Enjoy this in-depth author interview with New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Kent. Kathleen opens up about her writing process, her journey from aspiring writer to published novelist, and the craft behind transforming family history into compelling historical fiction.
Kathleen’s debut novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, tells the story of her ancestor Martha Carrier, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trials on August 19, 1692. Martha was from Andover, the town with the most accused witches was blamed for a smallpox epidemic that killed 13 people. Even when her children were tortured into confessing against her, Martha refused to admit to crimes she didn’t commit.
This episode offers invaluable insights for aspiring novelists and historical fiction writers, covering everything from research techniques to finding your voice as a writer. Whether you’re working on your first novel or looking to deepen your craft, Kathleen’s experience and teaching expertise provide practical guidance for writers at every level.
About Kathleen Kent
Kathleen Kent is a New York Times bestselling author and member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her novels include:
The Heretic’s Daughter (David J. Langum Sr. Award for American Historical Fiction, Will Rogers Medallion Award)
The Traitor’s Wife
The Outcasts (American Library Association “Top Pick” for Historical Fiction)
The Dime, The Burn, and The Pledge (Edgar Award-nominated crime trilogy)
Black Wolf
Kathleen teaches writing workshops and has worked with Texas Writes to mentor aspiring authors.
Episode Highlights for Writers
Kathleen’s journey from aspiring writer to published author
The writing process behind The Heretic’s Daughter
Research techniques for historical fiction writers
How to balance historical accuracy with storytelling
Finding and developing your unique voice as a writer
Working with family history and sensitive historical material
Navigating the publishing process
Teaching writing and what aspiring novelists need to know
Transitioning between historical fiction and crime fiction genres
For History Enthusiasts
Martha Carrier’s powerful story of resistance
The Andover witch trials and why this town had the most accusations
The 1690 smallpox epidemic and its connection to witch accusations
How children were tortured into testifying against their parents
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] ” Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial podcast. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today’s guest is the extraordinary author Katherine Howe. We’ll speak with her about the causes of the Salem Witch Hunt and about her new book on pirates. I’m excited to talk about Salem Witch Hunt again and really curious what her book is about.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it doesn’t matter what time of year.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:01:00] It’s always Christmas for pirates.
Sarah Jack: Just like Katherine’s other books, you are going to be delighted by the characters and the adventure. Fun getting to hear about it, and it’s gonna be hard to wait for the publishing.
Josh Hutchinson: She has wild swashbuckling shenanigans. But first, on a more serious note, we talk Salem, Witch Trials, what caused them, what didn’t cause them, why Katherine Howe it gets fired up about certain topics.
Sarah Jack: We get to a lot of layers.
Josh Hutchinson: Peeling that onion.
Sarah Jack: We just take Katherine right into the depths of the mechanics.
Josh Hutchinson: We talk about the different spheres that Malcolm Gaskill spoke about that are nested in each other and how each of those [00:02:00] spheres contributed to the witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: We talk about what kind of perspective do we need to be using when we look back at the individuals that were in a different time in history.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh yes, we do that, don’t we? Wow, this is gonna be one hell of an episode!
Sarah Jack: Aren’t they all?
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, but I have a good feeling about this one. It’s gonna be something special.
Sarah Jack: It’s another dynamic conversation with a phenomenal author and researcher, and she does not hold back.
Josh Hutchinson: She does not. The emotions come out. Be ready.
Josh Hutchinson: I’m going to talk about the before the Salem Witch Trials, what the conditions were in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Salem Village and Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: Colonies used to have charters, so they [00:03:00] were officially recognized by the English government to govern themselves without direct supervision from the Crown and Parliament. Massachusetts Bay lost its colonial charter in 1684, when King Charles II revoked it because they had been naughty boys. And when the witch hunt began in early 1692, they still didn’t have a charter, so they were in legal limbo.
Josh Hutchinson: In addition, they were fighting King William’s War and still recovering from King Philip’s War, which was the costliest and bloodiest of the colonial wars, occurring between 1675 and 1678. In fact, the Massachusetts economy did not recover to pre-war levels [00:04:00] until the 1800s, after the Revolution.
Josh Hutchinson: Economic hardship resulting from the wars and the collapse of land speculation were also contributed to by an influx of refugees from the frontier in Maine and New Hampshire, and Essex County, where Salem’s located, was especially impacted, due to its proximity to that frontier, being the northernmost county in Massachusetts. Many of the settlers of Salem had moved on to Maine and New Hampshire, only to be forced to return when their villages were burned to the ground.
Josh Hutchinson: Beyond these issues, in Salem, the town had recently gone through a bit of a separation, [00:05:00] where Salem Village was allowed to begin its own church. In 1689, Salem Village hired the fourth in a series of unpopular ministers, and there were disputes over his contract, so there was a lot of tension in the area.
Josh Hutchinson: There was also tension in Andover, which was the hardest hit by the witch trials, with some 45 individuals being accused. There, there was a dispute between two ministers, Francis Dane and Thomas Barnard. Francis Dane was an older gentleman with health issues, who was no longer performing full duties as minister. So they had brought in Thomas Barnard, a younger man to take over some of [00:06:00] his duties, but were still paying both men in 1692, leading to tensions within the community that may have fueled some of the allegations there.
Josh Hutchinson: We’ll get into these issues further with Katherine Howe, and specifically we’ll be discussing Andover in a few weeks with author Richard Hite and get into more of whether the dispute over the ministers did or did not contribute to witch-hunt fever in that community.
Sarah Jack: That was good, Josh. Thanks, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome. It was a fun one to do, and we’re going to dig into that stuff some more with our guest.
Sarah Jack: I am excited to introduce author Katherine Howe, whose works include The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Conversion, [00:07:00] The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs. She’s an editor of The Penguin Book of Witches and co-author of Vanderbilt.
Josh Hutchinson: We’ve read that you’re actually connected to somebody accused, which is an interesting connection. So can you tell us about who it is that’s your ancestor?
Katherine Howe: It’s a little bit of a funny story. So my last name is Howe, like, how are you? But with an “e” on the end. And one of the witches who was accused towards the beginning of the Salem panic and who was put to death was Elizabeth Howe. And she was from the same broad region that my family was from also. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when my aunt, back in the nineties, she was doing some genealogical research, and she figured out that that Elizabeth Howe is, I think it’s like my eighth great aunt. So it’s a lateral thing, rather than a direct thing. But at the time, she discovered that Elizabeth [00:08:00] Howe was related to us that way and also that Elizabeth Proctor was also a eighth or ninth great aunt, as well.
Katherine Howe: Just not all that surprising given that those communities were pretty small, and there were lots of intermarriages between different family groups and things like that. So it was in the nineties when I first learned that and thought, of course, it being the nineties and me being a grunge kid, and I thought was like, “oh, that’s so badass. That’s so metal.” thought that was the greatest thing ever.
Katherine Howe: I didn’t give it much thought beyond that, until I was actually living in that region of New England, because my family left New England in the 1930s. I grew up with this sense of it as like the motherland, but I didn’t actually grow up there myself. So I arrived in this region with this kind of funny twin consciousness of, oh, this is home, but I’m also a stranger here. And so it was being a stranger in this place that I felt this kinship that probably contributed somewhat to my getting started [00:09:00] writing fiction.
Katherine Howe: My first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which was something I started working on when I was in graduate school at Boston University and just trying to think about the humanity of people living in this time and the, maybe a funny little detail. So one of the historians of witchcraft who I really admire the most is a woman named Mary Beth Norton, who wrote a book called In The Devil’s Snare, which anyone is interested in Salem has to know Professor Norton’s work, cause she’s just like the kind of detail that she can bring to it. And she writes in a novelistic sort of way. It’s just like the most gripping account of Salem ever. And Professor Norton has said that the more you work on witchcraft, the more superstitious you become. And I have to say that this is true. As evidenced by the anecdote I’m about to tell you.
Katherine Howe: So my first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. It asked, “what if one of the Salem witches the real [00:10:00] thing?” But the real thing the way the colonists believe, which is to be not in that pointy hat fantasy, Harry Potter Sense.
Katherine Howe: And I built that story around a woman named Deliverance Dane who’s a real person. And she was a minor person in the Salem Witch crisis. She was accused towards the end of the panic. She was not put to death. She really, like, was a footnote, I think, in the real history of Salem. And so I felt like it was okay to build a more fantastical story.
Katherine Howe:Physick Book is a magical realist story, so I wanted room to have kind of a fantastical story around a real person. And so I picked her because of her obscurity, but also because of her name. Her name is so evocative of this particular moment in time of this like subculture that she was living in, Puritan New England, Deliverance Dane. Just amazing. So that is why I chose to write about her.
Katherine Howe: That book [00:11:00] came out in 2009, and so several years later I was futsing about on a genealogy website because of course, for people who are interested in family history, life’s gotten a lot easier. Over the last couple of years, with the advent of digital humanities and so many more ways of doing research online. Like, when my aunt was doing research in the nineties, it was really hard to do, and now it’s actually much more accessible, which is a huge gift.
Katherine Howe: So I’m messing about, point, click, point, click, and I come upon Nathaniel Dane, which is actually the name of a character in the book that I wrote, and I was like, “huh, that’s a weird coincidence. Who knew?” Point, click, point, click, point, click. Lo and behold, I learned that it turns out Deliverance Dane, the real one, is my eighth great-grandmother. And so she’s more closely related to me, genetically speaking, than Elizabeth Howe, even though Elizabeth Howe and I have the same last name. And I had [00:12:00] zero idea, no idea whatsoever, and I’d written an entire novel about this person and found that there she was, just hanging out, waiting for me. So I definitely have gotten more superstitious the longer I’ve worked on witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s a very strange thing to have happen to you. But it turns out that Deliverance Dane is actually my like eighth or ninth great grand aunt, and Elizabeth Jackson Howe is also an aunt, and Deliverance Dane, in her confession, says that she worked with Mary Osgood, and that’s my grandmother. I connected to a lot of the people you’re connected to.
Katherine Howe: So we’re cousins, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: And Sarah’s my cousin through Mary Esty.
Katherine Howe: Wow.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. It’s a small world when you get back to those little towns back there.
Katherine Howe: Yes. It really is, for sure. It’s still pretty far back there. It’s a long time ago. It was very funny. I once did a book event, and someone came out to me very emotional, [00:13:00] and they were, turns out, a descendant of a judge from the Salem trials. And this person wanted very much to personally apologize to me. And I was like, ” no, it’s really, it’s okay”. Like he’s, this is not something that you need to feel badly about. This is, everything’s fine, cool’s fine. But it is interesting to me how close people can feel to people who are living in such a distant time period.
Josh Hutchinson: We definitely feel connected to our ancestors, and we talk to a lot of descendants of which trial victims, and they have an emotional bond with those ancestors, but that was so long ago. Did you get interested in Salem because of your connection with Howe and Proctor?
Katherine Howe: Partly. I went to graduate school for American and New England studies, which is like interdisciplinary American history. And I actually came to it from an art history [00:14:00] background. I have a background in visual culture, and it’s a where for grad school visual culture and also material culture, which is to say, stuff, objects. On a whim, my husband and I moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is a small town on the water close to modern-day Salem.
Katherine Howe: We’re having this conversation in October, and there was just an article on Boston Globe about how like a hundred thousand people came to Salem for Halloween and running streets. Salem is a town of 40,000 people. I can’t even wrap my head around how many people they cramming in this season. And a lot of people come to Salem for Halloween. It’s like Halloween Central, and understandably.
Katherine Howe: But it was interesting to me while I was living in Marblehead and I was studying history. And I was living in a house that was built in 1705. And so one thing I have to say is people associate me so closely with Salem, because I’ve written so much Salem fiction. I grew up in [00:15:00] Houston, Texas. Okay. So the oldest building extant in Houston, Texas is a wine bar that was originally built as a bakery, and it’s from 1856. So the oldest building in the entire city that I grew up in is six years younger than the new edition of the house that I was living in in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Earlier, when I was talking about having a sense of being home but being a stranger there. I brought my new south eyes to this incredibly old environment, because Marblehead has the biggest collection of century houses in the entire country. They even have more than Colonial Williamsburg, for instance, except that in Marblehead, the houses have been continually occupied.
Katherine Howe: On the second floor of the house was an apartment, but the house had been a single-family house, been carved into apartments. Pine floors were like foot wide, and the ceilings were incredibly low. Like, you couldn’t stretch your arms over your head, cuz [00:16:00] the ceilings were so low. And this is actually when I learned for the first time, talking material culture, that bed headboards actually have a function. They’re not just decorative. And I discovered this, because we were so broke in grad school that we would turn the heat down as far as we could manage.
Katherine Howe: And so the room that we used as our bedroom, ice would form on the inside of the windows, because it was so cold, and we were so broke. And so when we were first living there, we had this futon I’d brought with me from Texas, of course. And there was no headboard on the futon. And so we were freezing, just like having your head up by this wall with ice on the window. We were freezing cold. And it wasn’t until we got like a bed with a headboard, we like, “oh, this is a lot warmer. This is great.” We just only then did I discover that a headboard really is important, at least if you’re living in New England.
Katherine Howe: And in this room, the bedroom that we had was tucked under the eaves of the lean-to part of a house. So if you’re familiar with colonial architecture, houses tended to be built in stages. You’d have room here and a [00:17:00] room here, and you have maybe you’d add a second floor and you might add a lean-to in the back to add some extra space. So we were in what had been the lean-to, and there was a little door that went into the back stair, and over the back stair, there was this little horseshoe-shaped charm over the back door that had been painted over. And of course, horseshoes are something that I think all over the country, we all recognize what they mean, and they mean that they’re there for luck or for protection. And you see this all over the place. This is a piece of folk magic belief that is incredibly widespread, such that we don’t even really notice it, as evidenced by the fact that you can buy horseshoe necklaces at Tiffany’s, wherever. We don’t even think about it anymore. But it was interesting to me to see this little remnant piece of magic. It wasn’t a real horseshoe. It was clearly there. It was tiny. It was a charm. It had been made as a charm, sold as a charm.
Katherine Howe: And so then I started looking around and noticing horseshoes wherever I went. And it got me thinking [00:18:00] between the fact that there was this little remnant magic shred, that there was that and also the fact that I was in this physical space that people had been moving through, who had been present when the trials were happening. Like we were only one town over from Salem, and, of course, when the trials were happening, people were traveling from towns all over the place to come and see, because it was a huge spectacle. People were talking about it.
Katherine Howe: So there was one day when I was sitting and thinking, like, “someone’s foot has been on this board, this actual board under my hand. The same foot was standing and watching what was going on.” And something about that tangibility or that proximate tangibility was really moving to me, and it got me thinking about the humanity of people who were living through that very strange moment in time, cuz I feel like much of the time their humanity is elided by our presentist biases or what have you. I feel like in [00:19:00] highly fantasy versions of witchcraft, the humanity of the people in the past is elided, and in, certainly in Arthur Miller, the actual humanity of people is alighted.
Katherine Howe: I started thinking about what became the story in Physick Book from that perspective, from like occupying this very weird, specific physical space as a stranger and trying to think about what it meant to be in that space and like how it felt to be in this space, over this incredible span of years, and how, in one sense, the early modern period is this incredibly alien and remote time. Their understanding of how reality worked is very different from our understanding of how reality works. But at the same time, there are certain common elements of common humanity that persist, like lying in bed and being freezing cold, unless you have a headboard at your head, and so a lot of my fiction, my desire to write fiction came [00:20:00] from thinking about these common points of humanity across really wide, gaping spans of time.
Josh Hutchinson: Can you give us a little background on what the situation was in Massachusetts Bay, when the witch trials started?
Katherine Howe: A few things were happening. A question that I get a lot is, what is the proximate cause o f the Salem Witch crisis, what caused it? And the thing that I think is interesting about that question is that it suggests that it would be so much easier if there were just one cause, if we could just point to the thing, and be like, “oh, that’s the thing.”
Katherine Howe: When we were corresponding, Josh, you mentioned the ergot hypothesis, that back in the seventies, somebody floated the idea that maybe all the afflicted girls had eaten moldy bread and were suffering from ergotism, and they were all tripping outta their mind. And that hypothesis was actually dismissed, I think, six months after it was first floated. But it still bubbles up periodically in [00:21:00] documentaries and popular discourses about Salem, because, and I think the reason that it doesn’t go away is because it’s so simple. It’s so tidy to be like, “okay, that’s the thing.”
Katherine Howe: And the truth of the matter is there isn’t one thing. The way that I sometimes talk about it is that it’s like a Venn diagram, and Salem is the point of the intersection of all the overlapping circles.
Katherine Howe: So one overlapping circle is the very specific kind of religion that everyone in Salem adhered to. It was a world view that did not hold that there was anything outside of Christianity. So, for instance, the indigenous population that was already living in Massachusetts at that time, by virtue of not being adherents of Christianity in their very specific puritan worldview, that which is not Christian is by definition devilish, and it was actually Mary Beth Norton who’s made the point that a lot of the language that the [00:22:00] people at Salem use to describe the devil is language that is used to describe indigenous people. So, one big Venn diagram circle is the specific religious and cultural moment that they’re living in.
Katherine Howe: Another diagram circle that we could point to is the weather, that the first panicky behavior that erupts with Betty Parris and with Abigail Williams, it starts in January, January, super cold in Massachusetts, cold, dark. The sun sets at 4:30 in the afternoon. And I’m not exaggerating, like it is dark AF. And and that’s true in the 17th century, as it’s today. And also in 1690s, North America was in miniature ice age. It was even colder and more bitter than it is now in Massachusetts.
Katherine Howe: Another piece is pretty relentless class and gender context. The girls who first experienced symptoms that they describe as [00:23:00] fits are Betty Parris, daughter of Samuel Parris, who’s the unpopular minister in Salem Village, Abigail Williams, who’s his 11-year-old, she’s described as being his niece, although that had a different meaning for them than it does for us today, but she was bound out to service.
Katherine Howe: So can you imagine living in a culture where when you can’t afford to feed your 11-year-old, you just give her to somebody to live with, for her to work for them? You just give her away. And so Abigail was this lonely, impoverished, starving, freezing child whose job it was to obey everyone all the time.
Katherine Howe: Oftentimes, I think with great sympathy about Abigail Williams, poor Abigail, who, by the way, in Arthur Miller is turned into a 17-year-old temptress. She’s a child. She’s a child. And if you look at the descriptions of her behavior that are described as her being in her fits, a lot of her behavior sounds to me like playing, [00:24:00] like running around in circles and flapping your arms and saying, ” whish” and saying that you’re gonna fly at the chimney.
Katherine Howe: Is that devilish possession, or is it an 11 year old girl being silly? And I feel like that is a, that is something that’s worth thinking about. So there’s the kind of class and gender politics, that’s another big.
Katherine Howe: So there are a number of different aspects, but you were asking about the politics and the charter. So this is another pretty big circle. So, typically in the early modern period in the colonies, if someone was accused as a witch, they would be accused and have a trial, and if they were found guilty, by the way, it’s hard to find people guilty. They actually had a pretty high bar for for evidence at that time. Believe it or not, you could be tried and found guilty, and if you’re found guilty, you could be put to death, and that could happen within a matter of weeks. Salem, the panic begins in January, the first hangings aren’t until June. That’s like a huge long span of time. And the reason for that long span of time is because the Glorious Revolution was unfolding.
Katherine Howe: Back in England at that [00:25:00] time, Massachusetts Charter had expired, so they didn’t have the legal wherewithal to hold a trial. That’s why the Salem trial trials are conducted by a special Court of Oyer and Terminer. They basically had to convene like a special tribunal to deal with this problem that had come together. In fact, there’s some historians who wondered if the Court of Oyer and Terminer didn’t just deal with witchcraft. They were supposed to deal with all the rest of the backlog. But we just don’t know what that backlog was, cause the records of the witch trials are what have survived.
Katherine Howe: And then there’s another piece of the Venn diagram, and we have to consider it. At the very beginning, the very first person who’s accused as a witch is accused by Abigail and Betty and she’s the only person who has less social and cultural power than they do. And they accuse Tituba or Titube Indian, who is an enslaved woman in the Parris household.
Katherine Howe: So she’s basically the only person who has less ability to protect herself than these children themselves do. And so Tituba’s accused. She [00:26:00] has two confessions, and there’s some evidence that she is beaten in between the two confessions. And in one of the confessions, Tituba introduces the idea of a conspiracy. She says that there is a group of witches at work in Salem Village. She doesn’t know who they are or how many.
Katherine Howe: And so at one point early on, there’s actually a sermon is preached in Salem Village that I’m gonna mangle the title, but it’s something along the lines of “Christ Knows How Many Devils There Are.” And so you have this idea of an unknown number of conspirators, who must be discovered. And when you have this undefined, invisible threat and also no legal relief, there’s no like pressure valve that this tension could be released by, because of the like, unfortunate timing of the expiration of the charter.
Katherine Howe: So you bring [00:27:00] all of these circles in the Venn diagram together, and that is why Salem gets as big as it does. And by the time Salem was over and done, 19 people were put to death and hundreds had been accused, hundreds in a period of time when a given town would only have a couple thousand people.
Josh Hutchinson: That was a great, thorough explanation of how it took all these different factors to create the situation. It wasn’t something, a single bullet theory, that you can put to rest.
Katherine Howe: But I think one reason that, that we keep craving for simplicity is because with a simple explanation for why than it’s easier to consign, to history. It’d be so much more encouraging or it’d be such a relief to be able to say, “Oh, it was air got poisoning. No big deal. That’s all.” But like the fact that it, what really was at stake was this intersection of circumstances and that everyone who was a participant in [00:28:00] Salem pretty much believed that they were doing the right thing. Not only the right thing, but the necessary thing to save their community. That to me is also a moving but also terrifying thing to remember and to realize.
Katherine Howe: Because certainly we all, we’ve all lived through moments where we are convinced that we’re doing the right thing, only to see ourselves perpetuating horrors, and that is I think that’s one of the reasons we as a culture are never really able to let go of Salem.
Sarah Jack: You said, ” as a culture, we’re never able to let go of Salem.” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, ” shall we never get rid of this past? It lies upon the present like a giant’s dead body.” I’m wondering what you think you would write now about that.
Katherine Howe: Hawthorne in particular is someone who, like he personally, so felt the weight of Salem’s past in a very personal way, because he was a descendant of Judge Hathorne, obviously. And because he was living there himself, and for many [00:29:00] generations, in fact, much during much of the time period when Hawthorne was living in Salem, the witch trials were not discussed in polite society. This was true into the 20th century, actually. They were not discussed. It was not something that was brought up. It’s certainly something my family never talked about until this is something that my, my aunt uncovered. There was a sense of embarrassment attached to it, I think.
Katherine Howe: But I’m also intrigued by the fact that when Hawthorne has tried to grapple with it, and he has tried to grapple with it, he took the line from he, he knew what had happened. Like he took a line from Sarah Good and put it in the mouth of Matthew Maule, in The House of the Seven Gables.
Katherine Howe: Was it Hawthorne who grumbled about “damn scribbling women?” I think it was. I think it was. And so this is me tweaking his nose a little bit, but Sarah Good. Sarah Good was a beggar. Okay. She was destitute. She was one of the first people accused, because she was in no position to defend herself. She was thrown into jail. She has a baby on her and like [00:30:00] toddler, essentially with her, the baby dies while they’re in jail. The toddler, whose name is Dorothy, ends up losing her mind and has to be like supported by the town after the trials are all over. So like this person is in absolutely dire straits and is and suffers mightily at the hands of the community where she lives and who’s supposed to be helping them.
Katherine Howe: And when she’s on the scaffold, she says the most badass thing anyone has ever said in history of time, my unbiased opinion. She says, “I’m no more than a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” And I wish I had that kind of wherewithal, because who has that kind of wherewithal under in those circumstances?
Katherine Howe: And so Hawthorne takes this line, Hawthorne knows it’s happened, and he puts this line in a guy, in a guy’s mouth. I understand that he’s writing in the 19th century. I get it. But at the same time, I think it’s impossible to look [00:31:00] at Salem and not consider gender politics in place. The fact that virtually everyone who’s accused and put to death was a woman. Any man who was accused cuz he’s associated with a woman who was already accused. Giles Corey was crushed to death between stones. He’s accused cuz his wife, Martha’s accused first, but also the accusers are initially children, but then also women. So there’s a really intense gender politics in place here.
Katherine Howe: So your question was, the past lying with the weight of the giant and what would Hawthorne say today? And I’m actually curious what Hawthorne would say about it today. I think he would sympathize with, or maybe be aggravated by the fact that we’re still having the conversation that he was having a hundred and fifty years ago. But at the same time, I feel like we’re talking about different things from what he was concerned. And and also I think he would be really annoyed because I write novels. I’m a woman.
Sarah Jack: I love [00:32:00] that you brought up that he took Sarah’s words and gave them to a man, because it just dawned on me very recently that Ann Putnam didn’t read her own apology. I just assumed, and I think that possibly other descendants, we read that, we think I don’t know what we really think about it. We’re evaluating what it says anyways, but we’re doing that with her voice in our head, and no, it was not.
Katherine Howe: One thing that, that continues to interest me, as a history person, about Salem is that it’s one of the rare instances when regular people are at the center of the store. So much of history, especially the further you go into the past, the vast majority of people who’ve been alive in history of ever, have left no record of themselves. They weren’t literate, they weren’t of sufficient note to have their burial place noted, [00:33:00] and so much of history, even academic history, as it’s gotten more serious about excavating stories, just by the nature of the way that archives come to exist, there’s still going to be a bias towards power.
Katherine Howe: There’s gonna be a bias towards privilege and a bias towards power, and, when it comes to Salem, that is one of the rare instances where the bias towards power falls away, because the people who are at the center of the drama are regular people, and where historians have put the work in to try to excavate what is able to be excavated of these lives that otherwise would’ve been invisible to us.
Katherine Howe: Would we have known Abigail Williams ever existed, if she hadn’t been part of the Salem Witch Trials? We would not have? And in fact, even with her central position at the beginning of the panic, we don’t know what happened to her. We don’t know where she went. We don’t know how old she was when she died. Nobody actually knows for sure.
Katherine Howe: And so particularly talking about people who are not literate, Anne [00:34:00] Putnam had her confession read. If I remember correctly, Anne Putnam wasn’t literate. And so you’re right in saying here’s this apology that she delivered in front of everybody and that it was read on her behalf. To what extent was she the author of her own apology? And it’s impossible to say. It’s impossible to know.
Katherine Howe: And it’s one of the reasons that you’ve touched on one of my rant buttons, I’m sorry to report, but as a writer of historical fiction, like I have so little patience for historical fiction about kings and queens. I don’t give a damn about kings and queens. Who cares? They get enough attention, they have enough records, they’re all literate, everyone documents every single thing that they do. And I do not give a damn, because history pays them enough attention, and I’m so much more interested in trying to excavate the history of people who would otherwise be forgotten.
Sarah Jack: I caught that from you reading Conversion, because your [00:35:00] main character, Colleen, she’s getting to give us the firsthand experience like no other afflicted person was able to do.
Katherine Howe: Thank you for saying that. I confess I haven’t looked at Conversion in kind a long time. You’re making me think I should look at it again, cuz there’s actually a group of high school students who are reading it right now and I’m gonna talk to next week. I should read that book.
Katherine Howe: But I appreciate you saying that, because I feel like, like one question I sometimes wrestle with as a history person and someone who’s a novelist is what does historical fiction have to offer that nonfiction doesn’t have to offer? Like, why not just write a really good history of something?
Katherine Howe: And I feel like in many instances, in the cases where a story cannot be recovered, that’s where historical fiction can be a really wonderful intervention. If you can build a credible world with credible material culture, and credible details, and credible politics, and credible ideology, and then [00:36:00] people it with people who are credible people, it is a way of accessing history that otherwise is not extant, where it doesn’t exist.
Katherine Howe: Is there going to be some imagination involved? Obviously, but it is, I feel like that’s where the opportunity lies. And I realize we’ve gotten off Salem a little ,bit and I apologize, but it’s something that I think about a lot. Like, particularly for some, a story that’s as revisited as often as the Salem story is, what does fiction have to offer? Like why tell a fictional version of this story? I feel like fiction gives you permission to fill in and shade in stories that where there just is no other shading available. And that to me seems like the real area of opportunity for storytelling.
Josh Hutchinson: I wanted to ask you about the afflicted girls. Do you think it’s plausible that conversion disorder could [00:37:00] explain some of the fits?
Katherine Howe: Yes and no. I’ll explain that hedge of an answer. For one thing I find it always a little bit tricky to apply contemporary psychoanalytic categories to people in the past. Like on the one hand, I believe very urgently in, the shared humanity of people in the past, but at the same time, like we take as natural so many habits of mind that are actually very historically contingent. The fact that you and I might casually talk about what our dreams mean or what our subconscious motivations might be for something like that is indicative of post-psychoanalytic. And I think it’s tricky to try to access the interior light of people who are living in a different moment, especially a moment like the early [00:38:00] modern in Massachusetts. It’s even hard for a scholar of that time period to really grasp the extent to which Christianity informed every, single aspect of existence.
Katherine Howe: So for my second novel I was working on. No, it’s Physick Book. I was reading up about alchemy, and like we know about alchemy as this pseudoscientific practice in early modern practice in which someone tries to turn that into gold. Okay, fine. But that’s actually not what it was. It is actually a way of understanding the order of the universe that took as scientific fact the perfectability of the human soul.
Katherine Howe: There’s this tense layering of religion and materiality and mirroring of structures and images like, like as soon as I would get close to thinking I understood alchemical thought, it would slither out of my grasp. And I would realize this because I’m just [00:39:00] too much of someone born in the 20th century to, to I will never actually really understand that intellectual landscape.
Katherine Howe: So when you ask can conversion disorder explain the girls’ behavior? Like in a way yes. But in another way I don’t know that we can actually really understand their selfhood, the way that these girls thought about themselves or understood themselves as individuals.
Katherine Howe: It’s just very different from the way that we think. It’s very different. So that there’s that qualification. With that qualification in place, I would say that, so conversion disorder is where you are under so much stress that your body converts it into physical symptoms. And then mass psychogenic illness is when a group of people experience strange behavior together.
Katherine Howe: And there are many examples of mass psychogenic illness [00:40:00] or mass psychogenic illness expressions of conversion disorder, and many examples of it across cultures, across time, across continents, across ethnicities. And it very often happens among adolescent girls, for whatever reason. Maybe cause we are conditioned to be more like socially engaged with other people. Who knows? You can try to explain it a number of different ways.
Katherine Howe: But it’s not only adolescent girls. I think that it is, this is gonna be a controversial thing to say, but like the recent incidences of Havana Syndrome are pretty clearly an example of mass psychogenic illness. Now it’s important to say that mass psychogenic illness is real. It counts as a real thing. It’s not just people like, it’s not all in your head. You know what I mean? Like the fact that it is, that it has its origin in mental disorder doesn’t make it any less real to the body. Conversion disorder is a disorder. It is your body being sick. It’s just that the sickness originates from [00:41:00] inside your own organism. That doesn’t make it count less. You know what I mean?
Katherine Howe: All of which is to say, did a group of girls start exhibiting strange behavior? Yes. Did it spread from girl to girl on networks of kinship and friendship? It did. But at the same time, their behavior, when you say “fits” today, that has a very specific connotation. And it sounds like a epileptic seizure or something like that to, to us today. If I say, “Oh my gosh, I just saw this person have a fit.” You’d be like, “Oh no.” And you’d imagine that they fell down twitching and foaming at the mouth, but that’s not what they were doing.
Katherine Howe: What they were doing was behaving out of the ordinary. So like earlier we were talking about Abigail running around flapping her wings and saying, her arms, and saying, “whish, whish, whish.” That is her in her fits. Or like another instance of Abigail in her fits is when she challenges Deodat Lawson to name his text. She like gets up in the middle of church and like mouths off to this very famous divine and rolls her eyes about how boring it’s gonna be when he reads his text. That’s [00:42:00] not her having a fit. That’s her misbehaving.
Katherine Howe: But her behavior was such a challenge to the gender and economic power structure that was in place while she was living. It was so out of the ordinary that her community could only chalk it up to devilish influence because it was that unimaginable that she would behave this way.
Katherine Howe: So was there a social illness aspect to the afflicted girl’s behavior? I feel certain, yes. So that, that’s my long and qualified example about or discussion of conversion disorder.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you think that they were really afraid of witches and that the fear of witches might have also translated?
Katherine Howe: Sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think the fear was real. I think it is a mistake to either chalk it up as craven opportunism or as naked stupidity or superstition. One of the [00:43:00] things that I think is important, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt who live in the past and that is that like absolutely they were afraid.
Katherine Howe: Can you imagine, what does it feel like to live in a world where you really, actually, honest to gosh believe that the devil can go walk about on the earth, as a real person and that he can disguise himself as people you know and love and trust? That at any given time, I could be talking to you right now, Josh, and you could be the devil in disguise, and I wouldn’t know it.
Katherine Howe: That’s a and if you really believe that, you really do believe that, and you actually really believe that hell is a real place that you can go there if you make a mistake. That there is no, this is another like aspect of puritan belief, that like they believed in the elect. The idea that you have no way of saving yourself. That your being saved was only up to God, and you had no control [00:44:00] over it whatsoever. Like what? You couldn’t go to confession. You couldn’t do penance. You could try your best to behave, but it was ultimately just up to God.
Katherine Howe: What an existentially dreadful way to live your life, to have no certainty. It’s a little, a really hard life, first of all, and to believe that there was such a thing as paradise after death, but to have no idea whether or not you got to go there and that nothing you did made any difference. And that everywhere, at every turn, the devil was waiting to trip you up. Like that would be a difficult and impossible mental landscape to occupy.
Katherine Howe: So yes, if your question was did they really believe in witchcraft and was that fear, could not fear contribute to their behavior? Like absolutely. What a terrifying way to live, and also what a relief. Like one of the reasons that I think witches [00:45:00] was such a persuasive idea for so many people at that time was wouldn’t it be great if something was going bad in your life, to be able to not try to see it as a sign of God’s Ill favor, but instead to have someone to blame for it? To be like, “it’s not me. I’m not messing up here. Someone’s doing this to me.”
Katherine Howe: I think that’s also very human, that human feeling. It’s not just bad luck or misfortune or like the luck of the draw, and it’s so much more of a, “no, this person doing something to me. They wish me ill, and that’s why my life is hard.” I think that’s a very human way to be.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We talked a little about Anne Putnam, Jr.’s apology earlier, and she still does that in her apology. “The devil made me do it.” And Samuel Sewall does the same thing, like the two big apologies that come about after Salem is over after everything’s done are Ann Putnam’s and [00:46:00] Samuel Sewall’s apology. But Samuel’s apology, too, is weird where he like, first of all, he comes to it. It’s not that he stops believing in witchcraft or stops believing that there is an invisible world. He comes to it after a series of wonders and marbles, including, if I remember correctly, like his house being tilted with stones. Who knows what really happened? And maybe there was like a passing hailstorm is how it took it.
Katherine Howe: But he comes to it after a series of wonders and marvels, and he comes to believe that the devil tricked them all. That it wasn’t that that the devil wasn’t luring people into witchcraft. Instead, the devil obscured the minds of the people who are supposed to keep the community safe. And but also what a horrifying thing to, to come to believe about yourself. To look back at your actions and think you’re doing the right thing, and think that you are saving your community from the most threatening presence that your imagination can come up with, and instead to conclude that, no, what happened [00:47:00] was that threatening presence tricked you. That you were so weak that you were fooled. Like what a, what a heinous thing to believe about yourself. It’s a very punishing worldview that they subscribe to.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you see any modern parallels to the Witch hunt?
Katherine Howe: Sure. A few years ago a historian of witchcraft named John Demos published a book about witch hunting, in which he has a chapter about the 1980s daycare satanism thing that happened, much of which I was only dimly aware of, being a small person in 1980s myself.
Katherine Howe: But what happened was, a group of people were put on trial, actually put on trial and actually convicted of having you run a daycare center and used the children in satanic rituals. And at the time that it was happening, and this is preposterous, like I, it’s actually just like on the surface of it, I think [00:48:00] preposterous. I think, taken out context, any of us looking at this would say, “this makes, this is ridiculous. Obviously this did not happen.” And at the time that it was unfolding, John Demos saw it unfolding and he was like, “Oh my God, it’s Salem all over again.” Like the same pieces are in place, like the idea of a conspiracy, the idea of trusted people that you cannot trust, the idea of children being at risk.
Katherine Howe: And I think that you see some of the same hysteria and language. I don’t like using the word hysteria, cuz it’s such a specific word, but you see some of this in like contemporary corners of the conspiracy internet, where I try not to spend any time, but Isn’t that Pizzagate? Isn’t there some like thing not too long ago about worrying a particular pizzeria was like putting kids at risk in this same kind of way? Like you see the same kind of like at any time that someone worries that children are at risk, there will be a lot of open-mindedness about it.
Katherine Howe: But of course, here’s me getting political. Like, of course, children actually literally are at risk [00:49:00] by, by school shooting, right? Like the one thing that would really keep children really safe in places where they’re supposed to feel safe and trust people around them, is if they restricted access to military assault weapons. That’s my opinion. My opinion is that if we really care about keeping children safe, we take those guns off the street, right, full stop. But feel free to send me hate mail. I can be reached to KatherineHowe.com/contact.
Sarah Jack: So I think asking the question about are there parallels, we have these modern parallels that are popping into our heads. We have our strong feelings, but what can the understanding of the Colonial Witch trials and those before do to help us with these parallels? Can it help us? Will it help?
Katherine Howe: I’d like to think that it can. One of the things that I like to say when talking about Salem is that I feel that one of the reasons we can’t let Salem go. As a culture, like we come back to it and we, like we can’t let it go.[00:50:00]
Katherine Howe: And I feel that the reason that we can’t let it go, among the many reasons, but I think one of the big reasons is that it forces us to confront how fragile our ideals really are. We are an unusual country in that in many respects, we are, notwithstanding those of us who were brought here against our will, which is many of us, but broadly construed, you could argue that we are something of an intentional community.
Katherine Howe: That the only thing that really holds us together is this set of shared ideals, and that some of our shared ideals include religious freedom. They include a social safety net. That we value people who are different from us, that we value people who are vulnerable. ” Bring us you’re tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” Like that, that arguably this is an ideal that we hold in common. This is an organizing principle of the culture in which we live.
Katherine Howe: And yet Salem is this instance where everybody, believing they were doing the [00:51:00] absolute right thing, instead put to death, the state put to death 19 people. That, in the course of doing the right thing, the state did the absolute wrong thing, and they also put to death people who were, many of them were vulnerable in their community. People who were more likely to be accused were those who were at the most vulnerable, who were the most out step vulnerable in community. And so I feel like Salem is an instructive moment for that, because here’s this moment where, in the course of being convinced of our total moral authority and correctness, a huge miscarriage of justice took place.
Katherine Howe: And I think that’s a really difficult thing to reconcile. And I think especially for a country like ours, where also so many of us are brought up to look to the colonial period for our origin, that we’re told, rightly or wrongly, that we are taught to look into the 18th, and to a lesser extent [00:52:00] the 17th century, and see in it the seeds of the country that we would become.
Katherine Howe: Maybe that’s another way of thinking about it. Like another way of thinking about it, is it more productive to think about what we want the future to look like than it is to try to think about what the past has to tell us? That’s a question. That’s a question that I think is interesting. One, particularly for an intentional community like ours. We have, we get to reinvent ourselves as a country, and we get to decide, and what kind of place do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects vulnerable people? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects people who are at risk, who are different from us, who are angry, who are grumpy, who read too many books? I would prefer to live in a place that protects those kinds of people. But we get to choose We choose who we protect.
Sarah Jack: We can make that choice, and not only is it going to stop suffering here, there are places in this world that are still totally captured by [00:53:00] doing the wrong thing, thinking they’re doing the right thing, witch hunting. This discussion it is about us here, but it’s about us there.
Sarah Jack: You have referred to time so much. That is such a strong piece of this. Even in Conversion, one of the simple quotes you have says, “any number of things could happen in the time it took to go down the hall.” You like go right to the time thing. And today when you started talking, you talked about time. And I look at the history, I look at us now, how do we all get caught up on this witch-hunting mentality and start looking out for humanity and protecting other?
Katherine Howe: It’s a hard thing. It’s a really hard thing. And I wish I had easy answers for it. I think simply the act of reflection and awareness is an important one. Stopping to interrogate what our assumptions are.
Josh Hutchinson: We’ve talked about a lot of heavy things. [00:54:00] I wondered if we could switch and discuss your new book project. What can you tell us about it?
Katherine Howe: Oh, so many things. So I’m obsessed with pirates, who isn’t? Hopefully, the answer is everyone is obsessed with pirates.
Katherine Howe: So I have a book coming out in fall, and I think they’re gonna let me keep the title. And you. Okay, Josh, Sarah, you guys have to tell me what you think of the title. You ready? So get comfortable, here it is: A True Account of Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. That’s the title. It’s a mouthful.
Katherine Howe: It starts in Boston in 1726 at a very real an actual pirate trial that really did happen. Like most of my stuff, it’s, it is grounded in actual facts and then becomes what I’m describing as a little bit like Gone Girl meets Treasure Island. And I had so much fun with it, and I’m really excited about it. And it is a little bit of a departure from what I’ve done, but it is about a girl, Hannah Masury, who has to disguise herself in order to escape some pretty heavy circumstances. And she [00:55:00] ends up basically stealing away on what turns out to be a pirate ship. And we have to follow her on her adventures.
Katherine Howe: And I have so much fun with some basic pirate tropes. There is treasure, there is a parrot. It’s so much fun, and there’s also some, a little bit of romance, and I have the most fun ever.
Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun one to read.
Katherine Howe: I really hope so.
Sarah Jack: I’m so delighted by what I just heard.
Katherine Howe: That makes me very happy. Makes me very happy. It’s weird because it’s one of the, it’s probably the most violent book I’ve written. If y’all have read my stuff, then you know I’m a teensy bit squeemish and shy away from. So there’s some violence in this book, but what’s strange about it is, I didn’t invent any of it. It is actually all from historical record. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any of the stuff that happens in this book, because it all ripped from the headlines. It all really happened.
Josh Hutchinson: And was Hannah herself based on a real [00:56:00] person?
Katherine Howe: Hannah is based on a couple of people. She’s inspired in part by real accounts of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who are two working-class women, who ended up disguising themselves as men and going raiding in Jamaica at the end of the 17th century. They were real people ,and there was a real Hannah Masury ,who I talk about a little bit in the author’s note of the book. She was a 19th-century person, and she ended up, I was inspired when I came across her. She was the wife of a ship captain. She was married to a ship captain, and she ended up putting down a mutiny by herself, armed only with a pistol, in the Pacific Ocean.
Katherine Howe: And so I read about her, and she didn’t have any children, and I was like, “oh my gosh, I am obsessed with you.” And so I decided to name my awesome pirate after her. Hannah, Hannah comes from a couple of different sources, but I really like her as a person. She’s a tough character .
Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like it. You said that it’s set [00:57:00] around a pirate trial in Boston?
Katherine Howe: Yeah, it starts, the action starts in Boston in 1726, and in 1726, it’s the end of the golden age of piracy. It’s actually funny that the Salem period, like the witch craze, the end of the witch craze and golden age of piracy are at the same time period, which I think is interesting. And a guy named William Fly was tried as a pirate, and the person who ministered to him and preached about him was none other than Cotton Mather .
Katherine Howe: So Cotton Mather by then was this like hugely famous, successful cleric. He was really rich. He was, like, had a very popular ministry and so he had taken it upon himself to crusade against piracy. So he tries to bring William Fly and his compatriots back to God, and he’s there when they’re hanged. William Fly was hanged, and then he was gibbeted. He was, his body was hung in chains on a tiny island in the Boston Harbor Islands and left [00:58:00] there to rot. He was really avid as a warning to other people who might go out on the account, which is a way of describing going, turning pirate.
Katherine Howe: And so I was fascinated by this. It was only a hundred years later that excursion boats are starting to leave Boston. Like steam boats are going from Boston to Nahant. This is no time all. To think that you could go by Nixes Mate, which is where William Fly was hanged and chained. You could go by there and to see you remnant oft remain dangling there.
Katherine Howe: So that’s where the action begins at William Fly’s trial, and things even crazier.
Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun ride. .
Katherine Howe: I’m excited for it. I’m not sure when it’s coming out. I think it’s gonna be November, 2023. So it’s coming up.
Josh Hutchinson: Here’s Sarah with an important update on what’s happening now in your world.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for listening a few minutes longer to hear End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News. How many innocent world citizens [00:59:00] is it okay to accept as suffering from violent brutalization, due to harmful practices related to accusations of harmful witchcraft and ritual attacks? These attacks are happening now to thousands of innocent people, who are not causing supernatural harm but are being punished by their community, as if they are the ultimate explanation.
Sarah Jack: They are innocent, not dangerous witches. These attacks are happening across countries of Africa and Asia. Please see the show notes for links to read about how some countries have advocacy groups working to intercede. When there is not an answer for unexpected bad luck, unfortunate death, or personal misfortune, blaming others for supernatural malevolence is the actual crime. This witch fear is still causing unfounded, violent attacks against women, children, and sometimes men. Listen and watch for the reports. These attacks are reported on.
Sarah Jack: The Northern Ireland borough of Larne wants to commemorate [01:00:00] eight Witch trial victims from the Islandmagee Witch Trial that took place on March 31st, 1711. A borough counselor raised questions very recently of whether the eight women and a man who were found guilty of witchcraft were actually innocent. In the trial era, using witchcraft was a covenant with the devil against the victims. When this counselor questioned if it is within the counsel’s capacity to say they were innocent, he’s questioning if the accused were indeed working with the devil himself to cause harm.
Sarah Jack: Is it within human capacity to not assign witch harm guilt onto others? I want to answer that question right now. Yes, it is within our capacity to stop questioning other people about their status as a supernaturally harmful witch. It is our duty to stop questioning accused witch innocence, past or present. These accused people were not, and today’s accused witches are not, causing the supernatural harm that is feared of them.
Sarah Jack: [01:01:00] This week, academic research was published that is “a new global data set on contemporary witchcraft beliefs .” It has determined that witchcraft beliefs cut across sociodemographic groups, but are less widespread among the more educated and economically secure. Country-level variation in the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs is systematically linked to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics. Altogether, the resulting data set covers more than 140,000 individuals from 95 countries and territories and 5 continents. Over 40% of all survey respondents claim to believe in witchcraft. Stay tuned for a discussion on this research outcome. Find a link to the report in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: While we watch and wait, let’s support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious sphere. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an [01:02:00] intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website, endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that eye-opening update.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Join us next week for a special Connecticut witch trial victim descendant episode.
Josh Hutchinson: And join us in our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Go to endwitchhunts.Org.
Sarah Jack: Subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen.
Josh Hutchinson: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Sarah Jack: Remember to tell your friends that you love what you’ve been hearing on Thou Shalt Not Suffer, so that they will not miss out.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Exodus 22:18. Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today’s guest is Greg Houle, an author currently working on a novel about the Putnams of Salem.
Sarah Jack: Because you like the show, please share it with your friends, family, and followers.
Josh Hutchinson: We hope you’re enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving. Have a slice of Turkey for me.
Sarah Jack: Share the mashed potatoes.
Josh Hutchinson: Pass that gravy.
Sarah Jack: This is a great topic for [00:01:00] Thanksgiving. I’m looking forward to talking to a Putnam of Salem descendant.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and we hope this episode gives you lots of conversation ideas for your Thanksgiving dinner.
Sarah Jack: Especially if you’ve been having boundary disputes with your friends or family.
Josh Hutchinson: Make a peace offering, and be sure to watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the best Thanksgiving anything ever made, hands down.
Sarah Jack: But only after you watched Holly Hunter’s Home for the Holidays.
Josh Hutchinson: Then get back to your Walking Dead marathon. That’s what you’re really watching. Or House of the Dragon.
Sarah Jack: And now Josh is gonna tell us some history about the Putnams of Salem.
The Putnams of Salem Village were instigators of the Witch Hunt. Thomas Putnam and his brother, Edward, were two of the four men who [00:02:00] filed the first complaints against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Thomas went on to make 35 complaints, testify against 17 people, and record 120 depositions, including those of his daughter Ann Putnam, Jr., who was the first villager outside of the parsonage to be afflicted. Later on, she was joined by her mother Ann Putnam, Sr. and their maid, Mercy Lewis, among the ranks of the afflicted. The Putnam family was an important family in the village for three generations. 12 out of the original 25 villagers to sign the church covenant were Putnams, and they ranked among the top taxpayers in the village, along with the Porters.
Josh Hutchinson: After accusing many people and going through [00:03:00] all her theatrics in the courtroom, Ann Putnam, Jr. did apologize in 1706, specifically to Rebecca Nurse’s family, but also to the whole village, as she joined the church under the new minister, Joseph Green.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for introducing us to the Putnams of Salem. I cannot wait to get more of these details from Greg.
Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome. I’m also looking forward to hearing this family covered in depth. They were so heavily involved, what they did in the witch trials, which was so much. So many Putnams were involved in so many ways.
Sarah Jack: I’m so happy to welcome Greg Houle, writer of short fiction and author of The Putnams of Salem, coming 2025.
Greg Houle: So I came into this story, the story of Salem and the Salem witch hysteria like a lot of people do, with a personal family connection to [00:04:00] it. My mother is a Putnam. She is a direct as descendant of Thomas Putnam, Jr., who, along with his oldest daughter Ann, were probably two of the most prolific accusers during the Salem witch hysteria. But yet, despite that connection, I really didn’t have any interest in exploring the story as I was growing up. And in spite of having a really intense, lifelong interest in history, I really didn’t care, and I think part of that was because of the fact that Salem is such a huge story, and it has a life of its own, and it’s become this kind of larger than life almost true crime story.
Greg Houle: And I think a lot of times what has happened is it’s deflected a lot of the attention away from the important things, the victims, why it happened, how can we prevent it from happening in the future, that [00:05:00] sort of thing. It was always an interesting thing to be connected to, so many of us are.
Greg Houle: Everything changed in the summer of 2021. And that is that summer, I live in LA now, and my wife and daughter went back east to visit our family, and my wife’s family lives in Boston. And while we were there, we decided, let’s go to Salem. And we went there, I thought, “Okay I really want to connect my daughter to my, her grandmother’s side of the family. I really ought to understand the story better and really dig into it. “And that’s really what I did.
Greg Houle: And as soon as I did that, I became immediately enamored by what was going on in the heads of someone like Thomas Putnam, Jr. and Ann. So you have someone who’s accusing all of these people, and then you have another one who is said to be afflicted. And I started exploring [00:06:00] that. And this is the part that’s unknowable for a historian. So we all wish we could be inside their heads and understanding what’s going on during that time. I thought the best way to explore it would really be to look at the environment in which they were in, the things that led to Salem and what happened there and then really just use fiction at that point to tell the story, and, of course, no historian would ever use conjecture , but the beauty of fiction is you can do that. And I think what I tried to do initially in this short story and then now to much greater depth in the novel, is really explore that and look at the forces that created this really tragic event.
Greg Houle: The short story and the novel, at least a tentative title of the novel is The Putnams of Salem. [00:07:00] And there is a sort of subtitle that I’m throwing around. That’s really The Fall of an American Family. Not sure how my family will feel about that, but it’s what we find out in this story.
Greg Houle: And I think it’s really quite fascinating when you think about all the different forces involved in the world that they were living. One of the major themes of the short story and the novel is really fear and the way in which fear drives a lot of what happens and the various types of fear and various sources of fear, from the fear that’s inherent within the Puritan religion to fear of the native population. In the case of Thomas Putnam, there’s fear of losing your place in society. The sense that throughout history there’s the common case of [00:08:00] the patriarch of a family kind of building something, the second generation making it stronger, and then the third generation messing it up somehow. Thomas Putnam Jr. was the third generation of the Putnams in America, and it really does follow that trajectory. And I think it’s really interesting when you insert this man into these circumstances and you see the way in which it drove him to do some pretty awful things.
Josh Hutchinson: You’ve touched on it already, but how did you go from where you were doing your research into your family to deciding to write stories and then a novel about them?
Greg Houle: Yeah, it’s a great question. I, again, a lot of the impetus for this was my 12 year old daughter at the time and really wanting to connect her to this story in a way that I thought was meaningful. For me it was about really trying to get behind any [00:09:00] lore that existed within our family to the actual story, and it’s not always easy to do when you’re dealing with 17th century America. You can’t always get every detail.
Greg Houle: In my family, there was not a lot of detail. I think there was always the sense of we are connected to this great American story, “great” in quotes, by the way. And isn’t that fascinating? But I think, for me, my interest in history has always been about the fact that it is multi-dimensional and dynamic. I think what tends to happen with history is over time we flatten it out, and it becomes very one dimensional. So the sort of typical story of Salem is that it’s these sort of fundamental crazy puritans who experience something one [00:10:00] day, start accusing women of witchcraft, and then put them to death. And while the basic facts may be true, there’s so much more involved in that story. They lived in a different world than we live in today, obviously, but they still wanted to succeed.
Greg Houle: They laughed sometimes. They cried. They had fights, and they, wanted to be successful. And I think a lot of times we forget that. And in looking at the story, the part that really fascinated me was thinking about the context of this tragedy within that parameter.
Greg Houle: And so for me that’s my entry point into this. And so when I really thought about both Thomas and Ann, I kept thinking, ” what must be going on in our heads?” I think a lot of times our simple answer is Thomas [00:11:00] is a devout Puritan, and he believes wholeheartedly that all these people he’s accusing are witches. And isn’t that crazy? But the reality of the fact is that’s probably not true, right? He was very strategic in his efforts. Again, we don’t wanna have too much conjecture here and assume that we know everything that was going on, but, for me, I was fascinated by that.
Greg Houle: And then you also have Ann, who, in my writing of her, tried to present her as the sort of typical, idealized Puritan girl who’s really trying to do all the right things and failing because of her affliction. We know that her afflictions are probably not a real thing, but they are something, and it’s it’s a sort of interesting juxtaposition between [00:12:00] the two of them. And that was what really fascinated me.
Josh Hutchinson: For our listeners who aren’t as familiar with the Putnams, can you explain Thomas’s role in the trials?
Greg Houle: The sort of patriarch of that family was John Putnam, who came over during the great Puritan migration, came over from England probably in the early 1630s. He was one of, not the initial group of settlers that settled Salem, but he was there a few years later. Pretty prominent landowner. But one of the things that the Putnams at least say that they always wanted to do was create this kind of communal society in Salem, where it was a little bit more, ” we’re not worried about individual wealth, we’re gonna just try to bring everyone up.”
Greg Houle: But again, this was at a time where everyone, where Puritans were much more sanguine about their prospects and in the new [00:13:00] world. And I think by the time we get to the witch hysteria 60 years later, everything, the shine has come off a little bit. But so John was the initial patriarch of the family, and then Thomas Sr. was, of course, Thomas Jr.’s father, and he built their land holdings. They were farmers. He was pretty privileged person, but things were different for him, and they weren’t quite so easy. By the time we get to 1692, Thomas is still doing pretty well, and his family is pretty prominent.
Greg Houle: He was known as Sergeant Thomas Putnam, because he fought in King Philip’s War, which was, some say, the bloodiest war in colonial American history, where it was, in many ways, almost like a akin to a world war in some respect. [00:14:00] It was fought throughout New England between the colonists and their Native allies and other native communities. I think by the time of the Salem witch hysteria, 1692, Thomas was a much different person than his father and his grandfather.
Greg Houle: I think that there are a couple of things that, that are going on. One is the realization that the Puritans are not going to have a shining city on the hill like they initially thought. Now, that doesn’t mean that, that they weren’t still trying, or they didn’t still believe that they were superior in many ways. But I think they realized at that point that wasn’t gonna be easy.
Greg Houle: The relationships that they had with the native populations in New England had really soured to the point where that [00:15:00] had created a lot of fear. You may have talked about the fact that they that Massachusetts did not have a charter at that time, had lost its charter. So there’s a lot of uncertainty there. So I think, the way I portrayed in the novel and the short story, to some extent, is that Thomas is really this fading patriarch but family that is still prominent, but like a lot of people with power, he wants to do whatever it takes to keep that power, and this opportunity arises, and he takes advantage of it.
Josh Hutchinson: What were some of the things that he did during the witch-hunt that stand out to mark him as a prominent figure?
Greg Houle: So he accused many people of witchcraft. He also pretty much wrote all of the documents that needed to be submitted to court for Ann, so he was really orchestrating a lot of that. There [00:16:00] was also, as I’m sure you’re aware, quite a rift in the community and had been for generations about who leads the church, and Thomas was very much in favor of the head of the church, Samuel Parris, but others were not. There was a lot of choosing sides there, and that became a big part of it as well.
Greg Houle: In terms of his actual role, he was there during the very first examinations of the first three witches when they were examined by the magistrates. The first three were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, who were three kind of outcasts. But he was there and playing a very prominent role. I think that he saw himself as a leader. He was, a military [00:17:00] leader and a fairly wealthy person with land, and I think he saw his role as being someone who should take a prominent role during a time like this. And he certainly did. And I think, certainly, as I explore in the novel, he uses that as an opportunity to really reshape the nature of his relationships.
Sarah Jack: What you had just said about growing and securing their wealth with that land, I think that was a really big part of the fight, as well as having a stake in what was happening with the church.
Greg Houle: That’s a great point. I think that another interesting component with Thomas is his father, Thomas Sr., remarried at a very older age, so Thomas had a half brother who ended up inheriting a lot of what he was expecting to inherit. In many [00:18:00] ways, he comes across by 1692 as really just having this series of just one after another of what he would think are tragedies. But again, the thing I kept coming back to and what was fascinating to me was this idea that, you have this privileged person who’s then throwing a fit because he’s not getting his way every time.
Greg Houle: Maybe I’m projecting something that’s 330 years old to today, but I really, that was the thing that I kept coming back to, and a lot of it is tied up in those land disputes and the endless lawsuits and the just no way to ever solve these problems, either in court or outside of court. And it really brought it to the forefront that you realize that they have a lot of these kind of frivolous and difficult problems that we all deal with [00:19:00] today. And I think, again, going back to what I said earlier, we tend to just have this very one dimensional view that they were this sort of whole community block that just all did, were in lockstep with each other, and it’s just not like that.
The other thing I explore in the novel and have fun with is their desire to gossip and just really spread these, rumors and innuendo and all of this other stuff. Obviously, a lot of it was part of the driving force of the accusations of witchcraft, but it’s really tied up in the same disputes, those family squabbles. They were a big deal obviously, but they go back generations. When you start digging into it, you realize, you know, what a mess it actually is.
Sarah Jack: And it sounds like getting to look inside [00:20:00] the Putnam family the way you are doing it with your novel is a way to redeem them.
Greg Houle: That’s a really great point. I hope so. There’s a lot of redeeming that needs to be done. The one thing that I’ve never really been able to quite put my finger on, and I think it’s really difficult, because we don’t have full knowledge in the historical record, and that sort of thing is what role someone like Thomas really did play. I think, obviously, it’s clear he made a lot of accusations.
Greg Houle: I’m making a lot of conjecture that was purposeful and political and driven by anger and annoyance and all these other things, but we don’t really know how true that is. And we don’t know if he got caught up with the people on his side of the argument. And so it’s really one of those things where I want to be a little [00:21:00] careful. I certainly don’t pull any punches and protect my family members, but I don’t really know, and I’ve never really been able to pinpoint the role precisely that the Putnams played.
Greg Houle: And, for me, what’s more interesting actually is to think about the role that Ann played as a 12 year old , because, you imagine a scenario where she is really believing that she has done something wrong, or she, like a lot of Puritans at the time, thinking that they’ve let the devil into their being and into their world. But then there’s a part of me that thinks, “or was she just doing what her father wanted her to do?” so it becomes one of those things where those are the unknowable questions that I think are challenging for us to understand.
Greg Houle: But you can certainly, looking at the history, looking at [00:22:00] the situation of the Putnam family, you can see where they may have said, “hey, let’s just make this thing happen. Let’s just keep pushing it forward and see what we can do.” And perhaps that was what happened, and that’s what’s so challenging about this, because we never really will know. But part of what’s fun about writing historical fiction is you can then tell the story the way you want to tell it, right?
Josh Hutchinson: I think the way that you’re telling it is so important, because to understand how witch hunts happen, we need to get into the head of both sides of them. So we need to know the people who were making the accusations, what were they thinking, what was going on in their minds, so we can learn from that, and I think it’s just terrific that you are exploring, getting inside the heads of Thomas and Ann in the way that you [00:23:00] are.
Greg Houle: Thank you. I think you’re right. That’s the part that is just so fascinating. I think a lot of it, and certainly the work that you’re doing here with the podcast is really touching on this as well, but I think we live in modern times, and I think we can’t help but think about the way that works today, the way, you know, people are exposed to certain media and develop certain beliefs, and then that manifests itself in certain actions. And so I think the whole time that I’ve been working on this, that’s always been in my mind is it’s easy for us in a one dimensional world to say Thomas was just a leader in the community. He was a devout Puritan. He firmly believed that these women were evil, and he just [00:24:00] wanted to cleanse Salem, which, by the way, the novel is a dual narrative between, first person narrative with Thomas and Anne, and he’s basically saying that the whole time, he’s saying, “no, I’m just trying to cleanse our community.”
Greg Houle: But I think as intelligent people, we know that cannot possibly be the case, that it isn’t just black and white, that there may be an inkling of that there. We don’t want to completely dismiss it, but it’s just too convenient for him not to have taken the opportunity to, essentially, engage in behavior that resulted in the deaths of many needlessly.
Josh Hutchinson: I like the way you frame it as, in the terms of, dimensions that we look at, history as this one dimensional black and white thing. And I like how you’re getting into [00:25:00] the persons of these complicated people, getting into their minds and their characters to analyze them from a human perspective and make them three dimensional. I think that’s very important to our modern understanding of how we operate today.
Greg Houle: Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s a really important component anytime we look at history, I think, for anyone, and I’m sure you both feel the same way. Anyone who has real interest in history tends to be interested in the fact that it’s really about people, right? And it’s about decisions they make and then how those decisions affect other decisions. And this kind of long stretch of what occurs. And I think, a lot of times, people think of history as a series of events and things that happen at certain dates. And it really is about taking that three dimensional or [00:26:00] multidimensional view and really trying to understand what was going through the minds of people when these things were happening.
Greg Houle: I think the probably any legitimate historian listening to me would be very angry, because without actual historical record or information, you can’t extrapolate what is actually happening. But I do think the value of something like historical fiction, in this case, is really trying to use your knowledge and the information you have to make those leaps a little bit and try to understand it.
Greg Houle: One thing I’ll say about the novel is that I really tried hard to make it plausible. Obviously, I wasn’t privy to what was going on inside of Thomas or Ann’s mind, wasn’t privy to a lot of conversations that they may have had with other people, but the world in which they lived [00:27:00] and the thinking that they had were, it’s legitimate, and I’m trying to create something is realistic in terms of, how they would respond to those things. And I think, when you look today, at similar manifestations of persecution, you really do the same thing.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about Ann Jr. And her struggles during all of this?
