Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (9 page)

Puritans believed that a true wizard could not possibly say the Lord’s Prayer without making a mistake, but Burroughs had recited it perfectly.

G
iles Cory, the cantankerous 80-year-old farmer who had testified against his wife, Martha, appeared at his final hearing on September 16 and pled “not guilty.” He refused to put himself on trial by jury, and some people say he had a good reason: Cory knew he wasn’t a witch, and he had no intention of confessing in order to be set free. If he went to trial, he would surely be found guilty and all his property would be taken away, leaving his family with nothing.

So perhaps that’s why Cory did a very stubborn thing: He decided to “stand mute” and would not utter one single word in court no matter what happened. Under the laws of New England, anyone who refused to talk could not be tried, but the punishment for remaining silent was far worse than being hanged; it was a type of torture known as
peine forte et dure
. This meant that the prisoner would be forced to lie down on his back while more and more weight was piled on top of him until he either agreed to be questioned in court, confessed, or died.

On Monday, September 19, Cory was stripped naked and a big board was set down on top of his chest. Then, as the townsfolk stared, a large number of extremely heavy rocks were piled one by one onto the board. Cory had only one thing to say; he asked to have more weight added so that he could die faster. But it would take two long days for him to breathe his last. Calef, the spectator who had written about Burroughs’s hanging, reported a horrible little detail about Cory: “His tongue being forced out of his mouth, the Sheriff with his Cane forced it in again when he was dying. He was the first in New England that was ever pressed to death.”

Cory was buried in an unmarked grave by Butts Brook as if he were a suicide. But some people were greatly upset about the way he had died. Public opposition to the witchcraft trials began to pick up speed.

T
hursday, September 22, turned out to be the last time anyone would hang on Gallows Hill, but nobody knew it yet. The final victims of the witch hunt were:

MARY EASTY

MARTHA CORY

MARGARET SCOTT

ALICE PARKER

ANN PUDEATOR

WILMOTT REDD

MARY PARKER

SAMUEL WARDWELL

All eight prisoners were jammed into a single cart, which bumped its way uphill toward the gallows. The overburdened vehicle was so heavy that it got stuck in a rut and almost turned over. Rowdy spectators cried out that “the Devil hindered it.”

And what were the last words of the condemned? Respectable Mary Easty, a highly intelligent mother of seven children and the sister of Rebecca Nurse, wrote a well-reasoned, humble petition to the governor and judges urging them to rethink their procedures and to stop condemning the innocent.

Her plea went unheeded.

What about the seven other people on the list? According to spectator Calef, “Martha Cory, protesting her innocency, concluded her life with an eminent prayer upon the ladder.” Her husband, Giles Cory, had been pressed to death just two days earlier. And Margaret Scott had been framed by rumors that a dying man said he would never be well as long as she lived. Then there was Alice Parker, who had been accused of bewitching a girl because the girl’s father wouldn’t mow her grass (Parker’s accuser, Mary Warren, received permission from Judge Stoughton to strike Parker for lying, but Warren had a dreadful fit instead).

Ann Pudeator, the wealthiest person to hang, was accused of making a man fall out of a cherry tree and making ointments to use for sorcery. Wilmott Redd was a gruff, unpopular fisherman’s wife from Marblehead. Mary Parker had yelled at her husband for going to a tavern and had also been accused of bewitching a sick child. Parker insisted that she was accused because someone else had the same name as hers.

Last came Samuel Wardwell, an eccentric carpenter, fortune-teller, and magician who had at first confessed that he was a wizard and then changed his mind and recanted. When Wardwell tried to declare his innocence on Gallows Hill, smoke from the hangman’s pipe set him to coughing. This prompted the afflicted girls to declare that “the Devil hindered him with smoak.”

As usual, hard-nosed Reverend Noyes had not one bit of sympathy for the people who were hanged. “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of Hell hanging there,” he proclaimed. About that time, it began to pour down rain.

