What really happened in Salem?

In 1692, girls in Salem Village experienced fevers, pains and strange behavior. A doctor deemed the affliction supernatural, and the girls pinned the blame on several people. These accusations led to a witch hunt -- but what was really to blame?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from houstuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast Time
to Blame in Chalk Reporting And I'm Sair Dowdy and
we are continuing on with our block of spooky podcasts
in honor of the Halloween season and what would Halloween be,

(00:24):
of course without witches, one of the classic scary figures
of Halloween. A classic Halloween costumes. Oh yeah, no matter
what age you are, right, A classic Halloween costume. Yeah,
I've done it. You have. Did you do it as
a as a child, like a cute witch, or did
you do like the sexy witch adult costume? I was
a child, but I timed it pretty perfectly for when

(00:46):
a lot of my baby teeth were coming out out,
and so I think I did end up looking half cute,
half scary because I was missing quite a few teeth
at the time. Nice, I like it. So, I mean,
we're we're joking about the costumes and the association with
the season. But this is why for this podcast, we're
taking a look at one of the iconic which related

(01:08):
events from history, the Salem Witch Trials. Now this isn't
the first time that this podcast is touched on the
Salem Witch Trials. We should say that right up front.
Candis and Josh did a show in two thousand and
eight about something called Urget and its connection to the trials,
and we're going to talk about that a little bit
today too. But since this was only a three minute
podcast that they did, and there are new theories emerging

(01:31):
all the time about the trials, including a new one
that made head lunch just this year, we figured they
warranted a closer look. Yeah. Plus it's one that we
still get requests for, and we still get requests for
topics we've covered. We figured they might have second legs.
So of course, especially if you're from the US to
this is probably a topic you do know, you think

(01:51):
you might even know it well. But just ask yourself
before we start, how much do you really know about
the Salem Witch Trials. I mean, we both sorted of
this before we got into it, and and you know
the basic story, but it's amazing how many details sort
of get glossed over. Yeah, thinking about Salem and those
events in sixte two, for a lot of people conjuous

(02:13):
of these images of rebellious young women being burned at
the stake but that image is really wrong in more
ways than one. First Off, it wasn't just women who
were convicted of witchcraft and condemned to die in colonial
Massachusetts that year. And secondly, burning really didn't have anything
to do with it. Now. We'll get more into that later,

(02:35):
but before we give too much away and go into
the theories of why the witch trials happened to begin with,
we need to recount the story for those of you
who aren't totally sure what happened or do you need
some brushing up on it. So it all started in
early six nine two in Salem Village, which is present
day Danvers, Massachusetts. Salem Village was about eight miles from

(02:57):
Salem Town, which was the real of local power and
became what is today Salem, Massachusetts, so too towns Salem
Village Phalem Town got it so in around January or
February of that year, Elizabeth Paris, who is the nine
year old daughter of Salem Village as minister at the time,
a Reverend Samuel Paris, and the reverends eleven year old niece,

(03:20):
Abigail Williams, they both started to act very strangely. For
one thing, they started having these sort of raving fits.
They would scream, they would throw things. They also contorted
themselves into strange positions, and they made weird sounds. Uh.
For example, they would run around on all fours and

(03:40):
bark like a dog. They complained of fever also and pain,
so there was an element of actual sickness to this
as well. It seemed right. So one by one other
girls in town, including the eleven year old and Putnam,
Mary Walcott, and seventeen year old Mercy Lewis, they all
started to suffer from the same symptom. So, of course

(04:01):
you can imagine all these girls in town not feeling well,
acting strangely. The adults in town are concerned, and so
they call in the doctor William Griggs to examine the girls.
He checksamilt, but is not able to figure out what's
wrong with them. None of the remedies he attempts seemed
to help at all, so finally he declares that the