Greg Houle: She, very early on, was afflicted, and I’m using the air quotes, and struggled a lot with various manifestations of that affliction. But one thing about Ann that you can tell from what sparse information is available about her, is that she was pretty well liked. And she seemed to, at [00:28:00] least the way I present her is, she was a good girl, I guess you could say, for lack of a better way of putting it, that she tried to live the way Puritan girls were meant to be living.
Greg Houle: What is very interesting, though, about Ann is in 1706, when she went back to the church in Salem and requested to take communion and become a member of the church. And that was when she essentially apologized, although it was a semi apology.
Sarah Jack: I think readers would love to hear what she was thinking around that. We have the apology, but I wanna know what she was thinking. I’ve seen so many family researchers or descendants of the accused talk about that, and they have different [00:29:00] perspectives, which I always enjoy reading. Some feel that it was very acceptable, especially based on what her beliefs of the devil’s work in her life would’ve been. Others think it was not really good enough. Getting to hear what was going on in her mind around the apology would be really interesting.
Greg Houle: I agree. It’s a very rare example for us to hear from someone who was involved so early on being also involved at the end like this. My view is that Ann was a broken woman at that time, and my thinking, and again I wanna preface this by saying, “of course I could be completely wrong here,” but my thinking is that, by that point, everyone knew, of course, that what happened in 1692 was this horrible thing, and she was this last vestige of that. And so [00:30:00] my read of the situation is that she is this outcast, and at the end of the novel, there’s a sort of epilogue where this comes up, and the pastor, Pastor Green at the time, is hesitating and thinking, “do I really wanna let this person back into the church? I worked so hard to try to bring us back together.” And, ultimately, of course, does, because she really has nothing else.
Greg Houle: Both her parents died the same year, in 1699. She never married. By all accounts, her experience was the kind of thing that basically ruined her life. And by the time 1706 rolls around, she basically just realizes that the only thing she has is the church, and she’ll do anything to be a part of it. So that’s my read. Now, whether or not it is [00:31:00] sincere, I think it’s really hard to speculate about. I think that it’s very plausible that it was not, but it’s also plausible that, there is a way of thinking about it where Ann truly was an innocent victim. Not saying that’s the case, but she may very well have manifested all of these afflictions and challenges and that she was encouraged by her father and others and that by the time they were all gone, she thought it was safe now to beg for mercy and try to live a life where she could be member of the church again.
Sarah Jack: I had mentioned family researchers and descendants. I’m wondering, are you ready for other Putnam descendants and other descendants to reach out to you about the book you’re writing?
Greg Houle: You know, I really would love to hear what they have to say. I’m sure I could learn a lot [00:32:00] from those folks. So I really am interested in that. You know, I’m not someone who wants to defend the Putnams or what occurred here. So I’m happy to have those discussions. I think that’s a very dangerous thing, so I would not wanna do that at all, but I would definitely love to hear what others know, and the Putnam family has a very important long legacy in New England, and there’s a lot to be proud of, but this is not one of those events that anyone should be proud of.
Sarah Jack: One of the things that you can be proud of is that there were seven Putnam that signed Rebecca Nurse’s petition.
Greg Houle: I think, you know, it speaks to another aspect of the Salem witch hysteria that really fascinates me, is how quickly it seemed to go south, right? The whole collection of events took place in a very short period of time, but it was like [00:33:00] all of a sudden the bottom fell out and everyone realized it was as if they woke up and realized what were we doing? And so that’s something that I’m not really that knowledgeable about, would love to know more about, because I think it’s really like a community of people realizing at that moment that they were on the wrong side of history and saying, “what are we doing? What have we done? How can we get out of it?” And I think, that’s why we see some of this stuff happening so quickly after, and even maybe why we saw Ann petition to, to want to join the church again.
Josh Hutchinson: I can totally relate to that. I’m a descendant of, among others, Joseph Hutchinson, who was one, along with Thomas Putnam, who complained against the original three suspects, but then later on he changes sides and defends Rebecca nurse. [00:34:00] So I’ve been exploring that a lot in my own mind, how you start off believing in this witchcraft and then at some point you realize you are on the wrong side of history.
Greg Houle: The one thing I’ll add to that is, when you think of the first three women who were accused, they were clearly outside the norm of late 17th century Puritan society. Tituba is a slave from the West Indies. Sarah Good is essentially homeless, for the most part. Sarah Osborne was always outside of the norms. In the beginning you think, “of course they’re gonna be the ones who were accused.” But it’s interesting as the accusations continue to fly going forward. When you get to someone like Rebecca Nurse, who is not like those folks, and that she was [00:35:00] well respected, it’s almost like the fire burned out of control, and you had a point where maybe people realized, “what are we doing at that point?” I think maybe some of that was what was happening, and that’s where you get people switching sides ,and there are multiple cases of that sort of thing. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that, I don’t know if anyone really expected it to become this kind of inferno that ended up really engulfing the entire community.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think about that too, cuz I think about when I first realized that people were writing testimony and defense of Rebecca and signing some petitions for her, and there were a lot, I remember thinking, “how was this not enough?” And also, [00:36:00] when her verdict was changed on her. I just remember, I’m like, “how could that happen?” And it’s just another tell of how out of control, when a fire takes off, sometimes you just don’t have enough water to put it out right then, and that was definitely happening.
Greg Houle: Yeah I think in many ways this goes back to the kind of perfect storm that existed, where you have, you know, a community appearance that is moving away from their original purpose, or they know that they’re not as pious as they should be at this point, three generations on, you have fear of, ” what’s gonna happen to our charter? Are we going to remain a colony of England?” And then you have this really burgeoning concern over the native population and the conflicts that were existing there. You have just the [00:37:00] inherent concern that exists within the Puritan religion of, ” am I going to heaven?” This idea of predetermination and that you don’t even really know and it’s all determined. “Am I on God’s path? I don’t know.”
Greg Houle: And I think it was almost like this perfect storm, where some things happen. Some people who are outcast get accused as. One would expect in a case like this, and then it just took off from there, and I would contend that people like Thomas Putnam were fanning the flames. There were others, as well. But I think that is part of what speaks to this, is that convergence of all of those different things and the kind of fear and concern about the future and what their world was gonna be like.
Greg Houle: I think, also, this may be a reach, they’re going into a new century soon, and I think there was a [00:38:00] lot of concern about, ” who are we gonna be?” There was, after King Philip’s War, there was a lot of concern that it was so gruesome that, “are we turning into these savages, who we claim they are?” So there’s all kinds of components here, and I think it’s interesting how they all play together.
Josh Hutchinson: It was a grand conflagration. In previous witch trial cases, you’d have one, maybe two people get accused at a time. And I think that’s what they expected in the beginning, when you had those first three outsiders accused. But then you get things like Tituba’s confession, where she says there’s nine witches, and you have people like Samuel Parris fanning the flames every week in church. And, like you said, a perfect storm of ingredients had to come together for it to continue and to expand the way it [00:39:00] did.
Greg Houle: Yeah. And I’m glad you brought up Tituba, because I think that was really the linchpin of a lot of this. And that scene is portrayed in the novel, and the way I portray it is they, it’s almost like boiler plate. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, of course they’re gonna deny it, but we know they’re witches. And then Tituba comes and says, “yeah, the devil came to me. Yeah, he wanted me to kill these girls. Yes, there was a yellow bird,” and saying all this stuff that they are suddenly thinking, “whoa, wait a minute, we weren’t expecting this.”
Greg Houle: So I think in many ways her saying the things that she said to the magistrates really helped get the wheels turning in the heads of a lot of people like Thomas Putnam. Again, it’s conjecture, I know, but I think that it’s an interesting concept to think about that, that really helped turn the tide a little [00:40:00] bit and fan the flames further.
Sarah Jack: And, like you said, there was this uncertainty with the charter. We know there was deceit with the new charter that ended up coming, but the court that was opened that, that was certain, that had procedure. It gave the powerful men power. So you had that piece sliding in when everything else was uncertain.
Greg Houle: Yeah, that’s a really important point. It was a sense of certainty at a time of great uncertainty. And that helps push the process along. And, also, and maybe we’re gonna touch on this, but the other aspect that really fascinates me is how, the new governor’s wife suddenly gets accused and everything falls apart at that point. So it also is a nice button to the story in the sense that you realize these external forces [00:41:00] are really what is driving this, rather than the Satan, the underworld, these dark forces. It’s endlessly fascinating, but there are all kinds of those markers along the way that you see, where you realize, “okay, this is why this happened, or this is why this didn’t happen, and et cetera.”
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I’m thinking, when would’ve the devil have got his foot in the door on some of this? It was already full.
Greg Houle: I don’t know. Yeah. I think again, looking at it from our eyes now with everything we see and just seeing the, maybe some of it, and it’s not, not trying to be political, and the novel is not political in that regard, but I think it’s, we see divisions in our own society and you see how those divisions are further exploited. And so it’s very easy to look back through that lens and [00:42:00] see where that is happening. And I think I was doing a lot of that as I was researching and writing this, this novel.
Josh Hutchinson: So what does it boil down to? What you are trying to say through your writing on the Putnams?
Greg Houle: That’s a really great question. For me, the biggest thing that I want to say, I think about the Putnam’s is that it’s the story of this privileged family who was losing its privilege. And in many ways, as that happened, you see what the family did in order to try to retain that power. For me, that’s what I kept coming back to, is that there is this sort of multi-generational, pretty powerful family that is losing its power in [00:43:00] that moment, and the years leading up to the Salem witch hysteria, it’s a fading family. That’s why I said earlier that a good subtitle for the book would be The Fall of an American Family, because I think it really is that kind of story, and so for me it’s about telling that story through this sort of famous American tragedy. And that’s, I think, probably the biggest thing that I want to try to do.
Sarah Jack: When you talk about their fall, and when one reads about all of their tactics with what was happening with all the families and the boundaries and stuff, they were really put trying to push forward. They were really fighting tooth and nail to not lose footing.
Greg Houle: That’s something that I really try to explore through various flashbacks and so forth. And the novel is just the [00:44:00] idea that Thomas Jr., In particular, has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His father did so much to try to build it up, and now it’s all on him, and you can feel it slipping away. But he’s very arrogant, and he’s got a lot of hubris, and he just is gonna keep saying that he’s great. And what’s interesting about how it appears during the witch hysteria at Salem is that you see there, you witness the fall, you witness the way in which he was trying to take advantage of this opportunity and failing, ultimately.
Greg Houle: And that’s what I really enjoyed exploring, even though it is a tragic story within my own family. And of course, again, a lot of this is fiction. I don’t wanna sound like I know everything that went on inside his [00:45:00] head, but I do think that it’s all plausible, and I think, the way the story sort of progresses before and after Salem, you see it, as we already talked about with Ann, you see what happens to her. She fades from history at that point. And that’s, in many ways, a metaphor for the entire family. Now, I don’t mean to say that my Putnam family no longer exists. They’re fine. They’re all over the country, but it’s not the same. So that is what I was trying to tell that story through this major event.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you hope people take away from your stories and your novel?
Greg Houle: I think the biggest thing I’d like for them to take away is realize that what we’ve been talking about in terms of the multi-dimensional aspect of history is real. When we think of [00:46:00] the Salem witch hysteria, we often think about it as, “well, there was witchcraft and these, this monolithic group of puritans then went crazy and accused witches and then put them to death,” but the reality, of course, is that there were a lot of things that led up to that and a lot of things that happened after it. And I think for me the biggest takeaway’s for people to see this story as a larger story, as the story of various things occurring at the same time, rather than just this one snapshot of an event.
Greg Houle: Because, going back to what I said earlier, my feeling with Salem is that it is often almost like a caricature of what we talk about, this idea that this thing happened [00:47:00] and isn’t that crazy? But the reality is it happened for a variety of reasons. And to me the biggest takeaway that someone reading the novel would get would be, “wow, I understand that there are multidimensions to this. And isn’t that an interesting way of thinking of it?
Sarah Jack: I think right now as a society, there’s a growing number of people who are learning to look at history dimensionally. So many of us were taught it as a snapshot, and I think everyone is ready. Not everyone, I think the amount of people ready to take a deeper look is now, and I think that’s why historical fiction is important, and the history’s important, but I think it’s great timing. I think your book is coming at a great, I know it’s, you still have a little while before it’s released, but that just means more people are gonna be ready to receive it.
Greg Houle: I think the same is true with podcasts. I think that’s why we’re having a [00:48:00] moment with podcasts. I think that’s why, even when you look at like true crime series and things that really take a deep dive into these stories that were often very flat and one dimensional, I think that is, you’re right that we’re at a time where a lot of people are interested in that, and for me that was really what I was trying to do here is create some dimension to this story. Now, I don’t claim to be the first person ever to do that, many others have, but I think that there needs to be as much of that as possible, in order for people to be able to connect to the elements that we hopefully will learn from and avoid, as we go into the future.
Josh Hutchinson: I think your writing is so important to help people understand what really happened. I know it is fiction, but it gets people into the right mindset to [00:49:00] start exploring possibilities of what happened and to reflect on what’s happening now. So I highly recommend that everybody read it. How can people access your writing currently?
Greg Houle: I guess the easiest way is they can visit my website, which is greghoule.info, that’s g r e g h o u l e.info. There are links to some of my writing about the book, and I’ll continue to build that up prior to publication.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. We very much appreciate you and your wisdom, and you’ve gone a long way towards answering the fundamental questions that are behind the podcast. We like to get in every episode part of the how do we hunt witches why do we hunt witches, how can we turn away from hunting witches? And your [00:50:00] answers have been quite elegant, speaking on those questions.
Greg Houle: Obviously, it was much different, but they had the same sensibilities. They wanted to succeed. They wanted to defeat their enemies, and they wanted to make sure that their kids succeeded. And there were a lot of the same fears that they had that are very familiar to us today.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I like to point out that witch hunting in one form or another has been going on as long as humans have been around, because we, though the technology evolves and our beliefs evolve, at the core of us, we still have those same insecurities and fears that you point out.
Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah’s here with another update on real-life witch-hunts happening in the present day.
Sarah Jack: Welcome to this [00:51:00] episodes Witchcraft Fear Victim Advocacy Report, sponsored by End Witch Hunts News. Today’s Thanksgiving 2022 in the United States. I thank you for tuning into our weekly End Witch Hunts News. Thank you to the advocates across the globe standing in the gap. For those who can’t, thank you for being an activist against witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: On its 47th session, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on July 12th, 2021 for the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economics, social, and cultural rights, including the right to development. Here is what they resolved regarding the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. It requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize an expert consultation with states and other relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations [00:52:00] Secretariat and relevant bodies, representatives of subregional and regional organizations, international human rights mechanisms, national human rights institutions, and non-governmental organizations, the result of which will help the office of the High Commissioner to prepare a study on the situation of the violations that abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization and to inform further action by existing mechanisms at the United Nations and to submit a report thereon to the Human Rights Council at its 52nd session.
Sarah Jack: Mr. Volker Turk is the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He took up official functions as high commissioner on October 17th, 2022. His Twitter handle is @ V O L K E R _ T U R K. Let him know you support his taking a suggested action on the [00:53:00] resolution. Let him know people like you stand against these violations and support finding solutions. Thank him for his work and accomplishments.
Sarah Jack: Next, support the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. You can support the project by sharing @_endwitchhunts, CT Witch Hunt, and CT Witch Memorial social media, and especially the news interviews in the first three Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast episodes. You can support the project by signing your name on the change.org petition. All these links are in our show episode notes. Go to the links, learn, support, and share.
Sarah Jack: When the state of Connecticut moves forward with an exoneration for their accused witches, they’re taking state action that stands with the promotion and protection of all human rights. Their exoneration decision is for Connecticut, but it is also for Africa and Asia. Their decision shows where they stand on violations and abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as [00:54:00] well as stigma.
Sarah Jack: While we watch and wait, let’s support the victims 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. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You’re welcome. Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com often.
Josh Hutchinson: And join our Discord for rousing discussions of the show.
Sarah Jack: Follow us on social media, links in description.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, and anybody else you run into about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Catch you next time.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Exodus 22:18
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
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.
Sarah Jack: Because you like the show, please share it with your friends, family, and followers.
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.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: We are, and speaking of getting more, Thanksgiving is next week.
Sarah Jack: I have my turkey. It’s not thawed yet, but I have it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, don’t thaw a week ahead of time. I wouldn’t wanna eat a week old Turkey.
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.
Sarah Jack: Have you seen it?
Josh Hutchinson: I think I’ve seen that. I don’t remember it though.
Sarah Jack: Love that movie. [00:02:00] And it’s all about frustrating family dynamics, and the sister brings a Neutra bird.
Josh Hutchinson: What is a Neutra bird?
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.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, like Joey and the turkey in Friends?
Sarah Jack: Oh yeah. See that’s what we should talk about is Friends.
Josh Hutchinson: I wanna talk about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. That’s my favorite Thanksgiving movie.
Sarah Jack: That is up there. That is up there.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s the classic Thanksgiving movie.
Sarah Jack: Josh, let’s hear some history about Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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 whom [00:04:00] 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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
Josh Hutchinson: And now after 330 years, her name has finally been cleared, the last of the convicted Salem witches to have that done.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome, [00:06:00] 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.
Sarah Jack: That sounds like him.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, he’s a rascal.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, he’s a liar.
Josh Hutchinson: The Prince of Liars.
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.
Sarah Jack: We would like to start out by finding out who was the last witch.
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.
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.
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.”
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Sarah Jack: None of us are gonna allow that. Are [00:09:00] we ?
Annika Hylmo: Let’s hope not.
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?
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: But as far as any other specifics, we know [00:10:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Josh Hutchinson: That reputation sticks with the person through the rest of their life and well beyond.
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.
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, the [00:13:00] pain is still pretty strongly, especially with ones that grew up on the east coast, knew about their heritage their whole life.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Josh Hutchinson: Does the film explain why she was overlooked?
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 working [00:16:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 member [00:17:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
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.
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 and [00:23:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
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?
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 you [00:26:00] go, “okay, this is fun.”
Annika Hylmo: 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.”
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: This was especially in July, when we were doing a ton of social media [00:27:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 those [00:28:00] 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.
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?
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
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.”
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: So we absolutely were honored when people started paying [00:29:00] 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
Sarah Jack: [00:30:00] It’s definitely planting very important seeds.
Annika Hylmo: And that’s how you stop it.
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.
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 stories [00:31:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 explanation. So [00:32:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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?
Annika Hylmo: 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.
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.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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.
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 that [00:39:00] 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?
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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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 side, [00:40:00] 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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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 different [00:41:00] than you. And that’s okay.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
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.
Annika Hylmo: And [00:42:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.”
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?
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.
Annika Hylmo: It’s like it’s stepping outside, being outdoors a little bit and just check in with your senses. Being curious about [00:45:00] 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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?
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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 exact [00:47:00] 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.
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
Annika Hylmo: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: 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?
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.
Cassandra Roberts Hesseltine: 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.
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.
Josh Hutchinson: Great. And we’ll have links in the show notes to your website and to your contact form on there, as well.
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.
Annika Hylmo: 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 having [00:52:00] this conversation. So guys, thank you to North and over Middle School, cuz you guys are amazing.
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.
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?
Sarah Jack: 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 Shalt [00:53:00] Not Suffer’s podcast social media to see all of us.
Sarah Jack: 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.
Sarah Jack: 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 for [00:54:00] 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.
Sarah Jack: 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.
Sarah Jack: 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.”
Sarah Jack: 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.
Sarah Jack: The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website, endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that moving and powerful update.
Sarah Jack: You’re welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week for our guest, Greg Houle, an author writing a book about the Salem Putnams.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com [00:56:00] often.
Josh Hutchinson: And join our Discord for discussion of our episodes. Link in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: Follow us on social media, links in description.
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.
Sarah Jack: So long for now.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] “Thou shall not suffer a which to live.” Exodus 22:18. Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer, the Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today’s guest is Dr. Danny Buck. We’ll be discussing a witch-hunt in Great Yarmouth, England and comparing that to the Salem Witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: I am so excited to look at these comparisons with him.
Sarah Jack: Knowing that some of the ancestors and parents of the accused witches in Salem came from Great Yarmouth really intrigues me, [00:01:00] and I’m looking forward to finding out about its history and who was doing what over there in the mid 17th century.
Josh Hutchinson: We both have familial connections to Great Yarmouth, you through Rebecca Nurse and both of us through Mary Esty. The Towne sisters were born in Great Yarmouth.
Sarah Jack: Their parents were married there and able to start their family. Rebecca and Mary and Sarah’s father was a gardener or a small farmer there.
Sarah Jack: Because of Dr. Danny Buck’s area of expertise, we’re getting a chance to look back at the area that Rebecca Nurse’s parents started their life and their family, and that really is exciting to me.
Sarah Jack: There’s an inscription on a tombstone in the cemetery at St. Nicholas Church in Great Yarmouth, England, and this is the church where Rebecca [00:02:00] Towne would’ve been baptized.
Sarah Jack: This life’s a voyage. The world’s a sea where men are strangely tossed about. Heaven’s our port. Steer thou that way. Thou shall anchor safe, no doubt.
Sarah Jack: Not only is Great Yarmouth interesting because we can understand the background of William and Joanna Towne, but because of what was happening there with the Civil War and the politics and the religious strife, it gives us an insight into the people of the Salem Witch Trial history.
Sarah Jack: Having a chance to talk with Dr. Buck about Yarmouth’s history and what created the environment for the witch trials is a great lens for us as we look again at the Salem Witch Trials. You come to the realization of how important looking at them [00:03:00] together is, once you learn more about both. It’s not something that you have to look for common threads. They are related, and that’s because of the people and the types of circumstances .
Josh Hutchinson: Today’s episode will provide valuable insight into not only the witch-hunt in Great Yarmouth but into the witch-hunt later in Salem. These were the same people we’re talking about, the same families coming from Great Yarmouth to New England had the same mentality, the same background, the same upbringing, and the same beliefs about witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Especially important in our discussion are the Towne family. You all know Rebecca Nurse and probably her sister Mary Esty, and maybe their sister, Sarah Cloyce, were all [00:04:00] arrested during the Salem Witch-hunt. Rebecca and Mary were born in Great Yarmouth before their family migrated to Salem, where Sarah was born.
Josh Hutchinson: Ultimately, sadly, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty were executed, but Sarah Cloyce was fortunate to survive, though she was jailed under harsh conditions for a long period. We’ll discuss them more when we get to our conversation with Danny Buck.
Sarah Jack: Dr. Danny Buck is a research historian who has identified the relationship of the Great Yarmouth Witch Trials with the religious tensions between Presbyterians and Church of England conformists in the 1620s and 30s. Also the challenge of Congregationalism, particularly in the 1640s.
What are the preconditions for the Great Yarmouth Witch Hunts? What was the background of the community?
Danny Buck: That is a very interesting question cause I, the good thing about getting to write a [00:05:00] PhD on topic is you can really go into detail. And I basically went back to 1625 to argue that some of the preconditions go back to just the existence of King Charles I and his reforms to the church and the tensions that caused between Puritans and particularly Presbyterian Puritans who want to create one unified Puritan church and the Anglicans who at this time are being well, not even properly Anglicans at this time, conformists to the church of England who want to see a church of England that’s very pretty, that’s very ceremonial, and these tensions and the desire for purity, unity that come out of that seem to me, the heart of what the witch hunt represents. The things that start in 1625, so that’s 20 years before the witch hunt proper, create the tensions necessary within the community.
Danny Buck: I feel, and I think it’s something we see throughout all the witch [00:06:00] hunts, I think we’ve, you’ve probably looked at and I’ve looked at certainly is the sense of a community divides and fearful of something. And in the first place, I think the idea of Presbyterianism, of a Puritanism that calls for a godly unified society, really struggles with the concept and reality of division. Before the English Civil War, this division can be maintained, because it could be used as a way of rallying against that Church of England as represented by Laudianism, by this beauty and holiness and particular in Great Yarmouth the hate figure of the local minister, Matthew Brooks, is something they could all rally against. They definitely agreed they are against him. I’ve got a fantastic record from Matthew Brooks saying about how much he’s hated, and you’ll see how they all work together.
Danny Buck: They abuse him, they abuse his assistant, they abuse his children. It’s something they can work against. [00:07:00] So that’s our first step. We’ve got this division within the community, but I don’t think at that point, it’s necessarily inevitable. With the outbreak of what we refer to the English Civil War, we start getting a breakdown in society comparable to other breakdowns I think you must see in North America, just before Salem, whereby government from London is getting truncated. There’s a war on. Power is devolved down to the local area in terms of military government called the Eastern Association.
Danny Buck: That means that instead of judges coming up from London, we’re reliant on military figures. So this creates more power to localities, towns like Great Yarmouth. They have to sort things out themselves. Also there’s a disjunction in government about deciding what religion is going to look like. There’s this great calling together of ministers called the Westminister Assembly of Divines. And they spend years debating, arguing, and they agree they ought to have a Presbyterian [00:08:00] settlement, but there’s enough people who think that’s not a great idea for there to be tension. So this national tension over religion is then played out in Great Yarmouth in a very personal way.
Danny Buck: Firstly, one of the members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a man called William Bridge is what the leading proponents of what’s called independency, a belief there’s one big, national Puritan Church, you have a series of separate congregations. He is invited to Great Yarmouth by the MP and later regicide Miles Corbet. He settles there, and from 1643, we see the development of his own separate church. I find this particularly fascinating in how it plays into sort of the tensions that lay behind witch hunting, because it’s both a separation, a division within the community again, one where the Puritans are beginning to fall out amongst themselves. But in particular it’s growth as a separate church peaks in 1645, the same time as the witch-hunt. Is also quite [00:09:00] remarkable in this involves a large number of women joining that community. So we see on an average two to one of the local converts are women, often without their husbands.
Danny Buck: And it’s followed up by the returning Puritan Presbyterian minister, a man by the name John Brinsley, providing a fantastic sermon called A Looking Glass for Good Women. The expectations of how these women should be behaving, which is basically continue to be Puritan. Again, it does include an exclusion saying this doesn’t include our congregationalists, our independent friends, but I can’t help but feel there’s gotta be some tension there, but he’s losing members of his the unification of the Puritan community.
Danny Buck: So this tension, the desire to return to a unified puritan community certainly feeds into a precondition for the members of the elite, the people in the town to support witch hunting. But a more vivid religious threat comes from a group of anabaptists, so these are people [00:10:00] who really are radical for the 17th century.
Danny Buck: I think that we’ve got a wonderful record of this, where John Brinsley, the puritan minister, writes this long letter to Thomas Edwards, the heresiographer, the man who just collects every awful religious view out there. And at one point, he describes it as the worst heresy since time began or since Christian history, when a John Boggis this former member of the army who’s come into the towns, part of garrison, he rolls up and he, first of all, he over grace, he says, “who are we offering thanks to? Not to God.” Another time he describes the Bible as but paper, and probably the most awful thing is he bursts into the puritan minister’s dinner and decides he’s gonna declare they’re gonna debate. So this real separate, private churches, separate communities, creating a real sense of fear and tension that makes this fear of people within your community.[00:11:00]
Danny Buck: Again, attempts to remove John Boggis come as 1645, just after the witch-hunt. It feels like a wider process of religious regeneration and attempt to make the community feel more cohesive. But again, this is still feeding off real fears and tensions. We’ve got people whose children have been languishing for the last year and a half being unwell.
Danny Buck: We have a problem of real economic turmoil caused by the civil wars that feed into this, but I can’t help but feel the religious element is striking in how it defines what’s possible and how people understand their conflict within their community.
Josh Hutchinson: And what were the key differences between the different religious groups?
Danny Buck: The conformist members of the Church of England, they believe in the book of common prayer. They see themselves as Protestant, but their neighbors believe they’re becoming more Catholic. They’ve [00:12:00] brought back in a lot of Catholic traditions.
Danny Buck: So we’ve got things like the rood screen that separates the priest doing the actual communion, looking more like the mass is in secret. The minister who comes in, Matthew Brooks, he puts back in stained glass windows. He removes this special seating for the local Puritans, so they could watch over him. The sense of bringing back power and authority to the minister, as opposed to the role of these local Puritans.
Danny Buck: Now for the Presbyterians, the people like John Brinsley, they want a much more reformed church. They want it to be plain. They have much more focus on giving sermons. There’s again the idea of sermon gadding. When John Brinsley is removed as minister, during the 1620s and the 1630s, his Puritan supporters in the town, they like his preaching so much they’re willing to travel five miles down the road, where he’s preaching in Lound, to go and hear him, so very much focused on the word. But again, that’s [00:13:00] still that sense of community. They seek a moral regeneration of the town. So we see them putting in reforms into local government, and it’s the ministers, their political supporters. They build new hospitals and workhouses, they build spaces to help people. They see that as part of their mission, but they also require people to follow the rules. They need to be married. They try and cut down on unlicensed ale houses. They have soldiers. So very much that focus on social regulation.
Danny Buck: The independents are the people around William Bridge. In some ways they’re quite similar that they believe in lots of these ideas of social regulation, but they don’t want to force people to be part of the Presbyterian church. Instead, they’re defined by the willingness to break.
Danny Buck: During the 1630s, when John Brinsley, he just goes down the road. These people feel that they’re not safe in England. England has become so corrupt, they want to go. So these are some of the people who are the basis of the Mayflower communities and the people who [00:14:00] go. So first of all, they go to the Netherlands, which obviously just across the road, a lot more religious toleration, but obviously some of them feel their parents are becoming a bit too Dutch, obviously want to then move on to the new world. But then some of them do stay in the Netherlands, they stay in touch, and they’re willing to do quite brave things to spread the word of God.
Danny Buck: There’s a couple of them. A man called William Burroughs, who was based in the Netherlands, who comes back to Great Yarmouth in 1635 to smuggle books while disguised as a veteran of the Dutch wars. And then the local MP hides him in his house. So still, there’s a belief. There’s still a connection, but what they want is to form separate covenant with God, form an elect group of people who are willing to worship in their own way, a much flatter structure, no bishops, no great meetings instead a lot more on their own conscience.
Danny Buck: Finally, we have religious radicals, people who want to meet God in their own way and often form private communities, so far beyond the [00:15:00] control of the government. In the 1630s, there’s a talk, what’s called a barn conventicle, where people are sneaking out to this hidden barn in the middle of the countryside. And they’ve got a glassmaker from London and a local alderman come up, and they just talk about things, discuss religion.
Danny Buck: We’ve got the anabaptists we’ve mentioned who seem to have no respect for the structures of the church or the expectations of Bible. Again, some of them obviously still exist in the 1630s, but in the 1640s with the collapse of the Church of England, with the hope for religious reformation, and with the army of the Eastern Association becoming a home for people whose views are unexpected, definitely not acceptable normally, we see a lot of these emerging and using the army as a means to maintain themselves in safety.
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts, as we go because religious radicalism, I think it’s a really interesting part of the story of New England [00:16:00] and the colonies there. So again, I believe there’s a famous Hutchinson involved in that story. How does this begin to tie into the fears and tension over the demonic presence in New England?
Josh Hutchinson: In New England, most of them were these independents that wanted particular churches, congregations, independent of each other. They did have ministerial councils that would meet, but otherwise they had no structure with bishops or archbishops. So initially the first generation, they’re all very much committed to this idea.
Josh Hutchinson: As you get into the second and third generation, a lot of the ministers are fearing that the people are backsliding and they’re becoming less Puritan, that they’re less committed to the vision of the new world as the new Jerusalem, which Salem got its name from.
Josh Hutchinson: They’re supposed to be this very pure, covenant community, everyone in [00:17:00] covenant with some congregation, some church somewhere, but the churches largely operating independently of one another. As you get down the line, the requirements for membership start to change in some of the churches. You have what’s called the halfway covenant, where children of members are allowed to become members without going through a conversion narrative, which was the requirement for their parents to get in, and they’re allowed to baptize their children. And then for those baptized children to become members without making this public, very public declaration of their faith and how they were converted. So there’s division, maybe half the churches adopt this rule and half of them say, “no, we’re going to stay pure.”
Josh Hutchinson: So you have in Salem Town, they’re on board with this halfway covenant. Where in the village, the [00:18:00] dominant faction, at least, the minister in 1692 is very opposed to the notion. He wants very strict requirements for membership, a very strict puritanical faith to be followed.
Josh Hutchinson: And when you get that division within Salem Village, between the supporters of the ministers, Samuel Parris, and his opponents, and that village had a 20 year history at that point of arguing over ministers. So it was a tradition in the community at that point to have this very heated conflict, one minister versus another or one minister versus we want to see who else is out there situation. So I think that is quite similar to what you described in Great Yarmouth, and I wonder was that kind of dynamic occurring in the rest of England as well?
There’s definitely a tension in, particularly, the [00:19:00] east coast towns that are particularly godly. And also some extent in London. Historically, they’ve had a process. A lot of these have been purchased by godly merchants, who’ve been able to therefore establish the ministers they wanted and the new reforms under Charles I, but trying to sweep those away, which creates that tension where you still have some places that are able to keep hold of their puritan ministers, other places remove them. You bring them in, and that creates a real source of this conflict we’re seeing religiously. Definitely places like Colchester down the way, Ipswich, all these connected. Again, it’s no coincidence these are often the places where you see their names being repeated New England. People are leaving there, following ministers to set up these new communities.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. You had mentioned a Burroughs and one of the famous characters in the Salem Witch Trials was a Burroughs, minister who was accused of having [00:20:00] Baptist tendencies. He hadn’t baptized most of his children, and that was part of the reason why he got caught up in the conflict.
Danny Buck: By 1690s, how settled is the Salem community? You’ve had you say two or three generations there, are they feeling something unique and new? Obviously we have the idea of the American identity is something that comes more the revolution, but is there a distinct sense that this colonial community having its own sense of itself, by this point?
Sarah Jack: I feel like they were still tug having tug of war over what that identity was gonna be.
Josh Hutchinson: Well, there was a sense in Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially involving the style of government, they very much wanted to be self govern. They really valued the original charter they had from the king. In 1684, King Charles II revoked their charter, and they didn’t have one again until [00:21:00] 1692. After the witch trials had begun, the new governor showed up with the new charter, and they were rather upset in the colony about that charter. They felt that they had lost some of their liberties as a unique government. They were forced to tolerate other religions. That was one of their big things. They didn’t want to tolerate the Quakers and the Anglicans and the Baptist.s Now, they had to accommodate Anglican services in their meeting houses in some places until Anglican meeting houses were built, which I believe you said in your thesis that in great Yarmouth, at the end, they split up the church into three parts. So that’s something of a situation like that by 1692.
Yes. I think that is itself really interesting. So ultimately I see a lot [00:22:00] of the tension of the moment of the witch hunt is about the struggle for unity versus toleration.
Danny Buck: It’s the point where it seems like unity is breaking down. And again, politics at this point is all focused on unity. So your charters, your corporations, again, these separate townships, politics is the idea that you work, you should work as one corporate body, like the frontest piece of Hobbs’ Leviathon. The corporation is one legal man who is made up of many men. So the reality has always been that people always fall out and have factions, but the ideal should be, they all work as one body. The right hand, shouldn’t be fighting the left hand. And the civil wars is a period when that fails because people are in conflict with each other, attempts to purge and remove people who disagree.
Danny Buck: I don’t think Great Yarmouth ever gets quite the job of purging during the point just before the [00:23:00] witch-hunt. It happens, certainly happens afterwards. And that in itself is quite interesting, but the attempt to push unity to again, when I go back to talk about these religious communities, there’s a letter from the Great Yarmouth corporation to members of the independent congregation to tell them to stop.
Danny Buck: We’ve had enough, we should only have one church, everyone together. So in this case, there’s that push for unity over toleration. And then it’s when it collapses, afterwards is when people then push for the opposite. So instead of having, we’re forcing everyone to be together, we find ways to work together. In Great Yarmouth, that takes another four years and a failed coup before they get round to that point where they can accept that and then accept division of their church.
Danny Buck: What a symbol of that, isn’t it? The one Great Yarmouth only has one church, one minister. They all come together still, Anglicans in the north aisle, Presbyterians in the south aisle, and the chancel, [00:24:00] you got the Independents. It’s quite surreal for a community where, you know, up until eight years before, no, even maybe four years before people had by law to attend the one church, listen to the one choice of ministers.
Danny Buck: But again, why this period is so earth shaking in terms of English history and probably, comparable to the shock of the reformation of your church broken up, to see it collapse and having to fend for yourself to some extent. So I can imagine a period where the godly have worked so long to build their communities in New England.
Danny Buck: You see that again, people working so long to build something. What happens when you can’t sustain it? When that dream has turned to ashes in your mouth? Something about the failure of the witch hunt is that it, it comes as a way to protect that, preserve that, but it never works. It’s not, it’s desperate.
Danny Buck: It’s a sense of the devil working amongst you attempt to pull, to purge the body politic of some, [00:25:00] a poison that’s has created a toxic heresy, symbolic of the very worst heresy going on amongst your community, but it can’t do that. It can’t bring back together what’s broken, what’s come untied in society.
Danny Buck: You have to find ways to retie yourselves back together. And the next little decade of history in Great Yarmouth remains so unsettled.
And you have that sense of a diabolical conspiracy in New England. Very much. They basically thought that everybody was out to get them. Even to some extent, the English government being out to ruin their plans for covenant community Puritan church. And they’re surrounded. They’re in a wilderness basically, as they see it. They believe that the original inhabitants of that wilderness worship the devil They have warfare with the French constantly.
Josh Hutchinson: They’re afraid of a papist conspiracy [00:26:00] of the Catholics coming against them, working in league with Satan and with his other worshipers already there. So they’re very much besieged in their eyes at that time of the witch trials.
Danny Buck: I think that’s a really nice comparison, the sense of the siege mentality. So obviously in England at this time, there’s the greater siege mentality of being at war with the king and that war taking on very much that cataclysmic, end of days feel. I imagine it must be similar during King Philip’s War, the sense that all these townships that were thriving are now forced on their uppers.
Danny Buck: In Great Yarmouth, there’s part of a wider trade collapse, as it’s reliant on merchants, is of starving strangling. This is the evidence of an increased population of people fleeing the countryside. On top of that, they are bouts of pestilence mentioned and in particular for Great Yarmouth, the great stranglehold, the besieging [00:27:00] comes from without, from the sea, where as you may have read there’s highly reliant on the herring fleet. Herring, delicious fish, part of the North Sea, but to catch it, you often have to go all the way up to Iceland, right up the North Sea, which is fine in peacetime, but in wartime, Great Yarmouth managed to make an enemy of its nearby neighbor the town of Lowestoft, and there’s one man called Thomas Allen, whose ship was in Great Yarmouth.
Danny Buck: They took it because he was involved in a royalist plot. He flees and he raises that piratical group of privateers in the king’s service and almost wipes out the herring fleet. So this is what’s reliant on the day-to-day living of most ordinary people in the town. That’s the kind of thing where if you think of the model witch carter’s charity refused as Keith Thomas argues, you can see why people Great Yarmouth would be starving.
Danny Buck: The herring, in some ways it’s the living because people go and fish it, sell it. There’s supplies from that. You have the industries linked to [00:28:00] that, so barrelmaking, ropemaking, protecting the keys. But on top of that, a certain amount of the catch was used as the funding for charitable exercises, so it’s like a special tax on it levied by the corporation.
Danny Buck: So you imagine that also collapses at the same time when everything else is going so economically wrong. On top of that, you have some really harsh winters, 1644, 1645, 1646. There isn’t enough money for coal. There’s no coal to be found at times. So people are starving, hungry, and then we have people coming, asking for charity, for support. As part of this, people get rejected for that. Things start going wrong.
Danny Buck: We see why some witchcraft accusations emerge, but they are seen as part of this great war against the great enemy. Certainly it’s something very catastrophic about being civil war on top of that, you’ve had soldiers garrisoned in Great Yarmouth, because it’s seen as a possible invasion [00:29:00] coast. The very top of Norfolk, called King’s Lynn, is seen as a possible entry point for the armies of the king. That is briefly held by a group of rebels, royalists supporting backed rebels for a couple of months, the summer of 1643. We know the supporters of the king on the continent. The queen Henrietta Maria is trying to raise money and mercenaries. And one of those ships is blown into Great Yarmouth, becomes part of their little own protection fleet, but also there’s the, this Great Yarmouth that’s just the south.
Danny Buck: Is this very flat area called Lovingland or Lovingland. I think today it’s Lovingland then it was Lovingland. Contrast, but it’s seems this perfect area to landing is where Lowestoft is, where they have this royalist uprising. So despite seeming in the middle, what’s the most secure part of parliamentary territory in the East Association, good Puritan towns, raising large bits of armies, the Homeland of Oliver Cromwell and his Ironside.
Danny Buck: It still seems fundamentally vulnerable. [00:30:00] I imagine, how far is Salem from the fighting in the 1680s?
Josh Hutchinson: It’s not terribly far. There’s a town called Andover. That’s just miles away. There’s one town in between Salem and Andover, and then beyond Andover there’s another town called Haverhill. Haverhill and Andover ultimately get attacked during King William’s War in the 1690s.
Josh Hutchinson: So they’re very much out near the frontier, exposed. The enemy comes through there, they’re in Salem essentially. So their outpost on the frontier, and you see a lot of accusations, especially in Andover actually has more witchcraft accusations than Salem.
Danny Buck: I think there has to be something to that. The way people rationalize this war against a papist enemy, against an enemy who’s not just, the enemy of [00:31:00] Parliament’s the enemy of God. The fact that Henrietta a cat Catholic is sending over mercenaries. The fact that there allegations that some of the witches in Norfolk are sending their familiars off to help prince Rupert.
Danny Buck: That is part of this papist, demonic conspiracy. Despite being, the second line of this conflict, and being uncomfortably close to billeted soldiers who are being radicalized with this conflict, sense of real tension there.
Josh Hutchinson: There was definitely tension. There was another coastal town called Gloucester just up the coast from Salem.
Josh Hutchinson: And they had sightings, allegedly, were probably not real, but they spotted allegedly French and native American soldiers in Gloucester in 1692 while the witch hunt is happening. So there’s a sense of panic there. One of the accused of witchcraft was [00:32:00] from wanna say Billerica, which is near Andover, and she stated specifically that, when she ultimately confesses to witchcraft, one of her reasons is that she was afraid of the Native Americans and the Devil promised that he would protect her.
Danny Buck: That’s fascinating.
Danny Buck: I also find this devil’s promise is fascinating as a whole. First of all, the Devil is the tempter, but also somehow often a failed figure. So the sense of the one case I’ve got a really good record of, the confession. There’s a woman called Elizabeth Bradwell. She’s old. She hasn’t got any family. I think the records aren’t sure if she’s a spinster or widow. She’s someone who seems to be very lonely. She’s reliant on charity from the local ministers. She’s asking for work or for charity, but she’s refused. So she goes home. She goes, first of all, to the man of business, he says, no, the master’s not here. I can’t give you [00:33:00] anything. She goes to the maid. The maid says the same thing. She goes home, she’s angry, she’s discontented. And this tall, black man appears in front of her and promises her revenge and no more need of money. It doesn’t say how much money he gets her, but it’s enough. And she must sign his book in her own blood. That it’s revenge and a little money. There’s not very much in some ways to damn yourself with.
Josh Hutchinson: There were some cases in Salem where it was a pair of shoes or a fashion book was all they were gonna get. Versus other cases where. One girl claimed that he offered her all the kingdoms that she saw from atop a great mountain that he took her to.
Josh Hutchinson: So you have this whole range from basically a pitance to everything.
Danny Buck: He’s also interesting figure, particularly in that confession I talked of. He does seem almost like a minister himself. He’s got his [00:34:00] little book, he requires her to sign in, he’s got his fancy pen dressed in black, quite an imposing figure. And again, we certainly, by the 1650s, their description of the Devil was the Great Quaker in England.
Danny Buck: What kind of shape does he take in Salem?
Josh Hutchinson: He’s described often as the black man. Sometimes he’s described as being tawny like a Native American. Other times he gets those ministerial features. He’s dressed in black. Sometimes he’s tall, sometimes he’s short, changes a lot. But sometimes he very much resembles that minister George Burroughs that we spoke of. He’s a little, dark-haired man dressed in black, carrying a book, getting people to sign a covenant with him like they would entering the church, but doing it in blood or red ink, or they had different ways of signing it. But generally it was red.
Danny Buck: [00:35:00] And does the tradition of the familiar cross over?
Josh Hutchinson: Very much. They have imps. They have a creature that was hairy all over, but like a man. They have a monkey with a rooster’s head as one of them, lots of cats and dogs. Sometimes pigs, people would shift into. They had a lot of birds, and one girl, they arrest this four year old girl, and she describes having a snake that would suck between her fingers and says that her mother, who was accused before her, gave her this snake as a familiar.
Danny Buck: It makes my reference to a Blackbird seem rather tame by comparison.
Josh Hutchinson: They had quite an imagination in some of these confessions. They get really elaborate.
Danny Buck: So obviously the process of examination is quite interesting. So in Great Yarmouth, we have just a [00:36:00] reference to midwives who are too expensive. So need to be they need to be limited to, I think, just four of them. So we’ve got Elizabeth Howard who’s one of the midwives. The corporation ordered 12 pence a day for their service and in the future, they will only to be hiring four women, cause they were just ruinously expensive to get the evidence there.
Danny Buck: Again, we have dark allegations about what Hopkins is doing. We know that some of the accused witches were being examined by the local ministers. So no, their bodies are being searched by the midwives. There’s no evidence for some of the harsh methods. Matthew Hopkins, who was invited in by the corporation to investigate the cases was famous for.
Danny Buck: So no swimming, no pricking. Again, suspect they’d been kept awake a while in the jail, but we’ve got no evidence of that. What kind of methods are being employed by those searching the witches in Salem?
Josh Hutchinson: You have the same with the midwives [00:37:00] searching for the witches marks, or in the case of the male suspects, they have a group of men search them, which sometimes is the jailer and whoever else they can enlist, the marshal, maybe the sheriff. And in some cases, they find these marks, they test them out, put a pin through the mark to see if anything comes out. If it’s insensitive, the person doesn’t feel it, then that’s a witch’s mark for sure. They have that going on. They have the magistrates doing the other examinations, basically grilling the suspect with a lot of leading questions starting out with, why are you a witch? When did you become a witch?
Josh Hutchinson: How long did you volunteer to serve for? How did Satan appear to you? They’re never asking them their side of the story. They’re telling them their side of the story. There was no swimming. There was a [00:38:00] case in Andover where they did a mass touch test, where they believed that the person that the witch had afflicted, by making contact with the witch, transferred the magic back to the witch and would be healed.
Josh Hutchinson: So they would take these afflicted girls who were having fits. They blindfold them, have them going around, randomly touching people. And if they stop having a fit, that’s a witch. So this actually happens in Andover where they were quite intense and belligerent in trying to get people to confess there.
Sarah Jack: The accused, they were blindfolded for that, were they not?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Everybody’s blindfolded and they’re just going around touching people and trying to decide who’s a witch. Basically they round up dozens of people in Andover. I don’t know how many came out [00:39:00] of that event specifically.
Josh Hutchinson: But they’re doing that kind of testing. No pricking. There are couple cases, though, where they tie them neck and heels until the blood comes out of their nose, and then they get a confession.
Danny Buck: Yeah. I think I’ll probably confess at that point.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And they leave them like that for hours and hours until that happens.
Josh Hutchinson: There’s some other cases where they might have done the thing of keeping them awake. There’s some petitions that referenced that idea, that they were basically out of their minds at the point that they confessed.
Danny Buck: Yeah, it is shocking, quite how close people were able to skirt the lines of what’s expected of legality. Again, partly, the argument of the witch hunt is that it is cruel necessity? That this is part of the war on demonic forces. Do you think that’s why these things burn out so quickly? The [00:40:00] very fact you’re having to create these emergency measures. The fact you’re having to carry something out, and it’s supposed to be this radical solution and it doesn’t work. And also it’s is just so traumatic for everyone involved. Even those making accusations.
Danny Buck: Like in Great Yarmouth we have 15 people accused by the end of the September. So we start off with the first accusations, April 1645, last ones in September of that year, we have half of them are convicted lead to hanging in that year. And then a further five the next year come to trial. None of ’em are found guilty, already the desire to carry this out all burnt out. The midwives are too expensive. Hopkins isn’t invited back. It seems like it’s this very sharp flame, but it can’t be sustained very long.
Sarah Jack: Josh and I were talking about how quickly that turned, that he had been invited on the first incident and [00:41:00] then was not called for the second.
Danny Buck: Again, partly it’s Hopkins’s own myth. He’s someone who’s very effective.. But for me, he is fantastic as this sort of shamanistic figure comes in. He resolves your problem. He’s invited in, but that only works as long as he’s effective.
Danny Buck: Certainly with Great Yarmouth, I feel like Hopkins has already had a bit of a dry run, because he has been invited to previous other towns connected to the MP in Great Yarmouth, Miles Corbet, where he also acts as the judge. The title at the time is recorder. So we’ve already, got Aldeburgh further down the coast in Suffolk, where he is recorder, where he’s obviously been involved in trials where Hopkins has arrived, and obviously Hopkins built his reputation first of all, in Essex, where he’s obviously been very successful about getting conviction after conviction. But already by the middle of 1645, I think his legend is beginning to weigh. People are criticizing his methodology. So got Thomas Scott at the same time. People are feeling [00:42:00] he’s not as effective, and they’re paying him quite a lot for this.
Danny Buck: He obviously he’s a gentleman. I think it’s too cynical to see him as fleecing people to do this. I think he believes he’s got the methodology. I think he believes he owes certain level of respect for his status. Now his self-declared Witchfinder General status, which requires people to pay for his lodging as a gentleman should be kept.
Danny Buck: But that’s still gonna put you off as a time when I’ve mentioned tax income is gonna be down cause of the problems of the trade collapse. The North Sea is lousy with pirates. When they all know people are suffering because their herring has been collapsed, there’s plague going on. Providing the support for ordinary people is now it’s much bigger burden.
Danny Buck: So you can justify bringing Hopkins as a short term response, but you can’t because the English system, he doesn’t get rewarded for this, the money doesn’t come in from witchcraft trials, you might get somewhere like Germany where they can self sustain, but maybe a couple of [00:43:00] years. Instead, yeah, he burns himself out.
Danny Buck: Which doesn’t help that. And on top of that, therefore that the crisis continues in these towns unabated, and it’s from 1646, we see that for religious toleration, as opposed to exclusion, reduces other pressure, I think of the witch hunt, but what brings the dying down in New England?
Josh Hutchinson: In New England, I think they just reach critical mass with the number of accusations. And they’re starting to target the wealthier, more influential people. There’s a rumor that they accuse the wife of the governor himself. But they’re going through these kind of brutal methods, especially in Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: So you’re accumulating resistance that way. There’s a lot of petitions starting to come in saying these people confessed, but they didn’t mean it, because they were forced into it, driven to [00:44:00] it. You have those things. You have just the quality of the people that they’re accusing very much religious people.
Josh Hutchinson: You have Sarah’s ancestor, Rebecca Nurse. She’s seen as a pillar of the religious community in Salem Village, and yet she’s accused. So you get that village divided fairly early on, and other towns that it spreads to, you have similar incidents there. In Salem town. They accuse the minister’s daughter. In Andover, they’re accusing dozens of people related to the minister. And you just get this cumulative effect from those types of things.
Sarah Jack: One of the comparisons between Great Yarmouth and the Salem accusations that I noticed was I believe it was in 1646, when it really mattered if they [00:45:00] had somebody that was standing up for them, if they were attached to a male or a powerful person, but in Salem, they were gathering lots of support and signatures.
Sarah Jack: And that still was not like that. It looked like it was gonna help Rebecca, but then it wasn’t enough. The governor didn’t do anything with all of those signatures.
Josh Hutchinson: Right? At one point, the governor does issue a reprieve of Rebecca Nurse, but then some people who aren’t named, Salem gentlemen, show up and pressure him, and he reverses that. And her sister Mary Towne Esty is actually released from jail. The afflicted people have basically double the fits that they were having before, and the court reverses on that. But you have these petitions starting to gather steam, dozens of people signing [00:46:00] them. There’s one for a woman named Mary Bradbury, which has 200 signatures on it.
Josh Hutchinson: So you have a lot of support for the accused that builds as these popular people are getting accused.
Danny Buck: Yeah, I think the closest we get to that in Great Yarmouth big case is that of the local astrologer Mark Prynn, it was a faceting character. He’s someone who the local MP has a grudge against for quite some time. Cuz there’s a first accusation, 1637. Then comes back again, 1645. It’s the case I’ve really enjoyed, cause I’ve got to talk about it in length in a second article, because this blows up in 1645 in a really interesting way. Because obviously astrology is this fine line. The astrologers themselves claim it’s Christian, it’s science, it’s very ordered and disciplined, it’s about just understanding the stars. This chap, he’s doing a good enough job that people are asking him for lost hats, lost [00:47:00] cushions, lost metal items. So he’s making it as a side hustle, as I think they’d say today between his job as an actual farmer, a tenant farmer. He’s interesting cause he’s got links to the local conformist Church of England minister. He’s one of his tenants, and later the assistant to the minister, Thomas Cheshire, comes back to defend the farmer Mr. Prynn later. But it, but what’s really interesting for the case is the MP involved, the recorder Miles Corbet, he’s made a few enemies, and I’ve got this fantastic 12 stanza poem by the water poet, John Taylor, who just hates Corbet so much. So he uses this case as a way to discredit him. And I think this is part of the reason why I think it’s hard to sustain that campaign when you’re being mocked for it.
Danny Buck: I think this in so much prefigures what goes on in England after the Restoration, where belief in witchcraft is used as a way to label Puritans as superstitious, as foolish in a way that [00:48:00] I don’t think quite manages to get across the colonies in quite the same way. But in short, what happens is that according to the satirical poem, Corbet looks at the collection of astrological books and believes they’ve referenced demons and devils, whether they’re in fact star constellations, or just names of Arabic philosophers.
Danny Buck: So again, it’s trying to make Corbet look credulous and foolish in a way that puritan fears of witches are being increasingly seen as something ridiculous. You see it, the civil war, as well, and Mark Stoyle’s written really convincingly on the poem about Prince Rupert’s dog, Boy, being a familiar, being a royalist satire that already it’s mocked the Puritan sphere of the demonic.
Danny Buck: But in this case, according to the poet, John Taylor, Prynn is just a conman. His friend, Thomas Cheshire comes up speak for him and says, no, he can’t be a demonic. He’s not raising spirits. He’s just conning old ladies out of money. And so making the [00:49:00] whole thing look ridiculous. And in particular making Corbet’s fear of the demonic, witches, and of this suppose seemingly harmless, man, as some kind of sorceror, as something that makes them just look silly.
Danny Buck: And I think that is also something that, that brings an end to general fears is seeing the people making these accusations, not as concerned citizens, as people desperately fearful of an enemy within, but citizens somehow laughably frightened of their aging neighbors or a strange man up the road who just reads almanacs for a living.
Danny Buck: Yeah. I dunno. Is that something you ever see New England, some kind of mockery of how ridiculous the whole thing has become?
Josh Hutchinson: You get some mockery at the very end of it. There’s a man named Thomas Brattle, who’s a scientist, among other things. And he writes a famous letter in October 1692, where he [00:50:00] criticizes the whole philosophy of how witchcraft is supposed to work, how they employ the touch test, why they employ it.
Josh Hutchinson: He criticizes those things. He criticizes the spectral evidence that they’re using. Did they have spectral evidence in Great Yarmouth?
Danny Buck: The only thing I’ve seen mentioned is people mention raising spirits as were the crimes. But no, allegedly Elizabeth Bradwell uses a wax poppet to it buried, which is supposed to create illness, but they never find it. By the time they go and dig it up, it has either rotted away or was never there.
Danny Buck: But spectral evidence as a whole, it’s just reliant on confessions.
Josh Hutchinson: In Salem, they very much rely on spectral evidence. They believe and accuse the suspects of physically being in one place while their spirit goes out to other places to afflict, and their spirit can travel any distance they want [00:51:00] to, 20 miles or more in an instant and afflict somebody, while you have witnesses saying, “I saw them at home. They were at home with me. They couldn’t have done that.” But yet these afflicted, mostly young girls, are coming together and saying, we all saw this happen and they use that evidence, even though we’ve spoken before on the show about the Connecticut witch trials. In Connecticut, you have John Winthrop, Jr. serving as governor for a long time. He’s actually an alchemist, a scientist, and he disputes the spectral evidence, says you need to have at least two witnesses seeing these things happen at the same time, you can’t have one witness come in and say, “I saw it this time,” another witness [00:52:00] saying, “I saw this other incident.” You need to corroborate. So he gets rid of spectral evidence before Salem happens. This is in the 1650s, 60s, 70s. But then interestingly enough, his son Waitstill Winthrop is one of the judges at Salem who accepts the spectral evidence.
Danny Buck: Interesting how this all believes have such a hold over such a time.
Josh Hutchinson: Early on, the judges asked a group of Boston area ministers for advice. They wrote what’s called the return of several ministers. In it, they’re cautioning against the use of spectral evidence and against some of the other aspects, but then at the very end Cotton Mather, one of the most famous of the divines in New England, writes on there, but proceed vigorously against all those who have rendered [00:53:00] themselves obnoxious. So he’s advocating for speedy trials, a quick resolution to this, because he very much believes in the diabolical conspiracy and sort of contradicts what the rest of the letter said.
Josh Hutchinson: So the judges choose to basically ignore all of the letter, except for that last bit.
Sarah Jack: When Dr. Buck asked about mockery, I was thinking Ben Franklin came to mind because there’s that essay that possibly he wrote in 1730, “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly.” That just popped into my mind. So I was thinking about that’s that was like, 40 years after witch trials.
Danny Buck: Again, just the sort of scale of history that again, we’ve got Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, both of these, and Mary Towne, they leave Yarmouth 10, 15 years before the trial in the big witch-hunt in Great Yarmouth. We’ve got trial happening. Then the people of that are people who know Ben Franklin and then lead [00:54:00] onto the revolution, only a couple of generations of that span. That’s fascinating. Also, I think it’s very interesting when you talk about Franklin’s mockery, comparing that to the famous poem, which mocks a lot of the civil wars by Samuel Butler, “Hudibras.” He brings in the figure of Hopkins as someone who’s got the devil’s book, he’s secretly a witch himself, and then is hanged for it.
Danny Buck: When in fact he died of tuberculosis a couple of years afterwards. That again, that mock of making it the past, finding a way to get past it and reject that era. I think that’s quite interesting as how you get perspective past it and try and reduce the horror of it all, perhaps.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. It’s an interesting point. How this spread of time works there, because in Salem, the oldest victim is 81 years old at the time that he’s pressed to death with stones, [00:55:00] because he refused to stand trial. So they buried him in stones essentially until he refuses to confess, he refuses to stand trial, but he’s 81 years old. So he’s born in around 1611. And you have him on the one end where you have these young afflicted girls. And you have a man named Joseph Putnam is one of the early critics of the trials. He’s related to the chief accusers, the Putman family, but his son, Israel, is a major general in Washington’s army. So just one generation apart, Salem Witch Trials, Revolution.
Danny Buck: Cause again, the whole era is this such a transformation point in global history, but particularly in the Atlantic world, I’ve found it very interesting to read book recently on the regicides who escaped to [00:56:00] America. And the fact that they were able to hide out there for so long and became part of this founding myth of Republican America, which, you know, how this, the two nations interlinked, but also separating at this point, in some cases for some people, the sort of Puritan communities of New England represent what England could have been become, if it didn’t decide to go crawling back to the king. And that sense of those sort destinies and both the positives and negatives of that we can see of the communities riven by a godly dream of regeneration and living a better life. But also with that diabolical fear, seems such an interesting contrast.
Danny Buck: Go back to the Puritans, the same people who are pushing for the witch hunt are the people pushing for new workhouses. It’s such a contradiction at times, people who want to make the world so much better, kinder a lot of ways where people are struggling, but the same people who are [00:57:00] willing to bully a Church of England minister, threaten to throw sand and lime in his eyes to protect their community.
Danny Buck: It’s so wonderfully vivid.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s a fascinating period of history, as you mentioned, there’s such profound change going on. And in a lot of ways that change itself is what’s driving these witch hunts. It’s maybe growing pains. You could describe it as, or all that conflict. They’re trying to pin that conflict on Satan and his agents.
Danny Buck: Yeah. It’s a real sense of a lost identity, I think, or losing identity. I think you could probably put the sort of a hundred years after reformation in England are times when people are really struggling to define themselves and their community, because it is something that’s become very changeable and flexible.
Danny Buck: The classic cases, if you go back to things like the Pendle Witch Trials, where [00:58:00] people, the magic there is allegedly a form of the sympathetic magic that comes from the Catholic medieval traditions that survived, that is a need for folk magic. And to take that away to desacrilize the world. You leave the darkness and the danger there, but you remove a lot the ways that people can combat that. As interesting with a lot of the religious nonconformance groups that emerge, like the Quakers and others. Peter writes about this fascinatingly, that the idea that witchcraft becomes a possession becomes part of their tool.
Danny Buck: So they seek to restore some of that magic to the world. The age of miracles, if you believe in miracles, positive miracles, like the Quakers do be able to speak in tongue, being able to form a relationship with God. That means there’s still room there for the demonic, but also room to protect yourself from it, to be able to be the godly people who can push out the spirits, inhabiting people, but it, then it makes the [00:59:00] identity of witchcraft so much more complex and harder for people who see themselves as orthodox to deal with, if it’s something that’s being taken up with, people who are a lot more radical.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s an excellent point. You have a great shift there when the reformation happens, and they strip all of those Catholic rites, like exorcism and other protective magic kind of elements, as the reformers see it, anyways, as magic. And then you’re left with nothing but witches and the idea of the satanic pact, where people are actually in league with Satan, physically meeting him and covenanting.
Danny Buck: Okay. There’s definitely a case. There are two options for you. If you are godly enough, if you go to church enough, the devil can’t harm you. If you haven’t got that, you’re a small child, then you’re in danger and it doesn’t seem, there’s no kind of protection available except [01:00:00] to get the person to confess, to get the ministers involved, to defeat the magic.
Danny Buck: The power to defeat witchcraft seemed to move upwards in the social scale. Your gentlemen like Hopkins, your witchfinders, your magistrates, the judges who can be given God’s power to judge the unworthy and to deal with them, or ministers who are educated enough to know what’s going on, fits in some of the, I the idea of Puritan and the focus on the words, the focus on ministry.
Sarah Jack: I’m really thinking about the Quaker thing and that piece of their power, their godliness, giving them power over evil, that progression of personal religion. That’s very interesting. My mind’s thinking about that now.
Danny Buck: They say also interesting because people take it the opposite way.
Danny Buck: Elmer written fantastic on this, that the fact they can do miracles means, they seem to be angels clad in rayments of light, but are they secretly of the devil’s party? It’s upon the 1650s where the devil is [01:01:00] called the great Quaker, as a belief that the miracles being done by men like George Fox are, in fact, demonic magic, or that the fact that they suddenly start spreading so quickly, they’re bewitching people.
