case of
seventy year old Mary Bradbury. She wasn't a local to
the area, having been brought south all the way from
Salisbury coastal town up near the border of modern Massachusetts
in New Hampshire. But Bradbury was a fighter and would
give the courts another challenge. Her husband was the wealthy
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and respected Captain Thomas Bradbury, grand nephew of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, militia officer, and local magistrate and judge. These
were powerful connections and that's exactly what Mary would need
to defeat the charges against her. But those connections were
also a handicap. You see, the Puritan didn't care for
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the Anglican Church, which meant that Thomas's great called the Archbishop,
was about as evil as one person could get. And
Thomas had friends who were Royalists, those who supported the
Anglican king. These were connections that had gone a long
way toward helping Thomas and Mary advanced through life, but
now they were going to hold them back. Mary had
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the added problem of having prior accusations of witchcraft in
her past. While she had never been formally charged, those
old stories had more weight to them in light of
the new rumors. Many of the afflicted girls, including Ann Putnam,
Elizabeth Hubbard and Mary Warren, all claimed to have been
attacked by her that year, and all of their stories
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helped the Attorney General deliver yet another conviction. More quickly
followed after Mary Bradberry and Mary sty the court convicted
Samuel Wardwell and Ann Foster of Andover, along with Anne's daughter,
Mary Lacey, and Abigail Hobbs. The teenage girl who had
returned from Maine with stories of the devil and claims
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of witchcraft, found herself on the wrong end of the
game she had started. Yes, her claims had put a
lot of other people in jail, but they had also
earned her a conviction. When Samuel Wardwell learned that three
other confessed witches and Foster, Mary Lacey, and Abigail Hobbs
were all sentenced to death by hanging, he had a
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change of heart. Maybe it was the realization that no
confessing to witchcraft was not the guaranteed ticket to safety
that he had assumed it would be. Maybe it was
just the impending doom of the hangman's noose. Neither way,
he recanted his claims. It didn't work. On Thursday September,
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the court handpicked eight individuals from the fresh crop of
convicted witches and carted them off to the site of
their execution. Those eight were Martha Corey, Mary st Alice Parker,
and Samuel Wardwell, along with some that we know much
less about and Beauty Wilma Red and Margaret Scott. The
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only account of their execution is from Robert Caliph, the
Boston merchant, who had written down an account of the
previous execution as well. According to Caliph, it was a
somber scene, with much weeping and heartfelt goodbyes from the victims.
The Salem town minister, Nicholas Noyce, however, was one of
the few to appear unmoved by the occasion. What a
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sad thing it is to see, he was said to
have announced, without remorse, eight firebrands of hell hanging there
sad Indeed, one by one the eight victims were pushed
off the ladder, and one by one they perished at
the end of the rope. But not Mary Bradbury. No,
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she didn't go to the gallows for a very simple reason.
She escaped. Then, As hard as it might be to believe,
she wasn't the only one. It's not hard to imagine why. Really,
if you and I have been living in Salem at
the time of the witchcraft trials, any one of us
might have felt just nervous enough about the direction things
were headed to consider running away. Sure, the accusations had
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first been thrown at the outsiders, and the others in
their community. But week by week, month by month, those
old norms were crumbling by September. Of anyone was fair game,
poor or rich, alone or well connected, religious outsider or
full member. In the Puritan Church, if you lived and breathed,
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there was a chance you might be accused, never mind
the fact that the trials had clearly been guided by
passion and fear rather than logic and fact. To most observers,
and especially those who had gone through the examination process
and the Oyer and Terminer trial, there was very little
night at the end of the tunnel. So the Bradberry's
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got creative. They were at the end of their rope,
and with Mary's conviction and sentencing, things felt urgent. Many
people had simply accepted their fate, but not Mary's family. Instead,
they broke her out. Here's historian Mary Beth Norton to
explain how well if you pay attention to where they are,
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remember there are a lot of people in jail. They're
not just in Salem. The jail in Salem is too
small to hold them all. The jail in Salem Town,
as we're talking about, there's too small to hold them all.
So they've been scattered around other places. And it happens
that a lot of the leading people who are accused
of being which is are sent to Boston. And I
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am convinced that the Boston jailer had his hand out
for bribes, and that it was from the Boston jail
that a lot of these people escaped. It's not written
down anywhere, but he basically took money to let will go.
I think there's no question um in my mind. There's
no question my mind that he was. He was bribable
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and probably earned a pretty penny from letting all these
wealthy people go, one of them being my very own ancestor,
Mary Bradberry, who was held and suddenly managed to escape.
Guess what, she had a wealthy husband. Another escapeee was
Captain John Alden, if you don't remember, he was one
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of the arrests in late May. In fact, his arrest
happened so quickly that they wrote the arrest warrant after
he was in custody, because nothing says we're running this
thing entirely by the book, like breaking basic rules like
having a warrant for his suspect's arrest. Since that arrest,
Alden had spent fifteen weeks in a Boston jail, waiting
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for his turn to stand trial before the Oyer and Terminator.
From the jail, he would have heard the news week
by week of each new trial, conviction, and execution. His
own approaching death was like the beating of a drum,
growing louder and more intense with each new day. And
then George Burrows was executed. Alden had served in the
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militia on the main Frontier, where Burrows had been a minister.
The men had known each other, and that made the
minister's execution personal. If the court could not stop at
convicting a frontier fighting minister, how could John Alden expect
anything less for himself as a result. Sometime towards the
end of August, Captain John Alden vanished. That's the how,
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But what about the why? Where did Alden and the
Bradberries get the idea in the first place. Well, it
turns out we might have one of the local ministers
to blame for that, and not just anyone, none other
than Samuel Willard. Willard, if you remember, was the minister
of Boston's Third Church, where three of the Oyer and
Terminer judges were members. Samuel Sewell Peter Sergeant, and wait
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Still Winthrop. Early on, he had preached from the pulpit
about the need to be sober and vigilant as they
began their spiritual mettle with the devil. But as time
went on that changed. Maybe it had to do with
how the magistrates handled that group letter written by many
of the local ministers called the Return of Several Ministers.
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Their purpose had been to warn and guide the government,
but instead their words were twisted and used as justification
for many of the injustices that followed. Samuel Willard wasn't
the type of man who would handle that sort of
misrepresentation well, so he spoke out. But he wasn't disconnected
from the trials. In fact, Willard was tangled up in
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it thanks to friendships and family. He was a close
friend of Captain John Alden, and his own brother, Simon,
was a lieutenant in the militia who testified against the
recently executed George Burrows. It's interesting to point out something else.
Burrows had been executed on August nineteen. Two days later,
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on August Willard stood before his congregation and preached on
Matthew Chapter ten, verse twenty three, Across Town inside Boston's
first church minister, Joshua Moody, taught the exact same Bible passage.
