ARTICLE A Seventeenth-Century Crime Wave: The Salem Witch Trials  The year is 1692; the place is a small farming village in Massachusetts. Inside the household of the Rever- end Samuel Parris, a small group of young girls—nine- year-old Betty, her twelve-year-old cousin Abigail, and a pair of friends—has spent hours indoors amusing themselves with secretive games of “fortune-telling” and “little sorceries,” predicting futures and perform- ing magic on household objects. These obsessions with the occult were inspired by tales told by a West Indian slave named Tituba who worked as a cook in the Parris household. Before long, more girls from the Village had joined in the mysterious club that met in the kitchen of the parsonage during the long dull afternoons. The master of the household, Reverend Parris was having troubles of his own during this difficult win- ter. For a new church in the village of Salem he had recently been appointed minister, a position of great importance and power in the colonial community. But this position was very shaky: only a handful of people within the community had elected to join the new church. Many more refused both to worship at the Village meetinghouse and to pay the taxes to support his salary, and in a recent annual election in October, a majority in the village had voted out of office those who had been responsible for his appointment. The future of Reverend Parris seemed very precarious in the winter of 1692 as the new Vil- lage Committee challenged his right to the position of minister and refused to even pay for firewood to warm his hearth. As winter wore on, the black magic games of the young girls came to the attention of the adults within the Parris household and wider village community. Rumors spread that the girls were meeting in the woods to perform the black magic Tituba had brought with her from her native Barbados. The youngest of the girls was the first to exhibit strange and worrisome behaviors: sudden fits of screaming, convulsions, bark- ing, and scampering about on all fours like a dog. The adult women in the household fretted in muted tones that the afflictions of the child were a malady brought on by the dark forces of witchcraft. Witchcraft was believed to be a particularly terrify- ing and horrible crime, not only because it was respon- sible for evil consequences such as murder, physical torture, or destruction of property, but also because it challenged the supremacy of God in the affairs of human beings. The crime of witchcraft was written into English statutes of law as early as the sixteenth century. The Massachusetts Law of Statutes, likewise, included the crime of witchcraft as a capital offense. The belief in Satan and his role in the affairs of humans and their evil doings was not confined to hys- terical young girls or religious fanatics. On the con- trary, the idea that the Devil was real and operated to do malicious things in the affairs of human beings was a widely ac.

1. ARTICLE
A Seventeenth-Century Crime Wave: The Salem Witch Trials
The year is 1692; the place is a small farming village in
Massachusetts. Inside the household of the Rever- end Samuel
Parris, a small group of young girls—nine- year-old Betty, her
twelve-year-old cousin Abigail, and a pair of friends—has spent
hours indoors amusing themselves with secretive games of
“fortune-telling” and “little sorceries,” predicting futures and
perform- ing magic on household objects. These obsessions with
the occult were inspired by tales told by a West Indian slave
named Tituba who worked as a cook in the Parris household.
Before long, more girls from the Village had joined in the
mysterious club that met in the kitchen of the parsonage during
the long dull afternoons.
The master of the household, Reverend Parris was having
troubles of his own during this difficult win- ter. For a new
church in the village of Salem he had recently been appointed
minister, a position of great importance and power in the
colonial community. But this position was very shaky: only a
handful of people within the community had elected to join the
new church. Many more refused both to worship at the Village
meetinghouse and to pay the taxes to support his salary, and in a
recent annual election in October, a majority in the village had
voted out of office those who had been responsible for his
appointment. The future of Reverend Parris seemed very
precarious in the winter of 1692 as the new Vil- lage Committee
challenged his right to the position of minister and refused to
even pay for firewood to warm his hearth.
As winter wore on, the black magic games of the young girls
came to the attention of the adults within the Parris household