Danny Buck: There’s a contemporary theory that the ribbons they were giving out were actually charms. During the 1650s, they are so controversial, sometimes they’re playing Jesus, one of them entering Bristol on a donkey, having palm leaves thrown in front of him, sometimes seem to be linked to plots of revolution.
Danny Buck: They’re so nebulous as well that they could be seen as this underground force, but it’s interesting that they, despite these fears of them, there isn’t, the pressure to condemn them as witch is, they’re called witches behind their back. You face these allegations, but they’re not convicted of that.
Danny Buck: So as the, of heresy, so this locks up for being annoying, but they never faced witchcraft accusations against them, even though the popular imagination casts them as witches, which again, post that [01:02:00] shift of that push for toleration after the civil wars.
Josh Hutchinson: Now in Massachusetts Bay, they famously did hang Quakers prior to the Salem witch trials. I believe some decades before they hanged four Quakers. In the Salem witch trials, there are some suspects that have these kind of nebulous connections to Quakers, and that’s believed to be a factor by some, or at least as a possibility.
Josh Hutchinson: There’s a community called Lynn that has a lot of Quakers in it. And so there are suspects from that community that have familial connections and might be suspected of having Quaker tendencies themselves. But there’s no direct, “this person is a Quaker. Let’s hang them as a witch.” You don’t get that direct confrontation as far as I see.
Sarah Jack: And Josh, which executed, accused, quoted [01:03:00] a Quaker curse?
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Good. When she said, “the Devil will give you blood to drink,” that was from the Bible, but it was used in a famous Quaker sermon or other publication. That was directed to the minister Nicholas Noyes. And then he’s believed to have actually died with blood in his mouth. That’s a famous legend associated with it. There’s a couple curses.
Danny Buck: We can’t let face good in the way of a good story.
Josh Hutchinson: No. Yeah. Don’t let the facts get in the way or anything like that.
Danny Buck: I think my favorite, one of that is, is nearby King’s Lynn. I mentioned before the story of a witch accused there, I think earlier than the Hopkins hunt who was being burnt. So again, popular folk story, her heart exploded out, and you can still see the patch on the nearby church where her exploded heart hit it.
Josh Hutchinson: [01:04:00] That’s intense.
Danny Buck: We got the, again, the sense of wilderness sometimes, which again, we think of England is pretty tamed, but the idea of the giant demonic dog, which is seen, familiars. We also have the story of black shook, who’s again, a dog that represents the devil that’s supposedly lurks in East Anglia and takes the unwary.
Danny Buck: How does that compare to the actual wildlife of new England? Like it is literally dangerous to leave your streets. Not only with the Native Americans, French, but still surrounded by wolves and there’s real sense of wilderness in a way that maybe coastal towns with their salt flats and their bleakness on a sort of North Sea wind in the winter might feel, but not gonna be the same as New England and it’s majesty and harshness and cruelty.
Josh Hutchinson: You still have mountain lions, bears, wolves. They’re all over the place. They have bounties on wolves. You kill a wolf and pin its head to the side of [01:05:00] the church. That sort of thing’s still going on, and you do get stories. There’s one girl, Abigail Hobbs, who’s about 15 when she’s accused, but she said that years earlier, when she lived on the frontier in Maine, that a black dog came to her and was the devil in the form of a dog and spoke with her and got her to agree to be a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: And there’s a case with Sarah Good. They accuse her of, it’s unclear whether they’re accusing her of becoming a wolf or sending a wolf to chase one of them, but allegedly this wolf comes from Sarah Good in some way and chases one of the afflicted persons.
Danny Buck: That’s obviously the foundation myth of Matthew Hopkins and the fact he went out there and was faced this giant black dog. His dog ran away, but he stood firm, as evidence he was [01:06:00] being pursued by these witches. Oh there is one, there is some preventative magic, used in East Anglia, which needs to come across this period with the witch bottle.
Danny Buck: Is this something we see sometimes in New England, the fact that people fill a bottle full of urine, that urine’s believed to contain the magic, often soaking some iron and then put into the fire as way to break.
Josh Hutchinson: You have a variety. We just spoke with someone a few days ago about folk magic in Salem. One of the things that they would do would be to nail a horseshoe above their door to prevent a witch from entering.
Josh Hutchinson: They’d also bury things in or near the hearth to prevent a witch from coming down the chimney. You still find in these old houses, shoes, dead cats, interesting artifacts. You do have some stories of the witch bottle itself. They bake a witch cake to identify a witch. They make a cake, they feed it to a dog and it’s unclear how they [01:07:00] expected to identify the witch, but that was their practice in one case.
Danny Buck: Some of those sound all too familiar, obviously these, the same communities, the same traditions survive. There’s this one dead cat I’ve seen for the Ipswich museum collection a couple of times now. Shoes survive that.
Danny Buck: That’s really interesting. Is there any tradition of marks above the hearth as well as a, for protection?
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, there are, what they call daisy wheels?
Sarah Jack: And hexafoil.
Josh Hutchinson: Hexafoils. That’s what it is. Yeah. They have hexafoils in various locations.
Danny Buck: Yeah. That’s definitely something that’s come directly over.
Danny Buck: Fantastic collection. I think they’re referred Germany as witches marks, but definitely that protective magic, these interest and exit points. You think these communities, they’re still keeping them going. Even that far across the ocean, even these godly communities, these little things that are meant to keep you safe in a world that’s so uncertain.
Josh Hutchinson: And this in 1692. It’s also a few generations removed by that [01:08:00] point. You still have these older individuals the Towne sisters that were born in England and raised by English parents. So they would have those traditions still, but you also have people who are grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the original settlers, and they still believe the very same folk traditions.
Danny Buck: I always find interesting. I’m gonna go complete tangent about the idea of folk, traditions and land, but land that isn’t one you’ve grown up in, because I recently went to SU who, which is this Anglo burial. And you imagine these are people who’ve come over maybe a hundred years before they found places of sacred memory to the previous people who were there.
Danny Buck: And again, not just the recent people like iron age settlements, ancient hinges, and they use those to build their new holy grounds and these important sites that overlook the river and become a place of power for their Kings. And, but they talk about these gods the Anglo-Saxon [01:09:00] gods Odin, Thor. I wonder, is there any sense that the locations picked by the settlers in New England, are these places that were of importance and memory to the Native Americans, and how do they cope with the sort of magic, if especially you say they mentioned the practices of the Native Americas they see as demonic?
Josh Hutchinson: The places they settle largely are along the coast. They’re in places that were visited by disease and where the natives had been established for many hundreds or thousands of years, but have been annihilated by disease brought by European fishermen. So they find these cleared lands, and they just take over where the natives had the before.
Josh Hutchinson: So some of those areas must have been considered sacred or been their burial grounds.
Danny Buck: So there’s no sense of trying to resacrilize them as bringing them into Christian harvest is [01:10:00] it’s something I thought about before just occurred to me. But how do you make this place yours and make it a godly place afterit’s been this godless wilderness?
Josh Hutchinson: I don’t think they did any consecration. My understanding of the Puritans, they didn’t consecrate the grounds. But they would build their meeting house, one of the first things they would do, and introduce their ministry. And they did they did attempt to convert the natives. They translated the Bible into Algonquin
Sarah Jack: I was just thinking Josh with Kings Philip’s war, I believe that some of the Native Americans that were converted were then used politically, in trickery during some of the incidents and battles.
Josh Hutchinson: There was a case I remember where one of the Christian Indians, is what they called the [01:11:00] converts, and they had whole towns of Christian Indians, but one of the Christian Indians at one time sees other Native Americans from the other side of the war, tricks them into coming over, and then kills them.
Sarah Jack: It just really seems like there was not an element of wanting to help them preserve any of their own sacredness of the land.
Josh Hutchinson: There seemed to have been every effort made to drive that out of the land and Christianize the entire land, anglicize it. They wanted it, I mean they wanted it all basically.
Danny Buck: Make it literally new England in every way, transport entire villages across, creating the space, but without the baggage of the Catholic past.
Danny Buck: Again, the sort of revolutionary element of you see that in the civil war, the prelude to Matthew Hopkins at the arrival of William Dowsing, the commissioner for removing idolatrous images. So [01:12:00] where first William dowsing goes to the church to break down the corrupted images of the past.
Danny Buck: It’s no coincidence. It can’t be a coincidence that Matthew Hopkins follows the same route to then remove the demonic influences in the community. And that desire for restoring, not even restoring to, to break that, which is corrupt and to break it down, rebuild. And I suppose that must be easier when you’ve got almost a, I don’t think the Native Americans see it as that, but what the settlers in New England see is a blank slate.
Danny Buck: And I suppose the tension there by the 1690s, if you’ve got, you’ve had a blank slate, what happens to that blank slate after you’ve been there a while and things aren’t going perfectly?
Josh Hutchinson: Just wanna ask if you have any other point you wanna make, any project you’re working on that you wanted to talk about?
Danny Buck: My big fascination is to try and find out more about the regicide Miles Corbet. He is a fascinating man. He comes from relative obscurity. He’s a second son of a minor [01:13:00] gentry figure in Sprowston, which is just the north of Norwich, so my home territory. He goes to Lincolns Inn. He becomes a lawyer.
Danny Buck: He comes back and becomes Great Yarmouth’s recorder, so he’s actually their judge. He’s the secretary, so he mans the records of the corporation and becomes indispensable to them. Eventually he ends up as the MP, but he’s had this, first of all, his religion. He’s happy to work with the Puritans, but he’s already showing independent tendencies.
Danny Buck: But yes, he starts bringing up witchcraft cases in the 1630s, 1637. We’ve got obviously Mark Prynn, and there’s another woman who’s sent to Norwich Castle. I know nothing about her. I’d love to know more, called violet Smith. She’s just sent to the, again, the major capital, that’s all the reference I’ve got in the assembly book.
Danny Buck: And again, cuz her trial is in Norwich. No records in Great Yarmouth, so still needs a bit more digging. He obviously becomes more important in the Long Parliament, the civil war begins. [01:14:00] So obviously that parliament keeps going. He gains a bit of a reputation, not always a good one. Rumors he’s a bit corrupt, rumors he’s engaging in dodgy practices, or he’s just a bit dim, but he’s largely successful.
Danny Buck: But his reputation does seem to be linked to Hopkins in 1645, because he’s in three communities affected by the witch-hunt. So in Aldeburgh, I’ve got chance visited there the weekend, this beautiful, Elizabethan Moot house, another courthouse. These old, converted merchant houses where he was sat there in judgment. Then obviously to Great Yarmouth.
Danny Buck: After Great Yarmouth, to King’s Lynn, so all around the coast, these communities he’s recorded for and Hopkins follows. That can’t be a coincidence. That’s one part of that. But then after this, his reputation declines, in part because he is involved in the regicide. So he’s the last person to sign his name to King Charles I’s death warrant.
Danny Buck: Not his best decision, I’m not [01:15:00] gonna lie. So catches up to him after the restoration. But, um, during the, um, protectorate, for some reason I think he might be his religion, he keeps being referred to as a Jew. Again, he’s, as far as I know, his family has been in Sprowston since Adam, or pretty close to it.
Danny Buck: So I’ve got no reason to think he’s actually Jewish, but he’s also suddenly described as swarthy. He’s very dark. Like there’s this awful royalist propaganda pieces in newspapers talking about how the Earl of Warrick suddenly finds him as coach and starts beating him thinking he’s the devil. Cause he’s so dark.
Danny Buck: And again, he meeting him just to the place where Charles was executed so good of curse. Another, accusing him impropriety on a boat with, uh, a woman of negotiable affection, which is obviously very untoward, but as far as I know, we’ve got this lovely diary. It’s beautiful. It’s like four pages folded together, in which he [01:16:00] lists, you know, when his children are born, his little thoughts, and his marriage dates. It’s so sweet. You know, it’s hard to imagine him of, of having a liaison on a boat in the river Thames and allegedly being beaten up by some other fellows. So his dark reputation, his interest in witchcraft, possibly some corruption involved in Ireland after the Oliver Cromwell’s conquest there. They became a fascinating figure that should tie up together.
Danny Buck: I got a chance to explore him with his feud with Mark Prynn, but it seems more to go with that. Obviously the east coast of England needs a lot more exploration.
Danny Buck: We’re very lucky now to been living in a sort of bit of a renaissance in witchcraft studies of various certain kinds, all kinds of different interpretation approaches.
Danny Buck: And I’m lucky that Peter Elmer, the other political witch-hunt chap has retired, so I’m not doing too badly. We live in a real era when people are exploring the witch in so many different [01:17:00] angles. So it’ll keep you busy and me busy hopefully for the next few years.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I have talked about this a lot. It seems like all the time there’s some new discovery. Um, we’ve learned about cases that weren’t even known about before. Uh, get more details on the cases and the background of them. There’s so many dozens of researchers. We have this whole, long list of a hundred some people we want to talk to, and that’ll keep us busy for a while, but we’re very grateful that you came on the show.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s been a very wonderful chat for us.
Danny Buck: I think if anything I’ve learned more from this than probably you and your audience. So I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed my time.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, we’ve learned so much from your thesis and from what you’ve said today.
Sarah Jack: Absolutely. Yeah. I, I just, the word essential came to my mind when I was thinking about the research you did.
Sarah Jack: That [01:18:00] what you did your, um, research on is essential to what is happening. With research now, with the, which Charles, like we’re talking about just the Renaissance that you said. So I think having all of that documentation and the, all of the facets of, um, what brewed the perfect environment for these witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: I, I’m just, I’m so thrilled that you did that study. Thank you very much.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Thank you for coming. It’s been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hey, Sharon.
Danny Buck: Thank you. Cheer.
Danny Buck: Cheer.
Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah has an update on witchcraft related persecution going on now.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for shining a light on these dark events.
Sarah Jack: You’re welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you all for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: I’m really looking forward to next week’s topic with Cassandra Roberts [01:19:00] Hesseltine and Dr. Annika Hylmo. We are going to discuss their documentary, The Last Witch.
Sarah Jack: The Last Witch follows the eighth grade class from North Andover Massachusetts and their teacher, Carrie LaPierre, as they’ve worked to exonerate forgotten accused witch Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.
Sarah Jack: We will hear from them on what that journey has been, what it means to descendants and the students. And for Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Goodbye.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow. Thou shalt tune in next week.
In May 1692, one of Boston’s most respected citizens walked into a Salem courtroom—and the accusers couldn’t even identify him. Captain John Alden Jr., son of Mayflower passengers and decorated war hero, seemed an unlikely target for witchcraft accusations. But his connections to Native Americans and the French made him dangerous in the eyes of wartime Massachusetts.
What happened when Salem’s witch hunt reached beyond the village to pull in a prominent Bostonian with impeccable colonial credentials? This episode examines how Captain Alden’s examination revealed the absurdity and danger of the spectral evidence system and how his escape became one of the trial period’s most dramatic moments.
From his parents’ legendary Plymouth courtship to his own flight from justice, Captain Alden’s story shows us who could be accused, who could survive, and what it took to navigate Salem’s machinery of suspicion.
Episode Highlights:
John Alden Sr. and Priscilla: The last surviving Mayflower passenger and the marriage that inspired Longfellow
Captain Alden’s controversial fur trading and the rumors that made him a target
The chaotic May 31st examination where accusers needed prompting
The touch test, the sword, and the claims of “Indian Papooses”
His September escape to Duxbury and surprising return
Key Figures:
Captain John Alden Jr., John & Priscilla Alden, Judges Bartholomew Gedney and John Richards, Rev. Samuel Willard, Robert Calef
Massachusetts has an opportunity to make history, and you can be a part of it. On November 25, 2025, Bill H.1927 goes before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on the Judiciary. This legislation will exonerate 8 individuals convicted of witchcraft in Boston and recognize everyone else who suffered accusations across Massachusetts. Between 1648 and 1693, more than 200 people were formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts. Only 31 from Salem have been cleared. The rest have been forgotten—until now.
Co-hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack, who helped co-found the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and successfully passed Connecticut’s witch trial absolution bill in 2023, share how YOU can help Massachusetts finish the job.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
The 8 individuals convicted in Boston who have never been exonerated: Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Kendall, Alice Lake, Hugh Parsons, Eunice Cole, Ann Hibbins, Elizabeth Morse, and Goody Glover
Why this matters today: Witch hunts didn’t end in the 1600s—they’re still happening around the world
The history of Massachusetts exoneration efforts from 1703 to 2022
How Connecticut proved it’s possible with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2023
Exactly what you can do to support H.1927, whether you live in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the world
Key Facts:
250+ individuals were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts between 1638 and 1693
38 people were convicted (30 in Salem, 8 in Boston)
25 people died: 19 hanged in Salem, 5 hanged in Boston, and Giles Corey pressed to death
Only Salem victims have been exonerated—the 8 Boston convictions remain unaddressed
The Boston Eight:
Five Executed:
Margaret Jones (1648) – The first person executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts
Elizabeth Kendall (1647-1651) – Falsely accused by a nurse covering her own negligence
Alice Lake (c. 1650) – Mother of four, judged for her past
Ann Hibbins (1656) – A widow, called “quarrelsome” for speaking her mind
Goody Glover (1688) – Irish Catholic widow executed just 4 years before Salem
Three Convicted But Not Executed:
Hugh Parsons (1651) – Conviction overturned, released 1652
Eunice Cole (likely 1656) – Convicted and imprisoned, though records are incomplete
Elizabeth Morse (1680) – Sentenced to death but eventually released
CRITICAL DATE: November 25, 2025
The Joint Committee on the Judiciary holds a hearing on H.1927 at 10:00 AM
This bill MUST get through committee to move forward. If it doesn’t receive a favorable report, it gets sent to “study” where it becomes invisible and inactive.
How YOU Can Help RIGHT NOW:
1. Sign the Petition (From Anywhere in the World)
change.org/witchtrials Goal: 3,000+ signatures
2. Submit Written Testimony (From Anywhere in the World)
Keep it short: 2-6 sentences is enough! Include:
Why this bill matters to you
That these people were innocent
Why Massachusetts should complete its exoneration work
Connection to modern witch hunts (optional)
Where to submit: Details at massachusettswitchtrials.org
3. Contact Your Massachusetts Legislators (MA Residents)
Email your state representative and senator
Ask them to support H.1927
Ask them to co-sponsor the bill
Tell them: “Massachusetts exonerated the Salem victims but left the Boston victims behind. Please honor all witch trial victims.”
4. Spread the Word
Share this episode and use hashtags:
#H1927
#WitchTrialJustice
#MassachusettsHistory
#mawitchhuntjusticeproject
#EndWitchHunts
5. Get a Support Pin
Purchase the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project pin on Zazzle (under $5) Link in show notes and at massachusettswitchtrials.org
Bill Sponsors:
Primary Sponsor: Rep. Steven Owens (Cambridge and Watertown)
Co-Sponsors:
Rep. Sally P. Kerans
Rep. William C. Galvin
Rep. Natalie M. Higgins
We need more co-sponsors! Contact your legislators if you’re in MA.
Why Exoneration Matters:
✅ Honors innocent victims – They maintained their innocence; we’re their voices now
✅ Acknowledges injustice – This was wrong and Massachusetts needs to say so
✅ Recognizes colonial heritage – Witch hunts are part of our real history
✅ It was human agency, not the devil – People made these choices; people must take responsibility
✅ Confronts coerced confessions – A stand against forcing false confessions (still happening today)
✅ Stands against misogyny – 80%+ of Massachusetts witch trial victims were women and girls
✅ Connects to modern witch hunts – People are STILL being accused, attacked, and killed over witchcraft accusations worldwide
✅ Sets an example – Fear should not drive us to scapegoat vulnerable people
✅ Completes Massachusetts’ work – Salem victims are cleared; Boston victims deserve the same
Connecticut Showed Us It’s Possible:
In 2023, Connecticut passed House Joint Resolution 34:
121 to 30 in the House
33 to 1 in the Senate
Bipartisan support across all political stances
34 victims absolved and official apology issued
Led by regular people: descendants, advocates, history buffs who cared about justice
We documented the entire campaign. We mapped the route from decades of setbacks to legislative success. Now Massachusetts can follow this path.
Quote from the Episode:
“Mary Esty, one of the women hanged during the Salem witch trials, wrote a petition recognizing she was condemned. She told the magistrates: even though you think you’re right, if you continue this way, more innocent people are going to die. Over 300 years between Mary Esty and a survivor in a refugee camp in Ghana—and they were essentially saying the same thing.”
Resources:
📚 massachusettswitchtrials.org – Complete info on the 8 convicted individuals, how to support H.1927, full bill text, history resources
📝 change.org/witchtrials – Sign the petition, find testimony submission info
🎙️ aboutwitchhunts.com/ – The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast
🎙️ aboutsalem.com – The Thing About Salem podcast (our companion show)
🌐 endwitchhunts.org – Our nonprofit’s broader work
🌐 connecticutwitchtrials.org – Learn about Connecticut’s success
📌 Zazzle Shop – Get your Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project support pin
International Context:
This movement is global:
Scotland: First Minister and Kirk of Scotland issued apologies
Spain (Catalonia): Pardoned hundreds of witch trial victims
Connecticut: Full absolution and apology in 2023
Witch hunts continue today in refugee camps in Ghana, across Africa, Asia, and beyond. When we stand up for historical victims, we stand against witch hunting happening right now.
Organizations working on contemporary witch hunts:
INAWARA (International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks)
AFAW (Advocacy For Alleged Witches)
For Massachusetts Residents:
Your voice carries extra weight. The Joint Committee on the Judiciary needs to hear from constituents. Email, call, submit testimony. Tell your legislators this matters to you and to Massachusetts’ historical legacy.
You Don’t Need a PhD or Political Title
You just need to care and be willing to speak up. Regular people made Connecticut’s exoneration happen. Regular people can make this happen in Massachusetts.
These eight individuals have waited nearly 400 years.
Will you be one of the voices that finally brings them justice?
Podcast Credits:
Hosts: Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack A Project of: End Witch Hunts (nonprofit organization)
Listen: Wherever you get podcasts Website: aboutwitchhunts.com/
Companion Podcast: The Thing About Salem (aboutsalem.com)
Take Action Today:
Every signature matters. Every piece of testimony matters. Every call to a legislator matters.
Show up for these victims the way advocates showed up for Connecticut’s victims.
Because history isn’t just something we study—it’s something we can respond to.
What do vampires, werewolves, and dragons tell us about ourselves? In this fascinating exploration of monsters in culture and society, we dive deep into why humanity has always been obsessed with creatures that go bump in the night.
From the etymology of “monster” (Latin “monstrum” – to warn or demonstrate) to modern cryptids and creepypastas, discover how these frightening figures serve as mirrors reflecting our deepest fears, repressed desires, and cultural anxieties. Learn why monsters aren’t just entertainment—they’re essential tools for processing trauma, establishing moral boundaries, and creating social cohesion. We’ll also examine the dangerous consequences of labeling real humans as monsters—and why this rhetoric prevents understanding, distances us from accountability, and can lead to dehumanization and violence.
Key Topics Covered
The Nature of Monsters
What defines a monster and the true meaning behind the word
Categories: supernatural beings, humanoid creatures, the undead, cryptids, and human monsters
Why witches became one of history’s most enduring monster figures
The Psychology of Fear
How monsters reflect our fear of ourselves
The intersection of monsters with our anxieties, values, and hopes
Why we’re drawn to “delicious fear” in safe contexts
Cultural Function of Monsters
Monsters as warnings that prefigure societal problems
How monster stories help us handle trauma and explore taboos
The role of monsters in teaching moral boundaries and creating in-groups
The Danger of Labeling Humans as Monsters
Why dehumanization prevents understanding
How calling people “monsters” distances us from accountability
The power of team-ups, protective magic, and courage
Why we need triumph stories to overcome our fears
Episode Highlights
✨ Monsters are cultural constructs that serve as societal mirrors 🧠 Understanding the Latin roots: “to show,” “to warn,” “to demonstrate” ⚠️ The problem with labeling real people as monsters 💪 How monster stories ultimately help us find courage and triumph
Keywords
monsters, cultural anthropology, folklore, mythology, psychology of fear, cryptids, supernatural beings, werewolves, vampires, social cohesion, moral boundaries, dehumanization, monster stories, horror culture, cultural fears, societal anxieties, creepypasta, witches in history
Connect With Us
Have your own thoughts on what monsters reveal about society? Share your perspective and join the conversation!
What makes a monster? In this spine-tingling episode, Josh and Sarah welcome back fellow podcasters Sean and Carrie from the hit show Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie to explore one of the internet’s most notorious creations: Slender Man.
From creepypasta legend to real-world tragedy, discover how this faceless, tentacled entity became modern folklore and what it reveals about our relationship with monsters. Four podcasters who love things that go bump in the night dive deep into digital horror, viral legends, and—because it’s The Thing About Witch Hunts—somehow end up discussing the Salem witch trials.
Whether you run toward mysterious figures in the woods or away from them, this episode will make you question why we create monsters and what happens when fictional nightmares bleed into reality.
Episode Highlights
🎃 What is Slender Man? – The origins of the internet’s most infamous boogeyman 👻 Creepypasta to Crisis – How digital folklore goes viral in the modern age 🕯️ Monster Theory – Why do we need monsters? Why do we treat humans as monsters? 🔮 Salem Connections – The unexpected link between witch hunts and modern monster-making 🎙️ Skeptic Meets Spooky – Sean and Carrie return with their signature perspectives on the paranormal
About Our Returning Guests
Sean & Carrie host Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie, where a skeptic and a believer explore the unknown, unsolved, unbelievable, and just plain weird. With their passion for history and uncovering truth, they bring complementary perspectives to every mystery they tackle.
Keywords
Slender Man, creepypasta, digital folklore, internet legends, monsters, witch hunts, Salem witch trials, paranormal podcast, horror podcast, Ain’t it Scary, folklore, urban legends, monster theory, viral horror, true crime
Listen & Subscribe
Don’t wander off the path—subscribe to The Thing About Witch Hunts and join us every episode as we explore the monsters, myths, and witch hunts throughout history.
Also check out:Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie wherever you listen to podcasts!
Sarah Jack: It’s whatever one sees as the main point of the Salem Witch Trials or the Witch City.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s that the people involved in the Salem Witch Trials were just like us.
Sarah Jack: It’s that fear can make communities turn on each other, but understanding that can help us do better.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s that history isn’t just dates and facts, it’s real people making real choices we might face too.
It’s where we share fun, bite-sized episodes focused on the Salem Witch Trials and the factors that influenced them, because these stories matter more than ever today. Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I’m Sarah Jack. You’re here for The Thing About Witch Hunts, but you get a special treat.
Josh Hutchinson: We recently created a second podcast called The Thing About Salem to explore Salem history, [00:01:00] culture, and community voices. In this special crossover episode, we’re going to play the extended edition of one of the episodes we did on The Thing About Salem, about the key moments in the Salem Witch Trials.
Sarah Jack: Subscribe to The Thing About Salem on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with someone who needs to hear these stories, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Just the facts, ma’am. Did you use at any time to ride upon a stick or pole?
Sarah Jack: Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: How high?
Sarah Jack: Sometimes above the trees.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you anoint yourselves before you fly?
Sarah Jack: No, but the devil carried us upon hand poles.
Josh Hutchinson: Tell us all the truth. What kind of worship did you do the devil?
Sarah Jack: He bid me pray to him and serve him, and he said he was a god and lord to me.
Josh Hutchinson: What did he promise to give you?
Sarah Jack: He said I would want nothing [00:02:00] in this world and that I would obtain glory with him.
Josh Hutchinson: Why would they hurt the village people?
Sarah Jack: The devil would set up his kingdom there and we should have happy days and it would then be better times for me if I obey him.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you hear the 77 witches’ names called over?
Sarah Jack: Yes, the devil called them.
Josh Hutchinson: What did he say to them?
Sarah Jack: He told them obey him and do his commands and it would be better for them and they should obtain crowns in hell. And Goody Carrier told me, the devil said to her, she should be a queen in hell.
Josh Hutchinson: Who was to be king?
Sarah Jack: The minister.
Josh Hutchinson: What kind of man is Mr. Burroughs?
Sarah Jack: A pretty, little man, and he has come to us sometimes in his spirit in the shape of a cat, and I think sometimes in his proper shape.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you hear the devil hurts in the shape of any person without their consent?[00:03:00]
Sarah Jack: No.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to The Thing About Salem. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: The interrogation we just reenacted was taken from the record of the July 21st, 1692 examinations of Mary Lacey Jr., Mary Lacey Sr., Ann Foster, Richard Carrier, and Andrew Carrier, and was a pivotal moment, which we’ll have more about later in the episode.
Sarah Jack: We think of the witch-hunt as a runaway train fueled by hysteria, but
Josh Hutchinson: there were a multitude of individual actors that had free will to change the course of the events.
We’ll be tallking about pivotal moments in the witch trials, when a person or group could have made a different decision and led the affair to a more peaceful conclusion.
Sarah Jack: We’ll also cover some times when people did succeed in bringing down the temperature in the [00:04:00] room. Had these choices not been made, the runaway train may have gone off the rails.
Josh Hutchinson: So, of course, we’re talking about the Salem Witch Trials, which we think of as beginning in January 1692 with the afflictions of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, and it lasted until May 1693, when the final court proceedings were held and the final prisoners were released from jail.
Sarah Jack: There are a lot of these points of escalations. We’re gonna highlight some of our favorites.
Josh Hutchinson: One early turning point was the arrests of Martha Cory, Rebecca Nurse, and Dorothy Good, which took place between March 21st and March 24th. Martha was arrested first on March 21st, and she was the first church member to be accused of witchcraft. She was a member of the Salem Village Church, and yet here [00:05:00] she stands accused of being a witch.
Sarah Jack: Then a few days later on March 24th, my ninth great-grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, was arrested.
Rebecca was the first member of the Salem Town Church to be arrested.
Josh Hutchinson: And the same day that Rebecca was arrested, Dorothy Good was jailed. She was a 4-year-old girl child, the daughter of Sarah Good. And despite her very young age, she’s thrown in jail. They have to make special irons to fit around her little wrists and ankles to keep her in chains in the festering dungeon.
And this tells us that they weren’t looking for just the usual suspects anymore. If church members and little baby children not even old enough for today, kindergarten [00:06:00] are getting accused of being witches that hurt people, anybody is open to accusation.
Sarah Jack: The next turn of events that was critical in escalating what was happening was in April. On April 19th, Abigail Hobbs gave a confession.
are grand.Abigail was the wild child of Topsfield, had a very interesting relationship with her stepmother and had a very interesting relationship with the devil, which she confessed to on April 19th, and in her subsequent questioning of her in jail, she elaborated, but being from Topsfield, that expanded the search radius for witches beyond [00:07:00] Salem Village. So that was a big piece of it. And this was the first confession by anyone since Tituba had confessed on March 1st.
Sarah Jack: There’s also no signs of coercion on this one. It appears to be a voluntary confession. Her confession was a confession of covenanting with the devil. It was a diabolical confession.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Abigail and her stepmother, Deliverance Hobbs, they filled in key details about the diabolic pact and the witches’ sabbath, how those things worked.
Sarah Jack: And Abigail said that she gave the devil her permission to afflict people. So the devil went out in her specter, her likeness, but only because she said that he could. And this was a big moment, because this said that the [00:08:00] witches had to willingly allow the devil to use their form, that the devil couldn’t use anybody’s shape without their permission. In other words, he couldn’t appear as an innocent person. So therefore, the specters that were being seen by the afflicted people were really the specters of witches who had given the devil their permission.
So this added some cred to spectral evidence, which the ministers and others were really trying to decide. I mean, in other witch trials even, they were questioning whether a spectral form was actually the person or if it was the devil impersonating them.
A very big moment in the Salem Witch Trials happened May 27th. This was what actually led to the trial phase happening, because [00:09:00] for months, the jails had been filling with witchcraft suspects, but Governor William Phips, the brand new governor for the Colony, he comes to Boston on May 14th with a brand new charter and instructions to form new courts, but the General Court, the legislature of the colony, has to be the one that forms the courts, and they don’t get around to doing this until November.
Josh Hutchinson: So what happens in the meantime, Phips creates a special court called the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which means to hear and determine, and he appoints nine judges to it. And they’re gonna start in June. The Chief Justice is gonna be William Stoughton. He’s the new Lieutenant [00:10:00] Governor in this new hierarchy with the royally appointed Governor Phips.
Sarah Jack: Who Margo Burns calls Uncle Billy.
Josh Hutchinson: Uncle Billy was in charge of this court of Oyer and Terminer, and with him, he had judges Bartholomew Gedney, John Richards, Nathaniel Saltonstall, Wait Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Peter Sargent.
Sarah Jack: Did I just hear Winthrop was one of the judges?
Josh Hutchinson: A Winthrop, the son of John Winthrop Jr., who had been the governor of Connecticut for many years.
Sarah Jack: And the grandson of John Winthrop Senior.
Josh Hutchinson: So this is the third generation of Winthrop that is trying people for witchcraft in the new world because both grandpa and father had previously been involved in witch trials in Boston and in Hartford, [00:11:00] Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, and John Winthrop Sr. wrote notes on the very first woman hang for witchcraft in Hartford, which was Alice Young, and then also on Margaret Jones, who was hanged in Boston Tangent. But it’s, it’s good to think about that. You know, Again, these escalations were up against all this historied experience of things coming.
Josh Hutchinson: Hmm.
Sarah Jack: To fruition where women are getting executed for witchcraft, this is that times 10.
Josh Hutchinson: A lot of things had to come together for the Salem Witch trials to happen the way that they happened. And the creation of the court of Oyer and Terminate was a pivotal moment in the witch trial process, because, you know, had they waited for the regular courts to be formed and gone through regular [00:12:00] processes, maybe some of the decisions would’ve come out a little differently about how to, what kind of evidence to admit and what procedures to follow.
Sarah Jack: Another thing about the witch trials that I think we sometimes forget is that ministers and other men were doing a lot of deliberation around the seen world and the unseen world and how that was impacting witchcraft and who the witch was, and if the accusations were about diabolical afflictions or harm and I love taking a look at what the ministers were saying. I love taking a look at the deliberations. I wish they would not have had such a difficult time coming to the conclusions that they needed to come to. But one of the significant ones is the Return of the Ministers on [00:13:00] June 15th.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Boston area ministers had been asked for guidance by Governor Phips. He wanted to know how to handle the witch trials and particularly what types of evidence were admissible and would, could be used as proof that witchcraft had happened. So they question things like spectral evidence. How do we proceed with this?
Sarah Jack: This report was called The Return of Several Ministers, and it was written by Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Increase Mather had just come home from London where he spent years negotiating the new charter for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, which became the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Sarah Jack: In the Return, the ministers warned the justices about relying upon spectral evidence. Even though Abigail’s story was so colorful and compelling, [00:14:00] they were urged, and not just hers, of course, a lot of the, the spectral evidence was, could have been very compelling and scary.
They urged the justices to avoid folk tests for witchcraft, and suggested that the justices follow the guidelines set forth in books by English puritans, such as Perkins and Bernard.
Josh Hutchinson: The ministers also recommended that the justices hold their proceedings in calm environments, cautioned them against using spectral visions as proof of guilt, because demons could assume the image of innocent people.
Sarah Jack: And we know from comments in the examination papers that during the examinations of Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good and others, it was not calm. It was not a calm environment.
The Return also closed with a recommendation for the speedy and [00:15:00] vigorous prosecution of the witches, so contradicts itself, basically. First, they’re urging caution throughout the report, but then at the end, they’re saying be speedy and vigorous. So the judges, they take this return and they say well, we like spectral evidence. We like doing folk tests. We do things like this touch test where if a witch touches an afflicted person, the afflicted person becomes well because the magic goes back from them to the witch who harmed them. And the judges continued to do those tests and to accept spectral evidence. What if they had stopped here? What if they had had a different response?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What if they, what if Cotton Mather hadn’t written that last line about the speedy and vigorous prosecution? What if he’d been consistent in [00:16:00] advocating for caution? Would there have been a peaceful end to the witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: In mid-July, there’s another grand turning point, and this one is really what expands the amount of people who are descendants of those who experienced the Salem Witch Trials, because things expanded to the community of Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Andover, including what is today the separate community of North Andover, was the scene of a very heated chapter in the Salem Witch Trials. The town of Andover had more witchcraft accusations than any other community, including Salem. Even if you combine the town center and the village of Salem, they did not have as many accusations as the little town of Andover, which was about the size of Salem Village, had about 500 ish people, [00:17:00] had 45 accusations by the end of the witch trials.
Sarah Jack: Another catalyst in the Andover phase was the sickness of Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. Sickness tends to be part of the story when there’s a witch trial.
Josh Hutchinson: For instance, the Salem Witch Trials all started because of sickness in Samuel Parris’s household that spread through Salem Village. And now here there’s an unexplained illness in Andover.
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: One big element of this Elizabeth Phelps Ballard sickness is that her husband at some point called down to Salem Village and got some of the afflicted girls to come up and examine his wife and determine who was bewitching her. And so they came up, they saw specters, they made accusations. July 19th, Joseph Ballard complained [00:18:00] against Mary Lacey, Sr. and her daughter Mary Lacey, Jr.
This was a renewal of arrests, because there’d actually been six quiet weeks, no warrants had been issued since June 6th, and here we are July 19th and we’ve got two people getting arrested.
Sarah Jack: Then also in Andover, on July 21st, Ann Foster confessedthe main aim of the witches was to replace Christ’s kingdom with Satan’s kingdom. So here is a conspiracy unfolding.
Josh Hutchinson: And this conspiracy gets elaborated on. The piece that we read at the beginning was from the examination of Mary Lacy Jr. during this big, they had a just a group of suspects come in. It was Mary, her mother, Andrew Carrier, and Richard Carrier being examined, and they elaborated [00:19:00] on a celestial game of thrones. They said that Martha Carrier and George Burroughs were the queen and king in hell. And they said that the devil did not hurt in people’s shapes without their consent, just confirming what Abigail Hobbs had said earlier and making it seem like spectral evidence was real.
Sarah Jack: Now we do know that those Carrier boys were essentially tortured. ‘ cause
I just pointed out,
Josh Hutchinson: and heels.
Sarah Jack: earlier we mentioned that there isn’t ev, there’s not evidence of Abigail being coerced, but
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Sarah Jack: with the boys, they were not handled gently.
No, Andrew and Richard Carrier were bound neck to heels, which caused blood to run out of their nose. They’re basically, you’re bound up [00:20:00] so tightly, co pressed together and left like that for hours and hours. So very excruciating ordeal. They didn’t call it torture at the time, but that is some torture.Yeah, sadly the sick Elizabeth Ballard did pass away on July 27th.
Josh Hutchinson: Her death just reinforced people’s belief that she had been bewitched. Now she’s murdered by the witches, so that definitely turns up the heat in Andover.
Sarah Jack: Let’s talk about those ministers again. They kicked things up again.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, this time they actually did a solid.Increase Mather, I don’t know what took him so long to come to this conclusion and publicly state this, because he visited Salem jail. He had been to [00:21:00] Salem and observed some of the proceedings firsthand, butit took him, apparently, months of deliberation and writing to come to the conclusions that he did about spectral evidence and so forth. And of course, we’re talking Increase Mather. He’s the delegate to London to works with the king and the king’s men to get a new charter. He’s the president of Harvard College. He is a minister at Boston’s leading church. And he’s the father of Cotton Mather, who writes a different book that will mention a little bit is Wonders of the Invisible World. These two books clash, but the men being father and son say that, no, we’re in agreement with each other. They write this into the books. We agree with each [00:22:00] other is very interesting.
Sarah Jack: This important publication, called Cases of Conscience, by Increase Mather came out on October 3rd, and a report of this publication was read to the Cambridge Assembly of Ministers at their monthly meeting at Harvard College, so they were all wanting to know what does Increase have to say about all of this, and their conclusions were read to congregations that week.
Josh Hutchinson: This work, Cases of Conscience, exemplified the shift in opinions about the trials that had happened over the summer, as we get into the fall, there starts to be some people coming out against what’s going on, the way things are being handled.
Sarah Jack: Increasesuggested the afflicted persons may actually be possessed, that bewitched persons are many times really possessed with evil spirits[00:23:00] And there you have this highest trusted ministerial authority saying that it’s certain that’s impactful.
Josh Hutchinson: And then on spectral evidence, Increase writes, “the devil may, by divine permission, appear in the shape of innocent and pious persons.”
Sarah Jack: So now he, all the way after all the hangings he’s saying maybe Rebecca didn’t give permission to the devil to go torment Ann Putnam Senior. I’m not bitter.
Josh Hutchinson: Exactly. Not bitter.
Yeah. It’s just why did he wait so long? He, he goes on, he says in his report, “it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.”
Sarah Jack: It also said, “it is better that a guilty person should be absolved [00:24:00] than that he should, without sufficient ground of the conviction, be condemned.” Oh my gosh. I had a, I don’t think I’ve actually considered that in light of what happened in Connecticut. Were those,
were those voters reading the records
Josh Hutchinson: oh yes. When they decided to absolve those accused of witchcraft,
Sarah Jack: instead
Josh Hutchinson: had read Cases of Conscience. Yeah.
Also wrote, “I had rather judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge, an honest woman as a witch.” He’s very concerned about mistakes being made and innocent people being killed.
Sarah Jack: Do you think it would’ve made a difference if he’d been in town when Mary Esty wrote her petition, because she was essentially saying she was an honest W woman and they were judging her as a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: I think it definitely, if Increase had spoken up, because remember, he’s [00:25:00] the one who got Governor Phips appointed as the royal governor. He advocated for him in London. So he had him kind of in his thrall or something, he, uh. his debt, the governor was in Increase Mather’s debt for being appointed governor.
So he had the influence at the highest levels of government. He knew all the ministers and all the magistrates and justices. He was the most respected minister in New England probably at the time. It would’ve made a difference, if he had put his foot down and said, “spectral evidence is not proof because the devil can impersonate innocent people.” I think the trials would’ve just come to a screeching halt as soon as he said that, unless Stoughton like did some hurried, [00:26:00] you know, death warrant writing.
Sarah Jack: He would’ve had to scramble.
He, Stoughton, would’ve had to scramble to keep the trials going. I think the governor would’ve said, you know, Reverend Mather is right. These things have got outta hand and it’s gotta stop and would’ve shut it down a lot earlier than he did.Finally, on October 29th, Governor Phips shuts down the special Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one of the assistants, James Russell, so he is a member of the legislature’s upper house, the Assistants, and he asked Governor Sir William Phips directly if the court of Oyer and Terminer should stand or fall, and Phips replied, “it must fall.”
So we had mentioned earlier the legislature established new courts [00:27:00] in November. That happened November 25th. Andthe witchcraft cases that remained were transferred to the new Superior Court of Judicature, which held sessions in 1693 in Salem, Charlestown, Boston, and Ipswich, processed all of these other claims.
Now, spectral evidence was not allowed to be considered by the jurors, so they went through the rest of the cases. Three people did get convicted, but the governor reprieved them, and basically the jails cleared out. The last case was heard May 11th, 1693, and as soon as everyone had paid their jail fees, the jails were cleared out of these accused witches and the Salem Witch trials were basically over.
Sarah Jack: What a [00:28:00] relief. What if he hadn’t shut down that court? What if the spectral evidence hadn’t been halted? Where would we be?
Josh Hutchinson: If the Oyer and Terminer had stayed around, they would’ve had another session in November. There were five women who had already been convicted, who weren’t executed yet, waiting to be hanged. There was maybe 130 people waiting to be tried in the jails. So this could have really, really just snowballed and instead of, you know, 25 casualties of the witch trials, the 19 hanged, the one pressed, the five who passed away in jail. If the Oyer and Terminer had dragged out until the last person was prosecuted, we’d be talking about European levels of [00:29:00] witch hunting with potentially over a hundred people being killed.
Sarah Jack: What a rollercoaster.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, what a, What a time to live, have to live through such a difficult period, And you just wonder, if one thing had happened differently in these turning points that we’ve talked about, what would’ve happened? How could things have been different? How could lives have been saved?
Join in on this discussion on our Patreon community. We’d love to see you there and hear what you think.
Sarah Jack: Patreon.com/aboutsalem. Since you’ve enjoyed the episode, why not subscribe to The Thing About Salem to support us and to keep the fun coming?
Josh Hutchinson: have explored themes like Poppets, the Crucible, Witches’ Sabbaths, spectral evidence, the ergot myth, and more. And we have so much more in store for you to [00:30:00] learn.
Sarah Jack: In between episodes, come engage with us in our Patreon community at patreon.com
Josh Hutchinson: /aboutsalem.
if you’re enjoying all of this great content and you want to know even more about witch trials and other things that are considered to be spooky, join us for our Halloween special. We’re gonna talk about witches and monsters and candy and goblins and all of that good stuff. So look for information about that on endwitchhunts.org/events. So when do you get to hear the next episode of The Thing About Salem? Every Sunday. Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack are featuring The Thing About Salem podcast on The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast to introduce our listeners to our companion 15 minute sized episode podcast! Both shows are produced by the End Witch Hunts nonprofit, and we want to make sure you don’t miss out on the incredible stories we’re telling about Salem’s witch trials. This crossover episode gives Thing About Witch Hunts listeners a taste of the detailed historical storytelling you’ll find over on The Thing About Salem.
Episode Summary
What if the Salem witch trials could have been prevented? In this compelling crossover episode, we examine the critical turning points between January 1692 and May 1693 when different decisions could have stopped America’s most notorious witch hunt in its tracks.
From the arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good to Martha Carrier’s infamous designation as “Queen of Hell,” we explore how a series of escalating choices transformed a local Massachusetts crisis into colonial America’s deadliest legal disaster.
Key Topics Covered
Historical Turning Points
Critical moments when the Salem witch trials could have been halted
The shocking case of Dorothy Good, the youngest accused witch
How local accusations spiraled into regional hysteria
Key Historical Figures
Cotton Mather and his contradictory influence on the trials
Governor William Phips and his delayed intervention
Martha Carrier and her notorious title as “Queen of Hell”
The role of judges, ministers, and community leaders
Geographic Spread
Salem Village and Salem Town dynamics
How 45 Andover residents became entangled in accusations
The regional impact across Massachusetts Bay Colony
Legal and Social Analysis
Spectral evidence and its dangerous precedent
Court procedures that enabled the witch hunt’s growth
Community tensions that fueled the accusations
Episode Highlights
This crossover episode reveals how a perfect storm of fear, superstition, and poor decision-making created one of America’s darkest chapters. We examine the moments when cooler heads could have prevailed and the individuals who either fanned the flames or attempted to restore reason.
Historical Context
The Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693) resulted in the execution of 20 people and the imprisonment of hundreds more. This episode explores the human decisions behind the historical tragedy and the lessons we can learn about mass hysteria, due process, and the importance of critical thinking in times of crisis.
Perfect For Listeners Interested In:
Colonial American history
Legal history and judicial reform
Social psychology and mass hysteria
Women’s history and gender dynamics in early America
Religious history and Puritan society
True crime and historical mysteries
Keywords:
Salem witch trials, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Cotton Mather, spectral evidence, Dorothy Good, Martha Carrier, Governor Phips, Andover witch trials, colonial America, Puritan society, mass hysteria, historical true crime, 1692 witch hunt, Salem Village, judicial history
Listen Now
Join The Thing About Salem and The Thing About Witch Hunts for this special crossover episode exploring how different choices could have changed the course of American history.
This episode contains historical content about persecution, execution, and legal proceedings from the 17th century. Listener discretion advised.
Win Ben Wickey’s “More Weight: A Salem Story” – The Graphic Novel That’s Being Called “What From Hell Did for Jack the Ripper”
Every word is an accusation… and every whisper kills.
After a decade in development, animator Ben Wickey’s haunting debut solo graphic novel has arrived, and critics are calling it a masterpiece. Publishers Weekly praised this “impressive first solo graphic novel” that “does for Salem, Mass., what From Hell did fo[r]” the Jack the Ripper story – delivering the same kind of deep, atmospheric horror that made Alan Moore’s legendary work a classic.
What Makes This Book Special:
Spans three timelines (1692, 1860s & present day) showing how Salem’s witch trials cast their shadow across centuries
Explores the infamous Salem witch trials and their lasting impact over 300 years later through the story of Giles and Martha Corey
Created by a descendant of Mary Eastey, one of the executed accused witches
Features “gorgeous” art that feels “quite cinematic” according to readers
Critics praise its “captivating illustrations” and examination of how “Hawthorne, Longfellow, and we today are all attempting to understand and find meaning in the nightmare”
This isn’t just another witch trial retelling – it’s a multi-generational epic that connects the dots between historical horror and modern pop culture’s obsession with Salem. Perfect for fans of The Crucible, The Witch, American Horror Story: Coven, and anyone who loves graphic novels that tackle real historical nightmares with artistic brilliance.
HOW TO ENTER:
Choose ONE of these entry methods:
FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS:
Subscribe to The Thing About Witch Hunts Podcast YouTube channel, Subscribe OR
Subscribe to The Thing About Salem Podcast YouTube channel, Subscribe OR
Subscribe to The Thing About Salem Podcast Patreon community (free tier) Subscribe
FOR EXISTING SUBSCRIBERS: Comment #ThingAboutMoreWeight on any of our recent YouTube videos
Entry Period: October 7, 2025 – October 25th, 2025 (11:59 PM ET)
That’s it! Two lucky winners will each receive a copy of “More Weight: A Salem Story” shipped directly from IDW Publishing.
OFFICIAL RULES:
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.
Eligibility: Open to legal residents of the United States, 18 years of age or older.
Entry Period: September 28th, 2025 – October 9th, 2025 (11:59 PM ET)
How to Enter: During the entry period, choose ONE of the following entry methods:
Subscribe to the Witch Hunts Podcast YouTube channel, OR
Subscribe to The Thing About Salem Podcast YouTube channel, OR
Subscribe to The Thing About Salem Podcast Patreon community (free tier), OR
Comment #ThingAboutMoreWeight on any of our recent YouTube videos (for existing subscribers)
Note: Winners who entered via YouTube subscription (options 1-2) must provide a screenshot of their logged-in user channel showing subscription status for verification.
Limit one entry per person/household regardless of method chosen.
Winner Selection: Two winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries (new subscriptions and hashtag comments). Winners must be from different households (same address disqualifies duplicate winner). Winners will be announced on both podcast channels and social media platforms.
Prize: Two copies of “More Weight: A Salem Story” by Ben Wickey, published by IDW Publishing. Each winner receives one book. Approximate retail value per book: $39.99 (total prize value: $59.98). Prizes will be shipped directly from IDW Publishing to winners’ addresses within the United States.
Winner Notification: Winners will be contacted through YouTube comments (reply to their hashtag comment) or through available platform messaging for subscription-based entries. Winners must respond within 48 hours with their mailing address to claim prize.
General Conditions:
Void where prohibited by law
Limit one entry per person/household
Two winners will be selected from different households
Prizes are non-transferable and no cash substitution allowed
Winners responsible for all applicable taxes
Sponsors reserve the right to verify eligibility and re-draw if winners are from same household
Personal information collected for contest entry will only be used for prize fulfillment and will not be used for marketing or other purposes beyond this contest
Winners will be announced publicly on social media platforms
For a winners list, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to [YOUR MAILING ADDRESS] within 60 days of contest end date
Winners who entered via YouTube subscription must provide a screenshot of their logged-in user channel showing subscription status for verification
By entering this contest, participants release YouTube, Patreon, IDW Publishing, and contest sponsors from any liability related to this contest
If entering through YouTube, entrants must comply with YouTube Community Guidelines. Noncompliance will result in disqualification.
By entering, participants agree to these official rules
Sponsors: The Thing About Witch Hunts Podcast and The Thing About Salem Podcast are not affiliated with YouTube, Patreon, or IDW Publishing beyond this promotional arrangement. YouTube is not a sponsor of this contest. Patreon is not a sponsor of this contest
With his highly anticipated debut graphic novel “More Weight: A Salem Story” releasing, Massachusetts-born author Ben Wickey joins us for an exclusive pre-launch interview about this Alan Moore-praised “appalling masterpiece.” The Edward Gorey Award-winning artist’s first solo work tells the harrowing tale of Giles Corey, the only person pressed to death under stones during the infamous 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
What makes this upcoming graphic novel release extraordinary? Beyond Wickey’s stunning and unmatched visual storytelling that brings historical horror to visceral life, he is a descendant of Salem Witch Trial victim Mary Easty, bringing deeply personal perspective to this decade-long project that Publishers Weekly compared to “From Hell.”
We explore the pre-release excitement, Wickey’s meticulous research using historical documents, and his innovative dual-timeline narrative featuring Nathaniel Hawthorne interludes. Using the graphic novel format, Wickey cuts through pop culture mythology to restore the genuine horror and humanity of Salem’s history.
Discover how Corey transformed from testifying against his wife Martha to defiantly uttering his final words “more weight,” and why this Salem witch hunt story will captivate readers everywhere.
When Jennifer Tozer, librarian at Pueblo Community College, set out to create an ambitious month-long educational program about the Salem Witch Trials, she knew she needed expert guidance to connect historical events to contemporary issues. That’s when she reached out to Sarah Jack, Director of End Witch Hunts, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization and the parent of The Thing About Witch Hunts.
From Historical Interest to Modern Relevance
Tozer’s passion project, “Witch Trials: Accusation to Exoneration,” began as a way to bring Salem’s history to students who might never visit Massachusetts. But she wanted the program to be more than just a history lesson. “I really wanted to start with something that people would be interested in and might draw them in, but then also talk about why it’s still relevant,” Tozer explained during a recent podcast interview.
Expert Consultation Makes the Connection
Sarah Jack, who works to raise awareness about modern-day witchcraft accusations worldwide, provided crucial consultation during the program’s development. As a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, one of the Salem victims, Jack brought both personal connection and professional expertise to the collaboration.
“I was so thrilled that you were interested in doing this,” Jack shared, acknowledging the challenges Tozer faced building the program from scratch when traditional museum exhibits aren’t available.
Bridging Past and Present
Through Jack’s guidance, the program successfully connects 17th-century witch trials to ongoing issues of injustice today. The collaboration ensures students understand that while Salem feels like ancient history, similar accusations and persecutions continue worldwide.
“We think Salem and we think it’s forever ago and what does that have to do with me?” Tozer noted. “If you think about it, it really wasn’t that long ago, and these things still happen today.”
Community Impact
Jack will present to Pueblo Community College students one of several expert presentations throughout October, alongside special author talks featuring Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter) and Daniel Gagnon (A Salem Witch). This collaboration demonstrates how local expertise can enhance educational programming, bringing awareness about End Witch Hunts’ global mission directly to the community.
The partnership showcases how education and advocacy nonprofits and higher education institutions can work together to make historical education both engaging and relevant to contemporary social justice issues.
You can hear more about this collaboration in “Bringing Witch Trial History to Students: A Librarian’s Creative Educational Program” on The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast.
“Witch Trials: Accusation to Exoneration” runs throughout October at Pueblo Community College Library, featuring exhibits, author presentations, and community discussions.
Episode Summary: Jennifer Tozer, librarian at Pueblo Community College in Colorado, shares how she created “Witch Trials: Accusation to Exoneration” – a comprehensive month-long educational program running throughout October. When traditional museum exhibits weren’t available, Jennifer built her own visual displays from scratch, featuring poster exhibits, author presentations, virtual tours with the Salem Witch Museum, and discussions connecting historical witch trials to modern-day accusations.
For Educators: This episode offers practical inspiration for teachers looking to create engaging historical programming with limited budgets. Jennifer’s approach demonstrates how to make distant history relevant to today’s students while addressing misconceptions and encouraging critical thinking.
Program Details: “Witch Trials: Accusation to Exoneration” runs throughout October at Pueblo Community College Library, featuring interactive exhibits, scavenger hunts, and community presentations.
Perfect for history teachers, librarians, and educators interested in innovative programming that brings historical events to life for modern students.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] “Thou shall not suffer a which to live.” Exodus 22:18. Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we’re talking to historian Maya Rook about folk magic in the Salem Witch Trials. We’ll also talk about Tituba, the afflicted girls of Salem, and pop culture.
Sarah Jack: Maya’s approach to discussing these historical topics is very approachable and interesting. So I’m really looking forward to having that conversation with [00:01:00] her on this episode.
Josh Hutchinson: So am I. Been fascinated with the Salem witch trials for a long.
Sarah Jack: And this time of year, you start thinking about these things.
Josh Hutchinson: I think it’s at the forefront of people’s minds, seasonally. It is Halloween coming up.
Josh Hutchinson: I’m pretty jazzed, and I don’t always get into Halloween, but this year there’s something about it that’s drawing me to it.
Sarah Jack: I love seeing the events popping up, the articles coming out, all the different ways that Halloween starts approaching.
Josh Hutchinson: I’m ready for the chocolate.
Sarah Jack: They said there was gonna be a shortage, but we’ve already had quite a bit of Halloween chocolate in our house.
Sarah Jack: Josh, I’m really looking forward to hearing your history segment on this episode. I believe you’re gonna be giving us some details [00:02:00] on Tituba.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, I am. Thank you. We did talk about Tituba a little bit last week, and we’re going to talk to Maya about Tituba some more.
Josh Hutchinson: So I’m keeping this one brief. Generally people who know about Salem know about Tituba either through The Crucible or history class, some way, but there are a lot of misconceptions out there about her. For one thing, she’s actually an indigenous person, possibly from south America or the. A lot of people out there somehow the legends about her, she morphed and became not an indigenous person, but all of the records referred to her either as a quote “Indian” or a “Spanish Indian”.
Josh Hutchinson: So we do know that she was an indigenous person who was enslaved. The minister, Samuel Parris acquired her when he lived in [00:03:00] Barbados, before he moved to Massachusetts. And became minister of Salem Village.
Josh Hutchinson: Another misconception about her is that she was practicing magic and teaching magic to the girls who became afflicted and became the first accusers in the witch hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: There’s no evidence whatsoever for her doing that. The only time that we know she did practice some magic was when she baked a witch cake, which was at the instigation of an English woman. And we’ll talk to Maya a little bit more about that. I recommend that everybody reads Elaine Breslaw’s book, Tituba: Reluctant Witch of Salem to get more details about what is known about her and the possibilities around her origins.
Sarah Jack: I’m so happy that author was able to present [00:04:00] that origin information. And I’m really happy that we’re talking about her. I think the more that the facts of her life are talked about that we understand her experience in a real important way.
Sarah Jack: I think she’s been an important figure to many people, and I think she can remain that as we get to know her better.
Josh Hutchinson: She was a victim in so many ways, all her life. It’s really important to get her story out there so people know about these things that happened in the past.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for introducing us to some of that information about Tituba.
Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome.
Sarah Jack: Our next guest wears many hats. She is a cultural historian, a college history teacher, a public speaker and artist, a writer, a podcaster, and a yoga teacher. When she’s not [00:05:00] teaching college, she teaches publicly available classes on a variety of history and cultural topics, including the Salem witch trials. She also posts about Salem online under the banner of Salem Oracle. We’ll have links to all these offerings in the episode description, and these classes that she offers are packed full of great information and just very interesting and intriguing topics. So you definitely want to follow her calendar of events, because there will be something you don’t wanna miss.
Sarah Jack: Without further ado. Here’s Maya Rook.
Sarah Jack: Hi, Maya.
Maya Rook: Hi.
Josh Hutchinson: Hello.
Josh Hutchinson: It’s nice to meet you.
Maya Rook: How’s it going? It’s nice to meet you.
Josh Hutchinson: Great.
Maya Rook: Seen you both a lot on the internet. So I feel like I know you already.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, same here. Do you wanna talk a little about folk magic? Figure folk magic is a [00:06:00] good thing to talk about right around Halloween.
Maya Rook: I’ve done some work on the folk magic of Salem. I’ve been really intrigued, because I think a lot of people are drawn to the Salem Witch Trials because of an interest in magic or witchcraft, and it lures people in and it has this air around it.
Maya Rook: And then you start learning about the trials and you realize that they’re just really incredibly brutal and dark, and that there wasn’t actually the kind of magic that I don’t know that a lot of pop culture shows as happening in Salem. So I got curious, though, from going through the records and just reading so much and researching the trials, is there any evidence that folk magic was practiced during the Salem Witch Trials?
Maya Rook: And you can find elements of folk magic throughout it. So I’ve spent some time going through secondary sources, primary sources, and trying to cull out where is the actual magic in Salem. The big things that I have [00:07:00] found are the witch cake incident is a big example of folk magic, the use of poppets, those show up throughout the trials, different forms of divination, as well, and fortune telling. We see that in the trial records, too.
Josh Hutchinson: I understand one of the popular legends out there is probably not true that supposedly may have started the thing, the whole Venus class thing. Can you tell us a little about that?
Maya Rook: Yeah, absolutely. So yes, there was one report from John Hale a few years after the Salem Witch Trials, and he said that he was told by one of the afflicted girls that they were practicing this form of divination, the Venus glass and egg is oftentimes what they called it in 17th [00:08:00] century New England.
Maya Rook: But the practice actually goes back to ancient Greece. So it’s pretty old. It’s called oomancy. And it’s the use of egg in water to divine one’s future. So we do know that this was a practice that people would’ve used during this time. Typically young girls would crack an egg, put it in water and then try to read the shape within it to see who their future husband might be.
Maya Rook: And so John Hale says that one of the girls was playing with this before the afflictions began and they saw a coffin, right? So they got really spooked and it has been this one source, which we don’t even know who the girl is that he’s talking about, has been used to create all these legends around Salem.
Maya Rook: A lot of people say oh, was Abigail and Betty, and then Tituba gets thrown in there too, that they were doing this magic together, and then they got really scared. And then the girls were afraid they had let the [00:09:00] devil in, and then they started exhibiting the afflictions. So would the girls have been playing with this? Possibly because it was a practice that people did, but to me, I don’t really see a lot of credibility in it.
Maya Rook: He doesn’t say who the girl was. So if you look and try to figure out who it possibly could have been, cuz he says that she died by the time this was published, and this is just a few years after the trials. So there’s only about four girls it could be. And I think it’s Mary Beth Norton, and she posits that it’s probably one of the older girls, because she doesn’t think somebody like Abigail Williams, being only 11 years old, would’ve been playing this particular game, trying to figure out who her husband was. That it actually would’ve been one of the older girls, but yeah, people love to latch onto that story.
Maya Rook: I’m a history teacher. I get papers from people and they outline this because it’s in the sources. We have historians who have said that this happened, based off this one source.
Sarah Jack: I noticed one of the [00:10:00] sources that I think sometimes people come across is the book written by W. N. Gemmill, and he has no sources cited from where he wrote his book.
Sarah Jack: And I was actually going to ask you what materials he may have been looking at when he wrote his book. I find it very interesting that he called the afflicted girls, the circle girls, named the 10 of them, said they were meeting nightly with Tituba. Where did he get that information to write about it?
Sarah Jack: And that was in 1924.
Maya Rook: That was in 1924. Interesting. I was gonna ask that because it makes me wonder now. Marion, L Starkey wrote The Devil in Massachusetts in the forties, and she really plays on this whole thing, but now I wonder if maybe she was looking at his book, and that’s where she got those ideas.
