From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging.

Another man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death over a two day period under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges.

Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials.  Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended.

Although there had been international witch hunts for several years, the outbreak in America was rather new. There were many causes for these hunts (both real and imaginary), but it was the hunts in Salem that became the epitome of what fear, hate and hysteria can do to otherwise sane people.

In England, witch hunts had been commonplace for quite some time. It was a time of great religious strength and belief, yet a time of fear and belief in otherworldly powers as well.

In a society based heavily on the belief, worship and adherence to biblical law, it is not hard to see why people so readily believed that witches and warlocks were about them. Spiritual crimes were completely acceptable in court, and spiritual evidence was enough to earn a person their death sentence.

In America, the strict Puritans were settled all across the north east. Puritans lived a simple life which revolved in all ways around bettering their lives spiritually.

They worked six days a week, resting only on Sunday when they would attend mass which would last from 5-8 hours. If they were not working or in church, they should be praying or reflecting on their spiritual lives.

They were aware at all times that Satan and God were at war and that the battleground was the Puritans’ souls. For this reason, life was quite somber. They did not dance, sing anything but hymns, write anything but religious journals or poems (except women…women should not write at all), nor could they participate in any idle activity like athletics….especially bowling…true story.

Some of the reasons witch hunts began in America were quite strange. One primarily dealing with mold and another with children playing games.

In one New York area, a type of mold has been blamed for the cause of children screaming ‘witch’ on several people. It is believed that the mold on a certain harvest of rye reacted to the rising hormones of teenage girls thus causing a type of minor hallucination. They would see people glowing, changing color or moving in odd ways. It was basically a minor acid trip…for ultra-religious Puritans. This seemed to make them look detached from their bodies, and some people were condemned for this.

Another case was due to children pretending to be dogs. Two ten-old-year girls were pretending to be dogs.

They were witnessed by a pair of adults who automatically thought the behavior must be due to witch possession.Within a few weeks, the jail was filled.

The trials in Salem had one of the most incredible stories.

There are variations of just where the strange behavior of several village girls began. Some accounts say it started with the weird behavior of Betty Parris (daughter of the village preacher).

However, a great deal more accounts claim that Betty’s behavior was due to her being involved with a voodoo priestess and the casting of love spells.

Reverend Parris (betty’s father) had a slave woman from Barbados named Tituba. It was known that Tituba practiced Voodoo, and she was therefore the first person to be accused as a witch.

During a clear night in 1692, Tituba and a group of young ladies gathered together in the woods around a fire. Tituba was helping them cast love spells for the boys in the village that they wanted to marry….here the story diverges. One account says that Reverend Parris stumbled across the dancing girls (some nude), thus causing panic and fear in the girls. Another case claims that Abigail Williams turned from a love spell to a death spell. She wanted to kill a man’s wife so she could marry him.

Whatever the case, Tituba was the first to be accused as a witch. She was not given the immediate luxury of a trial. Confession was beaten out of her. Eventually she named two women she said came with the Devil to visit her. Because of her cries, Bridget Bishop was the first to be executed. Soon, others were confessing that they had seen several more women with the Devil and that they had been witched by them.

Within weeks, hundreds were jailed, many were hanged, and many more ruined for life.

It was incredibly easy to prove witchcraft.

1. The afflicted person makes a complaint to the Magistrate about a suspected witch.  The complaint is sometimes made through a third person.

2.  The Magistrate issues a warrant for the arrest of the accused person.

3.  The accused person is taken into custody and examined.  If, after listening to testimony, the Magistrate believes that the accused person is probably guilty (which was almost always), the accused is sent to jail for possible reexamination and to await trial.

4.  The case is presented to the Grand Jury.  Depositions relating to the guilt or innocence of the accused are entered into evidence.

5.  If the accused is indicted by the Grand Jury, he or she is tried before the Court of Oyer and Terminer.  A jury, instructed by the Court, decides the defendant's guilt.

6.  The convicted defendant receives his or her sentence from the Court.  In each case at Salem, the convicted defendant was sentenced to be hanged on a specified date.

7.  The Sheriff and his deputies carry out the sentence of death on the specified date.

 

In Salem, all a person had to do was accuse a person of witchcraft. They were then arrested, jailed and tried. Here’s the kicker….there was no way to win.

