Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (5 page)

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n March 1, hordes of gawkers from miles around rode on horseback or slogged on foot through the flooded coastal roads leading to a tavern in Salem Village. They could hardly wait to find out what would happen at the questioning of the three suspects. Before long, an ugly crowd grew so big that everyone had to move to the church instead.

Today’s plan was to question the suspects and decide if they should appear before a grand jury at a later date. If the grand jury determined that there was enough evidence against these three women, they would eventually face a formal trial.

Nobody could be executed for witchcraft (or anything else) before appearing all three times. But accused people could most certainly be sent to prison. In fact, they would be stuck in the jailhouse for a very long time as the process dragged on.

First, the three accused women were examined for witch’s marks; did they have warts or bumps anywhere on their bodies that could be used as teats to feed their evil animal familiars? Not a mark was found.

Next, the two magistrates began their interrogation. Only one suspect was brought into the room at a time, but even before the defendants spoke a single word, it was obvious that the magistrates thought all three of them were witches. And it didn’t help their cause a bit when all day long the four accusers kept screeching and tumbling around on the floor and crying out that the suspects’ spirits were swooping through the air to torture them.

A man named Ezekiel Cheevers wrote down the questions and answers as fast as he could. Of course he already thought the women were guilty, too, as you can tell from his comments.

THE EXAMINATION OF SARAH GOOD
A

Recorder’s note:
Hathorn asked the children to look upon Sarah Good and see if this were the person who had hurt them, and so they said this was one of the persons that did torment them. Presently they were all tormented by fits.

Recorder’s note:
Her answers were given in a very wicked, spiteful manner, retorting against the authority with foul and abusive words and many lies. Her husband said that he was afraid she either was a witch or would become one very quickly. “And indeed,” said he, “I may say with tears that she is an enemy to all that is good.”

THE EXAMINATION OF SARAH OSBORN

The girls in the courtroom announced that Sarah Osborn was one of the three witches who were torturing them in this very room. Then they began to shake violently and tumbled to the floor.

When grilled by the furious magistrate, Osborn cried that she had never seen an evil spirit or met with the Devil in her life. She was not tormenting anyone!

“Sarah Good sayeth it was you that hurt the children,” argued the magistrate.

“I have not seen her for two years,” Osborn replied, insisting that for all she knew, the Devil had the power to make himself look exactly like her. Then he could go around in her shape to attack the girls, but she would have to take the blame.

Three people reported that the bedridden woman thought she was more likely to be the victim of witchcraft than to be a witch herself. When asked to explain, Osborn replied that she had dreamed she saw a black Indian who pinched her and pulled her to the door. Hathorn was not impressed. Implying that she was unfaithful to God, he asked why Osborn hadn’t come to church for the past two years. “Alas! I have been sick and not able to go,” she cried.

THE EXAMINATION OF TITUBA

The afflicted girls again began to writhe around, screech, and howl when the slave Tituba’s turn came to be questioned. At first she said she was completely innocent and that she and the children would never hurt each other. But a little later, she completely changed her tune and confessed that she was guilty!

The recorder who wrote down everyone’s testimony didn’t bother to say so, but it’s possible that the questioning stopped for a while and then started up again after a break, because many months later Tituba would reveal that she had lied when she told the court she was a witch. She claimed Reverend Parris had beaten her to make her confess and to make sure that she accused the two women Parris called her “sister-witches.” He even threatened not to pay any of the fees required to get her out of jail unless she told the magistrates that she was guilty. Tituba must have followed her master’s orders:

Tituba charged that Sarah Osborn and Sarah Good were torturing the children and wanted her to hurt them, too. And she said she had seen two more witches from Boston just last night when she was cleaning. They told her she had to hurt the children, and if she refused they would hurt her themselves. At first she agreed to hurt Betty and Abigail, but afterward she was very sorry and told the women she wouldn’t do it any more.

Tituba said that the man had pretty things and offered her a little yellow bird if she would become his servant. Then he sent her two cats: one red and one black and as big as a dog. But when she said her prayers and tried not to pinch Betty and Abigail, the cats scratched at her eyes, pulled her across the room, and almost threw her into the fire. Tituba felt even worse when the man appeared with Dr. Griggs’s niece and made her pinch this girl, too.