Maya Rook: It very well could have come from his imagination, but there are some sources in the late 1800s that start to play with the idea of Tituba teaching the girls [00:11:00] magic and witchcraft. So it could have just been part of that progression as well.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. I noticed The Witchcraft in Salem Village by John Fisk really paints Tituba in this light, that she was pulling them into her magical world, and he has something cited, but a lot of his descriptions would just be coming from his pen, it appears, so Gemmill would’ve had the opportunity to read Fisk, possibly.
Maya Rook: And if we look back at the first real full-length history in the 1860s by Charles Upham, he says in there that Tituba and John Indian may have originated the Salem Witchcraft.
Maya Rook: So I think he plants the seed there, and then other people pick up on it, and it becomes this legend, really, that has no roots. The only magic that Tituba could have been said to have practiced during the Salem Witch Trials [00:12:00] was her help baking the witch cake, which was an English folk magic custom that was taught to her by Mary Sibley, an English Puritan woman.
It’s so unlikely that Tituba would’ve been teaching the girls these things.
Sarah Jack: And I found it also interesting, when we look at Tituba’s examination and she’s naming witches and asked questions and pressed, she, in that circumstance, is saying, no, I did not bring magic over, but yet many authors and writers have portrayed her as most likely having done that.
Sarah Jack: And we can’t obviously take what she said then as any truth, because her whole thing there is untruth, but I just was like, oh, that’s interesting, she just said, no, I didn’t use magic before.
Maya Rook: That happens with another enslaved woman, as well. There was two others in the trial Candy and Mary Black, and I can’t remember, I think it was Candy who [00:13:00] said this. They ask her, cause she’s from Barbados, if she was made a witch in Barbados and she makes it very clear that she was not. She did not become a witch when she was in her home country, that it happened while she was in Massachusetts.
Maya Rook: So I think that’s very interesting that they’re looking. We look for people to blame even as we get into historical accounts in the 1800s, 1900s, like who could have been, who could have been responsible for this? And the same thing is happening then too, right? People are just pointing fingers, looking like, where could this possibly have been coming from?
Maya Rook: And, in a lot of ways, the only people they can really blame are themselves, because it’s from their own minds and beliefs that all of these fears are originating.
Maya Rook: Yeah. And I don’t know if you found this, I’ve been just researching and teaching on the trials for years, but it’s almost like the more I know, the more I realize what I don’t know, and it just keeps expanding. There’s so many different directions and different paths that you can go down and keep exploring.
Sarah Jack: Absolutely. I think I this week [00:14:00] referred to it as peeling my witch hunt onion. I’m like, oh my goodness, it’s another layer, but I often personally think about seeing the trees for the forest. You just see more and more trees and you see the bark on the trunk and how old that tree is and who else has been looking at that tree.
Sarah Jack: And I don’t know. I totally agree with what you’re saying.
Maya Rook: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Could you elaborate on the witch cake?
Maya Rook: So the witch cake, I always find that one of the most fascinating parts of the trials, and when I tell the sort of narrative of the trials, I think it’s this beautiful way that really draws people in, cause they’re like, oh, witch cake, what could it possibly be? So the witch cake incident happens pretty early on Abigail and Betty have been afflicted. They can’t figure out what’s going on. Then they get diagnosed as being Bewitched. And one day, this would’ve been in February, the Parrises are out of the house and their neighbor, Mary Sibley comes over [00:15:00] and the story goes that she is determined to figure out who the Witch is.
Maya Rook: So she instructs Tituba and her husband, John Indian, they’re both enslaved in the Paris household, how to make a Witch cake. And I believe the earliest records we have of witch cakes is in the early 1600s, but essentially what it is it’s called it’s a combination of sympathetic magic and counter magic. So they take urine from the afflicted girls, which must have been an interesting endeavor so they take the urine from ththe girls. They mix it with rye flour, and then they bake it in the ashes and feed it to a dog. So it’s called sympathetic magic because it’s believed that the witch has this connection to the body of the girls, that she has bewitched them, cursed them.
Maya Rook: So if they can take something out of the girls, like the [00:16:00] urine or hair or blood, something that comes from the body, but the witch has a sympathetic connection to that excrement basically, right? So they take it and then it can be manipulated. So it’s manipulated into this cake form, which I always imagined is probably more like a really hard biscuit, like hard tack or something and that once it’s manipulated, they can do something to it that might affect the witch.
Maya Rook: So there’s some debates about how this actually worked. Some people think that maybe it would make the witch reveal herself. Some people think that it might actually hurt the witch. Some people thought that by feeding it to the dog, it might transfer the bewitchment to the dog. This is also known as counter magic because it was using this folk magic tradition as a way to try to counter the harmful magic of this witch. But in the case of the girls it’s not successful.
Maya Rook: My understanding is that the Witch cake happens [00:17:00] after the examination that they have the confirmation that they’re bewitched. And so then it’s okay, if there bewitched, there must be a witch out there somewhere, who could it be?
Josh Hutchinson: I feel bad for the dog.
Maya Rook: Yeah, me too.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s pretty gross.
Maya Rook: We don’t really know much about the dog. I did find out that other ways that people might use witch cakes would also be to bury them in the ground or to burn them. So there is this element of that the cake is being destroyed in some way. That is so it can cause harm to the Witch.
Josh Hutchinson: So when they burned it, would they have believed that the witch would then be burned?
Maya Rook: My understanding is it would just potentially harm the witch or be able to cut that tie of magic.
Josh Hutchinson: Were other methods of detecting witches employed?
Maya Rook: It seems like with the Salem Witch Trials, a lot of the methods for determining witches were just accusations from people. In the records, people will like, oh, I got an argument with them.
Maya Rook: And a lot of times it’s [00:18:00] livestock, right? Like my livestock got ill suddenly afterwards, or there was some strange incident that occurred after I had an issue with this person. So a lot of times just seems like it’s stories that people then interpret. Okay, then maybe that person is a witch. Once somebody has been accused and if they are arrested for it, they’d be examined.
Maya Rook: So a lot of times they did look for some kind of witches mark on them. So they would usually strip the people naked and then, and look for this mark. Sometimes it was believed, described as like a third nipple or something like that. And I always think the thing with the witch’s mark is if you go looking for it, you’re probably gonna find something. It could be a mole. It could be a skin tag. It could be like a weird birthmark. It could even be a bug bite, just like something that is a little bit different. Cause if you wanna find it, then I think you will.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I think everybody has at least one of those things. But they wouldn’t have used [00:19:00] other folk magic methods for detecting witches?
Maya Rook: Oh I feel like there, there are some incidents that show up, which are not the sort of top of my mind, but I remember encountering them and thinking isn’t this person using folk magic to try to determine if this person is a witch or not?
Josh Hutchinson: But there was a case where they burned a cheese or something and Rachel Clinton showed up or somebody like that, but that might have been an accident.
Sarah Jack: Did it work that time?
Maya Rook: Oh, that I don’t know. It does also make me think though, of some of, one of, one of the incidents was with poppets, which I mentioned before. So poppets are similar to the way we might think of voodoo dolls in popular culture. Whatever you do to the doll or the poppet happens to the person it’s supposed to represent.
Maya Rook: So again, that case with Candy, she confesses to the crime of witchcraft and she says that she has poppets. They ask [00:20:00] if there’s poppets you, I want we wanna see them. So they allow her to go and retrieve the poppets and she comes back with like some grass and some rags, a handkerchief, that’s tied into knots and it’s described that they, afflicted girls say, oh she, she plays with the handkerchief and that’s what torments us. So they ask candy to untie the knots. It doesn’t do anything. They make her eat the grass that doesn’t do anything either the girls are still afflicted. So then the magistrates start playing with the handkerchiefs and trying to see, oh if we do it, will it stop the affliction?
Maya Rook: So I’m reading this. I’m like, okay, the magistrates are playing with magic right now. And I love it cuz it gets really out of hand where they try to burn one of the rags and then the girls complain of being burned. They dump it in water. They act like they’re drowning. Someone runs out towards the river.
Maya Rook: So it’s just this incident where things really start to go off the rails. the trials.
Sarah Jack: We need an illustration of that little segment [00:21:00] for sure.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s amazing. The magistrates are doing witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: I can just see the. Comic strip or the, the graphic novel art on that one.
Maya Rook: Absolutely.
Josh Hutchinson: I know there were some other methods of divination. Could you tell us about those?
Maya Rook: I do know. So the Venus glass and egg, or the oomancy definitely shows up. And then the other one that stood out to me was the sieve and scissors, which also goes back to again like ancient Greece. And that shows up a couple times in the trials.
Maya Rook: And I remember one of the cases, the sieve and scissors is just basically a way another fortune telling technique where you turn, I think you like turn the sieve with the scissors. And in one of the cases, the person who was being examined said that. She ended up confessing that she was using it to try to find [00:22:00] something out.
Maya Rook: And this basically led to her making, being approached by the devil and making a pact with him. So it’s almost shown as like a gateway drug, where it’s she was messing around with the sieve and scissors and thought it was this innocent way to figure out the future, and then all of a sudden she’s in the pact with the devil.
Maya Rook: So it’s almost like they planted this little seed and she admitted to playing with that. And then it just spun out into this larger tale.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking some of the other accused witches that entered into a pact with the devil, they were approached at night in their beds. I believe some of them. So this, I wonder this is interesting, cuz that is very different if it happened, like while she was working with her magic.
Maya Rook: Yeah. It’s Sarah Hawks. And she says she confesses at this last spring, after she had turned the sieve and scissors, the devil came to [00:23:00] her and got a promise of her, and then it goes on and says, she saith she went to the Salem Village meeting of witches with Goody Carrier. She promised to serve the devil three or four years and to give him her soul and body and that she signed a paper he offered to her.
Maya Rook: So there’s this very simple folk magic custom. And then yeah, right away, the devil is there.
Sarah Jack: He’s there. She’s got a contract with details.
Maya Rook: It’s crazy.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, I believe there were a couple people who were supposedly practicing fortune tellers or soothsayers. Is that right?
Maya Rook: Yeah. Dorcas Hoar, who is one of my favorites in the trials was said to be able to tell people’s fortunes. So that comes up and it also is said that she was able to tell her own fortune that she predicted that basically, that she would have a miserable life while her husband was still alive.
Maya Rook: But then after he died that she, she would come [00:24:00] into better fortune. And so then this comes, this is oh, this came true. So she predicted her own fortune. I always thought that was really funny. But yeah, I know she is, and then there’s a man as well.
Maya Rook: Yeah. Dorcas also had it said she had an elf lock, so her hair was like knotted together. I imagine like a giant dreadlock, and it was said to be four feet long. And they believed that it was a place where she could hold power. So during her trial, they actually cut her elf lock off. Which was, yeah, I think that’s should be considered torture. You shouldn’t just cut somebody’s hair they’ve been growing for that long off of them.
Josh Hutchinson: That sounds like Samson, cut his hair off and he loses his power.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if what they did with the hair, I’d like to know, did they bury it? Did they burn it? Did they construct something out of it? I don’t know. I wanna know. I wonder what color hair she had.
Sarah Jack: It’d be just interesting, [00:25:00] if she had like a really dynamic hair color too, or maybe it wasn’t.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I don’t think they remarked about hair colors very often. Except when they’re describing like George Burroughs as being dark, he might have had dark hair.
Maya Rook: Yeah. And I think she probably was, I think she was on the older side, so she might have had gray hair also.
Josh Hutchinson: They were accused of doing so many things that they couldn’t have done. Could you tell us Some of the powers that the witches were said to have?
Maya Rook: The powers, when with the Salem Witch Trials, it seems like a lot of the powers that these men and women were said to have was really having this like power to harm over the people of Salem, the power to change into different forms. So you have these instances where somebody’s like turning into a cat or turning into, I think a Wolf follows one of them home, turning into a bird and they could change shape that they [00:26:00] could harm people in different shapes that they could actually appear in the shape of somebody else as well. And so tricking people.
Maya Rook: So that you’d think that one person was there, but it was, the witch was actually just throwing their specter around. So that’s pretty big, and the use of their specter to be able to leave their bodies and to go to other locations would be a major power .Of being able to fly as well.
Maya Rook: We do see incidents, reports that the witches would fly. And I think we might have mentioned this before, but like the, these meetings and Sabbaths of the witches where they would gather together in the darkness of night. And a lot of times, and we see, especially with the Salem Witch Trials, they’re kind of inverting Christian practices.
Maya Rook: So they talk about these, basically these dark sacraments, like they’re drinking blood and reversing a communion during the Sabbath
Josh Hutchinson: I get [00:27:00] confused on their flying, because Tituba describes it as she gets on a pole and then she’s instantly at her destination, but then there’s descriptions of Martha carrier or somebody maybe Abigail Faulkner actually their pole breaks and they crash to the ground.
Josh Hutchinson: So they’re actually in the air moving.
Maya Rook: Yeah, the one that always stands out to me is Tituba she’s like and we we were there presently. Like they just, all of a sudden she’s, many miles away from where they started. Maybe the, they couldn’t always get their stories straight about what these witches were doing. They just knew that, they were doing it, they were doing something terrible and evil in the night.
I was just wondering when you spoke about the witches that would have tricked their victims into thinking they were somebody else, is there any specific case that we know that was in?
Maya Rook: Yeah nothing specific is bubbling to the surface right now. But [00:28:00] I do know that this kind of is one of the things that made people call it into question. When people start questioning the trials, it’s do we actually know that the specters that are appearing are of the people that they appear to be.
Maya Rook: It could this be another trick? How much can we trust that it’s actually them?
Josh Hutchinson: Increase Mather. He seems to imply that the devil could be impersonating an angel of light. How widespread do you think his belief was towards the end of the trial? Was that something that was catching on and affecting the outcomes?
Maya Rook: I think that it definitely catches on you start to see the doubt really creeping in really around this time of year. As we wrap up September, begin to get into October. And I think that, this community has been through so much over the last few months and there’s a lot of fear that kind of fear can only.
Maya Rook: Sustain itself for a certain amount of [00:29:00] time. It’s really difficult to live with that kind of mindset where you’re suspicious of everybody and you’re afraid you’re gonna be Bewitched and people are watching really horrible things happening. You have Dorothy Good. Who’s a child who’s been in prison for months at this point in time.
Maya Rook: Her mother and her infant sibling are dead. You have a man has, who’s been pressed to death. He’s been tortured to death in front of everybody. You’ve had a former Reverend who’s been hanged. You’ve had people who are full members of their church being excommunicated and hanged. So I think that, and then for other people, their loved ones are in prison.
Maya Rook: And they’re about to face the winter time. They know it’s gonna be really horrible conditions and people become desperate. They wanna get people. And I think it begins to shift people’s mindsets. You start seeing the petitions increasing September, October. And so I think that idea, people are looking for ways to start prove it the [00:30:00] other way.
Maya Rook: And so like that kind of that that comment, the devil could be tricking them. I think it becomes very valid in people’s minds.
Maya Rook: And I think people were starting to realize that, the people who are dead, what if they were wrong? They can’t bring them back, but maybe they can prevent other innocent from people from dying.
Josh Hutchinson: Who are the afflicted girls as a group, and who are some of the individuals that are key?
I was looking back in my notes today and in Marilynne K. Roach’s book, she has a, an incredible index, and she lists 73 people total as being afflicted.
Maya Rook: So it’s really high. But a lot of times when we talk about the people who are afflicted, we’re talking about this smaller group and it’s just about 10 girls. So two of the really big names where it starts would be Abigail Williams and Betty Paris. They’re the ones that have the initial afflictions and they’re only nine and 11 years old.
Maya Rook: So they’re quite young and they [00:31:00] are an interesting case cuz they, they live in the Reverend Samuel Parris’s household. So this place, this home where he’s supposed to be this spiritual leader in the community and that’s where it all starts. It’s almost like something was rotten at its core, in Salem, and it’s in his home, and there’s a lot of theories about what could have started their afflictions, but it is the spark I think that leads to everything that happens. And it doesn’t stop with them. It spreads to all these other people. So Ann Putnam Jr would be one of the other major names, and she’s probably one of the most in a lot of ways, one of the most well known, because she makes an apology several years later. So Ann Putnam was just about 12 years old and she’s becomes one of the most active people in the trials.
Maya Rook: Abigail Williams sticks around, as well. She’s also well known, because she’s transformed into a character in the play of The Crucible. Now Betty Paris, interestingly drops off [00:32:00] from the trials. They remove her from the situation just maybe a month after the trials start, because she’s not getting better and they don’t want her to be a part of everything that’s going on in Salem.
Maya Rook: But Ann Putnam goes on to become so active, her mother as well. Her family makes a lot of accusations, and it seems like there’s ties of other young girls to Ann Putnam. So she’s been presented a lot of times almost as like a ringleader of the afflicted girls. And she’s the only one to ever apologize for her role in the trials, which is a whole thing we could unpack, because that apology, it happens many years later, and essentially she wants to join the church, and to do she has to make this public apology. And I can give her props. And I’m like, you did say that you were sorry. And she does specifically name Rebecca Nurse and her [00:33:00] role in that trial. But she also says that she was tricked, that she was deluded by Satan. She deflects and is almost like I didn’t really know what I was doing.
Maya Rook: Yeah. So I go back and forth. Depends on what kind of mood I’m in if I’m like gonna be kind to Ann Putnam Jr or not. ,
Josh Hutchinson: It’s like the devil made me do it.
Sarah Jack: I’ve seen in some comments from descendants or just people researching and commenting on social media. They recognize that for them, the devil was an actual you know a real problem, that he was pulling people in. And if she still believed that but was sorry that she got pulled in, then it’s an easier apology pill to swallow. But I know the first time that I read that, cuz Rebecca nurse is my ancestor. So I was like, that’s what apology that the Nurses got for that.
Sarah Jack: But reflecting [00:34:00] on just who, what player the devil was in the problems that happened, then I cool off for a minute.
Maya Rook: Yeah. And Ann Putnam, Jr. also, she didn’t have a very good life. Her parents die. She ends up taking care of her siblings. She’s the eldest. And she dies pretty young as well. And she never marries. So I don’t think that things turned out very well for her.
Maya Rook: I’d love to give the ages because we, a lot of times we think of ’em or like oh the afflicted girls. And so in our imaginations, they’re all pretty young. Like they’re children, but Betty and Abigail are the youngest, so they’re 9 and 11. Ann Putnam, Jr. Is 12, and then we jump up. So Elizabeth Hubbard is 17, Mary Walcott is 17, Mercy Lewis is 18, Mary Warren is 18, Susannah Shelden is 18, Elizabeth Booth is 18, and Sarah Churchill is 25. And she’s [00:35:00] put in with the afflicted girl group, which seems like she’s a little bit old to be hanging out with them.
Maya Rook: But they’re the ones who are pointed to as being this core group of the afflicted girls.
Josh Hutchinson: But then there were also some afflicted adults as well. Weren’t there?
Maya Rook: There were, there was many afflicted I already mentioned, like Ann Putnam’s mother also becomes afflicted and yeah, 73 total are in Roach’s accounts that she’s put together from the records, which is a lot. Even John Indian, Tituba’s husband, becomes one of the afflicted.
Maya Rook: And my guess with him is that I always wonder did they have some way that they met with each other and they talked and, are just like, you need to save yourself basically by pretending like you are afflicted. Otherwise you’re gonna get accused as well.
Josh Hutchinson: I know Mary Warren, she starts as afflicted, but then she gets accused herself.
Maya Rook: She does get accused herself. Yeah. She is afflicted. And then she begins to say that she’s like getting better. Yeah, she’s [00:36:00] doing well. And so there’s this reaction from the afflicted girls and say it’s because she’s actually a witch. And if you look at her trial records, It just goes back and forth. It’s so intense where she appears to be both afflicted and being accused of afflicting others at the same time. Yeah. So pretty wild case.
Sarah Jack: One of the things that you mentioned in one of your podcast episodes that I listened to recently was you pointed out that the afflicted girls don’t really have, we don’t have their perspective.
Sarah Jack: I think that is a huge hole, but I was just thinking, oh we have Ann Putnam, Jr’s apology, we have a little bit, she’s still connecting it to trickery of the devil. And then you mentioned this gal who was afflicted and accusing. So we really have very little of their perspective. What would they say about it? We don’t know. We know what they were [00:37:00] saying about what was happening,
Maya Rook: We are so blessed to have all of these records from the trials, but they’re also, they’re not perfect records, right? It’s not like there was a video and a microphone that was recording everything.
Maya Rook: You have people who are in the room who are writing things down while it’s happening. You also have people who are writing things down afterwards and summarizing what went on. And we don’t know exactly, sometimes there’s direct quotes written down, but how accurate are they? So it is interesting.
Maya Rook: While we have descriptions of what the girls were saying and doing, and maybe even particular things they said during a case, we don’t actually have anything that’s from them. It’s this is what my experience was. It’s one of the reasons I really love if you’re familiar with Katherine Howe the writer she wrote this book conversion, and she plays with a present day situation, but she links it back to the trials, and we see it through [00:38:00] Ann Putnam’s eyes. And, obviously there’s a lot of things that are being fabricated there, but I just appreciated adding this human element to it. What would it have been like to be a 12 year old girl during this time? And how might you get pulled into this situation?
Josh Hutchinson: Could it have been stress related, specifically in the Paris household?
Maya Rook: Yeah. That kind of gets into the, again, the conversion disorder theory that, people will take things, mental anguish, and then convert them into physical symptoms so that these girls could have been experiencing intense emotion, stress, pressure, whatever, and then it manifests this way that they might not even been aware necessarily that they were doing it at least, perhaps not in the beginning, when the symptoms start.
Maya Rook: So the Paris household does seem like it was a pretty intense place. And I think that there probably was a lot of pressure, because things were not going very well for Reverend Paris.
Maya Rook: And he was upset about his situation as a [00:39:00] Reverend not getting enough, people weren’t really coming to the meetings. He wasn’t getting the proper pay and the firewood that he was supposed to be getting. So there could have been a lot of pressure on the family. Like they’re hearing about all of these issues that are going on.
Maya Rook: And then at the same time, we don’t know for sure, but perhaps, he wanted his children to present themselves in a particular way. Like they’re an example to the rest of the community that he would’ve wanted them to display their good, puritan behavior. So I think that it is quite likely that they could have been experiencing stress that would manifest this way.
Maya Rook: Yeah, I think of all the theories about why the girls were afflicted. The conversion disorder offers me the most substance. There’s probably a lot of other factors going on, but I think that that one comes up for me a lot.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking about when it started, and the congregation would’ve been hearing the reverend’s children are [00:40:00] afflicted. The other thing that I think about is how he was in a lot of stress with his congregation. There was a huge financial stress there for him, and then you look at the trials and over the course of it, how costly it was for all those villagers, all those church members. I just think that’s very interesting. Everyone was having a hardship, these families who had their loved ones in the prison. I think it was Giles Cory, he didn’t get to go on the ferry to say goodbye, because he couldn’t afford it.
Maya Rook: He’s been popping up this just the, anniversary of his pressing to death. But I think that’s a great point about the finances, and I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize was just how much it cost to be in prison, and people were racking up a bill the entire time. They’re paying for the chains that hold them in place. They’re paying for, whatever kind of like food or water they [00:41:00] might be getting. And so it was really hard even to get bailed out, because the bills could get so high and a lot of people just didn’t have money. And that’s what happens with Dorothy Good being so little, under the age of five, but it took another person coming in to pay for her bail so that she could actually be released, cuz her father couldn’t do it.
Josh Hutchinson: With the afflicted girls and maybe some of the root causes, some of them were refugees from the war, and I wonder how that might have affected them.
Maya Rook: Yeah. So there was a lot of warfare going on in the areas of the frontier at the time. So actually I’m up in Maine. And so the trials, people don’t realize all the time, but they affected as high up as here.
Maya Rook: So there was warfare going on, and some of these girls have been orphaned. Some of them are refugees. They’ve experienced war and death and that fear firsthand. [00:42:00] So again, if we look at that idea that these girls might be converting some of their stress, if they’re suffering from what today, we would call post traumatic stress disorder. If they’re converting that into these afflictions it makes a lot of sense. They’ve experienced really horrific situations being in warfare, losing their families. And then there’s also this kind of association with being on the frontier and being closer to the indigenous people, and in these areas were seen as being very dark, that there was more opportunities for the devil to be out, to be lurking. So even when they lived in these areas for however long they might have been there, they probably also had a lot of things planted in their minds, a lot of fear about where they were and that the devil could be just around the corner, ready to lure them away.
Josh Hutchinson: I know Abigail Hobbs, she mentioned that when she lived at [00:43:00] Casco Bay, which is the area that’s now Portland, that’s where she got converted to witchcraft. I happen to be related to Mercy Lewis. I have a theory that some of these afflicted girls, another thing that they did was bring these stories down to the Salem villagers. Mercy Lewis lived in the household with Ann Putnam Jr., so she must have shared some memories at some time. And I wonder how that could have affected the younger children.
Maya Rook: Yeah. I think that if those stories were being shared, then I think that would’ve a big effect. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and if they’re being told stories about firsthand accounts of warfare, that’s like getting a horror story, horror movie, put into your mind, except it’s very real. So I think that could have definitely contributed to a lot of fear that they experienced.
Maya Rook: And it also seems to have contributed to their descriptions of the afflictions or like [00:44:00] seeing, they might describe people that look like indigenous people as being associated with the devil. So sometimes it seems as though they’re pulling from those experiences that they had on the frontier.
Maya Rook: Between the three of us, we probably have a lot of ancestors in the Salem Witch Trials, and we could be related. That’s possible.
Josh Hutchinson: We could well be I’ve found about 72 connections so far to the Witch Trials either directly or aunt, uncle, cousin, that kind of thing. And I know I’m related to Sarah, because we’re both descendants of Mary Esty.
Maya Rook: Oh, wow. Yeah, my big one is the justice Dudley Bradstreet. So I’m descended from the sort of the Bradstreet clan of the Mass Bay Colony, and he was responsible for issuing a lot of arrest warrants. And then when he said, I’m not gonna do this anymore, and he steps [00:45:00] down from his position, he refuses to issue any more warrants, he’s pretty much immediately accused of Witchcraft, but he flees the area and this waits basically until things have settled down for to come back again.
Josh Hutchinson: He was accused, but I don’t believe he was ever indicted.
Maya Rook: No, he’s just accused. I don’t think there was any like arrest warrants or anything put out for him. And this would’ve happened in September. So things are already starting to they’re intensifying with the trials themselves, but other areas are winding down. And I think because he was a more prominent individual, it probably protected him a bit in that way, too.
Josh Hutchinson: I noticed that some of the other critics, like Samuel Willard was speaking out about it, and somebody would name them, and then the other adults in the room would say, not him.
Maya Rook: Having some element of power, prestige in the community definitely seemed to help, but not always.
Josh Hutchinson: They did go after the Englishes pretty hard, and John Alden.
Sarah Jack: [00:46:00] One of the things I wanted to ask you about Tituba was you mentioned how her image has changed over time. And I thought that is such a very important point. And what we know more of her now is newer and it hasn’t really taken center stage for her yet of who she is. She’s still followed by the previous descriptions of her, but I thought that was a really important point that you made about her.
Maya Rook: Tituba has shape shifted so much over the years, and I always like to point people towards Elaine Breslaw’s work, because I think she was really instrumental in giving us a clearer image of who Tituba really was. So a lot of times Tituba is presented as being an enslaved black woman of African descent to the point where it’s just taken at sort of face value that’s [00:47:00] who she was.
Maya Rook: And that went through a whole development, but I really see The Crucible as a thing that fully cemented it in people’s minds. But if we look back at her life, it appears she was actually an indigenous person, likely from South America and that she was kidnapped and taken to Barbados where she lived and then was purchased by Samuel Parris, served him, and then was brought to Massachusetts. And part of the evidence I love looking at language, and I think that it’s really helpful when we look at the records, because if you look at the way that Tituba is described in every account, it’s Indian servant, Indian woman, Indian servant woman. But like her racial and cultural identifier is always Indian. And then we know from other aspects that she was purchased from Barbados.
Maya Rook: So because of the way the Puritans saw the world, if a person had any African [00:48:00] features, if there was any chance of African ancestry, if they were black at all, they would’ve used the term Negro to describe them in the court records. And we do see that with two other individuals, as you mentioned before, candy and Mary Black, but we don’t see that with Tituba and in all the accounts afterwards, anything that’s written about her, the years immediately following the trials, there’s no indication. So it’s really not until the 1800s that transformation occurs. And at first she’s presented as oftentimes being quote “half Negro”, ” half Indian,” or “half savage”.
Maya Rook: And then at some point, even the indigenous connection drops off, and she’s presented as being a black woman. And then by the time we get to The Crucible, it’s she’s doing things in the woods with chickens and it gets into almost like she’s practicing voodoo and all of this stuff. And that’s the way that she’s largely been remembered in our culture. I have a whole presentation, talk, discussion around this. I’m like, I wanna get it out in the [00:49:00] world of who Tituba really was, as much as we can understand her.
Maya Rook: Although I do think that it’s important that she be has become a figure for other people, there is literature and artwork and poetry of Tituba as the black witch of Salem that is very meaningful to people, so I don’t think we should dismiss that either. But she is a figure that has taken many different forms over the years.
Sarah Jack: It’s so relatable to the actual portrayal of witches over the centuries, how that image has changed.
Maya Rook: It’s really fascinating to see how that’s developed over time. And that’s been some of my favorite research, actually has been on Tituba and diving into what do we know about her? And then looking at the historiography, how have historians portrayed her over time and tracing that development and watching the shifts and how has literature impacted it.
Maya Rook: Because even in the late 1800s, a couple plays come out that include [00:50:00] Tituba that start having her practicing magic, that have her as half black, half Indian. And it almost seems like that literature, those cultural elements enter the scene and then historians actually get inspired by that.
Maya Rook: And then they put that into their stories, right? So there’s this back and forth going on, this interplay between the popular culture and the historical work, that form the image of Tituba.
Sarah Jack: That’s a beautiful explanation of it. I agree with you. I think that who she has symbolized and what she has meant to so many writers and anybody, I think any type of positive strength that one of these victims can be for their descendants or for someone who just looks at them and recognizes they were in a really awful situation and they survived.
Maya Rook: And it’s one of the great mysteries of [00:51:00] the Salem Witch Trials is what happened to Tituba. She’s the first to confess, one of the first people to be imprisoned. And she’s one of the last people to be set free. And then we just have no idea. She’s disappears.
Sarah Jack: I hope we find out I that’s one of the things I love about witch trial history is, you never know what’s gonna pop up in a journal or on a record someone’s looking at. It’s right there, and we’re gonna find out.
Sarah Jack: That’s what I hope.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. One of our hopes is that all of the victims will be known as the humans that they were.
Sarah Jack: Absolutely.
Maya Rook: I love that.
Sarah Jack: And I think talking about the history and the different pieces that are interesting to people gives us the opportunity to talk about the individuals. So the ones that came up in our discussion today, that’s humanizing them, and we’re looking at the situation they were in and thinking about them as an individual. I think it’s one of the other great things [00:52:00] about talking about witch trials.
Maya Rook: Yeah. And I think to go back to where we started this discussion around folk magic, it’s that, a lot of people are drawn to Salem because of the, oh was there real magic? There’s witches, you know what’s going on there? And it’s so magical and spooky, and that captures people’s attention. But if you can use that as a hook to draw people in and then present this very human story, that’s where the real power is, I think. And that’s where people make a true connection to what happened.
Josh Hutchinson: In many ways, Salem is so sensationalized. The witchcraft element is really played up, magical aspects and possibilities are played up. But I think that, like you said, is a good way to draw people in and get them interested in the history. And the true story is so much more powerful to me than those legends out there about the magic in witchcraft, the story about [00:53:00] the persecution and the endurance of a lot of those people going through that suffering.
Sarah Jack: I was gonna ask Maya if she wanted to share anything from her, what you’re working on or, what you would like to say today about your work?
Maya Rook: Yeah. So in my sort of general life, I wear many different hats.
Maya Rook: I’m a cultural historian, I teach college history, and I’m also a yoga meditation instructor, but the Salem Witch Trials has just been this longstanding passion in my life and especially with my work with education and researching history. So a lot of this has culminated in recent years, I’ve created just many different talks.
Maya Rook: So we’ve talk touched on some of those topics already, like the folk magic, the afflicted girls, Tituba. I have one looking at, specific people that are involved in the trials, like the first people to be accused [00:54:00] of witchcraft, Salem in popular culture. All these different elements. So all these different dives.
Maya Rook: And then one of the other ways that I’ve been presenting this work to the world is through my Salem Oracle account, which is, I think how I’ve got connected with both of you. So @SalemOracle on Instagram and Twitter is a day by day account of the Salem Witch Trials. And so I try to use this like daily touch in, on the trials as a way to make it more real for people. I found as a historian, especially when you’re telling a story about I have a one, one of my, big talks is just like the Salem Witch Trials. It’s an overview. We pack a lot into an hour for that particular talk. But there’s certain things you just have to gloss over and, be like over the course of these three months, blah, blah, blah, this happened.
Maya Rook: So to go into the day by day details of it really makes you, I think, have a better sense of what really happened and what it might have been like to [00:55:00] watch this unfold in person. So this is the second time around the second year that I’m doing it. I did this once before with the Donner party actually similar idea, and I did that for three.
Maya Rook: And every year you learn something new, and it becomes more real and it becomes more human. So I think we’ve already really touched on, a big part of what I wanna do with this work is to humanize the trials, to make the past something that people can relate to, to understand, to touch and to look at.
Maya Rook: And I also love the magical element, the sensationalism, but to be able to separate those two things to appreciate the sort of that fun, magical quality, but then to be able to see the trials for what they were and the people for what they were, not as witches but as human beings.
Maya Rook: So I think that’s a really important part of the work here.
Josh Hutchinson: To touch on pop culture, which is another thing you talk about I like to separate the pop culture from the fact, [00:56:00] because a lot of the pop culture it’s off base, but it’s entertaining. And you can learn a little bit from every movie that comes out that’s about witch trials. So what are some of your favorite pop culture elements about Salem?
Maya Rook: I will say my favorite pop culture witch probably is Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the version played by Melissa Joan Hart. Sabrina spent through many different iterations, but the show that came out in the nineties. And there are some connections, of course, to Salem. She has a cat named Salem, who’s actually a warlock who is being punished by having to be in a cat’s body for like a hundred years or something like that, but he’s named Salem. But early on in the show, they actually do like a field trip to Salem, her school does, and she’s afraid. She’s like I don’t wanna go to Salem. I’m not going. They weren’t very kind to witches, and her aunts were like, [00:57:00] oh, you don’t have to be afraid. There were no real witches in Salem. Only thing you have to be worried about. There is overpriced souvenirs so you know they have fun. They play with that kind of stuff
Maya Rook: On a more like more serious note, I think one of my favorite pop culture, representations of witches in New England, it’s not specific to Salem, but the movie The Witch that came out a few years ago, I think is really incredible and really powerful. And I really like that they didn’t make it about the Salem Witch Trials, that they fabricated the story about a family, like basically on the frontier, which we’ve been talking about, that element on the edge of the settlement, by themselves and fears that develop around the daughter being a witch, because it allows us to look at what common beliefs around witches and witchcraft were at that time through the lens of this family. But we don’t have to worry about is this accurate to Salem or not? It’s almost like its own [00:58:00] little case study, little horror movie. And I just found from my studies of the Puritans in general of Mass Bay Colony, of the Salem Witch Trials, of my understanding of witches and witchcraft, I just thought they captured so much there.
Maya Rook: It really immerses you in the experience, so I think that’s a really incredible pop culture portrayal of witches during this time or fears around witches, rather I should say.
Maya Rook: And I think something that’s interesting about Salem is that even if people don’t know the details of the Salem Witch Trials, almost everybody in the United States has heard of the Salem Witch Trials. They have some idea, some association, so it shows up in pop culture a lot. There’s a lot of mistakes that are made. I’m sure you’ve encountered this many times, where you have this, a popular depiction and a kind of offhand thing about Salem, and it’s like about witches being burned, and we’re on the sidelines. No, no witches were burned. They were hanged , but it’s just the way that people, they just make this [00:59:00] assumption about it.
Maya Rook: So we see that show up a lot throughout our culture, I think. But it’s becoming little more nuanced. It, it does seem like people are interested in actually learning about what happened during the trials, which I I’m really happy to see, and it’s not, it’s really not that difficult to get a good, solid rundown of more. I have a hard time as a historian saying like the truth, because that’s always iffy, but just getting a more, maybe a more clear picture of what really happened during this time.
Maya Rook: This has really been a pleasure. I appreciate that you asked me to participate in this. I love that you are putting this podcast together and you’re gonna be sharing this and bringing in different people for interviews.
Maya Rook: There’s just so much to, to explore in this realm. And the more ways that we have to do it, I think the better.
Josh Hutchinson: I feel like we could go on the three of us chatting for hours about this because we’re all interested in the same thing. And it’s been really [01:00:00] lovely to meet you, and you’ve been a great guest.
Maya Rook: Yeah. Thank you both. Yeah.
Sarah Jack: Thanks, Maya.
Maya Rook: All right. Bye everybody.
Sarah Jack: Bye.
Josh Hutchinson: Bye.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for sharing how ongoing witch hunts are affecting another part of the world, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You’re welcome.
Sarah Jack: And now we’ll hear from Tom Mattingly in Jami Milne of Ballet Des Moines about their upcoming ballet Salem.
Tom Mattingly: I have always loved ballet as a vehicle for storytelling, and I think that there can be so much left to interpretation with the subject of witchcraft and that interpretation lends itself really well to ballet. So what I’ve done with Salem is I’ve taken inspiration from the historical events to create a fictional story, one that could have happened during the time, but isn’t necessary a recreation of actual events.
Tom Mattingly: Fear itself is very powerful, and when we [01:01:00] are led by fear rather than reason, there are horrific consequences.
Tom Mattingly: The character of fear is very important to this ballet. Fear is played by one of the male dancers in our company, and he is not a townsperson of Salem, but he is a constant presence and influence on the entire cast, so he really interacts a lot with the girl. The girl is the one who is making the accusations of witchcraft. She feels fearful from the pressures of the people around her, and especially her father, the preacher, to continue accusing and testifying against the people of Salem.
Tom Mattingly: The Salem Witch Trials has always been a captivating subject. One of the main reasons I chose the witch trials for a ballet is because I knew it was something that would capture people’s attention.
Tom Mattingly: I hope that people are moved by what they see and think about how they view others, if they’re viewing others with kindness, [01:02:00] with the benefit of the doubt, if they’re giving a chance to these people that they don’t know. I hope that they are inspired to learn more about the Salem Witch Trials themselves.
Tom Mattingly: It is a fictional story that I’m creating, but every element is based on historical fact. A lot of it is different people from the past kind of combined into become one character, like the Mathers with our preacher. There is one character who attempts to defend his wife, who has been accused, and he himself gets accused of witchcraft and demonic possession. Even down to the costuming, it’s going to be a modern reinterpretation but based on the strict puritan dress codes of the time with the muted colors, being covered up, those natural fibers, no lace, no ribbons, very much bare bones, utilitarian in a lot of ways.
Tom Mattingly: Same thing with the set design, too, of these furniture pieces that can be used in many different configurations so that [01:03:00] our meeting house can serve as a place of worship. It can serve as the home for the trials themselves in the courthouse. Our set even has a different modular design to become the gallows when one of the characters is hanged.
Jami Milne: Tom and I were talking just this last week, and he said, “everyone knows the end of the story here. There’s not a surprise, because we all know the Salem Witch Trials and what happened.”
Jami Milne: I don’t want anyone to forget the power of a somber ending and this idea that great change can come, feeling so emotionally disrupted that you have no choice but to think differently upon leaving. And I think that will really be the power of audiences walking in the doors and then leaving with very different emotional state.
The music for Salem will primarily be Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
Tom Mattingly:Rite of Spring is typically the story of ritual sacrifice, and in a way, [01:04:00] I feel like that’s what happened with the Salem Witch Trials. It became this ritual of accusations, trials, and hangings that just continued over and over until it was finally put to an end. And it’s an amazing score. It’s difficult as a dancer, because it’s difficult to count and the melodies are so surprising, but the overall effect, I think, is incredible, and it takes this kind of animalistic quality. And the dancers are really able to embody it, especially in these group scenes at the church or at the gallows. It’s really moving.
Tom Mattingly:Salem will be performed at the Stoner Studio Theater in downtown Des Moines, October 20th through the 29th.
Tom Mattingly: Tickets can be purchased at balletdesmoines.org.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you all for listening to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Josh Hutchinson: You want to set your calendar for this one, folks. Next week, we’ll be talking with the renowned [01:05:00] historian and emeritus professor Dr. Malcolm Gaskill, author of Witchfinders, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction,Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, and The Ruin of all Witches: Death and Desire in an Age of Enchantment, which releases in the United States on November 1st. That book details the story of a witch trial in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Josh Hutchinson: Once you hear that episode, you will have to buy that book immediately at your local book seller or online, and you’ll be thrilled.
Sarah Jack: He wrote it. We’re talking about. We’re so excited to have this special opportunity. This timely opportunity.
Josh Hutchinson: We’re excited to have this opportunity to introduce this book to you.
Sarah Jack: You’re gonna buy it.
Sarah Jack: [01:06:00] Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: And check out our website, thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Sarah Jack: Our website will keep you up to date on what’s happening with our podcast.
Sarah Jack: You can look forward to our upcoming weekly newsletters.
What if history’s most infamous witch hunt could have been stopped with just a few different decisions? We’re examining the pivotal moments between January 1692 and May 1693 when someone—anyone—could have pumped the brakes on Salem’s runaway train of accusations.
From the shocking arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good to Martha Carrier’s unfortunate promotion to “Queen of Hell,” we’ll explore how escalating choices transformed a local crisis into colonial America’s most notorious legal disaster. We’ll meet the key players who either fanned the flames or tried to douse them—including Cotton Mather’s mixed messages and Governor Phips’ late-in-the-game reality check.
Join us as we dissect the moments when cooler heads could have prevailed and discover how 45 residents of unlucky Andover got swept up in accusations that would make even the devil blush. Sometimes it takes a village—or several villages—to create a catastrophe.
Welcome back to the Witch Hunt Podcast. This is the final episode in the four part series:The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief. If you’re just joining us, we recommend checking out the previous series episodes first, though this episode can certainly stand on its own.
This completes our Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft conversation with Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, expert on Devil lore.
In Part 1 we began examining the critical relationship that developed between demons and witchcraft specifically in the 15th century. In Part 2, we delved deeper into how this connection became the driving force behind the witch hunts that devastated communities across Europe. In parts 3 and 4 we reveal shocking and informing details on the Malleus Maleficarum and its authors Heinrich Kramer, aka Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger. Thank you for joining us as we conclude this chilling and fascinating exploration of how demonology fueled witch persecution.
Today we conclude our series: The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief with Professor Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, an expert in medieval devil lore, with another double episode release. If you’re just joining us, we recommend checking out the previous series episodes first, though this episode can certainly stand on its own.
In this episode, part 3 of the series, Dr. Raiswell takes us into the minds and lives of Heinrich Kramer, aka Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger, the authors of the 15th century witch-hunting book, the Hammer of Witches, formally known as the Malleus Maleficarum.
This Dr. Raiswell series is essential for understanding how theological concepts about Satan evolved into specific witchcraft accusations and largely gendered persecution mechanisms that still influence witch hunting today.
The full series, in four parts, is available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to the Witch Hunt Podcast. This is episode 2 in the The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief. If you’re just joining us, we recommend checking out Part 1 first, though this episode can certainly stand on its own.
This marks the continuation of our conversation with Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us for our fascinating “Speak of the Devil” episode where we explored Satan as one of history’s most enduring and complex figures.
In Part 1 of we began examining the critical relationship that developed between demons and witchcraft specifically in the 15th century. Now in Part 2, we’ll delve deeper into how this connection became the driving force behind the witch hunts that devastated communities across Europe.
Professor Raiswell continues to guide us through how theological concepts about Satan evolved into specific accusations and persecution mechanisms. His expertise in medieval devil lore brings clarity to one of history’s darkest chapters.
Remember, both parts of this special episode are available now wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for joining us as we continue this chilling and fascinating exploration of how demonology fueled witch persecution. Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available now wherever you get your podcasts.
We have a special treat for our listeners this week – not one but two new episodes dropping simultaneously! Today marks the return of Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us for our fascinating “Speak of the Devil” episode where we explored Satan as one of history’s most enduring and complex figures.
In this two-part special, The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief, Professor Raiswell takes us deeper into the dark intersection where demonology meets witch persecution. We’ll explore the critical relationship that developed between demons and witchcraft specifically in the 15th century – a connection that would become the driving force behind the witch hunts.
If you enjoyed our previous exploration of devil lore, these episodes are essential listening, as Professor Raiswell helps us understand how theological concepts about Satan evolved into specific accusations and persecution mechanisms.
Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available now wherever you get your podcasts.
In his return to Witch Hunt Podcast, Antonio Stuckey joins hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack to discuss his research and book “Sober and Civil,” chronicling the remarkable life of Salem witch trials survivor Sarah Cloyse. As the younger sister of executed victims Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty, Sarah Cloyse’s nine-month imprisonment represents a powerful chapter in Massachusetts witch trial history—one with personal significance to both hosts, who count her among their ancestors.
Antonio shares how his focused research through court documents and historical records revealed the multidimensional woman behind the accusation—the same figure who inspired the PBS miniseries “Three Sovereigns for Sarah.” The conversation explores Sarah’s defining act of defiance when she walked out of church slamming the door behind her, her complex first marriage to the dispute-prone Edmund Bridges, and her second husband Peter Cloyse’s unwavering loyalty during her imprisonment.
Discover the once-overlooked story of Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the Salem witch trial victim finally exonerated after 330 years. At just 22, this young Andover woman was pressured into falsely confessing to witchcraft in 1692. She narrowly escaped execution when Governor Phips ended the Salem witch trials. However, she was unjustly left out of the 1711 mass exoneration that cleared many others’ names. Our guest, podcast regular Mary Bingham, reveals Elizabeth’s remarkable life through court records and family histories, including reading us the powerful petition for clemency submitted by Elizabeth at age 42. Learn why this case, with a personal connection to our host Joshua Hutchinson, resonates with justice movements today and how Elizabeth’s name was finally cleared in 2022.
Professor and author Jane Barnette from the University of Kansas joins us for a discussion on how witch trial narratives continue to influence our cultural understanding.
She shares about her groundbreaking production of Kimberly Bellflower’s “John Procter is the Villain” – a contemporary play that boldly reexamines “The Crucible” through the lens of #MeToo, premiering at the University of Kansas just days before its Broadway debut.
“John Procter is the Villain” considers Arthur Miller’s messaging in “The Crucible,” examining how Miller’s fictional recreations of historical figures like John Proctor and Abigail Williams have shaped public perception of the Salem trials, often at the expense of historical accuracy. Consider with us, how theatrical reinterpretation can help reclaim silenced voices and how the term “witch hunt” has evolved in contemporary discourse.
Theater serves as a powerful medium for confronting and transforming our understanding of the past and modern society. Witch Hunt podcast examines historical witch trials and their continuing impact on society through conversations with experts, descendants, and advocates for justice.
Join returning guest, author and Salem Witch Trials expert Marilynne K. Roach as she maps the physical landscape of colonial Massachusetts where witch accusations spread in 1692. From the newly identified execution site at Proctor’s Ledge to the tense boundary between Salem Village and Salem Tow. Discover if property disputes and travel routes fueled America’s most notorious witch hunt. Through modern research and historical maps, uncover why location mattered in this dark chapter of New England history.
In this gripping episode of Salem Witch Hunt 101, we delve into the pivotal period of March 8-24, 1692, when the Salem witch trials reached a fever pitch. We explore the dramatic escalation of accusations and arrests that rocked Salem Village, including the unexpected cases of respected community members Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse, as well as the shocking arrest of 4-year-old Dorothy Good. The episode begins with the election of new selectmen and constables in Salem, setting the stage for the tumultuous events to come. We then chronicle the return of former Salem Village minister Deodat Lawson and his influential sermon that further inflamed tensions. Listeners will hear detailed accounts of the examinations of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse, providing chilling insight into the judicial proceedings of the time. Throughout the episode, we discuss the growing role of spectral evidence in the trials and how it shaped the accusations and outcomes. Key moments include Martha Cory’s passionate declaration of innocence, Rebecca Nurse’s heartbreaking plea, and the community’s reaction to the arrest of young Dorothy Good. The episode concludes with an update on End Witch Hunts’ recent activities and a preview of upcoming content. This episode offers a comprehensive look at a crucial turning point in the Salem witch trials, demonstrating how quickly suspicion and fear can escalate into a full-blown crisis. Whether you’re a history buff, a legal scholar, or simply curious about this dark chapter in American history, this episode provides valuable insights and compelling storytelling.