What exactly does that specific verse say they that are
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persecuted in one city let them flee to another? It
was hard to ignore the obvious. Granted, some people might
have just assumed that Willard and Moody were preaching from
a passage of scripture that they had both agreed upon
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at their last Thursday lecture meeting. But if you were
deep in the tragic events personally, it was far from
a coincidence. And those people noticed. Two of the people
sitting in church that morning were Philip and Mary English.
They were a power couple and quite possibly the wealthiest
citizens of Salem Town. Philip was a merchant who was
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known to be impulsive, generous, and optimistic. He had arrived
in Salem in the sixteen seventies and quickly began to
grow his business empire. Early on, he formed a business
partnership with another already established merchant. In the process, he
fell in love with that man's daughter, Mary, and in
sixteen seventy five the couple were married. By sixteen ninety two,
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Mary was around forty years old and a full member
in the Salem Town Church, well respected among her peers.
She was even the manager of the business for her
husband whenever he was away or at sea, and proved
herself to be every bit his equal. She was a
powerful figure in her own right. Philip did well for
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himself over the years he served on juries and then
as a constable in sixteen eighty two. Nearly all of
the man registrates of six ninety two new Philip English
from those many official appearances in court, but also from
his business reputation. He was dripping with wealth, and those
men couldn't help but notice that English was so rich
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that by six eighty three he was able to build
the largest mansion in the city of Salem. Remember this
was a time when most people lived in a one
room home, with the occasional two room house in the neighborhood.
Philip's Great House, as people called it, was an exercise
in opulence. But Philip English had a secret. I'll let
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historian Emerson Baker clew you in. He's from the Channel Islands.
His first language is French. He comes over here as
Philip langlais not Philip English. Philip was an outsider. He
spoke the language of the evil Catholic French and identified
as an Anglican, not a Puritan. He tried to hide it,
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as the change and his surname might suggest, but most
likely not well enough. Eventually the truth slipped out, and
for as successful as his wife, Mary turned out to be,
not everyone liked her either. Here's historian Marilyn k. Roach.
Marry English was the richest woman in Salem. Her father
had been a merchant who was lost at sea, and
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she married his business partner, Philip English, who was from
the Isle of Jersey and had more of a French culture.
Some people, at least according to descendants, thought she put
on airs, but class and status and the responsibilities of
class were big in those days, not like now. But
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she was accused even though she was a full member
of the Salem Church in town. The stories tell us
they came for the english Is in the dead of night.
Of course, they had a warrant, and behind it was
a whole slew of accusations. Mary's mother had once been
accused of which craft, making her a prime suspect. Some
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of the afflicted girls, including Annie Putnam and Mercy Lewis,
even claimed to have seen Mary Specter visit and torment them.
The warrant had been issued on April and included other
names as well, names we should all recognize by now,
Mary Esty, Sarah Wild's, Abigail Hobb's parents, William and Deliverance,
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all of whom work harded off to jail. By early September,
some of them would have been executed, and that obvious
fate hovered over all the rest like a dark cloud.
Most people settled in for a long stay in jail.
But I need to take your mental image of a
jail and throw it out the window. Here's historian and
Salem archivist Richard Trask. If you were rich, you would
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treated differently, and you could take care of yourself much
better in jail, because in jail you had to pay
for your own fees. If you wanted to eat them
might have been a common pot in which you could partake.
But if you wanted to eat often your family brought
to the food. They'd bring you a fresh straw, so
that you would have a mattress that would have fresh
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straw in it. He wanted a stool so you didn't
go on the cold ground all the time. That could
be brought in. Of course, Philip English could pay for
anything his wife Mary might need in jail. Money has
always been the same as power, and he used it
to give her a better experience. But when the next
round of warrants went out in early May, Philip's own
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name was listed among the new suspects. Rather than caring
for his wife from the outside of a jail, he
was moved inside to sit beside her. Actually, his arrest
took a bit of time. The warrant was issued in
early May, but he couldn't be found anywhere in Salem Town. Finally,
a woman named Susannah Sheldon came forward and claimed to
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have seen Philip Specter heading to Boston on a mission
to kill Governor Phipps, so a marshal was sent after him.
They finally found Philip English hiding in the home of
a friend in Boston. Legend says that they found him
in the dirty laundry, where he'd been hiding off and
on for weeks. Once united in jail, though Philip flexed
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his political muscles to have himself and his wife freed
from the horrid conditions. They paid their massive four thousand
pound bond and were set free on house arrest for context,
Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village earned an average salary
of just sixty pounds a year. So yeah, the English
family were stinking rich. And then they got back to
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normal life as best they could. They went for walks
under the supervision of a jailer, They saw their daughter,
and they traveled around Boston. Oh and they went to
church too, which, of course is where they heard the
sermon on August nine that suggested running away. A short
while later, Philip and Mary English disappeared. They headed for
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New York, but in doing so left four of their
five children under the care of friends in Boston. The
hangman would be very busy in the coming weeks, but
it seemed as if money and power had afforded the
English as a chance to do something very few might
even dream of. They slipped the noose and lived to
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tell about it. There were more escapes, of course. One
of the other married couples to make a run for
it was Nathaniel and Elizabeth Carey. They lived in Charlestown
rather than Salem, but we're pulled into the Salem trials
on May when Nathaniel got word that his wife had
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been accused. So the couple headed north to clear the
matter up. Looking back, that wasn't the smartest decision. They
were probably expecting to arrive in Salem and find a normal,
ordinary trial in progress, where logic and reason ruled the day.
But we know better, don't we. We're aware of the
bias and disregard for simple logic. If we had been
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in Charlestown that day, in any one of us would
have shouted for them to stay away from Salem. While
they watched the first examinations of the morning, some of
the afflicted girls took notice of them and asked for
their names. In the afternoon session, one of those afflicted
girls fell into a series of fits and then pointed
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to Elizabeth Carey as the witch who was attacking her.
She was immediately taken into custody and arrest warrant was drafted,
and then she was brought to the front of the courtroom.
Nathaniel tried to help her. He requested permission to stand
beside her and hold her hand, but was denied. Even
when she told the judges that she felt faint and overwhelmed,
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they refused to let her husband help her. All he
was ever allowed to do was wipe away the tears
from her eyes. You can imagine how her examination went.
Stories were told by the afflicted girls. Witnesses came forward
who said Elizabeth Carey's specter appeared and tormented them. Nathaniel
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objected and disrupted the proceedings more than once, overwhelmed with
frustration at what he referred to as inhuman dealings. It
didn't work. Elizabeth was thrown in jail, and so Nathaniel
request did she at least be moved to a jail
closer to Charleston so he could better care for her. Instead,
the magistrates instructed the jailer to put Elizabeth in leg irons.
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The situation had been so unexpected and moved so quickly
that she practically collapsed under the stress, even having convulsions
in the jail due to the trauma of it all.
