Josh Hutchinson: What is The Thing About Salem?
Sarah Jack: It’s whatever one sees as the main point of the Salem Witch Trials or the Witch City.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s that the people involved in the Salem Witch Trials were just like us.
Sarah Jack: It’s that fear can make communities turn on each other, but understanding that can help us do better.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s that history isn’t just dates and facts, it’s real people making real choices we might face too.
It’s where we share fun, bite-sized episodes focused on the Salem Witch Trials and the factors that influenced them, because these stories matter more than ever today. Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I’m Sarah Jack. You’re here for The Thing About Witch Hunts, but you get a special treat.
Josh Hutchinson: We recently created a second podcast called The Thing About Salem to explore Salem history, [00:01:00] culture, and community voices. In this special crossover episode, we’re going to play the extended edition of one of the episodes we did on The Thing About Salem, about the key moments in the Salem Witch Trials.
Sarah Jack: Subscribe to The Thing About Salem on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with someone who needs to hear these stories, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Just the facts, ma’am. Did you use at any time to ride upon a stick or pole?
Sarah Jack: Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: How high?
Sarah Jack: Sometimes above the trees.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you anoint yourselves before you fly?
Sarah Jack: No, but the devil carried us upon hand poles.
Josh Hutchinson: Tell us all the truth. What kind of worship did you do the devil?
Sarah Jack: He bid me pray to him and serve him, and he said he was a god and lord to me.
Josh Hutchinson: What did he promise to give you?
Sarah Jack: He said I would want nothing [00:02:00] in this world and that I would obtain glory with him.
Josh Hutchinson: Why would they hurt the village people?
Sarah Jack: The devil would set up his kingdom there and we should have happy days and it would then be better times for me if I obey him.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you hear the 77 witches’ names called over?
Sarah Jack: Yes, the devil called them.
Josh Hutchinson: What did he say to them?
Sarah Jack: He told them obey him and do his commands and it would be better for them and they should obtain crowns in hell. And Goody Carrier told me, the devil said to her, she should be a queen in hell.
Josh Hutchinson: Who was to be king?
Sarah Jack: The minister.
Josh Hutchinson: What kind of man is Mr. Burroughs?
Sarah Jack: A pretty, little man, and he has come to us sometimes in his spirit in the shape of a cat, and I think sometimes in his proper shape.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you hear the devil hurts in the shape of any person without their consent?[00:03:00]
Sarah Jack: No.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to The Thing About Salem. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: The interrogation we just reenacted was taken from the record of the July 21st, 1692 examinations of Mary Lacey Jr., Mary Lacey Sr., Ann Foster, Richard Carrier, and Andrew Carrier, and was a pivotal moment, which we’ll have more about later in the episode.
Sarah Jack: We think of the witch-hunt as a runaway train fueled by hysteria, but
Josh Hutchinson: there were a multitude of individual actors that had free will to change the course of the events.
We’ll be tallking about pivotal moments in the witch trials, when a person or group could have made a different decision and led the affair to a more peaceful conclusion.
Sarah Jack: We’ll also cover some times when people did succeed in bringing down the temperature in the [00:04:00] room. Had these choices not been made, the runaway train may have gone off the rails.
Josh Hutchinson: So, of course, we’re talking about the Salem Witch Trials, which we think of as beginning in January 1692 with the afflictions of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, and it lasted until May 1693, when the final court proceedings were held and the final prisoners were released from jail.
Sarah Jack: There are a lot of these points of escalations. We’re gonna highlight some of our favorites.
Josh Hutchinson: One early turning point was the arrests of Martha Cory, Rebecca Nurse, and Dorothy Good, which took place between March 21st and March 24th. Martha was arrested first on March 21st, and she was the first church member to be accused of witchcraft. She was a member of the Salem Village Church, and yet here [00:05:00] she stands accused of being a witch.
Sarah Jack: Then a few days later on March 24th, my ninth great-grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, was arrested.
Rebecca was the first member of the Salem Town Church to be arrested.