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast bringing you a detailed, turn-by-turn account of the Salem Witch Hunt. I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack. We're back with the fourth installment of our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, covering the pivotal events of from March 8th through March 24th, 1692. Josh Hutchinson: In today's episode, we'll explore the dramatic escalation of accusations and arrests that rocked Salem Village during this crucial period. Sarah Jack: We'll examine the unexpected cases of Martha Cory, Dorothy Good, and Rebecca Nurse, three unusual witchcraft suspects. Josh Hutchinson: We'll also discuss the return of former Salem Village minister to Salem Village and analyze his influential sermon and eyewitness account of the unfolding events. Sarah Jack: As we walk you through these events, you'll gain insight into how quickly suspicions spread and how the legal machinery of the witch trials began to gather momentum. Josh Hutchinson: We'll break down the examinations, the testimonies, and the growing atmosphere of fear and [00:01:00] paranoia that gripped the community. Sarah Jack: So join us as we continue our in depth exploration of one of history's most infamous witch hunts, piecing together the complex tapestry of events that led to the Salem Witch Trials. Let's dive in and uncover the stories behind the accusations, the hidden tensions within the community, and the fateful decisions that set the stage for the tragedy to come. Josh Hutchinson: Previously in our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, we've introduced the witch hunt and discussed events up to March 7th, 1692. Sarah Jack: In the first episode in the series, we presented a broad overview of the Salem Witch Hunt, addressing many of the key events Josh Hutchinson: and people involved, as well as the reasons behind the crisis. In part two, we focused on the events of February, 1692 as residents of Salem Village began to consider that there was witchcraft in their midst. Sarah Jack: In the third episode, we covered February 29th through March 7th, 1692,from the arrest of Tituba , Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburn,through their [00:02:00] interrogations and jailings. Josh Hutchinson: Today, in part four, we follow the cases against church member Martha Cory, baby girl Dorothy Good, and pious grandmother Rebecca Nurse. Sarah Jack: These cases are captivating, so let's join the action on March 8th, 1692. Josh Hutchinson: On March 8th, at Salem's town meeting, new selectmen and constables were elected. Sarah Jack: The new selectmen included future witchcraft suspect Philip English and John Higginson Jr., the son of Salem's senior minister. Along with Salem Village's Israel Porter and Daniel Andrew. Josh Hutchinson: The newly elected constables included John Putnam Jr. and Jonathan Putnam of Salem Village, two cousins of Sergeant Thomas Putnam. Sarah Jack: The next day, in Boston, jailer John Arnold bought chains for Sarah Osborn and Sarah Good for 14 shillings. Josh Hutchinson: Chains were believed to have the power to stop a witch's specter from roaming. And the cost of the chains was added to each accused individual's jail bill, which they would have to pay to [00:03:00] be released if they were acquitted or the charges were dropped. Sarah Jack: The two Sarahs would be locked in these chains until their deaths months later. Josh Hutchinson: On March 11th, John Hale and other local ministers attended a fast at the Salem Village Parsonage. Sarah Jack: Robert Calef later wrote that the afflicted persons were, for the most part, silent, but after any one prayer was ended, they would act and speak strangely and ridiculously, yet were such as had been well educated and of good behavior, the one, a girl of eleven or twelve years old, would sometimes seem to be in a convulsive fit, her limbs being twisted several ways and very stiff, but presently her fit would be over. Josh Hutchinson: On an unknown date in March, perhaps shortly after this fast, Samuel Parris sent his daughter Betty to stay with his kinsman, Stephen Sewell, the brother of future Salem Witch Trials Judge Samuel Sewell. Sarah Jack: While staying in Salem Town, separated from the other afflicted persons, Betty's condition appears to improve, and after March, she never [00:04:00] takes part in any further courtroom proceedings or is named as an afflicted person in any arrest warrant or testimony. Josh Hutchinson: On March 12th, Ann Putnam Jr. was purportedly attacked by Martha Cory's specter. Sarah Jack: Martha was the wife of Giles Cory. Her maiden name is unknown, but her first husband was Henry Rich, and the two had a son named Thomas. While married to Henry, Martha had a second son, Ben, with another man. Josh Hutchinson: Martha was accepted as a full member of the Salem Village Church on April 27th, 1690. Sarah Jack: Which was coincidentally the same day that a certain Mary Sibley was accepted into the church. Josh Hutchinson: Ezekiel Cheever and Edward Putnam asked Ann Jr. what clothes Martha Cory's specter wore. She told them she was blind and could not see what the supposed witch had on. Sarah Jack: Cheever and Putnam went to Martha Cory's house, where Martha told them she knew people were talking about her and denied being a witch. She then asked if Ann Jr. had described her clothes. Josh Hutchinson: [00:05:00] The two men took this question to have come from diabolical knowledge. How else could Martha know what they had asked Ann? Sarah Jack: Elsewhere in Salem, Martha Cory's specter supposedly attacked Mary Warren at the home of Elizabeth and John Procter. Josh Hutchinson: On May 12th, Mary Warren would testify that when she was first afflicted by Martha Cory, she reached out for Martha's specter but instead pulled John Procter into her lap. Sarah Jack: When this happened, John Procter said, "it is nobody, but it is my shadow that you see." Josh Hutchinson: Mary again reached for the spectral Cory, but instead pulled the shadow figure back into her lap. Sarah Jack: John Procter said, "I see there is no heed to any of your talkings, for you are all possessed with the devil, for it is nothing but my shape." Josh Hutchinson: Mary also said she had seen Martha Cory at the Procter house in person, and Martha told Mary that "she would be condemned for a witch as well as she herself. And she said that the children would cry out and bring out all." Sarah Jack: [00:06:00] On Sunday, March 13th, during worship service in Salem village, Bethshua Pope, an aunt of Benjamin Franklin was allegedly afflicted by specters and was temporarily unable to see. Josh Hutchinson: Later, Ann Putnam Jr. was visited by an unknown specter at home. She thought she sort of knew the person from seeing her at worship services, and she could just about picture where this woman sat in the meeting house, but she didn't know her name until either her mother or her maid, Mercy Lewis, suggested it was Rebecca Nurse. Sarah Jack: Like Martha Cory, Rebecca Towne Nurse was a church member. However, she kept her membership in the Salem Town church and never joined the village, though she usually worshipped there. She was noted for her devotion. Josh Hutchinson: On March 14th, Martha Cory and Elizabeth Procter's shapes supposedly attacked Abigail Williams, niece of village minister Samuel Parris. Sarah Jack: In the visible world, Thomas Putnam invited Martha Cory to visit Ann Jr. in person. When Martha entered the Putnam house, Ann Jr. had a [00:07:00] fit, contorted into strange positions, and collapsed. Josh Hutchinson: Ann Jr. cried out against Martha for causing her affliction, but then "her tongue thrust forward, her teeth clamped down, and she was unable to speak." Sarah Jack: When she regained control of her mouth, Ann Jr. told Martha she saw a yellow bird sucking between her forefinger and her middle finger. Josh Hutchinson: Ann Jr. claimed Martha was the specter that had covered Bethshua Pope's eyes during the meeting the day before. Sarah Jack: Ann Jr. 's hands then got stuck in her own eyes and could not be removed for some time. Josh Hutchinson: Then Ann Jr. had a twisted vision of the invisible world, where she saw a man being roasted in her parents' hearth, with Martha Cory turning the spit. Sarah Jack: Mercy Lewis, the Putnam's maid, grabbed a stick and struck where Ann said the specter was. The vision went away for a moment. Josh Hutchinson: Mercy had been orphaned in King William's War and had previously witnessed the killings of most of her extended family as a very young girl during King Philip's War. Sarah Jack: Her family lived on the [00:08:00] frontier in the vulnerable settlement of Falmouth located in Maine on Casco Bay, where the city of Portland now stands. Josh Hutchinson: Following each of these wars, Mercy relocated to Essex County, Massachusetts. After her parents were killed, she spent some time in Beverly before taking a position as maid for Thomas and Ann Putnam in Salem Village. Sarah Jack: Mercy's sister Priscilla had married a Putnam neighbor, Henry Kinney, Jr. Sarah Jack: When Ann's vision came back, Mercy struck at the specter again. Ann cried out, "do not if you love yourself! "And Mercy shrieked, as Ann said Martha's specter clubbed her with an iron rod. Mercy claimed to see shadowy female figures in the room and said they were trying to get her to write in the devil's book. Josh Hutchinson: As the real Martha Cory left the Putnam house, Mercy Lewis succumbed to fits so violent it took three men to restrain her. Sarah Jack: Around 11 o'clock that night, while Mercy sat in a chair before the hearth, the chair creeped forward toward the fire.[00:09:00] Josh Hutchinson: Two men had to grab the chair to prevent Mercy, who couldn't get up, from being burned. Sarah Jack: But they couldn't stop the chair until Edward Putnam jumped in front and lifted Mercy's feet. Josh Hutchinson: Elsewhere in Salem, Giles Cory's ox and cat were strangely afflicted but later recovered. Sarah Jack: On March 15th, Martha Cory's shape allegedly afflicted Elizabeth Hubbard. Josh Hutchinson: And Rebecca Nurse allegedly attacked Abigail Williams spectrally. Sarah Jack: Ipswich's Mary Fuller and Marjorie Thorne were afflicted, allegedly by Rachel Clinton, who turned up at the James Fuller Jr. house at this moment. Josh Hutchinson: Rachel was a child-free divorcee who had been rumored to be a witch for years. Sarah Jack: At the Fuller house, she told them she was there to hear their lies about her. Josh Hutchinson: Suddenly, Joseph Fuller ran in, exclaiming that his sister Betty was dead. Rachel Clinton ran out, and James Fuller Sr. was unable to see her when he tried to follow. Sarah Jack: As it turned out, Betty Fuller had passed out and would recover [00:10:00] after three to four hours of unconsciousness. Josh Hutchinson: When she came around, Betty said she'd seen something so frightening that it had made her turn on the spot and run, but she wasn't quick enough and whatever she saw knocked her down. Sarah Jack: On March 18th, Ann Putnam Sr. reportedly wrestled with Rebecca Nurse's specter for two hours. Josh Hutchinson: The next day, Ann Putnam Sr. was allegedly assailed by the specters of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse because she refused to join their ranks. Sarah Jack: Henry Kinney and Edward Putnam filed a witchcraft complaint against Martha Cory and magistrates issued a warrant for her arrest. It is unclear which Henry Kinney was involved, father or son. Josh Hutchinson: The complaint alleged that Martha had afflicted Ann Putnam Sr., Ann Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mercy Lewis, sister-in-law of Henry Kinney Jr. Sarah Jack: The warrant issued by John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin instructed Marshal George Herrick to arrest Martha and take her to Ingersoll's Tavern in Salem Village on Monday, March 21st. Josh Hutchinson: Also on March 19th, [00:11:00] former Salem Village minister Deodat Lawson returned to the village. Tituba had claimed that his wife and his child were killed by maleficium. Sarah Jack: After Deodat Lawson checked into a room at Ingersoll's, Mary Walcott, the daughter of near neighbor Captain Jonathan Walcott, called upon him and claimed to be bitten on the wrist. Josh Hutchinson: In the candlelight, Lawson observed a set of teeth marks. Sarah Jack: In the beginning of the evening, Lawson visited the parsonage nearby Ingersolls. Josh Hutchinson: Abigail Williams ran back and forth across the room with her arms held high and flapping like a bird. She said, "whish, whish, whish," as she virtually flew about the home. Sarah Jack: She stopped suddenly and declared that she saw the specter of Rebecca Nurse before her. Nobody else could see the specter, which proffered the devil's book. Josh Hutchinson: Abigail said, "I won't, I won't, I won't take it. I do not know what book it is. I'm sure it's none of God's book. It is the devil's book for ought I know." Sarah Jack: Across town, when Giles Cory went to prayer before bed, he was hindered by some [00:12:00] unseen force. As his wife approached, his lips loosened and he was able to say his prayers. Josh Hutchinson: On March 20th, Deodat Lawson stood in for Samuel Parris to lead Sunday services, which were interrupted by the afflicted persons. Sarah Jack: As Lawson prepared to read the text introducing his sermon, Abigail Williams said, "now stand up and name your text." Lawson read the text, and Abigail asserted, "it is a long text." Josh Hutchinson: Lawson began his sermon. Soon, Bethshua Pope said, "now there is enough of that." Sarah Jack: Abigail Williams claimed Martha Cory's specter left her body and sat on a beam with her yellow bird. The bird alighted on Lawson's hat, which hung on a peg, but Abigail was silenced by neighbors. Josh Hutchinson: In the afternoon, when Lawson referred to his doctrine, Abigail said, "I know no doctrine you had. If you did name one, I have forgot it." Sarah Jack: On March 21st, Joseph Herrick arrested Martha Cory. During the arrest, Herrick spotted a strange ointment in Martha's [00:13:00] house. Josh Hutchinson: Herrick asked Martha about it, and she told him she got the recipe from future witch judge Major Bartholomew Gedney of Salem. Sarah Jack: Constable Herrick took Martha to Ingersoll's Tavern, where magistrates were preparing for her interrogation. Josh Hutchinson: Reverend Nicholas Noyes opened the hearing with prayer, and the very biased Samuel Parris was appointed to record the interrogation. Sarah Jack: Hathorne began questioning Martha. Josh Hutchinson: You are now in the hands of authority. Tell me now why you have hurt these persons. Sarah Jack: I do not. Josh Hutchinson: Who doth? Sarah Jack: Pray give me leave to go to prayer. Josh Hutchinson: We do not sin for you to go to prayer, but tell me why you hurt these. Sarah Jack: I am an innocent person. I never had to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am a gospel woman. Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see these complain of you? Sarah Jack: The Lord open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers. The Lord show his power to discover the guilty. Josh Hutchinson: Tell us who hurts these children. Sarah Jack: I do not know. [00:14:00] Josh Hutchinson: If you be guilty of this fact, do you think you can hide it? Sarah Jack: The Lord knows. Josh Hutchinson: Well, tell us what you know of this matter. Sarah Jack: Why, I am a gospel woman, and do you think I can have to do with witchcraft too? Josh Hutchinson: How could you tell then that the child was bid to observe what clothes you wore when some came to speak with you? Sarah Jack: Cheevers interrupted her and bid her not begin with a lie. And so Edward Putnam declared the matter. Josh Hutchinson: Who told you that? Sarah Jack: He said, the child said. Josh Hutchinson: Ezekiel Cheever said, "you speak falsely." Sarah Jack: Then Edward Putnam read again. Josh Hutchinson: And Hathorne asked, "why did you ask if the children told what clothes you wore?" Sarah Jack: My husband told me the others told. Josh Hutchinson: Who told you about the clothes? Why did you ask that question? Sarah Jack: Because I heard the children told what clothes the other wore. Josh Hutchinson: Goodman Cory, did you tell her? Sarah Jack: The old man denied that he told her so. Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say your husband told you so? Sarah Jack: She sighed. [00:15:00] Josh Hutchinson: Who hurts these children? Now look upon them. Sarah Jack: I cannot help it. Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say you would tell the truth why you asked that question? How came you to the knowledge? Sarah Jack: I did but ask. Josh Hutchinson: You dare thus to lie in all this assembly? You are now before authority. I expect the truth. You promised it. Speak now and tell who told you what clothes. Sarah Jack: Nobody. Josh Hutchinson: How came you to know that the children would be examined on what clothes you wore? Sarah Jack: Because I thought the child was wiser than anybody if she knew. Josh Hutchinson: Give an answer. You said your husband told you. Sarah Jack: He told me the children said I afflicted them. Josh Hutchinson: How do you know what they came for? Answer me this truly. Will you say how you came to know what they came for? Sarah Jack: I had heard speech that the children said I troubled them and I thought that they might come to examine. Josh Hutchinson: But how did you know it? Sarah Jack: I thought they did. Josh Hutchinson: Did not you say you would tell the truth? Who told you what they came for? Sarah Jack: Nobody. Josh Hutchinson: How did [00:16:00] you know? Sarah Jack: I did think so. Josh Hutchinson: But you said you knew so. Sarah Jack: A child says, there is a man whispering in her ear. Josh Hutchinson: What did he say to you? Sarah Jack: We must not believe all that these distracted children say. Josh Hutchinson: Cannot you tell what that man whispered? Sarah Jack: I saw nobody. Josh Hutchinson: But did not you hear? Sarah Jack: No. Josh Hutchinson: If you expect mercy of God, you must look for it in God's way by confession. Do you think to find mercy by aggravating your sins? Sarah Jack: A true thing. Josh Hutchinson: Look for it then in God's way. Sarah Jack: So I do. Josh Hutchinson: Give glory to God and confess then. Sarah Jack: But I cannot confess. Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see how these afflicted do charge you? Sarah Jack: We must not believe distracted persons. Josh Hutchinson: Who do you improve to hurt them? Sarah Jack: I improved none. Josh Hutchinson: Did not you say our eyes were blinded, you would open them? Sarah Jack: Yes, to accuse the innocent. Josh Hutchinson: Why cannot the girl stand before you? Sarah Jack: I do not know. Josh Hutchinson: What did you mean by that? [00:17:00] Sarah Jack: I saw them fall down. Josh Hutchinson: It seems to be an insulting speech as if they could not stand before you. Sarah Jack: They cannot stand before others. Josh Hutchinson: You said they cannot stand before you. Tell me what was that turning upon the spit by you? Sarah Jack: You believe the children that are distracted. I saw no spit. Josh Hutchinson: Here are more than two that accuse you for witchcraft. What do you say? Sarah Jack: I am innocent. Sarah Jack: Then Mr. Hathorne read further of Crossley's evidence. Josh Hutchinson: What did you mean by that the devil could not stand before you? Sarah Jack: She denied it. Josh Hutchinson: Three or four sober witnesses confirmed it. Sarah Jack: What could I do? Many rise up against me. Josh Hutchinson: Why confess? Sarah Jack: So I would, if I were guilty. Josh Hutchinson: Here are sober persons? What do you say to them? You are a gospel woman. Will you lie? Josh Hutchinson: Abigail cried out, "next Sabbath is sacrament day, but she shall not come there." Sarah Jack: I do not care. Josh Hutchinson: You charge these children with distraction. It [00:18:00] is a note of distraction when persons vary in a minute, but these fix upon you. This is not the matter of distraction. Sarah Jack: When all are against me, what can I help it? Josh Hutchinson: Now tell me the truth, will you? Why did you say the magistrates' and ministers' eyes are blinded and you would open them? Sarah Jack: She laughed and denied it. Josh Hutchinson: Now tell us how we shall know who doth hurt these if you do not. Sarah Jack: Can an innocent person be guilty? Josh Hutchinson: Do you deny these words? Sarah Jack: Yes. Josh Hutchinson: Tell us who hurts these. We came to be a terror to evildoers. You say you would open our eyes, we are blind. Sarah Jack: If you say I am a witch. Josh Hutchinson: You said you would show us. Sarah Jack: She denied it. Josh Hutchinson: Why do you not now show us? Sarah Jack: I cannot tell. I do not know. Josh Hutchinson: What did you strike the maid at Mr. Thomas Putnam's with? Sarah Jack: I never struck her in my life. Josh Hutchinson: Who are two that see you strike her with an iron rod? Sarah Jack: I had no hand in it. Josh Hutchinson: Who had? Do you believe [00:19:00] these children are bewitched? Sarah Jack: They may, for aught I know. I have no hand in it. Josh Hutchinson: You say you are no witch. Maybe you mean you never covenanted with the devil. Did you never deal with any familiar? Sarah Jack: No, never. Josh Hutchinson: What bird was that the children spoke of? Sarah Jack: Then witnesses spoke. Josh Hutchinson: What bird was it? Sarah Jack: I know no bird. Josh Hutchinson: It may be you have engaged. You will not confess, but God knows. Sarah Jack: So he doth. Josh Hutchinson: Do you believe you shall go unpunished? Sarah Jack: I have nothing to do with witchcraft. Josh Hutchinson: Why was you not willing your husband should come to the former session here? Sarah Jack: But he came for all. Josh Hutchinson: Did not you take the saddle off? Sarah Jack: I did not know what it was for. Josh Hutchinson: Did you not know what it was for? Sarah Jack: I did not know that it would be to any benefit. Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say you would open our eyes? Why do you not? Sarah Jack: I never thought of a witch. Josh Hutchinson: Is it a laughing matter to see these afflicted persons? Sarah Jack: She denied it. Josh Hutchinson: Several prove it. [00:20:00] Sarah Jack: Ye are all against me, and I cannot help it. Josh Hutchinson: Do not you believe there are witches in the country? Sarah Jack: I do not know that there is any. Josh Hutchinson: Do not you know that Tituba confessed it? Sarah Jack: I did not hear her speak. Josh Hutchinson: I find you will own nothing without several witnesses, and yet you will deny for all. Sarah Jack: It was noted when she bit her lip, several of the afflicted were bitten. When she was urged upon it, that she bit her lip, saith she, "what harm is there in it?" Josh Hutchinson: What do you say to all these things that are apparent? Sarah Jack: If you will all go hang me, how can I help it? Josh Hutchinson: Were you to serve the devil ten years? Tell how many? Sarah Jack: She laughed. Josh Hutchinson: The children cried there was a yellow bird with her. Sarah Jack: When Mr. Hathorne asked her about it, she laughed. When her hands were at liberty, the afflicted persons were pinched. Josh Hutchinson: Why do not you tell how the devil comes in your shape and hurts these? You said you would. Sarah Jack: How can I know how? Josh Hutchinson: Why did you say you would show us? Sarah Jack: [00:21:00] She laughed again. Josh Hutchinson: What book is that you would have these children write in? Sarah Jack: What book? Where should I have a book? I showed them none, nor have none, nor brought none. Sarah Jack: The afflicted cried out there was a man whispering in her ears. Josh Hutchinson: What book did you carry to Mary Walcott? Sarah Jack: I carried none. If the devil appears in my shape. Sarah Jack: Then Needham said that Parker some time ago thought this woman was a witch. Josh Hutchinson: Who is your god? Sarah Jack: The god that made me. Josh Hutchinson: Who Sarah Jack: is that God? Sarah Jack: The God that made me. Josh Hutchinson: What is his name? Sarah Jack: Jehovah. Josh Hutchinson: Do you know any other name? Sarah Jack: God Almighty. Josh Hutchinson: Doth he tell you that you pray to that he is God Almighty? Sarah Jack: Who do I worship but the God that made me? Josh Hutchinson: How many gods are there? Sarah Jack: One. Josh Hutchinson: How many persons? Sarah Jack: Three. Josh Hutchinson: Cannot you say so, there is one god in three blessed persons? Sarah Jack: Then she was troubled. Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see these children and women [00:22:00] are rational and sober as their neighbors when your hands are fastened? Sarah Jack: Immediately they were seized with fits, and the standers by said she was squeezing her fingers, her hands being eased by them that held them on purpose for trial. Quickly after, the marshal said, she hath bit her lip, and immediately the afflicted were in an uproar. Sarah Jack: Why do you hurt these, or who doth? She denied any hand in it. Josh Hutchinson: Why did you say, if you were a witch, you should have no pardon? Sarah Jack: Because I am a woman. Josh Hutchinson: After Martha's initial interrogation, Ezekiel Cheever, Edward Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and Nathaniel Ingersoll were deposed against her. Sarah Jack: Ezekiel Cheever and Edward Putnam described the events of March 12th, when they had confronted Martha Cory at her home. Josh Hutchinson: Edward Putnam testified about Martha's March 14th visit to the Thomas Putnam family. Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Hubbard said Martha had afflicted her many times since March 15th. She said, "I believe in my heart that Martha Cory [00:23:00] is a dreadful witch and that she hath very often afflicted and tormented me." Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Parris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and Thomas Putnam described how the afflicted were tormented during Martha's examination. Sarah Jack: After the examination, Marshal Herrick and the magistrates dined and fed their horses at Ingersoll's, racking up a bill of four shillings and sixpence. Then they took Martha Cory to Salem, where Marshal Herrick secured her in jail. Josh Hutchinson: On March 22nd, Rebecca Nurse's Shape allegedly assaulted Ann Putnam Sr. while wearing nothing but her shift and nightcap. Sarah Jack: The Nurse specter offered Ann a little red book, but Ann refused to sign and quoted scripture at the specter. Josh Hutchinson: The specter threatened to tear Ann's soul from her body, but yielded after another two hour battle and left . Sarah Jack: Around this time in March, Peter Cloyce, Daniel Andrew, and Elizabeth and Israel Porter, visited Rebecca Nurse, who had been in bed for around a week. Josh Hutchinson: After Rebecca expressed concern for the afflicted, whom she regretted not [00:24:00] visiting but couldn't, the visitors informed her that she too was being accused. Sarah Jack: Once Rebecca recovered from the shock, she said, "well, as to this thing, I am as innocent as the child unborn. But surely, what sin hath God found out in me unrepentant of, that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?" Josh Hutchinson: On March 23rd, Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse's specters reportedly afflicted Ann Putnam Sr. again. Sarah Jack: Deodat Lawson visited and found Ann in bed, where she was getting over a fit. Josh Hutchinson: Lawson prayed over Ann. Sarah Jack: At some point in the prayer, Ann seemed to fall asleep. Thomas Putnam took her in his arms and found her to be stiff as a board. Josh Hutchinson: He tried to sit her up on his lap, and she eventually had another fit. Her arms and legs jerked about as she argued with the specter of Rebecca Nurse again. Sarah Jack: That day, Jonathan and Edward Putnam filed complaints against young Dorothy Good and aged Rebecca Nurse. Josh Hutchinson: The magistrates issued [00:25:00] arrest warrants for Dorothy and Rebecca. Sarah Jack: Rebecca's warrant stated that she was wanted for allegedly bewitching Ann Carr Putnam and her daughter, Ann Putnam Jr. Josh Hutchinson: Dorothy's warrant did not specifically list any victims or even what form of witchcraft she'd been accused of, but it was likely given to Marshal George Herrick at the same time as Rebecca's warrant. Sarah Jack: To the northeast, Captain John Alden traveled to St. John, Canada to ransom captives, including his own son. His attempt failed, and his son and others were moved to Quebec. Josh Hutchinson: On March 24th, constables arrested Dorothy Good and Rebecca Nurse. They took the girl and the older woman to Ingersoll's Tavern in Salem Village. Sarah Jack: There, magistrates John Hathorn and Jonathan Corwin interrogated Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good. Josh Hutchinson: Reverend John Hale of Beverly gave the invocation and Samuel Parris again recorded the proceedings through his biased lens. Sarah Jack: Hathorne began with a question to an afflicted person. Josh Hutchinson: What do you [00:26:00] say? Have you seen this woman hurt you? Sarah Jack: Yes, she beat me this morning. Josh Hutchinson: Abigail, have you been hurt by this woman? Sarah Jack: Yes, Sarah Jack: Ann Putnam,in a grievous fit, cried out that she hurt her. Josh Hutchinson: Goody Nurse, here are two, Ann Putnam, the child, and Abigail Williams, complain of your hurting them. What do you say to it? Sarah Jack: I can say, before my eternal father, I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency. Josh Hutchinson: Here is never a one in the assembly but desires it. But if you be guilty, pray God discover you. Sarah Jack: Then Henry Kenny rose up to speak. Josh Hutchinson: Goodman Kenny, what do you say? Sarah Jack: Then he entered his complaint and further said that since this Nurse came into the house, he was seized twice with an amazed condition. Josh Hutchinson: Here are not only these, but here is the wife of Mr. Thomas Putnam, who accuseth you by credible information, and that both of tempting her to iniquity and of greatly hurting her. Sarah Jack: I am innocent and clear, and have not been able to get out of doors [00:27:00] these eight or nine days. Josh Hutchinson: Mr. Putnam, give in what you have to say. Sarah Jack: Then Mr. Edward Putnam gave in his relation. Josh Hutchinson: Is this true, Goody Nurse? Sarah Jack: I never afflicted no child, never in my life. Josh Hutchinson: You see these accuse you. Is it true? Sarah Jack: No. Josh Hutchinson: Are you an innocent person relating to this witchcraft? Sarah Jack: Here, Thomas Putnam's wife cried out, "did you not bring the black man with you? Did you not bid me tempt God and die? How oft have you eat and drunk your own damnation?" Josh Hutchinson: What do you say to them? Sarah Jack: Oh Lord, help me. And she spread out her hands, and the afflicted were grievously vexed. Josh Hutchinson: Do not see what a solemn condition these are in? When your hands are loose, the persons are afflicted. Sarah Jack: Then Mary Walcott, who often heretofore said she had seen her, but never could say or did say that she either bit or pinched her or hurt her, and also Elizabeth Hubbard under the like circumstances both openly accused her of hurting them. [00:28:00] Josh Hutchinson: Here are these two grown persons now accuse you. What say you? Do not you see these afflicted persons and hear them accuse you? Sarah Jack: The Lord knows I have not hurt them. I am an innocent person. Josh Hutchinson: It is very awful to all to see these agonies,and you an old professor thus charged with contracting with the devil by the effects of it, and yet to see you stand with dry eyes when there are so many wet. Sarah Jack: You do not know my heart. Josh Hutchinson: You would do well if you are guilty to confess and give glory to God. Sarah Jack: I am as clear as the child unborn. Josh Hutchinson: What uncertainty there may be in apparitions I know not. Yet this with me strikes hard upon you, that you are at this very present charged with familiar spirits. Josh Hutchinson: This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these familiar spirits come to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that? Sarah Jack: I have none, sir. Josh Hutchinson: If you have, confess and give glory to God. I pray God clear you if you be innocent, and if you are guilty, discover you, [00:29:00] and therefore give me an upright answer. Have you any familiarity with these spirits? Sarah Jack: No, I have none but with God alone. Josh Hutchinson: How came you sick? For there is an odd discourse of that in the mouths of many. Sarah Jack: I am sick at my stomach. Josh Hutchinson: Have you no wounds? Sarah Jack: I have none but old age. Josh Hutchinson: You do know whether you are guilty and have familiarity with the devil, and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these testify a black man whispering in your ear and birds about you. What do you say to it? Sarah Jack: It is all false. I am clear. Josh Hutchinson: Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way? Sarah Jack: I have not. Josh Hutchinson: What a sad thing it is that a church member here, and now another of Salem, should be thus accused and charged. Sarah Jack: Mrs. Pope fell into a grievous fit and cried out, "a sad thing, sure enough!" Sarah Jack: And then many more fell into lamentable fits. Josh Hutchinson: Tell us, have [00:30:00] not you had visible appearances more than what is common in nature? Sarah Jack: I have none, nor ever had, in my life. Josh Hutchinson: Do you think these suffered voluntary or involuntary? Sarah Jack: I cannot tell. Josh Hutchinson: That is strange. Everyone can judge. Sarah Jack: I must be silent. Josh Hutchinson: They accuse you of hurting them, and if you think it is not unwillingly but by design, you must look upon them as murderers. Sarah Jack: I cannot tell what to think of it. Sarah Jack: Afterwards, when this was somewhat insisted on, she said, "I do not think so." She did not understand aright what was said. Josh Hutchinson: Well, then give an answer now. Do you think these suffer against their wills or not? Sarah Jack: I do not think these suffer against their wills. Josh Hutchinson: Why did you never visit these afflicted persons? Sarah Jack: Because I was afraid I should have fits too. Sarah Jack: Upon the motion of her body, fits followed upon the complainants abundantly and very frequently. [00:31:00] Josh Hutchinson: Is it not an unaccountable case that when you are examined, these persons are afflicted? Sarah Jack: I have got nobody to look to but God., Sarah Jack: Again upon stirring her hands, the afflicted persons were seized with violent fits of torture. Josh Hutchinson: Do you believe these afflicted persons are bewitched? Sarah Jack: I do think they are. Josh Hutchinson: When this witchcraft came upon the stage, there was no suspicion of Tituba. She professed much love to that child Betty Parris, but it was her apparition did the mischief. Why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also? Sarah Jack: Would you have me belie myself? Josh Hutchinson: She held her neck on one side, and accordingly so were the afflicted taken. Sarah Jack: Then authority requiring it, Samuel Parris read what he had in characters Sarah Jack: taken from Mr. Thomas Putnam's wife in her fits. Josh Hutchinson: What do you think of this? Sarah Jack: I cannot help it. The devil may appear in my shape. Josh Hutchinson: When the hearing was over, the magistrates [00:32:00] committed Rebecca Nurse to the jail in Salem. Sarah Jack: Next, the magistrates questioned little Dorothy Good, daughter of a witchcraft suspect, Sarah Good. Deodat Lawson wrote an account. Josh Hutchinson: "The magistrates and ministers also did inform me that they apprehended a child of Sarah Good and examined it, being between four and five years of age. And as to matter of fact, they did unanimously affirm that when this child did but cast its eye upon the afflicted persons, they were tormented, and they held her head and yet so many as her eye could fix upon were afflicted, which they did several times make careful observation of. The afflicted complained they had often been bitten by this child and produced the marks of a small set of teeth. Accordingly, this was also committed to Salem prison. The child looked hale and well as other children. I saw it at Lieutenant Ingersoll's." Sarah Jack: Giles Cory made a statement against his wife Martha. Josh Hutchinson: He recounted the time when he was stopped from praying and the incidents which [00:33:00] befell his ox and cat. Sarah Jack: He also described a time when Martha knelt at the hearth, as if in prayer, but he did not hear her pray. Josh Hutchinson: Ann Putnam Jr. and Mary Walcott were deposed against Dorothy Good. Sarah Jack: Ann said that she was tortured by the apparition of Dorothy Good many times from March 3rd through the child's examination on March 24th. Josh Hutchinson: Mary Walcott claimed that she was afflicted by Dorothy's apparition from March 21st through 24th. Sarah Jack: Ann Putnam Sr. was deposed against Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse. Josh Hutchinson: She gave a day by day account of her torments at the hands of the specters of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse for March 18th through 24th. Sarah Jack: Daniel Andrew, Peter Cloyce, Israel Porter, and Elizabeth Porter made a statement for Rebecca Nurse on the 24th. Sarah Jack: Later on the 24th, Deodat Lawson delivered the Thursday lecture, which he soon published as Christ's Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan's Malignity. Josh Hutchinson: In published form, the book was endorsed by [00:34:00] ministers Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Charles Morton, James Allen, Samuel Willard, and John Bailey. Sarah Jack: The key verse Lawson used was Zechariah 3:2. "And the Lord said unto Satan, ' The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem, rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? Josh Hutchinson: Lawson stated that his doctrine was "that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only prevalent intercessor with God the Father for the relief of those that are in covenant with him and are made partakers of his special mercy, when they are under the most threatening and amazing distresses that by the rage and malice of Satan they can be exposed unto." Sarah Jack: Then he put forth six propositions and expounded upon six uses for this verse. Josh Hutchinson: 1. Satan is the adversary and enemy. He is the original, the fountain of malice, the instigator of all contrariety, malignity, and enmity. Sarah Jack: 2. [00:35:00] Satan makes it his business to improve all opportunities and advantages, to exercise his malice upon the children of men. Sarah Jack: He is an indefatigable as well as an implacable enemy. Josh Hutchinson: Three, the covenant people of God and those that would devote themselves entirely to his service are the special objects of Satan's rage and fury. Sarah Jack: Four, that in all Satan's malicious designs and operations, he is absolutely bounded and limited by the power and pleasure of the great and everlasting God, the Lord Jehovah. Josh Hutchinson: Five, that whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with him as the objects of his special mercy and favor, he will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them. Sarah Jack: 6. The great God doth manage all his designs of mercy to his people under the gospel dispensation in and through the mediator. The very tenure of the gospel covenant is such, and the terms thereof are so methodized as to introduce a [00:36:00] necessity of depending on a mediator. The whole transaction of the gospel covenant betwixt the Great God and fallen Man Is by the Mediator, hence it is on better terms than the Covenant of Works, Hebrews 8:6. Under the new covenant, all addresses to God are by the Mediator, Hebrews 4: 15 and 16, and all communications of grace from God are by the Mediator, John 1:16. Josh Hutchinson: After stating these six prepositions, Lawson then listed his six uses for the chosen verse. Sarah Jack: One, let it be for solemn warning and awakening to all of us that are before the Lord at this time and to all other of this whole people who shall come to the knowledge of these direful operations of Satan which the Holy God hath permitted in the midst of us. Josh Hutchinson: 2. Let it be for deep humiliation to the people of this place, which is in special under the influence of this fearful judgment of God. The Lord doth at this day manage a great controversy with you, to the [00:37:00] astonishment of yourselves and others. You are, therefore, to be deeply humbled, and fit in the dust considering. Sarah Jack: Three, it is matter of terror, amazement, and astonishment to all such wretched souls, if there be any here in the congregation, and God of His infinite mercy grant that none of you may ever be found such, as have given up their names and souls to the devil, who by covenant, explicit or implicit, have bound themselves to be his slaves and dredges, consenting to be instruments, in whose shapes he may torment and afflict their fellow creatures, even of their own kind, to the amazing and astonishing of the standers by. Josh Hutchinson: 4. Let it be for caution to all of us that are before the Lord, as ever we would prevail with God, to prevent the spreading of this sore affliction, and to rebuke Satan for us. Let us take heed of siding with, or giving place unto, the Devil. Sarah Jack: 5. Let it be for exhortation and direction to this whole assembly, and to all [00:38:00] others that shall come to the knowledge of these amazing dispensations, here then give me leave to press those special duties which all persons are concerned to put in practice at such a time as this." Josh Hutchinson: Six. The sixth and last use is in two words of comfort, to bear up the fainting souls of those that are personally under, or relatively concerned in, these direful operations of the grand enemy of mankind. Sarah Jack: Lawson wrapped up his sermon with a conclusion. Josh Hutchinson: He said, "to conclude, the Lord is known by the judgments which he executes in the midst of us. The dispensations of his providence appear to be unsearchable, and his doing pass finding out. He seems to have allowed Satan to afflict many of our people, and that thereupon he has come down in great wrath, threatening the destruction of the bodies,and if the infinite mercy of God prevent not, of the souls of many in this place, yet may we say in the midst of the terrible things which He doth in righteousness. He alone is the [00:39:00] God of our salvation, who represents himself as the savior of all that are in a low and distressed condition, because he is good and his mercy endures forever. Sarah Jack: Let us then return and repent, rent our hearts and not our garments. Who can tell if the Lord will return in mercy unto us, and by his Spirit lift up a standard against the grand enemy who threatens to come in like a flood among us and overthrow all that is holy and just and good? It is no small comfort to consider that Job's exerciseof patience had its beginning from the Devil, but we have seen the end to be from the Lord, James 5:11, that we also may find by experience the same blessed issue of our present distresses by Satan's malice. Sarah Jack: Let us repent of every sin that hath been committed, and labor to practice every duty which hath been neglected. And when we are humbled and proved for our good in the latter end, then we shall assuredly and speedily find that the kingly power of our Lord and Savior shall [00:40:00] be magnified in delivering his poor sheep and lambs out of the jaws and paws of the roaring lion. Josh Hutchinson: Then will Jesus, the blessed anti-type of Joshua, the redeemer and chooser, quell, suppress, and utterly vanquish this adversary of ours with irresistible power and authority, according to our text. And the Lord said unto Satan, The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" Sarah Jack: Once Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good were jailed, there were a total of six people behind bars for allegedly participating in the Salem Witch Conspiracy. Josh Hutchinson: Also imprisoned were Martha Cory, Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba. Sarah Jack: In the next episode in our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, we will cover the remainder of March and the beginning of April, getting into accusations against Rachel Clinton, Sarah Cloyce, and Elizabeth Procter. Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah has End Witch Hunts [00:41:00] News. Sarah Jack: As we wrap up this episode, we're excited to share some recent developments. End Witch Hunts just completed its first international trip, attending and presenting at two academic conferences outside the United States. This journey was more than just a professional milestone; it was a testament to the global community we've built through this podcast. We had the incredible opportunity to meet 10 of our past podcast guests in person for the first time, plus a rare encounter with Leo Igwe, Director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches. The experience of connecting face to face with these experts, along with several of our dedicated listeners, reinforced the impact of our work. Sarah Jack: This podcast is unique in delivering firsthand experiences and research from organizations and individuals working directly in communities affected by witch hunts.Our guests bring context and perspective from around the world, offering insights you won't find anywhere else. Our time in England, filled with enriching conversations, has inspired [00:42:00] a wealth of important updates and fascinating content that we can't wait to share with you this fall. Sarah Jack: We'll be bringing you snippets from our conference presentations on our projects, World Without Witch Hunts, End SARA, and the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. If you'd like to support our work and help cover the costs of attending these conferences, please consider making a donation. You'll find the link in our show notes. Sarah Jack: To those who have already contributed, we extend our heartfelt thanks. Your support is crucial in our ongoing efforts to end harmful practicesand witch accusations. Thank you for being part of this critical mission. We'll be back next week with more insights and stories from the front lines of ending witch hunts. Until then, stay informed and stay engaged. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah. Sarah Jack: You're welcome. Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for joining us for this episode. Sarah Jack: Be sure to join us again next week. Josh Hutchinson: And if you haven't already done so, check out our extensive back catalog of episodes. Sarah Jack: We have now done 28 episodes on the Salem Witch Trials. A link to these episodes is [00:43:00] included in the show notes. Josh Hutchinson: And we will continue to bring you the best witch trial content. Sarah Jack: Subscribe to our newsletter and always know what's coming up. The link is in the show notes. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
We’re joined by Antonio Infante, a Salem Witch Trials Historic Tour Guide and author. Antonio shares his journey into becoming a guide, sparked by a personal connection to the Salem witch trials through his ancestor. As he highlights the importance of accurate storytelling, Antonio offers a snapshot look at the Essex National Heritage Area’s historic tour that dispels myths about the trials. This episode also explores broader Massachusetts witch trial history and ongoing efforts for justice for all those wrongfully accused, not just the accused in 1692. He gives us a glimpse into his upcoming book about accused witch Sarah Cloyce, sister of Rebecca Nurse, titled Sober and Civil: Being a true narrative of one Sarah Towne Cloyse, formerly Bridges.
In this milestone 100th episode of Witch Hunt Podcast, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack reflect on their journey of exploring historical witch trials and modern witchcraft accusations. The episode begins with a recap of the podcast’s evolution from its initial focus on early modern witch trials to its current coverage of the ongoing global crisis of witch hunts. The hosts discuss their exploration of historical witch trials in various locations, particularly in New England and Europe, delving into the social, religious, and political factors that contributed to these events. They examine the impact of witch trials on individuals, families, and communities, both historically and in the present day.
The conversation then shifts to efforts to exonerate and memorialize victims of historical witch trials, highlighting the importance of these initiatives for justice and education. A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing modern witch hunts, also known as harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. The hosts outline the United Nations’ recognition of this issue as a human rights concern and various efforts by governments, NGOs, and grassroots organizations to address the problem. They emphasize the need for a multi-faceted approach to combat these harmful practices, including education, legal reform, community engagement, and challenging harmful beliefs.
Towards the end of the episode, Josh and Sarah announce their upcoming speaking engagements at two academic conferences on witchcraft in England, where they’ll discuss modern witch hunts, exoneration efforts, and their project tracking spiritual and ritual abuse in the United States. This comprehensive episode serves as both a retrospective of the podcast’s journey and a call to action for addressing ongoing issues related to witchcraft accusations worldwide.
Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast raising awareness of the violent reality of modern witchcraft accusations. Rather than being a relic of the past, witchcraft accusations remain a devastating issue in many parts of the world, leading to violence, ostracization, economic deprivation, mental health crises, and even death.
In recognition of this global crisis, August 10th has been designated World Day Against Witch Hunts. This year’s theme, “Exposing the Witchfinders,” focuses on those who incite violence by suggesting witchcraft as the cause of problems or identifying individuals as witches.
Today’s episode examines the role of witchfinders—individuals exploiting faith and belief for personal gain. We’ll explore who they are, their operations, motivations, and the profound impact they have on their victims. Including key insights in the voices of global advocates who have been guests on our podcast, we invite you to join us as we uncover the stark reality behind witchcraft accusations and advocate for a world free from such violence.
In this episode, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack explore the complex relationships between religion, politics, and harmful practices in India. Joined by experts Arjun Philip George and Giresh Kumar J, they discuss:
1. The persistence of caste-based discrimination across religious lines in India
2. The role of religious texts and traditions in perpetuating gender inequality
3. Challenges in reforming deeply ingrained cultural and religious practices
4. The impact of political leaders and parties on reinforcing or challenging harmful practices
5. The tension between constitutional values and religious beliefs in Indian society
6. The struggle for women’s rights in religious contexts, including the Sabarimala temple controversy
7. The use of religion in politics and its effects on India’s democratic fabric
8. The difficulty of separating harmful practices from mainstream religious beliefs
9. The need for progressive education and individual choice in religious matters
Key topics:
– Caste system
– Gender discrimination
– Secularism in India
– Religious reform
– Constitutional rights vs. religious practices
– Political use of religion
Guests:
– Arjun Philip George: Legal scholar with expertise in violence against women on social media platforms
– Giresh Kumar J: Professor of international human rights and social justice
– Samantha Spence: Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Social Justice
This episode provides a thought-provoking look at how witch hunt mentalities persist in modern forms, particularly through the lens of religious and cultural practices in India.
Thank you for joining us for this narrative history of the Salem Witch Trials. This third part of our Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series focuses on the first arrests and interrogations of Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba in late February and early March 1692.
On Witch Hunt, the people and key events are real. The examinations are taken directly from the historical record. The depositions of afflicted persons Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr. are paraphrased for natural conversation, while the deposition of the adult men Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and Ezekiel Cheever is presented verbatim.
Join us as we spend time in the early moments of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, based on actual words from the historical documents. Whether you’re a history enthusiast or a curious listener, this episode promises to be both informative and enjoyable.
Sashiprava Bindhani, a human rights advocate and legal expert from Odisha, India, has dedicated her life to raising awareness of witch-hunting and advocating for the protection of vulnerable individuals.
This impactful oral history conversation explores her life of advocating for individuals accused of witchcraft, examining the social ostracism, physical assaults, and the role of policy and legal intervention in protecting the vulnerable and stopping these practices. She shares her professional journey, personal experiences, and significant contributions to human rights. She discusses her work in law, public interest litigation, and efforts in implementing laws against witch branding.
Join Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack on the ‘Witch Hunt’ podcast for the second episode of their ‘Salem Witch-Hunt 101’ series. Josh narrates the chilling events of February 1692 in Salem Village, focusing on the strange behaviors of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris that ignited fears of witchcraft. He explores the harsh winter, social tensions, and the reactions of the community, including the infamous ‘witch cake’ and accusations against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. In this unique episode, Sarah hears Josh’s account for the first time, providing fresh reactions and questions that enhance the storytelling. The episode concludes with reflections on the motivations behind the Salem Witch Trials, with additional insights from Mary Louise Bingham. Tune in for an engaging retelling of the early days of the Salem Witch Hunt, based on historical records.
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast bringing you the most in-depth coverage of the Salem Witch Trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we are excited to present the second episode in the Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series. Josh Hutchinson: We're taking a different approach to this one. I'll be telling a narrative of the events of early 1692. Sarah Jack: And I'm hearing this telling of the story for the very first time, just like everyone watching or listening. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I've really kept this one under wraps from you, so I can't wait to hear your reactions to it. Sarah Jack: I can't wait to hear what you've done with your story. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, thank you. I think it's going to be quite a new experience for everyone. Sarah Jack: I'm going to have some questions for you. Josh Hutchinson: I sure hope so. The Salem Witch Hunt had its beginnings long before the trials began. [00:01:00] We discussed the precursors to the witch hunt in our last Salem Witch Hunt 101 episode. Today, we will focus on events in Salem Village in February, 1692. Sarah Jack: I am excited. Sarah Jack: Yes, now that we have those things out of the way, we get to dive in to some story. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're going to tell some little stories, um, about big events. In these stories we're going to tell in this series, we'll be recreating several major scenes from the Salem Witch Hunt using the facts that are, we get from the records left behind. Sarah Jack: The records are the story. What we can build out of what is written is all we have. Josh Hutchinson: And that's what we're working with tonight. So here comes the story. [00:02:00] Josh Hutchinson: Scene 1, Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, February 1692. The girl flitters across the room, chirping like a bird. Abigail Williams, the minister's niece and ward, aged 11, has been acting strangely lately. Perhaps a winter's confinement in a frigid house has given her cabin fever. Maybe she's just restless. A preteen in the boring 17th century, Abigail has been orphaned and lives in the care of her relative, Salem Village Minister Samuel Parris, who is known as her uncle, though the exact relationship is unclear. Parris's daughter Elizabeth, called Betty, is at this moment on all fours under a table, barking like a dog, while alternately complaining of terrible pain. Earlier, she had honked like a goose and soared through the air, all the way across the Parsonage's Great Hall. Nobody had seen her toes touching the ground. They'd all been fixated on the [00:03:00] honking and flapping, which would have been hard to ignore. Josh Hutchinson: Now Samuel Parris paces the floor, following Abigail, constantly praying as he walks behind her. Maybe the girls are ill, but if they are, what manner of illness causes these antics? Whatever it is, the minister has had enough of it. How can anyone expect him to write each week's sermon in this environment? He abruptly stops following Abigail. Sarah Jack: Two thoughts popped into my mind. Is this truly the first time Betty has been so silly? I think from what we know of what was permitted for behavior, it's possible. Josh Hutchinson: It is, I'm sure Betty, she's nine years old and Abigail's 11. They're at very silly ages. So probably, but to this extent, it seems like this was the first [00:04:00] time that they were flapping like geese and barking like dogs and mewing like kittens and everything. Um, So it was quite different and everybody was taken aback by it. Sarah Jack: The other thing I wondered if it went through the minister's mind, is is this affliction? Like, right away. Josh Hutchinson: Right. He was in Boston at, in 1688 when Goody Glover was arrested and executed for witchcraft towards the Glover children, who behaved in much the same way that Abigail and Betty are described as behaving. And he would have been fully aware, Cotton Mather had written a book about that. And, uh, Samuel Parris definitely was aware, and presumably his children were also aware of that story. Josh Hutchinson: And this might be something that they [00:05:00] got afflicted, um, through whatever mechanism, and they had imbibed these stories about affliction. So once somebody told them, "oh, you're afflicted" or something, it just triggered these behaviors from them because this is what they have known and heard all their, their lives. Sarah Jack: All right. Josh Hutchinson: "I have to get this sermon done, Elizabeth." He says to his wife, the former Elizabeth Eldridge, "I'm going to Ingersoll's. It'll be quieter there." Sarah Jack: Josh Hutchinson: "Quieter at Ingersoll's? Well, I'm sure he'd let you use one of his rooms. " Josh Hutchinson: The minister goes to his desk and grabs his material and Bible. Looking at the ice just forming atop the ink, he says, "warmer at Ingersoll's, too." Josh Hutchinson: "Why don't you see if he has any more wood to spare?" Josh Hutchinson: "He doesn't. He's already given us our share. It's those unregenerate types that are withholding." Josh Hutchinson: [00:06:00] Samuel Parris strides to the door and steps out, letting the door swing shut hard behind him. Betty jumps, striking her head on the bottom of the table. She rubs the sore and then crawls out from underneath, now whimpering like a scolded puppy. Maybe she and her cousin are ill, but, strangely, nobody else in the household has been acting anything but normal. Why has the illness not touched Betty's siblings, Thomas and Susannah? Why not Tituba or John? Why not Elizabeth Parris Sr., who seems to always be sick with something or other? Josh Hutchinson: Maybe the girls have succumbed to the pressures facing the Parris household this long, cold winter. They received a fraction of the firewood they need to live comfortably, and Samuel often finds himself writing his sermons at Ingersoll's or sometimes the nearby Walcott home or even Thomas Putnam's house. With the minister under intense pressure, [00:07:00] that may have rubbed off on some of the children. Sarah Jack: It's really important to recognize how brutal that cold was on the Parris household. I mean, you don't feel good when you're cold, and he's writing these sermons that are a remedy to, for his people. They have to hear what he's saying from God's word so that they're headed in the right direction. I just wonder if, if, you know, we say fire and brimstone about some of these messages when he was actually experiencing cold and ice. You just wonder, you know, how much he was taking out on his parishioners because he was so mad that they didn't want to keep him warm.[00:08:00] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there was a point where he said, or wrote down in his sermon notebook, I believe, that he would have, he was going to run out of firewood completely the next day. And so he was trying to get, desperately all the time to get more people to give him more, but of course they need their own firewood for the winter. Um, it's the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. And it's Massachusetts, so it's just brutal, uh, going through this winter. I can hardly imagine living in a house where you're all just like huddled real close because your fire is small and you don't have heat, you know, coming from the central hearth all the way through the house, uh, constantly. Josh Hutchinson: So I guess they wore a lot of coats. Sarah Jack: They were just cold. [00:09:00] They were cold. Josh Hutchinson: They were, it had to have been miserable. And then there's all the stresses facing him. There's other parties in the village who don't want him to be a minister anymore. So he's dealing with that frustration. And I'm sure just the stress level in that household was too much for these girls to bear. Um, I'm surprised that the rest of the household didn't have some kind of reaction to that. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I was just thinking, there's really no evidence of a reaction of, "hey, cut it out, this is unacceptable." They just reacted to the behavior. Josh Hutchinson: Right. Sarah Jack: Although there is somebody who did react to somebody's, that's later in the story. John [00:10:00] Proctor. Isn't he the one that just tells her to cut it out? Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. He sits her at her spinning wheel and threatens to thrash the devil out of her if she keeps behaving, because he really believes that she's acting and just playing around and it's going to be dangerous and people are going to get hurt. Sarah Jack: Yeah, Josh Hutchinson: He recognizes that pretty early. Yeah. As soon as people started getting arrested, John Proctor knew, um, this is going bad. So. Josh Hutchinson: So, the minister has prayed for weeks, but nothing in the girls' conditions has improved. They still contort into strange shapes, impossible to be caused by any known natural illness. They writhe in agony and cry out of pain. Josh Hutchinson: Samuel knows many of the villagers have turned their backs on him. But this seems more sinister, more diabolical. Or [00:11:00] is it God's judgment on him? No, it can't be personally against him. He's doing the best anyone can. Maybe it is to address the sins of the community collectively. Josh Hutchinson: If praying isn't working, maybe a fast will be necessary. He will preach another impassioned sermon on Sunday, reminding his congregation of the constant presence of the devil, who lurks about the village, as he does any place where such a beacon of godliness as Samuel Parris dwells. Monday, Samuel will hold a private fast. Josh Hutchinson: It is the devil who has poisoned men's minds against Samuel's ministry, and if there were ever a time for evil to gain a foothold in the village, he knows it is in this period of division. Samuel has to keep up his sermons and has to warn the villagers before it is too late. He will have to alert area pastors too, but maybe it's time for them to come over anyways to hold a significant fast. Sarah Jack: [00:12:00] Samuel. Josh Hutchinson: Alas, the cold numbs Samuel Parris's mind as he walks the short distance to Ingersoll's next door. What is he trying to get at in his sermons this week again? Samuel pulls the front door open and steps inside Nathaniel Ingersoll's Ordinary, a tavern that does quite well for itself with its central location in the village and its close proximity to the meeting house. Come Sunday, this place will be absolutely packed between the two services. Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel Ingersoll stands at the back of the room, discussing something with his adopted son, Benjamin Hutchinson, who helps out around the tavern. Samuel closes the door behind himself, and the two other men break off their conversation. Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel says, Good day, Samuel. Josh Hutchinson: And Benjamin says, Good morning, Reverend, will you be needing a room again? Josh Hutchinson: I would be indebted to you. Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel says, think [00:13:00] nothing of it, room's just sitting there unoccupied. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Samuel says, there's a ruckus at the house again. Josh Hutchinson: I figured as much, Nathaniel says. Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin leads Samuel upstairs and opens a door. Samuel enters and closes the door behind himself. He will be in here all day, except for meals and trips to the privy out in the yard. Josh Hutchinson: On Sunday morning, with his sermon written, Samuel Parris leads his family the short distance from their home to the meeting house. Entering, they once again find this building even colder than the house they left. There's no fireplace here. There's no grand hearth for cooking and warming. Measuring a modest 34 by 28 feet, the wooden meeting house features a gallery to help fit the many, many people who worship here. Sarah Jack: And there's a place today that people can visit a replica of the meeting house.[00:14:00] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. If you go to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, you get a replica built to the exact dimensions that were recorded in the Salem Village Record Book. It's quite remarkable to go in there and see a pulpit just like the one Samuel Parris would have preached at. Sarah Jack: I was able to stop by last May, so a year ago, May now, when advocate Dr. Leo Igwe Sarah Jack: with Advocacy for Alleged Witches was in New England doing a speaking tour and visiting the memorials, and he did his presentation there, standing in front of the pulpit. It was extremely moving to think about what that room symbolizes and, of course, the message today that Leo is giving the world and the work that he's doing to save lives. The other thing that was special to me was [00:15:00] being able to look out of the window at the meeting house and over to the homestead. I just liked looking through that old glass. Josh Hutchinson: The homestead is such a wonderful place to visit, but getting inside that meeting house for an actual talk was really a great experience. Sarah Jack: We're so appreciative to the team at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead for hosting him and opening it up to us and, um, all of those who attended. Sarah Jack: it was very special to, to have him there. Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And for you listening, we have done two episodes with Leo Igwe, and I do recommend that you go back and listen to those to hear what's going on in the modern world with witchcraft accusations. Sarah Jack: The [00:16:00] other thing I wanted to point out is unfortunately we can't, um, go to Ingersoll's. But there is lots of photos and chatter among descendants and locals online about its future. Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And we've recently done a bonus episode on "Nathaniel Ingersoll and His Tavern in the Salem Witch Trials" and recommend you go back and take a look at that or listen to that. And there is a very passionate community online that has developed around what the future might hold for that institution there. Josh Hutchinson: On January 3rd, Samuel had preached that, "Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the devil to pull it all down." Today, February 14th, he will warn the church of the dangers of [00:17:00] division and devilry. " is a woeful piece of our corruption in an evil time when the wicked people and the godly party meet with vexations by and by to lay down divine providence as if God has forsaken the earth and there were no prophet in his service." Josh Hutchinson: His vitriol is largely directed at those in the village who oppose him. They've challenged his ownership of the parsonage and his role as a minister. The village voted to withhold his pay and firewood, and once Joseph Hutchinson, a village committee member who had donated the land for the meeting house, fenced the building in. Now, for those of you keeping track, Joseph Hutchinson was the birth father of Benjamin Hutchinson, who he'd put in the care of the Ingersolls, who had lost their only daughter. Joseph himself had seven sons and four daughters, so obviously had a kid to spare for the Ingersolls. [00:18:00] Josh Hutchinson: Today, Parris will also speak of "the present low condition of the church in the midst of its enemies." Non-Christians have inhabited this continent since time immemorial, and now those French Catholics to the north are encroaching again with the aid of their Wabanaki allies. Josh Hutchinson: Monday morning, Samuel Parris rises well before dawn with the rest of his household. Betty and Abigail persist in their afflictions. Samuel needs medical advice, but first he will turn to the ministers. He sits at his desk and breaks out his writing materials, but the ink has frozen overnight again. Josh Hutchinson: "Elizabeth," Samuel says, "warm this ink for me." Josh Hutchinson: She takes the inkwell and places it in a pot, which she hangs over the low fire. In a few minutes, she returns the ink to her husband. The inkwell is warm to his touch. He sets it on his desk and draws ink into his pen. Josh Hutchinson: "John," Samuel [00:19:00] says, now handing John a paper, "take this letter to Nathaniel's, he needs to send messengers to the local ministers to ask them to meet me here as soon as they all can attend to see the girls." John takes the note and departs. Samuel and family spend the rest of the day, amidst numerous interruptions by the girls, fasting and praying, but the girls do remain unwell and continue to behave strangely. Josh Hutchinson: On February 24th, Parris sends John on another errand. This time he is to retrieve Salem Village's only physician, William Griggs, who lives some distance down the road. Sarah Jack: pulls Samuel aside Josh Hutchinson: After Griggs examines the girl, he pulls Samuel aside for a conversation. "They're under an evil hand," he says. Josh Hutchinson: "You're sure it isn't anything medical?" Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. This affliction is not natural. Josh Hutchinson: "Then Satan is after me." [00:20:00] Josh Hutchinson: "I'm afraid so." Josh Hutchinson: In the parsonage and around the village, talk turns to witches. Perhaps the girls were bewitched by one of Satan's agents. Christ knew there were devils in his church. On February 25th, Samuel and Elizabeth Parris travel for the Thursday lecture, a weekly event hosted by various neighboring communities on a rotating schedule. Josh Hutchinson: While they are away, a neighbor, Mary Sibley, stays with the children. Mary Sibley speaks with Tituba and John. Josh Hutchinson: "Here's what we're going to do," she says. "Tituba, you collect some urine from Betty and Abigail. John, get the rye flour." Josh Hutchinson: "What do you have in mind?" Tituba asks. Josh Hutchinson: "We're going to stop a witch." Josh Hutchinson: "With urine." Josh Hutchinson: "By baking a special cake, the girl's urine is needed so we can burn off some of the magic that the witch put in them." Josh Hutchinson: Soon, Tituba collects the urine of the girls, and John retrieves the heavy sack of rye flour, while [00:21:00] Elizabeth gathers the rest of what they'll need. The three adults meet at the hearth and bake the cake, with the girls wailing in agony behind them, contorting again into several bizarre shapes. After John removes the cake from the oven, Mary calls for the family dog, who eagerly devours the morsel. According to English custom, this witch-finding technique will reveal the identity of the woman who has afflicted the girls. Mary isn't exactly sure how, but her own mother taught her to do this. Maybe the witch will be hurt, or maybe she'll turn up at the door. Sarah Jack: The witch cake is not voodoo. Josh Hutchinson: The witch cake was English, and Mary Sibley instructed Tituba and John how to bake it, because they hadn't done anything like that before using English [00:22:00] countermagic. Sarah Jack: How great if that had burned the magic off. What a great quick intervention that would have been. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, if only that had worked, could have spared months and months and months of trials and, um, all those deaths. Josh Hutchinson: Now, the same day the witch cake is baked, two more village girls become afflicted. Ann Putnam Jr. is the daughter of Parris ally Mr. Thomas Putnam Jr. and Mrs. Ann Carr Putnam. Thomas and the two Anns have made several visits to the parsonage since Betty and Abigail have been ill. And I want to throw in that Thomas Putnam was also a sergeant in the local militia, serving under Lieutenant Nathaniel Ingersoll and Captain Jonathan Walcott, who are [00:23:00] also important characters in the Salem Witch Hunt story. Josh Hutchinson: Now, another visitor who's taken ill is Elizabeth Hubbard, an orphan teenage girl living with her relatives, the Griggses. She has also visited the parsonage along with the physician, whom she serves as maid. At 17, Hubbard is five years older than Ann Putnam Jr., making her the oldest person yet afflicted and the first of legal age to be able to bear witness in court. Her age lends credence to witchcraft accusations against villagers Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, whom Hubbard accuses of attacking her spectrally, which is to say the shapes of the women appear to her. They do not visit bodily. Everyone knows witches have the ability to leave their bodies and travel great distances to torment their victims. Sarah Jack: There's some things, like, here where you say, everybody knows. [00:24:00] There were, this is one of the things that everybody knew. It was like, not a question. They believed it. Just as much as they believed the devil was visiting them. Josh Hutchinson: Um, when I say everyone, of course, I mean, virtually everyone, um, believed in witchcraft. And if you didn't believe in witchcraft, that led people to call you an atheist, because how could you believe in God, not believe in his adversary, the devil, and then the devil's ability to, uh, contract with witches to do his work? Josh Hutchinson: The girl writhes, twisting and turning, shouting at the top of her lungs, "they got me!" Josh Hutchinson: "Who got you?" Thomas Putnam Jr. asks. Josh Hutchinson: I don't know, but it hurts. It hurts. Make it stop. Josh Hutchinson: Shh. [00:25:00] It's okay, Annie. You'll be fine. God is with you always. Josh Hutchinson: It's not okay. I won't be fine. Josh Hutchinson: What makes you say that? Josh Hutchinson: I feel like my bowels are being torn out. Josh Hutchinson: We are praying as hard as we can. Josh Hutchinson: It's not enough. Josh Hutchinson: Then we'll fast. Josh Hutchinson: No, I'm being pinched and pricked and choked right now. Don't you see that? How do you fast that away? Josh Hutchinson: I'm sorry, Annie, but you know the best weapon is prayer, the best weapon that we have in this spiritual battle. Josh Hutchinson: What's wrong with me, Father? Josh Hutchinson: I wish I knew. Josh Hutchinson: Is it natural? Josh Hutchinson: No, there is something very dark in this village. Josh Hutchinson: The spectral figure of a woman approaches Ann, holding out a little red book and a red pen. Take it, she says. Sign the book and you'll be freed from your troubles. And if I don't, then we'll kill you. Josh Hutchinson: Father, save me! Josh Hutchinson: If father won't save you, nobody will.[00:26:00] Josh Hutchinson: God, preserve me. Josh Hutchinson: Just sign the book and you'll be free from your guilt, worry, and pain. Josh Hutchinson: What book is that? Josh Hutchinson: My God gave it to me. Josh Hutchinson: And who is your God? Josh Hutchinson: You know who I mean, girl. Josh Hutchinson: A stabbing pain tears through Ann's chest. God save me, she says. Annie, Annie, Thomas Putnam is calling. Josh Hutchinson: After a moment, Ann snaps too. The spectral woman has gone away with her book, but Ann just knows she'll be back. Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Putnam shakes his daughter. "Are you all right?" Josh Hutchinson: "No, father. A woman came to me with a book and said she'd kill me if I didn't sign it." Josh Hutchinson: "What woman?" Josh Hutchinson: "I don't know, but it is none of God's book. It is the devil's book for ought I know." Josh Hutchinson: "What woman?" Josh Hutchinson: "I couldn't make out her face." Josh Hutchinson: But you must have seen her before. Josh Hutchinson: She had a familiar aspect. Josh Hutchinson: How did she get in here? I didn't see anyone come in. Josh Hutchinson: She appeared spectrally from [00:27:00] thin air. Josh Hutchinson: A witch. Josh Hutchinson: I think so. Josh Hutchinson: I knew it. Josh Hutchinson: But how? Josh Hutchinson: This explains everything. Mercy! Josh Hutchinson: Panting, maid Mercy Lewis enters the room. "Sir," she says. Josh Hutchinson: "Run and get my brother Edward. Tell him a witch has assaulted Annie." Josh Hutchinson: Mercy turns and strides away to the stairs. A moment later, the front door squeaks open and promptly slams shut. Footsteps ascend the stairs, and Mother ducks into the garret. Josh Hutchinson: "What's all this about a witch, then?" she asks. Josh Hutchinson: Annie twists and winds. Josh Hutchinson: "Look at Annie, Thomas says. A witch has done this." Josh Hutchinson: How do you know it's a witch? Josh Hutchinson: She saw a shape. Josh Hutchinson: What shape? Josh Hutchinson: A woman. Josh Hutchinson: Annie groans. Josh Hutchinson: What do you think this means? Witchcraft in our village? Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and they say the minister's girls are bewitched as well. Josh Hutchinson: Oh dear, after they've been sick for so long, why do they suddenly suspect a [00:28:00] witch? Josh Hutchinson: I don't know, but that's all anyone can talk about when I was over this morning. I suppose we'd better fetch Griggs and Parris to tell us if I'm right. Josh Hutchinson: I'll send Mercy as soon as she gets back from Edwards. Josh Hutchinson: No, I want to go now. I'll saddle the horse. Josh Hutchinson: What shall I do while you're gone? Josh Hutchinson: Pray, he says and mind she doesn't hurt herself. Josh Hutchinson: God send you back to us safely. Sarah Jack: So much fear. Josh Hutchinson: So much fear. There's talk about, um, we recently, in an interview, our guest Francis Bremer talked to us about Chadwick Hansen's book, Witchcraft in Salem, and in there, he posits the theory that if you truly believe in witchcraft, as soon as you believe that you've actually been cursed, your body and mind [00:29:00] takes all that in, and psychogenically you have reactions. You can have psychosomatic symptoms of bewitchment that basically are just brought on by your intense fear. And I believe that's something that is plausible that the girls experienced. Sarah Jack: Yeah. I mean, they're scared. Their parents are expressing their fear by their response to what's happening to the kids and what they're saying. And yeah, it's just, they have to find the witch. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Imagine if your children were behaving this way, screaming about pain, being twisted up like pretzels and, you know, do just randomly rolling around the room, writhing in agony, [00:30:00] screaming, get off me, get off me, you know, you would think that somebody's attacking them. You can't. I mean, what else do you think at that point? Sarah Jack: Yeah. If, you know, the cure, the only cure is finding the witch, then that's what has to be found. With the littles that have been in my house, sometimes when they get hurt, they need an ice pack for the injury. They're in pain, you can see the bump on their leg, what's happened, ice is going to make it feel better. It's such a comfort to them that often they might have a bump that they might get bumped and there is no wound. But they want the ice, because it comforts them. And so the ice is an actual remedy for inflammation and swelling, but other times [00:31:00] just knowing that they can go to the freezer and grab an ice pack, and they do it for each other too. I think there's this element of community that, you know, it's a family and you're trying to help each other. And you see that in your own interactions with, um, people in your life. You, you try to solve each other's problems and find the remedy. Josh Hutchinson: And it's interesting, I had mentioned that Parris had prayed for weeks. He fasted, uh, several times over January and February and the girls, they got sick in the middle of January and this, now we're towards the end of February. It's so interesting to me that it took basically six weeks for them running through all those measures that they normally take when somebody's ill, um, and doing the past, the fasting and the prayer. [00:32:00] You know, nursing the children as, you know, their mothers would have nursed them. Um, others from the community would have pitched in and come to the houses to see how they could help. Um, but after that, they run out of ideas. And basically you're left with, it must be a witch, it must be diabolical, especially after Dr. Griggs says it's nothing natural, uh, at that point, what's left. And like you said, when you know there is something that could cure or help the person in pain, then that's what you do. And when you believe that, that thing that you can do is to stop a witch, you put your whole heart into that. And I think that's what we see, uh, later on in upcoming episodes. We'll see all that playing out that these [00:33:00] people put their hearts in it because they really wanted to stop the afflictions from happening. Josh Hutchinson: Sometime later, Thomas returns home to find his brother Edward and neighbor Henry Kinney in the Great Hall, praying over Annie, while Ann Sr., Mercy Lewis, and Mercy's sister, Priscilla Kinney, hover over the afflicted girl. When the door shuts, the people in the room stop and turn to Thomas. Josh Hutchinson: What's the news? Edward Putnam says. Josh Hutchinson: Where's the minister? Ann Putnam Sr. asks. Josh Hutchinson: Where's Griggs? Henry Kinney asks. Josh Hutchinson: Griggs girl is afflicted too. She also complains of women assaulting her. Josh Hutchinson: Has she named them? Josh Hutchinson: No. Josh Hutchinson: And what of the minister? Josh Hutchinson: He's tied up with his own girls, but he's added Annie to his prayers, says he'll come visit when his man gets back from some errand at Ingersoll's. Josh Hutchinson: Dear God, Henry says, four of them afflicted now? Josh Hutchinson: [00:34:00] It's spreading, Edward says. Josh Hutchinson: The following two days, February 26 and 27, 1692, will prove pivotal, as these are the days the girls begin naming the names. Not one, but three women will be accused by the end of these days. Tituba, the enslaved indigenous woman in the Parris household, is the first accused when Betty and Abigail cry out against her, the woman who has cared for them as much as their own mother has, who will go on to profess much love for them during her examinations by the magistrates. Born in South America or the Caribbean, Tituba may have been an Arawak or a Carib Parris likely purchased her during his time in Barbados, where he tried to run his father's sugar business before his return to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he had for a time attended Harvard College, his academic career cut short by his [00:35:00] father's death in Barbados. To say Samuel was a poor businessman is quite an understatement. The man seems to never quite settle into a profession at which he will be able to succeed. Josh Hutchinson: At any rate, he had Tituba in Barbados, and he brought her to Boston in 1680 or 1681. Except while he served as temporary minister in Stowe in 1685, Samuel remained in Boston working as a merchant until men from Salem Village approached him about being the town's minister in 1688. When he accepted the call in 1689 and moved his family to Salem Village, he brought Tituba with him. It's unclear when he acquired the man known as John Indian, a man of undetermined Indigenous background. And for a time, a third enslaved person, an African American teenage boy, also resided in the parsonage with the Parrises. However, Parris recorded the boy's death in March 1689. [00:36:00] While Tituba's exact origin is unknown, Elaine G. Breslaw's book, Tituba: the Reluctant Witch of Salem, posits one plausible theory and is very well worth a read. Josh Hutchinson: On February 27th, Ann Putnam Jr. accuses Sarah Good of bewitching her. Elizabeth Hubbard, meanwhile, names both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne as her, her tormentors. In a dramatic incident, Elizabeth claims to be followed by a wolf, which is supposedly directed by Sarah Good, or may even be the shapeshifting Sarah herself. Josh Hutchinson: In 1692, Sarah Good is an impoverished woman with no permanent housing or reliable income. But things hadn't always been that way. Born Sarah Soulart in about 1654, she was raised by respectable parents in Wenham. Sarah Jack: Her father, John Soulart, was likely French by birth and may have been [00:37:00] Huguenot by faith. He worked as an innkeeper and left behind a healthy estate, but he took his own life in 1672. And unfortunately Sarah was left in the lurch, inheriting only three acres of meadow. So Sarah married Daniel Poole. Who promptly ran up an eye-watering debt, which Sarah was forced to pay from his meager estate after his death, leaving Sarah destitute. Josh Hutchinson: She next married William Good by 1683. Josh Hutchinson: William was a weaver and a laborer who never seemed to stay employed long. He and Sarah had to sell off the meadow to pay additional debts owed by Sarah's first husband. William Good's origins are unknown, but he had two children with Sarah. The first, Dorothy, was born in about 1687. The second daughter, whose name is unknown, was born in December 1691. And we have much more with, about Dorothy in our episode with Rachel [00:38:00] Christ-Doane, that you can refer back to learning what happened to Dorothy after the witch trials. At the time she was accused, Sarah Good was in the habit of going house to house, seeking charity. She evidently was given something at least once by the Parrises, but she left the house muttering, raising suspicions. Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Osborne had caused a scandal when, following the 1674 death of her husband, Robert Prince, she married Alexander Osborne, her young indentured servant. She was also involved in a dispute over her husband's first estate with his kin, Thomas and John Putnam, who were the executors. By February 27th, 1692, Osborne had been sick in bed for at least a year and not been able to attend worship at the meeting house all that time. Josh Hutchinson: All three accused women [00:39:00] were markedly different from the New England Puritan ideal of what a woman should be. All three were outsiders in key ways. Tituba was most clearly an outsider, being indigenous in a period when Massachusetts English settlers were at war with the Wabanaki Confederacy, an alliance of Algonkian-speaking peoples who had chosen to ally themselves with the French over the British. Josh Hutchinson: But Sarah Good from Wenham was also a relative newcomer to Salem Village. Being indigent placed her further outside the norms of the community. Requesting charity was itself a risky business in the age of witch hunts, as people who refused to give what was asked for felt guilt, and then resented the one who asked. If something shortly went wrong for the refuser, say a child took ill, or a livestock died, perhaps, then the person who refused the gift would suspect the [00:40:00] one they'd refused was seeking revenge through witchcraft. Sarah Jack: Aren't there some things in the record where those who were turned away for a favor or a handout were mad when it was refused and they wished something ill on the refuser? Josh Hutchinson: There are a number of cases exactly like that where someone, say, refused to give milk and the requester then said, "your cow will never give you milk or something to that effect in their irritation and anger and, you know, those words come back to haunt them. Definitely. Josh Hutchinson: Uh, in the case of Sarah Good, though, she's just accused of muttering. And in the next episode, we'll discuss her examination by the [00:41:00] magistrates and what she says about her muttering. Josh Hutchinson: Lastly, Sarah Osborne had transgressed social norms by wedding a younger man and indentured servant and by failing to attend meetings on Sundays. With three women accused of witchcraft, the witch hunt was ramping up and would soon be in full swing. We'll cover the first arrests and examinations in our next 101 episode. Josh Hutchinson: And now we'd like to summarize the facts that we covered in today's stories and help separate fact from fiction. In January 1692, Salem village minister Samuel Parris's daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams, began displaying strange symptoms and behaviors. Now, there are many, many theories about what caused the girl's symptoms, and many of these theories, such as ergot, have been disproven. [00:42:00] But I believe it's more important to understand the motivations of the adults who filed the complaints that we'll discuss beginning in our next installment. As I mentioned, so many theories about what caused it. Some theorize that the girls ate bad bread and got ergot poisoning. Others point to encephalitis, meningitis, and other physical ailments, while others point to mental health conditions such as mass psychogenic illness. In several instances, fraud was clearly perpetrated. Were the girls and the other people who were known as afflicted lying about everything? Or were they perhaps trying to strengthen their cases against people they truly believed were bewitching them? That's the big question. Sarah Jack: It's a big question. Josh Hutchinson: Whatever caused the ailments, we all know how this story ends. By the end of the saga, at least 156 people had been accused of witchcraft. So why did the men file the complaints and make the accusations they did? [00:43:00] That's something we'll be looking at in our future episodes. Josh Hutchinson: Continuing with the facts, on February 14th, 1692, Samuel Parris did preach that the godly "must war a good warfare to subdue all our spiritual enemies." And the other lines that I quoted that he said in his sermon, he did say as recorded in his sermon notebook. And it is known that Samuel Parris did observe several private fasts. However, we don't have the specific dates for those, so we don't know whether he held one on February 15th, like I said in the story. Josh Hutchinson: On February 24th, a physician thought to be Salem Village's William Griggs, though there's no record stating a name of a physician, what we have is that from John Hale who wrote a book in [00:44:00] 1697 that was published after his death. We know from his book that this happened with the doctor saying that they are under an evil hand, but we don't know exactly who that doctor was. Josh Hutchinson: But on February 25th, Mary Sibley instructed Tituba and or John Indian to bake a witch cake to determine who was afflicting the girls, and Ann Putnam Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard joined Betty and Abigail in displaying symptoms of affliction. Josh Hutchinson: February 26th, Betty and Abigail did name Tituba as their tormentor. Josh Hutchinson: And sometime between February 25th and February 29th, several Salem gentlemen and area ministers visited the Parris household and concurred that the hand of Satan was in the girl's afflictions. Under questioning, Tituba admitted to baking the witch cake, but did not implicate [00:45:00] Mary Sibley. Josh Hutchinson: February 27th, Ann Putnam Jr. claimed that Sarah Good was afflicting her, and Elizabeth Hubbard blamed both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Josh Hutchinson: The four girls continued to be sick on February 28th, a Sunday. As of that point in time, there were four people believed to be bewitched and three people suspected to have bewitched them. And we can't wait to be able to tell the rest of this story to you. Sarah Jack: That was great, Josh. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much, Sarah. Sarah Jack: Now Mary Louise Bingham is back with another excellent Minute with Mary. Mary Louise Bingham: According to historian Dr. Emerson Baker, in the early 1690s, the ministers complained of the decline of moral values, which resulted in an angry God, who sought revenge. Their solution was to seek a [00:46:00] moral reformation through the court and strictly enforce laws, which served as moral codes that had not been punished to the fullest extent. The ministers feared the community would fail if there was not a return to God. Mary Louise Bingham: One of the magistrates at the court in 1690, when this reformation was put into effect, was John Richards, who also served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692. One of the concerned ministers was Cotton Mather. According to author Marilynne Roach, John Richards was a church member held in high esteem at the North Church in Boston. So Cotton penned a letter dated February 13th, 1692, asking John to approve a commitment renewal service. According to Marilynne, John, and I quote, "apparently showed no enthusiasm." [00:47:00] Marilynne also wrote that this was not the only time that John Richards ignored the advice given to him by Cotton Mather in 1692. Mary Louise Bingham: Thank you. Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary. Josh Hutchinson: And here's Sarah with another informative edition of End Witch Hunts News. Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us today for this episode. Your unwavering support and the way you share our message are invaluable to us. We're excited to announce a new fundraiser that we hope you'll consider supporting. This podcast is a project of our nonprofit called End Witch Hunts. Sarah Jack: We have the opportunity to attend a conference at Lancaster University focused on the human rights issue of witch hunting, hosted by the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. This event will debut a powerful photo exhibit focusing on harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and [00:48:00] the humanity of people who are accused of being witches globally today. Sarah Jack: Josh has three photos in the exhibit, and it would be incredibly meaningful for him to be present at its reveal. This exhibit will travel internationally to raise awareness about these important issues, and your support can help make our participation possible. Sarah Jack: Additionally, we will be gaining valuable knowledge and making invaluable connections, which will advance our interviews and research we do for our education and advocacy projects. Sarah Jack: We will also have the opportunity to present on our recent exoneration and memorial work in New England, particularly the historic and landmark legislation in Connecticut that formally absolved the witch trial victims of the Connecticut colony. That bill was H. J. 34, a resolution concerning certain witchcraft convictions in colonial Connecticut. Sarah Jack: If you'd like to contribute to this upcoming opportunity, please donate on our website, endwitchhunts. org. We appreciate anything you can give. Thank you once again for listening, sharing, and supporting us. [00:49:00] Together we can make a difference. Until the next time, take care and stay engaged. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah. Sarah Jack: You're welcome. Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt. We hope you enjoyed today's stories. Sarah Jack: Join us every week. Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
In this Bonus episode, we chat with Rachel Christ-Doane Director of Education for the Salem Witch Museum about their new artifacts for the exhibit, “Witches: Evolving Perceptions.” The first case features four significant books from the 16th to 18th centuries:
– A 1600 edition of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum.
