October 26, 2021 • 49 mins
Looking back 300 years on, it’s easy to overgeneralize why the Salem Villagers decided to persecute (and execute) their neighbors. But as much as this story has become an American history chestnut, we still don’t understand why Salem lost its mind.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, there's Jerry over here,
uh lurking around like a bit of a ghoul because
it is the Halloween season after all. Uh, and this
(00:23):
is stuff you should that's right spooky which trials Yeah, yeah,
it is. It's really nice to like have stuff like
this that you can be removed from by a few
hundred years, and you know, it just kind of evokes
that Halloween spirit or whatever. But Chuck, I have found,
(00:43):
just in recently researching this, if you put yourself into
the position that people who are like walking to the
gallows and like think about how nuts all this was,
it is exponentially scarier on a much more existential level.
It goes beyond like Halloween spooky too. This is a
genuinely frightening event in the history of America. No kidding,
(01:05):
I mean like it was messed up in every way,
shape or form. So I take it you never read
The Crucible. I did read the Crucible, but I read
it and didn't do it. No, it really didn't, because
I don't I don't know if it was me. Maybe
I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared to accept it on
that level, who knows, But no, it was it was
(01:27):
like imagining myself in the shoes of the people who
were going to die. Um, that got me researching. Yeah
that's dark, no, uh no, no shade though on Arthur Miller,
he was great and his play was great, and it
was very timely for the time. Yeah. I mean, you know,
there's been so many kind of movie adaptations and TV
(01:51):
movie adaptations about this time, and I'm still waiting first
sort of the one great one that's not the Crucible. Well.
I think part of the reason why there hasn't been
that great one yet is because historians are still like
actively competing explaining just what exactly happened in Salem. It's
(02:11):
such an anomaly even among like Puritans, even among people
who believe there was such a thing as witchcraft and
even executed witches. This was a genuine anomaly, at least
as far as American history goes. And I think because
they don't understand it fully, it's difficult to really get
the point across as well. You know, I don't know, man,
(02:31):
I think you can make a great movie like look
at the Witch that that danced around it, so well,
like you just need a movie like that. But based
on this, well, why don't we just say the Witch
then as the is all we need? Well because it
wasn't about the Salem witch Trials, but I mean it
was so analogous to it and took place in at
the same time, you know, I mean, just pretend like
there's a trial scene that they cut it they cut out,
(02:54):
and there actually a lot of other people they drag.
They dragged the father into work basically and and excommunicate them.
So there is almost like a witch trial scene right there. Yeah,
that's true, the which is the Salem witch trial movie
We've always needed, That's right. So I'm glad we we
(03:17):
resolved that. You must feel very satisfied. Now, yeah, completely disagree,
but I'm just moving on. So, um, everybody knows about
the Salem witch Trials, right, but I think because you know,
we learned about it in American history, you hear about
it as Halloween stories all of that kind of stuff.
But like I said, I mean, we really genuinely don't
understand what happened. And that's despite the fact that it
(03:38):
is really well documented because a lot of the stuff
took place in the courts, and they wrote a lot
of stuff down. But we only have like official primary
documents that were written by people who were aware that
these were public documents, rather than say a trove of
private journals and letters. The Puritans didn't do that that much,
(03:58):
and so we don't have like kind of the underneath
the official line explanation for what happened. Well, yeah, and
if if people are confused by what we mean there,
you know, there were other witch trials in other places
in the Young America, there were other witch trials in
centuries previous in other countries, and there were mild panics
(04:21):
and stuff. But Salem like collectively lost their mind for
a short period of time. And that's what people still
don't get there, like why why did that happen only
there to to this scope and this degree? Uh? And
you know, people have looked at various biological reasons and
(04:41):
things like that, but I don't know. I think it
was just sort of one of those weird things that
could only happen like at one place in one time. Yeah, exactly.
And there was actually a guy who wrote a book
in two named John Demos, and he said, not only
can it happen like under these very specific circumstances, here
(05:03):
are the circumstances that could happen in And he his
book wasn't just about Salem. It mentioned Salem, but it
was about like witchcraft trials and panics and accusations in
New England in general. And he basically said that when
a town starts out really small and it's like a
colonial town, they're living like on the razor's edge of existence.
A lot of them don't really know each other. They're dying,
(05:25):
so there's a big population turnover as newcomers come in
and there's just not enough familiarity to say I think
you're a witch to accuse your neighbor or something like that.
But then after they settle in a little while and
maybe there's like some boredom and everybody gets to know
each other and you have grudges, but you're still living
in a really small area, that's when the witchcraft accusations
(05:46):
can really take place. And Salem seems to have kind
of followed that pattern to that these witch witchcraft accusations
like really took hold at a time where the colony
was under tons of stress. People knew each other, had
had deck aids, long rivalries and lane disputes, and they
lived still in a very small little village, and they
(06:06):
were basically crawling all over one another and saw one another,
and you could not get away from people you didn't like. Yeah,
and this is especially true in Salem. That was Salem Village,
in Salem Town, And like you said, they were stacked
on each other and there were a lot of uh like, hey,
your cow can't graze over this imaginary line because that's
(06:28):
my land and you're not even allowed to build a
fence over there, like kind of common land disputes that
have happened throughout history. But in Salem they were just
they were. They were described as a very quarrelsome people.
They were. They fought and argued a lot, kind of
more so than it seems like even other Puritans and
(06:50):
other parts of the country. Yeah, and the Puritans in
general were deeply litigious. They took each other to court
at the drop of a hat, at the drop of
a hat with a belt buckle on it. Um. But
they they they had like the way that they supported
that um, that kind of litigiousness was to say most
of the courts would be like, you need to go
(07:10):
handle this privately, and then this kind of secondary mediation
kind of thing would come in and there being negotiations
and then the dispute would be resolved. But the first
thing that they would do is drag one another into court.
That was how they would get one another's attention. Yeah,
And so this is sort of the backdrop of what's
going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and particularly in
(07:33):
Salem Village in Salem Town, which I think I think
Salem Village today is dan verse and then Salem Town
is Salem that's right, still around and still has spooky connotations. Yeah,
And dan Versus where the Um the State Asylum was located.
That was the setting for one of the greatest horror
films of all time, Session nine. Oh that's right, man,
(07:58):
that's a movie I don't even know if I want
to see again. It's so good. I saw it a
year or two ago and it's still just as good.
It's great. Um. All right, So the Puritans were in control.
I guess the back backdrop of this was they were
full on, you know, human holocausts in Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with their witch crazes and things
(08:19):
got really out of hand over there. But by the
time folks got to be here, they were mainly just
arguing a lot. And there were you know, there was
a small witch panic in Connecticut. Uh, not small if
you were one of the people accused, but it didn't
quite get out of hand, um, certainly in that like
it did in Europe in centuries previous. And I saw
an explanation, Um, I want to give a shout out
(08:39):
to a couple of sites. But when I got a
lot of info from is called the historic present, and um,
they were pointing out that like for the most part, yes,
people generally agreed that there were such things as witches, um,
And yes you would accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, but
it was kind of like it was a way of
like getting your neighbor's attention, like a serious about this
(09:00):
and publicly accusing you being a witch. Let's talk about
your cow grazing on on my land, you know. Um.
And that was another thing that made Salem so anomalous.
Is it just kept going and going through these steps
of like the court in trial and then finally executions
and and it. It just got out of hand basically, right.
(09:21):
So the Puritans are in control in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
They've got an iron fist on on ruling. They don't
like basically anybody who is not a Puritan. It seems
like most of the Puritans didn't even like each other.
But they certainly didn't like Quakers, they didn't like Catholics,
and they did all they could to really establish themselves
(09:43):
as the ones in charge and did so well. Yeah,
it depends on who you're talking about. Though. There were
some Puritans who were deeply conservative religious leaders like Increased
mather Um, who wanted to just completely secure Puritan control.
But there was also like a real um read through
the Puritan leadership that was willing to like give like
(10:04):
voting rights and and um the ability to be elected
into office to non Puritans who lived in in town um.
And they had kind of a proto democracy in a
lot of ways. So it's like the Puritans in general, Yes,
we're deeply intolerant of Quakers and Catholics, and they actually
tortured Quakers um who were unrepentant UM, but they also
(10:26):
did have they weren't just like this the band of
like theocratic thugs that that they're often painted as. There's
just more nuance to it than that. But yes, there
were plenty who were like, no, we just need total
puritanical control over over this whole colony. Yeah, and you know,
as we'll see once the witch trials were conducted. You know,
(10:48):
I said that Salem collectively lost their mind sort of
true in a way, and that a lot of people
in power and the decision makers did. But there were
still people even while it was going on. It wasn't
like hundred percent of the town was behind this. There
are a lot of people and I guess they were
probably some of those reasonable people you know that you
were talking about that were like, you know what we're doing?
(11:08):
Is it right? I don't think they really spoke up
to vocally, but they were like, what is going on here?
This is getting out of handing kind of crazy. Yeah,
I mean, it was such a dangerous situation where it
was one of those kind of fascist situations where people
who did dare to speak out against this and say
this is crazy, this is wrong, or even to like
(11:29):
testify on behalf of somebody who was accused, you were
putting your own life at risk. Like there's a possibility
you would be accused of witchcraft and then tried and
then executed. It was that kind of a situation, even
with people on the outside being knowing that this is wrong,
it was just such a inevitable machine that it was
(11:49):
like people just stayed out of its way for a
little while. All Right, I think that is a healthy preamble. Okay,
the foundation is laid. I think we should take a break, okay,
and come back talk about those mother boys right after this.