We don't know how, but Nathaniel somehow managed to organize
his wife's escape from the Boston jail. Maybe he paid
off the jailer it's entirely possible, or maybe someone slipped
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him a key to her chains. However it happened. She
headed south at the end of July and stopped in
Rhode Island to wait for Nathaniel to join her. Once reunited,
the couple continued on until they arrived in New York,
where Governor Benjamin Fletcher was said to have welcomed them
in and given them refuge. New York was where the
English Is would go as well and others from Salem
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to In a lot of ways, the former Dutch settlement
and it's more open minded culture made the colony something
of a sanctuary city, and it saved lives. There were
others too. Daniel Andrew was a bricklayer and builder who
was connected to many of the wealthy powerful men in
Salem Town. He was joined by marriage to the Porter
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clan and lived in Salem Village, where he owned large
tracts of land. He also held the position of Deputy
of the Massachusetts General Court for a while until Hawthorne
and Corwin took that over. He was accused of witchcraft
on May fifte and skipped town almost immediately. Unlike John Willard,
who had fled town only to be captured farther west,
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Daniel Andrew made it to safety. Yet another to escape
was George Jacobs Jr. We've already met his father, George Senior,
who was executed on August nine, alongside George Burrows and
the others. George Jr. Rented property from Daniel Andrew and
was married to his sister. He was also close to
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the Klois family, but Sarah Klois was in jail awaiting
her own trial. Life had suddenly become very tense and
uncomfortable for George Jacobs Jr. So he ran. Today we
still have a letter that his daughter, Margaret wrote to
him on August We don't know if it was ever
actually delivered to George, but it tells of how she
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was forced to confess against her grandfather, George Senior, and
that it broke her heart. She begs her father to
pray for her, and then closes the letter by stating
that God knows how soon I shall be put to death,
and that she looked forward to a joyful and happy
meeting in heaven. Historians today have no idea where Daniel
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Andrew and George Jacobs Jr. Found shelter, but their stories
tell us something important about the culture they lived in
and how similar it is to our own world today.
That when it comes to the mocking nations of power,
who you know is often more important than what you
know that money and status, those elusive tools of the elite,
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are useful in avoiding the power of the law, and
that ultimately, while some people's connections might save them, vast
majority faced a less hopeful truth. Who you know could
get you killed. Giles Corey didn't have Daniel Andrews quick
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thinking or the money and friends of Mary and Philip English.
He didn't have John Alden's military background or Thomas Bradford's
connected family. He was a rough spoken, quarrelsome eighty one
year old farmer with a bad reputation, and there would
be no escape for him. It's not that he didn't
contribute to that reputation himself. One historian records that Corey
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was given to vile language. He was often in arguments
with his neighbors and on more than one occasion referred
to them as damned, devilish rogues. Some records portray him
as a thief, claiming he stole things he felt he deserved,
such as tools or bushels of neighbors apples. He'd lived
in the community there for decades but had no friends
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to show for it. Giles Corey was a hard man
to like. He was also on the bad side of
the Salem Village Minister Samuel Paris, a staunch supporter of
the witch trial proceedings. Remember the Halfway Covenant, that agreement
amongst some of the Puritan churches to allow people to
become full members without the traditional strict requirements. Well, that
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comes in to play here too. As a reminder, here's
Emerson Baker to explain to us exactly why that was
frustrating to Reverend Paris. The Corries used that loophole. Giles
Corey becomes a member of the Salem Town Church and
even though they say, basically despite his his reprobate past,
he's acknowledged his past as a center and we accept
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him into our fellowship, into our covenant. So then imagine,
here's this fellow who people know to be who he is,
and he's sitting right there and partaking of the Lord
suffer with the other members of the Salem Village Church
because as a member of the Salem Town Church, you
can attend and you have full rights really to receive communion. Really,
isn't that interesting? This trophy hunting, social climbing wife who
(34:42):
claims she's a gospel woman, and look how she managed
to get her husband, Giles Corey, arsonist, beater of servants.
We've managed to get him into the church. Something's wrong here.
But it was worse than that. Almost two decades earlier,
in six seventy five, Giles Corey had murdered his farm hand,
Jacob Gooddale. The young man was reputed to be a
(35:05):
bit dimwitted, as they would say referring to someone with
a mental disability, and that slowness frustrated Corey. One afternoon,
he lost his temper and beat Gooddale so severely that
he died a couple of days later. The trial would
be a frustrating mess if it happened today. The coroner
ruled his death a murder, meaning he wouldn't have died
(35:27):
if Giles Corey hadn't beaten him so violently. And yet
during the trial a number of other locals came forward
to admit that they too had beaten Gooddale at some
point in the past. Corey, no longer an outlier, was
led off with nothing more than a fine. It was
hard to love a man like that. The fine might
(35:48):
have been paid, but there was no denying there was
blood on his hands, and the community would never view
him the same way. Again. Not only was he outspoken
and angry, but now there was proof that his anchor
could boil over into murder. Understandably, people kept an eye
on Giles Corey, so when his wife, Martha, the Queen
(36:09):
of Hell, was arrested in April, everyone assumed Giles would
soon follow her to jail. When it happened, and he
was brought before the magistrates for his initial examination. They
say Corey was tight lipped and quick to fight back
while they threw accusations at him. He wasn't shy about
how ridiculous they sounded. He hardly knew what a warlock was,
(36:31):
he said, and now Abigail Hobbs was insisting he was one.
According to Mercy Lewis, he was a dreadful wizard. His
wife's reputation was used against him, as was his past behavior.
They brought in neighbors to paint him as a liar
and a wicked man. And sure, Giles Corey wasn't well
behaved or well loved, but none of that amounted to witchcraft.
(36:53):
But that didn't matter. Logic wasn't the fuel that ran
the engine of the witchcraft trials. No, it was upheld
by religious intolerance. And a fear of being accused by others.
Better to point a finger at someone else than to
have a finger pointed at you. So Giles Corey, the
loud and abusive farmer with a foul mouth and a
(37:14):
murder charge on his record, went to jail. Over the
months that followed, he sat in a jail cell with
his wife Martha. He followed her from Boston to her
own Oyer and Terminator trial in Salem Town. He watched
as she was convicted of witchcraft and given the death sentence.
He listened as he was told of her execution on
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August nineteen. He was all enough to take the wind
out of anyone's sale, but not Giles Corey. There was
plenty of strength left in him, and in the coming
days he would show just how ready he was to
do battle. His fight was far from over. He wasn't
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an easy defendant. In the first week of September, the
authorities brought Giles Corey to sail In Town to stand
trial in the newest session of the Oyer and Terminer,
but nothing went according to plan. When asked, as every
other defendant had been, asked, how he would like to
be tried, he didn't give the scripted answer of by
God and my country. Instead, he stood silent and unspoken.
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It's what the English called standing mute. Frustrated, the judges
sent him back to jail for a while while they
handled the other cases. They needed time to research how
to handle someone who refused to speak in their own defense,
and by the time Corey was brought back on the
final day of the trial, they had two options. The
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first was a precedent from a New York trial a
previous year, where a leader of a rebellious faction refused
to speak. The court there simply declared him guilty and
executed him. But English law recommended a different approach, the
use of what they called strong and hard punishment to
compel a reply from the defendant torture. On Sunday, September eight,
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the day before his scheduled punishment, Corey was visited in
jail by representatives of the Salem Town Church, who excommunicated
him for his refusal to stand trial. Other members of
the church visited him as well, attempting to change his
mind and convince him to take the less stubborn road.