If a person plead innocent to witchcraft, they must obviously be lying and must therefore be hanged as a witch.

If they admitted to being a witch, they could be spared and be set free for coming clean and converting back to Christianity…..but…Puritan belief strictly enforced the knowledge that if a person purposely lies, they damn their soul.

So you could save your life but lose your soul, or lose your life but save your soul….either way, you’re shafted.

Salem also had the group of accusing girls as the jury. If they saw a devil with the accused, the girls contorted into grotesque poses, fell down into frozen postures, and complained of biting and pinching sensations. In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession.

The sad truth as to what happened in Salem was that there were several occasions where people accused their neighbors of witchcraft so that they could kill them off and take their land. The Putnam family actually had their daughter cry “witch” on several people so they could then buy their land at insanely cheap prices. People murdered for profit.

Other times it was so that the accuser could feel better about themselves. If a man had thought impure thoughts of a woman in the village, he could claim that she had sent her spirit out to seduce him. She would be tried and killed, thus making him feel “clean” again, and pure in thought….and, of course, someone else was to blame.

In Salem, hysteria rose to new levels. The girls in the courtroom (at least in part) truly believed they were seeing spirits, demons, spiritual birds and witches all about them. It came to a point where all it would take was a single reaction or word from anywhere in the court and every girl in the jury would fall into a kind of self-hypnosis. Their body temperatures would drop, they would all see the same things, sometimes they would even fall under invisible physical attacks….or at least believe so to the point that physical pain was felt.

The minds of the girls were so possessed with the belief that they were being attacked, that their bodies reacted to the mental stimulus. Abigail Williams, above all others, knew this and used it in her favor.

The madness would not stop until 20 people were executed, others died in jail, and the very ground of Puritanism was broken to pieces.

But was all this hate for hysteria’s sake? Or love?

The book “The Crucible” looks at the Salem witch trials through the views of some of its most important people. We see Reverend Parris’ insane need for control and power in the church and society. We see girls on the stand mesmerized in their own terror such as Mary Warren. There is the lust for land by the Putnams, and the hysteria of the masses, but there are also the very personal struggles of farmers like the Proctors. And of course, the events that famed one of the greatest murderesses of all time, Abigail Williams, who likely acted as she did in order to be with a man nearly 20 years her senior, John Proctor.

There is possible evidence to link the two in an affair which she would have paid any price to have continued. Whatever the case, she is definitely the girl who truly began and ended Salem witch hunts, while destroying Puritanism in America at the same time.

We must know and analyze the following characters to truly understand what happened, and why it has happened several times in America since.

Abigail Williams

John and Elizabeth Proctor

The Putnams

Parris

Lonely, orphaned, abandoned, she feels worthless to all but John. She believes that she has only one thing anyone would want. Needed to feel loved. Lost her reputation and her employment when she was caught in an affair by Elizabeth Proctor.

Married farming couple. Out of graces with the church recently. Elizabeth is sad, quiet and recovering from nearly dieing. John is strong, humorous, wise but ashamed of his infidelities with Abigail Williams…who was about 13 at the time he had an affair with her.

Undoubtedly the richest people in Salem, yet still greedy, Thomas Putnam has made it a habit to do anything in his power to gain more property. His wife is clinically insane. Her first 7 children all died the night of their births. Only one child survived, Ruth. When she becomes one of the “afflicted girls”, Mrs. Putnam goes even further insane.

Reverend Parris is a strange man. Formerly a man of bad reputation (including being involved in the slave trade and the horrors that come with it) Parris is now a man of God. Yet he is greedy and obsessed with the thought that people are always in conspiracy against him. He fears more that his name will be tarnished than that his own daughter may die at the hands of witches. And, of course, he’s Abigail’s only living relative.

There have been numerous witch hunts since those in Salem…they just went under different names. The most well known was McCarthyism. This was a time, very recently, when anyone could be exposed as a communist and potential threat to the USA. They could be arrested and tried for any number of crimes just as the “witches” in Salem were.

Throughout the world, several other forms of witch hunts have come and gone. Certainly you can think of a few.

The basic premise is that we still readily fall into hysteria and mass popular belief even in the face of honest facts. It is a human flaw which we show no signs of improving.

So long as there are people, it appears that we will find ever more incredible ways to fear, hate and destroy each other.