I concur stuff you should stuff you shouldn't, you should know. Okay, Chuck,
(12:37):
so you want to talk some mothers. That's the Beaver.
He's still around, I believe by the way, he still
looks like he's one of those guys that stayed the same. Huh. Yeah.
I think it doesn't help that he dresses the same
still too, But you can recognize him even in a
tux I'm guessing. So you can't talk about out the
(13:00):
Salem witch trials without talking about the Mathers. I'm talking
about the elder mother whose name was Increase of these
Puritan names, and uh, the younger mother, Cotton Mather. He
was the son son of a mother, so Increased Mother.
He was, like you said, he was sort of the
staunch Puritan who was in a position of power. He
(13:22):
was working to establish a charter that would, you know,
basically give the Puritans all the power. He was also
a believer, and you know, because I mentioned that the
European witch trials like this is sort of the background
that allowed people like Increased Mother and Cotton Mother to
really legitimately believe that demons were real and Satan could
(13:43):
overtake and possess someone, and that there were real witches.
I mean, that was just generally the puritanical worldview, but
some people were much more preoccupied with it than others.
And the Mathers were both deeply preoccupied with this kind
of thing, and Increase other gets a lot of the
blame for this, and and rightfully so, but there's a
(14:04):
lot of lesser known people who actually were way more
villainous during this and really took advantage of this crazy situation.
And and really I just didn't didn't care about the
lives of innocent people. But he was. He was not good,
and that he helped fan the flames of this initially
big time. That's right, Um, so should we I mean
(14:25):
we'll we'll get a little bit more into the matters
as we go. Uh. Cotton was certainly one of the
villains of the trials, and they were both writing books
about supernatural things. So this was all sort of the
foundation that was laid when the first two people, uh
were accused in what January of Yeah, So to to start,
(14:48):
there were two girls ages nine eleven. There was Betty Paris,
Elizabeth Paris was her name, and Abigail Williams. And they
basically started barking and convulsing and just behaving really bizarrely
and strangely and would not stop. And so Samuel Paris,
(15:09):
who was the head of the Salem Village church it
was actually pretty divisive figure apparently, UM, he brought in
a doctor and the doctor proclaimed this to be bewitchment,
that these girls were bewitched. And that's ultimately what kicked
the whole thing off. And a lot of people have
tried to figure out like what initially started that because
(15:30):
just about everybody who has a theory about this um
immediately converts to mass hysteria. But you still have that
first that first case of Abigail Williams and or Elizabeth
Paris to to explain, and apparently it was like really
prolonged stuff. They were vomiting, they were doing stuff beyond
(15:52):
just like behaving weirdly. They were they seemed to be
physically afflicted. And that's another thing too that I think
your theories that say like it was just a hoax
that these girls perpetrated, that doesn't understand like just how
long these girls carried out this stuff, And I think
it kind of ignores the fact that there are also
like the Puritans weren't dumb people. They were deeply religious,
(16:15):
they believed in witches and Satan having you know, a
hand on things here on earth. But they also were
very smart, very practical, and they would have seen right
through a couple of girls just planning a hoax or
carrying out a hoax. So there has to be something
there at the beginning that no one has ever fully
explained that kicked this whole thing off. Yeah, I mean
(16:36):
it's hard not to become a little obsessed with some
sort of biological route I know or got poisoning has
been mentioned. I saw encephalitis. Oh, I saw that one too.
That was interesting. Yeah, and just some other like possible
reasons of like maybe something physically was wrong with them,
while they also happened to be goofing around with folk
magic and stuff like that. Not not a good combination
(17:00):
to like get sick while you're being a kid and
playing around was essentially what they were doing. Yeah, but
I mean, if you if you think about the fact
that the the adults were like, okay, this is this
is significant enough that we're going to start looking around
for the witches, and the girl started accusing people too, Um,
it does seem like there was something going on with
(17:21):
at least one of them. And then yes, it started
to spread, probably through mass hysteria to other girls in
the village. It kind of makes when I when I
read the sort of timeline account, I feel like if
that original doctor hadn't said the word, which it could
have gone in a completely different direction. Yeah, he should
have just been like, it's um anti N M D
(17:42):
A R and cephalitis and dummies an autoimmune disease that
will only begin to grasp in thees and everyone would
say you're a witch, right, he just see some crazy words, doc,
So uh, the doctor has has breathed the word, which um,
the girls are like, um, They're like, hey, what's going
(18:02):
on with you, and they said, uh, you know, it's Tituba.
It is my father's slave to Tuba, and it's her
fault and she's a witch. And so they, like you said,
they started accusing, and they started with her. They started
with her, and then they very quickly moved on to
Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. And by doing that, by
accusing those two women are actually uh with Titchuba as well,
(18:27):
all three of them. Is it. I've always heard Tichuba,
but I've heard I think I've heard Tituba before too,
So I don't know that sounds Tchuba sounds more right, Okay.
So so by accusing those three women, they were following
um Abigail and Elizabeth were following like a well established
(18:48):
tradition of focusing on older women on the margins of
society as witches. Right, Titchuba was easy to accuse me
because she was a foreigner. She was brought to um
the colony as a slave, and she worked as a
slave in the Paris's house. Um, so who knows what
(19:10):
she was into before you know, she came over to Massachusetts,
I guess was the thinking of the Puritans. But then
also Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. They were like older
women who were poor, um, lived on the fringes of society,
and like that is who you accused of being a witch. Typically.
So at first, this which panic kind of followed the
standard which accusations that had been um, you know, spread
(19:33):
around New England before. But but what made it different
is that it just started to pick up steam more
and more because more and more girls and people around
them the colony or around the village I'm sorry, started
to suffer bewitchment and started accusing one another of of
bewitching them. Yeah, if you were a person, for sure,
(19:56):
a woman, but um, a man or a woman who
like you said, was about middle aged, and you know
you were over there kind of doing your own thing
a little bit and maybe just kept to yourself. Maybe
you didn't like hanging out in the village as much
as the rest of the villagers did. Uh, you marched
to the beat of your own drum. You had a
target on your back basically right. Yeah. And also apparently
(20:20):
one of the things that they were well known for,
these people who were accused of which is would be
like like they needed things from their neighbors, so they
would extract them by threatening to curse them, so they
would actually use like witchy threats. Um. They were probably
also into folk magic, so there was like, it wasn't
just completely baseless other than the fact that like which
(20:42):
is in that kind of puritanical conception don't exist. But
it wasn't just totally out of the blue like these
they they still like if you a modern person saw
the person that they were originally that they traditionally accused
of being, which is you'd be like, oh my gosh,
a real life which there's one right there, it would
fit the bill. Are you You know what I'm saying, Yeah,
(21:02):
for sure. So you know, these accusations start flying around,
they start mounting, the jails start filling up. The conditions
in the jail were not good. It got so crazy
early on. And this is sort of the first part,
This before the like trials and hangings and everything. This
is when you were just like jailed and shackled and
then charged for your shackles I guess like a rental fee. Uh.
(21:25):
But they arrested a four year old named Dorothy good
Um and she was eventually released. But a four year old, like,
it's crazy me as a father having gone through life
with a four year old that you could accuse a
four year old of being anything other than a four
year old, right exactly, But she wasn't. She was held
(21:46):
for months. I think she was arrested in March and
released in May, and like this wasn't like a pleasant December.
Just oh my goodness. Okay, so she was there for
almost a year, just under a year. For the intense
and purposes of exagger rating just how bad this was,
she was in there for basically a year, Okay, Yeah,
Sarah Ozgar died in jail. She died in jail. Yeah,
(22:07):
this is the thing. Like these jails were like dirt floors.
You were chained, like you're saying, like it was just
it was a place where like a life could just
be lost way too easily. So to keep a four
year old in there for almost years just horrible. There
was a woman who gave birth in jail and they
just left her infant daughter in there with her, so
(22:28):
the infants didn't survive. She died in jail. Um just
from being born in jail. Somebody who was accused of
being witches And this was before the trials had even started. Chuck,
Like this was just the initial phase of the panic,
which was accusation, accusation, accusation, and then suddenly the jails
were overflowing with more than a hundred people, um who
(22:49):
were accused of being witches, and the court was totally
backed up. When increased, Mather and the new governor that
he was coming back with, William Phipps, Uh he'd gotten appointed,
Um showed back up in in Salem and we're like,
what is going on here? And they had a choice, Chuck.
(23:09):
They could have been like, have you all lost your mind?
What are you doing? Stop this right now, let all
these people out. They didn't go that route. They went
the exact opposite route. They at that moment when they
decided which way to go, they chose incorrectly. Basically yeah. Um.
And it was also a pretty bad time. It was
kind of an uh, what's the word conflagration? Man, you
(23:32):
nailed it, And it sounded so confident confident. Uh. It
was a conflagration of a bunch of things happening politically
and legally. It was a very bad time because by
the time the trials rolled around, they eventually got this
new charter, but previous to that, they were uh, the
(23:53):
charter of the colony was temporarily suspended, and a new
charter did arrive in May of uh in the hands
of the Elder Mather, but it was brand new and
the court didn't create laws. They didn't have time to
create any new laws. That is so they basically said,
all right, we need to we got all these people
in jail. We need to quickly establish a special court
(24:15):
for this, and we'll call it the Court of Oyer
and Terminer to hear and determine, and we're going to
get this these people out of jail or kill them.
