Just saw Wicked: For Good (Wicked Part 2) and wondering what it all means? The sequel to 2024’s blockbuster Wicked movie starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande delivers the pure magic and joy of Wicked’s fairytale storytelling while also serving as a mirror reflecting our world’s darkest patterns of persecution. Join hosts Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson for a spoiler-filled celebration of this magical film as they explore both the enchantment of the story and the surprisingly relevant themes hiding behind flying monkeys, sparkly shoes, and that iconic green skin.
From Gregory Maguire’s beloved novel to the Broadway phenomenon with music by Stephen Schwartz, Wicked has captured hearts worldwide. This sequel delivers stunning musical numbers, an enchanting fairytale ending, and America’s greatest modern fairy story—while also offering profound insights about our world. Discover why Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Dorothy, and the Wizard of Oz create a story that’s both entertainment magic and meaningful social commentary.
From the breathtaking songs like “For Good” to the animals in cages vault scene that’s impossible to look away from, this episode explores how the Wicked movie with Jonathan Bailey and Jeff Goldblum delights audiences while helping us understand who gets labeled “wicked”—and who decides.
What You’ll Explore:
The pure magic and joy of Wicked’s fairytale storytelling
Standout musical moments and how the Broadway songs translate to film
The chilling parallels between Oz’s animal persecution and real-world witch hunts
Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship, sisterhood, and the choices that change everything
Why the treatment of talking animals in Oz mirrors modern oppression
How Dorothy’s witch hunt against Elphaba reflects real accusation patterns
Why Nessarose, Boq, and Fiyero’s transformations matter for understanding persecution
How the word “witch” is weaponized as a political tool today
Whether movies like Wicked help or harm the fight against modern persecution
Deep dive into Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Glinda
This is the next installment in our ongoing look at Wicked and Oz! If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our previous episodes “Witchcraft and Stagecraft: Unmasking Wicked’s Magic with Paul Laird and Jane Barnette” and “Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch” to explore how this beloved story connects to real witch trial history and contemporary persecution.
Content Warning: This episode includes movie spoilers and discusses themes of persecution, banishment, and contemporary witch hunts affecting millions globally.
Ready to see beyond the emerald curtain? This isn’t your childhood Oz anymore—and that’s exactly the point. But it’s also a wicked good time.
In this week’s episode of Witch Hunt podcast, Josh and Sarah translate to English when the guest speaks in Spanish. Please enjoy this new experience like we have.. We welcome Spanish documentary photographer and filmmaker Judith Prat. With a background in human rights law, Judith powerfully examines the persecution of women accused of witchcraft in the Pyrenees during the early modern period.
Judith discusses her documentary film “Decían Que Era Bruja” (They Said She Was a Witch), which pays tribute to the innocent women targeted during the witch hunts in Spain. She also shares insights about her photography exhibition “Brujas” and accompanying photobook featuring 67 striking images that document the landscapes of the Pyrenees and the women who inhabit them today.
Through her work, Judith challenges the stereotypical portrayal of “witches” as old hags, revealing instead the truth about ordinary women who were unjustly persecuted. Join us for this fascinating conversation about memory, justice, and reclaiming historical narratives through art.
We step behind Broadway’s emerald curtain to explore Wicked with two leading scholars. The University of Kansas’ Paul Laird, professor emeritus of musicology, received unprecedented access as Stephen Schwartz composed his blockbuster musical and wrote the definitive book on its making, Wicked: a Musical Biography. His colleague Jane Barnette is a professor of theater & dance and the author of Witch Fulfillment: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Casting the Witch for Stage and Screen. She reveals how the evolving story of Oz has redefined witchcraft in modern theater. In this engaging discussion, we prepare for the film while learning more about the book and musical that changed how we see good, evil, and female power and friendship.
Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch explores the nuanced and powerful portrayal of witches in the highly anticipated Wicked movie. Witch Hunt podcast hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into their immediate reactions and the deeper social themes conveyed through the film
Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch explores the nuanced and powerful portrayal of witches in the highly anticipated Wicked movie. Witch Hunt podcast hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into their immediate reactions and the deeper social themes conveyed through the film. From the breath-catching spectacle of Galinda’s grand entrance to the heartbreaking social justice undertones surrounding Elphaba’s journey, this podcast dissects the movie’s profound commentary on othering, power dynamics, and societal hypocrisies. Alongside enthusiastic discussions of standout scenes involving musical numbers, stunts, and emotional turns, Josh and Sarah provide a thorough examination of how the Wicked movie redefines classic witch stereotypes and resonates with contemporary issues. The podcast is an unmissable treat for fans of Wicked, Oz, and beyond, offering a thoughtful and passionate examination of one of the year’s most magical films.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] There's pandemonium. People are running in the streets in panic because, oh, the Wicked Witch is coming. Like suddenly there's a Wicked Witch. There hasn't been a Wicked Witch before, as far as we know. And now there is one and she's the great enemy. And oh, by the way, she's green. Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast reviewing the portrayal of witches in literature, theater, and film. I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we investigate the treatment of witches in the Wicked movie. Josh Hutchinson: And we're reviewing the Wicked movie because it's something that we obviously enjoy, and it's something a lot of people out there enjoy, and we want to be able to enjoy it together while also critically evaluating the role of the witches in the film. Josh Hutchinson: So, we saw the Wicked movie today, and Sarah, I'm really curious, how did you feel when you [00:01:00] walked out of the theater? Sarah Jack: I didn't want to leave. I wanted to walk right back in and watch the next showing. Josh Hutchinson: That's the same way that I felt, actually, though, even while the movie was going on, I was like, I can't wait to watch this again and catch more of the details and everything because I kind of had to live in the front of screen mostly to focus on what they were saying and singing, but I wouldn't be able to just sit back and enjoy everything. Sarah Jack: We've spent several weeks preparing for this event, reading, watching. So there's been all this time looking forward to being in Oz in the theater and so being there was fantastic and I wasn't ready to leave Oz. And Josh Hutchinson: It was a really, it was really just a great [00:02:00] creation of the world of Oz. I thought their rendition of Oz was quite excellent. Sarah Jack: Maybe we want to talk about Galinda's entrance into the film a little bit. Josh Hutchinson: Boy, do I. Galinda's entrance is so spectacular. And if you love the Good Witch in the 1939 MGM film, this is very evocative of her coming in, in her bubble. It's. I love the way they show, they pan up to the sky and you just see this like light twinkling in the sky moving. You think, Oh, it looks like the sun, but cause it's so bright and spectacular, but it keeps coming down. And then it's a bubble with Galinda in it. It's amazing. Sarah Jack: Yeah, and she, Cynthia and Ariana have now created these characters [00:03:00] that I, I don't, I, they will never be matched, in their, the combination together, their partnership, their friendship. And we'll be talking about that more, I'm sure. But I, I fell in love with Glinda immediately and, I'm sure, you know, my love for Glinda the Good Witch from MGM, you know, that sets the stage and, but Galinda was just marvelous right from the get go. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, she's spectacular. They really cast the movie very well. I thought all of the actors just fit perfectly the character. You know, I don't know if they, they cast it and then they did some rewrites to, to make it perfect for them, butall of the songs just came straight from the musical and they were able [00:04:00] to sing them perfectly. And, you know, you look at people like Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel and the vocal talents that they have, then you see Ariana and Cynthia able to pick that ball up and run with it. And they just nailed every note. It was literally pitch perfect and beautiful. thought, you know, the whole, the story between the two characters was just beautiful. They don't start out liking each other, but they come that way. Sarah Jack: I'm just gonna state that I have not been to the musical, but I've read and I've read and read and, you know, seen lots of Oz, and talked to experts, but the first look into Oz today in that theater was [00:05:00] not sparkly. Right out of the gate is the darkness. Josh Hutchinson: There was a really problematic moment for me, one that I struggled with a little in the first scene. Well, spoiler alert here if you're not familiar with the musical, the first scene of the movie is basically similar to the beginning of Oz, once Dorothy lands in Oz and The Wicked Witch of the East is dead and the Munchkins are celebrating, ding dong and all that. And, so the beginning of Wicked is similar in that they're actually celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. Which then the whole movie goes back explaining like the story from the beginning of the, before she was the Wicked Witch of the West when she was Elphaba, you know, [00:06:00] and goes through her life and adventures and misadventures, but in the first scene, while they're celebrating the death, they burn a giant, wooden effigy of the witch, which really evoked the terrors of the European witch trials and also modern-day persecutions of people accused of witchcraft. Sarah Jack: Absolutely. I almost cried. Sarah Jack: So, you know, my experience as a child watching the 1939 film, you know, for sure that the witch was evil. You just, it's not just assumed, but you know, you knew then. And it's this huge relief. This monster's gone. You just hear that a witch is dead. You see her feet there, and the celebration makes sense. It's [00:07:00] comfortable. It is a celebration of conquering evil. Sarah Jack: But if you've read Wicked, if you are familiar with the characters at all, and I think also when you have an awareness of what's happening in our world to innocent women and children and men, I've learned to not, so I automatically think it's not a witch.I don't see celebration in killing a witch because of the reality. And I'm fully aware, fully aware that this is a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale I love, but it was hard to start right there, celebrating and watching the burning of this effigy, especially when there's been things in the news this week of deaths of innocent people, but also of effigy burnings. [00:08:00] And so I couldn't, I was like for a minute there, I wasn't in the fairy, fairy tale. It was hard to see it. It's huge. I mean, it's not, it's huge. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Sarah Jack: they, I mean, Josh Hutchinson: It's a Burning Man size, effigy, basically. Sarah Jack: truly, obviously it goes into the story and you begin to fall in love with Elphaba. It's horrific to realize that that was her, that that is, yeah. I mean, Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Sarah Jack: I want to say it's not just about the things that I said. It does, as a descendant of women that were hanged for witchcraft, it was very upsetting. I'm not saying it was the wrong choice. I don't have an answer. I don't know what I think of that. I think that it is a portrayal of mob mentality against accused and alleged witches.
Josh Hutchinson: That's, uh, the flip side of, you know, what I was saying my [00:09:00] initial shock at it happening. Part of me did feel like this shows what happens. This is like a visual for people that you instantly connect to the historic witch trials most, but, you know, once you know about the modern witch trials, this really just evoked images that we've seen of people being burned alive for this. So it was difficult to see, but I also see it as, Hey, this is a, moment where we can talk about this and maybe shed some light on what's happening now. Like you said, the mob mentality in the manner that they were rejoicing. Everybody's getting caught up in what everybody else is, everybody else's celebration and you know, they just light this thing, but [00:10:00] the image was just so, it's so visceral. And it really just kind of knocks you out for a moment while if, you know. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm really curious if, if they did screen test. If they, what kind of responses they were getting and if they just ignored them, , you know, I think people would've been ho I think, I mean, it's very horrifying to watch and part of the, when you're looking at it from the fairytale perspective, you associate water or a, you know, a falling house with witch death, but it's just a different feeling to watch a giant witch burn. Josh Hutchinson: Now that said, if I wasn't aware of what's going on today, I might be It might be, my reaction to it might've been measured a little bit more, but still the thought of all the innocents, the tens of thousands of innocent people who were [00:11:00] actually burned or at least their bodies were burned at the stake because of witchcraft accusations in Europe, still knowing, just knowing about that makes me feel some kind of horror at seeing it. Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was horror. It was horrifying. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. But like you were saying earlier, then you go, it's kind of a dramatic switch. You go from this burning effigy, to then Josh Hutchinson: Glinda starts telling the story of Elphaba and she begins with, well, Elphaba's mother having a relationship that then leads to Elphaba's birth. So you see this little, like, I find it a little adorable green baby, coming out. Everybody who's present for the birth is like shocked and repulsed by it. Sarah Jack: So [00:12:00] that had another tie to me from that had another tie for me in reality. I read an article this week about a little girl that was born with albinism. And in the interview, the mom responds how disappointing it was, how hurtful it was that when her family came to meet their child, they only stayed five minutes. And that's like a real experience that just happened just a little bit ago. I do think that birth is a celebration. It's supposed to be a celebration and it wasn't. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah Jack: for Elphaba's family. Josh Hutchinson: Right. Yeah, the green skin color is obviously a device to mark Elphaba as being different than all the other characters in the movie. It's really just a [00:13:00] signal of her otherness, but like you said, real people go through very similar experiences where a baby's not born the expected skin color. And people don't know how to react to that. There's a lot of superstition. We just did an episode about that earlier this week, and there's so many myths about persons with albinism, especially, but also, you know, people who are born with anything that marks them out as being different than other people. If you have a disability, you're marked out as different right away. If people can see it, then they start thinking about you as being kind of different and maybe less than other people. Sarah Jack: You made a good point when you said they don't [00:14:00] know how to respond. And I do think that there is that. The shock causes people to not respond. Josh Hutchinson: The, that scene is so beautiful with her birth. One of the things that we just had a really wonderful conversation with Paul Laird and Jane Barnette earlier this week. And one of the things that I believe Jane brought up and they spoke about looking forward to how. Is this going to look off the stage on camera? And I loved the dimension that that room, the birthing room had. It had the, the family and the characters and the animals just like all around and the baby goes up. It was really a fascinating scene because, even though there was this, [00:15:00] the father's in the background, not responding well, she's still being elevated. Josh Hutchinson: That's a good point. There's, there's something to that where it begins with her being elevated and then later on in the movie, she's also elevated, like physically lifted above the ground. So you kind of can see her at two stages of life having a similar experience. And we know that flight is so important in portrayals of witches. Of course, the original Wizard of Oz book and film had the Wicked Witch of the West flying around the country on her broom. So you've got that back again and that's wonderful, but you wait for it. It builds up a lot of anticipation for that first actual flight [00:16:00] moment. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: So, Sarah Jack: Yeah. Flight is such a key element in even in Frank Baum's I mean, Dorothy, the wizard, how do they get to Oz? It's through the air. Josh Hutchinson: And how did the wizard get to Oz? Through the air in his balloon. And, you know, so it's common, like the Oz stories tend to begin and end with, you know, whether it's at the end of the MGM film, the wizard taking off in the balloon to go back and leaving without Dorothy or, you know, you know, the way this one ends with the song, the performance, of Defying Gravity. just leave that as a hint for now. it's very effective. I really loved the way that they closed this movie, but we'll come back to that after we talk about the middle a little more. Sarah Jack: I really want to talk about Elphaba's. [00:17:00] magic that they do show like right out, right out of the womb. That is flight. Like the magic that they show is the flight. Josh Hutchinson: But I also love the props, all the props, like all the details. Every little prop was so fun. And it looked like, you know, you just wanted to go play with Galinda's shoes and the poppies and the, the spectacles and glasses. And I wanted to try Elphaba's hat on, like the props were really marvelous. Sarah Jack: I loved the way that they used the poppies in the scene when Professor Dillamond is removed from the classroom, and another professor comes in with a lion in a cage, and Elphaba gets furious about the way they're treating this lion. She's used to animals walking around freely and being able to converse, and this cage is supposed to suppress the [00:18:00] lion's ability to learn to speak, and she gets really upset about that and begins her like social justice quest for the animals, but she puts everyone to sleep using poppies, which, of course, if you know the 1939 film or the original L. Frank Baum book, the poppies put Dorothy to sleep while she's walking the yellow brick road. And so I thought here they are using those poppies again. They found a way to, to tie those things and, you know, have that element included. Sarah Jack: This movie wanted to send some social justice messages and, you know, the animal culture that was under attack and being persecuted is something that is very, there's so many examples [00:19:00] in our history and in our modern world that that speaks to. So that is another one. Like with the burning effigy, that's not going to maybe affect everybody the same way, but I feel like what you see happening with the professor and the animals is not as subtle. Not that a burning effigy is subtle, but it was a clear statement. Josh Hutchinson: It's something that everybody's going to recognize something that's going on today that is reminiscent of the treatment of the animals, the persecution and suppression the animals, because, the animals, they're, you know. In Wicked, the animals begin, they're basically like humans in animal form. They speak, they're intelligent, they can have friendships with humans, and so [00:20:00] forth. They're suppressed and animals start disappearing. I really loved that they included the scene with Dr. Dillamond talking to his animal friends the, in his room, and they're having a little secret hush hush meeting because they can't be caught meeting together anymore, because that would look seditious to the wizard and, and his side of things, which Elphaba doesn't realize that the wizards behind it at first either. What's going on with the animals and them being banned from teaching, they're being banned from preaching. They're being banned from basically any involvement with humans other than as what we think in the real world, the role that animals play as pets and workers and so forth. So they're, they're really suppressed and treated as subhuman. [00:21:00] They're totally dehumanized, and, you know, like with that cage, they don't want the animals to speak anymore. They want them to be quiet, and the board, when Dr. Dillimond flips it over in an earlier scene, says animals should be seen and not heard, which is very upsetting. Sarah Jack: It's very upsetting. These animals are contributing to society. They're intelligent. They have, you know, they're not, they're being devalued, but they're actually are very valuable to society. Sarah Jack: Yes. Yeah. And. I said, through, through your own personal lens, you'll see things going on now and you'll know things that have happened in the past that really remind you of what's going on with the animals. There are so many for me. I hope people [00:22:00] think about Sarah Jack: it's just not a stretch of the imagination whatsoever. Josh Hutchinson: There's so many different ways that you could apply that to today's world and to the world history because, you know, this cycle of persecution has been going on and we've talked about this a little before, the label "witch," as just meaning, you know, an othered, bad person who's dangerous to us, could be a witch, whoever the witch in that sense of the word is changes from time to time. so, You know, the witch has been Jewish people, the witch has been black people, the witch has been feminists, the witch has been the LGBTQ, um, there's been so many witches over time, it might [00:23:00] be the people in the country next to you, um, who are the witches and, I mean, this is anywhere in the world, these kinds of things have been applied to so many where we just label someone as being this bad guy. And they said something about it in the film. There's a part where they talk about how, Sarah Jack: the Wizard talks about how to unite people, you create an enemy. And so he created the animals as being the enemy, because he tired of the discord in Oz. Sarah Jack: Yeah, but then in the next breath, they, they trade that in for Elphaba. She's there, not the enemy, boom, Madame Morrible trades it in. Well, the animal that their usefulness was done, and, it was pretty much squashed. I mean, they, appears that they gotten that handled. [00:24:00] And so then the new enemy is Elphaba. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. There's like announcements. You hear Morrible's voice all over Oz and they show it at Shiz. They show it in the Emerald City. People, there's pandemonium. People are running in the streets in panic because, oh, the Wicked Witch is coming. Like suddenly there's a Wicked Witch. There hasn't been a Wicked Witch before, as far as we know. And now there is one and she's the great enemy. And oh, by the way, she's green, so she's easy to spot. So. Easy to hunt her down and treat her as being different and different than human because she doesn't even look like us. Sarah Jack: Would you like to talk about the friendship and love? Josh Hutchinson: Yes. Sarah Jack: in Wicked? Josh Hutchinson: I definitely do want to talk about. Sarah Jack: It was amazing. Josh Hutchinson: it. It's such a good story, because Galinda [00:25:00] and Elphaba start out like their first big song that's the two of them together is Loathing. And, they just talk about how they loathe each other and well, they sing about how they loathe other, but they're always, even before that song starts, you know, they're at odds with each other at every moment and then they get stuck rooming together and they hate it and they hate each other and or loathe each other. So they're not off to a great start. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: But then Glinda, or Galinda, as she's known at the time, Galinda, well, there's this dance, you see, and Galinda gets a boy to ask Elphaba's sister, Nessarose, who we haven't talked about yet,to ask her out to [00:26:00] the dance, because she's just sitting there by herself, while everybody else is running off to the dance club, and she, in the film and in the musical she's a wheelchair user and Galinda thinks that oh this will look like I'm doing a nice thing by getting the boy to do a favor for, you know, this girl, but really she's just trying to get the boy out of her own hair. But Nessarose is so happy. She beams at Elphaba and just is so like glittery faced. I would, I don't know, that's not a thing but maybe it is a thing. She's just so happy that Elphaba does something nice for Galinda, and then Galinda does something nice for Elphaba, and then they become really good friends. And scene where they had that, that's one when I was about [00:27:00] crying. I was starting to well up a little because it just tugs at the heartstrings the way, you know, Elphaba's isolated on the dance floor and everybody's laughing at her because she's wearing a funny hat. And Galinda goes and dances with her. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: The goofiest Elphaba dance, kind of reminded me of the Elaine from Seinfeld, but it's just Sarah Jack: Oh, yeah. Josh Hutchinson: you know, arms flailing kind of dance. Yeah. Little shoulder moves and little, like whatever this thing was and. Sarah Jack: Yeah. yeah, I just was, I mean, I was there. I felt like I was right there in the, the, the film just really pulls you in. And Sarah Jack: there's another brand out there that we know as magical, but this one had the magic. Sarah Jack: This, I, I mean, [00:28:00] I have been to the magic place recently and in my seat in my theater, I felt Elphaba and Galinda's magic and Oz's magic. They really pulled that off. And that scene really does it. I mean, it is, you feel her isolation and this is something that really was a nod to the thread of courage from the original versions of Oz. They don't ever necessarily say courage in Wicked, but Elphaba was demonstrating that there in that scene, I think. So, and you're just like that turning point where Galinda decides that she's gonna go have fun with Elphaba with the silly dance. It's such a key moment. It is, you know, Elphaba was purposely, you know, [00:29:00] vulnerable right then and Galinda took the opportunity to become her friend right there in front of everybody. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it was so powerful. And this movie, the movie, and I know the musical also, they bring that friendship, female friendship so powerful in both of them. That's a big reason why Wicked's been a running on Broadway for over 20 years and has a touring show and shows in other locations. And, it's so massively successful largely because of that friendship story that you don't really expect from a story involving the so-called Wicked Witch of the West that, Oh, she once was young and she had friends. It's really amazing. Sarah Jack: Yeah. So we just talked about all of that. Josh Hutchinson: We danced around Fiyero. [00:30:00] We got to talk about all of that without bringing him up, but how fantastic was he? Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Dancing Through Life, his grand, big entrance into the scene and the song Dancing Through Life, it's been stuck in my head since I got out of the theater,along with maybe a dozen other songs, but that one keeps coming through because it's so fun. But they do a lot in the scene also of dancing through life. So it's important. And Fiyero, the character of Fiyero in first Wicked movie, he's very interesting. He's a deeper, guy than kind of, he comes off across at the beginning, he seems just shallow and self-absorbed and, he's, they make him the ultimate [00:31:00] goof off character. He doesn't want to take anything seriously. He wants to dance through life. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think it's interesting. So he's one of the main male figures.Wizard is one of the main male figures, and neither one is quite what they say they are. I don't know what that means. Josh Hutchinson: No. And one has power because he pretends to be powerful, the wizard. Where Prince Fiyero, he's a prince from the Winkie country, which they don't really get into what that is in the movie, but it's very heavily featured in the, this book, the original Wicked. And so he actually is born with real power over people, or at least his parents have authority over people. Yeah, he has authority where [00:32:00] the wizard usurps authority by being able to read a handful of words out of the Grimmerie, which is the ancient magical text in a language no one can read in Oz. Sarah Jack: Okay, I want to talk about Jeff Goldblum here. Fantastic. It was so great, Sarah Jack: Yeah. But I, I loved, I loved her trip to Oz. I loved her invitation to Oz. I loved her trip to Oz. You know, the, Wizomania, the, that was all fantastic. And I had seen an interview with the director and Jeff and Cynthia and Ariana and that huge Oz head was right there on the stage for the interview. I thought it was going to play a bigger part in the film. And it is amazing and remarkable, but they just got right to [00:33:00] Jeff, they got right to the Wizard himself. He couldn't wait to meet Elphaba. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I was surprised when he walks out from behind the head on his own, because we're so used to what happens in the 1939 film when Dorothy goes there and they, like, Toto runs around and finds the man behind the curtain that you're not like, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain. And he's in there on his microphone telling people don't pay attention. Like where here, yeah, Goldbloom Wizard walks out voluntarily, because he's eager to meet Elphaba, because, as is revealed several minutes later, he has a plan for her. He has something that he needs her to do for him. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Okay. So then actually I want to say another thing about my experience watching this. We get to this [00:34:00] point in the film, and I remember thinking, how come I haven't been scared yet? There hasn't really been anything scary. I, I was thinking it was probably more like childhood fear that I was hoping would be evoked a little bit more. Sarah Jack: And it wasn't there, but that changed too. Once Elphaba has the Grimmerie, the next few scenes are just brutal. And I just, man, that was, that was something. I'm talking about the flying monkeys. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Sarah Jack: That was scary and it was scary what was happening to them. but they were scary. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What happens to them when they're transformed to sprout wings all of a sudden from their back, these gigantic wings just breaking the flesh and clothing and coming out? The [00:35:00] poor, Chistery, the head of the Emerald Guard is writhing on the floor and like, you really feel his pain and what he's going through the animations on those monkeys were just really powerful. You first see it with one and then they go into another room and all the guards that were lining the hallway are all on the floor and jumping on walls. They're trying to, like, not feel this pain anymore. Sarah Jack: And you know what I felt like when Elphaba meets him before she walks up to the Grimmerie and is able to read it, it's like they were kind of, unless I was imagining it, cause I was just so pulled into the story, I wondered if he had been able to talk before and couldn't talk. Like, I felt like he wanted to say something to her. [00:36:00] Cause I feel like they just like paused on his face and his eyes, you know, were looking at her and they showed her eyes. And I just was like, you know why he can't talk. He lost it. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I really want to see what they do with him in the, in part two. yeah. Because he has a pretty significant role in Gregory Maguire's novel, Chistery, and he, does involve speech in his role there. So, be interesting to see what happens. But yeah, when the, the once the flying monkeys go after Elphaba, because Morrible goes out there and tells them that Elphaba's responsible, it wasn't the wizard's idea, it was Elphaba who did it, and they need to go after her, and they're all in a lot of pain, and they fly off in a [00:37:00] rage, and suddenly they're flinging themselves at windows as Elphaba and Glinda make their way down this, you know, one of those long hallways that they only make for movies like this.That exact hall Josh Hutchinson: With a lot of windows and it's high above the city, the Emerald city, they're up real high and these monkeys are flying and full force, like throwing their bodies at these windows. And the first time it happened, like everyone in the theater jumped a little bit, so this comes as a surprise at the beginning, I believe, but they are, they're fearsome, you know, adversaries. Sarah Jack: That Grimmerie was amazing. The way it opened, the way the spells came up off the page, and the language that she read the [00:38:00] spells in, I was so thrilled. Josh Hutchinson: Yes, I loved that she did this spell and she's pronouncing these mysterious spell words, like, which is what you think that a spell is like. It's some mystery language, you know, repetitive, repeating of syllables and things kind of magic. Sarah Jack: Maybe I missed this, you know, when they're, there's a couple times that Elphaba's in the forest. She's, it's not scary really. And I know with Oz there's, the, the MGM Oz, there's the scary trees and I don't feel like there are any Easter eggs or nods to talking trees. I would have liked to have seen at least a face on a tree, but maybe I missed it. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Maybe they're saving that for the second part. Sarah Jack: Could be, but I did the, one of the other Easter eggs that was in it was when they're rescuing the cub [00:39:00] and they bicycle out of there and put the cub in the basket, like Toto went in the basket. That was fabulous. Josh Hutchinson: see that because it like seeing Elphaba on the bike, you reminded me of MGM watching, the Wicked Witch and the mean lady in Kansas riding the bicycle and Dorothy sees her like riding in the air around the house while it's flying in the cyclone, just I had that image Josh Hutchinson: I guess I can't do the music from that sequence, but you guys I'm talking about from Sarah Jack: and then you just. Sarah Jack: You mentioned the cyclone and I feel like the, the, just a little nod. There was a little nod to when, when, Glinda's like, I like the air and she puts her hair out the window. Like that was a little one. And then obviously there's a storm later, but, yeah, I just, Josh Hutchinson: [00:40:00] Yeah, that storm's spectacular, too. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I love the green flashes in the sky. Very awesome. the end in the Defying Gravity sequence. Sarah Jack: I Hope You're Happy. Sarah Jack: I really look forward to being able to see the stage musical because I want to see the songs in that kind of environment and presented like that. Sarah Jack: Sarah Jack: Yeah. I know there's, there's a lot of power in going to see a live performance, and you can really feel very close to a story by being in the same room as the people acting it out and singing and playing instruments and all that stuff. You get to see this whole world coming to life in front of you and it feels very immediate. I'm ready to go see the [00:41:00] Nutcracker. Josh Hutchinson: I was thinking about a Christmas Carol, but like the film also brought a lot of immediacy, I thought, with the ability to do closeups, you know, you can pan back and see the whole world, or you can get really close and intimate with somebody's face and you really get pulled in that way by being able to see the nuances, the little, micro expressions and so forth in people's faces. Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Jack: So Josh, do we consider Madame Morrible a witch? Josh Hutchinson: She is a witch. She is a sorceress. You can call it by different names. She's a professor of magic. She's a spellcaster. She's a lot of things. She's not labeled [00:42:00] witch by anybody in the movie. That's important to note. Where Elphaba gets labeled the wicked witch at the very end, none of the other characters are actually, even Glinda's not called a good witch in this first film, so. Sarah Jack: But her little friends keep saying how good she is. That was so funny. Josh Hutchinson: was Sarah Jack: so good. Josh Hutchinson: Her and her friends and the, her friends,just every time she does something that's outwardly seems like she's doing a nice thing for somebody, they're just like, oh, she's so good. She is such a good one. She's so good. Like all through the movie, they're just saying that, reinforcing that she has this, she's able to build a reputation as being almost saintly or, you know, whatever she's. She's the good witch [00:43:00] without the label witch yet. Josh Hutchinson: Even though she did, because Elphaba got her into the sorcery seminar, and they call it sorcery not witchcraft, which is also something to note. But it's interesting because we also know just going back to the original Oz, and people are familiar enough with this story, this isn't giving much away for what happens. When know that there, in the original Oz, there's a Wicked Witch of the East and a Wicked Witch of the West, and then you have a Good Witch of the South and a Good Witch of the North, so there's like the four corner cardinal directions all are represented by some kind of witch, two good ones and two evil ones or wicked ones, I should say. So we know that we're going to see Glinda become the good [00:44:00] witch, but we don't know yet, who's going to be this Wicked Witch of the East who's Elphaba's counterpart, so I don't want to reveal who that is yet, if you're not familiar with the novel or the musical and you haven't seen the film yet um, because that's not going to happen yet, be revealed for another year when part two comes out, so anyways, we have you know, one wicked witch, a sorceress, a phony baloney wizard, a learning Glinda student of sorcery. So you can see there's kind of, basically you could just say there's four witches if you wanted to, even though one's a male. Sarah Jack: When you were, just reminding us that, you know, It can be anyone who's an accused witch today. That made me think [00:45:00] about childhood Elphaba being used to illustrate like her, her childhood character's there. Elphaba as a child is in this film more than once, but they don't show many of the characters that young. So I was just thinking about, you know, obviously, unfortunately there are children that are branded as witches today, too. Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and watching Elphaba grow up you can see that people are suspicious of her at an early age and like you said, coming out of the womb, she's already doing magic. She does this involuntary magic whenever she's upset, um, so it's just this emotional driven magic. And she in, right when she comes out of the room, out of the womb, into the room, [00:46:00] she, levitates all these objects in the room up to the ceiling. And it's quite remarkable. And then there's a scene where children are picking on her and she gets angry and something happens to those children. And then she gets yelled at by her father, "what have you done now, Elphaba?" Sarah Jack: And do you think that there was purpose, whether, I mean, it's really illustrated in the film, but, Elphaba's character seems to be the one that feels the most. And I don't mean those, those necessarily just those moments where her magic flares up, but she's the one that is thinking and looking outside, you know, what is popular and really evaluating what's happening, and then she's also the one that has power in the form of magic. Josh Hutchinson: She has, now see she's an interesting portrayal of a [00:47:00] witch, because she has this innate power but she's also othered, and therefore, she's people try to render her powerless. She fights back. And, so, but she also, you know, how stereotypically, a witch is like a poor, old crone who lives alone in a, like on the edge of a swamp or deep in the woods somewhere. And Elphaba doesn't have that upbringing. She's the daughter of the governor of Munchkinland. And so she's born into privilege just like Glinda is, or Galinda, born into privilege. They both, their families have servants, and [00:48:00] Elphaba is raised by a nanny, and so her family has resources. Josh Hutchinson: So what I'm thinking is that, you know, people have this image of the, of, always went after the poorest people. And certainly the, you know, that happened a lot. You look at a case like Sarah Good in Salem. You know, she's out asking people for gifts because she can't support herself and her husband can't support the family. But you also have people caught up in witch trials who were middle class or even who were wealthy, like Philip and Mary English in Salem witch trials were the wealthiest people in Salem and got caught up in it. So when I look at Wicked, I'm seeing all these different kinds of [00:49:00] Witches in it, because they all have different backgrounds and characteristics and their lives really shape what kind of witch they become. Sarah Jack: And I think it's something to reflect on that Wicked the film, the most evil thing is the mob mentality or the groupthink. It is the character, you know, on either side of each other, the neighbor, the friend together, you know, those that are, you know, extinguishing the animals, those that decide that Elphaba is the Wicked Witch. I don't know in the future what wicked she may do, but from what we've seen of the story, there wasn't an evil source of power, but there was an evil source of [00:50:00] hurt happening to citizens in Oz. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, hmm, she's not sworn an allegiance to any kind of devil figure or anything like that. Her power, she came by her power naturally, which is interesting. Josh Hutchinson: But, I think, do you think, you know, L. Frank Baum kind of put, flipped witch stereotypes on their head by introducing the idea that there could be a good witch, and then Wicked the novel took that further, by introducing the concept of, you know, a gray area kind of between wicked and good, where, which is the reality that everybody actually lives in, is the space between wicked and good. No, nobody's entirely either one. And, I love exploring that area. Then in [00:51:00] Wicked and in the movie, you really see all of those shades that come between this black-and-white world of good and evil. You see everything that's in between and another way that they change the portrayal of witches is again and I guess L. Frank Baum really started it, because the Wizard, the male figure, patriarch of Oz is a a phony. He can't do any of that real magic. He does the other kind of magic, which is sleight of hand and illusions and things like that so he has a big, giant head that talks and it's supposed to be him. He also takes other forms in the books, so, um, you know, he's effectively powerless. And he has all the power, [00:52:00] but it doesn't come from himself, it comes from these lies that he builds around himself. Whereas the women actually like have, Madame Morrible is a powerful sorceress. Elphaba is a powerful witch. Glinda, we know, is coming into her power. So you've got really, it's a patriarchally run world, but suddenly you've got these three powerful women in it. And what's that going to do? How's that going to shape the next movie? Josh Hutchinson: I've been intrigued by how it's the wonderful wizard, but it's also the terrible wizard. And they did say terrible. He did say terrible in Wicked today. And I was kind of, I was like glad to hear it. I think we always, you know, think the powerful and wonderful and terrible. Josh Hutchinson: You know, that other movie that came out [00:53:00] last decade, Oz the Great and Powerful. He's both great, which can mean a lot of different things, and powerful. Where we know that really he's not so powerful, but he has everybody believing that he is. Sarah Jack: So was there anything else that you loved or that really surprised you? Josh Hutchinson: I was like really happy to see the ruby slippers slipped in there. They had both, they had the silver and the ruby. Josh Hutchinson: yes. Yeah. Those slippers, they've. It was interesting that in, in this one, the slippers, they mentioned because,Elphaba and Nessarose's father gives slippers Nessa Rose. And that's a significant moment where he's got a gift for her, but he's got nothing [00:54:00] but grumpiness and anger for Elphaba. So, that's another moment that actually means, like, isolating Elphaba. Sarah Jack: Yeah, and she feels like she deserves that because she blames herself for Nessa's disabilities. Josh Hutchinson: When Elphaba and Nessarose's father gives Nessa those shoes, he says, these were your mother's. Josh Hutchinson: They're not at this moment in time in part one, the shoes are not special yet. Sarah Jack: She doesn't even put them on then. She's seen in a scene right after that with not those shoes on. Josh Hutchinson: shoes. Yeah. She must put them, tuck them away because they're so special being from her mother, who she never in Wicked the movie. And I also in the musical, Nessa never knows, never knows her mother because her mother [00:55:00] dies, giving childbirth to Nessarose. So, which is a little different than what happens in the novel. Josh Hutchinson: What's your favorite scene from a staging standpoint? There are like, I really love one of the dances when they're in the spinning contraption and Sarah Jack: yeah, Josh Hutchinson: around on the ladders. I thought that really took a lot of coordination to line up that scene, the choreography and the moving, literal moving parts of the set. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I got very excited. I pretty sure I almost clapped. I didn't, but I was like, when I like saw what that room looked like, and them putting the books. I was like, oh my goodness, they're going to be dancing there. It's going to spin around. It's going to be awesome. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, now, you know, if you were to ask me my favorite scene of the film, [00:56:00] that's the Defying Gravity sequence. The part when Elphaba takes flight for the first time. I found that to be very powerful and also very just entertaining and cool. You know, it's very action-packed and dramatic and bold and, just watching, you know, the stunt work in the film is incredible. I've watched a lot of behind the scenes stuff in the lead up to this, and just the number of times they had actors on wires, flinging them through the air at like top speed, and, and they would be singing. You can watch their, their mouth moving the whole time that they're, I'm like, how do you even concentrate while you're being flung through the air like that? So there's a lot of really cool scenes. There's a lot of great action in it. We've talked about a lot of the [00:57:00] emotions and the themes and the undertones and, and that kind of stuff, but there's, it's an action film too. Sarah Jack: It is an action film. Yeah. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, so, if you don't like musicals, but you like magic and awesome special effects and stunts, it's really a great film. Sarah Jack: Oh. And you know, the other part that was really great too is just the, the script, like what they're saying and the very special new words that sound like words you know, that are words you know, but don't sound like themselves. That was amazing. Josh Hutchinson: I love the Ozian language with words like horrendable. They're quite fun. They just take, take a word and throw a twist on it. So as the you still understand what they're saying, but it's kind of Seussian or something. It's [00:58:00] a fun way of Ozifying a word. Josh Hutchinson: Cause There's almost nothing that I could criticize about this film. I loved it. Josh Hutchinson: A lot of the stuff, it was like this, you're like looking and seeing so much at once, but then at other times you really are only seeing like a little bit, you know, a more defined, smaller space. Josh Hutchinson: I liked that variety because one of the good things that I really like about that you can do with musicals is make the scenes really come like there's a lot, so much movement at once. In other words, all the dancers, the choreography, people are moving in different directions, coming at each other, away from each other. You know, you see all these different kinds of people moving around on the screen in different ways at the same time. Sarah Jack: Yeah. And they really, in this, in the film, the props and the, the [00:59:00] large, the little props and the big, the furnace, like so much is used in the choreography. It's great. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's another thing I love about musicals, and they did that especially well in this movie, using the entire, like, the sets were practical pieces, because every piece of it is used in some somewhere in the choreography. You've got Galinda gliding, hanging on a ceiling fan at one point going in a circle. You know, people are jumping off walls. There's ladders. There's all kinds of moving parts. Sarah Jack: Which, I really want to point out that I felt like that was a real statement. You had Galinda singing in her room that she, you know, it was To use a word that Jane Barnette used this week in her interview with her that I loved, frothy. It was a frothy room and Galinda's frothy and she does this frothy little flying around in this room, [01:00:00] but the sky is not the limit there. When Elphaba actually flies, the sky is the limit. And I really, I saw, you know, that comparison as significant. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. That reminds me of something else I wanted to say about witch representation. You have the pinkness, another word that Professor Barnette used earlier this week. The pinkness of Glinda and her, Galinda's room is just so stuffed with pink, primarily there's a few other colors in there. It's overwhelmingly pink and so, you know, pink of course being a color traditionally associated with females. While Elphaba there in contrast is in all black, which, you know, a color certainly associated with females, but it's. Like, so different than pink. Pink is like, [01:01:00] we associate it with cheerfulness and happiness and fun and bubbly, cutesy things and gentleness. And black is like a strong, like harsher color. It's a more powerful color. It is associated with evil but Elphaba just Sarah Jack: Independence, Josh Hutchinson: like she belongs in it. And she's not wicked. She's, she's nice. Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us on Witch Hunt. Tune in Monday for a special interview with experts on Wicked and the representation of witches on stage and screen. Until then, have a great today and a wicked tomorrow.
Meet Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander writer and co-director of the upcoming film I Be a Witch. The film tells the story of Lori’s ancestor, Salem witch trial victim Ann Foster of Andover Massachusetts. Ann’s story is told through visions and memories that Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail. Lori and Matthew reflect together on the making of the movie and the impactful lessons the history offers.
[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, the show that asks why we hunt witches and how we can stop hunting witches. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:19] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack, and today we speak with Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander about their film, I Be a Witch.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: The film tells the stories of Lori's ancestor, Salem Witch Trial victim Ann Foster of Andover. Based on actual events, Ann's story is told through visions and memories Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: Welcome Lori Prescott Hansen, Salem Witch Trial descendant, writer, and actress, and I Be a Witch film director, Matthew C. S. Julander.
[00:00:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: I'm Lori Prescott Hanson. I always throw in the Prescott, because I live in a small town, and there's five Lori Hansons just here. My husband and I have been theater artists for a long time. We actually met in a production of King Lear. And we began to do professional storytelling quite a while ago. And we've been doing that ever since. He taught theater at the university here for 20 years, and I did a lot of directing of shows here and here in small town, Idaho as far as being a storyteller goes, there's not a lot of venues unless you create them yourself. And so that's what led me along the path of doing one person shows. And this one about Ann is the second one I've done. And so that's my background. Matthew, take it away.
[00:01:47] Matthew C. S. Julander: So I'm in Utah. I went to film school at Brigham Young University and then zapped off to Los Angeles for close to 20 years of unsuccessful attempts to make my way into the film industry in earnest. So I worked on a few shows and made some corporate videos and just bounced around.
And then eventually decided to move back to Utah. And at which point I met Sherry Julander, who I then married and she is the lady who co directed our movie. And also adapted the screenplay from Lori's one-woman show. And so the story goes that I don't know, two years ago Sherry comes to me and says, 'Hey, I have some friends who are putting on a one woman show up in Idaho,' so we drove for six hours and like about hour one of the drive, she said, Oh, by the way, it's a middle aged woman doing a one woman show. And she was worried that I was going to hate the whole thing and want to turn
[00:02:43] Lori Prescott Hansen: it under wraps.
[00:02:44] Matthew C. S. Julander: But so she waited until we got far enough along that I was stuck. So we went up and watched it, and the story is really compelling. I was just struck. And so I, as soon as the lights came up, I turned to Sherry and said, we, do you want to try and make a short film out of this? And thus was hatched our little plot here. What started as something that was going to be a 25 to 30 minute movie has ballooned up to a short feature length movie. And now we're on your podcast.
[00:03:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: Sherry was actually a former student of my husband's. And so we had worked together. I've done plays with her in the past. And we had talked years ago about wanting to do something around Salem just because we've both always been intrigued by the subject. Then I found out later my ancestor was actually one of the accused women, and Sherry said that name sounds so familiar and she went back and checked her personal history and lo and behold we are both descendants of Ann Foster. We felt a real a real bond and a real kinship doing that. And something that we meandered around years ago finally became a reality.
