Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (6 page)

Ann’s father, Thomas Putnam, got in on the act by writing the judge to report that Ann had seen “a dead man in a Winding Sheet who told her that Giles Cory had Murdered him by Pressing him to Death with his Feet, and the Devil promised He should not be Hanged.”

But something very surprising happened on April 19. John Proctor’s servant, Mary Warren, said that she had been lying when she accused people of being witches. She claimed that the other girls’ fits were faked and that they too had lied when they fingered people for witchcraft. The result? She was accused of being a witch herself.

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n late April, a deluge of new accusations spewed forth, spreading like the plague farther and farther away from Salem Village itself to 34 different towns. Between April 20 and April 30, 15 additional complaints were entered into the books, and between May 2 and June 6, 39 more people were charged with witchcraft.

Everyone got into the act. Brothers accused brothers. Neighbors accused neighbors. Parents accused their children, and husbands accused their wives. Accusers claimed they had been scratched and bitten and maimed and pricked and disjointed and bloodied and blinded and deafened by invisible furies that no one else could see. Some poor souls said they had been dragged out of their own bedrooms and forced to soar over the treetops to a secret place where they were pressured to sign the Devil’s book of laws.

And worst of all was this crippling fear: Seated directly beside you in your very own church might lurk even more witches cleverly disguised as pious worshipers of the Lord.

The record books named 74 people who said they were attacked by witches, and at least 59 of that 74 were female. These so-called victims were as young as 9 years old and as old as 81 (plus another woman described in court records as being “ancient”). The afflicted accusers were not satisfied by pointing out just one witch either. Almost all of them made lots of complaints that got people arrested. For example, Parris’s niece, Abigail Williams, fingered 41 different witches for attacking her; Ann Putnam Jr. accused 53; her servant, Mercy Lewis, blamed 54; and a girl named Mary Walcott, who was Ann’s step-cousin, named an astonishing 69 witches.

Besides all those victims, a number of Puritans suffering from fits were not officially listed. Some had confessed that they were witches themselves, some were babies too young to complain, and some were men who never accused any witches of making them sick. Since babies can’t fake their symptoms and the men didn’t claim they were bewitched, surely some of these victims were actually sick.

All kinds of people were accused of witchcraft. There was a fortune-teller, a man who was a judge in the witch trials, and the governor’s own wife. There were three floor sweepers, a folk healer, a pirate, and a physician who practiced “counter-magic.” There were weavers and watermen, blacksmiths and bricklayers. And there were slaves, merchants, shoemakers, ministers, and servants. Plus two officers in the militia and plenty of farmers. Even the wealthiest couple in Salem Town did not escape arrest.

Not all of the witches were human beings. A girl accused two dogs of belonging to the Devil and said they could cause fits by simply staring at their victims. They were hanged by the neck without benefit of trial. A third dog was bewitched in the town of Andover, supposedly by the magistrate’s own brother, who rode upon its back. This dog was executed, too. The same magistrate had refused to send anyone else to jail when more than 50 people were arrested at one time around May 14. For that reason, he was suspected of being a witch as well, so he and his wife and brother fled.

And what did a witch look or act like? There was a hilly-faced man, a woman with “scragged” teeth, a woman who had catalepsy (which meant that she went into trances and became as rigid as a statue), a crooked-backed woman, and a woman who was “broken in her mind.” The age of a witch didn’t matter one whit. Those accused of witchcraft ranged from age 4 all the way up to age 90.

Of course the jails were bursting at the seams, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. All of these horrible dungeons stank to high heaven. People were questioned mercilessly, and if they didn’t give the right answers they were tortured. If someone on the outside couldn’t bring food to the prisoners when they were hungry or bring them a blanket when they were freezing or bring them money to pay for their room and board, they were out of luck. What’s even worse, many prisoners had to leave their babies and young children at home without a bit of care from an adult or a single scrap of food to eat. And if any adults were still at home, how were they supposed to tend their crops alone, visit their loved ones at a far-off prison, or pay the jail fees—especially if they were poor in the first place?

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espite the crowding, more and more people were funneled into jail every day.

Take Bridget Bishop, for example. People had been calling her a witch for ten years, ever since an African slave named Wonn claimed that her specter had stolen some eggs, spooked a team of horses, and pinched him. Bishop ran a rowdy tavern in Salem Town that catered to sailors and other travelers who went there to spend the night, drink rum, and play the evil game of shuffleboard after the neighbors had gone to bed. Bishop was known for wearing a bright red bodice, and gossip had it that she was a prostitute, too. Worse yet, she was suspected of killing her first husband, had been beaten regularly by her second husband, and quarreled late into the night with her third.