So they're no longer in jail, but they're getting out
one way or another. Right So there there ed helps
us out with us. We should say we failed to
mention so far. But he he points out that Um
(24:37):
William Phipps, the new governor, possibly went along with this
idea of creating a new court to get rid of
this backlog of witchcraft accusations, to get these people out
of jail, to get this over and done with. And
that may have happened, actually, but he Um was very
much focused on dealing with the the constant threat that
(24:58):
the colonists lived under being attacked by Native Americans. King
Philip's war, King Philip being the guy that punks Tawny
phil was named after that I got way way wrong
in our Groundhog episode. Um that had just ended. There
was another war that included the French and the Native
Americans to the north, sweeping down all the way into
(25:18):
Massachusetts and staging rads. So they've lived under the constant
threat of death, which definitely didn't help their mindset during
the Witchcraft panic. But that's what Phipps was was worried about.
That's what he was working on. So he threw the
the um the job of seeing seeing this this court
through to his lieutenant governor, a guy named um what
(25:40):
was his name, William What william Ston Williams Stoughton I mentioned,
like some of the lesser known people who were actually villains,
this guy was a bad, bad man and he made
a decision that changed the course of everything. I think
Phipps's initial idea that this would have just moved the
backlogs out and freed everybody from jail would have come
(26:01):
true had it not been for Stoughton and Stowton's radical
decision to include what's called spectral evidence that changed everything,
and that that is what led to people being executed. Yeah,
so before we get into spectral evidence, I just want
to point out that William Stoughton was such a bad
guy they named a town after him, and they named
(26:23):
a college dorm at Harvard after him. I believe, well
Increase Mather was the Harvard president for a while too,
so Stoton went to Harvard, but I think it's still
one of the dorms is still Stowton. And uh, I
think Stoton mass is most well known now for having
an idea. Uh So yeah, spectral evidence. Let's talk about
(26:47):
this because this changed everything. Um, there were different kinds
of evidence that would be accepted in these courts. Uh.
One was the spectral, which we'll talk about. One was confession,
um two eyewitness testimonies. Uh. And then there were we
won't get really into all the tests, but there are
all kinds of different tests, including the you know, does
(27:10):
she float? Can she swim? Uh? From Monty Python, the
Holy Grail. I think they were still doing some of that.
That was the witch's teat, which was it's basically, if
they found a mole on a woman, they would call
it a witch's teat, which was uh supposedly a third
nipple used to feed her animal familiar. That's what my
dad always told me my moles were when I was
(27:32):
growing witches. He was dead serious too. So there were
certain tests and all, but spectral evidence was the big
one because this was basically you could kind of make
up anything, and and you could be in court and say,
as an accuser and say, this person is being uh
has been uh possessed or or their possessor is in
(27:55):
the courtroom right now, your honor, the this ghost, this
specter is sitting on your lap right now. You just
can't see it, and it's and it would freak people out.
There was nothing you could really say to defend it
because it was made up to begin with, uh and
supposedly Cotton Mather said it should be used more sparingly,
(28:17):
like at the end of the day he was like,
it's it's enough to indict, but not to convict. Was
that cotton or increase that was cotton supposedly. And then
in the end I think they verified that nobody was
convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence. Okay, well,
then my my hypothesis is kind of out the window.
(28:38):
That none of these people would have been executed without it.
Well it was you know, if if you need two
out of three things and that's one of them, then
you're right. You know. One of the other things that
one of the more practical problems that spectral evidence presented
for somebody accused of witchcraft was that it destroyed any
alibi you had, Like your your neighbor could be like, well, no,
(29:00):
couldn't have been bewitching this person. He was out working
with me in the fields all day. They could say no, no,
it was a spirit. He sent his spirit to bewitch
this poor person who's accusing him, and then boop, there
goes your alibi. So there you like it was like
you said, you just can't defend yourself against that kind
of thing. Um. And that was like the level of
stuff that they were. That they were, that was how
(29:22):
they were accusing people. There was one guy I read about,
Philip English who who will come up again later. Um,
he was accused of witchcraft by somebody who said that, uh,
they got a nosebleed while they were discussing a lawsuit
they had against Philip English with somebody else, so that
it must be that Philip English had bewitched that Like
this was the kind of accusations that they were making
(29:44):
against one another, and they were holding up in court.
That is something that you cannot look past. It's so
easy to look back three years and be like, yeah,
this whole collective group lost their mind. No, there were
plenty of people who did lose their mind, but the
people who were supposed to be in charge, the people
who were in a position to put a stop to this,
actually allowed it, in some cases fan the flames of
(30:07):
it even further. That was the true breakdown at the
Salem Witchcraft trials. The grown ups did not step in
in in halt it before it got out of hand. Yeah.
Another thing that someone might do if you had a
pet that you really liked, not good, Um, they could
say that, well, no, no, no, they have an animal familiar. Uh.
It could be anything like take Black Philip from the
(30:30):
Witch I mean that's taken kind of straight from this
time period. But if you had a pet that you
enjoyed hanging out with, they could accuse you of having
a familiar. If they found, uh a folk magic or
folk tale book in your library, Um, that could be evidence.
And that was pretty common too. I mean, like I
(30:51):
didn't have you know, local hospitals to go to to
to heal themselves or anything that any like you said
with the nosebleed or whatever, anything bad happened to you,
if your crop failed or if one of your cows died,
you could say it was my neighbor and there which
and they put a hex on me. So they established, okay,
we can use spectral evidence, and we're going to use
(31:12):
spectral evidence. And this court of Oyer and Terminer, um, god,
it was established. I think they held their first trial
on June two, and they were profoundly efficient at at
convicting and killing people. Um Bridget Bishop was the first
person hanged, and she was hanged on June tenth, just
(31:34):
over a week after the first trials began. Um, and
that kicked off like this new phase where this this
idea to like clear the the jails of the accused
was actually now diverting them to the gallows. And for
being witches, we can't forget that either, like for being
which is even though which is in this conception don't exist. Yeah,
(31:58):
and I think it's at efficiency in the speed that
all this happened was a big part of it, because
it was the train was moving so fast that once people,
the more level headed people of the town realized what
was going on, like, wait a minute, we're actually hanging
people for this um, certain people started to come forward
and say no, no, no, I'm recanting my confession, or
(32:21):
let me stand up for someone's good character. But it
happened so quickly that you know, before you know it,
there's you know, a couple of dozen people have died. Yeah,
and like people got wrapped up in it too, Like
there's the case of Giles Corey. I believe man, he
testified against his wife and then later he recanted it.
(32:43):
And after he recanted at the purgeon's apparently UM viewed
perjury so suspiciously that that was enough to get him
accused of which craft and he ended up paying for
his life with which we'll talk about a little more later.
But like, he testified against his wife, and to this
day was historians are like, we have no idea why
jil Corey testified against his wife. He didn't seem to
have a grudge, they seemed to have a fine marriage whatever,
(33:05):
Like it just doesn't make sense. The only way that
you can explain that, at least from my perspective, is
that it was, like you said, just this thing that
people got whipped up in, and it just happened so
fast that it was just easy to lose yourself into
that degree. I mean, the whole thing happened over the
course of what four to six months. Yeah, I think
(33:26):
the first things were in January, but yeah, the first
trials were June two, and they ultimately I think stopped
the following like winter. So yeah, I mean it was
not a very long prolonged thing, but it was just
like this weird orgy of of mind loss and death.
You know. Oh man, it sounds like some kind of
(33:47):
album after Uh. The other weird thing about this was that, uh,
the social order was completely knocked out of whack. Um
the Puritans, if there's one thing they didn't like, it
was hearing from children about anything. Kids were just they
(34:07):
were meant to work and to shut up basically and
do what they were told and kind of like full stop.
And you had a situation here where children, young girls
were accusing these middle aged men and women of of
witchery and and it works like people listened to them
and people were hanged because these kids were speaking up
(34:29):
at a time when kids were barely allowed to even
you know, have any agency or speak yeah, which is
another thing that perplexes his storians because they're like, something happened,
like there was something that was that this which panic fulfilled.
Maybe it was to let off steam from being constantly
afraid of being murdered by a Native American attack. Maybe
(34:52):
it was um living too close proximity, too far away
from where you called home, like who knows, but there
was something about it was worth turning the social order
on its head. And that was That was just one example.
There are other examples of how the social order just
totally broke down. And that wasn't how who some of
the people who were accused and executed were, because it
(35:14):
wasn't just the marginal women who were your prototypical witches
a living you know, on the outskirts of society who
were accused. That was just at first, it started to
become extended to really surprising people like Rebecca Nurse was
maybe one of the most upstanding Puritan women that town,
(35:36):
the colony had to offer, and she was accused, tried,
and executed as a witch. And that I think really
kind of opened a lot of people's eyes in two ways.
One I was like, what is going on here? This
could not be the case. And then to other people
is like, if Rebecca Nurse could be a witch, than
anybody could be a witch. And I think that was
(35:57):
kind of the thread that the witch trial followed. But
it also is a like a really good explainer about
how just completely the society broke down for these handful
of months that anybody was was at risk of being
murdered by their fellow townspeople for being a witch, no
matter what kind of background you had. I'm picturing a
(36:20):
I'm picturing a Puritan, like the only Puritan that actually
went on vacation that summer. And they come back, you know,
they leave in early June, they come back in in
late September, and they're like, so, what's been going on everybody? Right,
And then they get the sight of what's going on,
they dropped their mickey mouse ears to the ground. Oh boy.
(36:41):
All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come
back and talk about sort of the finality of this,
how it ended, and a little bit more about Giles
Corey's crazy, crazy story. Right after this stuff you should
(37:08):
stuff you shouldn't, you should know, all right, So in
the end, um I don't think that the final final number.