(04:21):
cause of the girl's quote affliction must be something supernatural.
It's certainly beyond his powers as a doctor, so it
must be from beyond, And at this time such a
diagnosis would have been acceptable. I mean, it sounds kind
of like a cop out now. But according to an
article by Jeff Bloomberg and the Smithsonian, many people around

(04:42):
this time did believe in witches and witchcraft, and they
thought that the devil gave which is the power to
harm people in exchange for the witch is loyalty. And
just as evidence of this belief at the time, Bloomberg
points to a witchcraft craze that swept Europe from the
fourteenth through the seventeenth century. Thousands of women were executed

(05:03):
as witches during this time, so saying that these girls
were affected by something or afflicted by something that was supernatural,
was not an unusual thing to say at all, right,
And I mean another example of I guess evidence of
this was that Cotton Mather had recently published a work
called Memorable Providences, which described a woman suspected of witchcraft,

(05:24):
and apparently one of her victims acted kind of the
way the girls in Salem Village were acting. According to
Douglas Linder and an article on the University of Missouri
Kansas City website on the Trials, so the Salem girls
seemed to fit what was at this point of a
pattern for how which victims might act almost exactly so Okay,

(05:47):
if these girls are the victim of witchcraft, say we
buy this. They're acting just like victims of witchcraft are
supposed to act, and you know, we believe that this
is possible. So who were the witches then that had
targeted them? Well, when press, the girls named three women
as the guilty parties. Tituba, the Paris's West Indian slave.

(06:10):
Paris had been a planter and a merchant in Barbados,
so their slave had come along with them when they
moved to Massachusetts. Also accused was a beggar named Sarah
Good and another woman named Sarah Osborne, who had lived
with her second husband before they were married, so she
had kind of a scandalous past. All the witches have
to be Sarah's I don't know. Um, So, just going

(06:33):
into the background of these three ladies, how did they
end up being the ones who were accused? I mean, Dablina,
you just sort of hinted at one of them. But
Tichibo was an obvious choice because of her background, and
it was said that she had told the girl's voodoo stories,
maybe even practice magic. Maybe the girls had participated in
fortune telling activities, and perhaps she even encouraged this influence.

(06:56):
I mean on the surface, especially looking back at it,
it seems like of fun activities for these preteen girls
to do. Fortune telling sounds like pretty standard sleepover stuff.
I don't know, not the video, but student keeps coming
up in these Halloween podcasts this year. It does. It's
it's maybe our theme of the season. I'm not sure so,

(07:19):
but anyway, teach about her connection to these girls and
her background made her seem like a pretty obvious choice
for them to denounce as a witch. And according to
an article by Benjamin C. Ray in the Journal of
American Academy of Religious Studies, there is actually no documentation
that names the girls by name and confirms that they
were involved in such activities. So it makes sense, but

(07:42):
if you actually look for the evidence to back it up,
it's not really there, right Regardless, the three women were
arrested and they were thrown in jail on March the first.
They were interrogated by magistrates in front of an audience,
and they were asked things like are you a witch?
And have you seen Satan? So point blank it was

(08:03):
put up. They were asked in a way that I mean,
obviously the people who were asking them assumed that they
were already guilty. They were also put to a kind
of test. The afflicted girls, as they were known, were
brought before them and started contorting and having their fits
in the presence of these women, and this was seen
as proof that they were in the presence of witches

(08:25):
who were causing their strange behavior. And there was testimony
to people testified against these three women. Villagers would come
forward and offer evidence of things like my cheese went bad,
or my live stock died shortly after one of these
ladies had visited my home, um very everyday life sort

(08:45):
of things, but attributed to the presence of a witch.
The women, of course denied guilt. But then somewhere along
the way, Tittuba did something really unexpected. She confessed. She
said that a tall black man, who to the interrogators
would have obviously been Satan, came to her and wanted

(09:07):
her to sign his book and to do his work,
and she said she did sign that book, and she
admitted to being a witch, and also said that several
other women, including Good and Osborne, were witches as well,
and that they had all flown around on poles together.
So the three women were kept in jail, and this confession,