[00:03:58] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. What's it like to find out that your friend is also your cousin?
[00:04:03] Lori Prescott Hansen: It couldn't have happened to a nicer person. I love her. I love her to death. And she is an amazing actor as well as screenwriter, and she and Matthew are a force together to be reckoned with, as far as film production. We're really excited that they joined on.
[00:04:23] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah and I also have a common Salem ancestor. We started doing this show, and then found out that we're cousins.
[00:04:31] Lori Prescott Hansen: Really?
[00:04:33] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're both from Mary Esty.
[00:04:36] Lori Prescott Hansen: Oh, wow.
[00:04:38] Josh Hutchinson: yes.
[00:04:39] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. You hear all these names and there's so many stories. So many stories. Yeah.
[00:04:48] Sarah Jack: Do you wanna tell us about Ann Foster's story?
[00:04:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: My son called me one day. He's known as a storyteller. I've always been drawn to crone figures, to wise women, to that sort of thing. And jokingly have always said I'm part witch. But he called me one day and said, "did you know that you are related to an accused witch of Salem?" And it just floored me. And I, cause I had no idea. So I went back and he showed me the timeline, the link from grandmother to grandmother. And she's my 11th great grandmother. And so I began to just read into her life, and the more I read, the more compelled I was and because her story is so unique and uniquely tragic, because of the elements in her life that it just it just pulled me in, and I wanted to do something about and for this woman that I felt a real kinship to. So that's the kernel of the beginning of it for me and my appeal to Ann, because like I say, even if she weren't a relation, her story is so compelling, because it's very unique in its own right. Go for it, Matthew.
What was it about Ann that sucked you in as a non relation?
[00:06:14] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that I found striking about this whole process is how much of just the dialogue in our movie is pulled straight from like court reports. This is apparently what, at least whoever was writing it down, got, is the exact things that people were saying. And so that makes it very it does make it very personal.
And you're saying, 'oh my gosh, this isn't just a story, this isn't the Avengers, this is like a real person that all this stuff happened to.' So as we set about to make a movie of it, in large part we just followed what we saw Lori when she put on the one woman show, but we, we treated it with a certain degree of gravity or reverence or care, because we wanted to keep it a true story. We wanted to keep it true to what, as far as we can tell, Ann Foster might've really felt. I have a feeling that Lori might be, I don't know, a feistier person than Ann was? Because I'm told that at the time of, yeah, maybe Ann was feistier in her younger years, but at the time of her incarceration, she'd gotten on in years and she was quite feeble.
[00:07:20] Lori Prescott Hansen: No one will ever accuse me of being feeble.
[00:07:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: But on the other hand, just from the life that she led and some of the things that she did that were contrary to what would have been culturally accepted, especially since being culturally accepted was, I think it was a much bigger deal for the Puritans in New England. I think she probably was a feisty lady. She probably was a little bit of a rebellious lady. And maybe she was forced to be that way just because she married a guy who was way too old for her and defied some expectations.
So in any case, it was really interesting being able to look into the life of this very real person and have some of the words that she came up with when she was in the trial, when she was giving her confession and just trying to not just see through that window, but try and open that window up to other people so they could see into it as well.
[00:08:14] Josh Hutchinson: And so this began as a solo project, a one person play, and then evolved from there. What can you tell us about the one woman play?
[00:08:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: When I began writing this whole thing, I began it through a storytelling approach. I was going to tell her story third person. And I actually wrote it out, and I began reading it to my husband, and I realized it was so boring, and it sounded like a book report. And so I played around with combinations of narration and then character, and that became really singsongy back and forth and he finally said one day, you just need to write it as a play. And so I did. I take on other voices throughout the script but not a lot. It's mostly her own voice, her own words. My creation, but it's through her voice. And yeah, it was really well received where I've done it. I've only really done it a handful of times.
But the thing that really turned the corner for me on writing it was my husband again, who is also a playwright, said to me one day, 'you're writing it like you're writing about a woman who knows she's going to die. And he said, that's not interesting. You should be writing about a woman who is fighting to live.' And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me, and I realized he was exactly right, and that's when the writing really began to flow.
And like I say, it was really well received. I was really very proud of it. When Sherry and Matthew came up and saw it and they talked to us about it directly after the show, honestly, I feel such a, not ownership, but such a, this is my thing. And I was really afraid to turn what I had envisioned and done over to someone else. And if it hadn't been that it was Matthew and Sherry, I may never have said, 'okay, you can take this and do it you want with it.' But I did. And I couldn't have been more happy.
They were true to Ann. They were true to her story. They were true to how I envisioned the show, and they only heightened it with a full cast and fleshed out dialogue and lots of scenes in the jail. And anyway, so that was the metamorphosis of it for me.
[00:10:57] Sarah Jack: Is there anything about her history, the story, that you want to share today?
[00:11:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: I can give you like a slight overview of what what the story is about. So Ann Foster was in Andover. She was not among the first people that were accused or tried for witchcraft. Her story started because there was a man in her town. So Joseph Ballard's wife was ill and he thought maybe it was witchcraft. He had heard about all these people getting accused and convicted of witchcraft in Salem, so he went down to Salem and grabbed some of the teenagers who had been accusing people and brought them back up to Andover.
And they spotted Ann Foster and accused her of being a witch. And so then she was dragged in and eventually tried, convicted, and set up in the the Salem jail. We basically tell that story and something that's interesting. This is maybe not so much about Ann's story, but it's more about how this, the way that we tell the story is like structured.
When Lori wrote this script, she wasn't following like the formulaic stuff that they use for say, like writing screenplays. Whereas the story that we told it's almost as if the inciting moment happens before the story starts. And it happens like in a flashback because the whole story is told from Ann Foster's perspective in the Salem jail. And the question that we're trying to put into the minds of the audience right out of the gate is, 'okay how did she get here? What happened? How did this madness ensue?'
And then she just tells the whole story. She goes back to the whole Salem witch like craziness, to her earlier life. She talks about how she was married to a man who was quite a bit older than she was. She talked about her children. She talks about something that happens, one of the terrible events that happens to one of her children, which maybe I don't want to reveal yet, because you have to watch the movie. All these things could have had an influence on why the people of the time thought, 'oh, yeah, that makes sense that Ann Foster would be a witch.'
[00:13:00] Lori Prescott Hansen: Because when you're already the other, you're a sitting duck.
[00:13:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: She was already like an easy target for the accusations. I think that everybody who does a Salem witch trial story or tries to tell the story, the central question is, 'how did this happen?' It's always, 'how did this happen? How did these people get to the point where they're actually executed people for a thing that nowadays we see is just like being a fiction, just completely made up?
And so we tried to get in there, too. And because we have Ann's personal story. And some of the things that she said, we have some of her words, we can say, okay, this is at least the perspective of one person, how she was able to, how she sees it ,why she was dragged into it.
One of the striking things for me is that Ann Foster herself, in our dialogue, she says, 'Oh, I believe there's witches. I'd just be not one of them.' That's not the exact quote, but it's close. So it's oh yeah, everybody believed that it was real. But everyone also knew about I'm not one, though.
We even got into the idea that some people maybe started toying with the idea that, 'am I a witch? Maybe I've had bad thoughts about this person or that person. Maybe I projected some evil onto that person. Maybe that's some witchcraft. Maybe I'm somehow involved.' And that's the sort of thing that allowed it to roll.
[00:14:21] Lori Prescott Hansen: That's one Ann's lines in it is, 'can one be a witch and not know it?' Which is an interesting question. The most poignant question to me that we raise in the script is a line of Ann's. She's in jail. She's been there quite a long time. And she says, 'so what do you do with a broken, old witch?' No one's paying for her to get out, whether they could or chose not to, we really don't know. She's there for the duration until she dies
[00:14:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Spoiler alert.
[00:14:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: So what do you do with people like this that are the throwaways? Even though your sentence has been stayed, you're still a convicted witch. That's probably the most poignant question to me in the film is 'what do you do with a broken, old witch?'
[00:15:12] Matthew C. S. Julander: And it's maybe not a question that we answer in great detail. It's something that the audience is left to think about for themselves. Because since we stay in Ann's, in her perspective, in her mind the whole time, it's yeah, we don't know why her son Andrew never showed up to pay the jailer's fees.
[00:15:30] Lori Prescott Hansen: Abraham is the one that paid to take her body. They paid to retrieve her body. They did not pay to have, you had to pay for everything. You had to pay for your straw. You had to pay for your chains. You had to pay for your food or water, anything. And we don't know if they didn't have the money to pay her way out or whether they chose not to. We know they did not sign the petition that the town raised when everyone had decided enough was enough. Whether they didn't want to bring more attention to her story or there's just so many questions that we don't have answers to.
[00:16:07] Matthew C. S. Julander: So we asked the questions.
[00:16:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: We asked the questions, and we did take a bit of a slant on things, because we realized if we're going to do this project, we have to make choices. We can't just have the whole thing be ambivalent. We have to make some choices. I hope they were the right ones, but we'll see.
[00:16:28] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think the creative piece of telling the story is an essential part. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have put together.
[00:16:38] Matthew C. S. Julander: So are we!
[00:16:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Me too.
We actually just did our first submission of it.
[00:16:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: That's a rough cut.
[00:16:47] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's this close to being done, but we were able to slip it in on a deadline that was important to us. Yeah, it's very close. We actually, the four of us traveled three weeks ago? Four weeks ago? We actually flew out to Andover and Salem and met with some people out there and particularly in Andover we met with a woman that works at the North Church, which is the congregation Ann would have been part of. We met with the caretaker of the cemetery on the South side of Andover.
We met with Jill Christiansen from the Salem Witch Museum, and she was very, very helpful and very kind. And in fact, all of them were, and it just, we really hope to be able to do a screening in, I would really prefer Andover to Salem, because that's where it began, and that's where it would be full circle. So anyway, we've talked to a few people and nothing's set in stone, but we're excited, excited.
[00:17:58] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of people don't realize the involvement of Andover, even though Andover had more accused than Salem did.
[00:18:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And Martha Carrier was from Andover. It's almost treated as an afterthought in some ways to Salem, and I guess that's probably because of the hype.
And I think there are many people in Andover that feel those strong, still connections to their history.
[00:18:30] Matthew C. S. Julander: It's striking as we went to the graveyard at the South church in Andover and then the other, the cemetery it's up closer to the North Church. When we went to those places and we looked at gravestones, I was struck that very often the people who were buried in, the official graveyard, the official cemetery, are what I would now consider the villains of this story, lots of the judges, but none of the people who were accused of witchcraft and then who would not cop to it.
The ones who would never give up and say yes, I'm a witch. The ones who actually maintain their integrity, those are the ones that don't get to be buried there. And, it's not even sure where many of them any of them, are buried. Because even the ones that were officially hanged, it's they have a, there's a Walgreens. Up the street from, that's where the which memorial is it?
[00:19:23] Josh Hutchinson: That's the Proctor's Ledge,
[00:19:25] Matthew C. S. Julander: the proctor's ledge. So they have a sense of, we think they must be buried here or here, but it's not really known.
[00:19:33] Sarah Jack: It's the exact situation in Connecticut with their victims and the, the founders that ran the witch trials and those kind of things. Their statues are there honoring the history, the impact of their history. And we worked on an exoneration project for the Connecticut victims last year, and the state did pass a bill apologizing to the 34 indicted, 11 hanged.
Now we're working on. State memorial for the victims and one of the things that we're up against is making room for these accused because there's already, all the space is taken by those who have already been buried and honored and,
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: in a lot of cases are the accusers.
[00:20:24] Sarah Jack: They are the accusers. When you started talking about that, I'm like, oh my goodness, there's some other ancient burial grounds in New England, it's the same situation.
[00:20:32] Lori Prescott Hansen: And just following your Facebook posts and that, I realized that the Connecticut thing has been a passion project for you a labor of love, and,
[00:20:43] Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was interesting because there were local Connecticut residents and advocates and descendants who, for many years, have tried to get an acknowledgment. And then last year when North Andover was working on Elizabeth Johnson Jr. 's exoneration. It was happening during the 375th anniversary of the hanging of Alice Young who was the first hanged in Connecticut and it just seemed so unfair that nobody knows her name. She has not been apologized to, and it really just fired a bunch of us up and everything, it was just the right timing. The politicians there were ready to make an attempt, and so this project, which we've talked quite a bit about in several episodes, it was a passion, and we all came together and found a route to that apology.
[00:21:37] Lori Prescott Hansen: Wow.
[00:21:39] Sarah Jack: But now they need a memorial. There's a few individual bricks in some of the local towns honoring some specific victims, but there's nothing. Nothing, there's no monument for the history, so that's what's next. We'll see how that unfolds.
[00:21:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. Because people don't even really think of Connecticut. It's that Salem story, no, it was all over. Yeah. Connecticut was earlier than Salem and Massachusetts, wasn't it?
[00:22:13] Josh Hutchinson: It, yes, it began much earlier, started in 1647, so 45 years before. But Andover also, there's not, a specific site to go to in Andover to remember the victims from there. And there were, what was it? 45 or 48 people accused from Andover? Very high number. And there's nothing there, there's no plaque, there's no statue, there's no wall or benches or
[00:22:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that when we set out to make this movie, making movies can be a pretty A large undertaking. Although this movie was quite small by comparison to some. We shot the entire thing in a 20 by 30 garage. So even though it is a period piece, we built a couple of sets.
So we have a prison set that is meant to look very realistic, and we had a Foster home set that ended up looking very realistic over the course of the shoot. The first scenes that we did in that, we only had two walls of that set, but later on, we built out the whole thing. In any Case it takes over your life for a while, because you end up realizing, oh, it's I'm building a house. There's something where you have to decide that you want to go through all the trouble, right? You have to tell yourself this is worth it. And so as we've been talking about the people who are past and the people who went through this incredibly unjust situation, and some of them lost their lives I, I was thinking, eh, whether you believe in an afterlife or not, I would think that those people, maybe it doesn't matter what we think of them now, right?
If you don't believe in an afterlife, then clearly they don't care. If you do believe in an afterlife, they might be busy with something else. And so it's maybe not so much for them that we do these memorials and that we try to try to set things right. It might be more for us. And so that's the thought that I had when we were making this film is, 'I want this film to be something that shows how that happened back then.'
In that sense, that those who don't learn from history will repeat it. If you do learn from history, hopefully you grow. And yeah. As we were making the film, I was always trying to think, okay, how is this going to affect people? How can we show people something that hopefully makes them into better people?