A
s the cool winds of autumn blew into New England, it became obvious that change was in the air. More and more people were starting to realize that the innocent were being executed because of hearsay, malicious gossip, and invisible evidence. Some people even wondered whether the accusers were witches themselves, especially since they said they could talk so easily with the Devil and because they sometimes contradicted their own stories.

Far too many fine upstanding Puritans from the best families were being packed off to jail. Besides that, the main accusers seemed perfectly healthy outside of the courtroom, and the sheer number of suspects was so high that it was impossible to believe this many people could all be witches. A Beverly, Massachusetts, minister named John Hale said it best: “It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil’s lap at once.”

What’s more, every single one of the 19 people who were hanged denied the crime of witchcraft right up until the moment they died. If these denials had been a pack of lies, God would never allow their souls to enter heaven, and the accused people knew it. Since nobody wants to go to Hell for lying about being a witch, surely this meant that none of them was guilty. Until now, many townsfolk who thought the trials were unfair had been afraid to say a word for fear of being accused themselves. But it was becoming quite clear that unless the trials were stopped, an entire generation of innocent Puritans could be condemned as witches.

O
n October 3, Boston Reverend Increase Mather preached a sermon arguing against the witch hunts. He agreed with his son Cotton that the Devil could make himself look exactly like any innocent person he chose. But Increase added that the Devil could play his dirty tricks without a person’s permission. (The judges had always claimed that the Devil needed a person’s permission before he could use that person’s likeness as a disguise.) The upshot was that Increase thought it could be the Devil, not the accused people, who was causing all the trouble. Like Cotton, he again urged the courts to exclude every bit of spectral evidence from now on, saying it would be “better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.”

On October 6, six young suspects in the Salem prison were released on bail. This was something entirely new.

On October 8, eight powerful men (a former governor and deputy governor, the Reverend Increase Mather, a major who had resigned as a judge during the witch trials, and several other justices from various towns) signed a letter declaring their objections to the witch trials. The letter was written by Thomas Brattle, the same man who wrote earlier that the accusers had purposely injured themselves in court with pins and thorns hidden in their clothing. Brattle said that the group was “very much dissatisfyed with the proceedings; also several of the present Justices; and in particular, some of the Boston Justices were resolved to throw up their commissions rather than be active in disturbing the liberty of their Majesties’ subjects, merely on the accusations of these afflicted, possessed children.”

On October 19, a group of sobbing women reversed their previous confessions and revealed that not a single person they had accused of witchcraft had done them a bit of harm. They said their examiners had harassed them over and over to make them confess, and their families begged them to confess, too, so that they wouldn’t hang. Finally they’d had no other choice than to wrong themselves and lie about their friends.

On Saturday, October 29, Massachusetts’s Royal Governor William Phips put a halt to all further arrests and disbanded the notorious Court of Oyer and Terminer. He also released a lot of the people who were still in jail. On December 14, a brand new Superior Court of Judicature was established, though Chief Justice Stoughton and friends were still included. Their new job was to figure out what to do with accused witches who hadn’t yet been tried. And this had to be done without basing any cases on spectral evidence; all those stories from the Invisible World had been banned at last.

The upshot was that out of 52 people tried before the new court in January and February 1693, only three were convicted, and each of them had already confessed. (This rule had changed, too. If you confessed, you no longer got off scot-free or received special privileges.) The governor later released all three anyway, and nine suspects who had been sent to jail earlier weren’t even called into court. The Salem witch trials had ended.

W
e may never know exactly what caused the tragedy in Salem. The root of all this horror and pandemonium lies buried in a dark and misty past. Oh yes, every single sentence in surviving trial transcripts, every surviving letter written by eyewitnesses, each legal document, and all of the books written during the period have been scrutinized by scholars for well over 300 years. And yes, every new explanation about the cause of the dread disease or the motives of the accusers has been debated over and over again by professional historians. Some of the most well-known ideas have been ruled out, but even so, plenty of questions and theories still remain.