Ann Putnam Jr. confirmed Tituba’s story, saying that they would have made Tituba cut off her own head if the slave refused to kill her.

Then, said Tituba, Good had tried to give her the yellow bird or a cat. Tituba refused to take them, though she wished she could give the pretty bird to the children.

B
ack to jail went the three women. Good was first sent to a prison in the town of Ipswich. She even had to bring along her tiny infant, and as she rode away seated sideways on a horse behind her guard, she swore that she was innocent, tried three times to escape (once bloodying her arm), and then tried to kill herself.

Jailers were allowed to question people in prison whenever they felt like it, so Tituba and Osborn were questioned all over again in the Salem jail, a dank, filthy dungeon full of rats, where women were strip-searched so the guards could look for witch’s marks, and where food and water were withheld or prisoners were tortured in other ways to make them confess.

Even though Tituba followed Parris’s orders by claiming to be a witch, he still hadn’t paid her jail fees. Tituba told the guards that she had been forced to stick herself with a pin in order to sign the Devil’s book with her own blood, and when she was examined, fresh wounds were found on her body. That’s when she claimed Good and Osborn were torturing her out of spite for telling the court they were witches. The magistrates and jailers all believed her. In fact, they thought she was very brave. (Some people thought Tituba’s wounds were the Devil’s work. Others later claimed that she bore old scars from Spanish cruelty when she was captured as a child. But did these fresh wounds really come from Parris’s beating?)

Of course Osborn still maintained her innocence. And in a few days, Good and her baby were sent to Salem’s jail, too, where both Good and Osborn were shackled to the wall with heavy chains.

On March 7, all three suspects were transported to another filthy, lice-ridden jail in far-off Boston, where they would be charged a fee for every single day of their stay whether they were guilty or not. They also had to pay for their own shackles. If you were imprisoned in those days, you had to pay a great many fees, even to the very jailers who tortured you, and even if you had no money. Otherwise you could never be set free. Since Tituba had confessed and her young accusers no longer claimed to see her specter, she didn’t have to wear chains or go to trial,

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o did the afflicted girls’ fits stop once the suspected witches were safely under lock and key? Not on your life. And almost every day, more and more people claimed that they were under attack. Those first three arrests had marked a tipping point; the witch hunt would now begin in earnest.

By March, practically everyone was starting to panic. As skies faded from gray to black on the night that Tituba, Good, and Osborn were sent back to jail, two men thought they saw a shadowy beast crouch down upon the ground and then spring up and up into the sky, where it split apart into the three spirits of the jailed women…and vanished!

The very next night, one of these terrified fellows was followed by an enormous white dog. He raced home to his bedroom, slammed the door, and dived under the covers to hide, but just then a large gray cat appeared in a ball of light right in the middle of the bed. And the second man thought he kicked Good’s spirit off of his own bed.

Dr. Griggs’s niece, Elizabeth Hubbard, cried out that she was being stabbed by the furious spirit of Good, who stood atop her uncle’s table “with all her naked breast, and bare footed and bare legged. Oh nasty slut,” yelled Hubbard. “If I had something, I would kill her!” Nobody else in the room saw a thing on the table, but Elizabeth’s uncle grabbed up his cane at once and swung it valiantly through the air in an attempt to smite the invisible witch. “You have hit her right across the back!” Hubbard exclaimed.

Then Ann Putnam Jr. singled out three more witches:

First was the spitfire spirit of little Dorcas Good, Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, who supposedly used inhuman strength to pinch Ann, to choke her, and to try to make her sign the Devil’s book.

Next, Ann accused a Gospel Woman who was a member of the village church. Her name was Martha Cory. Gospel Women were reputed to be the most zealous church members of all. But even though Cory was a well-liked member of the Puritan religious elite, certain people still disapproved of her because she had once borne an illegitimate mulatto son. Now she had made a major mistake; she had told people she thought the witch accusations were nonsense.

Martha was the second wife of an 80-year-old farmer named Giles Cory, and she had fought to keep him from going to watch the questioning of Good, Osborn, and Tituba by taking the saddle right off his horse. The cantankerous old man didn’t care—he went anyway.

