With Halloween just around the corner, it is a time for ghosts, witches, and werewolves. Costumes and candy are on everyone’s mind, and everyone always enjoys a good scare, especially with so many haunted houses and tours in the area. However, people forget that there was actually a time when magic and witchcraft were taboo subjects, and many people were accused of practicing witchcraft and killed for it.
The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft or the Devil’s magic. Twenty people were actually executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become associated with paranoia and injustice.
Several centuries ago, many practicing Christians had a strong belief that the Devil could give certain people, known as witches, the power to harm others, in return for their loyalty. A “witchcraft craze” rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Hundreds of thousands of supposed witches-mostly women- were executed. Though the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local circumstances explain why they occurred.
In 1689, English rulers William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Known as King William’s War to colonists, it ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia, and Quebec, sending refugees into the country of Essex and, specifically Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The displaced people created a strain on Salem’s resources, aggravating the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. Controversy also brewed over Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village’s first ordained minister in 1689. He was disliked because of his rigid ways and greedy nature. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil.
In January of 1692, the Reverend’s daughter Elizabeth, age nine, and his niece Abigail Williams, age eleven, started having “fits.” They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds, and contorted themselves into strange positions. The local doctor blamed the supernatural. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age eleven, experienced similar episodes. On February 29, the girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Sarah Good, a homeless beggar, and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman.
All three women were brought before the local magistrates and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692. Osborne and Good claimed innocence, but Tituba confessed. She described elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds, and a “black man” who wanted her to sign his book. She told everyone that the Devil came to her and told her to serve him. She admitted to signing the book and said that there were several other witches looking to destroy the Puritans. All three women were put in jail.
With the seed of paranoia planted, a stream of accusations followed for the next few months. Charges against Martha Corey, a loyal member of the Church in Salem Village, greatly concerned the community. If she could be a witch, then anyone could. Magistrates even questioned Sarah Good’s four year-old daughter, using her timid answers as a confession. The questioning got more serious in April when Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth and his assistants attended the hearings. Dozens of people from Salem and other Massachusetts villages were brought in for questioning.
On May 27, 1962, Governor William Phipps ordered the establishment of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer for Suffolk, Essex, and Middlesex counties. The first case brought to the special court was Bridget Bishop, an older woman known for her gossipy habits and promiscuity. She was found guilty and, on June 10, became the first person hanged on what was later called Gallows Hill.
Things did not settle until the governor’s own wife was questioned for witchcraft. He prohibited further arrests, released many accused witches, and dissolved the courts. He eventually pardoned all who were in prison on witchcraft charges by May 1693. But the damage had already been done. 19 were hanged on Gallows Hill, a 71-year-old man was pressed to death with heavy stones, several people died in jail, and nearly 200 people overall had been accused of practicing “the Devil’s magic.”