But that's not the type of man Giles Corey was.
(39:37):
The following day, Monday, September nine, he was led out
of the Salem jail to an open pasture across the street.
One contemporary account describes the day as dry and windy.
The sky might very well have been blue and beautiful
above them, but there was a darkness in the air.
Everyone gathered around to watch would have felt it. Corey
(40:01):
was placed on the ground, face up, and then flat
boards were set across his body, forming a platform. Then
one by one, a series of heavy stones were placed
on the boards. Robert Califf, that Salem merchant who left
us with some of the best private records of the
executions of Salem victims, was on hand that day to
(40:23):
watch as the pile of stones grew larger and larger.
This was torture, plain and simple. The basic idea was
the same as the neck and heels technique used on
the carrier teenagers Richard and Andrew use pain to make
them talk, but it didn't seem to work here. Later
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that evening, Judge Samuel Sewell would record three simple words
in his journal. Corey kept silent, which meant that the
weight kept adding up. Stone after stone was placed on
his chest, putting immense pressure on the elderly man's body.
In theory, there was time for him to answer and
(41:05):
the torture, but at some point they would pass the
point of no return. The damage that was being done
to him was irreparable. In the end, Corey did speak,
but it wasn't to confess. With a weight of hundreds
of pounds of stones on his chest, the old farmer
managed to draw enough breath to utter one final insult
(41:29):
more weight. He said, I can't help it smile at
how frustrated that must have made the judges feel. Robert
Califf describes Corey's final moments in graphic detail, tongue being
pressed out of his mouth. He wrote, the sheriff with
his cane forced it in again when he was dying.
(41:53):
It was the first execution by pressing in the history
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and thankfully it would also
be the last. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured.
Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview
of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured,
(42:20):
this was the mess that Phipps discovered when he returned
from Maine. People were having their land and property ripped
out of their hands seemingly left and right, and the
community was beginning to rumble with discontent, and so word
was spreading about it. So Phipps did something to stop
it all. No, not the seizure of property, but the
(42:41):
spreading of the news. He declared an embargo on the
public writing about the trials in their entirety, prohibiting anyone
from publishing news or information about what was happening. Phipps,
the rough spoken gold digger who preferred victory lapse to
actually doing work, declared the press to be illegitimate and
(43:01):
shut it down. But as everyone knows, you can't stop
the signal. Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron
(44:04):
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 dot com. Until next time,
(44:26):
thanks for listening.
Giles Corey was furious, partly at himself, but mostly at
the rest of the community. He had let slip a
small piece of information about his wife Martha's past, and
now that had snowballed into a massive attack on her character,
and he was going to stop it. Martha and Giles
Corey hadn't been married for a long time, and he
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wasn't even her first husband, although that wasn't unusual in
a day and age when people died often and quickly
from any manner of illness. No, her first husband had
been a man named Henry rich and together they had
raised one son named Thomas. But Martha had a secret.
She had another son, one that was born three years
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before her marriage to Henry rich In, born out of wedlock,
mind you, and fathered by a local slave. And while
she and Henry raised Thomas, their white and proper son,
inside the Rown home, this older son, Ben, lived in
a local boarding house where Martha would visit each day
and see to his needs. So when the very first
(01:19):
examinations took place back in early March and Tituba, Sarah
Good and Sarah Osborne were dragged into the meeting house
to account for the accusations leveled against them. Jiles Corey
knew that it was only a matter of time before
they came for his wife. Witch Hunts always began with
the outsiders and the rule breakers, after all, So he
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stormed out of his house that very same day, ready
to go defend his wife's name in the meeting house
if it ever crossed someone's lips. He was an outspoken man,
known to be rough and cantankerous, and he was not
about to let his wife be thrown into the mix.
Martha rushed out to stop him. They worked well together
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as a couple because she was just as strong willed
as he was. While he was grabbing whatever he might
need for his ride to the meeting house, she was
unbuckling his saddle. When it was loose, she tossed it
into the dirt. That was months ago. The little storm
that had blown in back in late winter had blossomed
into a September tempest, and it was threatening to devastate
(02:24):
countless lives in Salem. But this time Giles Corey wasn't
able to stomp out of his house and saddle his
horse for another ride to the meeting house. He couldn't
because he was in jail, along with a fresh crop
of newcomers, each with their own cloud of accusations hovering
over them. On the upside, Giles was finally reunited with Martha.
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But that's about all the silver lining I can find.
Anything else hinted at a darker future. The Court of
Oyer and Terminer had already met three times, and each
time had ended with the sentencing and execution of almost
everyone involved. The Corey's names were on the list for
the fourth session, and even though their trial had yet
(03:08):
to begin, they already knew how it would end, with
countless whispers and rumors swirling around them and no one
willing to step forward and defend them. They could see
no other way out, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't try.
This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. As August gave way
(04:03):
to September, the wreckage of the trials was already beyond unbearable.
Eleven people had been executed for the crime of witchcraft,
and others had died in jail waiting for justice. One
didn't have to look far to see the effects of
the trials. I can't help but wonder if many were
full of regret for remaining silent. Silence in the face
(04:25):
of injustice has a way of acting like a stamp
of approval. What was happening there in Salem must have
felt less and less like justice with each passing day.
Some of the people in the community had to have
been worried the magistrates and their supporters, However, they didn't
see it that way. The King and Queen of Hell
had been defeated, and they had new leads for yet
(04:48):
more witches hidden within their community and the wider area.
Samuel Wardwell, the andover man who had defended himself against
accusations that he had somehow bewitched Joseph Ballard's wife Elizabeth,
was arrested and thrown in jail, and the rumors were
pretty damning. Wardwell had a reputation for fortune telling and divination,
(05:10):
to activities that many people viewed as the skills of
a witch. He was proud of these skills too, and
bragged about them freely. He once shouted the devil take
you at another farmer who allowed his cattle to graze
on his land, and he even admitted to being baptized
by the devil himself in a local river, being careful
to wash away every bit of his earlier Christian baptism.
(05:33):
So yeah, while many had already died and the community
was writhing with unease and remorse, their fear was just
a little bit stronger, and their superstitions were still in
the driver's seat. After all, how could you pump the
brakes when someone confesses to signing the Devil's book and
doing his evil work. That and over branch of the
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witchcraft trials had become a monster of its own too,
so many new accusations him to light that the magistrates
in Salem set up a separate examination location right there
in and Over. Anyone found worthy of participating in the
official oyer and Termina or trial would then be carted
off to one of the many area jails who were
helping Salem out. And the Oyer and Terminer was about
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to resume for its fourth session beginning on September six,
a new wave of accused would begin stepping into the
courtroom to stand before the magistrates and make their case.