(37:28):
I've seen twenty two. I've seen UM nineteen people were hanged.
Giles Corey, who were going to talk about in a minute,
was pressed to death via you know, torture. UM. Five
people died in prison. I think the numbers sort of
depend on what you count is like like a fallout
death and not a direct death like the one lady
(37:50):
who couldn't repay like she was eis or. I think
she just couldn't pay her debt to get out of jail,
so she died in jail. That's such a sad story. Yeah,
Lydia Dustin. She is she outlived the um the witch
trials like they had ended a few months before, uh,
and she had actually been personally exonerated, and yet she
couldn't pay her um shackle fees, so they just kept
(38:15):
her in jail and she ended up dying there in
March of six even though she yeah, for sure, yeah,
because she otherwise would not have been killed or died
had it not been being placed in jail after being
accused of a witch for sure. But they did this
in mass hangings. It wasn't just like one at a time.
There was a hanging on July nineteen August nineteenth. In September,
(38:38):
after they died, they were stripped and put in a
big mass grave. Um. Supposedly, there are stories that families
would come and get them out of the mass grave
at night, buried them in unknown probably on parts of
their land. And they tried for many years to find
out exactly where these hangings took place, and they ended
up at a place called Roctor's Ledge, And I don't
(39:03):
I mean, there's a memorial there and people go there
and basically they treat that as though that is definitely
the place, But I don't think they have like hard
heart evidence other than just trying to like take eyewitness
accounts in place where they were right. Yeah, supposedly there
was a study in two thousand and sixteen that where
they took those eyewitness accounts, took into account what the
(39:26):
people said they could or couldn't see in like the
background or whatever, and then plotted them and then figured
out that the most of these points were standing in
around the same place around um that ledge where they
think that yes, this happened, yeah, but they never found
like and then underneath the ground they dug and they
found the gallows bowl. Right. No, they never found any
(39:47):
physical evidence. So whatever. So the story of Giles Corey,
if you know The Crucible you know it. Well, if
you've seen the movie, you know it. Um. He is
the man that was pressed to death. Uh, he was crushed. Basically,
pressing is when they would lay you down, they would
put boards on top of you and then just start
(40:08):
adding weight over the course of time, more and more weight,
until you eventually die. UM. I had heard this story
before because supposedly Giles Corey said more weight because he
refused to He was standing mute, and he refused to
to say whether he was guilty or innocent. The one
thing I didn't know is that Giles Corey was eighty
(40:29):
one years old. Yeah, he was an old guy. He
was like the old guy from that um Metallica video.
That's what I always imagined Giles Corey do. It looked like. Man,
what a story. Though. One thing standing mute would do
would um allow your estate to be passed onto your
heirs rather than being convicted where that wouldn't happen. But
(40:50):
I saw that this wasn't the reasoning behind him standing mute,
because most of his stuff had already been taken and
that he even wrote down that he was standing mute
to protests the sham proceedings. Yeah. So yeah, and it
sounds like just the way he's been um kind of
lionized by history, that that was his motivation for sure.
(41:10):
But you said something about how most of his stuff
have been taken. There's another villain in all this. Beyond
Stoughton and the Mathers, Um, there was a guy named
George Corwin, and he was the sheriff of Essex County,
which is where um, this which panics took place. Um.
And he was basically taking advantage of the fact that
(41:32):
a lot of people were suddenly way more vulnerable than
they had been the year before, a few months before.
And so when he would arrest them and take them,
he would also take possession of their property officially, their stuff,
their land, all that, and he and his deputies would
divvy it up. So he had every incentive to arrest
as many people as possible and throw him in jail.
(41:53):
And he did that, and he took a lot of
people's land. Uh. And I guess he took Giles Corey's
land as well. And Giles Corey curse the town and
the sheriff as he died, and supposedly, UM George core
Actually shouldn't say supposedly. George Corwin definitely did die less
than three years later at age thirty of a heart attack.
And there's a local legend that UM every Essex Essex
(42:14):
County sheriff from Corwin onward. Um either died or resigned
while in office because of a heart condition. I didn't
have time to go look through the records of Essex
County Sheriff's but I thought that was a pretty interesting
local legend. But this dude was in his twenties when
he was doing this. Yeah, he was in his in
his middle late twenties, and he was one of the
(42:35):
worst of the worst. And so there's one more story
about when he died. That guy Philip English that I
mentioned before, UM, who was accused because of the guy
getting the nosebleeding. He was a very very wealthy merchant
in Salem Town and Corwin took his stuff, like his land,
a lot of his ships. Um just took a lot
(42:57):
of his stuff while Um English was on the run
evading capture. And when English came back after the Salem
which trials were over, and found what Corwin had done.
He Um, he tried to get his money back from Corny,
tried to get his money, his land and ships, all
that stuff, and Corwin wouldn't give it to him. Well,
Corwin dies of a heart attack, and um, Philip English
(43:18):
placed a lean basically on this guy's body and said,
you're not burying him until I get paid back. The
family was like, we're not listening to you. We're gonna
go bury him. So Philip English hired a bunch of
guys and they went out and stopped the funeral procession,
took possession of the body and held a hostage until
Corwin's family paid Philip English back for what Corwin had
(43:40):
taken from, had confiscated from, and then Philip English gave
them the body to bury. Wow nuts, not a nice guy,
who Philip English? No, No, okay, yeah, I totally I
was gonna say I totally sighed with Philip English on
that one. Um. All right, So Corey dies and the
sort of the the long and short of his death
(44:02):
was that it was sort of a final straw. And
this is when Phipps comes back in and says, you
know what, things are getting really out of hand. Uh, increase.
Mather says, Yeah, this spectral evidence thing is gotten way
out of hand and it's probably not real. And people
started to um sort of stand up more and more,
(44:23):
and it was clear that Governor Phips had to kind
of halt things. Um. He said he did it under
the context of, you know, this is a contravention of
English law. We can't do this. I'm dissolving the court
of Oyer and Terminer and I'm going to create a
new court where we can't use spectral evidence. And what
do you know. In January and February there were dozens
(44:46):
of people released. Um. Note grand juries weren't indicting people. Uh,
they were found not guilty. Uh. He pardoned some and
by the end of May that next year, the jails
had no more um quote unquote, which is right, because
they found when you take away the spectral evidence, what
you have, for the most part is personal grudges, land disputes,
(45:08):
land grabs. People just trying to to um take advantage
of this situation to get back at somebody they don't
like and haven't liked for a really long time. And
that was a weird, weird, scary time. It was very scary,
and I can't imagine like living during that time. Actually
it's not true. I can't imagine it, um, But it
was just basically another example of like a time when
(45:31):
a group of people became fascist together and people died
as a result. Yeah, and that you know, the term
witch hunt is still used, um that the Crucible was
written because of McCarthy ism. It's been thrown around a
lot in recent years, maybe not as accurately, but it's
still a term for that reason. Um. I've got one
(45:53):
little nice button to put on the end of this, chuck.
There was at least one guy who was a judge
in the Court of vy or in term, named Samuel Sewell,
and within a year or two after the witch trials,
he was standing in front of the Boston Congregation of
Puritans having a petition read um by the local reverend there,
(46:15):
asking for their forgiveness and admitting that this was a huge,
huge mistake and he regretted participating in it, and would
they forgive him? Um, And I believe they did. So
the whole thing ended. Well, you got anything else else, man,
If you want to go down a rabbit hole start
researching the Salem witchcraft trials, you could do a lot
(46:37):
worse than going to the Historic Present, the New England
Historical Society and the History of Massachusetts dot org or
just hit at Grabanowski up, he'll tell you all about it.
Uh yeah, you could do that too. Walk around, they're
they're they're trying to take your money in all kinds
of ways. Yeah, Essex County, mass is one of the
most beautiful places on earth. If you asked me, sure, Um, okay, Well,
(47:01):
since I said that, it's time for a listener mail,
I'm gonna call this cool kid. I like to read
the emails from the cool kids. Hey, guys, my dad
introduced me to your show when I was barely a teenager,
and I've been listening ever since. In that time, my
family has gone through a lot of changes, and my
dad and I haven't always been on the best terms.
I wanted to reach out and let you know that
(47:23):
stuff you should know is the only thing that we
have consistently been able to talk about when we reconnect
after being a part. We can go months without seeing
each other and I can just ask if you listen
to your latest episode to have something to talk about.
It helped keeps things lighthearted and it's something we feel
like it's just for the two of us. I hope
we can see you live in Austin soon. Furthermore, this
(47:44):
is mostly for Chuck. You were so much like my dad,
it's actually freaky. Sometimes we always make jokes that you
two would be best friends if you met in real life.
Your voices even sound a little bit the same. I'll
be honest. Sometimes it's comforting to listen to y'all when
I miss my dad. Uh, I've been meaning to send
this email for a while. Just tell you guys how
much you mean to me and my family. Thanks for
(48:04):
being there for us. Also, I don't know if my
dad listens to the end of the episodes or just
the factual content. We'll find out, but if he's listening
this far in, tell him I said, hi, warm regards
c J. Curbo and Uh says, we come to Austin,
they treat us to dinner at their favorite fried catfish
seafood restaurant. Nice, very nice. Um, that was very nice,
(48:26):
c J. What a great email, and thank you very
much for the invite. We probably will be in Austin
again sometime. It was and c J, you should know
that we cut it out, but I accidentally said fried
cat food. It was hilarious and Josh got a good
laugh out of it. Yeah, so thanks for that. Yeah,
you're welcome. If you want to be like c J
and write a very nice email we want to hear it,
you can send it to us that Stuff podcast at
(48:48):
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, there's Jerry over here,
uh lurking around like a bit of a ghoul because
it is the Halloween season after all. Uh, and this
(00:23):
is stuff you should that's right spooky which trials Yeah, yeah,
it is. It's really nice to like have stuff like
this that you can be removed from by a few
hundred years, and you know, it just kind of evokes
that Halloween spirit or whatever. But Chuck, I have found,
(00:43):
just in recently researching this, if you put yourself into
the position that people who are like walking to the
gallows and like think about how nuts all this was,
it is exponentially scarier on a much more existential level.