When church deacon Edward Putnam (Ann’s uncle) and courtroom scribe Ezekiel Cheevers went to Martha Cory’s house to question her, she said, “I know what you have come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch, but I am none. I cannot help people talking about me.” But Ann soon exclaimed that Martha was trying to make her bite off her own tongue, that an invisible yellow bird was sucking a spot between Martha’s fingers, and that she had seen a spectral man being roasted on a spit by a spectral Martha Cory!

The third witch Ann incriminated was Elizabeth Proctor, who had been under suspicion for years because her grandmother was supposed to have been a witch.

And who else would rake coals over the reputations of Martha Cory, Elizabeth Proctor, and even Elizabeth’s husband, a big burly tavern keeper named John Proctor? It was the Proctors’ very own 20-year-old servant, Mary Warren.

Now why would she do that? Was she truly ill? Was she terrified by dark shadows in her chambers? Or was she was out for revenge against her hot-tempered master? Warren had been having (or faking) fits at earlier hearings and claimed that she was afflicted by the specters of Martha Cory and John Proctor. Proctor was so furious at his servant for incriminating innocent people that he had threatened to thrust hot tongs down her throat.

From the very beginning, John had never believed that anyone was a witch, and he thought the self-proclaimed afflicted people should be sent to the whipping post. His attitude infuriated Betty’s father, Reverend Parris; Ann’s father, Thomas Putnam; and other people who lived with the afflicted. John and Elizabeth Proctor had five children together. Two months after the Proctors were arrested, one of their daughters and two of their sons were taken into custody, too.

The next person to join the growing list of accusers was Ann Putnam Jr.’s 19-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis. After taking care of Ann for two weeks, Lewis started having fits herself. She was being choked! Blinded! Stuck with pins! Pulled by strong forces into a blazing fireplace! And Lewis said it was all the fault of Martha Cory, the very same Gospel Woman that Ann had already accused. Like Ann, Lewis claimed that she saw Martha Cory’s spirit roasting a spectral man on a spit inside her fireplace. When Lewis struck at Cory’s spirit with a stick, she suffered “grevious pane” herself, supposedly because the spirit was hitting her with an iron rod.

And besides Martha Cory, wealthy Elizabeth Proctor was out to bewitch Lewis. too. Or so Lewis said. Could the girls have really seen such spirits? Or did they get their story from Cotton Mather’s scary book? (Mather had written that an 11-year-old boy said he was roasted on a spit by a witch back in 1688.) Or was Lewis remembering what she saw or heard about during the Indian wars when she used to live in Maine? The Wabanaki Indians had supposedly roasted captive settlers alive over slow fires then. Or was another kind of mischief afoot?

On Saturday, March 19, the high sheriff of Essex County arrested Goodwife Martha Cory. When she was questioned two days later, Judge Hathorn grilled her harshly from the start, constantly accusing her of lying.

At that, Ann Putnam Jr. cried out that Cory was no Gospel Woman, she was a Gospel Witch! By now, witnesses Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and her mother, Ann Putnam Sr., were screaming at the top of their lungs and writhing around in agony at Cory’s every move. If Cory so much as bit her lip, they bit their own lips and showed bite marks and scratches on their arms and wrists, too, saying that Cory’s invisible powers had made them do it. And if Cory so much as wrung her hands when they accused her, they cried out that she had bruised them by making them wring their own hands. A woman named Mrs. Pope threw a shoe at Cory, and it hit her in the head.

Ann claimed she had seen Cory praying to the Devil one night outside her window. Then the afflicted girls said they could hear a drum calling all the witches to gather right outside of the meetinghouse. Even Martha’s own husband, Giles Cory, testified against her, blaming her for some very strange things.

It seems that the previous week he had fetched an ox that was lost in the woods, but it promptly lay down in his yard and couldn’t get up. It just dragged its rear end as if it had been shot in the hip. Before long, though, it got up on its own. Then his cat fell ill all of a sudden and he thought it would die for sure, so his wife told him to knock it in the head. He would not! And just as suddenly, that cat got well. Besides, he said, his wife liked to stay up after he went to bed. He even saw her kneeling in front of the fireplace as if she was saying a prayer, but he heard not a word.

Right about that time the children cried out that a yellow bird was sitting on Martha. When Magistrate Hathorn asked her about it, she started to laugh. Back to the Salem jail went Martha.