Bishop had never once set foot in Salem Village, but on April 18, she was placed under arrest because her specter had supposedly flown there to torture five Salem Village girls. She was questioned the very next day. First, the girls said she was a witch. Then the magistrate himself accused her of bewitching her first husband to death. Bishop insisted that she knew nothing about such attacks, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in frustration. As usual, the five afflicted girls blamed Bishop’s specter when their own heads shook violently back and forth and their own eyes rolled wildly in response.

“I am innocent,” Bishop testified. “I never saw these persons before, nor I never was in this place before. I have made no contract with the Devil. I never saw him in my life!” At that, Ann Putnam Jr. shouted out: “She calls the devil her God!”

Recorder Ezekiel Cheevers noted that “two men told her to her face that she is taken in a plain lie. 5 afflicted persons do charge this woman to be the very woman that hurts them…all her actions have great influence upon the afflicted persons and they have been tortured by her.”

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s spring breezes warmed the air of Salem on May 10 and 11, a farmer named George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret were being questioned by the magistrates when Margaret confessed that she was a witch. Then she testified that her grandfather—and a reverend named George Burroughs—were both wizards. (By May, plenty of people knew that if you confessed, you would be treated much better than suspects who claimed they were innocent. If you named extra suspects, you even got to stay in a nicer part of the jail.)

Now it just so happened that Margaret’s grandfather was a toothless, 80-year-old man with rheumatism who could only walk with the aid of two walking sticks. Yet despite his sorry physique, 12 screeching accusers exclaimed that Jacobs’s specter had beaten them. Lewis joined the fray: “He did torture me most cruelly by beating me with two sticks and almost put my bones out of joint, but I told him I would not write in his book if he would give me all the world.”

This particular testimony made Jacobs laugh out loud in court. When the magistrate asked why, he said: “Because I am falsely accused. Your worships, do all of you think this is true?” he asked incredulously. “I am as innocent as your worships.”

Sarah Churchill, George Jacobs’s maidservant, had already confessed to being a witch to save her own self. In her desire to be let off the hook, she became Jacobs’s strongest accuser. And maybe she had another reason, too. When she had told Jacobs earlier that fits were keeping her from doing any work, he had called her a “bitch witch.” Here’s what else he said at his hearing:

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n the little northern frontier town of Wells, Maine, most everybody liked and respected their minister, a short, strong, dark-haired man named George Burroughs with a history of performing heroic deeds for his neighbors. During just the previous summer, for example, he had helped his fellow citizens escape from Indian attacks when warriors snuck up to three nearby towns and laid them all to waste. One of Burroughs’s admirers called him “self-denying, generous, and public spirited.” Another who knew him well wrote that “he was an able, intelligent, true-minded man; sincere, humble in spirit, devoted as a minister, and generous as a citizen.” Also acknowledged as an excellent athlete and a scholar, Burroughs willingly ministered to people of every faith.

Reverend Burroughs had not spent his entire life in Maine. During the early 1680s, he had served two years as the minister of Salem Village and even lived in the same house now occupied by Reverend Parris. Burroughs had headed for Maine after two grave misfortunes befell him in Salem: first, his wife died, and then he got into a bitter dispute with the Putnam family over a debt he owed for her funeral expenses. He had no money because he had never received his salary.

Though it had been ten long years since he had lived in Salem Village, Burroughs was certainly not forgotten, because on April 20, 1692, Thomas Putnam’s daughter, Ann, swore that she had seen the apparition of a minister. Ann claimed she had been grievously afraid, crying, “Oh dreadful! dreadful! Here is a minister! Are Ministers witches too? What is your name? He told me that his name was George Burroughs.” And the next evening, Reverend Parris’s niece Abigail Williams also reported that former minister Burroughs was a wizard!

Two weeks later Burroughs was eating dinner with his family up in Maine, when he heard a ruckus outside his door. In marched Maine’s field marshal, Jonathan Partridge, along with a small band of soldiers. Had they come to help the citizens of Wells fight off Indian attacks? Certainly not! They had come to arrest Burroughs, and arrest him they did. Despite the fact that his neighbors looked up to him as a friend and counselor, Burroughs was immediately escorted all the way down to Salem Town, where he was “Suspected to have Confederacy with the devil.”