– A 1586 edition of Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum.
– A 1729 edition of The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d by Andrew Morton (Daniel Defoe).
– A 1796 edition of Robert Calef’s More Wonders of the Invisible World.
These books provide unique perspectives on early modern beliefs about witchcraft, from the notorious Malleus Maleficarum to the critical De Praestigiis Daemonum.
The second case explores witchcraft in popular culture with:
– An 1868 edition of the grimoire Les Secrets Merveilleux De La Magie Naturelle Du Petit Albert.
– A 1919 booklet, “Your Fortune in a Tea Cup,” by Dr. V.M Pierce.
– A signed first edition of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
– A signed first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Rachel shares the stories behind these artifacts and the ongoing renovations at the museum. These new additions provide a deeper understanding of how perceptions of witchcraft have evolved over time.
Tune in to learn about these fascinating artifacts and their impact on the narrative of witchcraft through history and culture and how you can see them for yourself.
Dive into the world of the Puritans with Dr. Francis J. Bremer, a historian with over fifty years of expertise in 17th-century New England and Puritanism. Dr. Bremer sheds light on the core beliefs, historical context, and diversity within Puritanism, including the differences between New England Puritans and those who stayed in England. He discusses myths about Puritans as zealous witch hunters and reveals their lasting impact on society, education, and community values. Join us for an episode filled with historical insights and surprising revelations about this influential group.
In this special bonus episode of Witch Hunt, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack detail the history of the Ingersoll’s Tavern in Danvers, Massachusetts. The episode highlights Nathaniel Ingersoll and his wife’s involvement in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, where their tavern served as a significant location for key events and imprisonments. The episode outlines various examinations, complaints, and testimonies that occurred at the tavern, and discusses how the Ingersolls and their associates participated in the witch hunts. The preservation efforts for this historical site, now under threat of decay, are also covered, emphasizing the importance of the tavern in understanding the infamous witch trials.
Welcome to Witch Hunt, where we uncover the truths behind some of history’s most compelling events. Today, we are joined by award-winning filmmaker Tom Phillips, who is here to discuss his new award-winning screenplay, “Salem Aftermath.” “Salem Aftermath” will be a drama series that explores the strained relationships following the Salem Witch-Hunt and the psychological impacts on those who lived through it like never before. Tom’s extensive research and collaboration with leading scholars infuses real life perspective into this often sensationalized period. Find out which historical voices he has brought to life and how science enabled these stories to unfold. Additionally we discuss the powerful Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, an active effort working to exonerate the remaining accused witches of Massachusetts. Below, you can check out Tom Phillips’ award-winning film “Chasing the Dead: Requiem,” streaming now. Please see links below to get in touch with Tom’s team or to join the Justice Project efforts.
In this episode, hosts Josh and Sarah explore the complexities of witchcraft legislation relating to witch branding and witch hunting in India. They are joined by Riya A. Singh, a third year law student specializing in human rights, and Dr. Amit Anand, an Assistant Professor of Law at Reva University. They discuss the differences in legal frameworks and implementation across Indian states, underscoring the urgent need for central legislation. The discussion highlights how the shortcomings of current laws are impacting the lives of vulnerable community members. They address the importance of tailoring education, systemic changes, and community programs to fit the unique needs of each region. Join us for an insightful conversation on the urgent need for legal reforms and societal action to combat witch-hunting in India.
In this episode, we welcome back Beth M. Caruso, author of the compelling novel One of Windsor and its sequel The Salty Rose, to discuss her latest book, Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch’s Daughter, the final entry in her Connecticut Witch Trials trilogy. Beth takes us through the chilling history of the Connecticut Witch Trials, focusing on Alice Young Jr., the daughter of the first person executed for witchcraft in Connecticut.
Beth shares insights into Alice Jr.’s experiences, her family’s history, and the extensive research behind the book, including work with historians Malcolm Gaskill and Kathy Hermes. We also explore themes of trauma, healing, and the lasting impact of the witch trials, along with efforts to honor the victims and educate the public. Join us for a compelling mix of historical insights and personal stories with Beth M. Caruso.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Witch Hunt, the podcast where we dive deep into the fascinating and often untold chapters of history, like the Connecticut Witch Trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we are thrilled to welcome back a very special guest, author and historian, Beth Caruso. Beth is the creator of the Connecticut Witch Trials Trilogy, and she's here to talk about her latest book, Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch's Daughter. Josh Hutchinson: That's right, Sarah. In this episode, Beth will take us on a journey through the chilling history of the Connecticut Witch Trials, focusing on the life of Alice Jr., the daughter of Alice Young, the first person executed for witchcraft in Connecticut. This episode promises to be a compelling mix of historical insights, personal trauma, and the quest for respectful memory. Sarah Jack: We'll also hear about the extensive research that went into Beth's book, including some surprising discoveries and the real life connections [00:01:00] between the characters in her narrative. Plus, we'll explore the ongoing efforts to memorialize the victims of these tragic events and Beth's exciting future projects. Josh Hutchinson: So, grab your headphones and get ready for a deep dive into a dark and intriguing chapter of American history. Let's welcome Beth Caruso back to the show. Sarah Jack: Hello, Josh. Josh Hutchinson: Hi, Sarah. Sarah Jack: Hey, Beth. Beth Caruso: Hi. How are you, Sarah? Sarah Jack: I'm good. Josh Hutchinson: Hi, Beth. Beth Caruso: Hi, Josh. And I hope you're doing well, too. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I am. Thank you. Sarah Jack: Thank you for returning to the podcast. I am so excited to get to talk to you about your new project, and I want to thank you for all the years you've worked to ensure the legacy of this history, and we are excited to hear about Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch's Daughter. What can you [00:02:00] tell us about that? Beth Caruso: Well, I'm thrilled to be back. Uh, you two are old friends. That's not a secret. So, um, I'm really happy to tell you a little bit more about the new book, Between Good and Evil. It is the third book in the Connecticut Witch Trials, uh, Trilogy, which by the way, it didn't start out as a trilogy; it started out with a book about Alice Young and then more information just kept coming. And It ended up being a trilogy, but this last one is about Alice, Jr., her only daughter, and what happened to her and what she saw and how she dealt with the trauma of losing her mother to a witch hanging. Josh Hutchinson: How have the descendants [00:03:00] of Alice Young inspired you? Beth Caruso: Well, the descendants had asked me a long time ago, after reading One of Windsor, when the book about Alice Jr. would be coming out. And at that point I said, "well, I don't have any plans for it. I just don't have enough information about her." Well, time went by, and there were some things that happened that gave me a lot more information where I got to a place where I could say, "hmm, okay, there's enough historical information now that I can piece together into a dramatic history." Beth Caruso: Um, one of the biggest developments was, um. I think it's a couple years ago now, The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill. Can you see this okay? Um, he [00:04:00] did research into the witch trials in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of course, you know, up the Connecticut River Valley was a hotbed of the early witch trials in New England. Not just Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford, all the way up to Springfield, as well, with the trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons and subsequently, um, Mary Parsons pointing fingers and accusing other people of being witches, such as, um, Mercy Marshfield, who had originally been from Windsor, um, or had settled in Windsor and then, uh, Mary Bliss Parsons, as well, who, who later had trials of her own. Beth Caruso: So, what Malcolm Gaskill did, I had read those records [00:05:00] before, but, you know, it's, they can be confusing. There's quite a lot of them, but, you know, this person had this type of aggression towards that person, and then they, Hugh Parsons did all these crazy things, and so did his wife, and without a historian putting it into a great context. It was very confusing. Gaskill was brilliant. He laid out the town of Springfield in a way that was understandable. Uh, the first pages, he says, these are the characters. And, um, I knew that Alice Junior's husband, Simon Beamon, had been living in Springfield, and he had actually been a participant in those trials against the Parsons. Beth Caruso: Um, But it helped me understand that whole background [00:06:00] much more and how people were interconnected with each other, um, and, and how these trials weren't really black and white. Um, so I had a lot more background information about Alice Junior's life after she married and she went to Springfield and how that all like came pieced together. Beth Caruso: But I also learned more on my own, and, and with historian Kathy Hermes, um, with our article, which I've been on your show and talked about, it's in Connecticut History Review, and it's "Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch Hunting and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World". Beth Caruso: We were doing some research at the Connecticut State Archives, and [00:07:00] it was thought before that Alice Jr. had, had somehow ended up in Springfield and ended up meeting Simon Beamon there and then she married there. But we realized by looking at the original, um, archives at the Connecticut State Library that she had indeed stayed in Windsor, Connecticut, which is mind-blowing if you think about the first accusation of witchcraft happening there to her mother and her mother being murdered. Beth Caruso: Um, we know she didn't go with her historical father, and this was also really interesting, too, in piecing together the story. Um, John Young, he went to Stratford pretty, pretty soon after [00:08:00] Alice Young's hanging. And in Stratford, he dies in 1661, but he was sick for seven months. Still, he died intestate. Basically, he had no will that he left behind. So I thought, well, wow, isn't, isn't that, um, fascinating and dramatic in some way? This, this man who's supposedly her father, like he splits, he goes to Stratford, but somehow she still stays in Windsor. Wow. What a revelation. Beth Caruso: So you can come up with all kinds of dramatic theories about that. Did she, you know, have a parting of the ways with her father because of him not standing up for the mother? Or was he really more, in fact, a stepfather? Because it's, it, in the records, it shows that John Young was [00:09:00] sick for seven months before he died. If you have a child or children and you know you're sick and you know it's not going well, what's the one thing you make sure you do for your children? You write a will for them. He did not write a will. And furthermore, nobody came to claim the will. Beth Caruso: So his property in Stratford sat vacant for seven years. The town couldn't sell it. They had to wait seven years to make sure no one would claim it. But once that seven years was passed, the town sold the property. Beth Caruso: And you can't say this is because, oh, well, Alice Jr. was a woman, because by that point she had four sons. She was married with a husband. So they certainly could have claimed it, but they never did. And so I thought all those pieces together were [00:10:00] pretty interesting. Beth Caruso: And the other thing, you know, Mercy Marshfield, I told you she was one of the people who was accused of witchcraft by Mary Parsons in Springfield during that time, I think it was early 50s. Correct me if I'm wrong, Josh. Um, but Mercy Marshfield had a daughter, Sarah, Uh, Sarah Miller, she, she married a man named Thomas Miller in Springfield, but they had been in Windsor. They would have been in Windsor for Alice Young's accusations and everything leading up to her hanging. Um. Beth Caruso: So, Sarah ends up, Sarah, Mercy Marshfield's daughter, ends up being the next door neighbor of Alice Young, Jr., um, and, and this is, again, due to the work of, uh, Gaskill. Uh, they're right next door to each [00:11:00] other. Their two husbands work for William Pynchon, who's the head of the colony. Both of their mothers get accused of witchcraft, you know? So I thought, "oh my gosh, they, they have to be tight." They hold, they're both from Windsor. They have this unique common thing. Both their husbands know each other. They're working for Pynchon. On top of that, they have lots of children, both of them. They both have like a dozen children. And then finally, they, those children intermarry. The, they become truly family. Beth Caruso: And, um, so I thought, well, that's a great basis too, because here is, I know this has to be, um, a unique friendship and a strong friendship. So when we talk about Alice Jr. and we talk about how she could have made it through, certainly that could have been an element of it. Sarah Jack: It's [00:12:00] so great to get to talk about the Youngs again. This is wonderful. Um, one of your themes, um, with Alice Jr. in this story is her internal conflicts and the guilt by association. Can you tell us about how that impacted her as a mother and friend and wife? Beth Caruso: Well, you know, of course I can only theorize, um, but I thought, here's, here's a trauma. Um, there's probably post traumatic stress syndrome in some way. And let me look at, you know, just cases that I know about, some horrific cases of childhood trauma, whether we're talking about like child sexual abuse by priests or, um, doctors or people like [00:13:00] that, or war or things like that, um, or even, even divorce within a family. How do children process that? Beth Caruso: And for extremely traumatic events, the children will often, you know, push all those traumatic memories, all those things into their subconscious, because it's just too much for their little psyches to handle when they're children like that. And you find them later on as adults with repressed memories that come to the surface that are often quite shocking. So, that's one element. Beth Caruso: And the other one is that when a child goes through trauma, a lot of times what they do is they internalize it. It's very common in divorce. Oh, what [00:14:00] did I do to cause mommy and daddy to break up? It's my fault in some way. Um, so those are just things that we can easily observe by these childhood traumas that we can see in present day. Beth Caruso: Well, of course, those things are, you know, part of humanity and the human experience. And so I thought, "well, Alice Jr, it wouldn't be unbelievable at all that she would go through something like that, that she would have repressed memories that would eventually be triggered with time." and as she's more mature as a woman, you know, these memories might seep out and, um, she would have to deal with them. How would she deal with them? Another, you know, great tool to use to [00:15:00] dramatize the story. Um, because what memories are repressed? Beth Caruso: Well, of course, I, I wanted to paint a good picture of what happens in One of Windsor, some of it fictionalized, some of it real, but I thought, "oh, wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be, um, juicy for readers to realize, oh, well, maybe there's other secrets that were not told and couldn't be told because it's from Alice Jr's viewpoint." And so I tried to do that with her repressed memories. Beth Caruso: And then also the feeling of guilt, one, because it does fit these childhood patterns of trauma. But also because there was such a stigma in those days about, uh, someone in your family being called a witch. And there were real and deadly consequences to [00:16:00] that. Beth Caruso: Sarah, you know, in your own, um, family history with the Connecticut Witch Trials and the Benhams and how the the stigma of witchcraft carried on from generation to generation. In fact, with Alice Young, it, it most certainly carried on and we have a story about it. Beth Caruso: And in this case, a lot of people think that she was actually accused of witchcraft. She wasn't accused, per se, but her reputation was tarnished and known as the daughter of a witch, no doubt by this story. Her, her, um, son, Thomas, and of course this is after her husband dies. Her son, Thomas, gets into a fight with someone, and because he has said that Thomas looks like a witch and his mother's a witch, [00:17:00] um, no formal accusation there, but Thomas was extremely upset by this, because being called a witch and that may lead to being accused of something may lead to, of course, death. And he knew this all too well, and he lost it. He beat up this guy. Beth Caruso: Um, the guy countersued. The guy brought him to court, but Thomas brought the guy to court as well. They countersued each other. The guy who basically slandered Thomas and his mother got a stiffer fine than Thomas Beamon for beating up the guy. Because I think the courts understood how dangerous it could have been for that family. And people were, this was, I [00:18:00] think in the 1670s. So things were dying down a little bit, at least until they picked up again with Salem. But so yeah, there were real consequences to all these things. Josh Hutchinson: There were. Just having your reputation ruined in that way could really impact how you were able to do commerce and trade with others in your community and, uh, get the help that you needed from the community, because everybody had to work together. Beth Caruso: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It wasn't, you know, always black and white, though. And that's, what's so interesting about this story. As I said before, the man that [00:19:00] Alice Jr. marries has been an active participant in the Hugh and Mary Parsons trials. He shares his stories. He truly believes that Hugh Parsons is a witch. And so how ironic that, you know, just a couple years later, basically, he meets Alice Jr. and marries her and in a way I see him standing up for her with the timing of that marriage. Beth Caruso: The interesting thing about Alice Jr. being in town, in Windsor, in 1654, was that Windsor's second witch trial victim, Lydia Gilbert, was being accused of witchcraft. [00:20:00] So it just so happens that only about two weeks after Lydia Gilbert's conviction is when Simon Beamon marries Alice Young, Jr. And then she's out of town. So the timing is very interesting, because by marrying her when he did, he may have helped to save her life, because, of course, everyone in Windsor is in a witch hunting frenzy once again. Later, you see Simon Beamon go to trial, another witch trial, the one of Mary Bliss Parsons, the second Mary Parsons, I swear it's a nightmare to keep them straight, but he stands up for her. And you know, he talks about her trauma of, of losing a child [00:21:00] and, um, is supportive of her. So there's two sides to the coin, and it's definitely not clear. Sarah Jack: Lydia Gilbert's story. There's so much more there than, um, what we're able to know about Alice. And what do we need to know about Lydia? Beth Caruso: Well, the first part of the book, the first third of the book, takes place in Windsor, Connecticut. And I do tell Lydia's story through the eyes of Alice Jr. And I use the latest research to tell her story. Beth Caruso: Um, there's been a lot, a lot of confusion about who Lydia Gilbert was and did she have children? Who exactly [00:22:00] was she married to? There's a Thomas Gilbert Sr. and a Thomas Gilbert Jr. And most historians think now that she was married to Thomas Gilbert, Jr. And if you don't mind, I want to read the exact passage that really helps us to figure this out that's in the Connecticut archives, the, in the historical record. So in the particular court in 1642, so we're talking about 12 years before Lydia's conviction, there's a record from March 2nd, states Will Rescew, he was the jailer, "is to take into his custody James Hullet, [00:23:00] Thomas Gilbert, Lydia Bliss, and George Gibbs and to keep them in guides or shackles and give them course diet, hard work, and sharp correction." Beth Caruso: So what were one of the factors of someone being targeted for a witch? Of course, it's previous crime. So you see Thomas Jr. here and you see him with a woman named Lydia, but her name is Lydia Bliss. There was one Bliss family in Hartford that she, that we know of. Um, a lot of times when you have records for families, there may be a missing child or two, so Lydia could be a missing child accounted for in the Bliss family, or she could be a cousin or a stepchild or something like that. But in any case. um, [00:24:00] most historians think that because of this record, and because we know that Thomas Jr. bought land in Windsor, that this is the Lydia Gilbert we're talking about, the wife of Thomas Junior, not Senior. Beth Caruso: So Thomas Jr., and there's more evidence to show that this is probably the case, although we can't say this for a hundred percent sure. Thomas Gilbert went to, um, Springfield as well, right after Lydia's Hanging. We find him marrying into the Bliss family again in Springfield in 1655. He married, um, a woman by the name of, I forget her first name right at the [00:25:00] second, but her maiden name was Chapin, and she married a Samuel Bliss. He was the brother of Mary Parsons, Mary Bliss Parsons. And so Lydia Bliss could have been the sister of both of them. Lydia Bliss could have been the sister of both of them. Um, and so this suggests, you know, more family connection. Beth Caruso: The other thing was, we don't, a lot of us don't think that Lydia had any children. For those who think they are descended from her, please don't hate me, um, but I really don't think she had children. And I think this is one of the reasons why she may have been targeted. So some people say, well, no, no, there's children there, because when Thomas Jr. dies [00:26:00] in Springfield in 1662, in his will, he mentions the, the Chapin children, um, he mentions the children that he had in the marriage in Springfield, but he also mentions a previous family of four children. That would have been referring to his wife's previous marriage to Samuel Bliss. It wouldn't have been any children with Lydia. There are no records for children for Lydia. And those children being married to a Lydia Bliss would have already been family to him. So, so there was a combined family there in Springfield already. So, um, this is, [00:27:00] you know, this is all very interesting. Beth Caruso: And Malcolm Gaskill, again, he, his research was so phenomenal. He spent so much time talking about the witch accusations for Mary Bliss Parsons and Mary Lewis Parsons, um, as their peculiar behavior related to grief and loss of a child. And in those days, fertility was everything for women. They were told by the patriarchy it was important for them. And Gaskill does define and other researchers define how it was suspicious for women who had low fertility, um, such as Alice Young with one child, such as Lydia Gilbert with no [00:28:00] children, and that they would be jealous of women who were fertile and who had lots and lots and lots of children. Of course, back in those days, so much of it was out of their control, right? But, um, this, this fed into all the superstition that they would be willing to make a pact with the devil to improve their fertility. Of course, this is all, you know, patriarchal musings that probably have no, nothing related to reality at all, including real feelings of women at that time. Josh Hutchinson: We've even seen cases where women were accused of luring children to come with them. And that was suspicious to make you a witch, because if [00:29:00] you had especially lost a child, then there was an assumption that you had that child envy and you craved to have one, because that's the natural role of the woman in that, the thinking of the time. Beth Caruso: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that could have played a role in the Hartford witch panic with Judith Ayers, um, befriending little Betty Kelly before she died, helping feed her soup. Supposedly she had lost a child, um, and you know, oh, so now she's, she's got this yearning within, and so is she trying to lure this other child, because she gets blamed, Judith Ayers gets blamed for this child's death. You can see how it all feeds into this story. Beth Caruso: [00:30:00] You know, what else is part of the book, like the, the aspect of, okay, There's trauma, but then what happens with healing and, uh, respectful memory, especially those witch trial victims who were just, you know, probably thrown in a ditch. Sarah Jack: Yeah. Beth Caruso: How this is, uh, part of respectful memory and honoring Alice and the other victims. Sarah Jack: Beth, the romance dynamic that you're able to weave into your stories is so enjoyable. Is there anything of that nature that you would like to share with us today out of your new book? Beth Caruso: Hmm. Well, let's see. I can talk to you about when Simon Beamon and Alice Young Jr meet each other again. In my story, I have [00:31:00] Alice Jr. going to Springfield briefly, um, because I had that in One of Windsor, so I wanted to continue that, but then she quickly came back to Windsor to, and I suppose, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but in the story, to live with her Aunt Rhody. As we're talking, you know, I've been saying Alice Jr., but to make it less confusing, I called her Alissa, which is what she was called in One of Windsor. Beth Caruso: So Simon Beamon, his profession, I told you he worked for Pynchon up in Springfield. A lot of what he did was, besides being a cobbler, was he was a messenger for the leader of that colony. And he often took canoe trips down the Connecticut River, which is called the Big River in those days. And he [00:32:00] made many, many trips to Windsor. Beth Caruso: So even if they didn't know each other before, like I have in my story, you know, even if it was different in real life, Simon Beamon was often in Windsor, canoeing down the river and exchanging goods, sending messages from William Pynchon to the people of Windsor and probably going down further down the Big River to share news with the Connecticut leaders in Hartford, as well. Beth Caruso: So in this early chapter, chapter four, this is where Simon Beamon and Alissa, Alice Jr. meet each other for the very first time again. "'Alissa! Alissa! Is that really you?,' a voice beamed from the water. [00:33:00] Beth Caruso: Aunt Rhody was surprised to hear an unfamiliar voice talking to me and looked on with curiosity. I squinted and looked down to see. I held Rhody's arm. Beth Caruso: 'That's Simon Beamon, Uncle John's friend and Mr. Pynchon's assistant,' I whispered. Beth Caruso: She finally remembered and nodded. 'Aye, he works for Springfield's leader. I remember,' she said. Beth Caruso: Simon was boyish with straight brown hair and navigated the river currents so skillfully he might as well have been a shadfish. His satchel was full of papers for the leaders of Windsor and Hartford from Mr. Pynchon. The leather bag was always kept dry in his capable care. He'd been coming around for a long time to Windsor from Springfield, doing errands for his boss, Mr. Pynchon. Beth Caruso: I smiled shyly. 'Aye, Simon, tis I, the little girl you [00:34:00] used to tease so mischievously.' Beth Caruso: He grinned. 'Aye, I was guilty of that. But I needed you to laugh then, so I was only helping your uncle to get a smile out of you. It wasn't so bad, was it?' Beth Caruso: 'No, well, I suppose it wasn't.' I grinned. Beth Caruso: 'I was hoping that I would see you here in Windsor. I heard you were here, but never had the good fortune to see you again until today.' He smiled. Beth Caruso: 'She's become quite the young woman now, almost unrecognizable for the child she once was,' Aunt Rhody said, beaming as proud as if I were her own daughter." Beth Caruso: And in this chapter, later on, they go on, they're all going to Hartford by river and, um, Alice Jr. was going to take the [00:35:00] shallop with Aunt Rhody and her future husband, but Aunt Rhody, at this time, all these witch trials are, are, they're still going, and now all these accusations against Lydia Gilbert are happening, and she's very worried, and she sees, oh, this man seems interested in Alice Jr., so she kind of nudges her, 'well, why don't you go in the canoe with this guy?' And in this chapter they just they have a lovely time, and they get to know each other, and, um, they truly do love each other, and they have, as I said, about a dozen children together, and he's the, one of the main parts of her healing along with her friendship, and each of her children is a part of her healing, too. Beth Caruso: Aunt Rhody says to her at one point, 'hold your children around [00:36:00] you like a protective cloak.' Again, this is the idea that women who have few children and no children are very vulnerable. Have many, many children with your husband, and indeed having those children and having a male child and Thomas Beamon at the time that, you know, the slander happens in the 1670s, even though her husband is not around anymore, her son is standing up for her. So having these male children is another form of protection. Sarah Jack: The healing element in your book is another one of those important threads, as you just mentioned, and, um, I remember, you know, just really, um, reflecting on his [00:37:00] excitement and support of her when she has her first, um, , they have their first child coming, and then as their story unfolds, you just, you see how the family was a strength to her, the, you know, through the very difficult things that come along. Beth Caruso: Absolutely. You know, in those days she couldn't go to therapy. Um, they had no name for post-traumatic stress syndrome. And so I thought, 'well, back in those days, how would she have healed?' Of course, healing is always possible and to some degree, um, even without the level of knowledge we have about psychology today. And what would have been those traditional ways? And I really wanted to show those. Beth Caruso: Um, as I mentioned, her, her husband seems to be, you know, a [00:38:00] good guy. After he meets her, he's sticking up for others who have been accused of witchcraft. And they have many children together. And then, of course, Mercy Marshfield's daughter, Sarah, would have also been the neighbor right next door with the same unique experiences supporting her, and they're all, they're having children together at the same time. They would have supported her. Beth Caruso: Um, but you know, the other part of this is I think that she comes to terms with what happened as she remembers and she understands how she can heal by remembering her mother in a way that's not the witch. She can remember her as a child remembers their mother fondly, anyway, [00:39:00] children who do have a good relationship with their mother. And those respectful memories are not just for those who have passed on. They are for us, to heal us from the grief, especially if it's been a traumatic grief and someone hasn't been buried properly, like a witch trial victim who has just been thrown in a ditch unceremoniously. Beth Caruso: Um, so for this reason, I have a English ballad that I put, put in the book, and its theme is very much about respectful memory. You know, this is a very common thread throughout all humanity, how we treat our dead, how we remember our dead, especially those that were wronged at some point. Beth Caruso: And last [00:40:00] year, we all did the journey together through the Connecticut General Assembly to get recognition for Connecticut's witch trial victims. This was also a form of respectful memory, trying to educate the public about who these women really, really were, um, at, uh. Josh recently pointed out at several, um, witch memorials throughout the world, there have been signs like, "just people," "just ordinary people," um, to help get the respectful memory on track and correct the assumptions and the, the, you know, reasons for the tarnished reputations, the, the propaganda against these people when they were alive. So anyway, this is a big part of the [00:41:00] story, as well. And it's, you know, it's the perfect thing to wrap up this trilogy. Josh Hutchinson: And you've been studying the history of the Connecticut Witch Trials and educating people about it through your books and talks for a number of years now. And I know you're continuing to do that in many ways. Uh, we just had the anniversary episode of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, but the exoneration isn't the end of the work. So what's next? Beth Caruso: Well, what we're all working on right now is we're discussing, we have a whole group of people in Connecticut, outside of Connecticut. Um, carrying on this whole theme of respectful memory. We would like there to be a memorial [00:42:00] for Connecticut's witch trial victims. In addition to that, there is really a void in telling this history in Connecticut. I mean, it's one thing for myself and others to come up with a few novels. That does help, but, you know, there are, of course, fictional aspects to these. Beth Caruso: And we want, we would love for people to know the full history, the accurate history, how it was a major important part of the whole witch trial saga in New England, how Connecticut was the first, how we had the first witch panic, um, how these ideas got promoted and spread. And we would like more people to know about that. Beth Caruso: So, um, we're also working with others in Connecticut, institutions and museums, stakeholders, who are [00:43:00] involved in public history, to talk about ways that this history, the real history, not the propaganda, can be shared, um, through different venues using the archives that we do have in Connecticut. Josh Hutchinson: Right. And there's also talk about getting something about the Connecticut Witch Trials into the school curriculum. Beth Caruso: Yes. Well, we had a meeting with someone recently. And, uh, with a few people actually. And that was, uh, that was a pretty cool thing to bring up. We're at the beginning stages, but the work is not done, and, of course, this is all, this is all pertinent to people who are persecuted today as witches, [00:44:00] both, uh, you know, symbolic types of finger pointing as well as real witch hunts. Um, I posted today on CT Witch Memorial Facebook page an article about how exonerations, modern day exonerations of countries' past witch trial victims can have an effect on witch hunts that are still happening in many parts of the world. Josh Hutchinson: And that article was written by Witch Hunt recent guest, Brendan Walsh. Beth Caruso: Oh, wonderful. I didn't realize that. Josh Hutchinson: We can, uh, you can refer back to Brendan's episode to hear him. Beth Caruso: Absolutely. Yes. Um, I'll have to post that link next. Sarah Jack: Yeah, it was so, like, seeing the article was exciting and then, you know, immediately I'm like, okay, who, who publishes, oh, [00:45:00] it's, it's Dr. Walsh. So that was like a, a neat surprise. Beth Caruso: Oh, that's, that's very cool. That's very cool. Yeah. Sarah Jack: But it just, you know, it's another way you see this conversation that is around this history, it has become ongrowing and very alive and lots of people from all different backgrounds and expertise have insight and reflect on what, what, what does that past mean for what's happening today? So it's really good to see. Beth Caruso: It is. And there are parallels, you know, not just from a witch trial standpoint, or it's also just generalized misogyny. I mean, some of the things I'm hearing in present day are shocking to me. This, you know, [00:46:00] um, a legislator in Indiana talking about women not voting, how it should be a family vote, and the male in the family should vote, things like this. I'm like, "what? Is this really 2024?" So you know, this is pertinent on so many different levels. Sarah Jack: Absolutely. Do you have any new projects that you have your sights on? Beth Caruso: Um, aside from what we just talked about, I am doing, I am working on another novel, and it's also historical fiction, but based on a story, family legend about a kidnapping and immigrants from Sicily. So, um, that it's interesting and, um, [00:47:00] I'm all pumped up about it. Beth Caruso: It's fun to kind of change gears after a while and share some different history, but, um, that, immigrant histories are very interesting too, because, you know, they didn't just come for economic reasons, um, or more freedom of religion or things like that. I mean, they, they also had hidden histories where they might not have been able to stay in the village or things like that. And, um, it's just so fascinating. And sometimes it can be just as hard to find out about them if they change their names after they come to this country. Beth Caruso: But, um, not all those things will be an element in the next book, but it just in general, I'm saying, I think the immigrant stories are very interesting and I think [00:48:00] very pertinent to humanize now as well, because, of course, now immigrants are being demonized. Um, so I think this will be an important commentary, not a blatant commentary, but just a story that truly does humanize immigrants and everything that they go through to be a part of this country. Josh Hutchinson: The level of rancor in politics today, people are literally being called demons, followers of Satan, and evil. It's, yeah. So it's very important to humanize all these stories of different people from different backgrounds. So thank you for that. Beth Caruso: Completely agree with you, Josh. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Beth Caruso: On the same page. We're all part of [00:49:00] humanity. Josh Hutchinson: Yes. Beth Caruso: Yes. Josh Hutchinson: Do you have any events coming up? Beth Caruso: There is a, there's a fair called Made in Connecticut. I am going to be there sharing the books and connecting with people. Beth Caruso: Yes. Beth Caruso: In the fall, I'm also going to be at the Webb Dean Stevens Museum. I'm going to be giving a lecture about the Connecticut Witch Trials there. Um, that's a great venue. So I'm very excited to go to Wethersfield, another, you know, hot spot in the Connecticut Witch Trials. I think there were, well, there were four victims right off the bat that I can think of. Josh Hutchinson: And where can people go to [00:50:00] learn about your events and your books? Beth Caruso: I have a website, it's called oneofwindsor.com, and I have links to each book that tell you a little more about each book. I have links to events. I also have a cool link to media. Um. I have been fortunate enough to be invited to be on things like Rhode Island Public, uh, Public Television. I have a clip from that. I have a clip from, uh, some news stations here in Connecticut. I have clips from the Witch Hunt podcast. Um, a couple of your, there's one episode on there now, but I'm, I'm building up the site some more. So there will be more of your episodes that will be linked there. Beth Caruso: Um, I have a research page, if you [00:51:00] want to learn more about the research that I did with Kathy Hermes, that really went quite in depth about the Alice Young case, as well as a man named Thomas Thornton, her next door neighbor, who, uh, curiously ends up knowing so many people from the Salem Witch Trials and is in Salem at that time hobnobbing with the Mathers and, um, people like that. So we did a pretty in-depth research article about that. Beth Caruso: Um, so that is there on the site and, you know, I add events to it all the time. I add media to it all the time. I can't wait to post this podcast on it. Um, so yeah, please, please visit the site and, uh, gosh, I, I thank you guys so much for everything you've done [00:52:00] to bring light to this Connecticut history. I think you've done an enormous amount to get the word out, and I appreciate that so much. Sarah Jack: Thank you so much. It's such an honor that much of that has been something we've gotten to partner with or collaborate with you on. And the broad coalition of descendants and historians and authors, much of which are in Connecticut. And, um, this discussion today is so special to me. And I, I just keep thinking about that very first time I sent a Facebook message to CT Witch Memorial to you and Tony. And I just, I think, 'wow, if I could have looked into the future and seen everything that we were going to learn together. I wouldn't have believed it.' Beth Caruso: I'm so, I'm so glad you did, Sarah. I'm really glad that you reached out. Um, [00:53:00] and it's, I, I think it's a really good reminder, like you don't know who's going to reach out to you and maybe you don't know them then, but you have no idea what they're going to do with their enthusiasm and their passion, you know. Always keep possibilities open. Sarah Jack: Well, you're very generous, um, in responding to people. And I think that's one of your great strengths as an author and advocate. Beth Caruso: Thank you so much. And I have to, I really, I have to say the same for you too. It's, you're very good at connecting people. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much. And we'll have links to oneofwindsor. com in the show notes, and it'll appear on the screen right about here. [00:54:00] So you'll be able to see it. Beth Caruso: Thank you so much. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful. Beth Caruso: It's my pleasure, always. Sarah Jack: Mary Louise Bingham is back with A Minute with Mary. Mary Louise Bingham: As many of you already know, I have been researching the life and legacy of John Winthrop, Jr. Beth Caruso has been such an inspiration in this endeavor because of her own desire to keep telling his story and help people understand the important role he played in saving many wrongfully accused of the capital crime of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut. Mary Louise Bingham: Beth and I have had many conversations where I learned so much of Winthrop Jr. 's interest in alchemy, his medical practice. In addition, she has introduced me to some of his very dear friends, such as Edward Howes and Gershom Bulkeley. Mary Louise Bingham: Beth will also appear in an upcoming presentation of [00:55:00] my program, Wednesdays with Winthrop, Jr. We will keep our audience posted of the exact time and date. Thank you, Beth, for your graciousness and your continued support, and for being the wonderful friend you will always be to me. Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary. Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to this special episode of Witch Hunt. Sarah Jack: Visit us on YouTube. Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
In this episode of “Witch Hunt,” we are privileged to share the expert insights of Mary Beth Norton, a distinguished historian specializing in early American history. Mary Beth shares her profound research on the impact of frontier warfare on the dynamics of the Salem Witch Trials, offering a unique perspective that centers on the accusers. Mary Beth gives insights from her experiences teaching this intriguing topic of history at Cornell University, alongside the compelling witch trial research her students undertook. Join us as we discuss key takeaways from her groundbreaking book, In the Devil’s Snare, and hear firsthand about the innovative research conducted by her students. Don’t miss this deep dive into one of the most mysterious chapters of American history.
We present a thought-provoking episode that considers the enduring legacy of witch hunts, tracing their historical roots through the Salem Witch Trials to the present day with Martha Carrier descendant and author Alice Markham-Cantor. Her personal journey and research, lead our reflection on the economic, political, and personal motivations driving witch hunts. Witch hunt history reveals how accusations of witchcraft, intertwined with social disputes and global dynamics, persist across time, necessitating a call for historical truth, awareness of ongoing injustices, and activism against this continuing phenomenon. Alice’s new book, The Once and Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant’s Reckoning from Salem to the Present, releases May 8, 2024, and stay tuned to awitchstory.com for updates on the new documentary, A Witch Story, featuring Alice.
This comprehensive discussion brings together experts Dr. Akanksha Madaan and Dr. Amit Anand, focusing on witch hunts, the intersection of spirituality and gender roles in societies, particularly within Hinduism, and comparisons with African contexts. Dr. Madaan, an Assistant Professor of Law with extensive study in Victimology, and Dr. Anand, also an Assistant Professor who has researched violence against women in India, including aspects of witchcraft and honor-based abuse, discuss the historical and sociocultural facets of witch-hunting. They examine how witch hunts have been influenced by various factors, including patriarchal structures, lack of education, and misconceptions about religious and spiritual practices. The conversation extends beyond India, touching on similar practices in Africa and drawing parallels to historical European witch trials, highlighting the universal scapegoating of women in such accusations. The discussion underscores the complexity of tackling witch hunts, calling for multidimensional approaches involving law, education, and community engagement to address this grave human rights issue.
This episode features a comprehensive discussion on superstitions and their impact on child rights in India, specifically focusing on the harmful ritual of Pillai Thookkam. The guests, Naveen Suresh, a PhD researcher on anti-superstition law in India, and Dr. Samantha Spence, an expert in human rights law, dive into the legal, cultural, and psychological aspects of superstitions and their enforcement. Naveen shares unsettling details about Pillai Thookkam, a ritual involving putting babies at risk without safety measures, to highlight the severe neglect of child rights under the guise of tradition. Both guests discuss the complexities of applying existing laws against such practices, emphasizing the importance of scientific temper, education, and mental health awareness. The episode concludes with insights into how media and education can play pivotal roles in combating superstitions and fostering a rational and empathetic societal outlook towards child welfare.
In today’s episode, we sit down with Brendan Walsh, an expert in Early Modern Intellectual History and Religion to examine a chilling account of a 17th century demonic child possession in Connecticut, as chronicled in Cotton Mather’s “Memorable Providences Relating To Witchcrafts And Possessions.” Brendan takes us through the golden age of demonic possession, spotlighting significant figures such as the English exorcist John Darrell and notorious New England minister Cotton Mather. As we consider the account of the “Boy of Tocutt,” Brendan elucidates how such reports reflect the fundamental Puritan perceptions of the diabolical or malevolent and their assault on the spiritually weak. Join us for a fascinating journey into the past, exploring how immemorial beliefs in witchcraft, the devil’s pact, demonic obsession and possession continue to shape our understanding of evil in our society and ourselves.
Witch Hunt presents “The Ultimate Introduction to the Salem Witch Trials,” the first episode of the Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series. This episode provides a comprehensive overview of the Salem Witch Trials, emphasizing the event’s extensive reach, the variety of people involved, and its unique characteristics compared to other witch hunts in history. We discuss the origins and progression of the witch hunt, debunking myths and shedding light on the social, legal, and political factors feeding the crisis. Also covered are some of the key accusers, victims, opposition, and lasting legacy of the trials, with an emphasis on the importance of remembrance and learning from this dark chapter in history.
Hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack, descendants of people hanged for witchcraft in the Salem Witch-Hunt, welcome you to explore the witch-hunt in great detail in this episode and the rest of the series. Look for much more in-depth Salem coverage over the coming months and years.
Joined by John Azumah, an expert who sheds light on the origins and societal impacts of witchcraft accusations, we navigate the intricate landscape of family disputes, community fears, and the national efforts to combat this grave injustice. Our journey takes us into the heart of communities torn apart by fear and suspicion, where accusations of witchcraft have long led to banishment and the resulting formation of ‘witch camps.’ Azumah’s insights offer a profound look at the cultural and societal dynamics that perpetuate these practices, as well as the ongoing struggles to reintegrate victims into their communities amidst threats of re-accusation and violence. This episode is a deep dive into the efforts at various levels to address and hopefully eradicate the stigma and harm caused by these ancient accusations, highlighting the urgent need for reform and protective measures for those unjustly accused.
Paul Moyer delves into New England’s witch-hunt history this week on Witch Hunt. Drawing from his book, Detestable and Wicked Arts, Moyer discusses the origins of witchcraft beliefs, transatlantic connections, and infamous trials like Salem and Hartford. Learn about the societal pressures behind these hunts, from religious conflicts to political turmoil, and gain new insights into this haunting chapter of American history. How did heavy societal expectations on family and marriage bring out the hunting of diabolical duos, couples accused of being witches? Paul Moyer discusses his upcoming book about a gripping murder case set in antebellum America, an enthralling history with themes of social justice and defiance of gender norms.
Pulitzer-prize-winning author Stacy Schiff joins hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack for a dive into the heart of the Salem Witch Trials on this week’s episode of Witch Hunt. Celebrated for her book, The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, Stacy sheds light on the trials’ misunderstandings, explores their actual origins, and spotlights the pivotal individuals involved. Her insights and story telling make history accessible and engaging. Together, they reflect on the timely relevance of lessons learned from the Salem Witch Trials.
Stacy Schiff: [00:00:00] There had been witchcraft accusations before, there had been outbreaks of witchcraft before. Never before had there been this kind of prosecution where no one who walked into that courtroom exited innocent. Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt. I'm Josh Hutchinson, but you can also call me excited. We get to talk about Salem today! Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. In this episode, we are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Stacy Schiff. Josh Hutchinson: Schiff is the author of six books, including The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem. Sarah Jack: In this exciting conversation, Stacy clears up some major misconceptions about the witch hunt. Josh Hutchinson: And reviews many of the theories [00:01:00] that have been proposed to explain what started the witch hunt. Sarah Jack: And you're about to hear the factors that really did shape the witch hunt. Josh Hutchinson: And we'll learn about many significant actors, including Tituba, in this conversation with discussion of the roles that they played. Sarah Jack: It was such a treat to get to hear about her research process and approach to making historical events so understandable. Josh Hutchinson: Together, we reflect on key lessons from the Salem witch hunt. Sarah Jack: Welcome Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for her compelling narratives and deep research into historical events and figures. Her notable works include The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem. Sarah Jack: What are some major misconceptions people have about the Salem Witch Trials? Stacy Schiff: Oh, my goodness, it's such a, it's a long and distinguished list, isn't it? I think generally people tend to [00:02:00] assume that people burned, not hanged. So I think that's the first one. I think the general assumption is that all the victims were women, but as we know, five men were also victims that year. They were not universally poor women, they were not older women. They were, there was a 5-year-old accused as well. Stacy Schiff: Because I think we take a lot of what we understand to have been the history from Arthur Miller, I think we have assumed that voodoo and naked dancing in the forest were part of it, and that's taken from The Crucible, either the play or the movie, not from the actual events of 1692. And I think the word Salem is slightly misleading because 25 communities wind up being implicated, being involved in any case, not only the town of Salem. And I guess the biggest misconception is that there were witches, of which there were none. Josh Hutchinson: And what are some of the theories about how the Salem witch hunt happened? Stacy Schiff: I think that the epidemic that year, the panic that year, has been pretty much written down [00:03:00] to anything you can possibly think of, from regional hostilities, to class conflict, to tensions within the church, to food poisoning, to teenage hysteria, to fraud, to taxes, political instability, trauma due to the frontier with the Native Americans, the weather. You could go mad actually staring at the events and trying to pick a pattern. As with all things, if you're really looking for a pattern, you can almost always find one, which is something of a key to what happens that year. Stacy Schiff: So I think many of those things have been applied and then discarded. And I think we can get into this. One of the issues, of course, with that year is that so many forces come into play that it isn't predominantly actually one thing. There isn't a key. As much as we would like for there to be one, there isn't a key to the Salem witch epidemic of that year. Sarah Jack: And how did you manage to clarify the true causes behind the witch trials? You made them so easy to understand for the readers, despite the reputation for [00:04:00] the mystery and the complexity. Stacy Schiff: Thanks Sarah, that's a lovely, it's a lovely way to put it. I hope it's clear. I think what I did is that when I started the research, I read through all of the paper that survives, and it's about a thousand pages of, as the court papers are missing, but we have about a thousand pages of arrest documents or depositions or jailers' accountings. We have about a thousand pages of paper, and I read through all of that, and try to make that material really speak for itself in some way, because you can see the story mutating from beginning to end. What initially passes for witchcraft when the first girls are afflicted is not what will be discussed as witchcraft by late summer when this thing has really snowballed to just tremendous effect. So you can begin to tease out who's carrying the narrative and how the narrative twists and turns and what the sources of that are. Stacy Schiff: And I guess to that end, I would say 2 things. I would say. I went back and I read all [00:05:00] eight or nine, I can't remember any longer, volumes of the records and files of the quarterly courts of Essex County, which is not, it's to the years prior to 1692, but it is a complete record of all of the, these are very litigious people, these are all of the collisions in court that all of these families had over these years. And the same issues and the same names come up as you will later see in some of the witchcraft accusations. So that was almost like a template to both the sensibility and the history of these people. Stacy Schiff: It's interesting that about half of the women who hang had been accused previously of witchcraft. There's obviously some lingering resentment or some lingering questions here. And then the other, from a textual point of view, the other great guide was the writings of Cotton Mather, the minister who's at the center, the young minister who is at the center of the trials, and who had written a bestseller in which he had incorporated an account of the European witchcraft, Swedish witchcraft panic of years earlier, which [00:06:00] infiltrates the New England drinking water and which bears a mark on Salem. I think there's actually, I think, a great doctoral thesis to be written about this, because he imports elements from Sweden that had never before been seen in any kind of New England witchcraft testimony. Stacy Schiff: That's a long answer to your extremely good question, but that was how I began to decode it. You can see, I read all of the sermons that the girls would have heard that year, and you can see bits and pieces of that sermon in their testimony. You can see that they're recycling the imagery that they've heard on Sundays. Josh Hutchinson: And what were some of the factors which actually did lead to the Salem witch trials? Stacy Schiff: Guess the chief ones, this is an overdetermined event. It's very hard, as I said, to tease one thing or another thing out. I would say more than anything, the question that year becomes not what was afflicting these young women, but why was the court so intent on prosecution? Stacy Schiff: Because there had been witchcraft accusations before, there had been outbreaks of witchcraft before. Never before had there been this kind of [00:07:00] prosecution where no one who walked into that courtroom exited innocent. And for that, I would say that it was something of the political environment which makes that year stand apart. You have on this court a group of men who, for reasons of their own, given political instability of the previous few years, need to prove they are a law and order administration. And in particular, the Chief Justice of the Court, who has been something of a political, he's been very ambidextrous politically. He's played both sides repeatedly. needs to prove that he is solely in command and is not going to relax his hold. And he is the one who's pushing, it's very clear to us, he's the one who's pushing for convictions. So I think that the politics is something that we haven't necessarily paid enough attention to in the past. Stacy Schiff: I think, as I said, some of those earlier accusations, some of that sense of suspicion that had never really been dissipated before. And you really do have a community that's very much under fire. Salem Village, which is where the first girls begin to show [00:08:00] signs of some sort of affliction of some disorder, is a village that has had serious trouble with its ministers, and in different ways, all of those prior ministers will play a role in what happens this year, but the minister in whose household the witchcraft, so to speak, breaks out, is under siege with his, in his community. He's at war with his parishioners and he's very much driving these events forward in some ways. Sarah Jack: Were there any other primary actors who caused the witch trials to proceed as they did? And if you're interested in following that with what halted the witch trials? Stacy Schiff: So yeah, I think you could probably draw something of a schematic if you wanted to just take like the, how does this thing snowball? What are the bases it has to hit, to, to produce this storm of accusations? And I think household under siege, obviously, it's a hothouse environment. You have these girls living in a situation where they can see that their father and uncle is in disfavor with the community, [00:09:00] so there's a sense of an explosion within that household. One of the first people accused, as you know, was Tituba, the Indian slave in the household. And Tituba's testimony is so vivid and so kaleidoscopic and so convincing that once she, and moreover, she establishes, she's the one of the only one of the three first accused who says, yes, witchcraft was at work. Yes, I flew on a pole to Boston with my accomplices. And moreover, I saw these spectral cats. It's a crazy testimony. Once she has established in the eyes of the community that witchcraft has been at work, it's very hard for anybody to reverse course. So that's another sort of post on the way. And then one of the first girls who testifies, a teenager named Abigail Hobbs, who's the bad girl of Topsfield, she then spreads the accusations out beyond Salem Village, because she suddenly points a finger to, toward a former minister of the town, of the village, in fact. Stacy Schiff: And so there you begin [00:10:00] to see that the thing has tentacles, and it begins to spread beyond the immediate household. And then I guess the, I should add actually, Thomas Putnam, one of the villagers, who has had a run of terrible luck, and who will complain against, I think, 35 of the ultimate accused witches, and who will file the first charges, he does something as well to help this thing explode. And then from the other side, you have the head of the witchcraft court, Stoughton, and you have Cotton Mather, who's always in the background, trying very hard to help advise the court, but always in a way that seems to press them toward prosecution. As much as he's pretending to be even handed, he seems quite intent on somehow exorcising this ill and purifying the community. So you have these other forces that are both massaging the narrative and enforcing the prosecution. Josh Hutchinson: It's hard to say what single element shuts down the prosecution. A [00:11:00] number of things happen, and I think the timing is crucial, as well. The trials, the witchcraft breaks out in late January, early February. The trials take place largely over the summer. And by fall, the accusations have begun to spread in every direction. Stacy Schiff: We've got to the point where it is far easier to accuse someone else or to confess than it is to claim your innocence. And so obviously in that situation, the snowballing is out of control. It's also, however, the fall, which is traditionally the season when you wanted to make sure that you had plenty of stores in your cellar and you were ready for the winter, and so the interest in spending all day in witchcraft courtrooms tended to wane a little bit. So it may be that a healthy dose of skepticism begins to creep in for practical reasons. Stacy Schiff: It's also true that the newly appointed, newly installed Massachusetts governor is not a Puritan. He doesn't buy into these trials the way the other authorities had, and he reaches out late that year to the New York ministers to get their opinion on what's happening in [00:12:00] Salem. And that's the first attempt to go beyond the kind of monolith, which is the New England establishment. And their opinion is very different from what the judges in Massachusetts are hearing. So you get this outside opinion, as well. Stacy Schiff: And slowly but surely you get people in the community, and Thomas Brattle would be the best instance of this. He's a 35-year-old Boston merchant who doesn't have any relationship to any of the other well born justices, which is unusual, because they are a very inbred, familiar group one to the other, and who realizes that basically if someone gives testimony with her eyes closed, she's not observing what's happening, she's imagining something, and sees that a great miscarriage of justice is taking place and will be very hard to erase from history and very quietly, and in fact anonymously, he writes a small pamphlet about the court's proceedings, and he is one of two voices. Stacy Schiff: There's a Boston minister as well, also very quietly, who will begin to speak up against the trials, and it may be that at that point, the [00:13:00] accusations have just reached a very high level, and too many important people have been implicated. It may just be that it begins to stretch the imagination. At first, there had been 5 witches, and then there had been 10 witches, and suddenly there were 500 witches. Stacy Schiff: And it may be, it's as if suddenly everyone awoke from this great delirium is what it does begin to feel like. But even at that juncture, there are two things that are interesting. One is that Stoughton, the Chief Justice, is unwilling to shut down the court, and he has to be forced to shut down the court, because he's convinced still of his rectitude and of the court's probity in prosecuting. Stacy Schiff: And secondly, and this, I think, is something we tend to lose sight of. The belief in witchcraft will persist well after the trials. People believe that they themselves were innocent or that the accused that year were innocent, but they don't yet lose their faith in witchcraft. It's an interesting thing where the trials end, but there is still this lingering sense that there was something supernatural at work. Josh Hutchinson: And there's still a lot of supernatural [00:14:00] explanations for Salem. Sarah was talking to somebody the other day who was asking, did they have powers? Stacy Schiff: When you see, when you begin to read the testimony in court, I don't know if you all have household mysteries the way we do, but the kitchen scissors always goes missing. Who's got the kitchen scissors? You begin to realize how much can be explained by witchcraft. It's such an elastic and versatile definition, and especially in a world where you didn't have science, where you couldn't explain illness, where weather was not something you could understand, much less control, where things seem to happen in the night, where there was a lot of drinking, by the way, where the dark was very dark, where you had Native Americans or people with whom you were at, with whom you had conflicts at your doorstep, you can see how this would be the perfect cauldron in which to dissolve your questions. Sarah Jack: How should Tituba's station in life and experiences, especially in contrast to those of the Puritan [00:15:00] women, inform our understanding of her role in the witch trials? Stacy Schiff: Three women are initially accused, and they are the three most obvious women one would have chosen. One is a, one is a woman who's homeless, one is a woman who'd been at, who had sued multiple times and was in disfavor in the community, and the third was Tituba, who's who's the household slave. Stacy Schiff: And who would have had more, she's the only one of the three, as I said, who actually confesses that she is involved in something satanic, and would have had more reason, obviously, than either of the other two women, to give these men in authority what they were looking for. It's really clear when you look at the papers, how much these young women, in particular, how much all the youngsters really were cowed by these men in authority. These were the most eminent men in town. They lived in the most beautiful homes. They dressedwith the greatest of fashion. And their authority would've been something very difficult to resist for anyone but much less someone who was a slave. Stacy Schiff: Tituba [00:16:00] has every reason to cough up this extraordinary tale about yellow birds and flying cats and flying off to Boston on a pole. She makes it very clear that the devil has said that if she talked about this, he would slice off her head. So she sounds like she's terrified of something anyway and that testimony possibly was beaten out of her, but even if it wasn't beaten out of her, there's one hint that perhaps it may have been. Stacy Schiff: Those men knew what they were about to hear, because there were at least three people sitting in the room that day waiting for her to testify. So they knew that this was the goldmine, that she was going to be the witness who was going to make this thing real. It's very hard to believe she would have had any grounds with which to resist them given her station in life. Josh Hutchinson: Very true. And I have to fess up that my great grandfather, Joseph Hutchinson, was one who filed the complaint along with Thomas Putnam. Stacy Schiff: I love that. [00:17:00] Wait, are you related to Thomas Hutchinson, too? Josh Hutchinson: No there's the. Yeah, Salem Hutchinsons and Boston Hutchinsons, and so far, genetically, nobody's found a DNA connection between the two. Anyways, what key lessons should be learned from the Salem witch hunt and applied today? Stacy Schiff: I suppose we should avoid jumping to conclusions. This is what happens when fear paralyzes reason and when we overcorrect and sort of overanalyze and, I guess what the best that could be said for this real mishap, this tragedy, is that it should serve as a sort of vaccine for us all. We have this instance in our record. We should be looking at it and using it when we think we might be heading in this direction. So we don't end up with McCarthyism, basically. We've seen this, we've seen the dynamic so vividly so often. And it is so clearly where you end up going if you head down the road of conspiratorial thinking. This is the end of the road. Stacy Schiff: And, as early as [00:18:00] really Thomas Brattle's writings that year, people were very aware of the fact that this was something that was going to be a stain on history, and that was going to be there a blinking red light or a guardrail for future times, which is a, which is indeed how we should be looking at it. Stacy Schiff: It's always been interesting to me, it's very much in line with Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics, but it doesn't figure in that book. But it really is the beginning of that this overheated rhetoric and the need, this tribal need to prosecute in some way and the inability to basically defer to reason when you realize that the reasonable is actually the right solution, somehow the complicated answer seems somehow like the more appealing answer often. Sarah Jack: I wanted to talk a little bit about how you brought out some really strong themes in your book, like the darkness or the tension between people's expectations and disappointments with each other. What, how did you [00:19:00] draw those out into the forefront of your book? Stacy Schiff: I don't know that I have an exact answer for you. I think what was important to me was to get beyond the theory. I wanted the reader to feel something of what it was like to be in New England in the 17th century, and that is why the darkness became such an obsession of mine, because so much of the testimony is based on a man trying to find his way home from the inn at night and being able to, unable to maneuver through the trees and, therefore, assuming the trees have moved, not that he might have had a few too many drinks earlier himself. But that the darkness is just constant and a sort of disability almost to everyone. So I wanted to bypass the theory at the early end of the book, leave all the explanations to the end, which may or may not have been successful, but just to plunge the reader immediately into what it felt like. Stacy Schiff: That's why the book begins with Ann Foster, who, and I think I read fairly early on of Ann Foster, who's this older, Andover [00:20:00] farm woman who testifies in court under oath to the fact that she flew through the air on a pole, and moreover, not only flew through the air on a pole, but crash landed. I wanted the reader to think what would possess a person to swear to that under oath? How could you be so certain that this had happened and even tell the authorities about the cheese and bread you had put in your pocket before your flight? So I just wanted to literally plunge right into that New England feel and into this, into where, how a person could wind up believing that of herself, or at least believing that if she swore to that, she was telling the truth. Josh Hutchinson: On the flying, you had mentioned the Swedish witch trials before, and is the flying, did that come from Sweden? Stacy Schiff: Oh, I'm so glad you asked because I should have mentioned that, Joshua. Yes, there had never, witches in New England had never flown before 1692. So there were two things that were new. Basically the whole, and I should have gone back to mention this, the whole question of what was a [00:21:00] witch? A witch was basically a devil's accomplice who's target wasn't your body, but your soul. She or he was there to do the devil's work with her little menagerie of helpers who were generally cats and dogs and toads and all the diabolical creatures we can imagine, but the idea of a pact with the devil was very much an Anglo-Saxon concept, while the idea of a witch being able to fly to do her business was not. That was a continental witch. Stacy Schiff: And continental witches tended to be much more exotic creatures. They engaged in all kinds of sexual acts. Puritan witches never engaged in sexual acts. And they did not have, Anglo-Saxon witches did not have a satanic Sabbath. That, too, was a continental idea. So both the flying and the satanic Sabbath came to New England, it seems to me, through the writings of Cotton Mather, who wrote about that Swedish outbreak of witchcraft, which almost completely parallels what happens in Salem down to the ages of [00:22:00] the first girls who are afflicted, first children who are afflicted, and with very similar results, in fact, in that innocents die. But those two concepts were something that were entirely foreign to previous, both the lore of witchcraft in New England, and to previous witchcraft testimony. Sarah Jack: Having written extensively on various historical figures and events, how does your latest project, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, compare to your other works in terms of research challenges or thematic focus and the narrative approach you take? Stacy Schiff: That's a big question, Sarah. To start with the thematic piece, there's a funny footnote in a way to the, with the American Revolution in that Salem lives on. And that's an interesting thing with Salem generally is to see how it then gets recycled and used by different parts of the country. Stacy Schiff: Abolitionists will end up saying that basically slavery is on par with, essentially, hanging witches and pro slavery people in the South will basically point to New England and say abolition is on [00:23:00] par with, and they'll say the opposite. So both sides will end up going back to cite Salem witchcraft. Stacy Schiff: But in the run up to the Revolution, as Stamp Act protests and other protests take off, an extraordinary number of people compare the moment to the delusion of 1692. So you get this constant drumbeat of things that there has never been this much unrest. There has never been such delusion. People have never been so mad since the Bedlam of 1692. And it's just funny to see that there's a comparison between Stamp Act protests and trying witches in the court in Salem town. Stacy Schiff: From a research point of view, I was at a great loss, because although there are things missing from the Salem record, Samuel Adams' papers are very incomplete. He destroyed a lot of paper, because he needed to destroy his trail, because he's obviously fomenting revolution. So there is a no fingerprint school at work here, and I was working from a somewhat mutilated record for that reason. So that was a big challenge, and a challenge that I ended up filling by reading a [00:24:00] lot in the archives in London, which are essentially what his enemies were saying about him. So he would never claim credit, for example, for some misdeed, some street protest or street ambush. But you can be certain that the customs commissioners in Boston or the Lieutenant Governor in Boston was writing back to London saying, 'let me tell you what this rascal Samuel Adams is up to this week.' Stacy Schiff: So I ended up being able to fill in a certain amount of his whereabouts and his machinations from the other side, with a grain of salt, I should add. And there was a great deal. I think this is a big difference between the two. There's a great deal of Adams in the newspapers, because he's writing constantly for the Boston newspapers, and one of the reasons the Revolution takes off, as it does from Boston, is because there are so many newspapers and such a literate populace. Stacy Schiff: And that, in a funny way, is a fallout from something that was true in 1692. You didn't have newspapers in 1692, but you did have a highly literate populace, because in order to pray, you needed to know how to read. And it is, in [00:25:00] a funny way, that very erudition that fuels the Salem Witch epidemic, because people have bought into this library of books which Cotton Mather brings to the forefront and which these men are consulting. Stacy Schiff: And so they have these shelves of literature on witchcraft. What they don't have are the skeptical texts on witchcraft, because those had been banned from coming into Boston. So in a funny way, you have a case of too much erudition. But anyway, it's that very, it's that literate tradition which flows obviously from one book to the other. Josh Hutchinson: And Cotton Mather, ironically, spurred a lot of the activity on by writing about the other events. So you have the Swedish trials and the Goodwin case, and they're all feeding into the behaviors of these afflicted people. So Cotton was involved from the beginning, I suppose. Stacy Schiff: It's funny, the court appeals to him, I think, three times. I'm now forgetting, but I think it's three times. And [00:26:00] three times, he basically says, you need to go very carefully, you need to exercise exquisite caution. And then he adds, nevertheless, I would vote for a speedy and vigorous prosecution. And there's always that nevertheless attached to each of his statements. And after the trials, there is a document and I no longer remember if it's 1694 or if it's later, where he talks about how essentially the trials had done good, because they had filled the pews, and they had awakened a sluggish generation to its faith, and really nobody who mattered had been lost in the process. It's not a statement had been meant for public consumption, but it tells you something of how the establishment viewed both the victims and the prosecution. Josh Hutchinson: It's remarkable. Sarah Jack: How do you hope your books impact reader understanding of history and its relevance to the present? Stacy Schiff: I called the trials a kind of vaccine. I like to think this is something of which we don't lose sight, so that we do not repeat this kind of [00:27:00] demented behavior, but generally, on a sort of happier front, I'd like to think that there's something about biography that allows one to open the window to history from a more personal point of view. In other words, through the sensibility of the individual in question, so that if you can see something like the strains and the tensions in the family of someone like Samuel Adams, you can begin to understand why someone would feel so deeply wed to American rights and privileges and so deeply sensitive to British overreach, and therefore begin to publish the kind of supposedly seditious statements that he publishes, and really spearhead what becomes a revolution. Why this cause becomes so very vital to him. And you don't really understand that if you don't really understand sort of the personal history that goes behind it. And I think we lose that sometimes when we talk about history from a higher altitude. I think when you're seeing it through the sensibility of one person, whether that person is [00:28:00] Cleopatra or Samuel Adams, you begin to understand those forces better. Josh Hutchinson: And what subjects or events are you drawn to explore next? Is there anything that you can tell us about? Stacy Schiff: I am working on a new book. Interestingly or not, it's actually a return to a subject, something I've never done before, it's a book about, it's another book about Benjamin Franklin, and this time it's about, the previous time I had written about the almost nine years that Franklin spends in France soliciting aid and and guns and men for the revolution, and he comes home in 1785 from that stint and will die in 1790. So this is a book which is going to tell the story of his life through those last five Philadelphia years. So it's really sort of the finale. It's Franklin's last act in a way. Josh Hutchinson: I'm looking forward to that. Stacy Schiff: Thank you. So am I. I'm looking forward to having written it, to being on the other side of it. Sarah Jack: Thank you for your work in your book, but your work today too, [00:29:00] the getting this information out and dissecting it like this is just really key for the world. So I know it sounds dramatic, but Stacy Schiff: No, it's not. And the one thing we didn't talk about, and to your point, is the silence that comes, that descends after this wipe out, right? Because for a generation, nobody would talk about it. Exoneration was impossible, because people were unwilling even to admit that they were related to victims of the trials. Stacy Schiff: So you, even in those first, attempts So when you look at attempts at getting reparations for families in 1711, families avoiding the word witchcraft. It's basically, I lost my relative in the recent unpleasantness is essentially what they're saying. And that whole sort of cushion of shame and regret that falls, guilt that descends on the scene afterwards means that so much has been lost to us, so much of the history has been lost to us, so much of the record goes missing, because everyone just wanted to pretend this had [00:30:00] never happened. Stacy Schiff: And I guess that's why, when we're saying this is really crucial for us to bring back to the forefront, there's your reason. Stacy Schiff: And now, for Minute with Mary. Mary Louise Bingham: Let me update you about Female Gleason. We found that Susanna, wife of Thomas Gleason. All the records were found proving she lived at Cambridge in 1665, when she was supposed to have been accused for witchcraft. However, the author who listed a Female Gleason accused for witchcraft in their book did not cite their source. We have reached out to that author, who has yet to respond. However, our team didn't stop. Contact was made with both the Massachusetts State Archives and the Judicial Archives. These archivists exhausted all their resources and could not locate any document tying an accusation to any woman with the surname Gleason. Mary Louise Bingham: Therefore, until we [00:31:00] hear from this author, it can be declared as of this recording that no woman named Gleason was ever accused of witchcraft who lived at Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in any surrounding town. This is why looking at the original source or primary document is so important. Thank you. Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary. Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News. Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News. We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for your unwavering support for this growing nonprofit. Your monetary donations and the invaluable time you've dedicated as volunteers have been pivotal in fueling the growth of our vital projects. It's through your contributions of time and money that we're able to continue our mission, bringing to light critical lessons from history, and fostering a deeper acknowledgment of witch-hunting today. Sarah Jack: Your involvement not only aids in amplifying this history, but [00:32:00] also in ensuring that the lessons derived from it resonate far wide and clearly. Thank you for being an integral part of our journey and for your commitment to helping us make a meaningful impact worldwide. Your engagement is what makes all of this possible, and we're immensely grateful for the community we've built together. Sarah Jack: We're thrilled to announce the upcoming Salem 101 series on witch hunt podcasts. This original series is a comprehensive deep dive into the Salem witch trials written by Josh Hutchinson, also known as @salemwitchhunt on social media, each episode promises to peel back the layers of this unmatched account of community betrayal, guided by the records and writings that have propelled the story to this day. Join us, Salem Witch Trial Descendants, as we examine the year these events unfolded. Join us as we look closely at the fascinating individuals that many of us call ancestors. We will tackle the pressing questions that have intrigued the world, revealing insights that have led to the [00:33:00] current understanding of the Salem Witch Trials. For those eager to broaden their knowledge, we encourage you to explore our past catalog of episodes. These recordings offer an insightful introduction to the subject and cover witch trials that predate Salem, setting the stage for this monumental series. Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah. Sarah Jack: You're welcome. Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt. Sarah Jack: Join us again every week. Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
This week on Witch Hunt, we delve into lesser-known witch trials and local lore with Dr. Tricia Peone, Project Director at the Congregational Library & Archives. Our engaging discussion highlights the stories of individuals like Eunice Cole and Jane Walford, bringing to light the history of witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire from the earliest case in 1648 to a significant incident in the 1790s. You will discover how the local community’s efforts to revitalize the reputation of Eunice immortalized her in the public consciousness of Hampton, NH. Dr. Peone provides deep local insights, revealing the complexities beneath the surface. After listening to today’s episode, you might find yourself inspired to explore Eunice Cole’s history firsthand.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the leading podcast on the witch trials of the past and the continued witch hunts of today. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: We're descendants of women accused of witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: And we're here to tell stories of people like them.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we're talking to Dr. Tricia Peone about witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire.
