Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (8 page)
Read Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem Online
Authors: Rosalyn Schanzer
Tags: #Juvenile Nonfiction, #Witchcraft - Massachusetts - Salem - History, #Witchcraft, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Puritans, #Puritans - Massachusetts - Salem - History, #Witchcraft & Wicca, #General, #United States, #Religion, #Salem, #Colonial & Revolutionary Periods, #Massachusetts, #Christian Church, #Salem (Mass.) - Church History, #Christianity, #History
I
t was June 2, 1692, and the time to begin the first formal trial for witchcraft had arrived at last. The first person to be tried was Bridget Bishop, the keeper of Salem Town’s rowdy tavern.
Bishop seemed doomed from the start. As she was led from the jail toward the court, she glanced over at an empty church just as something came crashing down inside its walls. The spectators were sure that her spirit had caused all the trouble. This was not a good sign.
The moment Bishop arrived in court and pled innocent, another torrent of accusations poured forth—and nothing had changed from the previous hearings because every single bit of the evidence against her was spectral. One man claimed that Bishop had bewitched his child; he said the boy had been stupefied for 12 years. Another man said that 14 years earlier Bishop had hired him to do some work and paid him well, but by the time he got 15 or 20 yards away from her house, he realized that the money had vanished out of his pocket. Not long after that, the man saw her again, and his wagon “plumped or sunk down into a hole upon plain ground” and his wagon wheel fell off. He even testified that Bishop’s spirit had been hopping around on his bed wearing a black cape and hat.
A woman who had given Bishop a tongue lashing for stealing her spoon ten years earlier was convinced that Bishop’s specter was trying to drown her. Crazed with fear, she had lost her sanity. Bishop’s spirit had supposedly snatched a girl from her spinning wheel and tried to drown her, too. And some people even claimed to have met ghosts who said they were killed when Bishop stared at them with her evil “eye beams.” One field hand said he saw Bishop’s spirit stealing eggs again and then stared in wonder as she transformed herself into a cat.
Two workers who had repaired Bishop’s house testified that they had found some old stuffed dolls called poppits hidden inside a wall. Nobody really knew who owned them, but they were made out of rags and boar bristles, and lots of headless pins had been stuck into them. This was bad news because people had also found pins stuck into the accusers’ skin right there in the courtroom. Could Bishop’s spirit have put pins into the dolls in her house in order to torture her victims from afar?
But here’s the story that sealed her fate. According to Bishop’s neighbor, a hairy, black thing with the face of a man, the body of a monkey, and the feet of a rooster jumped into his window carrying a message from the Devil, who was out to kill him. The neighbor struck at this monster with a stick, but it was like striking thin air. The monster flew out of the window and vanished, so the neighbor ran outside, and there was Bishop walking toward her orchard next door. Some strange force made it impossible for him to move a single step in her direction, and at last he turned around to shut his door. Just then, the beast flew toward him yet again, sprang back, and then flew over an apple tree, flinging dust with its feet against his stomach and scattering apples as it sped away. The man was so terrified that he couldn’t even speak for three days.
Apparently only one of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, believed that Bishop was innocent. Chief Justice Stoughton and the rest of the men believed every single detail in this mountain of spectral evidence. So the end had come for Bridget Bishop. She was found guilty and condemned to death.
THE END IS NEAR
O
n the morning of June 10, Bishop was loaded into a cart surrounded by guards and officers on horseback and was driven away from the Salem Town Prison down Prison Lane. The procession then headed toward Salem Village, past crowds of gawking onlookers, and after crossing a bridge, it wound its way to the top of a ledge above a salt marsh. As Bishop continued to proclaim her innocence, guards wrapped her skirt around her feet and tied it tightly at the bottom. Then Essex County’s high sheriff, George Corwin, made her stand halfway up a ladder, where she was blindfolded and a noose was placed round her neck. Corwin kicked the ladder out from under her, and the noose jerked tight! She was hanged by the neck until dead.
On the very same day, a man named Thomas Brattle sent a letter to a gentleman in London. He made no mention of Bishop’s hanging, but he wrote a few words about the other goings on: “When Witches were Tryed several of them confessed a contract with the Devil by signing his Book, and did express much sorrow for the same, and said the Tempters tormented them till they did it.”
This was important because by now so many people who were accused of witchcraft had figured out that they would not be hanged if they confessed. Like Reverend Parris’s slave Tituba, all they had to do was to say they were sorry. In the end, 49 people confessed that they were witches.
The next part of Brattle’s letter revealed some foolish shenanigans going on in court:
At the time of the Examinations, before hundreds of Witnesses, strange Pranks were played; sometimes the afflicted took Pins out of their own Clothes and thrust them into their flesh. Many of these pins were taken out again by the Judges own hands. Thorns also were thrust into their flesh. The accusers were sometimes struck dumb, deaf, blind, and sometimes lay as if they were dead for a while, and all of these things were foreseen and declared by the afflicted just before it was done.