2. and wider village community. Rumors spread that the girls were
meeting in the woods to perform the black magic Tituba had
brought with her from her native Barbados. The youngest of the
girls was the first to exhibit strange and worrisome behaviors:
sudden fits of screaming, convulsions, bark- ing, and
scampering about on all fours like a dog. The adult women in
the household fretted in muted tones that the afflictions of the
child were a malady brought on by the dark forces of witchcraft.
Witchcraft was believed to be a particularly terrify- ing and
horrible crime, not only because it was respon- sible for evil
consequences such as murder, physical torture, or destruction of
property, but also because it challenged the supremacy of God
in the affairs of human beings. The crime of witchcraft was
written into English statutes of law as early as the sixteenth
century. The Massachusetts Law of Statutes, likewise, included
the crime of witchcraft as a capital offense.
The belief in Satan and his role in the affairs of humans and
their evil doings was not confined to hys- terical young girls or
religious fanatics. On the con- trary, the idea that the Devil was
real and operated to do malicious things in the affairs of human
beings was a widely accepted belief common to most
individuals of all social backgrounds and educational levels. It
was believed that a person who entered into a covenant with the
Devil by signing his book had the power to call Satan to enter
his or her body to perform evil doings and deeds to others. By
deploying the power of the Devil, the witch was able to act out
his or her own petty hates toward other human beings.
At the suggestion of Aunt Mary Silbey who lived in the house,
Tituba was asked to prepare the tra- ditional “witches cake,” a
recipe guaranteed to iden- tify the source of the affliction. By
baking a “witches cake”—a recipe which combined rye meal
with the child’s urine—and feeding the cake to a dog, it was
thought that the dog would immediately identify its master, the

3. witch. Before this method of investiga- tion could be completed,
however, Reverend Parris called in the town physician, a
William Griggs, who examined the girls and proclaimed the
chilling news. Malevolent witchcraft was the source of their
malady, not any sickness responsive to the cures of medicine:
the Devil had come to Salem Village.
The strange behaviors first seen in the Parris house- hold now
began to spread like wildfire among the group of girls who
attended the secret meetings in Parris’s kitchen. Parris and
another minister, Thomas Putnam (one of Parris’s key
supporters and father to Ann Putnam, aged twelve), urged the
girls to reveal the names of the individuals responsible for their
suffering. “Who are your tormentors?” they asked repeatedly.
“Name who is doing this to you!” The girls hesitated, at first,
but then named three women: Sarah Good, a local beggar known
throughout the village for her nasty temper and bitter tongue;
Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman with a dubious reputation;
and Tituba, the slave woman herself. On February 29, several
men including Putnam traveled to Salem Town to swear out
formal complaints charging witchcraft against the three women
before the local magistrates. Warrants were issued for the arrest
of the three women and an interrogation or preliminary hearing
was hurriedly scheduled for the following morning.
All three accused were typical of those found guilty of
witchcraft throughout Europe and colonial Amer- ica. They
were marginal, unrespectable, powerless, and deviant in their
conduct and lifestyle. Although they lived within the
community, they were, in a sense, outsiders viewed with
suspicion and disliked by the majority of the community. Sarah
Good, at the time of accusation, was both homeless and
destitute: she and her husband William had been reduced to
begging for shelter and food from neighbors. In her requests for
assistance, she had the effrontery to be aggressive and angry,
cursing and muttering reprisals to those who refused to offer her

4. charity. Few in the community stood to support her once she
was accused; indeed, her husband was one of the first to
proclaim that she was, in fact, “either a witch or would be one
very quickly.”
Sarah Osborne too was an “outsider.” Although she possessed
an estate from her first husband, she was old, had no children,
and had suffered the gossip and disapproval of the community
when several years ear- lier she had cohabited with her second
husband for several months before becoming officially wed. The
slave women, Tituba, was, of course, a natural target of
suspicion and her involvement in the baking of the cake only
hardened assumptions that it was she who was acting as an
agent of the Devil.
The Investigations
The date for the first hearing to determine if there was
sufficient evidence to hand down an indictment for the crime of
witchcraft was scheduled to take place the next day at the inn in
Salem Village but on the morn- ing of the hearing so many
townspeople turned out to witness the proceedings that the
venue was changed to the larger meetinghouse to accommodate
the agi- tated and curious crowd. The accusers—the afflicted
girls—were seated in the front row as one by one each of the
women was brought before the magistrates for questioning. As
each of the women came into view, the girls began to exhibit
the tortured and tormented behavior in a dramatic enactment of
the charge itself. The behavior had frightened their parents,
astonished observers, and convinced many skeptical witnesses
that they were indeed suffering from an affliction of
supernatural causes.
These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents;
their arms, necks and backs turned this way and that way, and
returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of

5. themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or
natural disease to effect.
Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their
throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might
move a heart of stone, to sympathize with them.
During the proceedings, as the girls were contorting in dramatic
displays of torture and physical agony, the magistrates pressed
the women with questions: “Have you made no contract with the
devil?” “Why do you hurt these children?” The girls themselves
continued to moan and plead for the women, especially Sarah
Good, to put an end to their torments. Before long, Tituba had
confessed, named the other two as her accomplices, and
announced that there were many others in the colony engaged in
the conspiracy against the community of God. While Osborne
continued to maintain her inno- cence, Good eventually accused
Osborne and by so doing implicated herself in the eyes of the
magistrate. At the end of the interrogation and before a crowded
and tightly packed audience composed of the entire village and
many from neighboring communities as well, the magistrates
ordered all three sent to jail on suspicion of witchcraft to be
held there until trial.
The prosecution
At the religious services the very next day, the fits and
afflictions of the young girls continued along with more
accusations of witchcraft directed against other women in the
community. During the service, twelve- year-old Abigail
Williams suddenly began to shout out that she saw an apparition
of one of the townspeople in the rafters, a Martha Corey who
had publically expressed her own doubts over the whole affair.
The next day, Goodwife Corey was arrested to be examined in
the presence of their accusers before the magistrate. Within a
month, two more “witches” had been identi- fied by the girls

6. and were arrested: Rebecca Nurse and the four-year-old
daughter of Sarah Good.
As the snows melted, the intensity of the girls’ afflic- tion
seemed to increase rather than wane. By the end of April, a total
of twenty-eight more people had been accused and charged with
the crime of witchcraft. The month of May saw an additional
thirty-nine people accused. The town of Andover requested the
afflicted girls to come to their village and identify suspected
witches among the townspeople. Although the girls did not
personally know any of the people accused, they managed to
name more than forty persons as witches. By the time of the
first trial on June 2, 1692, a total of 160 persons had been
publically and legally accused and many of them were
languishing in the local jail awaiting trial. These included not
only those men and women who were marginal or poor but a
large number of men and women of considerable wealth and
power, including the former minister of the parish, George
Burroughs, who was arrested in his new parish in Maine and
transported back to Salem charged with being the master-wizard
during the years he had served in Salem Village.
The Trials
The royal governor of Massachusetts had just arrived from
England, when he was confronted with the
epidemic of witchcraft accusations which had swept through the
villages of New England in the preced- ing four months.
Governor Phipps responded to the crisis with swift action
appointing a special judicial body known as the Court of Oyer
and Terminer which means literally to “hear and determine”; the
Massachu- setts attorney general was ordered to begin prosecu-
tions; a jury was selected; and on Friday, June 2, 1692, the
infamous Salem witchcraft trials began.

7. The first to appear for a formal trial was Bridget Bishop, an
unpopular and widely despised woman who had been held in
prison since her indictment on April 18. The evidence against
Goodwife Bishop was considerable and many people came
forward to provide testimony to support the charge against her.
She was accused of causing the death of a child by visiting as
an apparition and causing the child to cry out and decline in
health from that moment onward. Several men and women
testified that she had visited them and afterward they had
suffered from strange misfortune or peculiar experiences. The
jury returned a verdict of guilty against Goodwife Bishop and
she was sentenced to death by hanging. On June 10, 1692,
Bridget Bishop was the first to be executed during a public
hanging on a rocky hillside forever after known as Witches Hill.
At the second sitting of the court of Oyer and Ter- miner, the
court tried and sentenced to death five more accused witches. A
session on August 5 produced six more convictions and five
executions, including that of the former parish minister George
Burroughs. In Sep- tember, the court sat two more times,
passing a death sentence on six more persons in one sitting and
nine more in the final session of the court on September 17. The
last executions were held on September 22, when eight persons,
six women and two men, were hung at the gallows. A total of
twenty-three persons accused of witchcraft died: most by
hanging, a few while in jail awaiting trial, and one by being
crushed to death from heavy rocks piled upon his prostrate
body, an ancient form of execution reserved for those who
refuse to testify at all.
The evidence used in the trials was typical of that used to prove
the crime of witchcraft but quite differ- ent from that used to
provide evidence for ordinary murders, assaults, and thefts. The
ordinary rules for trial procedures called for two eyewitnesses
in a cap- ital offense but in the case of witchcraft the rule was
altered because witchcraft was deemed a “habitual” offense. It