Josh Hutchinson: And the same day that Rebecca was arrested, Dorothy Good was jailed. She was a 4-year-old girl child, the daughter of Sarah Good. And despite her very young age, she’s thrown in jail. They have to make special irons to fit around her little wrists and ankles to keep her in chains in the festering dungeon.
And this tells us that they weren’t looking for just the usual suspects anymore. If church members and little baby children not even old enough for today, kindergarten [00:06:00] are getting accused of being witches that hurt people, anybody is open to accusation.
Sarah Jack: The next turn of events that was critical in escalating what was happening was in April. On April 19th, Abigail Hobbs gave a confession.
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail, who’s Sarah’s favorite confessor.
Sarah Jack: She is,
Josh Hutchinson: The wild.
are grand.Abigail was the wild child of Topsfield, had a very interesting relationship with her stepmother and had a very interesting relationship with the devil, which she confessed to on April 19th, and in her subsequent questioning of her in jail, she elaborated, but being from Topsfield, that expanded the search radius for witches beyond [00:07:00] Salem Village. So that was a big piece of it. And this was the first confession by anyone since Tituba had confessed on March 1st.
Sarah Jack: There’s also no signs of coercion on this one. It appears to be a voluntary confession. Her confession was a confession of covenanting with the devil. It was a diabolical confession.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Abigail and her stepmother, Deliverance Hobbs, they filled in key details about the diabolic pact and the witches’ sabbath, how those things worked.
Sarah Jack: And Abigail said that she gave the devil her permission to afflict people. So the devil went out in her specter, her likeness, but only because she said that he could. And this was a big moment, because this said that the [00:08:00] witches had to willingly allow the devil to use their form, that the devil couldn’t use anybody’s shape without their permission. In other words, he couldn’t appear as an innocent person. So therefore, the specters that were being seen by the afflicted people were really the specters of witches who had given the devil their permission.
So this added some cred to spectral evidence, which the ministers and others were really trying to decide. I mean, in other witch trials even, they were questioning whether a spectral form was actually the person or if it was the devil impersonating them.
A very big moment in the Salem Witch Trials happened May 27th. This was what actually led to the trial phase happening, because [00:09:00] for months, the jails had been filling with witchcraft suspects, but Governor William Phips, the brand new governor for the Colony, he comes to Boston on May 14th with a brand new charter and instructions to form new courts, but the General Court, the legislature of the colony, has to be the one that forms the courts, and they don’t get around to doing this until November.
Josh Hutchinson: So what happens in the meantime, Phips creates a special court called the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which means to hear and determine, and he appoints nine judges to it. And they’re gonna start in June. The Chief Justice is gonna be William Stoughton. He’s the new Lieutenant [00:10:00] Governor in this new hierarchy with the royally appointed Governor Phips.
Sarah Jack: Who Margo Burns calls Uncle Billy.
Josh Hutchinson: Uncle Billy was in charge of this court of Oyer and Terminer, and with him, he had judges Bartholomew Gedney, John Richards, Nathaniel Saltonstall, Wait Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Peter Sargent.
Sarah Jack: Did I just hear Winthrop was one of the judges?
Josh Hutchinson: A Winthrop, the son of John Winthrop Jr., who had been the governor of Connecticut for many years.
Sarah Jack: And the grandson of John Winthrop Senior.
Josh Hutchinson: So this is the third generation of Winthrop that is trying people for witchcraft in the new world because both grandpa and father had previously been involved in witch trials in Boston and in Hartford, [00:11:00] Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, and John Winthrop Sr. wrote notes on the very first woman hang for witchcraft in Hartford, which was Alice Young, and then also on Margaret Jones, who was hanged in Boston Tangent. But it’s, it’s good to think about that. You know, Again, these escalations were up against all this historied experience of things coming.
Josh Hutchinson: Hmm.
Sarah Jack: To fruition where women are getting executed for witchcraft, this is that times 10.