One of those, of course, was Martha Corey, who had
been in jail longer than anyone else, but another was
a local woman named Alice Parker. Alice was the husband
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of John Parker, who worked as a fisherman just south
of what's referred to as Salem Neck, a peninsula of
land that pushes northeast from the rest of the city.
They rented a home there near the water, and, like
a lot of people in town, did their best to
just survive. Alice, though, was prone to seizures that were
refer to as catalepsy, a medical condition that was well
(07:03):
known at the time. Those who suffered from it would
have seizures that resulted in their bodies becoming rigid and unmoving,
while they would appear to everyone else as if they
were asleep or unconscious. In a community frightened by a
rash of witchcraft stories, though Alice Parker made people uncomfortable,
it didn't help that she had a bit of a temper.
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One of her neighbors was the Warren family, whose daughter
Mary had become a well known member of the group
of afflicted girls doing much of the finger pointing, and
years before Alice had caused a scene at their home.
With her husband out on the water much of the time,
Alice had asked Mary Warren's father to help harvest the
grass on her meadow. He agreed to help but when
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the time came around, he never showed up. So Alice
paid them a visit and shouted at him, using threatening
words that seemed to take roots and hold on. And
Mary Warren remembered those words. She remembered them when her
sister became ill and lost her hearing. She remembered them
when her mother became sick and died. She remembered them
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when her father also died. Even after leaving her childhood
home and moving in with the Proctors as a helper,
she remembered those words. So when Alice Parker entered the
courtroom to hear the charges against her, those charges included
a description of that encounter years before and the detailing
of the fallout from that curse. According to Mary Warren,
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her entire family had been destroyed because of Alice Parker's
powers as a witch, and that was enough for the magistrates.
The jury considered the evidence and then returned with a verdict.
Alice Parker was guilty of witchcraft, but she wouldn't be
the last. Others stood before the court that week as well.
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After Alice Parker's conviction, Mary ste had her turn, hearing
the accusations and speaking for herself. Mary Esty, if you remember,
was the sister to Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Klois. And
while Sarah would have her own trial soon enough, Rebecca
was already dead, executed for the very same crime for
which her sister Mary now stood trial. And I can't
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imagine Mary not being acutely aware of that, still in mourning,
she was about to follow in her sister's footsteps. It
was to be expected, I suppose. Part of the evidence
that led to Rebecca's conviction was the fact that her mother,
Johanna Town, had been accused of witchcraft. Seeing as how
Rebecca and Mary shared that dark lineage, the court already
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had a head start. Added to this was the fact
that Mary ste had worked tirelessly to defend her sister,
something that made sense to a court that believed one
which would gladly support another. There was more. Mary was
the wife of tops Field farmer Isaac ste and mother
of twelve children, Being much younger than her sister, she
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was in her late fifties at the time of the trial.
But that's where the differences stopped. Mary and her husband
were just as connected to the wealthy Porter family and
just as hounded by accusations from the afflicted girls in
the area. Eight different men stood before the court that day,
validated the stories of Mercy Lewis, who claimed that Mary
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ste had attacked her in spectral form. But remember, Rebecca
Nurse had come prepared, armed with a petition. She had
used her position and connections to reach for more help
than most people could have managed, and here in early September,
her sister Mary did the same. Not only did she
show up for her trial with a signed petition in hand,
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but she also came with statements from her jailer swearing
to her good behavior and character. They spoke of her
unblemished reputation of Christianity, but all of it failed to
sway a jury and court of magistrates who were frightened
by the claims of the afflicted Mary Esty. Like her sister, Rebecca,
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was convicted after her. The court handled the case of
seventy year old Mary Bradbury. She wasn't a local to
the area, having been brought south all the way from
Salisbury coastal town up near the border of modern Massachusetts
in New Hampshire. But Bradbury was a fighter and would
give the courts another challenge. Her husband was the wealthy
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and respected Captain Thomas Bradbury, grand nephew of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, militia officer, and local magistrate and judge. These
were powerful connections and that's exactly what Mary would need
to defeat the charges against her. But those connections were
also a handicap. You see, the Puritan didn't care for
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the Anglican Church, which meant that Thomas's great called the Archbishop,
was about as evil as one person could get. And
Thomas had friends who were Royalists, those who supported the
Anglican king. These were connections that had gone a long
way toward helping Thomas and Mary advanced through life, but
now they were going to hold them back. Mary had
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the added problem of having prior accusations of witchcraft in
her past. While she had never been formally charged, those
old stories had more weight to them in light of
the new rumors. Many of the afflicted girls, including Ann Putnam,
Elizabeth Hubbard and Mary Warren, all claimed to have been
attacked by her that year, and all of their stories
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helped the Attorney General deliver yet another conviction. More quickly
followed after Mary Bradberry and Mary sty the court convicted
Samuel Wardwell and Ann Foster of Andover, along with Anne's daughter,
Mary Lacey, and Abigail Hobbs. The teenage girl who had
returned from Maine with stories of the devil and claims
(12:59):
of witchcraft, found herself on the wrong end of the
game she had started. Yes, her claims had put a
lot of other people in jail, but they had also
earned her a conviction. When Samuel Wardwell learned that three
other confessed witches and Foster, Mary Lacey, and Abigail Hobbs
were all sentenced to death by hanging, he had a
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change of heart. Maybe it was the realization that no
confessing to witchcraft was not the guaranteed ticket to safety
that he had assumed it would be. Maybe it was
just the impending doom of the hangman's noose. Neither way,
he recanted his claims. It didn't work. On Thursday September,
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the court handpicked eight individuals from the fresh crop of
convicted witches and carted them off to the site of
their execution. Those eight were Martha Corey, Mary st Alice Parker,
and Samuel Wardwell, along with some that we know much
less about and Beauty Wilma Red and Margaret Scott. The
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only account of their execution is from Robert Caliph, the
Boston merchant, who had written down an account of the
previous execution as well. According to Caliph, it was a
somber scene, with much weeping and heartfelt goodbyes from the victims.
The Salem town minister, Nicholas Noyce, however, was one of
the few to appear unmoved by the occasion. What a
(14:27):
sad thing it is to see, he was said to
have announced, without remorse, eight firebrands of hell hanging there
sad Indeed, one by one the eight victims were pushed
off the ladder, and one by one they perished at
the end of the rope. But not Mary Bradbury. No,
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she didn't go to the gallows for a very simple reason.
