Jenny Harrell

After contemplating on what to write my second research post on, I finally made the decision to write on a topic that we learned about in class, the Salem Witch Trials. This topic has always interested me. I can’t help but to wonder about what really went on during this horrible time as there was so much missing that the modern person will never truly know. But one thing in particular was very interesting to me, I wanted to know if the girls who started the accusations really were being bewitched or was it something else. Perhaps they did this because they had a sickness or just wanted to get attention.

               After deciding that this is what I wanted to do research on, I went off to see what other writers and researchers had discovered and ended up fining out quite a few things that I never knew. For instance, the extent of the trials lasted from January 1692 through May 1693 and in the end, nineteen men and women were carted to Gallow’s Hill for execution and were hanged. One man who was over eighty years old was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on the charges of witchcraft. His name was Giles Corey. He spent five months in chains in a Salem jail with his wife who was also accused. Although it was nineteen in the end, hundreds of other people faced accusations, dozens of people sat in jail without trials. The results were 185 people were accused at Salem, 141 women and 44 men. Of that number, 52 women and 7 men were convicted; and 14 women and 5 men were executed. After the famous trials ended, two judges had publicly renounced their part in the affair, and one entire jury panel apologized for its verdicts. Ann Putman Jr., was the most persuasive of the accusers. She convinced people that their neighbors were agents of Satan and afterwards, she stood before the congregation in Salem Village and asked pardon of all those she had hurt. So, what really went on?

               The people who were “bewitched” apparently did really believe that they were bewitched by the Devil. People also said that God was testing them to see what they would do. It all started in the winter of 1692 when there was a very bad winter and Betty Parris became uncommonly ill. Her stomach began to hurt in February. She was not sick like a normal child would become sick; she dashed about, lashed out, and dove under furniture. Abigail began to do it too. Parris knew of other children, the Goodwin children, in Boston who acted similar to them three years prior. He had seen the children act this way. The people of Boston gossiped about what was happening to the Goodwin children and an old Irish washerwoman, Mary Glover, was executed for witchcraft. Girls who came to see and play with Betty and Abigail seemed to be sick afterwards too. Everyone in the town began to believe that their sickness was not normal, that it was caused by the Devil. A new doctor in Salem confirmed that it was not natural. Parris was not convinced, but Betty and Abigail both grew worse. A neighbor, Mary Sibley, took it into her own hands to find out what was wrong with Betty. Her daughter was also afflicted. She had Tituba (Parris’ servant) and her husband, Indian John, bake a rye cake with the urine of the victims and feed it to a hound, supposedly a familiar of the witch. This was supposed to prove in some that way that it was witchcraft. After this, Tituba became more Indian in her masters’ eyes and the Puritans associated Native Americans with magic. One of the stories that I heard was that Betty and Abigail looked into a cup of milk and egg to find out who they might marry and they saw a coffin and soon after both fell ill. They coffin symbolized death. Betty and Abigail accused Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn of witchcraft. Betty told her parents that the girls had been approached by a man in black and promised cities of gold and baubles to hold. When they rejected the Devil’s offer, his witches began their assault. Good was a beggar and a social misfit and lived wherever someone would let her stay. Osborn was an old, quarrelsome woman who had not attended church for over a year. Tituba claimed that she was approached by a tall man from Boston, obviously Satan, who sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work. Tituba declared that she was a witch and that her and four other witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on their poles. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for council but the Devil had blocked her path. Dorcas Good, 4 year old daughter of Sarah Good, became the first child to be accused of witchcraft when three of the girls complained that they were bitten by the specter of Dorcas. The 4 year old was arrested, kept in jail for eight months, watched her mother get carried off to the gallows, and would cry her heart out. Suspects who were stuck in jail began to see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance Hobbs was the second witch to confess, admitting to pinching three of the girls at the Devil’s command and flying on a pole to attend a witches’ Sabbath in an open field. Jails began to approach capacity. The judges began to allow the “touching test” where defendants were asked to touch afflicted persons to see if their touch would stop their contortions. They also allowed examinations of the bodies of accused for evidence of “witches’ marks.” These so called marks were moles or things like them where a witch’s familiar might suck. The first accused witch to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop. She was almost 60 years old, the owner of a tavern where patrons could drink cider ale and play shuffleboard, even on the Sabbath. She was critical of her neighbors and reluctant to pay her bills. She was a likely candidate for the accusation. Her trial was June 2, 1692. A field hand testified that he saw Bishop’s image stealing eggs and then saw her transform herself into a cat. Deliverance Hobbs and Mary Warren, who were both confessed witches, testified that Bishop was one of them. She was accused of many things. She was hanged at Gallow’s Hill on June 10, 1692. People who scoffed at accusations risked becoming targets off accusations themselves. Two dogs were executed as suspected accomplices of witches. A conclusion that many scholars draw is that property disputes and congregational feuds played a major role in determining who lived and who died. When the first round of investigations ended, Parris sent his daughter to live in Salem town.