Josh Hutchinson: A lot of things had to come together for the Salem Witch trials to happen the way that they happened. And the creation of the court of Oyer and Terminate was a pivotal moment in the witch trial process, because, you know, had they waited for the regular courts to be formed and gone through regular [00:12:00] processes, maybe some of the decisions would’ve come out a little differently about how to, what kind of evidence to admit and what procedures to follow.
Sarah Jack: Another thing about the witch trials that I think we sometimes forget is that ministers and other men were doing a lot of deliberation around the seen world and the unseen world and how that was impacting witchcraft and who the witch was, and if the accusations were about diabolical afflictions or harm and I love taking a look at what the ministers were saying. I love taking a look at the deliberations. I wish they would not have had such a difficult time coming to the conclusions that they needed to come to. But one of the significant ones is the Return of the Ministers on [00:13:00] June 15th.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Boston area ministers had been asked for guidance by Governor Phips. He wanted to know how to handle the witch trials and particularly what types of evidence were admissible and would, could be used as proof that witchcraft had happened. So they question things like spectral evidence. How do we proceed with this?
Sarah Jack: This report was called The Return of Several Ministers, and it was written by Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Increase Mather had just come home from London where he spent years negotiating the new charter for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, which became the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Sarah Jack: In the Return, the ministers warned the justices about relying upon spectral evidence. Even though Abigail’s story was so colorful and compelling, [00:14:00] they were urged, and not just hers, of course, a lot of the, the spectral evidence was, could have been very compelling and scary.
They urged the justices to avoid folk tests for witchcraft, and suggested that the justices follow the guidelines set forth in books by English puritans, such as Perkins and Bernard.
Josh Hutchinson: The ministers also recommended that the justices hold their proceedings in calm environments, cautioned them against using spectral visions as proof of guilt, because demons could assume the image of innocent people.
Sarah Jack: And we know from comments in the examination papers that during the examinations of Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good and others, it was not calm. It was not a calm environment.
The Return also closed with a recommendation for the speedy and [00:15:00] vigorous prosecution of the witches, so contradicts itself, basically. First, they’re urging caution throughout the report, but then at the end, they’re saying be speedy and vigorous. So the judges, they take this return and they say well, we like spectral evidence. We like doing folk tests. We do things like this touch test where if a witch touches an afflicted person, the afflicted person becomes well because the magic goes back from them to the witch who harmed them. And the judges continued to do those tests and to accept spectral evidence. What if they had stopped here? What if they had had a different response?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What if they, what if Cotton Mather hadn’t written that last line about the speedy and vigorous prosecution? What if he’d been consistent in [00:16:00] advocating for caution? Would there have been a peaceful end to the witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: In mid-July, there’s another grand turning point, and this one is really what expands the amount of people who are descendants of those who experienced the Salem Witch Trials, because things expanded to the community of Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Andover, including what is today the separate community of North Andover, was the scene of a very heated chapter in the Salem Witch Trials. The town of Andover had more witchcraft accusations than any other community, including Salem. Even if you combine the town center and the village of Salem, they did not have as many accusations as the little town of Andover, which was about the size of Salem Village, had about 500 ish people, [00:17:00] had 45 accusations by the end of the witch trials.
Sarah Jack: Another catalyst in the Andover phase was the sickness of Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. Sickness tends to be part of the story when there’s a witch trial.
Josh Hutchinson: For instance, the Salem Witch Trials all started because of sickness in Samuel Parris’s household that spread through Salem Village. And now here there’s an unexplained illness in Andover.
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: One big element of this Elizabeth Phelps Ballard sickness is that her husband at some point called down to Salem Village and got some of the afflicted girls to come up and examine his wife and determine who was bewitching her. And so they came up, they saw specters, they made accusations. July 19th, Joseph Ballard complained [00:18:00] against Mary Lacey, Sr. and her daughter Mary Lacey, Jr.
This was a renewal of arrests, because there’d actually been six quiet weeks, no warrants had been issued since June 6th, and here we are July 19th and we’ve got two people getting arrested.