She escaped. Then, As hard as it might be to believe,
she wasn't the only one. It's not hard to imagine why. Really,
if you and I have been living in Salem at
the time of the witchcraft trials, any one of us
might have felt just nervous enough about the direction things
were headed to consider running away. Sure, the accusations had
(15:19):
first been thrown at the outsiders, and the others in
their community. But week by week, month by month, those
old norms were crumbling by September. Of anyone was fair game,
poor or rich, alone or well connected, religious outsider or
full member. In the Puritan Church, if you lived and breathed,
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there was a chance you might be accused, never mind
the fact that the trials had clearly been guided by
passion and fear rather than logic and fact. To most observers,
and especially those who had gone through the examination process
and the Oyer and Terminer trial, there was very little
night at the end of the tunnel. So the Bradberry's
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got creative. They were at the end of their rope,
and with Mary's conviction and sentencing, things felt urgent. Many
people had simply accepted their fate, but not Mary's family. Instead,
they broke her out. Here's historian Mary Beth Norton to
explain how well if you pay attention to where they are,
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remember there are a lot of people in jail. They're
not just in Salem. The jail in Salem is too
small to hold them all. The jail in Salem Town,
as we're talking about, there's too small to hold them all.
So they've been scattered around other places. And it happens
that a lot of the leading people who are accused
of being which is are sent to Boston. And I
(16:44):
am convinced that the Boston jailer had his hand out
for bribes, and that it was from the Boston jail
that a lot of these people escaped. It's not written
down anywhere, but he basically took money to let will go.
I think there's no question um in my mind. There's
no question my mind that he was. He was bribable
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and probably earned a pretty penny from letting all these
wealthy people go, one of them being my very own ancestor,
Mary Bradberry, who was held and suddenly managed to escape.
Guess what, she had a wealthy husband. Another escapeee was
Captain John Alden, if you don't remember, he was one
(17:28):
of the arrests in late May. In fact, his arrest
happened so quickly that they wrote the arrest warrant after
he was in custody, because nothing says we're running this
thing entirely by the book, like breaking basic rules like
having a warrant for his suspect's arrest. Since that arrest,
Alden had spent fifteen weeks in a Boston jail, waiting
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for his turn to stand trial before the Oyer and Terminator.
From the jail, he would have heard the news week
by week of each new trial, conviction, and execution. His
own approaching death was like the beating of a drum,
growing louder and more intense with each new day. And
then George Burrows was executed. Alden had served in the
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militia on the main Frontier, where Burrows had been a minister.
The men had known each other, and that made the
minister's execution personal. If the court could not stop at
convicting a frontier fighting minister, how could John Alden expect
anything less for himself as a result. Sometime towards the
end of August, Captain John Alden vanished. That's the how,
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But what about the why? Where did Alden and the
Bradberries get the idea in the first place. Well, it
turns out we might have one of the local ministers
to blame for that, and not just anyone, none other
than Samuel Willard. Willard, if you remember, was the minister
of Boston's Third Church, where three of the Oyer and
Terminer judges were members. Samuel Sewell Peter Sergeant, and wait
(19:01):
Still Winthrop. Early on, he had preached from the pulpit
about the need to be sober and vigilant as they
began their spiritual mettle with the devil. But as time
went on that changed. Maybe it had to do with
how the magistrates handled that group letter written by many
of the local ministers called the Return of Several Ministers.
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Their purpose had been to warn and guide the government,
but instead their words were twisted and used as justification
for many of the injustices that followed. Samuel Willard wasn't
the type of man who would handle that sort of
misrepresentation well, so he spoke out. But he wasn't disconnected
from the trials. In fact, Willard was tangled up in
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it thanks to friendships and family. He was a close
friend of Captain John Alden, and his own brother, Simon,
was a lieutenant in the militia who testified against the
recently executed George Burrows. It's interesting to point out something else.
Burrows had been executed on August nineteen. Two days later,
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on August Willard stood before his congregation and preached on
Matthew Chapter ten, verse twenty three, Across Town inside Boston's
first church minister, Joshua Moody, taught the exact same Bible passage.
What exactly does that specific verse say they that are
(20:26):
persecuted in one city let them flee to another? It
was hard to ignore the obvious. Granted, some people might
have just assumed that Willard and Moody were preaching from
a passage of scripture that they had both agreed upon
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at their last Thursday lecture meeting. But if you were
deep in the tragic events personally, it was far from
a coincidence. And those people noticed. Two of the people
sitting in church that morning were Philip and Mary English.
They were a power couple and quite possibly the wealthiest
citizens of Salem Town. Philip was a merchant who was
(21:09):
known to be impulsive, generous, and optimistic. He had arrived
in Salem in the sixteen seventies and quickly began to
grow his business empire. Early on, he formed a business
partnership with another already established merchant. In the process, he
fell in love with that man's daughter, Mary, and in
sixteen seventy five the couple were married. By sixteen ninety two,
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Mary was around forty years old and a full member
in the Salem Town Church, well respected among her peers.
She was even the manager of the business for her
husband whenever he was away or at sea, and proved
herself to be every bit his equal. She was a
powerful figure in her own right. Philip did well for
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himself over the years he served on juries and then
as a constable in sixteen eighty two. Nearly all of
the man registrates of six ninety two new Philip English
from those many official appearances in court, but also from
his business reputation. He was dripping with wealth, and those
men couldn't help but notice that English was so rich
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that by six eighty three he was able to build
the largest mansion in the city of Salem. Remember this
was a time when most people lived in a one
room home, with the occasional two room house in the neighborhood.
Philip's Great House, as people called it, was an exercise
in opulence. But Philip English had a secret. I'll let
(22:37):
historian Emerson Baker clew you in. He's from the Channel Islands.
His first language is French. He comes over here as
Philip langlais not Philip English. Philip was an outsider. He
spoke the language of the evil Catholic French and identified
as an Anglican, not a Puritan. He tried to hide it,
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as the change and his surname might suggest, but most
likely not well enough. Eventually the truth slipped out, and
for as successful as his wife, Mary turned out to be,
not everyone liked her either. Here's historian Marilyn k. Roach.
Marry English was the richest woman in Salem. Her father
had been a merchant who was lost at sea, and
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she married his business partner, Philip English, who was from
the Isle of Jersey and had more of a French culture.
Some people, at least according to descendants, thought she put
on airs, but class and status and the responsibilities of
class were big in those days, not like now. But
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she was accused even though she was a full member
of the Salem Church in town. The stories tell us
they came for the english Is in the dead of night.
Of course, they had a warrant, and behind it was
a whole slew of accusations. Mary's mother had once been
accused of which craft, making her a prime suspect. Some
(24:03):
of the afflicted girls, including Annie Putnam and Mercy Lewis,
even claimed to have seen Mary Specter visit and torment them.
The warrant had been issued on April and included other
names as well, names we should all recognize by now,
Mary Esty, Sarah Wild's, Abigail Hobb's parents, William and Deliverance,
(24:25):
all of whom work harded off to jail. By early September,
some of them would have been executed, and that obvious
fate hovered over all the rest like a dark cloud.
Most people settled in for a long stay in jail.
But I need to take your mental image of a
jail and throw it out the window. Here's historian and
Salem archivist Richard Trask. If you were rich, you would
(24:50):
treated differently, and you could take care of yourself much
better in jail, because in jail you had to pay
for your own fees. If you wanted to eat them
might have been a common pot in which you could partake.