(09:28):
the fact that she did confess, really did convince a
lot of people who were originally skeptical of the situation,
skeptical about these girls and their fits and all of it.
It seemed pretty legit at this point, well, right, because
why would you confess to something if you hadn't done it,
especially something that was this bat Clearly your life would
be on the line, right, So soon more girls became

(09:51):
afflicted with these strange fits, and many more people were
accused of witchcraft along the way, including a lot of women.
For example, just name a few, Bridget Bishop, who was
a sixty year old tavern owner known for being very
gossipy and promiscuous. Also Susannah Martin, a woman who potentially
stood to inherit a lot from her father. Rebecca Nurse,

(10:14):
Pious seventy one year old woman. According to an article
in Newsweek by Lara Shapiro, she was the matriarch of
a large family. So we can see some similarities to
some of between some of these women here already, right.
But then probably one of the most shocking people to
be accused was Dorcas Good, who was the four or
five year old daughter of Sarah Good, and she was

(10:35):
the first child to be accused and thrown in jail.
According to Shapiro's article, they had to make a special
set of chains for her because the usual shackles were
too large. They're sad, so the afflicted girls. I mean,
you have to wonder how did this four or five
year old girl get accused in the first place. But
the afflicted girls in town said that Dorcas had bitten them,

(10:59):
had pinched them, said that they had seen her doing that,
even though these attacks weren't visible to anyone else. She
apparently was in jail for eight months. Are her mother
get carried off to the gallows? Really maybe one of
the satter parts of an already sad story. So, as
we hinted in the intro, it wasn't just females who

(11:19):
were accused, though several men were arrested at this time
as well. One was tavern owner John Proctor, who becomes
a central figure in Arthur Miller's A Crucible if you've
read that, And he really spoke up at the time,
and like others who spoke out against what was going on,
he paid a price for that. Another man was the
village's former minister George Burrows, who was living in Maine

(11:43):
in sixteen ninety two. He was accused of being the
ringleader of all the witches. Just a note here. This
is an example of how it wasn't just people in
Salem Village who were affected by this witch hunt. According
to an article by Richard Latner in the Journal of
Social History, of the total one fifty one witches whose
residence is known, they came from twenty five different communities

(12:07):
in New England. So not a super local problem, right,
But we are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
We're talking about totals and stuff like that. Of course,
once accusations started flying and more and more people were
locked up, they couldn't just be left to languish in
jail for one thing. Jails were reaching capacity and things
were starting to get out of control. So on May

(12:32):
Governor William Phipps ordered the creation of a new court
to hear the witchcraft cases. It was called the Court
of Oyer and Terminer, which meant to hear and to
decide respectively. William Stowton, a friend of Cotton Mather, was
appointed Chief Justice here and the court was considered kind
of controversial even by contemporary standards, mainly because it allowed

(12:53):
something known as spectral evidence, already found sketchy. Basically, spectral
evidence was testimony you that consisted of things like dreams
and visions. So for example, as an accuser, you could
say you were visited or tormented by a suspect specter
and that would be accepted. We're actually going to have
another podcast coming up that has some spectral evidence in it.

(13:16):
But according to Ray's article, this went against quote thirty
years of judicial restraint in resolving complaints about witchcraft. I
thought that was a really interesting point that these witchcraft
trials of earlier days weren't as intense as that they
had not allowed so much to be included in the trials, right,

(13:37):
which makes you start to wonder even more about the
motivations and things, which will discuss later on. Well, yeah,
and there was another issue about this court, another thing
that the court allowed which was quite lax and quite
out of the ordinary. Usually, accusers were required to post
a monetary bond for prosecution of their complaints, so that

(13:57):
kept people from just filing countless frivolous complaints accusing somebody
of witchcraft just because you know, your cheese went bad
and because you didn't like them. Yeah, something just an
everyday annoyance becomes of legitimate to to file a complaint
if you can just do that willy nilly. But according