Sarah Jack: Then also in Andover, on July 21st, Ann Foster confessedthe main aim of the witches was to replace Christ’s kingdom with Satan’s kingdom. So here is a conspiracy unfolding.
Josh Hutchinson: And this conspiracy gets elaborated on. The piece that we read at the beginning was from the examination of Mary Lacy Jr. during this big, they had a just a group of suspects come in. It was Mary, her mother, Andrew Carrier, and Richard Carrier being examined, and they elaborated [00:19:00] on a celestial game of thrones. They said that Martha Carrier and George Burroughs were the queen and king in hell. And they said that the devil did not hurt in people’s shapes without their consent, just confirming what Abigail Hobbs had said earlier and making it seem like spectral evidence was real.
Sarah Jack: Now we do know that those Carrier boys were essentially tortured. ‘ cause
I just pointed out,
Josh Hutchinson: and heels.
Sarah Jack: earlier we mentioned that there isn’t ev, there’s not evidence of Abigail being coerced, but
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Sarah Jack: with the boys, they were not handled gently.
No, Andrew and Richard Carrier were bound neck to heels, which caused blood to run out of their nose. They’re basically, you’re bound up [00:20:00] so tightly, co pressed together and left like that for hours and hours. So very excruciating ordeal. They didn’t call it torture at the time, but that is some torture.Yeah, sadly the sick Elizabeth Ballard did pass away on July 27th.
Josh Hutchinson: Her death just reinforced people’s belief that she had been bewitched. Now she’s murdered by the witches, so that definitely turns up the heat in Andover.
Sarah Jack: Let’s talk about those ministers again. They kicked things up again.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, this time they actually did a solid.Increase Mather, I don’t know what took him so long to come to this conclusion and publicly state this, because he visited Salem jail. He had been to [00:21:00] Salem and observed some of the proceedings firsthand, butit took him, apparently, months of deliberation and writing to come to the conclusions that he did about spectral evidence and so forth. And of course, we’re talking Increase Mather. He’s the delegate to London to works with the king and the king’s men to get a new charter. He’s the president of Harvard College. He is a minister at Boston’s leading church. And he’s the father of Cotton Mather, who writes a different book that will mention a little bit is Wonders of the Invisible World. These two books clash, but the men being father and son say that, no, we’re in agreement with each other. They write this into the books. We agree with each [00:22:00] other is very interesting.
Sarah Jack: This important publication, called Cases of Conscience, by Increase Mather came out on October 3rd, and a report of this publication was read to the Cambridge Assembly of Ministers at their monthly meeting at Harvard College, so they were all wanting to know what does Increase have to say about all of this, and their conclusions were read to congregations that week.
Josh Hutchinson: This work, Cases of Conscience, exemplified the shift in opinions about the trials that had happened over the summer, as we get into the fall, there starts to be some people coming out against what’s going on, the way things are being handled.
Sarah Jack: Increasesuggested the afflicted persons may actually be possessed, that bewitched persons are many times really possessed with evil spirits[00:23:00] And there you have this highest trusted ministerial authority saying that it’s certain that’s impactful.
Josh Hutchinson: And then on spectral evidence, Increase writes, “the devil may, by divine permission, appear in the shape of innocent and pious persons.”
Sarah Jack: So now he, all the way after all the hangings he’s saying maybe Rebecca didn’t give permission to the devil to go torment Ann Putnam Senior. I’m not bitter.
Josh Hutchinson: Exactly. Not bitter.
Yeah. It’s just why did he wait so long? He, he goes on, he says in his report, “it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.”
Sarah Jack: It also said, “it is better that a guilty person should be absolved [00:24:00] than that he should, without sufficient ground of the conviction, be condemned.” Oh my gosh. I had a, I don’t think I’ve actually considered that in light of what happened in Connecticut. Were those,
were those voters reading the records
Josh Hutchinson: oh yes. When they decided to absolve those accused of witchcraft,
Sarah Jack: instead
Josh Hutchinson: had read Cases of Conscience. Yeah.