But if you wanted to eat often your family brought
to the food. They'd bring you a fresh straw, so
that you would have a mattress that would have fresh
(25:10):
straw in it. He wanted a stool so you didn't
go on the cold ground all the time. That could
be brought in. Of course, Philip English could pay for
anything his wife Mary might need in jail. Money has
always been the same as power, and he used it
to give her a better experience. But when the next
round of warrants went out in early May, Philip's own
(25:32):
name was listed among the new suspects. Rather than caring
for his wife from the outside of a jail, he
was moved inside to sit beside her. Actually, his arrest
took a bit of time. The warrant was issued in
early May, but he couldn't be found anywhere in Salem Town. Finally,
a woman named Susannah Sheldon came forward and claimed to
(25:53):
have seen Philip Specter heading to Boston on a mission
to kill Governor Phipps, so a marshal was sent after him.
They finally found Philip English hiding in the home of
a friend in Boston. Legend says that they found him
in the dirty laundry, where he'd been hiding off and
on for weeks. Once united in jail, though Philip flexed
(26:14):
his political muscles to have himself and his wife freed
from the horrid conditions. They paid their massive four thousand
pound bond and were set free on house arrest for context,
Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village earned an average salary
of just sixty pounds a year. So yeah, the English
family were stinking rich. And then they got back to
(26:37):
normal life as best they could. They went for walks
under the supervision of a jailer, They saw their daughter,
and they traveled around Boston. Oh and they went to
church too, which, of course is where they heard the
sermon on August nine that suggested running away. A short
while later, Philip and Mary English disappeared. They headed for
(27:00):
New York, but in doing so left four of their
five children under the care of friends in Boston. The
hangman would be very busy in the coming weeks, but
it seemed as if money and power had afforded the
English as a chance to do something very few might
even dream of. They slipped the noose and lived to
(27:21):
tell about it. There were more escapes, of course. One
of the other married couples to make a run for
it was Nathaniel and Elizabeth Carey. They lived in Charlestown
rather than Salem, but we're pulled into the Salem trials
on May when Nathaniel got word that his wife had
(27:41):
been accused. So the couple headed north to clear the
matter up. Looking back, that wasn't the smartest decision. They
were probably expecting to arrive in Salem and find a normal,
ordinary trial in progress, where logic and reason ruled the day.
But we know better, don't we. We're aware of the
bias and disregard for simple logic. If we had been
(28:04):
in Charlestown that day, in any one of us would
have shouted for them to stay away from Salem. While
they watched the first examinations of the morning, some of
the afflicted girls took notice of them and asked for
their names. In the afternoon session, one of those afflicted
girls fell into a series of fits and then pointed
(28:25):
to Elizabeth Carey as the witch who was attacking her.
She was immediately taken into custody and arrest warrant was drafted,
and then she was brought to the front of the courtroom.
Nathaniel tried to help her. He requested permission to stand
beside her and hold her hand, but was denied. Even
when she told the judges that she felt faint and overwhelmed,
(28:47):
they refused to let her husband help her. All he
was ever allowed to do was wipe away the tears
from her eyes. You can imagine how her examination went.
Stories were told by the afflicted girls. Witnesses came forward
who said Elizabeth Carey's specter appeared and tormented them. Nathaniel
(29:08):
objected and disrupted the proceedings more than once, overwhelmed with
frustration at what he referred to as inhuman dealings. It
didn't work. Elizabeth was thrown in jail, and so Nathaniel
request did she at least be moved to a jail
closer to Charleston so he could better care for her. Instead,
the magistrates instructed the jailer to put Elizabeth in leg irons.
(29:32):
The situation had been so unexpected and moved so quickly
that she practically collapsed under the stress, even having convulsions
in the jail due to the trauma of it all.
We don't know how, but Nathaniel somehow managed to organize
his wife's escape from the Boston jail. Maybe he paid
off the jailer it's entirely possible, or maybe someone slipped
(29:55):
him a key to her chains. However it happened. She
headed south at the end of July and stopped in
Rhode Island to wait for Nathaniel to join her. Once reunited,
the couple continued on until they arrived in New York,
where Governor Benjamin Fletcher was said to have welcomed them
in and given them refuge. New York was where the
English Is would go as well and others from Salem
(30:16):
to In a lot of ways, the former Dutch settlement
and it's more open minded culture made the colony something
of a sanctuary city, and it saved lives. There were
others too. Daniel Andrew was a bricklayer and builder who
was connected to many of the wealthy powerful men in
Salem Town. He was joined by marriage to the Porter
(30:38):
clan and lived in Salem Village, where he owned large
tracts of land. He also held the position of Deputy
of the Massachusetts General Court for a while until Hawthorne
and Corwin took that over. He was accused of witchcraft
on May fifte and skipped town almost immediately. Unlike John Willard,
who had fled town only to be captured farther west,
(31:01):
Daniel Andrew made it to safety. Yet another to escape
was George Jacobs Jr. We've already met his father, George Senior,
who was executed on August nine, alongside George Burrows and
the others. George Jr. Rented property from Daniel Andrew and
was married to his sister. He was also close to
(31:21):
the Klois family, but Sarah Klois was in jail awaiting
her own trial. Life had suddenly become very tense and
uncomfortable for George Jacobs Jr. So he ran. Today we
still have a letter that his daughter, Margaret wrote to
him on August We don't know if it was ever
actually delivered to George, but it tells of how she
(31:41):
was forced to confess against her grandfather, George Senior, and
that it broke her heart. She begs her father to
pray for her, and then closes the letter by stating
that God knows how soon I shall be put to death,
and that she looked forward to a joyful and happy
meeting in heaven. Historians today have no idea where Daniel
(32:04):
Andrew and George Jacobs Jr. Found shelter, but their stories
tell us something important about the culture they lived in
and how similar it is to our own world today.
That when it comes to the mocking nations of power,
who you know is often more important than what you
know that money and status, those elusive tools of the elite,
(32:27):
are useful in avoiding the power of the law, and
that ultimately, while some people's connections might save them, vast
majority faced a less hopeful truth. Who you know could
get you killed. Giles Corey didn't have Daniel Andrews quick
(32:50):
thinking or the money and friends of Mary and Philip English.