8. was sufficient, therefore, that there be two
or more witnesses coming forth with testimony about different
images or incidents to support the charge of witchcraft.
The most abundant form of evidence came in the form of
spectral evidence. These were eyewitness accounts of seeing the
image or apparition of the accused. This might be in a dream or
in their bedroom at night, or even in a crowded meetinghouse or
court- room. The unique difficulty with spectral evidence was
that it was believed that the image might be visible only to
those being tormented while completely invis- ible to others
present in the very same room. As long as more than one person
came forth with spectral evi- dence, it was not necessary for
them to be “seeing” the same image. The behavior of the girls at
the trial pro- vided the most convincing evidence to the jurors
since the accusers often described the image of the accused
flying on the rafters, or exhibited signs of distress and torment
as the accused witch moved her head or arms.
In addition to testimony by witnesses of spectral evidence, there
were several other important forms of evidence. Because it was
believed that the Devil would not permit a witch to proclaim the
name of God or recite the Lord’s Prayer without error, there
was often a trial by test in which the accused was asked to
perform these tasks. Errors, stumbles, or failures of memory
were seen as proof they were agents of the Devil. Evi- dence of
“anger followed by misfortune” was another form of evidence.
Since the crime of witchcraft was believed to be an instrumental
one in which the witch takes out her personal anger against
others using the power of Satan, the testimony of those who
gave exam- ples of conflict, disputes, or angry outbursts
followed by bad fortune was also seen as compelling evidence
of the crime of malevolent witchcraft. In the case of Brid- get
Bishop, five townspeople came forth to accuse her of being
responsible for “murdering” a family member. In each instance,

9. evidence was presented of a display of anger on the part of the
accused followed some- time afterward by an illness or accident
befalling those who had displeased her. A fourth form of
evidence came in the search for physical marks on the body of
the accused such as moles, warts, or scars which were believed
to be “witches teats” or places where the Devil and other evil
creatures gained sustenance from the witch herself.
A final form of evidence, and ultimately one of the most
compelling, was the freely given confession on the part of the
accused. Beginning with Tituba herself, as many as fifty of the
accused eventually confessed to their status as witches, and to
their involvement in witchcraft in some cases providing
elaborate detail and accusing others in the process. During the
hear- ings, as soon as an accused confessed to the crime, the
agonized writhing of the girls suddenly and instantly ceased and
the girls fell upon the confessed witches with kisses and tearful
pledges of forgiveness. None who confessed was brought to trial
or hung: the inten- tion of the court was to spare them in order
to make use of them in testifying against others in future trials.
Only those who continued to proclaim their inno- cence were
made to suffer the spectacle of the trial and the horror of the
public execution.
The aftermath
Between June 10 and September 22, 1692, twenty- four people
were executed for the crimes of witch- craft. As the New
England fall began to cool the air, an additional 150 people
remained awaiting trial in local jails and 200 more formal
accusations had been made against others as well. On the part of
the judicial authorities, there was a sudden sense of unease
about the quality of the evidence used to convict and hang the
accused. Anyone might indeed fail to recite the Lord’s Prayer
with a slip of the tongue, particularly if they are standing before
a packed courtroom charged with being a representative of

10. Satan. And legal opinion was plagued by the question that it
might be possible for the Devil to present himself in the image
of inno- cent folk as well as those who had struck a covenant
with the Devil.
On October 3, Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard
College delivered an address that claimed that evil spirits might
be impersonating innocent men and implied that it was possible
the girls themselves were fabricating their afflictions. Mather
went on to declare that “it was better that ten suspected witches
should escape, than that one innocent person should be
condemned.”ii Many more joined the chorus to object to the
fallibility of the court to prove the crime, and the injustice of
the proceedings in potentially con- demning the innocent based
on the unsubstantiated accusations of the inflamed. Within days,
the governor had disbanded the court of Oyer and Terminer and
replaced it with a court that forbade the use of spectral
evidence. The jury acquitted forty-nine of the fifty-two cases it
heard; the remaining three had entered confes- sions but these
were given immediate reprieves by the governor. The remaining
prisoners were all discharged and a general pardon was issued
against all who had been accused in the terrible and most
infamous series of trials within our nation’s history. Two years
after the trials, witchcraft was no longer a legal offense in the
colony of Massachusetts Bay.