The trials and accusations were ridiculous. Examples of what happened to the accusers at the trials were the Goodwin children had fits, Elizabeth Knapp had fits, other women and men possessed or attacked by “evil spirits” had fits. The girls were bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Invisible and audible agony, the victims twisted their arms and back and contorted their faces. Sometimes they could not speak; other times they could not stop speaking. Those who watched were filled with compassion and were fully convinced that the girls were truly afflicted. Pins that were normally worn to keep dresses and bonnets together became instruments of torture as the girls accused defendants of pricking them. They would take them off and stab themselves with the pins and then accuse the supposed “witch.” One of the charges laid against Bridget Bishop by Reverend John Hale of Beverly was that she encouraged young people to stay up at all hours at her house playing shuffleboard.    

After finding out all of this information, I continued to search for my original question, what was the real reason the girls did all of this. Refugees of Indian raids would come through Salem and tell of massacres, first-hand accounts of fighting, and predictions of savages to come. This brought on rumors of witchcraft. The girls could have been afraid of that. John Cotta, and English doctor, wrote a book in 1616, about symptoms like hers. Trancelike states, numbness, and other physiological abnormalities were taken as symptoms of both hysteria and witchcraft. Some modern medical observers still thing the Salem girls’ fits were caused by hysteria. Hysteria has long been associated with being bewitched. Hysteria among young women can present itself as unexplained eruptions, palsy, rigidity, and awkward body movements. It may also involve perceptual disorders, illusions, and visions, such as the specters of the witches which the girls later saw tormenting them, or watching their torments, with the witches’ “familiars” alongside them. Hysteria does not come and go, however, with the ease with which the girls moved in and out of their symptoms. For doctors and ministers in the seventeenth century, Satan was a convenient and compelling explanation for mental distress of all kinds. Panic, which may be a part of hysteria, complicates certain medical conditions. These girls testified that they were choking. Such symptoms are common in hyperactive bronchial disease (asthma) patients and may be brought about by episodes of intense stress combined with physical exertion, pollution by mold spores, or other airborne agents, or pathogens such as viruses. Also, sudden changes in room temperatures may cause an episode. A more severe diagnosis is the possibility that Betty suffered from epilepsy or a form of seizure. But the seizures did not continue when Betty was removed from her house. Nor is epilepsy contagions, as the Salem girls’ fits apparently were, although others might have simply copied her symptoms. She could have been an abused child. Some of her symptoms fit the admittedly vague confines of the emotional maltreatment syndrome, including accusations against others and an overheated fantasy life. She acted out and by so doing center her emotions on her caretakers. Her intractability and hallucinations fit pattern as well. The girls could have just been making the whole thing up and formed a sort of “gang” and didn’t realize how bad everything would turn out or thought all of it was funny and didn’t care how it turned out.

All of these diagnoses seem to fit the girls’ syndromes. Unfortunately we will never fully know what happened for sure. If only all of this had happened in this era, we would have been able to figure out what was happening. Of course, it could have all been real. Maybe they really were witches.