There were two Girls, about 12 or 13 years of age, who foresaw all that was done and were therefore called the Visionary Girls; they would say, Now he, or she, or they, are going to bite or pinch the Indian; and all there present in Court saw the visible marks on the Indians arms; they would also cry out, Now look, look, they are going to bind a certain person’s Legs, and all present saw the same person fall with her Legs twisted in an extra-ordinary manner;
Now say they, we shall all fall, and immediately 7 or 8 of the afflicted fell down, with terrible shrieks and outcries even though the Witch was tied up with a Cord and the afflicted Indian Servant was on his way home, (being about 2 or 3 miles out of town). Many Murders are supposed to be committed in this way, for these Girls, and others of the afflicted, say they can see Coffins and bodies in Shrouds rising up and looking at the accused, crying Vengeance, Vengeance on the Murderers.
On June 15, five days after the hanging, Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall resigned from the court. He had been totally appalled by its proceedings. Apparently a growing number of people were beginning to feel the same way because on that very same day, 14 ministers from 12 different towns presented an important message to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Entitled “Return of the Several Ministers” and written by famous Boston minister Cotton Mather (the author of that scary 1689 book about children with horrible fits), it stated that spectral evidence should never be used all by itself in court.
Mather believed in the Invisible World, but he also thought the Devil could make himself look exactly like an innocent person whenever he did his evil deeds. That way the Devil could lay the blame on anyone he pleased and they would be wrongly condemned to death. If the new magistrates were to do their duty properly, Mather wrote, they would only punish people for crimes everyone could see with their own two eyes.
Would the chief justice and his fellow judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer finally read what the document had to say and ban spectral evidence from the courtroom so that the trials could be fair?
The answer is no. The court did NOT abolish spectral evidence. It was obvious from their first trial that, to them, evidence everybody could see was simply not necessary. Before long, Nathaniel Saltonstall, the judge who had resigned, was accused of being a witch himself.
T
he Court convened again on June 29 for the final trials of these five women:
SUSANNA MARTIN
ELIZABETH HOW
SARAH WILDES
REBECCA NURSE
SARAH GOOD
Witnesses told scores of bizarre tales about the suspects. Their specters had drowned 13 oxen! Twisted a farm hand into a hoop! Turned into a ball of light the size of a bushel basket! Vanished into thin air! Choked a woman with nails and eggs, and choked men in bed or tore them to pieces! One suspect had turned into a black hog at a sinful party and another caused a horse to set a barn on fire. Again, the judges believed every word.
A woman named Goodie Bibber testified that the specter of Rebecca Nurse had pricked her with pins in the courtroom, but Nurse’s daughter Sarah testified that she had watched Bibber slip the pins out of her own dress and stab herself with them. The jury found Nurse not guilty. But the minute they heard this news, all of the afflicted accusers made a hideous outcry, amazing the spectators and the judges alike. Chief Justice Stoughton sent out the jury a second time, and when they returned, they pronounced Nurse guilty as charged.
Next up was Sarah Good, and for a change, some evidence from the Natural World came into play, according to Robert Calef, who witnessed the proceedings:
At the Trial of Sarah Good, one of the afflicted fell into a Fit, and after coming out of it, she cried out that the Prisoner had stabbed her in the breast with a Knife, and said that the Prisoner had broken the Knife when she stabbed her. Accordingly a piece of a Knife blade was found near the accuser. But immediately someone informed the Court that there was some new evidence. A young Man was called, who produced a Knife Handle and part of the Blade. The Court saw that it came from the same knife, and upon being questioned, the young Man affirmed that yesterday he happened to break that Knife, and that he cast away the upper part, and this afflicted person was watching when he did it.
Chief Justice Stoughton simply told the accuser to be honest from now on. He had already decided Good was guilty, and the use of false evidence did not matter.
I
t was the morning of July 19, just one day after Indian raiders had killed several people and kidnapped a three-year-old boy not too far north of Salem Village. The weather was hot and dry, dry, dry on this hanging day for the five condemned witches. As they rode toward Gallows Hill, each of them prayed fervently that God would prove their innocence. Susanna Martin, a tiny, 70-year-old widow, had laughed at her accusers in court and thought they might be witches themselves. When asked if she had any compassion for the people beset by fits, she said, “No, I have none.” Elizabeth How had exclaimed, “If it was the last moment I was to live, God knows I am innocent of anything in this nature.” And most of the accusations against Sarah Wildes had been about things that supposedly happened 15 or 20 years earlier.