It goes beyond like Halloween spooky too. This is a
genuinely frightening event in the history of America. No kidding,
(01:05):
I mean like it was messed up in every way,
shape or form. So I take it you never read
The Crucible. I did read the Crucible, but I read
it and didn't do it. No, it really didn't, because
I don't I don't know if it was me. Maybe
I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared to accept it on
that level, who knows, But no, it was it was
(01:27):
like imagining myself in the shoes of the people who
were going to die. Um, that got me researching. Yeah
that's dark, no, uh no, no shade though on Arthur Miller,
he was great and his play was great, and it
was very timely for the time. Yeah. I mean, you know,
there's been so many kind of movie adaptations and TV
(01:51):
movie adaptations about this time, and I'm still waiting first
sort of the one great one that's not the Crucible. Well.
I think part of the reason why there hasn't been
that great one yet is because historians are still like
actively competing explaining just what exactly happened in Salem. It's
(02:11):
such an anomaly even among like Puritans, even among people
who believe there was such a thing as witchcraft and
even executed witches. This was a genuine anomaly, at least
as far as American history goes. And I think because
they don't understand it fully, it's difficult to really get
the point across as well. You know, I don't know, man,
(02:31):
I think you can make a great movie like look
at the Witch that that danced around it, so well,
like you just need a movie like that. But based
on this, well, why don't we just say the Witch
then as the is all we need? Well because it
wasn't about the Salem witch Trials, but I mean it
was so analogous to it and took place in at
the same time, you know, I mean, just pretend like
there's a trial scene that they cut it they cut out,
(02:54):
and there actually a lot of other people they drag.
They dragged the father into work basically and and excommunicate them.
So there is almost like a witch trial scene right there. Yeah,
that's true, the which is the Salem witch trial movie
We've always needed, That's right. So I'm glad we we
(03:17):
resolved that. You must feel very satisfied. Now, yeah, completely disagree,
but I'm just moving on. So, um, everybody knows about
the Salem witch Trials, right, but I think because you know,
we learned about it in American history, you hear about
it as Halloween stories all of that kind of stuff.
But like I said, I mean, we really genuinely don't
understand what happened. And that's despite the fact that it
(03:38):
is really well documented because a lot of the stuff
took place in the courts, and they wrote a lot
of stuff down. But we only have like official primary
documents that were written by people who were aware that
these were public documents, rather than say a trove of
private journals and letters. The Puritans didn't do that that much,
(03:58):
and so we don't have like kind of the underneath
the official line explanation for what happened. Well, yeah, and
if if people are confused by what we mean there,
you know, there were other witch trials in other places
in the Young America, there were other witch trials in
centuries previous in other countries, and there were mild panics
(04:21):
and stuff. But Salem like collectively lost their mind for
a short period of time. And that's what people still
don't get there, like why why did that happen only
there to to this scope and this degree? Uh? And
you know, people have looked at various biological reasons and
(04:41):
things like that, but I don't know. I think it
was just sort of one of those weird things that
could only happen like at one place in one time. Yeah, exactly.
And there was actually a guy who wrote a book
in two named John Demos, and he said, not only
can it happen like under these very specific circumstances, here
(05:03):
are the circumstances that could happen in And he his
book wasn't just about Salem. It mentioned Salem, but it
was about like witchcraft trials and panics and accusations in
New England in general. And he basically said that when
a town starts out really small and it's like a
colonial town, they're living like on the razor's edge of existence.
A lot of them don't really know each other. They're dying,
(05:25):
so there's a big population turnover as newcomers come in
and there's just not enough familiarity to say I think
you're a witch to accuse your neighbor or something like that.
But then after they settle in a little while and
maybe there's like some boredom and everybody gets to know
each other and you have grudges, but you're still living
in a really small area, that's when the witchcraft accusations
(05:46):
can really take place. And Salem seems to have kind
of followed that pattern to that these witch witchcraft accusations
like really took hold at a time where the colony
was under tons of stress. People knew each other, had
had deck aids, long rivalries and lane disputes, and they
lived still in a very small little village, and they
(06:06):
were basically crawling all over one another and saw one another,
and you could not get away from people you didn't like. Yeah,
and this is especially true in Salem. That was Salem Village,
in Salem Town, And like you said, they were stacked
on each other and there were a lot of uh like, hey,
your cow can't graze over this imaginary line because that's
(06:28):
my land and you're not even allowed to build a
fence over there, like kind of common land disputes that
have happened throughout history. But in Salem they were just
they were. They were described as a very quarrelsome people.
They were. They fought and argued a lot, kind of
more so than it seems like even other Puritans and
(06:50):
other parts of the country. Yeah, and the Puritans in
general were deeply litigious. They took each other to court
at the drop of a hat, at the drop of
a hat with a belt buckle on it. Um. But
they they they had like the way that they supported
that um, that kind of litigiousness was to say most
of the courts would be like, you need to go
(07:10):
handle this privately, and then this kind of secondary mediation
kind of thing would come in and there being negotiations
and then the dispute would be resolved. But the first
thing that they would do is drag one another into court.
That was how they would get one another's attention. Yeah,
And so this is sort of the backdrop of what's
going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and particularly in
(07:33):
Salem Village in Salem Town, which I think I think
Salem Village today is dan verse and then Salem Town
is Salem that's right, still around and still has spooky connotations. Yeah,
And dan Versus where the Um the State Asylum was located.
That was the setting for one of the greatest horror
films of all time, Session nine. Oh that's right, man,
(07:58):
that's a movie I don't even know if I want
to see again. It's so good. I saw it a
year or two ago and it's still just as good.
It's great. Um. All right, So the Puritans were in control.
I guess the back backdrop of this was they were
full on, you know, human holocausts in Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with their witch crazes and things
(08:19):
got really out of hand over there. But by the
time folks got to be here, they were mainly just
arguing a lot. And there were you know, there was
a small witch panic in Connecticut. Uh, not small if
you were one of the people accused, but it didn't
quite get out of hand, um, certainly in that like
it did in Europe in centuries previous. And I saw
an explanation, Um, I want to give a shout out
(08:39):
to a couple of sites. But when I got a
lot of info from is called the historic present, and um,
they were pointing out that like for the most part, yes,
people generally agreed that there were such things as witches, um,
And yes you would accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, but
it was kind of like it was a way of
like getting your neighbor's attention, like a serious about this
(09:00):
and publicly accusing you being a witch. Let's talk about
your cow grazing on on my land, you know. Um.
And that was another thing that made Salem so anomalous.
Is it just kept going and going through these steps
of like the court in trial and then finally executions
and and it. It just got out of hand basically, right.
(09:21):
So the Puritans are in control in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
They've got an iron fist on on ruling. They don't
like basically anybody who is not a Puritan. It seems
like most of the Puritans didn't even like each other.
But they certainly didn't like Quakers, they didn't like Catholics,
and they did all they could to really establish themselves
(09:43):
as the ones in charge and did so well. Yeah,
it depends on who you're talking about. Though. There were
some Puritans who were deeply conservative religious leaders like Increased
mather Um, who wanted to just completely secure Puritan control.
But there was also like a real um read through
the Puritan leadership that was willing to like give like
(10:04):
voting rights and and um the ability to be elected
into office to non Puritans who lived in in town um.
And they had kind of a proto democracy in a
lot of ways. So it's like the Puritans in general, Yes,
we're deeply intolerant of Quakers and Catholics, and they actually
tortured Quakers um who were unrepentant UM, but they also
(10:26):
did have they weren't just like this the band of
like theocratic thugs that that they're often painted as. There's
just more nuance to it than that. But yes, there
were plenty who were like, no, we just need total
puritanical control over over this whole colony. Yeah, and you know,
as we'll see once the witch trials were conducted. You know,
(10:48):
I said that Salem collectively lost their mind sort of
true in a way, and that a lot of people
in power and the decision makers did. But there were
still people even while it was going on. It wasn't
like hundred percent of the town was behind this. There
are a lot of people and I guess they were
probably some of those reasonable people you know that you
were talking about that were like, you know what we're doing?
(11:08):
Is it right? I don't think they really spoke up
to vocally, but they were like, what is going on here?
This is getting out of handing kind of crazy. Yeah,
I mean, it was such a dangerous situation where it
was one of those kind of fascist situations where people
who did dare to speak out against this and say
this is crazy, this is wrong, or even to like
(11:29):
testify on behalf of somebody who was accused, you were
putting your own life at risk. Like there's a possibility
you would be accused of witchcraft and then tried and
then executed. It was that kind of a situation, even
with people on the outside being knowing that this is wrong,
it was just such a inevitable machine that it was
(11:49):
like people just stayed out of its way for a
little while. All Right, I think that is a healthy preamble. Okay,
the foundation is laid. I think we should take a break, okay,
and come back talk about those mother boys right after this.
I concur stuff you should stuff you shouldn't, you should know. Okay, Chuck,
(12:37):
so you want to talk some mothers. That's the Beaver.