And the crazy thing about the whole witchcraft trial fervor that ran across Europe and then America in many cases, it wasn't as if there was some ulterior motive. But a lot of times it was just, I don't know, the arrogance of the judges. The arrogance of the people in their religion thinking that they were infallible. It was just, things got out of hand, and people's emotions were driven to a certain direction and there was no one to say, 'whoa, let's calm down. Let's think about this.' And so it seems like that is an informative lesson for us right now. And maybe always, everybody always likes to say, 'Oh, in our time, things are so tough.' And it's so similar to now. And you could say that about now, you could say that about probably any epic in the Earth's history as well.
In any case, it seems like it's a useful story for us to look at and say, 'Hey, do I have any prejudices? Do I have any arrogance? Do I have any beliefs that are untested that I'm so sure about that I would do something that might turn out to be reprehensible?' And I hopefully the movie and these stories, and even when we talk about the monuments and trying to call attention to it, so like Alice Young that nobody's ever heard of. If we can call attention to these people and say, 'look, these stories all happened,' hopefully that'll affect us now and say, 'okay I don't want to create another story for somebody 375 years from now to look back at and go,'
[00:26:06] Josh Hutchinson: And Ann Foster's story is so compelling because of so many reasons. You alluded to earlier something that happens to one of her daughters before the trials. And then there are things that happen to her family during the trials.
[00:26:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: Ann, humble, meek, fragile, old Ann was very well known, because of her family and what had happened in it. Everyone knew Ann Foster's history. She was very ripe for the picking. Yeah.
[00:26:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: I think that's actually an interesting thing about the story. So maybe most people's entrance into their understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is the Crucible. That seems to be the most famous story that's been told. But the Crucible sets it portrays John Proctor and is it Elizabeth Proctor? They're portrayed as having John had an affair, right? He's portrayed as having this sin that he committed.
Ann is interesting in that there's really no sin for her, but there is this circle of bad things that have happened, things that, okay, your son in law is a really bad guy though and maybe there's a little impropriety with this and maybe like your granddaughter is a bit of a mess. She's not being very Puritan. There was things that made it look like she could be looked at as being bad somehow.
I think that's a really important thing to look at in the story. If I were to tell another story from the witch trials, I maybe would want to do one about Rebecca Nurse, because she's theoretically like the perfect Puritan, just angelic in every way.
But the idea that I'm going at is some of these people who got roped up in this, they really were unimpeachable. I guess you can't say they were above reproach. They would probably, had their, personal interactions where they might get mad at somebody or do something that people would remember and think of them as having been sinful or wicked or something.
They really were just good people, just fairly honest, fairly good. People like hopefully you and me.
[00:28:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And John Proctor himself, the same thing that, historically there was not an affair or anything like that. That was Arthur Miller's slant on it that pulled us all in. John Proctor was unique in that he didn't buy it, and he decided he was going to beat the witchcraft out of, was there, was it Mary Warren? And because he didn't go along with it, he was pegged.
The other thing that was interesting about Ann, too, with Joseph Ballard is that was the first time anyone had gone to Salem and literally recruited these girls and brought them back to Andover. And then they singled out Ann, who they already were aware of who she was, everyone was, but that was interesting to me, the lengths that he went to to find a witch, to literally go recruit the girls and bring them up to Andover from Salem.
[00:29:08] Josh Hutchinson: That was a major turning point in the course of the witch hunt, bringing them to Andover, starting that whole, it just snowballed after that, Andover, you had Martha Carrier accused previously to that, but it was limited to her.
And then that just opened the floodgates, and they had the mass touch test where they brought everybody in and had the afflicted people touch them to see if that cured them.
The touch test, basically the belief was that when a witch used their magic against their victim they're transferring this effluvia, this kind of substance from the witch to the victim, and then on contact, the substance would go back from the victim into the witch.
[00:30:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: A literal substance.
[00:30:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, a literal substance that they could...
Yeah, so they could beam at you through the evil eye
or they could get you with it, an image of you, there was, there were poppets and image magic and spells and curses. So they had a few ways to strike at you. But there were ways to cure. You just had to get really close to the person you thought had bewitched you.
[00:30:40] Matthew C. S. Julander: So what the part about it that was backwards is they would, they would blindfold or somehow make it so that the witch was unaware of who was touching them, but they would let the person, the afflicted, still be able to see. So when they did these touch tests, the afflicted person would come in, they'd know exactly who they were touching, so if they like, oh, it's Ann Foster is the one we're accusing. When I touch Ann Foster, I'm suddenly going to not be afflicted anymore, right? So they could clearly fake it. Whereas, Ann Foster didn't know who was touching her, right? So the idea was, 'we don't trust the witches, so we have to blindfold them. But clearly our accusers are perfectly honest, good people, so we don't have to blindfold them.'
And that's just you guys are very bad at interrogation. It never occurred to you that maybe the accusers are not being honest. If we're doing the test, either they're being honest or they're, it's one of the possibilities that we should be testing for. And we can, we just blindfold everybody.
[00:31:30] Josh Hutchinson: Or even if they truly believed that the person was bewitching them, they would behave differently around the person. They buy into this stuff, they first, they see that person, they fall into one of their fits, then they touch the person believing that's going to cure them, and the fit suddenly stops.
[00:31:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: We have tried with the film to be as accurate as we know and as we can be. We all felt, I think, a real sense of obligation to do that. We want it to be true to her story. It's sensational enough on its own. We didn't need to hype it up even more than her story already is. To me, it may be the most compelling of that era, her story, because of so much, but I'm also biased.
[00:32:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: We've talked about how in Andover, it was like a much bigger problem. It was, it's really where it got it blew up more. I said something that maybe for the listeners, it'd be nice to clarify. I said maybe it was because of Ann. So Ann Foster apparently is the first one to have ever said that there were 300 some odd. 307, oddly specific, but maybe she knew that would, made the story sound more authentic. She said there were some 307 witches in our county and nobody had ever put a big number on it like that. And so maybe when she said that, everybody was like, and so then the authorities are like, 'okay buckle on your swords, boys. We got to go pick up some more people,' or something like that.
[00:33:06] Josh Hutchinson: That's also something that makes her confession really interesting, and it is a big turning point, again, in the witch hunt, because, early on, Tituba says there's nine witches, so they're looking for nine people, but then the number just keeps growing, and then it leaps with Ann Foster to this 300 some people, and yeah, they really were looking under every stone, trying to find a witch in Andover.
[00:33:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Was she the first one, I can't remember, was she the first one in her confession that talked about flying on a stick, or had someone done that before her?
[00:33:49] Josh Hutchinson: Tituba had talked about it.
[00:33:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: and even that she had cheese in her pocket, which I thought was not funny, but like that's really specific. And you do get the idea, too, the question is raised, she was old, she was feeble, she was frail. Did she start to believe these things? Was her mind beginning to wander? Was she confessing to save herself and members of her family, to take it on herself? We don't know all those things, but they're all really compelling questions.
[00:34:27] Josh Hutchinson: And we do know that people, as you mentioned earlier, were thinking, 'could I be a witch and not know it?' Was a theme that was going through the Andover Confessions,
[00:34:41] Lori Prescott Hansen: Right.
[00:34:42] Josh Hutchinson: People questioning themselves, could I have committed some sin that turned me over to the devil?
And could I unwittingly be causing these people harm?
Yeah, people were truly confused about it.
[00:34:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's interesting too, to me, that Ann called out Martha Carrier. She wasn't guiltless in accusing others. In her mind, Martha Carrier is already in prison, so I'm not doing any additional harm. You could spend years delving into all of this and never get to complete answers.
[00:35:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: I feel like one of the things when we're trying to figure out how it all happened is this idea of like they had competing virtues. Like one of the virtues was you had to have faith and believe. And another virtue was you had to have integrity and be honest. And those were competing virtues in the sense that say with John Proctor, who thought that all the witch stuff was a bunch of hubbub. And Lori said he tried to beat it out of his servant. He's, ' I'll show you, say that you've sensed witches, whack whack, do you still sense witches? Nope!' For that, for Proctor to do that, it's like he's saying, 'okay, so witches, that's a bunch of nonsense,' but witches are in the Bible and witches are something that we all believe is part of, it's tied to the religion.
And so is John Proctor like showing a lack of faith and a lack of belief? That means John Proctor is not virtuous. But on the other hand, John Proctor went to his execution and wouldn't say that he was a witch. He would, he never I don't want to say admitted because that suggests that he actually was. He never copped to it, right?
And so in that sense, he had the other virtue of the integrity. So these people who were trying to say, 'maybe I am a witch. Can I be a witch and not know it?' That's their attempt to make those two competing virtues work together. I'm still going to believe, but I don't want to lie. It's a form of like cognitive dissonance for them, but like that's an interesting and I guess kind of awful way that they had to try to do the mental gymnastics to make it so they could keep all their virtues.
[00:36:52] Josh Hutchinson: That's a really good analysis. And there was so much going on in Andover contributing to the confessions. Really most of the people in Andover did ultimately confess, and they were being pressured by their own families to do so, because there was a rumor going around that if you confessed, you'd be spared.
[00:37:17] Lori Prescott Hansen: be forgiven. You were capable of being forgiven or of repenting.
[00:37:22] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, they did end up convicting a number of people who confessed, but fortunately for them it was late enough in the game that they were never actually executed. But that rumor was going around. And then there was the whole, 'could I be one and not know it? Everybody's telling me I am a witch. If the magistrate is telling you you're a witch, and he's a reliable guy and trusted and looked up to, and maybe you start believing him instead of yourself.
[00:37:58] Lori Prescott Hansen: And if you look at that in terms of Ann, she had so much tragedy in her life that maybe this has happened because I am this and she's old and she's feeble and she's worn down and she's seen so much in her family that's just remarkable. I'm sure she was just, in some ways, just done.
[00:38:21] Matthew C. S. Julander: I do wonder how she came up with all the details that she came up with. Like the bird that came black and left white, or the dog, the stick, the cheese in the pockets. There were so many like interesting little tidbits. It's is it because she was in that kind of feeble place and her mind was just making things up now and she was in fever dream mode? Or was she like knowingly trying to protect her family and she's, this is the best way to do it. I've seen enough lying. I if she had, but I'm going to do details with the lies so they seem more.
[00:38:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: And the details of life that are given extra magical or whatever stories to explain them. Ann had a bad leg or a bad hip. She says it's because she fell off the stick. So anyway, just so many things that make it. It's interesting and sad and educational that, if we can learn the lessons that we ought to learn, we'd be better off for our own futures.
[00:39:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: Somebody was talking about how dense those forests are and imagine them without electric lighting, like how there'd be so little that you could see and how everything would be so close. There was the dangers of getting diseases. There was plenty to be afraid of that you couldn't see and wouldn't know was coming, right? And that seems like that also made it rife for people to work up in stories of things and to believe in things that maybe weren't there. It's a really strange place.
[00:39:53] Lori Prescott Hansen: New England is, it's to me a magical place. It's beautiful. It's picturesque. The houses are amazing. I love the styles and all that. I love the toll roads, but it's interesting that such a tragic thing could take place in such a beautiful place. And that's, that happens everywhere, it can happen anywhere. And it was the frontier, particularly Andover. It was the frontier.
[00:40:22] Josh Hutchinson: I've camped in the forest near Andover. There's a Harold Parker State Forest right there. And I spent about 10 days, I believe, in the woods right there. And even today, the woods are so thick that if you're out on one of those hiking trails, it doesn't take long to not have roads and sounds from roads and so just imagining back then, and coming from England where it's a little more crowded and there'd be some more lights to this very wilderness. It's so hauntingly frightening. You actually have wolves and bears and things that they don't have in England anymore. Yeah, it's just a spooky environment, but so beautiful.
[00:41:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: beautiful.
[00:41:18] Sarah Jack: At this stage with your project, what is it that you need from listeners, from supporters?
[00:41:25] Lori Prescott Hansen: We need viewers. Yeah. And exposure. Exposure. That's why we appreciate this podcast so much because it's huge. It's a huge benefit to us. So we need energy.
[00:41:39] Matthew C. S. Julander: We are going to try to put it into festivals, and as we do, we'll post about it on our Facebook page and on our website so that anybody who's interested in seeing the film can go see it. So one thing would be great for us is if you go search for I Be a Witch on Facebook and follow us there. Or you can go to ibeawitch. com, bookmark that, and go back to it. You can also go to ibeawitch. com and find your way to the Facebook group from there.
And that way, anybody who's interested in the film can keep track of, like, where it ends up, so where they can see it. And that, then, as we start, rolling it out and showing it in different places, the exposure would be great. If you, if... If you want to help us with the film, you can, "Hey, they just said they're going to be in this film festival in North Carolina. Everybody who wants to go see it in North Carolina." And that, that, that'd be helpful for us. Eventually, we hope to get it onto a streaming platform. And when we do that, of course, we'll tell everybody where that is. And then it's just a matter of, yeah, tell your friends, go watch the movie.
[00:42:38] Sarah Jack: And right now they can watch the preview,
[00:42:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: They can. You can watch the trailer.
[00:42:42] Matthew C. S. Julander: The trailer's on ibeawitch. com.
[00:42:44] Lori Prescott Hansen: The trailer, I have to say. I'm tickled with it.
[00:42:48] Josh Hutchinson: We'll have a link to that in the show description to both the Facebook and the website. And as you start to have showings, we'll definitely share that on our social media to help get the word out. It's something that our listeners are going to be interested in. We'll definitely be helping promote that as we can.
[00:43:12] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[00:43:14] Mary Louise Bingham: Alice Markham Cantor, a freelance writer and a fact checker for the New York Magazine. She is creating a database regarding worldwide witch hunts. Alice uses her writing skills by weaving the common threads of witch hunts from the 1300s to the current day. Alice introduced me to the story of Iquo Edet Iyo, a prosperous woman looked on with suspicion for years who was accused of using black magic to cause a motorcycle accident at Cross River State, Nigeria. As a result, Iquo was brutally murdered in October of 2022. Alice reminded me that there are over 1,000 innocent people killed due to ongoing deadly witch hunts every year. I encourage the listeners to read Alice's story titled, "Social Turmoil Has Increased Witch Hunts Historically" on Portside.Org. Check out her profile on theinternationalnetwork.org. Thank you, Alice Markham Cantor, you are one powerful advocate.
[00:44:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:44:22] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:44:25] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide. At End Witch Hunts, our commitment is unwavering to actively engage in educating and advocating for the cessation of witch hunting practice. We can do this through the power of collective action. Thank you for already supporting our projects by listening to and sharing our podcast episodes. If you'd like to further contribute, please consider a financial contribution. Your financial support empowers us to continue our education and advocacy efforts. As the holiday season approaches, we invite you to keep End Witch Hunts in mind when considering your charitable gifts. We have donate buttons on our websites.