O
n March 23, Edward Putnam (Ann Putnam Jr.’s uncle) and a farmer named Henry Keney entered a complaint against a 71-year-old grandmother named Rebecca Nurse, who was sick in bed. Everybody loved and respected Goodwife Nurse, who had raised and educated her eight children to become fine, upstanding adults. Besides, she and her husband, Francis, had always been faithful and loyal to one another and to their family and their religion—how could she possibly be a witch?

Some people thought Rebecca Nurse’s mother was a witch, so maybe she was a likely target. But was this accusation really a way to take revenge against the Nurse family? Rebecca’s father had often battled with the Putnam family over their farm boundaries. Besides that, Rebecca’s husband had been Salem Town’s constable in the 1670s, and way back then, the Putnam family was rich. The Putnams had gotten into a big legal battle with the Porters, another wealthy family, over whose timberland was whose. As constable, Francis Nurse had arbitrated their dispute, and the Putnam family lost out in the end.

In all, 10 of 18 depositions against Rebecca Nurse were signed by Putnams, but 2 of the other accusers had grudges against the Nurse family as well. Francis Nurse was a member of the Salem Village committee that voted against paying Reverend Parris’s salary in 1691 in order to drive him out of Salem. And then there was the Putnam family’s 19-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis. Of course she always sided with Ann Putnam Jr. when it came to accusing people of witchcraft. But Francis and Rebecca Nurse had enough money to hire another man to take their son’s place as a soldier in the Indian war. Though this practice was perfectly legal, Lewis, who was orphaned when her family died fighting in the Indian war, might have resented the Nurse family’s good luck.

To make matters even worse for Rebecca and her relatives, both Ann Putnam Jr. and her mother claimed that Nurse’s two sisters, Sarah Cloyse and Mary Easty, were also witches (and lots of other accusers chimed in). So if the Putnam family, Reverend Parris, and Lewis were out for revenge, they were about to get it.

Rebecca was taken from her sickbed to appear before the magistrates on March 24. “I can say before my Eternal Father I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency,” she testified. A sympathetic audience believed her until the victims claimed to see the Devil and a whole swarm of his familiars whispering in her ear. Next thing you know, they said they spotted Nurse’s specter as it zoomed past the meetinghouse, riding upon a pole behind the evil black man. And besides, every time she moved, the girls appeared to be bitten, pinched, bruised, or bent as if their backs were broken. “I cannot help it,” cried Goody Nurse. “The Devil may appear in my shape!” Off to the Boston jail she went.

T
he cold winds of March were fading, but still the chilling accusations flew. During Reverend Parris’s church services on Sunday, April 10, Tituba’s husband, John Indian, was apparently bitten so hard by the spirit of Sarah Cloyse that he started to bleed. Services got even more interesting when Abigail Williams insisted she saw the specters of Cloyse, Nurse, Cory, and Good—and a shining white male angel who made all the witches tremble.

Claims about the suspects were getting more and more out of hand. The next day in the meetinghouse, Abigail made Cloyse seem like she was an enormously important and ridiculously evil witch. According to Abigail, 40 witches had taken communion together in a pasture by drinking the afflicted girls’ own blood. And it was served by the two chief witches, none other than Sarah Cloyse and Sarah Good! After hearing such accusations, the real Sarah Cloyse fainted dead away. “Oh!” proclaimed the afflicted girls, “Her spirit has gone to prison to see her sister Nurse!”

Then several girls blamed the spirits of Elizabeth and John Proctor for yanking up a spectator by her feet and for sitting upon the roof beams to harm the people below.

Every day there were more terrible tales of torment. One of the newly accused witches was Martha Cory’s husband, Giles Cory. He was supposed to have used witchcraft against at least nine people. An angry woman swore that “the Specter of Giles Cory Murdered his first wife & would have murdered this wife too if she had not been a Witch…” Then two people testified that Cory participated in “the sacriment” at a gathering of 50 witches. Ann Putnam Jr. called Giles Cory “a dreadfull wizard” who “did torture me a great many times.” And whenever he shook his head at the accusers or waved his arms in frustration, all the victims shook their own heads and waved their own arms in apparent pain, crying out that Cory was hurting them grievously from all the way across the room.