He's still around, I believe by the way, he still
looks like he's one of those guys that stayed the same. Huh. Yeah.
I think it doesn't help that he dresses the same
still too, But you can recognize him even in a
tux I'm guessing. So you can't talk about out the
(13:00):
Salem witch trials without talking about the Mathers. I'm talking
about the elder mother whose name was Increase of these
Puritan names, and uh, the younger mother, Cotton Mather. He
was the son son of a mother, so Increased Mother.
He was, like you said, he was sort of the
staunch Puritan who was in a position of power. He
(13:22):
was working to establish a charter that would, you know,
basically give the Puritans all the power. He was also
a believer, and you know, because I mentioned that the
European witch trials like this is sort of the background
that allowed people like Increased Mother and Cotton Mother to
really legitimately believe that demons were real and Satan could
(13:43):
overtake and possess someone, and that there were real witches.
I mean, that was just generally the puritanical worldview, but
some people were much more preoccupied with it than others.
And the Mathers were both deeply preoccupied with this kind
of thing, and Increase other gets a lot of the
blame for this, and and rightfully so, but there's a
(14:04):
lot of lesser known people who actually were way more
villainous during this and really took advantage of this crazy situation.
And and really I just didn't didn't care about the
lives of innocent people. But he was. He was not good,
and that he helped fan the flames of this initially
big time. That's right, Um, so should we I mean
(14:25):
we'll we'll get a little bit more into the matters
as we go. Uh. Cotton was certainly one of the
villains of the trials, and they were both writing books
about supernatural things. So this was all sort of the
foundation that was laid when the first two people, uh
were accused in what January of Yeah, So to to start,
(14:48):
there were two girls ages nine eleven. There was Betty Paris,
Elizabeth Paris was her name, and Abigail Williams. And they
basically started barking and convulsing and just behaving really bizarrely
and strangely and would not stop. And so Samuel Paris,
(15:09):
who was the head of the Salem Village church it
was actually pretty divisive figure apparently, UM, he brought in
a doctor and the doctor proclaimed this to be bewitchment,
that these girls were bewitched. And that's ultimately what kicked
the whole thing off. And a lot of people have
tried to figure out like what initially started that because
(15:30):
just about everybody who has a theory about this um
immediately converts to mass hysteria. But you still have that
first that first case of Abigail Williams and or Elizabeth
Paris to to explain, and apparently it was like really
prolonged stuff. They were vomiting, they were doing stuff beyond
(15:52):
just like behaving weirdly. They were they seemed to be
physically afflicted. And that's another thing too that I think
your theories that say like it was just a hoax
that these girls perpetrated, that doesn't understand like just how
long these girls carried out this stuff, And I think
it kind of ignores the fact that there are also
like the Puritans weren't dumb people. They were deeply religious,
(16:15):
they believed in witches and Satan having you know, a
hand on things here on earth. But they also were
very smart, very practical, and they would have seen right
through a couple of girls just planning a hoax or
carrying out a hoax. So there has to be something
there at the beginning that no one has ever fully
explained that kicked this whole thing off. Yeah, I mean
(16:36):
it's hard not to become a little obsessed with some
sort of biological route I know or got poisoning has
been mentioned. I saw encephalitis. Oh, I saw that one too.
That was interesting. Yeah, and just some other like possible
reasons of like maybe something physically was wrong with them,
while they also happened to be goofing around with folk
magic and stuff like that. Not not a good combination
(17:00):
to like get sick while you're being a kid and
playing around was essentially what they were doing. Yeah, but
I mean, if you if you think about the fact
that the the adults were like, okay, this is this
is significant enough that we're going to start looking around
for the witches, and the girl started accusing people too, Um,
it does seem like there was something going on with
(17:21):
at least one of them. And then yes, it started
to spread, probably through mass hysteria to other girls in
the village. It kind of makes when I when I
read the sort of timeline account, I feel like if
that original doctor hadn't said the word, which it could
have gone in a completely different direction. Yeah, he should
have just been like, it's um anti N M D
(17:42):
A R and cephalitis and dummies an autoimmune disease that
will only begin to grasp in thees and everyone would
say you're a witch, right, he just see some crazy words, doc,
So uh, the doctor has has breathed the word, which um,
the girls are like, um, They're like, hey, what's going
(18:02):
on with you, and they said, uh, you know, it's Tituba.
It is my father's slave to Tuba, and it's her
fault and she's a witch. And so they, like you said,
they started accusing, and they started with her. They started
with her, and then they very quickly moved on to
Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. And by doing that, by
accusing those two women are actually uh with Titchuba as well,
(18:27):
all three of them. Is it. I've always heard Tichuba,
but I've heard I think I've heard Tituba before too,
So I don't know that sounds Tchuba sounds more right, Okay.
So so by accusing those three women, they were following
um Abigail and Elizabeth were following like a well established
(18:48):
tradition of focusing on older women on the margins of
society as witches. Right, Titchuba was easy to accuse me
because she was a foreigner. She was brought to um
the colony as a slave, and she worked as a
slave in the Paris's house. Um, so who knows what
(19:10):
she was into before you know, she came over to Massachusetts,
I guess was the thinking of the Puritans. But then
also Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. They were like older
women who were poor, um, lived on the fringes of society,
and like that is who you accused of being a witch. Typically.
So at first, this which panic kind of followed the
standard which accusations that had been um, you know, spread
(19:33):
around New England before. But but what made it different
is that it just started to pick up steam more
and more because more and more girls and people around
them the colony or around the village I'm sorry, started
to suffer bewitchment and started accusing one another of of
bewitching them. Yeah, if you were a person, for sure,
(19:56):
a woman, but um, a man or a woman who
like you said, was about middle aged, and you know
you were over there kind of doing your own thing
a little bit and maybe just kept to yourself. Maybe
you didn't like hanging out in the village as much
as the rest of the villagers did. Uh, you marched
to the beat of your own drum. You had a
target on your back basically right. Yeah. And also apparently
(20:20):
one of the things that they were well known for,
these people who were accused of which is would be
like like they needed things from their neighbors, so they
would extract them by threatening to curse them, so they
would actually use like witchy threats. Um. They were probably
also into folk magic, so there was like, it wasn't
just completely baseless other than the fact that like which
(20:42):
is in that kind of puritanical conception don't exist. But
it wasn't just totally out of the blue like these
they they still like if you a modern person saw
the person that they were originally that they traditionally accused
of being, which is you'd be like, oh my gosh,
a real life which there's one right there, it would
fit the bill. Are you You know what I'm saying, Yeah,
(21:02):
for sure. So you know, these accusations start flying around,
they start mounting, the jails start filling up. The conditions
in the jail were not good. It got so crazy
early on. And this is sort of the first part,
This before the like trials and hangings and everything. This
is when you were just like jailed and shackled and
then charged for your shackles I guess like a rental fee. Uh.
(21:25):
But they arrested a four year old named Dorothy good
Um and she was eventually released. But a four year old, like,
it's crazy me as a father having gone through life
with a four year old that you could accuse a
four year old of being anything other than a four
year old, right exactly, But she wasn't. She was held
(21:46):
for months. I think she was arrested in March and
released in May, and like this wasn't like a pleasant December.
Just oh my goodness. Okay, so she was there for
almost a year, just under a year. For the intense
and purposes of exagger rating just how bad this was,
she was in there for basically a year, Okay, Yeah,
Sarah Ozgar died in jail. She died in jail. Yeah,
(22:07):
this is the thing. Like these jails were like dirt floors.
You were chained, like you're saying, like it was just
it was a place where like a life could just
be lost way too easily. So to keep a four
year old in there for almost years just horrible. There
was a woman who gave birth in jail and they
just left her infant daughter in there with her, so
(22:28):
the infants didn't survive. She died in jail. Um just
from being born in jail. Somebody who was accused of
being witches And this was before the trials had even started. Chuck,
Like this was just the initial phase of the panic,
which was accusation, accusation, accusation, and then suddenly the jails
were overflowing with more than a hundred people, um who
(22:49):
were accused of being witches, and the court was totally
backed up. When increased, Mather and the new governor that
he was coming back with, William Phipps, Uh he'd gotten appointed,
Um showed back up in in Salem and we're like,
what is going on here? And they had a choice, Chuck.
(23:09):
They could have been like, have you all lost your mind?
What are you doing? Stop this right now, let all
these people out. They didn't go that route. They went
the exact opposite route. They at that moment when they
decided which way to go, they chose incorrectly. Basically yeah. Um.
And it was also a pretty bad time. It was
kind of an uh, what's the word conflagration? Man, you
(23:32):
nailed it, And it sounded so confident confident. Uh. It
was a conflagration of a bunch of things happening politically
and legally. It was a very bad time because by
the time the trials rolled around, they eventually got this
new charter, but previous to that, they were uh, the
(23:53):
charter of the colony was temporarily suspended, and a new
charter did arrive in May of uh in the hands
of the Elder Mather, but it was brand new and
the court didn't create laws. They didn't have time to
create any new laws. That is so they basically said,
all right, we need to we got all these people
in jail. We need to quickly establish a special court
(24:15):
for this, and we'll call it the Court of Oyer
and Terminer to hear and determine, and we're going to
get this these people out of jail or kill them.