Our latest historical justice initiative, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is dedicated to securing formal exoneration for those wrongfully convicted as witches in Boston. We are also seeking a formal apology for all documented victims of the Massachusetts Colony Witch Trials. Each of these individuals has a story of innocence, Injustice and life altering consequences due to false accusations. You can make a difference immediately by signing and sharing the petition. Do so now at change.org/witchtrials.
If you live in Massachusetts, you can share this project with your legislative representatives and ask them to propose the amendment. If you are a voting member of the Massachusetts General Court, we need you to lead or collaborate on this amendment effort now. Please consider reaching out to the project so that we can support you as you propose or support such an amendment. Please take action, and let's work together to help close a chapter of American history that calls out to us all for answers.
Commemorating Goody Glover Day, November 16th.
On this day of witch trial memorialization in Boston, we want to highlight the significance of November 16th, proclaimed as Goody Glover Day by the Boston City Council in 1988.
Goody Glover, an Irish Catholic widow, was falsely accused, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft on this date in 1688. We invite you to commemorate Goody Glover Day by visiting her memorial plaque at the parish of Our Lady of Victories. The memorial plaque recounts the tragic tale of Ann Glover, emphasizing her unwavering commitment to the Catholic faith.
You may not be able to visit the memorial plaque, but you are able to pay tribute through various means, including social media discussions, coffee shop conversations, educational programs, and moments of reflection. Your support is instrumental in driving positive change and bringing an end to the dark history of witch hunting practices.
For more information and to contribute, visit endwitchhunts. org.
[00:46:58] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:47:01] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:47:02] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:47:07] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:47:09] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:13] Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:47:16] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:47:19] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:47:24] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Exodus 22:18
[00:00:05] Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:31] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:34] Josh Hutchinson: Today we're talking to Annika Hylmo and Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine. Their documentary, The Last Witch, covers the exoneration of Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the "Last Witch" of Salem to have her name cleared.
[00:00:49] Sarah Jack: Because you like the show, please share it with your friends, family, and followers.
[00:00:54] Josh Hutchinson: I'm looking forward to today's episode. I think we'll have a deep, [00:01:00] powerful conversation with Annika and Cassandra, and looking forward to diving into how and why we hunt witches with them, what they've learned from doing their documentary.
[00:01:15] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm really excited to get to talk to them directly. I've really enjoyed their Facebook Live updates on their work, but we're gonna get so much more tonight.
[00:01:27] Josh Hutchinson: We are, and speaking of getting more, Thanksgiving is next week.
[00:01:31] Sarah Jack: I have my turkey. It's not thawed yet, but I have it.
[00:01:36] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, don't thaw a week ahead of time. I wouldn't wanna eat a week old Turkey.
[00:01:41] Sarah Jack: There's this movie that I watch every Thanksgiving if I can get it. It's Home for the Holidays with Holly Hunter and Dylan McDermott and Robert Downey Jr.
[00:01:54] Have you seen it?
[00:01:55] Josh Hutchinson: I think I've seen that. I don't remember it though.
[00:01:58] Sarah Jack: Love that [00:02:00] movie. And it's all about frustrating family dynamics, and the sister brings a Neutra bird.
[00:02:09] Josh Hutchinson: What is a Neutra bird?
[00:02:11] Sarah Jack: I I have no idea, but it was like a special health. They called it a Neutra bird or Neutry bird, and she ends up wearing it.
[00:02:18] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, like Joey and the turkey in Friends?
[00:02:21] Sarah Jack: Oh yeah. See that's what we should talk about is Friends.
[00:02:25] Josh Hutchinson: I wanna talk about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. That's my favorite Thanksgiving movie.
[00:02:30] Sarah Jack: That is up there. That is up there.
[00:02:34] Josh Hutchinson: That's the classic Thanksgiving movie.
[00:02:38] Sarah Jack: Josh, let's hear some history about Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
[00:02:42] Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Johnson, Jr. was an unfortunate victim of the Salem Witch Trials. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was the granddaughter of Reverend Francis Dane of Andover, but, more importantly, she was the first cousin, once removed of Martha Carrier, who Cotton Mather described [00:03:00] as the Queen of Hell and whose family were basically all arrested during the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:03:09] Elizabeth Johnson, Jr. was 22 at the time of her arrest. Her father Steven Johnson had died in 1690, due to a smallpox outbreak that was blamed on Martha Carrier. Elizabeth Johnson, Jr. was arrested shortly before August 10th, 1692, along with her second cousins, Sarah and Thomas Carrier, children of Martha.
[00:03:34] Elizabeth was examined by magistrate Dudley Bradstreet on August 10, and she did confess. She was alleged to have afflicted Sarah Phelps with the help of Sarah and Thomas Carrier. Sarah Phelps was the daughter of Samuel Phelps and the niece of recently deceased Elizabeth Phelps Ballard, the woman for [00:04:00] whom the Andover witch-hunt really started, when her husband invited afflicted girls from Salem Village to come up and detect witches. Elizabeth confessed to afflicting Sarah Phelps, Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott, Lawrence Lacey, Benjamin Abbott, a child of Ephraim Davis, two children of James Fry, the children of Abraham Foster, and Elizabeth Phelps Ballard, who died.
[00:04:28] Elizabeth stated that she had been a witch for four years. She became a witch at her cousin Martha Carrier's house, and in 1689 she was baptized by the devil by having her head dipped in Martha Carrier's well. She also scratched the devil's book with her finger to sign the covenant with him. She was present at a witch sacrament, where red bread and blood wine were served. All the witches there pledged to pull down the Kingdom of Christ and [00:05:00] set up the Devil's Kingdom.
[00:05:02] While she confessed, she also accused Martha Carrier, George Burroughs, Martha Toothaker's two children, Richard Carrier, Sarah Carrier, Mary Lacey, Sr., Mary Lacey, Jr., John Floyd, and Daniel Eames. She confessed to using puppets and she showed a place on her knuckle, where her familiar suckled her and said that there were two more places that she couldn't reveal. So women searched her body, and they found one behind her arm, but didn't mention any other.
[00:05:36] And now after 330 years, her name has finally been cleared, the last of the convicted Salem witches to have that done.
[00:05:48] Sarah Jack: Thank you for all of that information on Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.'s life and for making her experience something that we know about.
[00:05:58] Josh Hutchinson: You're [00:06:00] welcome, and I forgot one detail. She sold her soul to the Devil for one shilling, which is just a bunch of pennies, 5 cents worth, a nickel. She sold herself to the devil. And she never got paid. The devil never paid up anybody who confessed to covenanting with him during the Salem witch trials. Never once did the guy actually do what he said he would do.
[00:06:28] Sarah Jack: That sounds like him.
[00:06:30] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, he's a rascal.
[00:06:33] Sarah Jack: Yeah, he's a liar.
[00:06:35] Josh Hutchinson: The Prince of Liars.
[00:06:36] Sarah Jack: Welcome to Annika Hylmo and Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine of The Last Witch, a documentary about the work of a middle school teacher and her students to exonerate Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last person convicted during the Salem Witch Trials to be cleared.
[00:06:53] We would like to start out by finding out who was the last witch.
[00:06:58] Annika Hylmo: The last witch, it depends on [00:07:00] how you see it, depends on what you consider to be a witch. But the last convicted witch from the Salem Witch Trials was Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was just exonerated on July 28th, 2022, three hundred and twenty-nine years after she was convicted. So with that, I guess you could say that she was the last witch from the Salem Witch Trials, and that kind of ended the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:07:28] Sarah Jack: When I saw how you listed that on your social media, the end of them, I thought that's really a strong statement and thought, and that's a wrap. So that's really powerful.
[00:07:41] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: Yeah, we felt that way too. I think Annika came up with it first, and she said that, and it was like, "wait, you're right."
[00:07:46] Oh my gosh. It's, it made history and it like closed a chapter in history. Not all the way, there's still more obviously other people that haven't been exonerated, like in Connecticut and other places around the world, but also and still the lasting effects of it. But [00:08:00] definitely that particular chapter felt like it had come to a close.
[00:08:04] Annika Hylmo: It's incredible when you start to think about it that it's been almost 330 years, right? And that for all this time that somebody could be considered to be a witch. And it raises, I think, a lot of questions about what we believe to be a witch, who is a witch, who isn't a witch, who's culpable, and how we treat people, as well as all the issues that you can trace back to the Salem Witch Trials. History and present are so intertwined, and we tend to forget that history is, it's happening now, and we're a part of all of this.
[00:08:42] So the fact that this took 330 years for simplicity to get taken care of makes me wonder sometimes what things we're dealing with now that it will take 330 years to clear and set things right.
[00:08:58] Sarah Jack: None of us are gonna allow that. [00:09:00] Are we ?
[00:09:00] Annika Hylmo: Let's hope not.
[00:09:02] Sarah Jack: Can you tell us a little bit about where she lived, how old she was, how long she was in prison, a little bit about her experience?
[00:09:10] Annika Hylmo: We don't know an awful lot about her, to be honest. We have snippets of information about her. We know that she lived in what is today, North Andover, Massachusetts, which is outside of Salem. We know that she was about 22 at the time of the witch trials, and we know that she was not married. She did not have children.
[00:09:32] And we know that she may have been a little bit different. There was talk of her being simplish. She, there was talk of her being simple-minded, and that came up on a couple of occasions in some of the documents. We also know that she was the granddaughter of Reverend Dane, of Reverend Francis Dane, who was the elder clergyman in town at the time.
[00:09:56] But as far as any other specifics, we [00:10:00] know very little. We can assume things. We can assume that she probably lived with family, for example. We do know that she was examined, and that's another word of being like really threatened, because these were very threatening circumstances. In 1692, early fall of 1692, she was then in prison, we assume, but we don't know because some of them were let out temporarily, so we don't know the exact circumstances, but until January of 1693, when her grandfather wrote a letter where he stated that she was simplish at best, but about a week after that she was convicted and sentenced to hang. At the time, the governor of Massachusetts had already pardoned everybody, so she wasn't going to actually hang, but she was imprisoned, from what we understand, a little bit longer.
[00:10:59] We do [00:11:00] have a sense that she was supposed to hang early February. That did not happen because of the pardon, but it wasn't like people let go of this thing about witch hunts and witch trials and witchcraft. It was just that the governor had said no, and there's an end to it. From there, we don't know much about her.
[00:11:16] We know that she probably owned some property. She tried to get restitution for the time that she was in prison. Basically, people had to pay their own way, and she tried to get that money back at one point. We know that she sold some property at one point and that she probably died when she was, I think, in her seventies.
[00:11:35] But we know very little about her circumstances after the trials, before the trials. She was, in many ways, one of us. Most of us, you don't know exactly who we are, what we do, even with social media, That's our modern day version of gossip, but you don't really know that much about each one of us. And for many of us, once we are gone, we're gone, as much as we'd like to think otherwise. So [00:12:00] she's somebody that could be anyone of us at the time and now, and that's what makes her so compelling. One of many reasons.
[00:12:09] Josh Hutchinson: That reputation sticks with the person through the rest of their life and well beyond.
[00:12:15] Annika Hylmo: And the interesting thing about that is that the whole connection to the witch trials is profound. When you look at people that have some kind of connection and who you are related to, there's a big difference when you talk to people who consider themselves to be related to somebody who was a witch compared to somebody who was an accuser compared to somebody who was a judge. That still is part of modern day community, and that has not let go.
[00:12:45] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: And, unfortunately, I'm related to all three , so I'm confused with my feelings. But yeah, it is true. When we met descendants who were descendants or relatives of people that were accused or witches that were actually executed, [00:13:00] the pain is still pretty strongly, especially with ones that grew up on the east coast, knew about their heritage their whole life.
[00:13:06] And then you have the accusers. I'm a direct descendant actually of an accuser, joseph Ballard, who actually, because of him and his wife, who was ill at the time, is why the Salem girls were brought over to Andover and why people were then accused in Andover's from my grandfather.
[00:13:21] And I'm actually a cousin through marriage of Elizabeth, as well. So I'm related, and then I'm related to a few that were executed, and I'm related to Judge John Hathorne, which he wasn't the nicest of people. And it can be confusing and also feel, wow, what a timeframe of what went through with all these people.
[00:13:39] I can't imagine being a direct descendant of someone who accused and caused more people to be accused than in Salem itself. There is a guilt that came on when I first learned about it, but I wasn't raised with this. I had to learn about it about ten years ago. Until then, it was a story that happened to someone else.
[00:13:56] But yeah, as Annika says it's interesting when we've talked to other descendants, [00:14:00] relatives of what that has carried on for them.
[00:14:03] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I are both descendants. Sarah's a descendant of Rebecca Nurse and her sister Mary Esty. I'm a descendant of Mary Esty and found family connections to several dozen people involved. So I have that thing of being related to judges and jury and accusers and everyone, and it brings up conflicting feelings.
[00:14:30] You try to understand what each of those people was thinking and what their experience was, and that fear of witches was so real back then that kind of understand where they were coming from, but it still doesn't make it better.
[00:14:47] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: Josh, when we first started our project, it was actually a narrative feature film that we were working on, a story of about Andover and what happened there. A lot of people have done stories on Salem, so we were wanting to make a movie [00:15:00] about a different version or portion of what happened. And Annika had actually brought that up, and I thought that was really lovely of seeing the humanity, cuz I had the guilt of, oh no, my grandfather, did this horrible thing.
[00:15:11] And she's, " but he was in love with his wife and she knew, and they had real fears and this was their religion and their beliefs". And that really actually helped me. So thank you, Annika. With that portion. At the time as well, when we started, I didn't realize actually I was related to so many other people at the time. I only thought it was related to the accuser. But as Annika says, they all, they all had to marry each other and everything. It was such a small town. And and so you end up, if you're related to one, you're probably related to a few.
[00:15:35] Josh Hutchinson: Does the film explain why she was overlooked?
[00:15:40] Annika Hylmo: That's one of the big questions why she was overlooked, and there's really no good answer, except that it makes for really good drama, because once we discovered this story, it came about because there was an article about school teacher Carrie LaPierre and her middle school students who were [00:16:00] working to study the case of Elizabeth Johnson Junior and to exonerate her from the witch trials and working together with Senator Dizoglio to get that.
[00:16:08] So in digging into this story and asking people who were in some way connected to Salem, in some way connected to the witch trials and go, "so why do you think that she was not cleared?" Because there were others who have been exonerated various phases as we know. The last group before her was in 2001.