WHAT CAUSED THE FITS AND THE HYSTERIA OVER WTICHES?

Was there really a dread disease running rampant in New England? If so, could it have been encephalitis or Lyme disease, both of which exhibit many of the symptoms described by the victims? Were any sick people and animals poisoned by hallucinogenic jimson weed or a fungus in rye called ergot?

Did people who had originally lived on the frontier during the Indian wars suffer from fits and see visions of specters because they had post-traumatic stress disorder? After all, many members of their own families had been massacred right before their eyes. And did the Puritans’ belief that Indians were devils and witches worsen their fear of attacks by unknown forces as well?

WERE THE ACCUSERS CROOKED OR HONEST?
A

Were the families of at least some of the afflicted simply trying to protect their loved ones from the Devil and his witches? That might make perfect sense because most everyone believed in witches and the Devil back in those days. And it does seem that some people and animals were really sick.

Was there an evil plot by Reverend Parris, Thomas Putnam, and their supporters to take advantage of hysteria over the dread disease by doing away with their personal enemies? Did the Putnams’ jealousy and anger over the perceived loss of their property spur a desire to destroy the Porters’ supporters by making them look like witches?

Rebecca Nurse’s son and son-in-law and Sarah Cloyse’s husband thought so, and they later helped force Parris to leave the community. And a series of letters and documents Putnam wrote or co-wrote in 1691 and 1692 indicate that he may have set up the accusations against Reverend George Burroughs, Burroughs’s arrest, and his daughter Ann’s testimony against the minister. He may even have worked with the judges to see that Burroughs was found guilty and hanged.

Was some of the witch hunting the result of that big fight between Reverend Parris and the members of his congregation who refused to pay his salary? These members had also been incensed over a 1689 contract with Parris that had given him the house he lived in. (Usually, the church would own the house, and the minister working there at the time would live in it.)

What about the testimony of the young girls? Had a group of them joined in a secret conspiracy to fake their fits and tortures? Did they purposely stick pins into their own skin during the trials or secretly bite themselves before accusing the witches of harming them? If so, why? Were some of them simply helping their parents by making their enemies look bad in court? Were they bored thrill seekers trying to get attention? Was it all a big game to pull the wool over the eyes of the adults? After all, John Proctor’s servant Mary Warren, who had once accused the accusers of lying, reported that one girl said they went after the innocent suspects “for sport…we must have some sport.”

WERE THE JUDGES CROOKED OR HONEST?

Were the judges, consciously or unconsciously, eager to put blame for their blunders during the Indian Wars at the feet of witches and devils to avoid responsibility themselves? Did they use the minister George Burroughs as their scapegoat because they disapproved of his unusual religious views? Or did the judges conspire to make off with a share of the arrested citizens’ money and property. Three of the judges were related to George Corwin, the 25-year-old high sheriff of Essex County. They included the sheriff’s uncles, Jonathan Corwin and Wait-Still Winthrop, and his father-in-law, Bartholomew Gedney. Sheriff Corwin was in charge of arrests and property seizures among other duties.

In those days, a witch’s property was supposed to be turned over to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the King of England after she or he was hanged. What’s more, large fees could be collected from the accused witches and their families. But Sheriff Corwin ignored the King and the Colony and kept all that booty, even before anyone was hanged.

If certain judges connived with Corwin to convict wealthy people, maybe they got a cut of the action. Chief Justice Stoughton wrote out a warrant that allowed the estates and property of people who were executed to be seized and disposed of without ever telling Governor Phips or asking for his consent. This was illegal, too. And one time, when a Quaker woman asked why the court had seized her oxen, a judge replied, “Would you have us starve while we sit about your business?”

I
t seems likely that several of these theories are correct: Perhaps all of the disease, superstition, paranoia, hysteria, past resentments, cowardice, religious fervor, greed—and even boredom—boiled and bubbled together to foment a perfect storm in 1692 that finally exploded in the little town of Salem Village, to horrendous and tragic effect.