So they're no longer in jail, but they're getting out
one way or another. Right So there there ed helps
us out with us. We should say we failed to
mention so far. But he he points out that Um
(24:37):
William Phipps, the new governor, possibly went along with this
idea of creating a new court to get rid of
this backlog of witchcraft accusations, to get these people out
of jail, to get this over and done with. And
that may have happened, actually, but he Um was very
much focused on dealing with the the constant threat that
(24:58):
the colonists lived under being attacked by Native Americans. King
Philip's war, King Philip being the guy that punks Tawny
phil was named after that I got way way wrong
in our Groundhog episode. Um that had just ended. There
was another war that included the French and the Native
Americans to the north, sweeping down all the way into
(25:18):
Massachusetts and staging rads. So they've lived under the constant
threat of death, which definitely didn't help their mindset during
the Witchcraft panic. But that's what Phipps was was worried about.
That's what he was working on. So he threw the
the um the job of seeing seeing this this court
through to his lieutenant governor, a guy named um what
(25:40):
was his name, William What william Ston Williams Stoughton I mentioned,
like some of the lesser known people who were actually villains,
this guy was a bad, bad man and he made
a decision that changed the course of everything. I think
Phipps's initial idea that this would have just moved the
backlogs out and freed everybody from jail would have come
(26:01):
true had it not been for Stoughton and Stowton's radical
decision to include what's called spectral evidence that changed everything,
and that that is what led to people being executed. Yeah,
so before we get into spectral evidence, I just want
to point out that William Stoughton was such a bad
guy they named a town after him, and they named
(26:23):
a college dorm at Harvard after him. I believe, well
Increase Mather was the Harvard president for a while too,
so Stoton went to Harvard, but I think it's still
one of the dorms is still Stowton. And uh, I
think Stoton mass is most well known now for having
an idea. Uh So yeah, spectral evidence. Let's talk about
(26:47):
this because this changed everything. Um, there were different kinds
of evidence that would be accepted in these courts. Uh.
One was the spectral, which we'll talk about. One was confession,
um two eyewitness testimonies. Uh. And then there were we
won't get really into all the tests, but there are
all kinds of different tests, including the you know, does
(27:10):
she float? Can she swim? Uh? From Monty Python, the
Holy Grail. I think they were still doing some of that.
That was the witch's teat, which was it's basically, if
they found a mole on a woman, they would call
it a witch's teat, which was uh supposedly a third
nipple used to feed her animal familiar. That's what my
dad always told me my moles were when I was
(27:32):
growing witches. He was dead serious too. So there were
certain tests and all, but spectral evidence was the big
one because this was basically you could kind of make
up anything, and and you could be in court and say,
as an accuser and say, this person is being uh
has been uh possessed or or their possessor is in
(27:55):
the courtroom right now, your honor, the this ghost, this
specter is sitting on your lap right now. You just
can't see it, and it's and it would freak people out.
There was nothing you could really say to defend it
because it was made up to begin with, uh and
supposedly Cotton Mather said it should be used more sparingly,
(28:17):
like at the end of the day he was like,
it's it's enough to indict, but not to convict. Was
that cotton or increase that was cotton supposedly. And then
in the end I think they verified that nobody was
convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence. Okay, well,
then my my hypothesis is kind of out the window.
(28:38):
That none of these people would have been executed without it.
Well it was you know, if if you need two
out of three things and that's one of them, then
you're right. You know. One of the other things that
one of the more practical problems that spectral evidence presented
for somebody accused of witchcraft was that it destroyed any
alibi you had, Like your your neighbor could be like, well, no,
(29:00):
couldn't have been bewitching this person. He was out working
with me in the fields all day. They could say no, no,
it was a spirit. He sent his spirit to bewitch
this poor person who's accusing him, and then boop, there
goes your alibi. So there you like it was like
you said, you just can't defend yourself against that kind
of thing. Um. And that was like the level of
stuff that they were. That they were, that was how
(29:22):
they were accusing people. There was one guy I read about,
Philip English who who will come up again later. Um,
he was accused of witchcraft by somebody who said that, uh,
they got a nosebleed while they were discussing a lawsuit
they had against Philip English with somebody else, so that
it must be that Philip English had bewitched that Like
this was the kind of accusations that they were making
(29:44):
against one another, and they were holding up in court.
That is something that you cannot look past. It's so
easy to look back three years and be like, yeah,
this whole collective group lost their mind. No, there were
plenty of people who did lose their mind, but the
people who were supposed to be in charge, the people
who were in a position to put a stop to this,
actually allowed it, in some cases fan the flames of
(30:07):
it even further. That was the true breakdown at the
Salem Witchcraft trials. The grown ups did not step in
in in halt it before it got out of hand. Yeah.
Another thing that someone might do if you had a
pet that you really liked, not good, Um, they could
say that, well, no, no, no, they have an animal familiar. Uh.
It could be anything like take Black Philip from the
(30:30):
Witch I mean that's taken kind of straight from this
time period. But if you had a pet that you
enjoyed hanging out with, they could accuse you of having
a familiar. If they found, uh a folk magic or
folk tale book in your library, Um, that could be evidence.
And that was pretty common too. I mean, like I
(30:51):
didn't have you know, local hospitals to go to to
to heal themselves or anything that any like you said
with the nosebleed or whatever, anything bad happened to you,
if your crop failed or if one of your cows died,
you could say it was my neighbor and there which
and they put a hex on me. So they established, okay,
we can use spectral evidence, and we're going to use
(31:12):
spectral evidence. And this court of Oyer and Terminer, um, god,
it was established. I think they held their first trial
on June two, and they were profoundly efficient at at
convicting and killing people. Um Bridget Bishop was the first
person hanged, and she was hanged on June tenth, just
(31:34):
over a week after the first trials began. Um, and
that kicked off like this new phase where this this
idea to like clear the the jails of the accused
was actually now diverting them to the gallows. And for
being witches, we can't forget that either, like for being
which is even though which is in this conception don't exist. Yeah,
(31:58):
and I think it's at efficiency in the speed that
all this happened was a big part of it, because
it was the train was moving so fast that once people,
the more level headed people of the town realized what
was going on, like, wait a minute, we're actually hanging
people for this um, certain people started to come forward
and say no, no, no, I'm recanting my confession, or
(32:21):
let me stand up for someone's good character. But it
happened so quickly that you know, before you know it,
there's you know, a couple of dozen people have died. Yeah,
and like people got wrapped up in it too, Like
there's the case of Giles Corey. I believe man, he
testified against his wife and then later he recanted it.
(32:43):
And after he recanted at the purgeon's apparently UM viewed
perjury so suspiciously that that was enough to get him
accused of which craft and he ended up paying for
his life with which we'll talk about a little more later.
But like, he testified against his wife, and to this
day was historians are like, we have no idea why
jil Corey testified against his wife. He didn't seem to
have a grudge, they seemed to have a fine marriage whatever,
(33:05):
Like it just doesn't make sense. The only way that
you can explain that, at least from my perspective, is
that it was, like you said, just this thing that
people got whipped up in, and it just happened so
fast that it was just easy to lose yourself into
that degree. I mean, the whole thing happened over the
course of what four to six months. Yeah, I think
(33:26):
the first things were in January, but yeah, the first
trials were June two, and they ultimately I think stopped
the following like winter. So yeah, I mean it was
not a very long prolonged thing, but it was just
like this weird orgy of of mind loss and death.
You know. Oh man, it sounds like some kind of
(33:47):
album after Uh. The other weird thing about this was that, uh,
the social order was completely knocked out of whack. Um
the Puritans, if there's one thing they didn't like, it
was hearing from children about anything. Kids were just they
(34:07):
were meant to work and to shut up basically and
do what they were told and kind of like full stop.
And you had a situation here where children, young girls
were accusing these middle aged men and women of of
witchery and and it works like people listened to them
and people were hanged because these kids were speaking up
(34:29):
at a time when kids were barely allowed to even
you know, have any agency or speak yeah, which is
another thing that perplexes his storians because they're like, something happened,
like there was something that was that this which panic fulfilled.
Maybe it was to let off steam from being constantly
afraid of being murdered by a Native American attack. Maybe
(34:52):
it was um living too close proximity, too far away
from where you called home, like who knows, but there
was something about it was worth turning the social order
on its head. And that was That was just one example.
There are other examples of how the social order just
totally broke down. And that wasn't how who some of
the people who were accused and executed were, because it
(35:14):
wasn't just the marginal women who were your prototypical witches
a living you know, on the outskirts of society who
were accused. That was just at first, it started to
become extended to really surprising people like Rebecca Nurse was
maybe one of the most upstanding Puritan women that town,
(35:36):
the colony had to offer, and she was accused, tried,
and executed as a witch. And that I think really
kind of opened a lot of people's eyes in two ways.
One I was like, what is going on here? This
could not be the case. And then to other people
is like, if Rebecca Nurse could be a witch, than
anybody could be a witch. And I think that was
(35:57):
kind of the thread that the witch trial followed. But
it also is a like a really good explainer about
how just completely the society broke down for these handful
of months that anybody was was at risk of being
murdered by their fellow townspeople for being a witch, no
matter what kind of background you had. I'm picturing a
(36:20):
I'm picturing a Puritan, like the only Puritan that actually
went on vacation that summer. And they come back, you know,
they leave in early June, they come back in in
late September, and they're like, so, what's been going on everybody? Right,
And then they get the sight of what's going on,
they dropped their mickey mouse ears to the ground. Oh boy.
(36:41):
All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come
back and talk about sort of the finality of this,
how it ended, and a little bit more about Giles
Corey's crazy, crazy story. Right after this stuff you should
(37:08):
stuff you shouldn't, you should know, all right, So in
the end, um I don't think that the final final number.
(37:28):
I've seen twenty two. I've seen UM nineteen people were hanged.