[00:16:31] And so the question is, why was she left out and why is there only one? Why is she the last one? And the response that inevitably came up was that they just forgot about her, and it became an echo. They just forgot about her. They just forgot about her. They just forgot about her. And it got to be a little bit eerie.
[00:16:50] Almost there's a conspiracy theory around this, which opens up a number of questions, right? So why would you forget somebody who was a [00:17:00] member of your family? Why would you forget somebody who was convicted of witchcraft during such an important time and that's been studied so much. And there are probably a number of reasons why she was forgotten, overlooked, and ultimately considered to be unimportant, which is a critical part of this when we're gonna be going into some of this, during the story, during the documentary, and obviously dig deeper.
[00:17:29] But for our purposes today, and remembering the contemporary side of this is that she did not have kids. She was a single woman who was a little bit different in some way. We don't wanna go back and give her a diagnosis because that's not fair to her. It's not fair to history. And back in the day, people did not have psychiatrists and other people to help them out, but she was different in some way.
[00:17:58] And you take all of [00:18:00] those elements, plus the fact that this was a big, dark shadow that was cast over the communities. Nobody really wanted to talk about it. Nobody really wanted to talk about the Salem witch trials. People tried to figure out how to move on through marriage, in some cases by moving away, in some cases by running away. We have a lot of people that disappeared after the witch trials.
[00:18:24] And for Elizabeth, she probably lived with her family afterwards for a while, but she didn't have descendants. And when you don't have descendants, you're much easier to forget. It's like society is saying that you don't matter if you don't have descendants. So that's a really big and important thing for us to look at is when do you stop mattering? And if you don't have kids, do single people matter less than people who are married or people who have kids? We know that women then and now are still more likely to be struggling financially, economically, for [00:19:00] example.
[00:19:00] So some of those issues that she would've been dealing with then that would make her less important to people around her are probably the reasons for why she kept being forgotten. All the people that have been exonerated since have had family members that have been speaking for them. We know Rebecca, Nurse's family, for example, have been integral in making sure that she was never forgotten.
[00:19:26] Some of the other families tried to move on and just forget, but Elizabeth didn't have anybody speaking up for her, and to me that is one really important question and lesson to be taken away from this is who are we as individuals today when we are overlooking people, where we're not paying attention to that one person who's alone by themselves, when we walk by somebody who is not connected, who doesn't have a family, the same way, somebody who doesn't have kids, who [00:20:00] might need a little bit of support, and how often do we do that without stopping to think about it? Because that's probably what happened to Elizabeth back then.
[00:20:09] Sarah Jack: Yeah, that is very powerful. I just think about how unfortunate for her experience that the exoneration didn't happen for her and during her lifetime or even in a quick amount of time, but it's really giving us a lot of power today to do something with it for these people that are getting looked over. And also, when I saw the exoneration news popping up, it was right before the anniversary of Alice Young's hanging. And I like anything you guys put out, I pushed out and talked about Alice, and I feel like it really was important during the very beginning of the exoneration for the Connecticut witch trials, when that group was forming this [00:21:00] spring, what you guys were doing, about sharing what was happening with Elizabeth with the legislator. That's like another powerful thing. This is one of those things that it was, a grave oversight, but it's also something very powerful today.
[00:21:15] Annika Hylmo: Yeah, it's very much something that's holding up a mirror to us. And for me, that's why it's important to tell this story, because it's asking us to take a look at a lot of the same questions that were happening back then that are happening again today. Historically, we know that Massachusetts didn't have a charter at the time. We know that people were coming out of war. There was a lot of war going on at the same time. They just had a smallpox. This was a community that was settling, and so economically, there was a lot of instability and it was a community that had a lot of young people and not so many elder people, older people. So it was like a pyramid if you look at it that way, in terms of the numbers of people. [00:22:00] And again, a very unstable time when people were trying to figure things out. People were trying to build a new community, and people were trying to recover from famine, from misfortune when it came to crops and trying to find a way to create a new society. And in some ways did, and in some ways they failed.
[00:22:25] And if we look at what's going on around us right now, we're very much at that precipice again, that we can either do what people have done over and over in time, right? Which is to look around and blame somebody else, and point a finger at somebody else, and continue with this black and white thinking where whatever is wrong in the world is somebody else's fault, while we watch and we look around and we see war, we see climate change, we see all sorts of destruction going on around us, we see families being torn apart, we see death [00:23:00] and dying and pandemics taking over regardless of what you think may or may not be. We are seeing a lot of lot similar changes as we're taking place back then.
[00:23:12] And the question for us is really what can we learn from what happened in 1692 so that we don't push ourselves toward the same kind of apocalypse that happened for them at that time? And so that we can really think about what kind of world do we want to live in and create that world, as opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the latest rumors and misfortune and catastrophe. So what do we wanna do as individuals and as our society? And I think that's a big lesson to think about, because otherwise we're gonna land in the same kind of apocalyptic underworld that they felt like they were in at the time.
[00:23:54] Sarah Jack: Were you surprised at the impact your work is [00:24:00] having, even in the stage, like your research stage and now in a new stage of the film? Has the power of your work been a surprise? Was it your hope to get things rolling in people's minds now at this point of your project?
[00:24:15] Annika Hylmo: That's part of the fun, isn't it? To shake people up a little bit and to get people to think a little bit, and obviously this story is about a story that was already in motion.
[00:24:25] Carrie LaPierre was already working on this based on the work of Richard Hite, who was the one who discovered that Elizabeth was still not exonerated and the wonderful Diana Dizoglio state senator, who pushed this through the Massachusetts Senate. And as you start to look at the story, obviously there's a reason for why we picked doing this.
[00:24:49] It's like this, there's curiosity behind this. This is crazy. There's this, how could this be? And how could this be that there is somebody that's still convicted as a witch from [00:25:00] 1692? And that became the impetus. But as you start to pull at it and things happening in real time, then you start to realize how much there is to this story.
[00:25:13] So then it becomes, how can we have fun with this and challenge people to be a part of it? Because that's, it's fun to challenge people to be a part of it and to listen to people and hear their stories. It's a lot of fun to do that. But as we went on, this, the bill, the initial bill went through this Massachusetts State Senate and then it stalled.
[00:25:37] So there are these moments that you come up against where you go, "this is crazy. Why would they not just sign up on this?" So when other people are starting to step up and saying, "yeah, we also think this is crazy, this is nuts," then you start to feel that community, and when you start having that community that's doing something good or starting to realize that there's something good about this, then [00:26:00] you go, "okay, this is fun."
[00:26:02] And filming the kids, and even seeing the kids in the classroom go from, "yeah, this sucks. We gotta do the school project," which we expected because they're eighth graders. If they weren't like that, then I'd be really worried. But they went from that to go, "yeah, I guess this kind of maybe important."
[00:26:19] And then you realize that they go, "yeah, we're doing something that adults aren't doing. This is cool." So it shifts along the way, and seeing them and seeing everybody else take on and let it grow, I think has been affirming more than anything else. This is something that matters. It's, beyond just the surface level of the story, which is great, like teacher kids exonerating, but the impact, seeing all those accounts start to pop up.
[00:26:55] This was especially in July, when we were doing a ton of social [00:27:00] media outreach, and I know you were both part of that and then responding and answering and everything like that. We did a ton of social media outreach in July, and seeing more and more accounts pop up and more and literally around the world and say, "yeah, we too." So it went from me too to we too when it came to the witches. Was incredible power, incredibly powerful, seeing the story spread, not just here in the US but literally spread around the world, which the original story had as well, when Carrie first started with the project, or when the first articles came out about it that also went around the world, but nothing like this.
[00:27:42] But it's also, I think, giving us hope that we can come together as a community and do the right thing when it comes to many of the people who were convicted back in the day, but also to move forward and really ask [00:28:00] those profound questions about what does this tell us about who we are, about what we need to do? Because we can't stop. If we stop here, we will have more tragedy. And that's what the witch trials, I think, can teach us and tell us.
[00:28:16] Josh Hutchinson: You've touched basically on the central premise of why we're doing this show and our questions that we're looking to have answered as we do this, which are how do we witch-hunt?
[00:28:31] Why do we hunt witches? And how can we possibly stop this behavior because it does continue today. So I thank you for getting into so much detail on that. That was wonder.
[00:28:44] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: And I think, in a way you just want everyone to look at your movie and support it, right? We wanted to be able to make the movie. We loved it. We loved the topic. We were already working on a project prior to it. When Annika had discovered what was going on, I said, "oh my gosh, let's work on this."
[00:28:56] So we absolutely were honored when people started [00:29:00] paying attention and when you, yourself, when both of you started paying attention to our project and then it connected us to other witch trials, that was such an honor. I think that's how I look at it now. And as Annika said, the community of building everybody and coming together.
[00:29:13] And I think also one more part that I wanted to mention from earlier, your question earlier was just that, and Annika's mentioned this as well. She, as the director, she points out a lot of these things, and so that's why I keep referring to her, which is great. I'm so honored to have her be able to be so intelligent about it.
[00:29:26] But the middle school news often nowadays is a school shooting. And how amazing is it that this is not that, that this is success, that this is them standing up for someone's rights? This is changing history. Even if they were bored and didn't understand it at times, they did get it at times, and especially, when the senator came to visit them and getting when they were able to do it. And one of the young girls even actually ran into the governor before he even signed off and was like, "you should do this." So it was pretty amazing, to have them fight for something like this.
[00:29:59] Sarah Jack: [00:30:00] It's definitely planting very important seeds.
[00:30:04] Annika Hylmo: And that's how you stop it.
[00:30:05] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: Josh is saying, "how do you stop some of this?" And it's I think we do have to start young with this. And inspiring others. Annika's talked about, that the movie being an inspiration to get you to see how can you help, how can you be part of changing history or the story or what story do we wanna write, because if it happened then, and it's echoing now and paralleling, then where are we going? Are we going to a second apocalypse? Are we going to have a situation where people are gonna be collected and told they're witches and hanged? That's seems so unimaginable, but it must have been very odd then too.
[00:30:40] Annika Hylmo: Stop to think about it a little bit, though, this whole thing about witches and witchcraft, which there's a whole question of who is a witch and who isn't a witch. And I think witches are something. We've always had witches around us in some way, whatever, because we designate, we put a label on people, and they happen to be the witches of the time. Even the Bible has [00:31:00] stories about witches, and those, the Bible is based on oral traditions. I think it's something that we've always had with us. And it's something that's morphed at that community. It's a community that's morphed in different ways, and we can go into whole conversation around the connection to theology and spirituality and religion.
[00:31:20] But it is a very interesting phenomenon to look at. Back in the day, in the 1600s, they were superstitious, just like we are superstitious today. So I think that's one place to start really considering how close are we to this? They were very superstitious. They used an almanac, which is basically astrology, and anybody that's ever read their astrological horoscope or something like that, that could have been you.
[00:31:47] They would do little rituals, they will do things and they would have sayings just like we have now. There were some stories of people dying very suddenly and nobody understanding why, and so people came up with an [00:32:00] explanation. So there's a whole range of what that might be. There were, they would sell little booklets about palmistry, about how to read somebody's hand to tell their fortune, that kind of thing.
[00:32:10] During the pandemic, I saw some statistics about Tarot cards, and apparently the sale of Tarot cards went way up during the pandemic. So I would say that anyone who's listening to this, who's got a deck of Tarot cards at home, if we consider that to be your local poppet or your local whatever it might have been back in 1692, this is how close it is. Little things that we say and do, little superstitions that we all have in different ways, like throwing salt over your shoulder for one thing what, whatever it might be, everyone's got something that we do. That could potentially mark us as a witch. Somebody that's really intuitive could be marked as a witch.
[00:32:59] It [00:33:00] happens easier than we think, so that's when it comes to the whole idea of witches, and of course people go into see a psychic, which Salem is these days, very famous for that. It's become a safe haven for people who are psychics and who are spiritually minded, and it's wonderful that it is a safe space in many ways, but it's also telling us how easily this could be potentially be repeated, if we look just at spirituality and women's spirituality in some way.
[00:33:30] And we take the same thing, and we can look at any other community that's different in some way, and how easy it is to say that's you, not me. And then we start to build those walls, and the same challenge comes up. We just had it during this entire pandemic where we had people say, "I believe there's a pandemic. I believe there's a virus." And we had people who said, "no way there is a virus, absolutely not." People are saying that, "of course I'm gonna get [00:34:00] vaccinated and it's the right thing to do." And then people are saying, "no. It's almost like it's the devil's work, right?" It's closer to us than we think, and we can take that image and place it on so many different social issues, so many different circumstances that are very close to us.
[00:34:18] So the whole idea about witch hunts, it's here. That's the thing that, witch hunts are here. Look at politics. Every single time there's an election, somebody's gonna say something and be called a witch or being called a witch hunter, or something along those lines. There's a witch-hunt on this, there's a witch-hunt on that. It happens consistently, and we're all a part of it. The question is, what are we gonna do about it? And then I think another question is, are we doomed ? For want of a better word, are we doomed to constantly repeat this? Because if we've done this for thousands and thousands of years, is this something that's just by [00:35:00] nature, a part of humanity?
[00:35:01] And that I don't know the answer to, and I don't know that I want to know the answer to it either, to be honest.
[00:35:09] Sarah Jack: We've been looking more and more at the modern witch killings that are happening in other parts of the world, and there is a very strong religious superstition tied to it. And so not every community in the world is in the same place as far as the understanding or the tools they have to start changing that next generation. So I just really hope that these powerful words that you're saying today, the power of your documentary the historical part of the documentary is so important. It's interesting cuz you brought up the safe, the safeness of Salem today for those that are practicing, and [00:36:00] it's so how does this all come together without the fear? I just, I want the fear to be. dissipated and yeah, I just really thinking, I've just been really thinking.
[00:36:13] Josh Hutchinson: We haven't in many ways changed very much, but we're hoping that somehow a way to intervene can be found, and these witch hunting behaviors can be stopped.
[00:36:27] They have been going on since basically the beginning of humanity in various forms. Labeling the other, the one you want to scapegoat for all your problems. We saw that with World War II. We've seen that so many times in our own lifetimes. I wanted to thank you for bringing that up.
[00:36:51] Annika Hylmo: It's very real. Yeah. I think we all have superstitions and I think it's it's a big part of psychology and our [00:37:00] superstitions and our fears. They're there for a reason as well. They're there to protect us, so it's not like we want to get rid of it altogether, but to learn to question it and to learn to take action. Too often do we look at something further away, as opposed to looking at what's really close at hand and even how we're talking to each other, how we're expressing things. I've been called a witch. I've been called witchy, and there's probably some truth to that. Do I identify myself as a witch? Not particularly, but depending on what the other person sees in me, then I may well be a witch.