He didn't have John Alden's military background or Thomas Bradford's
connected family. He was a rough spoken, quarrelsome eighty one
year old farmer with a bad reputation, and there would
be no escape for him. It's not that he didn't
contribute to that reputation himself. One historian records that Corey
(33:14):
was given to vile language. He was often in arguments
with his neighbors and on more than one occasion referred
to them as damned, devilish rogues. Some records portray him
as a thief, claiming he stole things he felt he deserved,
such as tools or bushels of neighbors apples. He'd lived
in the community there for decades but had no friends
(33:36):
to show for it. Giles Corey was a hard man
to like. He was also on the bad side of
the Salem Village Minister Samuel Paris, a staunch supporter of
the witch trial proceedings. Remember the Halfway Covenant, that agreement
amongst some of the Puritan churches to allow people to
become full members without the traditional strict requirements. Well, that
(33:59):
comes in to play here too. As a reminder, here's
Emerson Baker to explain to us exactly why that was
frustrating to Reverend Paris. The Corries used that loophole. Giles
Corey becomes a member of the Salem Town Church and
even though they say, basically despite his his reprobate past,
he's acknowledged his past as a center and we accept
(34:19):
him into our fellowship, into our covenant. So then imagine,
here's this fellow who people know to be who he is,
and he's sitting right there and partaking of the Lord
suffer with the other members of the Salem Village Church
because as a member of the Salem Town Church, you
can attend and you have full rights really to receive communion. Really,
isn't that interesting? This trophy hunting, social climbing wife who
(34:42):
claims she's a gospel woman, and look how she managed
to get her husband, Giles Corey, arsonist, beater of servants.
We've managed to get him into the church. Something's wrong here.
But it was worse than that. Almost two decades earlier,
in six seventy five, Giles Corey had murdered his farm hand,
Jacob Gooddale. The young man was reputed to be a
(35:05):
bit dimwitted, as they would say referring to someone with
a mental disability, and that slowness frustrated Corey. One afternoon,
he lost his temper and beat Gooddale so severely that
he died a couple of days later. The trial would
be a frustrating mess if it happened today. The coroner
ruled his death a murder, meaning he wouldn't have died
(35:27):
if Giles Corey hadn't beaten him so violently. And yet
during the trial a number of other locals came forward
to admit that they too had beaten Gooddale at some
point in the past. Corey, no longer an outlier, was
led off with nothing more than a fine. It was
hard to love a man like that. The fine might
(35:48):
have been paid, but there was no denying there was
blood on his hands, and the community would never view
him the same way. Again. Not only was he outspoken
and angry, but now there was proof that his anchor
could boil over into murder. Understandably, people kept an eye
on Giles Corey, so when his wife, Martha, the Queen
(36:09):
of Hell, was arrested in April, everyone assumed Giles would
soon follow her to jail. When it happened, and he
was brought before the magistrates for his initial examination. They
say Corey was tight lipped and quick to fight back
while they threw accusations at him. He wasn't shy about
how ridiculous they sounded. He hardly knew what a warlock was,
(36:31):
he said, and now Abigail Hobbs was insisting he was one.
According to Mercy Lewis, he was a dreadful wizard. His
wife's reputation was used against him, as was his past behavior.
They brought in neighbors to paint him as a liar
and a wicked man. And sure, Giles Corey wasn't well
behaved or well loved, but none of that amounted to witchcraft.
(36:53):
But that didn't matter. Logic wasn't the fuel that ran
the engine of the witchcraft trials. No, it was upheld
by religious intolerance. And a fear of being accused by others.
Better to point a finger at someone else than to
have a finger pointed at you. So Giles Corey, the
loud and abusive farmer with a foul mouth and a
(37:14):
murder charge on his record, went to jail. Over the
months that followed, he sat in a jail cell with
his wife Martha. He followed her from Boston to her
own Oyer and Terminator trial in Salem Town. He watched
as she was convicted of witchcraft and given the death sentence.
He listened as he was told of her execution on
(37:36):
August nineteen. He was all enough to take the wind
out of anyone's sale, but not Giles Corey. There was
plenty of strength left in him, and in the coming
days he would show just how ready he was to
do battle. His fight was far from over. He wasn't
(38:04):
an easy defendant. In the first week of September, the
authorities brought Giles Corey to sail In Town to stand
trial in the newest session of the Oyer and Terminer,
but nothing went according to plan. When asked, as every
other defendant had been, asked, how he would like to
be tried, he didn't give the scripted answer of by
God and my country. Instead, he stood silent and unspoken.
(38:28):
It's what the English called standing mute. Frustrated, the judges
sent him back to jail for a while while they
handled the other cases. They needed time to research how
to handle someone who refused to speak in their own defense,
and by the time Corey was brought back on the
final day of the trial, they had two options. The
(38:49):
first was a precedent from a New York trial a
previous year, where a leader of a rebellious faction refused
to speak. The court there simply declared him guilty and
executed him. But English law recommended a different approach, the
use of what they called strong and hard punishment to
compel a reply from the defendant torture. On Sunday, September eight,
(39:13):
the day before his scheduled punishment, Corey was visited in
jail by representatives of the Salem Town Church, who excommunicated
him for his refusal to stand trial. Other members of
the church visited him as well, attempting to change his
mind and convince him to take the less stubborn road.
But that's not the type of man Giles Corey was.
(39:37):
The following day, Monday, September nine, he was led out
of the Salem jail to an open pasture across the street.
One contemporary account describes the day as dry and windy.
The sky might very well have been blue and beautiful
above them, but there was a darkness in the air.
Everyone gathered around to watch would have felt it. Corey
(40:01):
was placed on the ground, face up, and then flat
boards were set across his body, forming a platform. Then
one by one, a series of heavy stones were placed
on the boards. Robert Califf, that Salem merchant who left
us with some of the best private records of the
executions of Salem victims, was on hand that day to
(40:23):
watch as the pile of stones grew larger and larger.
This was torture, plain and simple. The basic idea was
the same as the neck and heels technique used on
the carrier teenagers Richard and Andrew use pain to make
them talk, but it didn't seem to work here. Later
(40:44):
that evening, Judge Samuel Sewell would record three simple words
in his journal. Corey kept silent, which meant that the
weight kept adding up. Stone after stone was placed on
his chest, putting immense pressure on the elderly man's body.
In theory, there was time for him to answer and
(41:05):
the torture, but at some point they would pass the
point of no return. The damage that was being done
to him was irreparable. In the end, Corey did speak,
but it wasn't to confess. With a weight of hundreds
of pounds of stones on his chest, the old farmer
managed to draw enough breath to utter one final insult
(41:29):
more weight. He said, I can't help it smile at
how frustrated that must have made the judges feel. Robert
Califf describes Corey's final moments in graphic detail, tongue being
pressed out of his mouth. He wrote, the sheriff with
his cane forced it in again when he was dying.
(41:53):
It was the first execution by pressing in the history
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and thankfully it would also
be the last. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured.
Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview
of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured,
(42:20):
this was the mess that Phipps discovered when he returned
from Maine. People were having their land and property ripped
out of their hands seemingly left and right, and the
community was beginning to rumble with discontent, and so word
was spreading about it. So Phipps did something to stop
it all. No, not the seizure of property, but the
(42:41):
spreading of the news. He declared an embargo on the
public writing about the trials in their entirety, prohibiting anyone
from publishing news or information about what was happening. Phipps,
the rough spoken gold digger who preferred victory lapse to
actually doing work, declared the press to be illegitimate and
(43:01):
shut it down. But as everyone knows, you can't stop
the signal. Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron
(44:04):
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 dot com. Until next time,
(44:26):
thanks for listening.
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Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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