Giles Corey, who were going to talk about in a minute,
was pressed to death via you know, torture. UM. Five
people died in prison. I think the numbers sort of
depend on what you count is like like a fallout
death and not a direct death like the one lady
(37:50):
who couldn't repay like she was eis or. I think
she just couldn't pay her debt to get out of jail,
so she died in jail. That's such a sad story. Yeah,
Lydia Dustin. She is she outlived the um the witch
trials like they had ended a few months before, uh,
and she had actually been personally exonerated, and yet she
couldn't pay her um shackle fees, so they just kept
(38:15):
her in jail and she ended up dying there in
March of six even though she yeah, for sure, yeah,
because she otherwise would not have been killed or died
had it not been being placed in jail after being
accused of a witch for sure. But they did this
in mass hangings. It wasn't just like one at a time.
There was a hanging on July nineteen August nineteenth. In September,
(38:38):
after they died, they were stripped and put in a
big mass grave. Um. Supposedly, there are stories that families
would come and get them out of the mass grave
at night, buried them in unknown probably on parts of
their land. And they tried for many years to find
out exactly where these hangings took place, and they ended
up at a place called Roctor's Ledge, And I don't
(39:03):
I mean, there's a memorial there and people go there
and basically they treat that as though that is definitely
the place, But I don't think they have like hard
heart evidence other than just trying to like take eyewitness
accounts in place where they were right. Yeah, supposedly there
was a study in two thousand and sixteen that where
they took those eyewitness accounts, took into account what the
(39:26):
people said they could or couldn't see in like the
background or whatever, and then plotted them and then figured
out that the most of these points were standing in
around the same place around um that ledge where they
think that yes, this happened, yeah, but they never found
like and then underneath the ground they dug and they
found the gallows bowl. Right. No, they never found any
(39:47):
physical evidence. So whatever. So the story of Giles Corey,
if you know The Crucible you know it. Well, if
you've seen the movie, you know it. Um. He is
the man that was pressed to death. Uh, he was crushed. Basically,
pressing is when they would lay you down, they would
put boards on top of you and then just start
(40:08):
adding weight over the course of time, more and more weight,
until you eventually die. UM. I had heard this story
before because supposedly Giles Corey said more weight because he
refused to He was standing mute, and he refused to
to say whether he was guilty or innocent. The one
thing I didn't know is that Giles Corey was eighty
(40:29):
one years old. Yeah, he was an old guy. He
was like the old guy from that um Metallica video.
That's what I always imagined Giles Corey do. It looked like. Man,
what a story. Though. One thing standing mute would do
would um allow your estate to be passed onto your
heirs rather than being convicted where that wouldn't happen. But
(40:50):
I saw that this wasn't the reasoning behind him standing mute,
because most of his stuff had already been taken and
that he even wrote down that he was standing mute
to protests the sham proceedings. Yeah. So yeah, and it
sounds like just the way he's been um kind of
lionized by history, that that was his motivation for sure.
(41:10):
But you said something about how most of his stuff
have been taken. There's another villain in all this. Beyond
Stoughton and the Mathers, Um, there was a guy named
George Corwin, and he was the sheriff of Essex County,
which is where um, this which panics took place. Um.
And he was basically taking advantage of the fact that
(41:32):
a lot of people were suddenly way more vulnerable than
they had been the year before, a few months before.
And so when he would arrest them and take them,
he would also take possession of their property officially, their stuff,
their land, all that, and he and his deputies would
divvy it up. So he had every incentive to arrest
as many people as possible and throw him in jail.
(41:53):
And he did that, and he took a lot of
people's land. Uh. And I guess he took Giles Corey's
land as well. And Giles Corey curse the town and
the sheriff as he died, and supposedly, UM George core
Actually shouldn't say supposedly. George Corwin definitely did die less
than three years later at age thirty of a heart attack.
And there's a local legend that UM every Essex Essex
(42:14):
County sheriff from Corwin onward. Um either died or resigned
while in office because of a heart condition. I didn't
have time to go look through the records of Essex
County Sheriff's but I thought that was a pretty interesting
local legend. But this dude was in his twenties when
he was doing this. Yeah, he was in his in
his middle late twenties, and he was one of the
(42:35):
worst of the worst. And so there's one more story
about when he died. That guy Philip English that I
mentioned before, UM, who was accused because of the guy
getting the nosebleeding. He was a very very wealthy merchant
in Salem Town and Corwin took his stuff, like his land,
a lot of his ships. Um just took a lot
(42:57):
of his stuff while Um English was on the run
evading capture. And when English came back after the Salem
which trials were over, and found what Corwin had done.
He Um, he tried to get his money back from Corny,
tried to get his money, his land and ships, all
that stuff, and Corwin wouldn't give it to him. Well,
Corwin dies of a heart attack, and um, Philip English
(43:18):
placed a lean basically on this guy's body and said,
you're not burying him until I get paid back. The
family was like, we're not listening to you. We're gonna
go bury him. So Philip English hired a bunch of
guys and they went out and stopped the funeral procession,
took possession of the body and held a hostage until
Corwin's family paid Philip English back for what Corwin had
(43:40):
taken from, had confiscated from, and then Philip English gave
them the body to bury. Wow nuts, not a nice guy,
who Philip English? No, No, okay, yeah, I totally I
was gonna say I totally sighed with Philip English on
that one. Um. All right, So Corey dies and the
sort of the the long and short of his death
(44:02):
was that it was sort of a final straw. And
this is when Phipps comes back in and says, you
know what, things are getting really out of hand. Uh, increase.
Mather says, Yeah, this spectral evidence thing is gotten way
out of hand and it's probably not real. And people
started to um sort of stand up more and more,
(44:23):
and it was clear that Governor Phips had to kind
of halt things. Um. He said he did it under
the context of, you know, this is a contravention of
English law. We can't do this. I'm dissolving the court
of Oyer and Terminer and I'm going to create a
new court where we can't use spectral evidence. And what
do you know. In January and February there were dozens
(44:46):
of people released. Um. Note grand juries weren't indicting people. Uh,
they were found not guilty. Uh. He pardoned some and
by the end of May that next year, the jails
had no more um quote unquote, which is right, because
they found when you take away the spectral evidence, what
you have, for the most part is personal grudges, land disputes,
(45:08):
land grabs. People just trying to to um take advantage
of this situation to get back at somebody they don't
like and haven't liked for a really long time. And
that was a weird, weird, scary time. It was very scary,
and I can't imagine like living during that time. Actually
it's not true. I can't imagine it, um, But it
was just basically another example of like a time when
(45:31):
a group of people became fascist together and people died
as a result. Yeah, and that you know, the term
witch hunt is still used, um that the Crucible was
written because of McCarthy ism. It's been thrown around a
lot in recent years, maybe not as accurately, but it's
still a term for that reason. Um. I've got one
(45:53):
little nice button to put on the end of this, chuck.
There was at least one guy who was a judge
in the Court of vy or in term, named Samuel Sewell,
and within a year or two after the witch trials,
he was standing in front of the Boston Congregation of
Puritans having a petition read um by the local reverend there,
(46:15):
asking for their forgiveness and admitting that this was a huge,
huge mistake and he regretted participating in it, and would
they forgive him? Um, And I believe they did. So
the whole thing ended. Well, you got anything else else, man,
If you want to go down a rabbit hole start
researching the Salem witchcraft trials, you could do a lot
(46:37):
worse than going to the Historic Present, the New England
Historical Society and the History of Massachusetts dot org or
just hit at Grabanowski up, he'll tell you all about it.
Uh yeah, you could do that too. Walk around, they're
they're they're trying to take your money in all kinds
of ways. Yeah, Essex County, mass is one of the
most beautiful places on earth. If you asked me, sure, Um, okay, Well,
(47:01):
since I said that, it's time for a listener mail,
I'm gonna call this cool kid. I like to read
the emails from the cool kids. Hey, guys, my dad
introduced me to your show when I was barely a teenager,
and I've been listening ever since. In that time, my
family has gone through a lot of changes, and my
dad and I haven't always been on the best terms.
I wanted to reach out and let you know that
(47:23):
stuff you should know is the only thing that we
have consistently been able to talk about when we reconnect
after being a part. We can go months without seeing
each other and I can just ask if you listen
to your latest episode to have something to talk about.
It helped keeps things lighthearted and it's something we feel
like it's just for the two of us. I hope
we can see you live in Austin soon. Furthermore, this
(47:44):
is mostly for Chuck. You were so much like my dad,
it's actually freaky. Sometimes we always make jokes that you
two would be best friends if you met in real life.
Your voices even sound a little bit the same. I'll
be honest. Sometimes it's comforting to listen to y'all when
I miss my dad. Uh, I've been meaning to send
this email for a while. Just tell you guys how
much you mean to me and my family. Thanks for
(48:04):
being there for us. Also, I don't know if my
dad listens to the end of the episodes or just
the factual content. We'll find out, but if he's listening
this far in, tell him I said, hi, warm regards
c J. Curbo and Uh says, we come to Austin,
they treat us to dinner at their favorite fried catfish
seafood restaurant. Nice, very nice. Um, that was very nice,
(48:26):
c J. What a great email, and thank you very
much for the invite. We probably will be in Austin
again sometime. It was and c J, you should know
that we cut it out, but I accidentally said fried
cat food. It was hilarious and Josh got a good
laugh out of it. Yeah, so thanks for that. Yeah,
you're welcome. If you want to be like c J
and write a very nice email we want to hear it,
you can send it to us that Stuff podcast at
(48:48):
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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