[00:37:39] I think the question though, of how it's expressed and how we're talking to each other, how we're talking about one another, not just when we're in the room, but also when we're not in the room with one another. How do we express respect for somebody else? How do we talk about, [00:38:00] again, going back to that person who's alone, but talk about that person in a respectful way to a point where it feels like, "oh my gosh, that's somebody that I want to invite into my world," as opposed to, "poor so and so that are by themselves." So instead talking about something amazing that they're doing or great sense of humor or whatever it is that person has.
[00:38:25] It's often those little things that where it starts. And that's a personal responsibility that we have, I think each one of us. And probably should find something that really matters to us and stand for that and stand up for it, not be afraid to express an opinion. But would that also take the responsibility of learning about it? So it's not just because somebody said or because you picked it up on the news or social media or something, but really take the time to discover different sides to it. Be curious about [00:39:00] that issue, and then stand up and speak for it, and find somebody that you're going to protect when you're doing it, somebody who might not be as good at speaking about it as you are, but bring them into your fold. So it's certainly, I think, a lot about personal responsibility in this that needs to come out. What can we do as individuals? How can we talk about questions in ways that we might not feel comfortable talking about?
[00:39:26] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: And to speak to that, Dr. Samuel Oliner, who I was very fortunate to get to meet. He taught here locally at the university. He really helped foster and coin the phrase of altruism. And he was a teenage boy and during World War II and had to pretend to be German on a, at a ranch that he stumbled upon after his whole family was killed in a mass grave.
[00:39:48] And he, the woman he found out later had always known he really actually was Jewish and saved him and didn't turn him in. And so he studied. Instead of studying the negative [00:40:00] side, which we've been talking about, that energy of that happening, he studied the opposite, which is the answer, some of the answers, I won't say it's the answer, but what Annika was saying of us taking responsibility and caring about someone else. So he studied altruism, and he created a whole facility. He wrote a plethora of books on it. And what he found was that it was a lot of times somebody who, people had more empathy and were more altruistic the more that they were able to see outside their little world.
[00:40:29] So if they traveled, they were the person that was gonna come to a bridge. If they saw a car go over the bridge, they would be the person who would jump into the water to go save someone, versus the spectators who stood and watch. And what made that difference? How do we get more of those people who jump in the water, or who write the letter and say, "no, this is ridiculous? We're not gonna hang or burn people for playing with Tarot cards, things like that." And it basically came down to just be more worldly and be more experienced so that you would have more empathy and realize there's people that do things [00:41:00] different than you. And that's okay.
[00:41:02] They can still exist and we can still coexist and not have to feel so threatened and blame them for the things that we are confused about or don't understand. But how do you teach that to everybody? And some people don't have that, they're not in the space, the mindset, I think, as Annika said, psychology, they're going through a tough time.
[00:41:19] Annika Hylmo: It brings to mind somebody that I met when I was working on my PhD. And my PhD is in communication, which is basically storytelling. That's the simplest way of explaining it to everybody. But I met a researcher back then, his name was George Gerbner, and he studied the impact of mass media, and people who are always watching a lot of news, taking in a lot of the bad news, often feel like it's a very dangerous world of life, bad living in, and as a result, refusing to interact with other people, refusing to make contact with other people and thinking that the world is a lot worse than it actually is.
[00:41:59] [00:42:00] And it strikes me that we had another event, just 2020, and that was the Black Lives Matter movement, which came up very suddenly and not suddenly. It was interesting to talk to people who are very different. I'm very pale skinned in comparison to the vast majority of this world. I have blue eyes, I've got brown hair, and I found that I had such rich conversations with people who didn't look like me and with people who looked like me, and I learned so much about myself and about the world through those conversations. That's something that's open to anyone to have those conversations, to do that outreach.
[00:42:45] And that's also where a lot of this is going to start. It's dared to have a conversation who isn't like you, who doesn't have the same belief system as you, who might be [00:43:00] different, whether it's economically, it's spiritually, it's sexually, it's ethnically, whatever it might be. Those conversations are so powerful because they teach you something about you at the same time as it opens up to the rest of the world.
[00:43:17] So I think, just like what Cassandra was saying, it's that really that connecting and seeing how you can connect with other people. There's a lot of psychology in this and a lot of opportunity for us to step across those boundaries, to step outside of that fear zone a little bit and go, "hey, this is fun. I like hanging out with you. Let's do this."
[00:43:40] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's such an excellent point about connecting with people who could alternatively be seen as the other and avoided. One thing, one big step towards getting rid of this witch hunting behavior is exactly that, embracing [00:44:00] people with different beliefs, different appearances, different backgrounds and connecting. But it's still the problem of how do we get everyone to embrace that?
[00:44:12] Annika Hylmo: I think that we need to open up to curiosity a lot more in this world compared to where we might have been. And I actually think that's a lesson, too, that we have to learn from the 1600s, because their experience was very different with the world compared to ours. Theirs was one of all the senses, and we are not using all of our senses anymore. And with that, we've lost some curiosity. And I think this is actually a really important point that we need to not just go, "oh, we don't wanna be at all like the 1600s" But there are some ways, at least for me, that I wanna be more like the 1600s and that use of all the senses, to me it's really tied to curiosity.
[00:44:54] It's like it's stepping outside, being outdoors a little bit and just check in with your senses. Being curious [00:45:00] about that. What does it feel like? Is it warm? Is it cold? Is it windy? What am I tasting? And sometimes if you're lucky enough that you come across something that you could get a bite of along the way, or that experience that you're touching something touch is so incredible. I love walking up and down the street, and sometimes I'll just grab a bit of rosemary, and I'll smell it, and I'll touch it, and it feels a little bit oily, and it smells really good, and it just pops me, wakes me up a little bit.
[00:45:27] That sense of curiosity with the natural world is something that people had back in the 1600s, because that was part of their life. They didn't have streetlights the way that we do, and so they had to be curious about the shadows at night. They had to be curious about how to grow their crops, about all of those things.
[00:45:49] And I think that kind of curiosity at a very basic level is something that we've lost. But it's a step toward connecting, [00:46:00] cuz that lets us connect with ourself and then connecting with other people as well. That, and that's something that we all have. That's something that people, you're never gonna be able to take that away from us, but as long as all we do is look at a screen all day long, then we'll forget how to do that.
[00:46:15] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: I think that there is that connecting, like what she said. And then there's also not labeling too, so there's a thing that we should be doing and something maybe we need to also stop doing. I had to take a whole class as part of my degree on labels and what it does to a society when we label.
[00:46:29] Besides being, through my mother's side being related to the witch trials, I'm also half Mexican through my biological father's side, but a lot of people look at me and think, You're not Mexican. Where's your accent?
[00:46:41] I've actually been told, "where's your accent? Were you born in Mexico?" And I giggle, and I'm like, "no, I read white, I appear white, but I am Mexican too." And stop having these labels and then be curious, as Annika said. Be able to wonder what's going on and inquire. And those same [00:47:00] exact elements that she was talking about with nature. We could do with people too. Find out more about them. Find out what makes them, instead of labeling them as this thing, and then that thing becomes bad.
[00:47:08] Annika Hylmo: The labeling thing is actually a really good thing to look at, and it's an opportunity to look at a little bit for each one of us as individuals, because there's a whole movement now that lets people self identify and self label, right? So do you want, what pronouns do you wanna use? And how you react to that has a lot to do with, or tells you a lot about how comfortable you are in a world that isn't so clear, so specific.
[00:47:37] Again, this is what happened in 1692, that things were not clear, crystal clear to people, something as small or big, depending on your worldview and how, what your comfort level is as having people label themselves, self-identify, and/or asking you what your pronouns are and/or getting [00:48:00] comfortable using those pronouns when you're not comfortable, you've never done it before. It's something completely new to you in a small way.
[00:48:10] That encapsulates what people were dealing with back in 1692, because there was so much ambiguity around them. And taking that opportunity to really think about that and then to act on it to say, "maybe I am gonna be making it a little bit more effort to step up and use the pronouns that someone else wants me to use and embrace." That's a really small, large step that everybody can take. And that's the kind of thing that I think we need to look for. It's what are the small things that we can do as individuals and hold ourselves personally accountable for.
[00:48:51] Sarah Jack: And when everybody goes out and does these very important things that Annika and Cassandra are [00:49:00] recommending, talk about that experience. I think that once you've had a new experience, be brave enough to talk about it with other people.
[00:49:09] Annika Hylmo: And if you feel like you wanna go to church, if you wanna go to synagogue, you wanna go to mosque, please do. If you wanna be out in nature, if that's where you find your spirituality, please do. If you find that doing something creative, artistic is your spirituality, please do. Whatever it is, talk to animals, go for a long walk, sit on the beach, yoga. Whatever it is, take the time to experience spirituality every day. That will help us a lot too.
[00:49:38] Josh Hutchinson: I personally, I just wanna say I love talking to animals. I find that to be very therapeutic, if nothing else, engaging with them and I love engaging with nature in general. So I'm glad you brought that up and the curiosity with our senses that we need to engage all five again. That's a good [00:50:00] point.
[00:50:00] I think what you're doing with the film and what you've done with the conversation so far today is just so important in so many ways. How can people support the documentary?
[00:50:14] Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: There's a couple different ways they can. As Annika said, definitely, reach out to us, tell us their stories. It helps educate us, helps us know more of what's going on. We can't be everywhere at all times. We weren't fully aware of everything that was going on in Connecticut until you reached out to us, so helpful. That is so helpful. So that's one way. Following us on all the social medias. If people do that, obviously we hope that everyone uses it for the right reasons, but following where the project is, commenting participating. Facebook, Instagram, we do a little Twitter. And then we have a website. People can, stop and check out and see where we are with the project.
[00:50:48] And then, if inclined, we always understand this is the awkward part, but we are self-funding as of right now and the contributions and we're working on our funding for the bigger project. So [00:51:00] that's obviously a big way would be help us get it made, help us get the word out by helping contribute to actually the process of making the film.
[00:51:08] Annika Hylmo: And I would add to that, that if there are nonprofits out there that would be interested in learning more about this project and to see where there is a cause, where there might be an overlay, reach out to us because this is a community effort and there may well be a way that we could partner on this.
[00:51:27] Josh Hutchinson: Great. And we'll have links in the show notes to your website and to your contact form on there, as well.
[00:51:36] Annika Hylmo: Thank you, and a huge shout out to these kids in Massachusetts. They are incredible, amazing. Were it not for these middle school kids, two years worth of middle schoolers from North Andover Middle School.
[00:51:50] If it weren't for them and the work that they did together with our teacher, Carrie LaPierre, we would not be sitting here today. We would not be making the documentary, and we wouldn't be [00:52:00] having this conversation. So guys, thank you to North and over Middle School, cuz you guys are amazing.
[00:52:07] Josh Hutchinson: This has been such a great conversation. In many ways don't want it to end. I thank you both for your powerful insights into humanity and the things that we can be working on to improve ourselves. Thank you for that.
[00:52:24] Sarah Jack: Welcome to this episode's Witchcraft Fear Victim Advocacy Report, sponsored by End Witch Hunts News. You have been hearing Witch Hunt Happenings in Your World from me. Who has heard about these crimes from you? Have you looked up any news? Have you checked out the Africa advocacy links in our episode show notes? Who did you say you have mentioned it to?
[00:52:45] This week I attended the Colorado Podcaster's Meetup events sponsored by Podfest Expo and others at the Great Divide Brewery in Denver. I enjoyed meeting other creative conversors out here in the West who run various podcasts of their own. Check Thou [00:53:00] Shalt Not Suffer's podcast social media to see all of us.
[00:53:03] I had the chance to tell these podcasters that witch hunts are a very relevant conversation. I talked about the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, and that Alice Young, the first accused Witch, executed in the American colonies, died in Hartford 375 years ago and is still waiting for her good name to be restored.
[00:53:23] She was not using witchcraft to harm others. Neither were the dozens of others accused in the Connecticut colony. If she and the other 10 hanged for witchcraft are exonerated by the state of Connecticut, it will be because we advocated for them. Also, those who have been cleared and memorialized by Massachusetts were not harming others with witchcraft. This week, our episode was about Elizabeth Johnson, Jr. of Andover, Massachusetts, and how she was finally advocated for after she remained overlooked in previous Salem Witch Trial exoneration efforts. Each of these exoneration efforts happened because of advocacy from humans like you. It didn't just occur [00:54:00] for Elizabeth because she was actually not a harmful Witch, but it happened because a mighty, collaborative effort from the community spanning young and old came together to make it happen. Likewise, efforts to stop the witch attacks in Asia and Africa must come from other people, people who can use their voice to talk about it and to stand against it.
[00:54:20] This month, a woman lost her life due to superstition fears in the Gaia District of Bihar in the Jarkhand state of India. She was burned alive at her home after neighbors accused her of being a witch. She was 45. You can find a news link in our episode notes.
[00:54:38] Pre-pandemic, Global Journalist reported this, "for many, witch trials may seem like a relic of early colonial America. But in fact witch-hunting is still a feature of rural life today around the world. One place where it's prevalent is India. On average, an Indian woman is killed every other day after being accused of witchcraft, according to government [00:55:00] statistics. Many are tortured or publicly humiliated before being burned, stabbed or beaten to death."
[00:55:07] I will be researching and reporting more in India. While we watch and wait, let's support the victims in India and across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious fear. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them.
[00:55:24] The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website, endwitchhunts.org.
[00:55:35] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that moving and powerful update.
[00:55:39] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:55:41] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:55:45] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for our guest, Greg Houle, an author writing a book about the Salem Putnams.
[00:55:53] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:55:56] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com often.[00:56:00]
[00:56:00] Josh Hutchinson: And join our Discord for discussion of our episodes. Link in the show notes.
[00:56:06] Sarah Jack: Follow us on social media, links in description.
[00:56:11] Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends and family and coworkers, and shout it from a mountaintop, about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:56:22] Sarah Jack: So long for now.
[00:56:23] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:56:27]
Join us for a fun bonus episode, as we review both Hocus Pocus movies and share our thoughts on the real history of the Salem Witch Trials, as it relates to the films.
SPOILER ALERT. We take a deep dive into the details of Hocus Pocus and Hocus Pocus 2.
We discuss:
What we like, as well as what we’re not so fond of.
How events in the movie compare to events in the real-life Salem Witch Trials and other witch-hunts.
The identity of Sarah Jessica Parker’s ancestor who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Theories about the origins of the Sanderson sisters.