Sarah Jack: In 1648, Jane Walford became the first New Hampshire woman to be accused of witchcraft. Learn what happened to her and the others who followed.
Josh Hutchinson: As in other witch hunts, socioeconomic and religious factors played a significant role in spurring witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire.
Sarah Jack: Spectral evidence was still in [00:01:00] use in a case from the 1790s, a full century after the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Peone tells us all about Eunice Cole's case and its unique historical significance.
Sarah Jack: We also discuss recent efforts to exonerate Eunice Cole.
Josh Hutchinson: And close with various commemorative efforts and public interest in Hampton.
Sarah Jack: We are honored to welcome Dr. Tricia Peone. Dr. Peone holds a PhD in history from the University of New Hampshire, specializing in the study of witchcraft and witch trials with a particular focus on New England.
Josh Hutchinson:
Josh Hutchinson: And I am a historian. I specialize in the history of magic and witchcraft in the 17th and 18th centuries. And my job is I work at the Congregational Library and Archives, which is in Boston. And I manage a project called the New England's Hidden Histories Project, which is looking at Congregational Church [00:02:00] records throughout New England and digitizing them and making them accessible by publishing them online. So I've been in that job for about a year, a little over a year, but before that I've worked as a researcher, I've taught classes on the history of witchcraft and public history, and I did a PhD at the University of New Hampshire, and I was focusing on the history of magic and witchcraft in New England.
Tricia Peone: So it is truly my favorite thing in the world to study. And I'm very lucky that right now I have a job whereI get to think about Puritans all day, which not everyone would enjoy, but it can be fun. We get a lot of Cotton Mather jokes at work,and occasionally we do get to do some programming about witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: That's excellent. And what drew you into this, the field to study witchcraft?
Tricia Peone: I have a distinct memory of being in the library at the elementary school I [00:03:00] attended and finding a book on the Salem Witch Trials, and I kept returning to that book. It was a really fun book to read, and I figured out later, I tried to figure out what, what,children's books about witchcraft were available in the 1980s to figure out what book it was that I'd been reading. And I think it was Shirley Jackson's History of the Salem Witch Trials. So I think that was the first book that caught my interest at a very young age. When I was in college, I think I was an art major for a while, and then art history, and then I switched over to history, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly, but I found out that you could, in fact, study the history of witchcraft and read some of the exciting books that had come out.
Tricia Peone: There was a huge flurry of publications in the 90s because of the anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials. So there's a lot of new research coming out about the history of witchcraft, and I, my interest was really piqued by that. And I did a master's in history, and I wrote about the Salem witch [00:04:00] trials, and then went on to do a PhD in history. It's not, like, maybe not the best career choice for anyone or for a historian to go into witchcraft studies, but it is probably the most interesting thing that you can study, in my opinion. You'll never be bored. There's talking cats, you got ghosts, you got haunted houses, what more could you want?
Sarah Jack: Today, we're going to talk about witch trials in New Hampshire. What background do we need to know about colonial New Hampshire?
Tricia Peone: New Hampshire is kind of an outlier in New England, although I think other New England states, I think Vermont and Maine and Rhode Island and Connecticut actually could also make that same case, but New Hampshire's a little bit different than what we think about when we think of New England, and you had a great episode with Emerson Baker a while back talking about the Devil of Great Island on his New Hampshire cases. Some of your listeners probably have heard from him how unique New Hampshire is, and it's kind of a weird place on the seacoast in that period, but there are at least four [00:05:00] cases where women face trial or some kind of court action for witchcraft in New Hampshire in the 17th century.
Tricia Peone: What I think is especially interesting about New Hampshire, though, is, particularly in this one case I want to tell you about, which is the case of Eunice Cole in Hampton, New Hampshire. She's charged with witchcraft a few times in the 17th century, but she has this, her story has this kind of a second life in the 20th century. Because this is the first time, it's in 1938, her community, Hampton, goes through basically the first community exoneration for someone accused of witchcraft.
Tricia Peone: And not a lot of people know that story, and it is really interesting. So that, I think that is one of New Hampshire's unique qualities, is that you have a community in the 1930s during the Depression that decides to revisit their past and think about what their responsibility is as a community to people who were accused of witchcraft.
Tricia Peone: So no one was executed in New Hampshire for witchcraft, but there are some formal court cases and there are[00:06:00] at least a dozen or so other pretty interesting accusations of witchcraft that happen. The last accusation that results in the community coming together to take some action is 100 years after Salem. It's in the 1790s. So it,New Hampshire also provides us with some clear evidence that witchcraft continued to be a concern for people, long after the Salem Witch Trials, even after the American Revolution.
Josh Hutchinson: That is a long history of witchcraft accusations. When was the first witchcraft case in New Hampshire?
Tricia Peone: Probably 1648. That's the first one we know of. And that's happening at the same time as the other early cases in New England, right? You've got 1647 and 1648 in Connecticut and Massachusetts with their first cases in court action. So 1648 in Portsmouth.
Sarah Jack: And what were primary factors that led to New Hampshire accusations?
Tricia Peone: The typical ones you'd expect, disagreements between [00:07:00] neighbors, old grudges. Jane Walford, who's the first woman accused of witchcraft in 1648, her neighbors accused her for several decades of being a witch. Someone said they'd overheard her husband call her an old witch, someone said they saw her turn into a cat, and, so those are the kinds of, typical accusations you might hear, but she was pretty interesting, because she took her accusers to court for slander, and she actually won, so that is one of the weird things about New Hampshire, is that at the same time as other New England coloniers are going through their sort of first attempts to formalize court actions against witches, you In Portsmouth, a woman accused of witchcraft is able to successfully defend her reputation. So there's a case where a physician from Boston calls her a witch, and he says he has proof and the court actually finds for her. So they order this physician to pay her five pounds for the damage to her reputation.
Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
Tricia Peone: Certainly [00:08:00] unusual.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. You expect the slander cases to happen later. Owen Davies calls them the reverse witch trials. So yeah, that's interesting.
Tricia Peone: Yeah, the first, from the first case in 1648, her accusers ordered to publicly apologize to her.
Josh Hutchinson: Really that early?
Tricia Peone: Yep. But that doesn't stop her. The woman accuses her again later.
Josh Hutchinson: Doesn't learn a lesson.
Tricia Peone: Right.
Sarah Jack: Do you, so what would have a public apology been like there? Would have that happened at a church service?
Tricia Peone: I would imagine, typically, it would be at a church service, although Portsmouth is a little different in thatthere were Anglican and Congregational churches competing for a little bit for people's attention. And the court moved around, so quarterly courts moved around, so it's, I don't think it's clear where that public apology would have happened, but, yeah, probably either in a court or the meeting house.
Josh Hutchinson: And how did, [00:09:00] macro scale factors like social, economic, and religious elements, how did those factors play a role in spurring witchcraft accusations?
Tricia Peone: I think in New Hampshire, you can tell those are certainly important elements to accusations. Around 1679 and 1680, when New Hampshire is officially, becoming a royal colony and separating from Massachusetts, there's a little outbreak of witchcraft accusations that happens in Hampton, so you can possibly point to that as saying, there's some political uncertainty going on,they typically, they're these cases in New Hampshire are following similar trends in the 17th century.
Sarah Jack: In New Hampshire, what influenced the proceedings in those trials?
Tricia Peone: I think that the evidence in some of these cases shows that everyone believed in magic, that it's a pretty universal belief, and certainly that's true for 17th century New Hampshire. You get some interesting kind of [00:10:00] little glimpses of what people's magical beliefs were. Like you can tell in the case, The Devil of Great Island, Emerson Baker talks about practicing countermagic. They boil urine to try to break the curse. One of the cases in Hampton shows that this woman, Rachel Fuller, who's accused of witchcraft, it sounds like she, in 1680, she'd been trying to help a sick child, like she'd gone to visit their house. They said that she brought some herbs with her, that she was, like, rubbing her hands by the fire, she spread the herbs around, and she said, the child will be well, and then she told them they should plant sweet bay in front of their house to keep witches out, and then she's accused of witchcraft because the child dies.
Tricia Peone: So I think that it shows us that people certainly did believe in what we might call superstitions today, butyou can also see it as just part of their worldview. This is a way that people thought they could protect themselves, that you could plant some bay leaves by the door to keep witches out. That certain rituals and practices might help with illness. So I think the cases show both sides of that, [00:11:00] so they're accusing people of witchcraft when things go wrong, but if things went well, if that child had recovered, Rachel Fuller probably would not have been accused of witchcraft, if her alleged magic had worked.
Josh Hutchinson: It was just a part of daily life that magic could happen anywhere, anytime around you. And that continues to be the case for many people around the world today. So you've talked a bit about some of the notable cases. You had mentioned that Jane Walford, her accuser that she took to court in 1648, that accuser came back around again to complain about her?
Tricia Peone: Yeah, Jane Walford had, I think her reputation was tarnished in the community, she, I think she was a bit wealthier than her neighbors, but she was widowed. Some of the testimony against her is like[00:12:00] saying that they saw a cat.One woman testifies that her friend was being followed by a yellow cat, and they couldn't catch the cat. There's a lot of testimony about cats as being suspicious, and that's what some of this evidence against her is.
Tricia Peone: Her daughter was later accused of witchcraft, Hannah Jones, who was accused of witchcraft in that case with the Waltons at the Walton Tavern in Newcastle, so you do have that family connection, so I don't think Jane Walford's reputation ever was repaired, even though she was successful in court, which is interesting,even when the courts are reluctant to convict. in New Hampshire, we could maybe say was using a different standard of evidence than Massachusetts, but that still means there's still damage to the reputation and to the family'srole in the community, because her daughter was also accused of witchcraft, so even when she's wealthier, she has the power to take people to court, even taking a man to court for calling her a witch and winning, that's still not really winning in the community, right? That's not going to repair those relationships.
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: I was wondering [00:13:00] what would the evidentiary standards have been in New Hampshire at that time.
Tricia Peone: They should have been following English law. They should have been using the same kinds of legal references and guidebooks as Massachusetts Bay would have been using. I have not seen any evidence from courts in New Hampshire of what they're referring to, other than referring to the law in England. So then hopefully what they want is, you always want the person to confess, that's usually the best evidence. If not, you want to have two people who could testify to seeing the same act of witchcraft, something that shows that they're involved in a pact with the devil, which I think is usually why they're talking about cats so much. One, because they're just suspicious of cats, but also if you can show that that cat is their animal familiar, if you can find the witch's mark on their body, which is something they do in the case of Eunice Cole, they do find a mark, then that's evidence of the pact with the [00:14:00] devil. So that's the kind of evidence they're looking for that's the best.
Josh Hutchinson: And who isn't suspicious of cats?
Tricia Peone: I love them, but who knows what they're really up to.
Josh Hutchinson: Exactly.
Tricia Peone: There's a lot of talking cats in the New Hampshire cases. You see it in Salem, too. There's a few, some of the people mentioned a cat talking to them. In one of the New Hampshire cases, a little girl testifies that this gray cat offered her fancy things if she would agree to become a witch. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Those fancy things also appeared at Salem in many of the descriptions of what the devil was offering people.
Tricia Peone: Yep. Yeah. You see cases like the devil offers to help you with your chores, to buy you a new dress, to buy, to give you fancy things. So these are humble requests I think of, to make of Satan.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We had one in Connecticut where he was sweeping the hearth.
Tricia Peone: You would think maybe a waste of his time, but I guess [00:15:00] not.
Josh Hutchinson: I know, right?
Sarah Jack: Are there any connections between New Hampshire trials and the Salem witch hunt as far as people or families?
Tricia Peone: Oh yeah, quite a few. So Susanna Martin, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trial, she lived briefly in New Hampshire. She lived in Stratham for a while. And one of the first accusations against her that comes up is, so we don't have evidence of it in New Hampshire, but it comes up that this is like, it happened in New Hampshire when she was living there. She's accused of infanticide and fornication and witchcraft. And this is when she was young. I think she was a servant in a house in New Hampshire and then ended up back inwhat's Amesbury, Massachusetts now.
Josh Hutchinson: And there were a few New Hampshire residents who were named during the Salem Witch Trials.
Tricia Peone: Yeah. And there's definitely family connections. There are people who moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire afterwards.[00:16:00] So yeah, there's definitely quite a few New Hampshire connections.
Josh Hutchinson: What kind of spectral evidence comes up in the New Hampshire accusations?
Tricia Peone: There's actually spectral evidence in one of the later cases, the case in the 1790s that takes place in Campton, New Hampshire, which is up in the White Mountains. And it has some parallels to Salem. It's interesting because it's literally a hundred years after the Salem witch trials take place. And that's the case against a woman called Polly Wiley. And the only evidence we really have about her case is a letter. So it's just this one document. It's at the New Hampshire Historical Society. And it is written by the minister, Reverend Selden Church, and he's basically, he writes this letter, it's signed by a group of 14 other men in town.
Tricia Peone: So all we really have is this one document, I'm not entirely sure what [00:17:00] happens afterwards. So we just have this one document that shows us this one moment in time, and I haven't found any other evidence really about who she was, because there's a couple people in Campton and Thornton, a neighboring town, who might have been Polly Wiley , not 100 percent sure yet.
Tricia Peone: So all we really have, we take this document at face value. Basically it sounds like they're responding to an accusation of witchcraft that Polly Wiley makes against several other people in the community. The men who are writing the document and signing it are saying they're not really sure if she is bewitched, if she is possessed. They don't know if she has a medical illness, so they're not really sure what is happening, but what they describe is that she's got bite marks on her, she's seeing things, and from their perspective, these are the men, these are the propertied wealthy men in the town, and the minister, who's the arbiter of this dispute, and what their concern is, They say, it's not safe to be sure.
Tricia Peone: They're not sure if it's the devil or witchcraft or a medical illness, but their [00:18:00] concern is that people in town and people from other towns are starting to come to Polly Wiley to ask her to name the other witches in the neighborhood. Similar parallels to Salem, definitely. You have this, this, asking someone to name, name witches, people are coming to her and asking her, they're trying to test her, doing some of the traditional tests of witchcraft, to figure out what's going on, and so she's got these wounds and scratches all over her body, she is having these difficulties. She says she's seeing people that are invisible to everyone else in the room, but she can see them. So she's seeing these specters and people in town want her to say who they are. So that's all we know. That's all there is.
Tricia Peone: And then we have the 14 men who sign it and say, they're urging caution, basically. They're saying, let's not jump to conclusions, we're not entirely sure what's happening here. It's possible that this is witchcraft. It's possible that these are specters. And so we don't know what happened after that, but it's a weird little glimpse, a little window into what was [00:19:00] going on up in the White Mountains in the 1790s, so it's the period after the American Revolution, they're just founding this town, and there's clearly some kind of tension.
Tricia Peone: And clearly some kind of maybe unexplained illnesses, some other mysterious happenings, but you have a young woman who is essentially saying that she's seeing the specters of other witches and people want more information. But the town leaders are saying, let's try to maybe put a damper on this and take a breath and figure out what's happening. Sadly, we don't know what happens, but it is definitely a, an interesting case.
Josh Hutchinson: It's really telling that a hundred years after Salem, someone presenting the same symptoms as the afflicted of Salem they urge caution now in that new era.
Tricia Peone: And, so we can read it that way, and you're right, they're urging caution, which, but people at Salem urged caution, as well. They [00:20:00] just didn't follow it until it was too late. But we can also read it as this is a continuation of those beliefs, just because the formal trials and executions for witchcraft have stopped in New England by that point. It doesn't, it didn't necessarily stop people believing in witchcraft and believing that witches were responsible for their illness.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's interesting to me around that same time in Vermont, we have one secondary source reporting on a witch accusation, and we don't get that lens of the community saying, 'Hey, let's take caution,' but we do know that they, she went before a committee, that they wanted to test her. Was she a witch? They threw her in the river. So here you are, a hundred years later, this is two different states or colonies that it's coming up in the community and they're not exactly sure what to make of it still.
Tricia Peone: [00:21:00] It continues, and just because the courts aren't really interested doesn't mean people aren't interested in it, doesn't mean communities wouldn't take action in both these cases. And I don't know, in Vermont, I don't know if the church was involved or not in arbitrating that dispute, but they certainly were in Campton, in this case in the 1790s in New Hampshire. There's still this role that ministers are playing, because they are still ministers, Congregational ministers, anyway, still had to believe in witchcraft, and ghosts, part of the job.
Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about the Congregationalists really informative to witch trial history?
Tricia Peone: I think, when we think about the Puritans, a lot of the ideas we have about them are they're witch hunters, they'repuritanical, right? We still use that word today, but when we look at the history of witchcraft in New England, that there are people that were congregationalists, attending church regularly who believed in and sometimes practiced [00:22:00] magic.
Tricia Peone: And you see even ministers who are sometimes confused about exactly what's happening in their congregations. A lot of ministers, Cotton Mather, John Hale, they would write about they're parishioners using magic, using witchcraft to harm their neighbors. And they're not always positive what is the real cause when something unusual happens to you or happens in your community, someone's becomes unexpectedly ill, they're not always certain if it's the devil, if it's a medical illness, or if it's caused by witchcraft.
Tricia Peone: And so I think that uncertainty continues definitely in through the 18th century, even in the 19th century, and probably still today, right?
Josh Hutchinson: What are some of the primary sources or documents that have been crucial in your research?
Tricia Peone: Because New Hampshire was part of Massachusetts for much of the 17th century, a lot of the New Hampshire documents are in the Massachusetts State Archives.[00:23:00] So Eunice Cole, I think, is the case where we have the most documentation. They're the most records about her. Jane Walford, there's just a little bit and some of it secondhand, but Eunice Cole, I think we have the most.There's some of her indictments, the testimonies against her survive, and they're at the Mass State Archives. And then, of course, her case is,it's all over the newspapers in the 20th century, so there's a lot of really amazing illustrated newspapers and commentary about her case, where you have people in the 1930s looking back at what survived from the 17th century and reinterpreting the evidence, when they're trying to put forward this effort to exonerate her.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking about that community exoneration effort, and I believe they burned replicas of the court documents as a symbol of clearing her name, purifying what happened. How much additional lore has developed around her? Is she a figure of lore as well?
Tricia Peone: Yeah, so she definitely is. She's so [00:24:00] fascinating, because she was reviled by her community. They hated her in the 17th century. Three decades, she's being brought up on charges. She's kept in jail. They send her to jail in Boston. The town has to pay for her to be in jail. There's a lot of animosity towards this woman.
Tricia Peone: The evidence against her in her cases, which I think they start in her first witchcraft case, I , think is in 1656, but she had faced some other charges before then. She was accused ofslander. She was accused of stealing pigs. So she was known to the community to be somewhat disagreeable.
Tricia Peone: So her first formal kind of accusation of witchcraft is in 1656. Her neighbors offered a lot of testimony against her. She's brought again to court in 1673. And then the final one is in 1680. So you have these three, and evidence survives from these. So we can read the testimony and see what people were saying about her.
Tricia Peone: Her neighbors say things like, they saw her in church once with a mouse in her lap. All right. One of her, one of her neighbors says that she went to [00:25:00] visit a sick friend and Eunice Cole had been there the same day. She had just been there and then the friend comes over. And the man who is sick complains and says that he saw a gray cat near his bed and then he cried out, 'Lord, have mercy upon me. The cat hath killed me and broken my heart.' And it was implied that Eunice Cole was the cat. So she's causing illness. They did find some really great evidence against her, but the court continued to be hesitant to convict her, but they did send her to jail. So they said that, they were suspicious of her and that she should be in jail, but they were not ready to execute her. So they didn't.
Tricia Peone: But at one of her trials, she was sentenced to be whipped publicly and then sent to jail, which is, I think, interesting. And when she's whipped, they see that she has a witch's teat. So she has, they see a mark under her breast that looks like it's blue and they're not sure what it [00:26:00] is and they think that this is where her animal familiars, maybe the mouse, maybe the cats, are suckling from her in the night.
Tricia Peone: And then they go back to look at it again to examine the mark, and she's scratched it off. So she's accused of concealing some of this great evidence against her. She's accused of enchanting an oven. So there's a lot. People say that they heard voices coming out of her house when she was alone. So she's like allegedly having conversations with Satan. She was accused, a girl accused her, a young girl who's nine years old, Ann Smith, she said that she had tried to entice her, that Eunice Cole offered her plums to come and live with her, and the girl said no, and Eunice Cole pushed her and hit her with a rock. So Eunice Cole runs away, a cat appears in her place, this is when the cat offers the girl fine things if she will go and live with Eunice Cole, but she doesn't. There's tons, there's overwhelming evidence, but they found that she wasn't legally guilty, in spite of this testimony, but that there was just ground of vehement suspicion of [00:27:00] her for having had familiarity with the devil.
Tricia Peone: It's cyclical in the community. What's going on? Let's accuse Eunice Cole of witchcraft again. She's in and out of jail. She comes back to town. Her husband dies. She becomes a town charge.And when she dies, according to town legend, they found her in her shack, and they buried her body with a stake through her heart and then a horseshoe around the stake so that her spirit wouldn't be able to escape and haunt them.
Tricia Peone: However, the town folklore also says that her ghost still haunts and walks the streets of Hampton, and so people have said that they've seen her over the years, and to this day, allegedly, her ghost is unsettled and upset, and so that was part of the justification for exonerating her was to appease her ghost.
Tricia Peone: So her whole reputation goes through a rehabilitation, starting in the 19th century, because in the [00:28:00] 19th century you get more of the sort of romantic idea of Puritans and witchcraft. So she's in a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, he writes about her in a poem called "The Wreck of the Rivermouth." And in that poem she's kind of sympathetic. Like, yeah, she caused this shipwreck. But she felt bad about it, right? And it was because people were cruel to her. So in the 19th century, the stories you have about Eunice Cole are more that she wasmaybe a little rough around the edges, but that basically the community was mean to her and had wronged her.
Tricia Peone: It's such a fascinating case. So then what, by the time you get to the 20th century, the community decides, and I'm not totally sure where the motivation comes from in the community to do this rehabilitation and create this monument, but it comes up around the 300th anniversary of the town. So 1938 is the 300th anniversary of the English founding of Hampton. And so at town meeting that year, the citizens get together and they vote to exonerate her and they say they're going to create this memorial. It's not [00:29:00] totally clear like why they want to do this, but what they say, and take it with a grain of salt, is they say in a newspaper article from 1938, they say the reason for the exoneration was part of the current revolt against the Puritan tradition. So that's what some of the people involved were saying, that it's a rejection of the Puritan past, but why in 1938? That's one of the kind of unanswered questions. So they have town meeting in March of 1938. The residents vote on an article, and the article says, quote, 'We, the citizens of the town of Hampton, do hereby declare that we believe that Eunice Cole was unjustly accused of witchcraft and familiarity with the devil in the 17th century, and we do hereby restore her to her rightful place as a citizen of the town of Hampton.'
Tricia Peone: And then they resolved that they would celebrate her during the 300th anniversary that summer, that they would have these ceremonies, which, as you mentioned, it's when they decide to publicly burn the certified copies of the [00:30:00] documents from her various trials. And then they take the ashes from those documents, and they take some soil from where she had lived,some soil from the earth, and they mix them together and they put them in an urn, and then they said they were going to bury that on the town green, but it's actually in the Tuck Museum, so you can go see that and see some of these artifacts from her, from the case of Eunice Cole in Hampton.
Tricia Peone: But it sounds very ritualistic, right? Like they're doing, it sounds a little bit like sorcery to me, like burning these documents symbolically, mixing them with earth, burying them, but that's what they did. And then they declared August 25th of 1938 to be Goody Cole Day. They always call her Goody Cole like the Puritan address, Goodwife, so short for Goodwife, Goody Cole. They had a pageant, they reenacted some of her trials, okay, dramatizing the events, like someone wrote a play, and the town all comes and they listen to this reenactment of the events, there are speeches, [00:31:00] there's a big party, there's the Hampton Beach Bandstand, 3, 000 people attend the ceremony, it's covered in the national news. It got a fair amount of attention. Famous people were there, government officials, they created a commemorative coin and a doll that like, is supposed to look like Goody Cole. Again, slightly witchy, but yeah, and you can see those things also at the Tuck Museum. They have the urn, they have the doll, they have the coins. And there's pictures online if you want to see them. So this, these efforts are all being led by this group, and the group calls themselves the Society in Hampton for the Apprehension of those Falsely Accusing Goody Cole for Having Familiarity with the Devil, and they made membership cards to be in this society. Not like a catchy name, really, but that's what they went with. And so they're making the coin, they make the doll, they're rehabilitating her public image. And it's a moment in New Hampshire history where New Hampshire could have been the site of witchcraft tourism before Salem really [00:32:00] took that on. It could have been Hampton, New Hampshire, and apparently there was some witchcraft-based tourism in the 1930s and afterwards. People visitedone of the alleged sites where she had lived, and they come to see this huge event at the bandstand on the beach. Quite an amazing story. They promised to build a memorial in 1938. They actually didn't. They didn't leave anything permanent after that ceremony, but then in 1963, the town placed a boulder on the town green, and then they put the plaque there at the town's 375th anniversary, which was in 2013, so there is a marker on the town green that you can go and see, but compared to the other markers in New England, this one gets very little attention, right?
Tricia Peone: Literally hundreds of thousands of people will walk through the city of Salem and see the witchcraft memorials there, and very few people know about Eunice Cole or visit her marker.
Sarah Jack: And Eunice was not a confessor. She [00:33:00] didn't confess.
Tricia Peone: She did not confess, and she was not executed, and yet there is a marker, yeah.
Sarah Jack: And what about some of these other stories that we talked about today. Do they have markers or historical sites that are remembered today?
Tricia Peone: The only marker about witchcraft in New Hampshire is Eunice Cole's boulder on the town green in Hampton. There are other kind of, informal markers, there's Witch Creek, which runs through Portsmouth, and that appear that name appears on maps still, like USGS Maps today, and, it's most likely because of Jane Walford. That area where she lived is where the creek, runs through. So that's more informal, but yeah, the only monument to witchcraft in New Hampshire is Eunice Cole's boulder. Although, in the 1970s, there was a museum of witchcraft in New Hampshire, but that's a whole other story. It's not there anymore. It was only there for a few years. It was up at, up at Weir's Beach.[00:34:00]
Josh Hutchinson: And Goody Cole's memory has lived on, and there was an effort to exonerate her just last year.
Tricia Peone: Yeah, I didn't hear as much about the recent effort, but back before the pandemic, one of the state reps from Hampton, Renny Cushing,was, had started that effort. And I talked to him a little bit about it at the time, but then he's sadly, sadly died since then.
Tricia Peone: And I think the pandemic, too. So I hadn't, I actually haven't seen if what the state house actually decided to do in this case. So if you can, if you have an article you could send me, I'd actually love to read it. Cause I haven't seen if they, did they formally do anything? Cause it's a weird case because technically it was Massachusetts that convicted her.
Sarah Jack: It passed the House, but then in the Senate, it was voted down by party lines 14 to 10. And, yeah, but,there [00:35:00] is potential for legislation in Massachusetts that would clear her, so she's definitely not been forgotten.
Tricia Peone: I'll keep following it because it's, it's interesting to think about the fact that Hampton, before any other community, so before Massachusetts exonerated anyone or Connecticut, Hampton did it in 1938 and they did it through a town article. The town passed it. It wasn't the state, but they did it on a town level. Have you seen other towns that have taken action like that? Because I think it's mostly been on the state level, right?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Windsor, Connecticut has and Stratford, Connecticut did just last fall.
Tricia Peone: Interesting.
Sarah Jack: With Goody Bassett there. Yeah. I think these local community exonerations are so important to building that history at that local level. I think it's really important to see towns who have these connections to these [00:36:00] stories rehabilitating the reputations.
Tricia Peone: It is fascinating to me that New Hampshire did it first, right? It's bizarrethat's what happened. And the other, it was contentious, like not everyone in the community agreed in 1938 that's what they wanted to do. One of the descendants of someone who had accused Eunice Cole of witchcraft wrote to the town and was like, you can't overturn her conviction. You can't publicly say that she wasn't a witch because that disparages my ancestor. His ancestor had accused her of being a witch because she had cursed his cattle, he said, so he objected. And the town had to go through this PR process with him to get him to come to the ceremony. So he, this ancestor of one of her accusers did attend the ceremony, and agreed to like, not make a big fuss, but there were articles in the newspaper about it. Not everyone in the community agreed that they should exonerate someone accused multiple times by many people of witchcraft 300 years later.
Sarah Jack: But [00:37:00] isn't that such a great example of how, even though we fear, how does this hurt the accusers, their descendants or if we're looking at some kind of judgment from the state that just wasn't just, if we're going to make things right for the innocent, what are we, what is that saying about the authority? Or what does that do to the reputation of others? And I think that is an example in other communities that have come together through those questions that you can look at these hard histories, and everybody can come full circle and move forward with this acknowledgment of, hey, some things are not right here, but we want to make them right. And that's such a huge impact for others today.
Tricia Peone: Yeah, I think you're totally right, and I think that also shows the importance of [00:38:00] when a community or on the state level, local or state, like, when they're going through this process, to think about who all the stakeholders are, to think about, not just the descendants of the accused but the descendants of the accusers and having them be part of the process, cause I think, I think a lot of the people who have a genetic connection to the Salem Witch Trials might be on both sides, like you said, right? Josh, like you said, like you have both accusers and accused.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. I have accusers and accused, and I have ancestors who were obviously conflicted about the witch trials. My grandfather, Joseph Hutchinson, ninth great grandfather, he was one of the first accusers who signed the first complaint against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, but then later on, he signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse, so he seems to have changed his [00:39:00] mind over the course of the trials, and I think there's a lot of stories like that, and, like you said, genetically, if you're related to one of the accused, because they're all it contributing to the same gene pool, the accused and the accuser families intermarried so much in the following generations that you're likely to have ancestors on both sides.
Sarah Jack: In Connecticut, there was an anonymous descendant who wanted to see exoneration for the accused who descended from accusers. So you have descendants of accusers who feel both ways. And you mentioned stakeholders. We are all stakeholders in this. I think that's why it keeps coming up, because we're the stakeholders of the dignity of humans.
Sarah Jack: And what do we know about it today? And what can we learn [00:40:00] from the bad things that happened in these courtrooms then? Let's look at them, let's look at these stories, the humanity there and have a different chapter ahead, not the same chapters, flipping through the stories that we're seeing on the news now that are too similar.
Tricia Peone: I would like to know more about your job. What can you tell us about New England's Hidden Histories?
Tricia Peone: So New England's Hidden Histories is a project that the Congregational Library and Archives has been working on for quite a while, and it's creating a digital archive to preserve and provide access to all early Congregational church records in New England. So if you go on the Congregational Library and Archives website, you can find New England's Hidden Histories, and currently there are records from more than a hundred churches, and as well as collections of personal papers, so we've got a lot of Cotton Mather's papers,and his father, some Increase Mather papers, as well.[00:41:00]
Tricia Peone: And the purpose is some of these records are, for one, they're really community records, right? Because, in Massachusetts, for example, the Congregational Church was the established church for a very long time. And sometimes a church record book, it's not just baptisms, marriages,it's not just the kind of genealogical information that's interesting for people looking for family members and their ancestry. It's also town meeting records. It's also tax records, like these, the church and state were very intertwined in the 17th and 18th century. And so these records tell a lot of really There are some fascinating stories. There are, you can find stories about, ministers who enslaved people. You can find about churches who purchased enslaved people to pay part of the salaries of their ministers. So there are stories of slavery.
Tricia Peone: There are stories of people confessing to all sorts of things. They would give public confessions in congregational churches, these relations of faith, to talk about their experiences. And you will often have people talking [00:42:00] about, whether it's like fornication or adultery, whatever sins they were committing. And those are some of the I think most interesting, from my perspective, records that you can read is these 18th century people confessing their sins to their entire community. But it also demonstrates again, like the things we see with the Salem Witch Trials of that importance of confession. So we, we talk about that for the Salem Witch Trials, that's what really what people wanted to hear. They wanted that confession of witchcraft and that it has not just this legal meaning, but also a social and a spiritual meaning. And so you can read people's confessions of all sorts of things, occasionally witchcraft, but other things, as well. So yeah, so it's a, it is a digital archive that is seeking to put together the records from congregational churches from all six New England states.
Josh Hutchinson: And what's the most recent date that is covered in that project?
Tricia Peone: We try to go up to about 1850, so we've got records from the 1620s, through about 1850.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, That's excellent. [00:43:00] Yeah. Because my ancestors were all in the Congregational Church right down to my grandfather, who was a member of the First Congregational Church in Danvers.
Tricia Peone:
Tricia Peone: I think we have some Danvers and Salem church records.
Tricia Peone: It's really fun, it's always fun to see. It's not always a ton of information, but you might see oh, he was at this meeting and they elected him to be a church official or a deacon orjust seeing people's records of their marriage records. It's really, it's interesting to see it, to see the original, to see the actual 17th and 18th century hand of someone recording this information is always, I think it's always fun. It's a way of connecting with the past when you actually can look at these volumes.
Josh Hutchinson: Definitely. Yeah, I've seen the seating arrangements in those records before. Yeah, it gets pretty detailed about everything that went on in that community, especially around the church.
Tricia Peone: Yeah. [00:44:00] Congregationalists and New Englanders were amazing record keepers.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, thankfully for us.
Tricia Peone: So what survives isis really interesting. It's fun to think too about what didn't survive, right? We know that there are more records of witchcraft that were destroyed, and still,still new things turn up every once in a while. You'll find new documents,so we might not even know of all the New England witchcraft cases yet.
Josh Hutchinson: It's very true. Is there anything else that you wanted to discuss today?
Tricia Peone: I told you about Eunice Cole. I think that's really the most interesting New Hampshire story, is Eunice Cole. And then, yeah, I think the Polly Wiley case, too, of this kind of 100 years after Salem. It's a similar case, but goes in a different direction. The other interesting thing about New Hampshire, I think, is that in the 1970s, there was this museum of witchcraft, again, another opportunity for Hampton to be a witchy tourist destination that just didn't happen. So that's [00:45:00] a much more modern story, so probably not as interesting, but I do think this, the case in Hampton with this,the sort of the reinterpretation and the cleansing of Eunice Cole's reputation and how she changes in public memory over time, from being the most hated woman in the community to being a tragic romantic figure to beingalmost a local legend hero status, someone who was very defiant of authority, she bit a constable, she was, disagreeable, but plucky, right?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, she had moxie.
Tricia Peone: Exactly.
Josh Hutchinson: Spirit. Yeah. And,it did, when you were describing the 1938 ceremony, it sounded like a ritual of atonement and maybe appeasement. I was wondering, in the 1930s, that's the Great Depression era, were they literally trying to appease and atone for what they did, [00:46:00] who knows?
Tricia Peone: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I want to find some more, see if there are any more records. I've seen the newspaper accounts talking about it, and I, but I wonder if there are any other personal accounts to find still, that kind of are people talking about why they felt this need, because that's, it's an outlier.
Tricia Peone: You have, the 1990s where everyone revisits the Salem Witch Trials. You have the 1880s, I think, is when they first started putting up some of the monuments to to Rebecca Nurse and John Proctor. And that's coming from families who are doing that in the 1880s, 1890s, and then there's this gap and then it's 1938, this community gets together in New Hampshire. And I think, yeah, I think, they're trying to absolve the town of guilt through their efforts, but at the same time, they're trying to make a profit, right? They're like, they're saying like, come to Hampton, come to the beach, buy a doll, get a commemorative coin, come give us your tourism dollars. It's the depression. We, we need it. I think there's a couple of different angles
Tricia Peone: to
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's good, it's a [00:47:00] good marketing strategy, whether that was the intent or not.
Tricia Peone: I'm fascinated too that they're saying in the newspaper that they're trying to reject this Puritan past, 300 years after the settlement of the town. I think Puritans are always being reassessed.
Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
Mary-Louise Bingham: Sarah Parker was accused of the capital crime for which her mother, Mary, hanged in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts, British America, witchcraft. However, Sarah was not legally condemned. Still, Sarah suffered the same environment as those who stood trial. After her arrest, she lived at the Salem jail for 17 weeks where she experienced the suffering and sickness of her neighbors.
Mary-Louise Bingham: It was here that Sarah was told of her mother's death, leaving her to grieve in isolation and fear her own fate. She was eventually released from [00:48:00] jail. In 1710, Sarah's brothers added her jail fees into their accounts when they filed a petition for restitution for their mother. Only Mary's fees were reimbursed. In 1712, Sarah filed a petition on her own behalf. She was denied. Sarah's trauma in 1692 was due in large part by the actions of the government. Today, the state of Massachusetts owes Sarah Parker and the Parker family a sincere apology.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501c3 organization, Weekly News Update. The Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project is a project of End Witch Hunts. This project continues its vital mission building on previous legislative successes that acknowledge the convictions of the Salem Witch Trials. Yet, a significant number of Individuals, [00:49:00] notably five executed in Boston and others accused, still lack formal recognition from the Massachusetts General Court for the injustices they endured.
Sarah Jack: The Massachusetts Witch Trials occurred between 1638 and 1693. During this period of 55 years, At least 254 individuals were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. 209 of these were complained of, implicated in court, questioned, arrested, and or imprisoned. The other 45 were defamed, named socially, but not complained of legally or have been linked to witchcraft accusations by incomplete evidence. 37 people were indicted apart from Salem and 81 were indicted during the Salem witch hunt of 1692 to 1693.
Sarah Jack: To learn more day by day history on the 1692- 1693 Salem Witch Trials follow our social media channels and tune into the live Salem Witch Hunt Daily Report hosted by [00:50:00] Josh. In addition to the 24 individuals executed by Hanging and the one pressed to death in 1692, at least six others arrested for witchcraft perished while in jail, including the infant sister of Dorothy Good.
Sarah Jack: Also to date the eight convicted in Boston have not been acknowledged. No official apology by the Massachusetts General Court has ever been issued for the witch trials or to the victims. This justice has been delayed for over 300 years. To quote Dr. King, 'justice delayed is justice denied.' Our goal is to secure legislative recognition for all prosecuted under various colonial governments in Massachusetts.
Sarah Jack: Suggesting an amendment to the 1957 resolve could be a viable approach. This amendment would honor victims like Tituba and the accused child witch Dorothy Good, among others, who endured significant trauma and injustice. As highlighted today by Mary Louise Bingham's observations, Massachusetts [00:51:00] victims such as Sarah Parker sought exoneration from the Massachusetts General Court, the very institution we approach today. This historical body once presided over witchcraft prosecutions in the 17th century, and it failed to exonerate Sarah. Now we stand as her representatives, appealing to the current Massachusetts General Court, today ruled by the House and the Senate. To rectify these past wrongs, we invite you to join the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project by signing our petition, volunteering, or making a donation. Your involvement, whether by sharing our content, discussing these issues in your networks, or urging leaders to act, is invaluable. Together, we can nurture values of compassion, understanding, and justice in our world. Support our mission by becoming a financial donor. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ to donate any amount you're comfortable with. Your generosity is the backbone of the podcast content you value. Let's commit to making a difference together.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome, [00:52:00] Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Please join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at aboutwitchhunts.com/.
Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell all your friends.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
What happens when an astrologer, a witch, and a poltergeist walk into a barn in colonial Massachusetts? In this third installment of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 on Witch Hunt, we delve into the intricate narratives of various Massachusetts witch trials that span from 1657 to 1687. Several significant cases are broken down such as those involving Elizabeth Morse, Mary Webster, and John Godfrey.These cases illustrate the trials of the period and their lasting impact. The hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack also touch on their ancestral connections to these trials and discuss their advocacy work to end present-day witch hunts through their organization.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that investigates the mysteries of the witch trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. We are both descendants of persons accused of witchcraft in New England.
Josh Hutchinson: Heck, we're both descendants of people in this episode.
Sarah Jack: And we, in Mary Louise Bingham, are all cousins through our common ancestor, Mary Esty, who was executed for witchcraft in Salem in 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we are discussing Massachusetts witch trials before the Salem witch hunt. These cases originated in towns spread across the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies, with witch trials held in places like Boston, Plymouth, [00:01:00] and York.
Sarah Jack: These cases are fascinating, so let's get right to it.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you want to kick things off, Sarah?
Sarah Jack: Sure, we're primarily covering witchcraft accusations made between 1657 and 1683.
Josh Hutchinson: But I want to point out that our first case actually overlaps with the timeline of the trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons of Springfield, which we covered in the previous edition of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101. But continues through the 1660s.
Sarah Jack: Jane James of Marblehead sued accusers for slander in 1650 and again in 1651 and 1667 for being called a witch. On one occasion, she was accused by Peter Pitford of cursing his garden. Another accuser claimed she had appeared at sea in the shape of a cat. Fortunately for Jane, she was never tried for witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: The next case involves my possible ancestor, William Browne of Gloucester, who in [00:02:00] 1657 was accused of bewitching Margaret Prince, whose child had been stillborn. Browne was not convicted of witchcraft. Instead, he was convicted of 'diverse miscarriages' and was ordered to spend one week in jail, pay a 20 mark fine, and pay Thomas Prince, husband of Margaret, unspecified costs.
Sarah Jack: Next, we have the long and allegedly magical career of John Godfrey of Essex County. John was in court on witchcraft related matters at least five times.
Josh Hutchinson: John came to New England as a teen in the 1630s and frequently moved around Essex County.
Sarah Jack: In March 1659, 11 people accused Godfrey of witchcraft. James Davis Sr., Jane and John Haseltine, Abraham Whitaker, Ephraim Davis, Benjamin Swett, Isabel Holdred, Job Tyler, Charles Brown, The Widow Ayers, and Goodman Proctor.
Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Hayne [00:03:00] testified about a spectral horse that scared Isabel Holdred. Nathan Gould testified about a spectral snake that scared Isabel Isabel Holdred herself testified about these shape shifting animals.
Sarah Jack: Goodwife and Charles Brown testified about John Godfrey talking about witches, saying they should be treated kindly, or there could be consequences. Charles also reported he once saw a teat under John Godfrey's tongue.
Josh Hutchinson: William Osgood testified that he once, back in 1640, accused Godfrey of making a deal with the devil, and that Godfrey admitted it.
Sarah Jack: On June 28, 1659, Godfrey won two pounds and twenty nine shillings in damages in a slander suit against William and Samuel Symonds.
Josh Hutchinson: Who happened to both be my ancestors. In a document dated March 25th, 1662, Thomas Chandler said that John Care had called [00:04:00] Godfrey a witching rogue.
Sarah Jack: In a document dated March 15, 1663, Essex County Court ordered Jonathan Singletary to appear at the next court, which would be held in Ipswich, to answer charges that he slandered Godfrey by calling him a witch, saying, 'is this witch on this side of Boston gallows yet?'
Josh Hutchinson: John Remington and Edward Youmans said that Jonathan Singletary had told them he'd been visited by spectral Godfrey while in jail. Singletary was ordered to make a public apology to Godfrey or pay 10 shillings. Jonathan Singletary testified that Godfrey indeed visited him in jail and Singletary tried to hit Godfrey with a stone, but Godfrey vanished.
Josh Hutchinson: On June 30th, 1663, the court found for the defendant in the Godfrey versus Singletary suit. Godfrey vowed to appeal.
Sarah Jack: On March 29th, 1664, the [00:05:00] court found for Godfrey and ordered Singletary to acknowledge wrongdoing or pay 10 shillings plus 2 pounds in court costs. In 1666, Job Tyler and John Remington complained about Godfrey.
Josh Hutchinson: On February 22nd, 1666, the court summonsed witnesses to testify about Godfrey's witchcraft. Matthias Button, Sarah Button, Edward Youmans, Goodwife Youmans, Abraham Whitaker, Elizabeth Whitaker, Robert Swan, Elizabeth Swan, Abigail Remington, John Remington Jr., Joseph Johnson, Goodwife Holdridge, Ephraim Davis, William Symonds, Samuel Symonds, my ancestors, Mary Neasse, Francis Dane, my ancestor, Nathan Parker.
Sarah Jack: March 5th, 1666, Francis Dane wrote that he was unable to attend court due to infirmity and rough weather.
Josh Hutchinson: Job, Mary Sr., Moses, and Mary Jr. Tyler [00:06:00] testified that one time when Godfrey came over, a bird appeared with him and then disappeared. Job asked Godfrey about the bird, and Godfrey said, 'it came to suck your wife,' meaning that Mary Tyler Sr. was a witch.
Sarah Jack: Nathan Parker claimed that John Godfrey had said to Job Tyler that he could afford to blow on Tyler and not leave him worth a groat, a coin of little value.
Josh Hutchinson: Joseph Johnson said that Godfrey said, 'if John Remington's son was a man as he was a boy, it had been worser for him.'
Sarah Jack: John Remington, Jr. said Godfrey said to John Remington, Sr. 'if he drive the cattle up the woods to winter, then my father should say and have cause to repent that he did drive them up.' That December, the young Remington was riding his horse when a mysterious crow appeared and harassed them. The horse fell. The bird pecked the dog. Remington got home but was laid up a while with an injured leg. [00:07:00] Then Godfrey came over and argued with the boy and his mother.
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail Remington repeated her son's testimony about what Godfrey said when he came over after the fall, saying Godfrey had bragged about unhorsing a boy the other day.
Sarah Jack: Matthias Button corroborated the Remington's testimony, as he had been there at the Remington house when Godfrey said those things he said.
Josh Hutchinson: Godfrey was found suspicious but not legally guilty on March 6, 1666.
Sarah Jack: John Godfrey passed away no later than 1675.
MarkerMarker
Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Bailey of York, now in Maine, made the mistake of letting a rando minister named John Thorp board in her house. Not only did he drink too much alcohol, he also used a ton of profanity, and Bailey wasn't having it. In fact, things got so bad that she ripped her boarder a new one, prompting him to move out. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, that settled that.[00:08:00]
Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, Thorp was a bitter man who couldn't let things go. In an apparent act of retaliation, he accused Bailey of witchcraft ,resulting in her trial by the county court. She must have been ecstatic when the verdict of not guilty was read.
Josh Hutchinson: At the same court that tried Elizabeth Bailey, the minister, John Thorp, was tried for abusive speech to a social superior, excessive drinking, scandalizing two ministers by saying they preached unsound doctrine, and for actually being the one preaching the unsound doctrine himself. He was convicted of all charges and ordered to pay fees.
Josh Hutchinson: In June 1659, Winifred Holman of Cambridge and her daughter Mary were accused of witchcraft by Rebecca Gibson Stearns, who had an affliction not unlike those suffered 33 years later in Salem. The Holmans were arrested. The Holmans were both indicted. Mary probably was tried and acquitted. Winifred may not have been tried [00:09:00] at all. And the Holmans sued John Gibson and Rebecca Stearns for defamation and slander in March, 1660.
Sarah Jack: Gibson had to pay a fine and apologize. Rebecca Stearns was let off the hook, because she was in an irrational state of mind when she made her accusations.
Sarah Jack: Which is interesting because if an accused person was in an irrational state of mind, the accusations had weight.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that's a good point, Sarah. Next up we have a rare case from Plymouth Colony. In 1661, William Holmes of Marshfield sued his neighbor, Dinah Silvester, for defaming his wife by publicly calling her a witch. In court, Silvester claimed she had seen Goodwife Holmes in the shape of a bear. The court did not find sufficient evidence that Holmes had contracted with Satan, so they sided with the plaintiff and ruled Silvester guilty of defamation. [00:10:00] She was sentenced to sign an admission of guilt.
Sarah Jack: In 1665, Goodwife Gleason of Cambridge was presented on witchcraft charges. Not much else is known about this case.
Josh Hutchinson: Edith Crawford, a resident of Salem, found herself embroiled in controversy when she was accused of employing witchcraft to burn a house from which she had been recently evicted due to a court decision. In a bold move to confront these allegations, Crawford took legal action in 1667, suing the individual who had leveled the accusations against her, the new homeowner of the property in question.
Sarah Jack: Susannah North Martin is a well-known victim of the Salem Witch Trials. A stretch of highway going through Amesbury commemorates her. She is less known for her 1669 witchcraft trial, which marked the beginning of a long career of notoriety as a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: Born in 1625 to [00:11:00] Richard North, Susannah lost her mother when she was a young girl. She migrated to New England with her father, stepmother, and two sisters in about 1639, when Richard North was one of the initial proprietors of Salisbury, Massachusetts. In 1646, Susannah married recently widowed George Martin, and the couple had nine children.
Sarah Jack: In April 1669, her husband, George Martin, posted a hundred pounds bond to keep Susannah out of jail while she awaited trial for witchcraft. The same day, George Martin filed a defamation suit against William Sargent for slandering Susannah.
Josh Hutchinson: At her first witchcraft trial, Susannah was accused of having her first son out of wedlock and attempting to kill him, and of having another son who wasn't human, but actually an imp. The court did convict William Sargent of slander for accusing Susannah of infanticide and fornication. However, the jury did not convict him for slandering [00:12:00] Susannah as a witch, and he was fined a mere eighth of a penny.
Sarah Jack: Records of Susannah's first trial do not survive, but she's presumably acquitted, as she was soon at liberty again.
Josh Hutchinson: Also in 1669, Robert Williams of Hadley was acquitted of witchcraft but convicted instead of lying.
Sarah Jack: Another witchcraft accusation in 1669 was when Goodmen Cross and Brabrook said that Thomas Wells said he could set spells and raise the devil. He offered himself to be an artist. No formal charges filed. Wells denied the accusation.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1671, an unknown woman of Groton was accused of witchcraft by Elizabeth Knapp, a supposedly possessed young woman serving in the household of minister Samuel Willard, who later earned fame for opposing the Salem Witch Trials. Willard did not trust the devilish voice coming from young Elizabeth, so he kept [00:13:00] secret the name of the woman Elizabeth accused of bewitching her.
Sarah Jack: Then in 1673, Anna Edmonds of Lynn was known as a doctor woman and was presented on charges of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Next we have the sole Plymouth Colony witchcraft trial, that of Mary Ingham of Scituate. Eagle-eared listeners may remember this case from our February 9th, 2023 episode titled 'Between God and Satan with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes.' Unfortunately, not much is available on this case.
Sarah Jack: We've previously covered the case of Alice Young, New England's first witch trial victim hanged in 1647. 30 years later, her daughter, Alice Jr., was accused of witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1677,Her son sued the accuser for slander.
Josh Hutchinson: In an intriguing case in 1679 and 1680, my 10th great grandaunt, Elizabeth Morse of [00:14:00] Newbury, found herself accused of witchcraft, following a series of poltergeist like events in her home. The trouble began sometime after William and Elizabeth Morse took in their grandson, John Stiles. Much of this story will be familiar if you've listened to our episode on the Devil of Great Island.
Sarah Jack: First, William Morse said sticks and stones were thrown at his house. The Morses went outside to look and saw nobody, yet stones were still hurled at them, and they retreated inside and locked the door. Later that night, a hog appeared in the house, despite the door being locked.
Josh Hutchinson: The next day, some things hanging in the chimney crashed down into the fire, and an awl disappeared only to come down the chimney. William put the awl away in a cupboard and closed the door, but the awl kept coming down the chimney again and again, three or four times. Then the same thing happened with the basket.
Sarah Jack: Things just continued to disappear and then come [00:15:00] down the chimney.
Josh Hutchinson: Another hog appeared in the locked house.
Sarah Jack: More sticks and stones.
Josh Hutchinson: The pots hung over the fire danced and clanged against each other and had to be taken down.
Sarah Jack: William's ropemaking tools kept disappearing.
Josh Hutchinson: And the bedclothes flew off while Elizabeth was making the bed.
Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell, a seaman, visited often, and he said he would take the boy for a time and see what happened. He took the boy for a day, and nothing happened while the boy was away.
Josh Hutchinson: William Morse gave in a statement on December 3rd, 1679.
Sarah Jack: Thomas Rogers and George Hardy corroborated some of William Morse's testimony. John Richardson said a board flew against his chair.
Josh Hutchinson: William Morse's brother, and my ancestor, Anthony Morse, said he saw the board that hit Richardson while it was still tacked to the window.
Sarah Jack: John Dole said a pin, a stick, a stone, and a firebrand fell [00:16:00] down beside him.
Josh Hutchinson: John Tucker said that while these things were falling by John Dole, John Stiles was in a corner and didn't move.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Titcomb said Caleb Powell said if he had another scholar with him, he could find whoever was bewitching the Morse house.
Josh Hutchinson: Stephen Greenleaf and Edward Richardson affirmed seeing the strange motion.
Sarah Jack: John Tucker said Caleb Powell said John Stiles threw a shoe.
Josh Hutchinson: John Emerson said Caleb Powell had boasted about being trained in the black art by someone named Norwood.
Sarah Jack: William Morse also testified to a number of strange events on December 8th, 1679.
Josh Hutchinson: Bread turned over and struck him.
Sarah Jack: A chair bowed to him several times.
Josh Hutchinson: Door closed itself.
Sarah Jack: An iron wedge and a spade flew out of the chamber at Elizabeth without hitting her.
Josh Hutchinson: A drum rolled over.
Sarah Jack: The cellar door flew shut.[00:17:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Barn doors unpinned themselves, and the pin fell out of the sky.
Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell told the Morses that John Stiles had done the mysterious things around the house.
Josh Hutchinson: Powell claimed skill in astrology, astronomy, and the working of spirits.
Sarah Jack: The Morses loaned John styles to Powell. And nothing happened for a time.
Josh Hutchinson: When John Stiles returned to the home, a great noise was heard in the other room, but nothing was seen there.
Josh Hutchinson: And William Morse's cap almost came off his head.
Sarah Jack: There was a hit to William's head.
Sarah Jack: His chair was pulled back as if to topple him.
Josh Hutchinson: And a cat was thrown at his wife, Elizabeth.
Sarah Jack: The cat was thrown about several times.
Josh Hutchinson: Once the poor cat was thrown on the bed, wrapped in a red waistcoat.
Sarah Jack: The lamp tipped over and all the oil spilled out.
Josh Hutchinson: Another great noise, for a great while, described as being very dreadful.[00:18:00]
Sarah Jack: And a stone moved on its own.
Josh Hutchinson: Two spoons flew off the table and the table was knocked over.
Sarah Jack: The inkhorn was hidden, and the pen was taken.
Josh Hutchinson: William Morse's spectacles were thrown from the table.
Sarah Jack: And his account book thrown into the fire.
Josh Hutchinson: Boards came off a tub and stood upright.
Sarah Jack: John Badger said he was at Morse's house when Caleb Powell said he knew astrology and astronomy and could determine whether the diabolical means were used against the Morses.
