Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (4 page)

D
ays passed, but the two girls’ frightening symptoms only intensified, even though no one else in the household was getting sick. So Reverend Parris began to wonder. Maybe the children’s illness meant that God was sending him a sign. Maybe his congregation had committed some unforgivable sin and was being punished for its own good!

And did the reverend see a second sign of God’s wrath? Just one week after the awful fits first struck, and a mere 75 miles to the north, in York, Maine, the Abenaki Indians and their French allies attacked, leaving the town in flames. Even babies, women, and farm animals had been slaughtered. Puritans like Reverend Parris had long believed that Indians were devils and their shamans were witches. He may have wondered if God had unleashed the destroyers to teach his subjects a lesson.

Perhaps Parris had received a third sign as well, for early in February a homeless woman named Sarah Good came knocking at Parris’s door, begging for food for her baby and her four-year-old daughter, Dorcas. As Sarah Good turned to go, she muttered something under her breath. Was their gift too small? Were her words curses, the kind that caused crops to fail and livestock to die? The two afflicted girls soon seemed to get much worse.

Parris thought some more and began to wonder if he himself had been the sinner. Had he been lax in his duties as a minister or as a father? Parris prayed and fasted, and so did the rest of his family. He consulted with doctors and tried dosing the girls with every elixir he could find, from parsnip seeds in wine to smelling salts made from blood, ashes, and deer antlers. Nothing worked.

Then an elderly physician named William Griggs, who had lived in Salem Village for perhaps two years, examined Betty and Abigail and declared that they were most certainly “under an Evil Hand.” This was the worst of all possible news because it meant that the two girls were BEWITCHED!

Dr. Griggs had good reason to think so.

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s early as the 1640s, about 50 years before Betty and Abigail first got sick, settlers in New England had begun to suffer from violent, life-threatening fits. Even farm animals wrestled with these convulsions; many that seemed healthy one day could wind up dead the next. But why? Doctors couldn’t find any rational explanation for the victims’ bizarre contortions. Nor could they explain people’s visions of dark apparitions and bright lights; their temporary paralysis; their blindness and deafness; or their claims that they were being pinched, choked, bitten, scratched, sat upon, or pricked with pins.

Before long, the Puritans began to look for answers in the Invisible World. Was this truly some new dread disease, or could the symptoms have been caused by witches? After all, the Devil’s witches could infiltrate the Natural World. If such an invasion had occurred in New England, perhaps these dreadful creatures were working their magic on mere mortals, casting spells and stabbing images of victims from afar to inflict pain, or staring at their prey with a poisonous Evil Eye until they died. Worse yet, witches could be corrupting the innocent, who might join league with the Devil by signing his book of laws just to ease their pain—or bargain away their own immortal souls in exchange for their heart’s desire.

That’s why in 1641, 1642, and 1655, new laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut proclaimed that witchcraft was a crime punishable by death. The first so-called witch to hang was a healer from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Margaret Jones. It was said that her mere touch could cause violent pains, deafness, and vomiting, and that she had used witchcraft to kill animals. She was tried and hanged in 1648 during an epidemic of fits. But most cases like hers were thrown out of court for lack of solid evidence or because magistrates and ministers thought the witnesses were delusional or carried a grudge against the accused. Take the case of a New Haven, Connecticut, widow named Elizabeth Godman. In 1655, she was released from jail in spite of one woman’s claims that Godman was pinching her and causing dreadful fits that left her boiling hot, freezing cold, and shrieking in pain.

The rash of mysterious fits never disappeared completely, and by the 1680s, rumors about this dread disease were scaring people half to death. Fear spread even farther when a popular father-and-son team of Boston ministers named Increase and Cotton Mather wrote several astonishing books and essays about settlers who were possessed by demons or plagued by witches. One of the most terrifying tales came from Cotton Mather’s 1689 best seller,
Memorable Providences
. Everyone flocked in droves to read this story, especially since Mather claimed that he had watched with his own two eyes as every detail unfolded.

In the reverend’s book, four children from a pious Boston family were suffering from horrible fits. Their tongues would first be sucked down their own throats, then pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. Their jaws would snap out of joint and then clap together like a strong spring lock. They cried that they were being cut with knives, then struck with blows. Their necks were broken! Their heads were twisted almost all the way around! And they would bark like dogs or roar exceedingly loud. These tortures were blamed upon a neighbor, an old Irish Catholic washerwoman named Goody Glover, who was suspected of being a witch. Before long, she was tried in court and hanged by the neck until dead. Surely Reverend Parris and Dr. Griggs knew all about this famous tale.