Even in Salem, where everyone suspected everyone else of witchcraft, people argued fervently about Burroughs’s guilt or innocence. One frontier militia leader said he was “a Choice Child of god, and God would Clear up his Innocency.” Others thought he was a wife-beater. And yet another swore he had an Evil Eye and “he was the Cheife of all the persons accused for witchcraft or the Ring Leader of them.”

By July, a 15-year-old girl from Andover named Mary Lacy Jr., who had confessed that she was a witch, would claim that she had flown to a secret communion where 77 witches were drinking blood and eating blood-colored bread. It was there that she saw a woman named Martha Carrier, also from Andover, who was supposed to have killed 13 people and was now Hell’s own Queen. And it was there, too, that she saw the Devil make a promise: Reverend George Burroughs would soon be crowned the King of Hell.

Burroughs was examined several times in front of enormous crowds between the day of his first witchcraft investigation on May 9 and his final official trial in Salem Town on August 5. At least 30 accusers would pile up a mountain of sworn testimony against him. What did they say? Some truly amazing things.

Ann Putnam Jr. said, “He told me he had had three wives: and that he had bewitched the first Two of them to death: and he bewitched a great many soldiers to death at the eastward.” These soldiers had died three or four years earlier during battles they lost against the Indians, and some of Burroughs’s detractors insisted that he was in cahoots with the enemy French and Indian soldiers. Since Puritans thought the Indians were devils, they believed that Burroughs must be in cahoots with the Devil, too. Then Ann said, “He told me that he was above a witch, he was a conjurer.” She embellished her story even more later on:

Next, a woman named Mary Toothaker testified that the minister had ordered a convention of 305 witches to pull down the Kingdom of Christ and set up the Kingdom of Satan. Before long, confessed witch after confessed witch claimed that they had been baptized in the name of the Devil by the King of Hell himself, Reverend George Burroughs.

Eighteen-year-old Susannah Sheldon, another refugee from the Indian war on the Maine frontier, said Burroughs threatened that if she wouldn’t sign the Devil’s book, he would tear her to pieces, starve her to death, and choke her until her vittles gave out. And to scare her even more, he said he killed three children on the frontier, smothered and choked two of his wives to death (their ghosts again agreed), and murdered two of his own children.

Though Burroughs was a short, slender man, some witnesses testified that he possessed superhuman strength that could only come from the Devil. Why, he could put two fingers in the bung holes of enormous barrels of molasses or cider or meat and lift them out of a canoe all by himself! He could put one finger into the seven-foot-long muzzle of a heavy fowling gun and hold the weapon straight out in front of him at arm’s length. He could run faster than any horse. He could turn into a gray cat. And a man named Thomas Ruck swore that Burroughs “could tell his thoughts.”

But who made the most stunning accusations in the entire case? It was none other than Ann Putnam Jr.’s servant, Mercy Lewis. Unlike most of the young accusers, Lewis knew Burroughs—not from the time he lived in Salem Village, but from the time he spent as the minister of Falmouth, Maine, her hometown.

When Lewis was three years old, Falmouth had been attacked and burned to cinders by Indians, and she and the few members of her family who were still alive had escaped to an island in Casco Bay with Reverend Burroughs’s help. Much later, when she was 16 years old, Lewis’s parents were killed (possibly right before her eyes) in another battle with the Indians, and she apparently became a servant in Burroughs’s household for a short while after that.

Burroughs had escaped from every single Indian attack on the frontier without a scratch. Did Lewis believe he was an ally of the Indians? She thought the Indians were devils, and she certainly wanted to get him in trouble, because this is what she swore under oath on April 3:

On the evening of May 7, before his first hearing had even begun, she had seen the spirit of Burroughs, whom she knew very well. This apparition tortured her horribly over and over again, urging her to sign her name in a mysterious book that he kept in his study. He said he had several books she had never seen, and he could use this one to raise the Devil himself. He told Lewis that the Devil was his servant and said he had even commanded the Devil to bewitch several other teenage girls.

Again he tortured Lewis, threatening to kill her if she told anybody what he had just said and ordering her once more to sign her name in the Devil’s book. Though he was shaking her all to pieces, she cried that she would never write in that book even if he killed her.

Then she told a rapt audience what happened two days later:

Upon hearing this testimony, the hideous clamor and screeching of the afflicted girls became so intense that they were removed from the courtroom for their own safety.