Also wrote, “I had rather judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge, an honest woman as a witch.” He’s very concerned about mistakes being made and innocent people being killed.
Sarah Jack: Do you think it would’ve made a difference if he’d been in town when Mary Esty wrote her petition, because she was essentially saying she was an honest W woman and they were judging her as a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: I think it definitely, if Increase had spoken up, because remember, he’s [00:25:00] the one who got Governor Phips appointed as the royal governor. He advocated for him in London. So he had him kind of in his thrall or something, he, uh. his debt, the governor was in Increase Mather’s debt for being appointed governor.
So he had the influence at the highest levels of government. He knew all the ministers and all the magistrates and justices. He was the most respected minister in New England probably at the time. It would’ve made a difference, if he had put his foot down and said, “spectral evidence is not proof because the devil can impersonate innocent people.” I think the trials would’ve just come to a screeching halt as soon as he said that, unless Stoughton like did some hurried, [00:26:00] you know, death warrant writing.
Sarah Jack: He would’ve had to scramble.
He, Stoughton, would’ve had to scramble to keep the trials going. I think the governor would’ve said, you know, Reverend Mather is right. These things have got outta hand and it’s gotta stop and would’ve shut it down a lot earlier than he did.Finally, on October 29th, Governor Phips shuts down the special Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one of the assistants, James Russell, so he is a member of the legislature’s upper house, the Assistants, and he asked Governor Sir William Phips directly if the court of Oyer and Terminer should stand or fall, and Phips replied, “it must fall.”
So we had mentioned earlier the legislature established new courts [00:27:00] in November. That happened November 25th. Andthe witchcraft cases that remained were transferred to the new Superior Court of Judicature, which held sessions in 1693 in Salem, Charlestown, Boston, and Ipswich, processed all of these other claims.
Now, spectral evidence was not allowed to be considered by the jurors, so they went through the rest of the cases. Three people did get convicted, but the governor reprieved them, and basically the jails cleared out. The last case was heard May 11th, 1693, and as soon as everyone had paid their jail fees, the jails were cleared out of these accused witches and the Salem Witch trials were basically over.
Sarah Jack: What a [00:28:00] relief. What if he hadn’t shut down that court? What if the spectral evidence hadn’t been halted? Where would we be?
Josh Hutchinson: If the Oyer and Terminer had stayed around, they would’ve had another session in November. There were five women who had already been convicted, who weren’t executed yet, waiting to be hanged. There was maybe 130 people waiting to be tried in the jails. So this could have really, really just snowballed and instead of, you know, 25 casualties of the witch trials, the 19 hanged, the one pressed, the five who passed away in jail. If the Oyer and Terminer had dragged out until the last person was prosecuted, we’d be talking about European levels of [00:29:00] witch hunting with potentially over a hundred people being killed.
Sarah Jack: What a rollercoaster.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, what a, What a time to live, have to live through such a difficult period, And you just wonder, if one thing had happened differently in these turning points that we’ve talked about, what would’ve happened? How could things have been different? How could lives have been saved?
Join in on this discussion on our Patreon community. We’d love to see you there and hear what you think.
Sarah Jack: Patreon.com/aboutsalem. Since you’ve enjoyed the episode, why not subscribe to The Thing About Salem to support us and to keep the fun coming?
Josh Hutchinson: have explored themes like Poppets, the Crucible, Witches’ Sabbaths, spectral evidence, the ergot myth, and more. And we have so much more in store for you to [00:30:00] learn.
Sarah Jack: In between episodes, come engage with us in our Patreon community at patreon.com
Josh Hutchinson: /aboutsalem.
if you’re enjoying all of this great content and you want to know even more about witch trials and other things that are considered to be spooky, join us for our Halloween special. We’re gonna talk about witches and monsters and candy and goblins and all of that good stuff. So look for information about that on endwitchhunts.org/events. So when do you get to hear the next episode of The Thing About Salem? Every Sunday. Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Leave a Reply