Salem Town clergyman Nicholas Noyes, the official minister of the trials, told Good he knew she was a witch and tried to get her to make a last-minute confession. Good was furious. “You are a lyer,” she exclaimed. “I am no more a Witch than you are a Wizard; and if you take away my Life, God will give you Blood to drink!” Legend has it that 25 years later, Reverend Noyes died of a hemorrhage, choking on his own blood.
The women were buried near the hanging site, but as soon as darkness fell, Nurse’s family uncovered her body and transported it by boat to be reburied on their own home ground.
M
ore people than ever flocked to the hangings on Friday, August 19, mostly because everyone for miles around had come to see Salem Village’s former minister, George Burroughs. Five condemned witches would be hanged on that day:
JOHN PROCTOR
JOHN WILLARD
MARTHA CARRIER
GEORGE JACOBS SR.
REVEREND GEORGE BURROUGHS
One convicted witch was excused from being hanged with the rest. Elizabeth Proctor was pregnant, so she was allowed to remain in jail. But her faithful husband was certainly not let off the hook. Huge, energetic, and blunt, John Proctor was the tavern keeper who had been accused by his own maidservant back in April. After punishing his servant for framing innocent people (including himself), and after calling the witch trials a sham, he had become the first male to be accused as a witch. He had strongly defended his wife, too, testifying that “If they [the afflicted girls] were let alone, so we should all be devils and witches.” Once jailed, John Proctor had written five Boston ministers to say that all the accused witches were innocent and to describe how torture was being used to make his teenage son William and others confess. Of course his petition did nothing to stop the trials.
John Willard had fled from Salem Village after a warrant was issued for his arrest, and he managed to reach a field he owned 40 miles away before he got caught. During his examination back on May 18, he had said, “I fear not but the Lord in his due time will make me as white as snow.” He, too, never confessed, and he approached the gallows with great dignity.
Back in May, when the girls in the courtroom had accused Martha Carrier of murdering 13 people and said she was the Queen of Hell, she had told the judges, “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.” Carrier, a minister’s niece, had been jailed along with four of her five children. Her two oldest sons were tortured along with Proctor’s son in an effort to make them say their own parents were witches. Carrier’s boys adamantly refused to confess or to blame their mother. For being so stubborn, they had their heels tied to their necks until blood gushed out of their noses. Finally, the oldest said he had signed a black man’s book, and he accused 19 witches, including his mother. The younger son said he had signed the book, too. He reluctantly named three witches but refused to accuse his mother.
On August 12, a week before 80-year-old George Jacobs Sr. was sent to the gallows, Sheriff George Corwin confiscated everything he owned—off Corwin went with all of Jacobs’s cows, pigs, fowls, land, cider, Indian corn, bedding, brass kettles, pewter, furniture, hay, apples, and cider. He also took a horse and even Mrs. Jacobs’s wedding ring. This was illegal. The goods that Corwin stole were supposed to support the family of the accused while he was in jail and were to be turned over to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the King of England only after his death, but the government never saw hide nor hair of the booty and neither did Jacobs’s family.
Puritans believed you had to confess your sins before you died if you wanted to save your soul and go to Heaven. On the day of the hanging, John Proctor absolutely refused to confess that he was a witch, but he did ask Reverend Nicholas Noyes to pray with him at the jail. Noyes angrily refused in turn. So when the prisoners reached Gallows Hill, Proctor and Carrier asked Reverend Cotton Mather to pray with them, and he did. Proclaiming their innocence to the end, they prayed that God would forgive them for any other sins and would forgive their accusers too, so that theirs would be the last innocent blood to be shed.
And what about the supposed King of Hell, George Burroughs? Despite the risk of being condemned as witches themselves, 32 highly respectable citizens of Salem Village signed a petition pleading his innocence. It made no difference.
The day before the hangings, Margaret Jacobs had paid a visit to Burroughs to admit she had lied when she accused him along with her grandfather, George Jacobs Sr. She had already officially petitioned Salem’s Court to recant her accusations and thereby save their lives, writing that “What I said was altogether false against my grandfather, and Mr. Burroughs…[the jailers] told me, if I would not confess, I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess I should have my life.” Though she had risked her own life by recanting, it didn’t do a bit of good for her grandfather or Burroughs. Margaret begged Burroughs’s forgiveness, and it is said that he was kind enough to pray “with and for her.”
The hanging of Burroughs is described here by a spectator named Robert Calef:
Mr. Burroughs was carried in a cart with the others through the streets of Salem to his execution; when he was upon the ladder, he made a speech for the clearing of his Innocence, with such Solemn and Serious expressions, as were to the Admiration of all present; he concluded by reading the Lords’ prayer so well, and with such composedness and fervency of Spirit, that it drew tears from many, and it seemed that the Spectators would hinder the Execution.