T
he day after Dr. Griggs presented his dire diagnosis to the Parris family, Reverend and Mrs. Parris rode off to a lecture. While they were there, they hoped to invite some neighboring ministers to join them in their home for a solemn day of prayer. But as soon as the parents left, the two Parris slaves, Tituba and John Indian, did something that was strictly forbidden. They knew that in New England, people used folk magic all the time to perform cures, even though Puritan ministers railed against it. There were ways to draw out witches—by boiling snippets of children’s hair, for example—and the two slaves were apparently so worried about Betty and Abigail that John Indian accepted a set of instructions from their helpful neighbor, Goodwife Mary Sibley, telling how to bake a black magic witchcake.

Carefully following Sibley’s recipe, Tituba and John Indian mixed some rye flour with the afflicted girls’ urine, patted it into the shape of a cake, and baked it in the ashes of their fireplace. The trick was to feed this magical witchcake to a dog. Ancient European folklore alleged that dogs were the “familiars” of witches. This meant that dogs were actually imps disguised as animals to help witches do their dirty work. When a dog ate a witchcake, the witches’ spells were supposed to be broken. Then the victims could reveal the witches’ names for all to hear.

But when Reverend Parris and his wife got home and found out about the witchcake, they were absolutely furious. Using black magic was an enormous sin! Though the two slaves were probably just trying to help, black magic could not be tolerated. Parris would later preach that Goodwife Sibley had “a-going to the Devil for help against the Devil.”

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etty and Abigail must have been terrified by now; their fits and strange gibbering grew worse, and the contortions of their backs, necks, and arms were frightful to behold. Maybe Parris and his family still had not been pious enough! Parris and the neighboring ministers prayed together. He and his family fasted yet again. And he made sure that everyone in his household doubled their prayers again, too. But the minute a prayer would end, the girls’ fits began anew.

So Parris, the other ministers, and certain townsfolk pressed Betty and Abigail hard to reveal the witches’ names. Whose evil spirits had ventured forth from the Invisible World to torture them? How could the girls ever get well if the guilty witches were allowed to roam free?

If these two impressionable children were convinced that witches were out to get them, whom should they blame? Maybe their tormentors were the usual suspects, people their family didn’t like or respect. Tituba seemed to be a logical choice. Besides making the witchcake, she was a slave, and an Indian slave at that.

After all, everybody the girls knew was convinced that Indians were in league with the Devil. So Betty and Abigail declared that Tituba was a witch and that Tituba’s spirit, which was invisible to everybody else but themselves, had been pinching them and pricking them and chasing them around the room.

Before long, they claimed that two other women’s spirits had tortured them as well.

First, Betty and Abigail remembered Sarah Good, the muttering beggar woman who had pled for food for her two young children. In Salem Village, nobody liked a beggar, especially an ungrateful, pipe-smoking beggar. She had to be a witch.

And then they pointed the finger at a bedridden old farm woman named Sarah Osborn, whose young second husband used to be her own servant. She had not gone to church for more than a year, and rumor had it that this husband was a wife-beater. Nobody liked Osborn either, especially a certain family called the Putnams, who had fought with her for years over some land and were now leading members of Parris’s church. Betty and Abigail claimed they had seen a bird with a human head that turned into Sarah Osborn! She was obviously a despicable witch.

Tituba said she loved Betty and would never have hurt her, but Reverend Parris seemed not to believe a word she said. It was time to take action. So on February 29, 1692, the first official complaints were filed by two Salem Town magistrates, and the three accused witches were arrested.

W
ord traveled fast. Even as the arrests were taking place, more people began to say they were tormented by fits. And almost every one of them would claim that it was witches—or the witches’ spirits—that were torturing them.

The first of these new accusers was a clever 12-year-old girlfriend of Betty and Abigail named Ann Putnam Jr. Ann’s parents were the very strongest supporters Reverend Parris had in Salem Village. It seems that Ann was having dreadful fits, and they were all because the spirit of that beggar woman named Sarah Good was pinching her and trying to make her sign the Devil’s evil book.

Then a 17-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hubbard claimed she had been chased by a wolf that turned into Sarah Good and attacked by the bedridden old lady, Sarah Osborn. Hubbard happened to be the niece of Dr. Griggs, the very same physician who had first blamed Betty’s and Abigail’s fits on witchcraft. Not only did Hubbard live in Dr. Griggs’s house, but she was friends with Betty and Abigail, too.