(14:18):
to Ray's article, the Court of Oil and Terminer didn't
require this monetary bond, so there was just an endless
stream of accusations, arrests, hearings for petty grievances people had.
The hearings became something of a spectacle to almost like
a show, because they were open to the community. And

(14:40):
at the hearings, like those early interrogations, the so called
afflicted girls were put on display to help prove guilt
or innocence, and the accused seldom had a chance in
these situations, No, they really didn't. The first one that
went to court was Bridget Bishop's case. She was the
tavern owner, right, she didn't admit to practicing witchcraft and

(15:03):
instead she said, quote, I'm as innocent as the child unborn.
She was convicted though, on June tenth two and was
hanged on what later came to be known as Gallows
Hill in Salem. And that's the point to to get into.
In fact, all of the people convicted in the Salem,
which chials were hanged. No one was burned at the state.

(15:24):
That's a misconception. One man who was accused of seventy
one year old Giles Corey, was pressed to death with
heavy stones because he refused to stand trial. He didn't
want to be convicted because he knew that if he was,
his farm would go to the state instead of his relations.
But he also wasn't about to admit to which a witchcraft. Yeah,

(15:46):
because he thought the whole thing was kind of a
particulous Yes. According to Ray's articles, some folks followed Titubus
example of confessing and naming other suspects. And you might
wonder why they would want to name their suspects, why
would they want to bring other people into this, And
it's because they saw that this was a way to
get your trial postponed indefinitely. But of course that just

(16:08):
perpetuated the whole thing because then more people are accused
and brought into this web. This is of course why
Arthur Miller got interested in this in this topic, to
compare it to things that were happening in his era.
But um, many people were hanged that summer. I mean
the difference between the people not being burned at the stake.
There were still a lot of people who were executed,

(16:30):
but by early fall, the atmosphere surrounding this whole witch
hunt started to change, and according to Bloomberg's article, both
cotton mother and his father Increased. Mother, who was by
that point president of Harvard, spoke out against the use
of spectral evidence, and Increase even wrote quote, it were
better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent

(16:53):
person be condemned. Um. Other people also began to point
out the obvious that so many other wise good, respectable
people couldn't all be witches. I mean, come on, how
many witches can there be in one town? Seems like
a good point. Another point made by Boston minister Samuel
Willard was basically, hey, if the devil can make a

(17:17):
specter of a guilty person appear, couldn't the devil also
make the specter of an innocent person appear to someone too?
It seems likely, seems likely may be convinced by these points,
or maybe if you're taking a more cynical point of view.
Because his wife was also a question in regards to witchcraft,
the governor ordered that spectral evidence could no longer be

(17:38):
allowed in court, and October twenty nine he dissolved the
Court of Oyer and termine Are altogether, replacing it with
the Superior Court of Judicature. Without the use of spectral evidence,
only three out of fifty six accused people were convicted,
and those three were eventually pardoned, along with everyone else
who was imprisoned at the time. Ultimately, though it really

(17:59):
was too little, too late for a lot of people.
Nineteen people had been hanged, one press to death, others
had died in jail, and according to Lender's article, even
a couple of dogs had been executed, as which is
accomplices um. Several people involved, ultimately, including a judge and
several jurors, later publicly admitted that they had been in

(18:22):
the wrong. They apologized, and in seventeen o two a
court even declared that the trials were unlawful, and in
seventeen eleven a bill was passed that restored the rights
and the good names of those who had been accute,
so a lot of backtracking pretty shortly after the trials happened.
Right That bill also gave six hundred pounds to the

(18:43):
heirs of the accused, as restitution. It did take tune
and fifty years though, for Massachusetts to formally apologize for
what had happened in sixteen ninety two. That happened in
nineteen fifty seven. Alright, so time to get to the furies.
Apologies have been taken care are of what happened, and
it's interesting, so much time, so many studies on this,

(19:05):
but scholars have yet to agree what really happened in Salem,
what was going on. I mean, of course, the whole
thing started with these girls acting funny, and that's a
pretty good place for for us to start. There is
the ergot theory that Josh and Candas discussed in their
earlier episode Ergot if you haven't listened to that that podcast.
It's a fungus that thrives in warmth damp climates and

(19:30):
can be found in rye and if you eat foods
that have been contaminated by it, it can affect your
central nervous system, causing things like muscle spasms and delusions
and hallucinations. It contains one of the main ingredients in
a drug LSD, and hence the hallucinations, and that might
explain what some of the girls were seeing. Many say

(19:51):
because it had been a cold winter and a humid
spring and summer in six that conditions were perfect for
erget contamination of rye grain. It's also said that there
had been a crop failure that could have forced the
Puritans to eat freshly harvested rye. So Linda Corporeal came
up with this theory published in Science in ninety six,
that urg it was to blame for the girl's behavior,

(20:14):
and some other clues point to this as a possibility. Also,
for example, some animals in the area, I think we're
also affected. In six some cows died and it's suspected
that they might have been affected by the ergot. But
according to an article by Alan Wolfe in Clinical Toxicology,

(20:34):
there are also a few reasons why ergot poisoning is
an unlikely cause. One, there's no verification of the crop failure. Two,
there were none of the constitutional residual effects typical of ergotism,
such as weakness, strictures, dementia. So the the after effects
after the delusions path and then make the best one

(20:58):
here the symptoms of the girls. The afflicted girls could
be turned on and off depending on the audience. You
know they're in front of the three witches. They've been
accused and suddenly they're having their their affliction. That's a
pretty good point, yeah, because if you actually had or
get poisoning, from what I understand, you can't just turn

(21:18):
it on and off like that exactly. Other theories, of course,
for what caused the Salem witch trials, what caused these
girls to act this way, and for all these people
to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft, They range from gender
related reasons, political theories, to local feuds. Raised article is
all about religious tension, saying that it was a struggle

(21:41):
between those who followed Reverend Paris and went to his
church and the people in town who were non church going,
and that's where the struggle came from. There are also
economic theories. One prevailing theory is that if you look
at a map of Salem village, you can divide it
in half, and on one half of the accusers, who

(22:02):
were mostly farmers whose way of life was being threatened
by the other commercial and also more secular side of
town and the merchant class who lived there. This is
the theory I remember learning about in school. It's um
I know I mentioned in our bronte episode. I could
think of that little map with the water supply going
under the cemetery. I can think of this map to

(22:23):
Salem Village versus Salem Town and and how clear it
was where the accusers lived and where the accused right. Well,
the most recent theory has to do with the weather.
US researchers, including Emily Aust who is a University of
Chicago economics professor, shows that the trials may have been
caused by a spell of cold weather that occurred in sixteo.

(22:45):
And so, I mean, why cold weather, you're probably wondering. Apparently,
which hunts have often coincided with cold weather because people
fall on hard times during cold weather, they lose crops,
and they believe that witches can control the weather. So
obviously the witches must be responsible for their partship. I
think that's something that Molly and Kristen of Steph Mom

(23:06):
Never Told You mentioned a while back in an episode
they did on on which is the hard times coming
from external problems like bad weather, uh, coinciding with the
spike in which accusations. I mean, it makes sense if
you look at it from from a big picture, but
of course, if we look at this story, it means

(23:30):
a whole lot more now than what just happened in Salem.
And we talked a little bit about Arthur Miller's play already,
but it's just fallen into our our general vocabulary even
it has. I mean, we've talked about Arthur Miller a
little bit in this podcast, and I know you and
Ben mentioned him and the McCarthyism and your McCarthy ism episode,
because Miller used the Trials as an allegory for McCarthy ism.

(23:53):
But there are other ways in which we've brought this
into popular culture, so to speak, as well. There's an
article that Gretchen Adams wrote an O Age magazine of History,
and she points out how it's become over the years
just a way to it's a metaphor that is used
to just basically malign your opponents in any way. I

(24:14):
mean when interesting example she brought up was the Civil
War and how Confederates would use it as a way
to kind of characterize Northerners and abolitionists, you know, characterizing
it as a witch hunt against them. And we throw
around the term witch hunt all the time to describe things.

(24:35):
It's always clear what somebody means when they when they
use that term. Um, I don't know if if we
should talk about Salem a little bit too. Used to
live in Massachusetts, I'm sure you have have visited the
town today. I did, although I can't really speak to
it that much. I just spent one really kind of
short day there because I didn't realize, as you should

(24:56):
all know, if you ever visit Salem, especially during the
Halloween se and you have to make reservations to see
a lot of the things that you want to see.
And I just sort of hopped on a train with
some friends and went out there in my first year
in Massachusetts and wandered around the town wondering what to
do and where everything was. And it was very unorganized,
and I think we just ended up like having ice

(25:16):
cream or something. I think I have similar advice. I
went there with my now fiance a few years ago,
and um, you know, I was expecting, oh, which stuff
will just be everywhere. I don't need to plan for this,
I'll just go see cool historical site. I didn't realize,
and this was a little naive of me, that, of

(25:38):
course there is a huge which entertainment industry in Salem.
There is, and so if you just go off the map.
You're going to go to the haunted witch House, not
the real witch House. I did fortunately end up at
the at the main surviving historical site in Salem, which
is the one of the judges homes. H You can

(26:01):
walk around, you can see where's his kids left Tina.
They have the crib and everything set up, and think
he came home every night after those trials into this house.
So it is it is cool that there is some
surviving stuff in this um in this city from an
event that happened so long ago. Though of course there's

(26:22):
nothing wrong with going to the commercial haunt of the house.
I think I would have settled for that. Well, I
don't know. We know how you feel now about haunted houses,
that's true. I don't know why I said that. I
would have been freaked out, but it was during the
daytime anyway, so I probably would have been fine. All right,

(26:42):
So let's move on to some listener meal to Lena.
What do we have today, Well, we have another frequently requested,
very frequent. We have a postcard featuring the Dion Quinns.
We have a postcard here from a listener, Greg and
it's from North Bay, Ontario in Canada, and he says, Hi,

(27:04):
on our recent visit back home, I decided to bring
my daughters to the Dion Quent's Museum. There's is an
incredible story. On one hand, it was a story of
great hope during a time of depression. On the other
it was a story of exploitation and abuse of governmental power.
Add that Amelia Earhart crossed their paths and it would
make this a great subject to cover in your podcast.

(27:24):
So thank you Greg for the suggestion. Rest assured we
get that all the time. You people really want to
hear about them. It is a really cute postcard though
it's one of it's like a hand tinted card and
so it's five little girls all in mint green dresses
with their doctor I believe. Yeah. And it's a really
cool way to get a request because it's sort of

(27:45):
a visual reminder all the time, like, hey this topic,
so do an episode on a it's on the list.
So thank you very much Greg for that. We also
got a really cool postcard from Mongolia, which was from
one of our Peace Corps listeners, listener Lauren and Um,
I've just always like giving a shout out to all

(28:05):
the folks we have listening while they're in the Peace Corps.
And I'm not sure how many postcards we've gotten from
Mongolia before too. It gets true, even the postcard looks
pretty isolated. So thank you. Thanks to everybody again who
sent cool postcards over the summer and keeps on sending
them our way too. It's very fun to get camp.

(28:26):
If you would like to send us a note in
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Salem which trials. You can search for that and type
in Salem All on our homepage at www dot how

(28:47):
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
The cousins named the lake basins named the Lake w

(29:09):
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