Josh Hutchinson: Mary Tucker and Mary Richardson said Caleb Powell said he spied through the Morse's window and saw the boy play tricks.
Sarah Jack: Anthony Morse, brother of William Morse.
Josh Hutchinson: And Anthony being my ancestor and William my uncle.
Sarah Jack: Witnessed a brick disappear from his hands and fly down the chimney. Also, a hammer came down the chimney, and a piece of wood and a firebrand, which happened around November 28th. This [00:19:00] testimony was dated December 8th in 1679 by John Woodridge, the commissioner.
Josh Hutchinson: William Morse complained of Caleb Powell for working with the devil to disturb the Morses.
Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell appeared before John Woodridge on December 8th, and the magistrate agreed William Morse could prosecute the case at Ipswich County Court on the last Tuesday of March.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Hall and Joseph Mirick testified that John Moores, boatswain of the vessel where Caleb Powell was a mate, said that if there were any wizards, he was sure that Caleb Powell was a wizard. This testimony was dated February 27th, 1680.
Sarah Jack: The court dismissed the case, but declared Powell suspicious and ordered him to pay court costs.
Josh Hutchinson: Israel Webster said John Stiles said that he, John Stiles, was going to hell and could not read on Sundays because the devil didn't let him.
Sarah Jack: Thomas Titcomb said John Stiles, quote, 'used many foul words [00:20:00] on Sabbath day, and when asked if he was going to meeting, he said he was going to hell.'
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, this is so familiar with other afflicted children's stories. When they're asked to do work, suddenly they're afflicted and can't do it, or they're, they're held back by a witch or a devil and they can't do the things they're supposed to do, but they can do, strangely enough, the things that they want to do. Elizabeth Titcomb said there was a mysterious knocking at her door while she was sleeping. It knocked three times, but nobody responded when Elizabeth asked who was there. Lydia and Peniel Titcomb agreed.
Sarah Jack: Jonathan Woodman said seven years ago, he was going home when he saw a white cat, which did play at my legs. As he had no weapon, he only kicked the cat, which cried out and disappeared. He later learned that the Morses had called for a doctor that same night to tend Elizabeth's head.
Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin Richardson testified about something weird [00:21:00] happening at Morse's house.
Sarah Jack: David Wheeler talked about a heifer that came home with a chewed up back twice and got sick and started behaving strangely.
Josh Hutchinson: Joshua Richardson said he tried to stash his sheep in Morse's cow house one time when he was out working on getting the sheep across the river, but Elizabeth Morse chewed him out and he left. When he arrived at his destination, the sheep were all sick and foaming at the mouths.
Sarah Jack: Caleb Moody testified that he lost several livestock in an unusual manner over the 20 years he lived near the Morses.
Josh Hutchinson: And William Fanning described being attacked by a great white cat without a tail. Maybe just a lynx?
Sarah Jack: John Mighill testified that a calf's skin fell off, replaced by something red like a burn before the animal's eyes bulged out of his head, a cow pooped out of its side, and other animals met ill fates.
Josh Hutchinson: Robert Earle said that he visited Elizabeth Morse and heard a strange sucking [00:22:00] sound, like a whelp feeding.
Sarah Jack: On March 6th, 1680, the court ordered Constable Joseph Pike of Newbury to apprehend Elizabeth Morse and take her to the jail in Ipswich.
Josh Hutchinson: Esther Wilson testified that when her mother, Goodwife Chandler, was sick, she complained about Elizabeth Morse being a witch and nailed a horseshoe to the door to prevent witches from getting in. Morse would not come in while the horseshoe was on. Instead, she'd kneel by the door and talk with them from outside. William Moody came to the house of Goodwife Chandler and knocked the horseshoe off the door. Then Elizabeth Morse would come in until the horseshoe was nailed back up. Later, Moody knocked it off and took it away. Once again, Morse would enter the home. Goodwife Chandler began having visions of Elizabeth Morse and then experiencing fits. This testimony was dated May 17th, 1680 and read in court on [00:23:00] May 20th.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Titcomb said Susanna Tappan said Elizabeth Morse seized her by the wrist at court to ask what evidence Susanna would give in. That night, Susanna felt a cold, damp hand grab her wrist. She then became Ill, feeling itchiness and pricking throughout her body, her skin dry and scaly. Since then, she has not been out of her house.
Josh Hutchinson: And Elizabeth Titcomb said she told Goodwife Morse about the evidence against her and Morse was greatly affected and fell on weeping and said she was as innocent as herself or the child newborn, or as God in heaven.
Sarah Jack: Lydia Titcomb claimed she and her sibling saw an owl turn into a cat, then a dog. This mystery animal was sometimes completely black. At other times it had a white ring around its neck. Sometimes it had long ears. At other times it had virtually no ears at all. Sometimes it had an extremely long tail. At other [00:24:00] times it had virtually no tail at all.
Sarah Jack: This sounds like a riddle. The beast accompanied them home, scaring their socks off.
Josh Hutchinson: Susan Tappan did testify and said that Morse did indeed grab her by the wrist, but not in court. It was actually after a public meeting on a Sabbath day.
Sarah Jack: Thomas Knowlton said that when he was escorting her to jail, Elizabeth Morse said that she was as clear of the accusation as God in heaven.
Josh Hutchinson: John Chase, another possible relative of mine, said the day Caleb Powell had come to hear his testimony against Elizabeth Morse, he, John Chase, was taken with the bloody flux, which lingered until he spoke against Morse in court. Also, his wife had sore breasts that she have lost them both and one of them rotted away from her.
Sarah Jack: Jane Sewall said that William Morse told her a story about his wife not [00:25:00] being called for at first when Thomas Wells wife was in labor, due to some hesitancy by Thomas sister. The woman suffered a long labor until finally Morris was sent for, at which point the baby came.
Josh Hutchinson: John March said that sometime around 1674, he was awakened by several cats and rats at play together. He flung several things at them but could not strike them. The next morning, he heard Goodwife Wells call Elizabeth Morse a witch to her face. After Elizabeth left, Goodwife Wells told John March that Elizabeth had told her about the cats and rats, and Goodwife Wells wondered how Elizabeth could know they'd seen them, since nobody who saw them had left the house yet that morning.
Sarah Jack: According to John March, Goodwife Wells told him she'd often seen small creatures like mice or rats under Elizabeth Morse's coat. Daniel Thurston and Richard Woolsworth affirmed that they had also heard Goodwife Wells say such things.[00:26:00]
Josh Hutchinson: James Brown, another Josh ancestor, testified that Elizabeth Morse said George Wheeler's vessel would not return from its voyage and that she told him in the morning of his misdemeanors the previous night. He asked her how she knew what he had done, and she said everyone knew. He replied that everyone knew she was a witch. She said, 'our savior, Christ, was belied, and so is you and I.'
Sarah Jack: David Wheeler testified that he had seen Elizabeth Morse, his next door neighbor, do many strange things. And once, he was supposed to do an errand for her and neglected to do it for several days while he was busy hunting geese. He was unsuccessful at getting a bird. Then, Elizabeth Morse told him he wouldn't get any geese until after he finally performed the task. At last, he did what he had agreed to do, and then he was immediately successful hunting geese.
Josh Hutchinson: Margaret Mirick claimed that she had once concealed a private letter, and yet Elizabeth Morse came a few [00:27:00] days later and recited everything in the letter, though she'd most likely never seen it as it was in hiding.
Sarah Jack: A calf belonging to Zachariah Davis mysteriously danced and roared after Zachariah failed to bring Elizabeth Morse some wings.
Josh Hutchinson: Gotta bring those wings, man.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth was tried in May 1680.
Josh Hutchinson: And indicted on May 20th.
Sarah Jack: On May 22nd, Secretary Edward Rawson wrote that the court decided it was okay to admit the testimony of a single witness to a single event, if at least one other witness brought in similar testimony about another event only they witnessed.
Josh Hutchinson: Governor Simon Bradstreet pronounced the death sentence for Elizabeth on May 27th.
Sarah Jack: However, the governor and assistants reprieved her on June 1st. On June 4th, her husband, William, petitioned for better treatment for her in jail, such as liberty to walk the yard during the day and [00:28:00] to sleep in the common jail rather than the dungeon.
Josh Hutchinson: On November 3rd, the deputies protested the court's decision not to execute Elizabeth.
Sarah Jack: According to John Hale, The governor and magistrates rejected the death sentence because they determined that seeing a specter of Elizabeth was not the same as actually seeing Elizabeth perform witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: They also determined that multiple witnesses to the same event were indeed necessary to admit the testimony as evidence.
Sarah Jack: In 1681, William wrote to the General Court on May 14th and again on May 18th, contesting the testimony against his wife and pleading her innocence. And we are writing to the same general court today, asking for these accused witches to receive an apology from the state.
Josh Hutchinson: William Morse won the release of Elizabeth into his custody, and she was placed under a sort of house arrest.
Josh Hutchinson:
Josh Hutchinson: In 1679, an unknown woman from Northampton, Massachusetts was accused of witchcraft. [00:29:00] Unfortunately, no other details are available in this case.
Josh Hutchinson: Moving forward, we get to the 1680 case of Margaret Gifford of Lynn, who frequently appeared in court as attorney for her husband and was accused of witchcraft in 1680. Her so-called unwomanly behavior in acting as attorney may have drawn suspicion.
Sarah Jack: Our next witchcraft suspect in 1680 is Bridget Oliver, better known as Bridget Bishop, the first execution victim of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. But that wasn't her first run in with the law on suspicion of witchcraft. In 1680, she was acquitted of witchcraft, a year after her husband, Thomas Oliver, died. We will have much more on Bridget in our upcoming Salem Witch Hunt 101 series.
Josh Hutchinson: In the 1987 book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, author Carol Karlsen suggests that the Mary Hale who was accused of bewitching mariner Michael [00:30:00] Smith to death could be the mother of Winifred Benham of Wallingford, Connecticut, who was accused of witchcraft multiple times in the 1690s.
Sarah Jack: In 2007, authors Michael J. LeClerc and D. Brenton Simons used the most reliable sources to connect Mary Hale to Brothers and also to Winifred Benham in their article, The American Genealogist publication, 'Origin of Accused Witch Mary Williams King Hale of Boston and her brothers Hugh, John, and possibly Nathaniel Williams.'
Josh Hutchinson: The article establishes Mary's life since 1654 in Boston, highlighting her family ties and property dealings, and suggests she was married twice, with her first husband's surname possibly being King or Ling, and her second husband's surname being Hale. Established her connection to the Williams family with roots in London and Surrey, England.
Josh Hutchinson: Despite the serious witchcraft accusations in 1680 and 81, [00:31:00] Mary was acquitted. Her family, particularly her brothers Hugh and John Williams, were prominent figures in Boston and Block Island.
Sarah Jack: Her husbands have not been identified. The 1674 Boston tax list records her name as Widow Hale. Only one of her children has been identified, Winifred, but she's recognized as having multiple children.
Josh Hutchinson: She faced witchcraft accusations in February and March of 1680. Michael had lodged at her home and had courted the granddaughter, Joanna.
Sarah Jack: Mary was accused of supernaturally transporting him to a witch's sabbath in Dorchester.
Sarah Jack: During the trial, a form of evidence for witchcraft was presented, centering around a test with a bottle containing Michael Smith's urine. Observers noted that when the bottle was sealed, Mary began to pace restlessly, exhibiting an agitated behavior within her dwelling. Conversely, when the bottle was opened, her restless movement ceased entirely. This correlation between Mary's actions and the state of the [00:32:00] bottle was deemed to be indicative of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Accuser Margaret Ellis wanted to see Mary burned, which was never done to a witch in New England. But Mary was acquitted, and then no more is heard of her.
Sarah Jack: Mary Hale is my 10th great grandmother.
Sarah Jack: An unknown woman of Kittery was accused of witchcraft in 1682. Unfortunately, no further details are available for this case.
Josh Hutchinson: Mary Webster, wife of William Webster, was examined at county court on March 27, 1683, and the case was referred to the Court of Assistants in Boston.
Sarah Jack: Mary was indicted May 22nd, 1683 and acquitted June 1st, 1683.
Josh Hutchinson: According to witness testimony, she served the devil in the form of a black cat and suckled imps from teats in her secret parts.
Sarah Jack: According to Cotton Mather, Philip Smith was a saintly man who died at the hands of Mary Webster.
Josh Hutchinson: Smith became [00:33:00] unduly anxious about his health and had ischiatic pain in the lowest three bones of his pelvis.
Sarah Jack: Smith became delirious and loudly ranted in multiple languages, or so it was thought. Suffered sore pain from sharp pins pricking him.
Josh Hutchinson: He claimed to see Mary Webster and some others afflicting him.
Sarah Jack: He smelled a strange, musky scent.
Josh Hutchinson: Some of his attendants went and harassed poor Mary Webster, and he was well while they were at it.
Sarah Jack: A container of medicine emptied without spilling.
Josh Hutchinson: People heard a strange scratching sound.
Sarah Jack: There was a mysterious fire on the bed from time to time. It would quickly vanish. Something strange seemed to move in the bed away from Smith's body.
Josh Hutchinson: The night after he died, the bed moved on its own.
Sarah Jack: Two nights after he died, mysterious sounds like furniture being moved in the room where the corpse lay were heard.
Josh Hutchinson: And strange signs of [00:34:00] life in the body after Smith had presumably died.
Sarah Jack: According to lore, Mary Webster was brutally beaten in 1684 by a mob of zealous youth.
Josh Hutchinson: According to Thomas Hutchinson, who wrote much later, the people who went to harass Webster actually 'having dragged her out of her house, they hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the snow, and at last buried her in it and there left her.'
Sarah Jack: In 1685, Mary Webster sued for slander.
Josh Hutchinson: The James Fuller case from Springfield is particularly interesting. Fuller was accused of seeking the devil's aid, a familiar charge.
Sarah Jack: Fuller's change of response to the accusations is especially notable. He initially admitted to the claims but then retracted, stating he had belied himself. This turn of events adds significant complexity, highlighting the [00:35:00] challenges in discerning guilt or innocence in these trials.
Josh Hutchinson: Fuller's case exemplifies the judicial severity of the period. Despite his retraction and claim of lying, the court sentenced him to whipping for wicked and pernicious, willful lying. Such harsh punitive measures were common and reflect the Puritan's strict approach to law and order.
Sarah Jack: The harsh sentence underscored the need for control and punishment of behaviors deemed deviant.
Josh Hutchinson: Cases such as Fuller's were instrumental in perpetuating the fear of witchcraft. Understanding these cases is crucial for comprehending the complexities and fears of early American society.
Sarah Jack: It's also telling that he, a man, was let off of the witchcraft charge and only punished for lying. We have seen this several times with men, but never with women.
Josh Hutchinson: It came up a few times in this episode. Must be a thing.
Josh Hutchinson: The period of 1657 to 1687 saw [00:36:00] no executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts and only one known conviction, that of Elizabeth Morse, who was placed under house arrest instead of being hanged.
Sarah Jack: In the next episode of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101, we will examine the 1688 case of Goody Glover of Boston and what may have led the judges to condemn her after more than 30 years without an execution.
Josh Hutchinson: And stay tuned after that episode for the beginning of our Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series.
Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.
Mary-Louise Bingham: You may recall from last week's Minute with Mary that Female Gleason was indicted on the capital crime of witchcraft at Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, British America. This week, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project is closing in on her identity. Project member and genealogist David Allen Lambert provided the team with marriage documentation for two women who married into the Gleason family. These two [00:37:00] women were alive and living in the area in the mid 1660s. I found evidence that a third woman married into the Gleason family, but her vital dates are unknown. Dr. Tricia Peone, another project member and researcher, provided a resource regarding the First Church of Cambridge records dating to the early 1660s. Diving into the list of members to locate the Gleason family has begun. We've also reached out to Beth Folsom of Cambridge History to help us locate Middlesex County court records for a possible court record regarding Female's indictment. Stay tuned, we are close to identifying Female Gleason's given name.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a non profit 501c3 organization, Weekly News Update. Remember, each case of sorcery accusation or witch-hunt represents real individuals, each with their own names, [00:38:00] families, dreams, and aspirations for peace. It's vital to actively oppose the targeting of vulnerable members within our communities.
Sarah Jack: Education and advocacy are key to ending witch hunts. This entails transforming perceptions regarding the equal worth of every individual, insisting on a moral code that upholds human dignity, and challenging mob behaviors through the enforcement of laws in place to protect victims. If you hold a position of influence, whether in your community, on social media, in educational settings, or within the government, it's your opportunity to advocate and to stand up for the vulnerable. Speak out, raise awareness, and help strengthen organizations fighting these harmful practices.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts firmly advocates for universal human dignity, echoing the United Nations Charter's commitment to human rights, equality, and dignity. We condemn harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks [00:39:00] as grave violations against human dignity.
Sarah Jack: We urge states and individuals alike to defend and uphold human dignity, protecting everyone from torture, mistreatment, and discrimination. You can join us by amplifying the stories of victims of witch hunts past and present. Engage with advocacy groups, learn through our resources, and voice your concerns to authorities. Your involvement, whether by sharing our content, discussing these issues in your network, or urging leaders to act, is invaluable. Together, we can nurture values of compassion, understanding, and justice in our world.
Sarah Jack: Support our mission by becoming a financial donor. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ to donate any amount you're comfortable with. Your generosity is the backbone of the podcast content you value. Let's commit to making a difference together.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: us next week when we learn about [00:40:00] the witch trials of several New Hampshire residents.
Josh Hutchinson: Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ and sign up for our newsletter, Witch Hunt Wednesday.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
In this episode of ‘Thou Shalt Not Suffer, The Witch Trial Podcast’, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into an intriguing conversation with Mary Louise Bingham about their mutual ancestor, Mary Esty, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trials. They explore their genealogical connections to Mary Esty, discuss her life and tragic fate, and shed light on the historical context of the time. Hear Mary Esty’s own words from original documents, including her impassioned plea to end the witch hunt.
[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:16] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. In this episode, Josh and I talked to Mary Louise Bingham about our mutual ancestor, Mary Esty, who was hanged for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: And stay tuned at the end for a special announcement
[00:00:30] Sarah Jack: We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
[00:00:32] Josh Hutchinson: And enjoy any other holidays you celebrate this time of year.
[00:00:36] Sarah Jack: One thing I know you'll enjoy is our chat with Mary.
[00:00:41] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah, how are you connected to Mary Esty?
[00:00:44] Sarah Jack: So Mary Esty was the second Towne connection, direct connection that I found. I knew that I descended from Rebecca since the nineties. That was something my family had passed down. And then when I was doing my own [00:01:00] research, I realized the Mary line was there. I couldn't believe it. Their grandchildren married. So John Esty, their son, married and then had Hannah, and Francis and Rebecca had Elizabeth who married William Russell and William Russell married Hannah. And then my Russell's go all the way to my fifth great grandmother's maiden name was Russell.
[00:01:28] Josh Hutchinson: So you're connected to Mary through a grandchild, and I'm connected to Mary through her son, Isaac Jr., who married Abigail Kimball, and they had a daughter, Sarah Esty, who married Joseph Cummings. How did you say you were connected, Mary, through Isaac Jr. also?
[00:01:51] Mary Louise Bingham: Yes, I'm connected through Isaac Jr., as well. But in terms of the Towne family, so Mary's siblings, [00:02:00] I descend from Edmund, who I found out about first, Jacob, Joseph, and then it was Gail Garda who discovered Mary Esty, and that was such a surprise. I had no inkling about that, it was such a surprise. In fact, it's one of those where I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Mary Esty was my nine times great grandmother.
[00:02:28] Josh Hutchinson: I just found out that I'm an Edmund also.
[00:02:33] Mary Louise Bingham: Here we go again, Josh!
[00:02:37] Sarah Jack: I think it's interesting that Mary Esty, Mary Towne, was not any of ours first known link to the Salem Witch Trials. She was our secondary find. All of us. Second or third, third, fourth, fifth, maybe for Josh, and with history, she always, you know, is a little less known than her [00:03:00] sister.
[00:03:01] Mary Louise Bingham: And that's why I think this episode is very historic, because it's the first episode where we're telling the story of Mary Esty. I don't think I've ever heard any other podcast episode about the Salem Witch Trials even mention her name. They name a lot of the others, but Mary Esty is not one of them.
[00:03:25] Sarah Jack: I'm so excited that we're gonna talk about her today.
[00:03:29] Josh Hutchinson: And if you've listened to this podcast at all, you've probably heard me tell the story about how it was at Mary Esty's sister's house, the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, where I found out my first connection to the witch trials through my ancestor, Joseph Hutchinson, and that inspired me to get into the genealogy, which then led to a cousin in Massachusetts who had our connection to Mary [00:04:00] Esty researched. One Towne led to another in my tree. And now I've got Edmond Towne also in my tree.
[00:04:11] Mary Louise Bingham: Edmund is also an ancestor of Lucille Ball.
[00:04:16] Josh Hutchinson: So I'm a little bit closer to Lucille Ball than I was before. Like, one step on the genealogy.
[00:04:25] Mary Louise Bingham: It really is exciting.
[00:04:28] Sarah Jack: When we first teamed up last year on the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, Mary Bingham and Sarah Jack knew that they were related through Mary Esty, but we didn't know Josh was yet. So three Mary Estys teamed up to work on the exoneration for Connecticut.
[00:04:48] Sarah Jack: That's
[00:04:49] Mary Louise Bingham: Yes.
[00:04:50] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, without realizing it.
[00:04:55] Mary Louise Bingham: I know that's wonderful though. That's our connection, our spiritual [00:05:00] connection to each other, too, so as far as I'm concerned.
[00:05:03] Sarah Jack: right.
[00:05:04] Josh Hutchinson: It's imprinted into our DNA. We're supposed to be friends.
[00:05:14] Sarah Jack: Mary, please tell us the story of the mutual ancestor who brought us all together.
[00:05:20] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was the sixth child born to William and Joanna Towne about the year 1634 at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. And William was a farmer and a basket weaver in this seaport town, known for its smoked herring, and he lived on a three acre house lot.
[00:05:38] Josh Hutchinson: You can learn more about the lives of William and Joanna Towne in Great Yarmouth by listening to our December 29th, 2022 episode, Rebecca Nurse of Salem with Dan Gagnon, and our November 10th, 2022 episode, Witch Hunts in Great Yarmouth and Salem with Dr. Danny Buck.
[00:05:55] Mary Louise Bingham: So why did the Townes leave? [00:06:00] Well, William wanted to worship as what we term today as a Puritan, but back in the 1600s, that term was considered to be derogatory. William would have considered himself and his family to worship as a community of believers known as the people of God. Their belief centered on reading the scripture without the superstitious articles in the church that had significant monetary value. During William and Joanna's time, some of those items were sold, smashed, or demolished, as in many of the side altars. And according to author Dan Gagnon, the Townes probably attended, and I quote, and unquote, 'unofficial services,' where they hired their own clergy to preach on Sunday afternoons and market days.
[00:06:51] Mary Louise Bingham: The new Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 further reformed the liturgy to resemble that of the Catholic [00:07:00] tradition, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Two years later, between April and September of 1635, William and Joanna decide to leave everything behind, making a dangerous journey across the Atlantic Sea with four children, including one year old Mary, to worship as they saw fit in new surroundings of which held both mystery, danger, and hope.
[00:07:30] Mary Louise Bingham: Upon their arrival, the Townes ended up at the northeastern part of Salem today, which is known as Danversport in Danvers, Mass, current day North Shore Avenue on what was a nine and a half acre farm. Their first house would have probably been an English wigwam, which did not protect well from the outside elements, though there was a fireplace, but the fireplace was made of wood, of all [00:08:00] things. About a year after their move, there was a hurricane, which caused great damage and wiped away many of the homes. So sometime after that, William would have had a more colonial wooden structure built. It was at this residence where the final two Towne siblings were born, Sarah and Joseph.
[00:08:22] Mary Louise Bingham: Young Mary would have learned how to operate the day-to-day activities of the household, such as cooking, sewing, weaving, spinning, using a cheese press and a butter churn, eventually milking the cows, taking care of the chickens, as long as the activity was in the home, in the herb or kitchen garden, or in the barn. Mary would master each skill with precision to perfection. In time, Mary would have to teach her own daughters what she herself was taught by her own mother.
[00:08:54] Mary Louise Bingham: Rebecca moved out of this residence about 1645, when she [00:09:00] married Frances Nurse. Then in 1652, William and Joanna moved the rest of the family more inland to Topsfield on a 40 acre farm, a definite move up for 18-year-old Mary and her family. Eventually, as William and his sons were granted and purchased land neighboring their parents, the entire Towne and Esty families owned the whole length of the seven mile drumlin running from east to west from what is now Essex County Co-op and the Fairgrounds all the way out to Beverly.
[00:09:37] Mary Louise Bingham: What is not certain, however, is whether or not Mary knew Isaac Esty while she was living in Salem or met him when they both lived in Topsfield. The first time Isaac appeared in the court records was in 1652, where he acknowledged judgment to Edmund Botter at a court held at Salem on November [00:10:00] 30th, but this entry does not specify where Isaac was living at that time. Also, 18 years old was considered young for a woman to get married, so she probably was married when she was 20 or 21. And since the Topsfield records from its incorporation in 1650 to 1658 were lost in a house fire, we can't be certain when Mary and Isaac were married and exactly when their eldest child, Isaac Jr., was born. In fact, Isaac Jr. is not even mentioned in the Massachusetts Vital Records to the year 1849 for the town of Topsfield.
[00:10:42] Mary Louise Bingham: But we do know that Mary eventually moved just across the street from her parents after her marriage to Isaac. And we know that Isaac loved Mary, as he demonstrated in both words and action. He said in his petition to the General [00:11:00] Court after he reviewed his travel and jail expenses, as well as the cost to provide provisions for Mary in 1692, that his total expenditures for that year for that travel was 20 pounds. Isaac continued, and I quote, 'besides my sorrow and trouble of heart in being deprived of her after such a manner which this world can never make me any compensation for,' end quote. Today, that dollar value might be about $2,070. Again, this dollar amount certainly does not include the trauma experienced by Isaac himself, his and Mary's children, and their grandchildren. Isaac traveled two times a week for five months, without fail, to bring provisions to Mary. These were long journeys, and Mary spent time in [00:12:00] three jails. The round trip from his home to the Salem jail was 14 miles. The round trip to the Ipswich jail was 14 miles. The round trip to the Boston jail was 44 miles. So this clearly demonstrated that Isaac was a devoted and loving husband to Mary and she a devoted wife to him.
[00:12:26] Sarah Jack: Forty four miles was a long way to travel in those days. Even traveling by horseback, you'd be hard pressed to complete the trip without overnighting somewhere, and he would have had all his work at home waiting for him.
[00:12:41] Josh Hutchinson: And Isaac Sr. wouldn't have been the only one in the family to be affected by this. As he was away, his adult children would have been helping tend to chores on his farm, therefore leaving their own families [00:13:00] and spending more time away than they would have, working extra hours, because they still had to work full time in their own professions and working their own farms and then go off and tend to their parents' farm.
[00:13:17] Sarah Jack: And they were used to seeing their mother there if they were visiting. If they were there before this, they would have gotten to spend time with her.
[00:13:26] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there was always that empty seat at the table.
[00:13:31] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary and Isaac had nine children who lived into adulthood. At least two of her sons were active in town affairs as surveyors, constables, and bricklayers. Isaac Jr. learned the trade of cooper, presumably from his father.
[00:13:49] Mary Louise Bingham: Both Mary and Isaac were members in full communion at the Topsfield Church before 1684. This meant that the community of believers believed that both [00:14:00] Mary and Isaac were God-fearing Christians and that they were going to heaven once they died. They were among the Elect who received communion once a month.
[00:14:09] Josh Hutchinson: And most colonists were not church members, though they were required to attend services.
[00:14:16] Sarah Jack: Before the Salem Witch Hunt, it was rare for a full church member to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:14:22] Josh Hutchinson: Even in Salem, most of the population was not full church members, so most of the people that accused were not full church members, but there were enough church members accused that it stood out.
[00:14:40] Josh Hutchinson: It's one of the contrasts between Salem and a regular witch trial, which only involved one or two suspects at a time. Those cases, generally, it was not church members.
[00:14:53] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was also known to tell someone if they spoke out of turn and to be very careful what [00:15:00] they say. She was also described by both the jail keepers at the Salem and Ipswich locations as a model prisoner. So we might assume that Mary did what she was supposed to do, but stood in the truth, or in her truth all the while.
[00:15:20] Mary Louise Bingham: So how do we get from a woman who was totally accepted by her community to a woman accused of being in league with the devil? One reason could be that Mary's sisters, Rebecca and Sarah, were already in jail for the same crime, which increased the likelihood that Mary would also be charged at some point.
[00:15:41] Mary Louise Bingham: Reason two, John Putnam Jr., who is a cousin-in-law to Ann Putnam Sr., said later that he heard Ann Putnam Sr. say something about the Townes sister's mother, gossip also most likely heard by two of Mary's chief [00:16:00] accusers, Ann Putnam, Jr. and Mercy Lewis, who was the Putnam servant living with Thomas Putnam Jr. and Ann Putnam. And please remember, it was believed that witchcraft could be passed from mother to daughter.
[00:16:15] Josh Hutchinson: John Putnam Jr. testified that, 'I, the said John Putnam, had reported something which I had heard concerning the mother of Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce.'
[00:16:27] Sarah Jack: And Ann Putnam Sr. testified that, quote, 'Young John Putnam had said that it was no wonder they were witches for their mother was so before them.'
[00:16:37] Mary Louise Bingham: Sure enough, the warrant for Mary's arrest was issued or sworn out on April 21st, and her chief accusers were Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and quote unquote 'others.' She would have been brought to Nathaniel Ingersoll's tavern until it was her turn for her pre-trial examination, when she would have walked down the [00:17:00] street to the meeting house. And the meeting house would have been packed on the inside, and people peering in the windows on the outside, making it very difficult to see. The atmosphere inside would have been incredibly noisy and disruptive. But Mary stood her ground against her accusers and the magistrates, even though they tried to bully her into a confession with leading questions such as, 'What do you say? Are you guilty? And, what have you done to these children?' Mary replied, 'I can say before Christ Jesus, I am free. I know nothing.' The magistrates then ask, 'how can you say that? You see that these tormented and accuse you. You know nothing'? Then Mary turned the tables and questioned the magistrates, 'would you have me accuse myself?' they reply, 'yes, if you were guilty.' Then they continue to badger her. 'How [00:18:00] far have you complied with Satan, whereby he takes this advantage against you?' Mary replied, 'Sir, I have never complied but prayed against him all my days. I have no compliance with Satan in this. What would you have me do?' And then they repeat, 'confess if you'd be guilty.' Mary doesn't waver, 'I will say it if it were my last time. I am clear.'
[00:18:28] Mary Louise Bingham: After Mary's pretrial examination was done, she was taken to the Salem jail and stayed there until possibly May 13th, when she may have been transferred to Boston. And this, we are not sure of because Margo Burns has stated that that particular document has a tear in it and it's missing one of the names. But we suppose that that's Mary Esty, because all of the others in Topsfield who the warrant went out [00:19:00] for that same day were all transferred to Boston at that time.
[00:19:03] Mary Louise Bingham: It seems that three of Mary's accusers changed their minds regarding her guilt, and she was released from prison on May 18th to the home of her son, Isaac. Her family must have been relieved, and the Nurse and Cloyce families must have received hope that maybe Rebecca and Sarah might be returned to their homes, as well.
[00:19:26] Mary Louise Bingham: So why not go home to her husband? One might surmise that Isaac, Sr. may not have been able to adequately nurse Mary back to health and since Isaac, Jr. only had his wife Abigail and their infant daughter at their house, he and Abigail may have been the best choice to care for Mary until she could return to her home. Sadly, that did not happen.
[00:19:52] Mary Louise Bingham: There were a lot of people in and out of John and Hannah Putnam, Jr. 's house on May 20th. The [00:20:00] reason? Because their servant, Mercy Lewis, who previously was a servant to John's cousin, Thomas Putnam, Jr., was violently sick in both mind and body. In fact, Samuel Abbey got wind of Mercy's condition, and he went to the Putnam household to see what was happening.
[00:20:20] Mary Louise Bingham: He saw Mercy in bed and unable to speak. Because John was not home, Hannah asked Samuel to retrieve Ann Putnam Jr. so that she could ID the specter who tormented Mercy. Samuel returned with Ann and Abigail Williams, and possibly Sarah Trask, who was along for the ride. So Ann and Abigail ID'd the specter as the quote unquote 'woman who was sent home the other day,' end quote.
[00:20:50] Mary Louise Bingham: The other specters were visiting as well, namely Anne Whitridge and John Willard. According to Ann and Abigail, they all seemed to be [00:21:00] attacking Mercy while she lay still and unable to speak. But that changed, and Mercy, when she was able to speak, begged God not to let the specters kill her. She further declared that Mary's specter would kill her by midnight, because Mercy remained steadfast in her belief that Mary was a witch, when the others basically cleared her.
[00:21:24] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary Walcott entered the scene at some point that same day and said Mary's specter told her that she would kill Mercy by midnight if she was able. So finally, Constable John Putnam returned home about 8 p. m. with his friend, Marshal George Herrick, as well as Benjamin Hutchinson.
[00:21:45] Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin Hutchinson was my ninth great granduncle, and this isn't the only time he stuck his nose in it. In fact, we'll have tales of some of his adventures in future episodes.
[00:21:56] Josh Hutchinson: And Mercy Lewis is my cousin. [00:22:00] So I'm related to so many of the characters in this episode. It's really personal to me and to see my relatives, Mercy Lewis and Benjamin Hutchinson being deployed almost against Mary Esty, my grandmother, is very weird to me to think about all my relatives fighting for life in such a way. We got Mercy and everybody, Benjamin Hutchinson, thinking that Mercy's going to die by midnight if they don't go and arrest Mary Esty, and just so tense for both sides. And I'm related to people on either side and that itself being related to the people who did the accusations, who made the arrests, that is a weighty [00:23:00] kind of ancestry, and the way I tried to use that to understand why accusations were made, and that helps to learn how we can stop witch hunts if we understand how they started in the first place, and having ancestors who accused gets me thinking about that a lot.
[00:23:28] Mary Louise Bingham: They seriously thought that Mary's specter would kill Mercy before midnight. Now the rush was on to apprehend Mary. Though John and Benjamin's travels for the next three hours or so are not recorded, George Herrick's travels are, and it's possible that they all may have traveled together. Anyhow, Herrick would have traveled south five miles to John Hathorne's house so that Hathorne could sign the complaint. Then [00:24:00] Herrick travels north 8 miles to Isaac Esty Jr. 's house. Isaac probably saw Herrick approach the house, gathered Mary, and swiftly brought her downstairs into the basement, which would have been a small root cellar at that time And she was probably crouched, most likely in a fetal position, by the cornerstone. Words were most likely exchanged between Isaac Jr. and Herrick. I cannot even let my mind and heart begin to imagine the gripping fear Mary experienced as she heard everything going on, then to hear those footsteps approach closer and closer until they find her and she is arrested yet again. And lore states that Herrick was not patient with those whom he arrested.
[00:24:54] Mary Louise Bingham: Then Herrick, with Mary, was required to travel nine miles south to [00:25:00] Beedle's Tavern in Salem. This must have been harrowing again for Mary. The men testified that they had returned to John Putnam, Jr. 's house by midnight only to discover Mercy was still not well, and she continued to have seizure like fits, complained of severe stomach issues until she fell asleep at dawn.
[00:25:22] Josh Hutchinson: When they put the time, the midnight deadline in here, it really gets very dramatic and intense. It's like watching a Hollywood thriller with that bomb ticking down and are they going to be able to defuse it in time?
[00:25:42] Sarah Jack: It's like a scene. It gives us the opportunity to see this commotion and this reaction and this fear and these men going after, hunting the witch. And I, personally, a lot of times I'm thinking of just that courtroom [00:26:00] and people riled up and, backing each other, but this is different.
[00:26:04] Josh Hutchinson: And it shows you the intensity of the fear of witchcraft that they're willing to travel all these miles at top speed trying to arrest her before the deadline so that Mercy's affliction would stop and she wouldn't be murdered. They think they're preventing a murder by doing this.
[00:26:30] Sarah Jack: Was John Hathorne asleep or was he waiting? He was probably asleep and they didn't mind waking him to stop the murder.
[00:26:39] Josh Hutchinson: It's a warrant getting issued to call the judge in the dead of the night and try and get a suspect apprehended or a site searched in a hurry. And This guy's dead asleep, passed out, who knows what condition he's in.[00:27:00]
[00:27:00] Sarah Jack: is recovering, presumably.
[00:27:04] Josh Hutchinson: Presumably that family doesn't know what's going on at the Putnam house, because they're all in bed for the night. And they're thinking she's a free woman and she's going to be okay. And then it gets pulled back. That's, gut wrenching. It's ripping your heart right out of you. Imagine what both of the Isaacs felt at that moment and the rest of the family.
[00:27:31] Josh Hutchinson: You think your wife and mother is in the clear and then she's just jerked away from you.
[00:27:39] Sarah Jack: And they know she's innocent. It's like a community betrayal to them.
[00:27:44] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it would be so easy just to be angry at basically half the community is lining up against them. So many powerful people, the Putnams being involved and getting [00:28:00] George Herrick out in the dark of night. He also, the marshal of Essex County, would he have been asleep? Was he still awake on duty somewhere?
[00:28:12] Josh Hutchinson: How did they get him over there to Salem Village so fast?
[00:28:17] Sarah Jack: Not one of these men said, hold up, let's discuss this in the morning, because there wasn't time.
[00:28:24] Josh Hutchinson: And they're just, yeah, because there's that midnight deadline, it's that ticking clock, just ticking down and they're desperate people at this time, willing to do basically anything. It's I picture, just horses zipping along rough trails and roads in the dark at night, people carrying lanterns or torches, maybe.
[00:28:54] Sarah Jack: And Mercy's suffering.
[00:28:56] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Mercy the whole time is having this, these [00:29:00] seizures, these fits, and everybody around her is just gotta be so tense with worry. So everybody here is getting dragged through the emotional wringer this night. Nobody's winning this one.
[00:29:19] Josh Hutchinson: So arresting Mary Esty, maybe it saved Mercy Lewis's life in these people's minds, but it didn't stop her afflictions altogether. So what does that mean? What are the implications of that? Does it mean there are other people afflicting her, or is Mary Esty somehow still doing damage from jail?
[00:29:46] Sarah Jack: There would've been accused in the jail, right?
[00:29:48] Josh Hutchinson: There would have been other accused people in the jail.
[00:29:50] Sarah Jack: Yeah. So Mary arrives at the I can just imagine the wail, the wailings that could have happened, the gasping, [00:30:00] the shock, the disappointment, and the fear.
[00:30:04] Josh Hutchinson: Right.
[00:30:05] Sarah Jack: Big brother or Yeah, Big Brother. When the house is sequestered those, they're waiting to see who's gonna come to the sequester house. shocked who walks in. But this is not just somebody losing a game.
[00:30:22] Josh Hutchinson: I'm just thinking about the people who were in jail already. They get awoken in the middle of the night, they're curled up on their piles of straw and trying to sleep on the rough floors of the really dank dungeon. And they had woken up and they're in their half. Asleep state seeing Mary Esty come to them thinking, Oh, I was so hopeful when she got released that the rest of us would soon be released. And now she's back.
[00:30:59] Josh Hutchinson: [00:31:00] Totally stunned, totally caught off guard. Yeah. Just in shock, jaws dropped to the ground and just, still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Am I seeing this? This is Mary Esty? Yeah. And I'd be crying my eyes out just thinking, I thought I might have a chance to get out of here like she did.
[00:31:22] Sarah Jack: Because nobody's been hanged at this point.
[00:31:25] Josh Hutchinson: No, this is still early. Nobody's been tried yet. But there've been people sitting in jail for two months by this point and just more and more people getting thrown in jail. And finally, there's a ray of hope for all the prisoners when Mary's freed that, oh, maybe, they're coming to their senses and this madness is going to end and then she's back.
[00:31:53] Sarah Jack: Absolutely. Because it's been several [00:32:00] people were hanged in the colonies.
[00:32:02] Josh Hutchinson: But the recent Goody Glover hanging in 1688, just three and a half years before this is unfolding would have still been,
[00:32:15] Josh Hutchinson: ,
[00:32:15] Josh Hutchinson: yeah. And that is tied to afflictions of children. And you're seeing that scenario play out but on this much larger scale. There's many more afflicted people, and they're pointing the finger at everybody. It doesn't matter your status or anything. They're coming after you.
[00:32:39] Sarah Jack: Those afflictions were affirmed by the authorities just a few years before.
[00:32:46] Josh Hutchinson: Cotton Mather himself had written his book, Memorable Providences, which featured the Goody Glover case and the so called possession or affliction of the [00:33:00] Goodwin children, the four children she was supposed to have tormented. And so that's fresh. People have read that book. They've heard that book being read. They've seen it around, they've heard sermons about witchcraft and everything, so it's all in their minds, and this is unfolding in real life, in their own lives.
[00:33:29] Sarah Jack: Right before their eyes.
[00:33:31] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's just shocking. I would have been so bewildered and befuddled by Mary's return, panic stations right there.
[00:33:46] Mary Louise Bingham: Since the records of her second pretrial examination do not exist, one can surmise that Mary was interrogated this time at Beedle's Tavern or at the Salem Town Meeting House. Either way, [00:34:00] Mary was sent to the Boston jail on May 23rd. Two days later, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce were transferred to that same jail. This would be the last time that all three sisters were together and hopefully found some type of comfort in each other.
[00:34:20] Mary Louise Bingham: In a deposition offered against all three Towne sisters, and most likely used at both Rebecca and Mary's trial, was that of John Putnam Jr. and his wife, Hannah. He spoke of his own afflictions, from which he recovered, and the afflictions of his infant child, who died. John and Hannah described the affliction of their baby as similar to those afflictions suffered by those who accused Mary. John and Hannah were so frightened for their child's life they sent for his mother and, later, a doctor. His mother believed the child was bewitched, and the doctor could not offer relief. John [00:35:00] said that the baby died such a violent death, and I quote, 'being enough to pierce a stony heart,' end quote. However, he does not say who bewitched the child.
[00:35:15] Mary Louise Bingham: So the gossip of which John referred somehow morphed into Joanna Towne, Mary's mother, being accused as a witch about 22 years prior to 1692. After researching, I discovered that Joanna was never formally accused of being a witch.
[00:35:34] Mary Louise Bingham: While Mary was in jail, her sister in law, Mary Browning Towne, who was the wife of Edmond Towne, was summoned to appear in court with all of her children on September 7th. They don't show up. Mary Towne issued a statement September 8th that the entire family was too sick to appear in court. At this time, her daughter, Rebecca, was [00:36:00] continually falling down for no apparent reason.
[00:36:03] Mary Louise Bingham: A second summons was issued only for Mary and her daughter, Rebecca, to appear. The return for the summons does not exist, so one might assume that Mary doesn't show up again, and it turns out that her daughter, Rebecca, does accuse Sarah Cloyce of bewitchment. The fact that they don't show up for Mary's trial does not save Mary's life, but it may have helped to delay Sarah's trial and saved Sarah's life. You see, the indictment against Sarah, which involved her niece, was returned ignoramus, along with the other three indictments. Sarah Cloyce never stood trial.
[00:36:48] Mary Louise Bingham: On September 9th, Mary and Sarah offered three suggestions to the magistrates. Number one, judges should offer legal advice to the accused, who did not have legal [00:37:00] representation. Number two, testimony should be heard from the family of the accused, their neighbors, and their religious leaders. And number three, balance the testimony of the afflicted with legal evidence.
[00:37:16] Mary Louise Bingham: Furthermore, Mary's solo petition to the court, which was composed to save others from being hanged, though her date was already chosen, suggests that the magistrates examine the afflicted separately and try some of the people who confessed. Mary was confident that some of the confessors were actually innocent and believed that they were innocent. And they disguised the fact that they had nothing to do with witchcraft.
[00:37:45] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was hanged on September 22nd, 1692. Some of the family members start to petition to lift the stain from their family name in 1703. Isaac Esty, [00:38:00] Sr. and Jr., as well as Mary's daughter, Sarah Gill. And the same thing happened in 1709 and was signed by Isaac Esty and John Nurse, among others, who had other family members that were hanged. And then, of course, Isaac Senior's petition, spoken of earlier in 1710. October 17th, 1711, was Mary's reversal of attainder. Isaac had possibly passed away. His death date is not recorded, and Jacob is a subscriber for the Esty family. They were awarded the 20 pounds, and it was equally divided amongst their surviving children, who were Isaac Esty Jr., Joseph Esty, John Esty, Benjamin Esty, Jacob Esty, Joshua Esty, Sarah Gill, and Hannah Abbott.
[00:38:59] Sarah Jack: [00:39:00] We would like to close this segment with a reading of a petition Mary Esty submitted to the governor, judges, and ministers.
[00:39:06] Josh Hutchinson: The humble petition of Mary Esty unto His Excellencies Sir William Phipps, to the Honored Judge and Bench now sitting in Judicature in Salem, and the Reverend Ministers humbly showeth that whereas your poor and humble petitioner, being condemned to die, do humbly beg of you to take it into your judicious and pious considerations, that your poor and humble petitioner, knowing my own innocency, blessed be the Lord for it, and seeing plainly the wiles and subtlety of my accusers, I myself cannot but judge charitably of others that are going the same way of myself if the Lord steps not mightily in. I was confined a whole month upon the same account that I am condemned now for, and then cleared by the same afflicted persons, as some of your honors know. And in two days time, I [00:40:00] was cried out upon by them and have been confined, and now am condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocency then, and likewise does now, as of the great day will be known to men and angels.
[00:40:14] Sarah Jack: I petition to your honors not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set. But the Lord, he knows it is that if it be possible, no more innocent blood may be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not, but your honors does to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and would not be guilty of innocent blood for the world. But by my own innocency, I know you are in the wrong way. The Lord in His infinite mercy direct you in this great work if it be his blessed will that no more innocent blood be shed. I would humbly beg of you that your honors would be pleased to examine these afflicted persons strictly and keep them apart sometime, and likewise to try some of these [00:41:00] confessing witches, I being confident, there are several of them has belied themselves and others, as will appear, if not in this world, I am sure in the world to come, whither I am now a going, and I question not but you'll see an alteration of these things.
[00:41:15] Josh Hutchinson: ThEy say, myself and others, having made a league with the devil, we cannot confess. I know, and the Lord knows, as will shortly appear, they belie me, and so I question not but they do others. The Lord above, who is the searcher of all hearts, knows that, as I shall answer it at the tribunal seat, that I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore I cannot, I dare not, belie my own soul. I beg your honors not to deny this, my humble petition, from a poor, dying, innocent person, and I question not, but the Lord will give a blessing to your endeavors.
[00:41:56] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to stay tuned for a special announcement [00:42:00] following End Witch Hunts News.
[00:42:01] Sarah Jack: Discover your Towne family heritage with the Towne Family Association, dedicated to preserving the history of William Towne, Joanna Blessing, and their six children, including the three sisters from the Salem Witch Trials, Rebecca, Sarah, and Mary. Open to all interested in Towne family history, membership costs 22 for individuals and 25 for families annually. Take advantage of the special two year memberships at $40 for individuals and $44 for families. Join the community on Facebook in the Towne Cousins Facebook group to connect with over 2,000 other Towne family descendants. Embrace your roots. The Towne Family Association gets together every year for a reunion. In 2024, it will be in Salt Lake City, Utah. Find out more, visit the Facebook group Towne Cousins today.
[00:42:52] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide.
[00:42:57] Sarah Jack: At End Witch Hunts, we firmly believe in the power of [00:43:00] collective action to bring about positive change. In alignment with our mission, we proudly support the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. Explore the impactful work of this global network and its affiliated advocacy organizations at theinternationalnetwork.org. Take a moment to visit their website, where you can scroll to the bottom of the homepage and subscribe to receive their latest news and updates. By staying informed and sharing what you learn in your daily conversations, you contribute to a deeper understanding of ongoing initiatives worldwide.
[00:43:35] Sarah Jack: Join us in actively participating in these crucial efforts. Our podcast episodes feature insightful conversations with experts deeply involved in the network. Hit play to gain valuable perspectives from Damon Leff, Leo Igwe, Govind Kelkar, Samantha Spence, Amit Anand, and Miranda Forsyth. By listening to their experiences, you'll not only broaden your knowledge but also become a part of the movement against witch hunts. [00:44:00] Together, let's make a difference.
[00:44:02] Sarah Jack: Are you a part of the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project? It is seeking exoneration for wrongfully convicted individuals in Boston's witch trials. We aim to secure formal apologies for all formerly accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. Give your support by signing and sharing the petition at change.org/witchtrials. If you're in Massachusetts, engage your representatives in proposing the amendment. And if you're a voting member of the Massachusetts General Court, lead or collaborate on this amendment effort. Reach out to us for support. Let's unite to close this chapter of American history. Take action now.
[00:44:38] Sarah Jack: Thank you for 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. During this holiday season, we invite you to keep End Witch Hunts in mind when considering your charitable gifts. We have [00:45:00] donate buttons on our websites. Your gift is tax deductible. 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 endwitchhunt.org.
[00:45:16] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:45:17] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:45:19] Josh Hutchinson: now we have our special important announcement.
[00:45:25] Josh Hutchinson: Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast will be renamed Witch Hunt and the change will take effect January 1st, 2024 when the ball drops in New York City.
[00:45:41] Sarah Jack: Josh and I will continue to host the show with important contributions from Mary.
[00:45:46] Josh Hutchinson: Witch Hunt will feature interviews with leading scholars and advocates.
[00:45:50] Sarah Jack: Topics will include past witch trials, modern extrajudicial witch hunts, and everything in between.
[00:45:58] Josh Hutchinson: We will also continue [00:46:00] to create 101 episodes about specific events, regions, and topics.
[00:46:05] Sarah Jack: As well as bonus episodes focused on representations of witches and witch hunts in popular culture.
[00:46:12] Josh Hutchinson: So thank you for continuing to listen to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, and for listening to Witch Hunt next year.
[00:46:21] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:46:23] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:26] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:46:29] Josh Hutchinson: Which will become aboutwitchhunts.com/ January 1st. And remember to tell your friends about Witch Hunt, coming January 1st, and stay tuned for more great episodes of Thou Shalt Not Suffer all through December.
[00:46:46] Sarah Jack: Thou Shalt Not Suffer and Witch Hunt are presented by End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:46:54] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
New York Times Bestselling Author Katherine Howe climbs aboard ship for a captivating conversation about her new novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. Embark on a voyage with us as Katherine navigates us across the enthralling seas of piracy history, offering listeners an unforgettable discussion that delves into the high-stakes world of seafaring adventures. Her expertise and passion shine through, making this episode a must-listen for history enthusiasts, book lovers, and anyone seeking a thrilling journey into the past. Ready to embark on a literary adventure? Weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen! It’s time to press play and sail through the seas of history, mystery, and the indomitable spirit of characters like Hannah Masury. And we don’t forget the witch trials.
[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Ahoy, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial and Pirate Podcast. I'm Able Seaman Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:19] Sarah Jack: And I'm First Mate Sarah 'Calico' Jack.
[00:00:23] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is acclaimed author Katherine Howe, who is here to talk to us about her new book on pirates.
[00:00:30] Sarah Jack: That's right, this is our special pirate Thanksgiving episode. You may also be asking what pirates are doing on a witch trial podcast.
[00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: Well, you know Katherine Howe the witch trial writer, but you're fixing to meet Katherine Howe the pirate writer.
[00:00:45] Sarah Jack: As announced here last year, she has written a wonderful historical novel titled, A True Account, Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself.
[00:00:55] Josh Hutchinson: It's not just wonderful. It's marvelous.[00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: That's an understatement. I had such a great time reading this book.
[00:01:05] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Once I picked it up, I literally could not put it down until I was done. It's really a thrilling book, and you have to know what's coming up next, so it just keeps you in its hook like grip.
[00:01:24] Sarah Jack: Hannah's account pulls you in immediately, and you start hearing it from the moment the story begins. It's full of local history and Hannah.
[00:01:39] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, the beginning of the book is just so captivating and really drew me in. And that's why I just, from there on, things just kept going and going. And I had to keep reading and reading.
[00:01:58] Sarah Jack: This is one of those books, as soon as you [00:02:00] have your nose in it, you are so glad you picked this book up and started it and you're thinking about your schedule and you hope you can clear your calendar so you can enjoy every page.
[00:02:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, you will be willing to drop everything once you get into this. Forget about sleeping that night or running the errands. They can wait, but Hannah Masury's story cannot.
[00:02:25] Sarah Jack: Hey, book clubs, this is a book for your club. This is great for discussion.
[00:02:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, you really enjoy Katherine Howe's comments on the book in this episode, and you can use those as some talking points in your book club. And we talk about how there are more similarities between witches and pirates than you might think.
[00:02:54] Sarah Jack: Executing the witches and executing the pirates were both acts of purification for the community.[00:03:00]
[00:03:01] Josh Hutchinson: Katherine Howe is the best selling author of The Physic Book of Deliverance Dane, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, Conversion, The House of Velvet and Glass, and The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen. She is editor of the Penguin Book of Witches and, coming soon, the Penguin Book of Pirates.
[00:03:21] Josh Hutchinson: She coauthored Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune and Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Anderson Cooper.
[00:03:32] Katherine Howe: Chapter One, Boston, June 1726. I don't know what made me determined to go to the hanging. I'd always made a point of avoiding them. I resisted the entreaties of my friends who wanted to be in amongst the throngs of onlookers, ears pricked for the last words and the pious advice of the soon to be damned. Of course, I'd always been curious. One cannot help but wonder about the face of one condemned, [00:04:00] to see his carriage toward the crowd and himself, to feel the swelling cheers and cries of all the townsfolk, to hear the crack of the felon's neck snapped like a chicken's. I wondered if their eyes were open or closed when their moment came.
[00:04:14] Katherine Howe: What happens in the instant in between being a living, breathing creature, trembling with needs and wants and fears, and being an empty sack of flesh and bone? Is it the same for an old woman alone in her bed with the covers pulled up tight as it is for a man mounting the scaffold before God and everyone? Does an unearthly light of heaven attained shine upon the greasy strings of their hair if they have confessed and repented? Everyone repents at the end, or so I've been told. I'd heard the moment of public death described often enough, usually by someone with a hand around a glass, but I'd always been of too delicate a nature to see for myself.
[00:04:54] Katherine Howe: I didn't like to drown kittens or stomp trembled whiskered mice, and as often as not found a way to avoid such grim [00:05:00] chores on the occasion Mrs. Tomlinson chose to impose them on me. I even crossed the street from dogs lying dead in the gutter. But something about William Fly was different. I made up my mind that I would go.
[00:05:15] Josh Hutchinson: Such a good introduction. That hook just grabbed me when I was reading it. So starting with the execution, that was quite a way, quite a bang right at the beginning.
[00:05:29] Katherine Howe: Why mess around? One of the things that I enjoyed about working on this book, because it's set in 1726, it opens at a real event. So the hanging of William Fly was a real thing that happened. William Fly led a short-lived mutiny and went briefly pirating off of Cape Hatteras, and then he trusted a guy to take him to, I think it was Martha's Vineyard for water with, he had renamed his boat the Thames Revenge, which is such a great pirate name, but the guy he trusted [00:06:00] to pilot him fooled him and led him off the coast of Boston, which of course now as a sailor in Massachusetts, I find myself wondering like going on the outside of Cape Cod, which is how you have to go to get from Martha's Vineyard, like all the way around and get back to Boston, it's actually like a really long trip. It's like really way out of their way because there was no Cape Cod canal to cut through. So that must have been, William Fly must have been a pretty naive leader, unfortunately.
[00:06:24] Katherine Howe: But what happened was William Fly's public trial and gibbeting. So William Fly is tried and he's found guilty and he's not just hanged in front of everyone, but he's gibbeted. And what that means is that his body, after he is dead, it hanged in chains in a public place for everybody to see. And so he was gibbeted on a little rock, one of the Boston Harbor islands called Nix's Mate, and just left there to rot. And the historian Marcus Rediker has pointed out that is a that practice of publicly [00:07:00] displaying the mutilated bodies of people convicted of piracy was a, was like a conscious act of terror by the state. The state was trying to terrorize people out of thinking of turning to piracy.
[00:07:12] Katherine Howe: And it's so interesting to me because, of course, this is so most people who know my fiction associate me with Salem witch trial stories or Salem stories. And of course, this is a generation later, because Salem is 1692 and William Fly is 1726. But the idea of using public execution as a mode of terror is still very much in play. And interestingly enough, too, one of the theologians who presided over William Fly's trial was Cotton Mather himself. He was much more famous by the time the 1720s rolled around, and at the beginning of the story, in A True Account, we actually talk a little bit about his fame, that people respond to him like, like he's a celebrity, they freak out when they see him in the street.
[00:07:56] Katherine Howe: And Hannah Masury, is bound out to service in a [00:08:00] real tavern, Ship Tavern is a real place, at the foot of Clark Wharf, which is a real wharf, one of the longest, most major wharfs in pre-revolutionary Boston. And so I imagine her mistress, Mrs. Tomlinson, as being very much enthralled to Cotton Mather, very much like touched by his fame and the proximity of his fame.
[00:08:20] Katherine Howe: And so at one point, I even have Hannah remark to herself that she grew up in Beverly, which is a town close to Salem, which is on the water, a seafaring town, and that she grew up close to where Cotton Mather had driven the devils out of Salem a generation before, before she was born, which seems impossible to her, as impossible as driving fairies out of a hole in the ground, because public thinking about witchcraft had changed by the 1720s, but not completely. Hannah is still living in this sort of just post-Calvinist world and much of her internal monologue or the way that she understands the world is inflected by [00:09:00] Christianity because of the moment in which she's living, even though she herself is living a very, what we might term, unchristian life.
[00:09:09] Josh Hutchinson: As you mentioned, you're known for writing about Salem Witch Trials. What drew you away from that to write about pirates?
[00:09:18] Katherine Howe: I think, I think everyone is secretly attracted to pirates. Maybe that's a sweeping generalization, but maybe it was partly having spent so much time thinking about the world of very early European-settled, English-settled Massachusetts, and what an incredibly strict and hierarchical culture that was. And trying to imagine ways that people chafed under that structure or bucked that structure a little bit. And if Salem was, if the Salem Witch Crisis was one example of when regular people are at the center of the story, which is so a little bit unusual. So [00:10:00] much of our history is so called great man history where you talk about leaders or kings or queens or people who are in charge. And I've never been particularly interested by the people who are in charge. I'm much more interested by the people who are just trying to make their way in the world who are regular people.
[00:10:15] Katherine Howe: And so another instance of regular people in extraordinary circumstances is piracy. So often pirates didn't plan to be pirates, or they turned to piracy through mutiny or, as William Fly did, through what they called hard usage, and especially at a time when impressment was such a big part of the British Navy. You could be snatched away from everything that you knew in your life and thrown into a ship with no desire to ever leave the land and have your freedom taken away. And so I was interested by piracy, like the golden age of piracy, which kind of wound down in the 1720s, but stretched broadly from the 1680s to the 1720s, the same period [00:11:00] as the period of the witch trials in North America.
[00:11:02] Katherine Howe: And also it is an example of the collision between the most radical forms of freedom and the most radical forms of unfreedom. Because so much golden age piracy was inextricably bound up with the money to be made in the transatlantic slave trade, and one of the reasons that it was so important to the state to strike terror into the hearts of mariners of the threat of being tried as pirates was because of the economic risks that they posed to this very wealthy triangle trade between the Caribbean and the North American colonies and Great Britain.
[00:11:40] Katherine Howe: And so I was, I just was very drawn to the idea of here are people in extreme circumstances, under extreme forms of constraint, or sometimes forced servitude, and who throw off those constraints, often using violence and often, with no hope of success, [00:12:00] really, depending on how we define success.
[00:12:03] Katherine Howe: So I was just very, I was very moved by it, and also very moved by, the story of witchcraft is so much a story about women in extreme circumstances, and typically piracy is a story of men in extreme circumstances, but not always. There are a couple of very famous examples of women who disguised themselves as men and went pirating, and I was very moved by that possibility and what that might look like and how that might feel.
[00:12:34] Katherine Howe: And so I have Hannah Masury at the beginning of her story, she gets a sort of traditional call to adventure, as a way of structuring the story, where she's working, she's in her late teens, we never really learn exactly how old she is. She's bound out to service, which is not unusual for this time period. In fact, Abigail Williams, famously, who kicked off the Salem Witch Panic, who was 11 years old and was bound out to service.[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah ends up getting tangled up in the events around the trial of William Fly and winds up having to flee for her life in a way that she does that, because the only way in or out of Boston, pre-revolutionary Boston at this time, was by the Neck, which is a long, skinny stretch of land. So Boston at the time was this, was a peninsula. And it was very easy to choke off access to that peninsula. The only way that Hannah could escape, people are trying to hunt her down. I don't want to give away too much about why they're trying to hunt her down. They're trying to hunt her down, and so the only way she can flee is over the water. And so she disguises herself and ships out on what she thinks is a fruit packet down for the Azores. And then her adventure goes in a pretty wildly unexpected direction.
[00:13:47] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, quite a lot of wildly unexpected directions. Yeah, you keep us guessing what's going to happen next.
[00:13:56] Katherine Howe: Yeah, I don't want to give too many twists away, but I've been telling, when [00:14:00] people ask me about this story, I've been telling people it's a little bit like Treasure Island meets Gone Girl. And and there are people who are fans of pirate fiction, anyone who's read Treasure Island is going to see a couple of little winks here and there, narrative winks or things that are slightly familiar seeming but that is of course like the ultimate pirate story, which is also set in the 17, I've never learned the specific year, but sometime in the 1700s, but was written in the 19th century.
[00:14:29] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's what got me interested in pirates, Treasure Island. Read that very early.
[00:14:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah we're, I have a young son and I've been reading Treasure Island to him at night for some weeks now. And as you can imagine, we're a completely normal family. So his playhouse in our garden has a pirate flag on it. It has a sign hanging from it that says the Admiral Benbow Inn, which is where the action starts in Treasure Island, and a bill of fare hanging from a nearby tree. And my son likes to demand kid rum. Everything's completely [00:15:00] normal in my family. Kid rum is water, I hasten to add.
[00:15:04] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, okay.
[00:15:05] Katherine Howe: Not to worry. That's a worry.
[00:15:08] Josh Hutchinson: I was thinking it was a Juicy Juice or something.
[00:15:10] Katherine Howe: no. He gets very frustrated when other kids want to play pirates, but they don't know all the weird, obscure plot points of Treasure Island. He's no, you have to be the blind man.
[00:15:19] Katherine Howe: He's, very controlling. Anyway,
[00:15:22] Josh Hutchinson: That's adorable.
[00:15:23] Sarah Jack: It is. And he'll share his love for the story with his peers. Yeah.
[00:15:28] Katherine Howe: Whether they want him to or not.
[00:15:33] Sarah Jack: How has your love for sailing influenced your writing about seafaring?
[00:15:37] Katherine Howe: I think certainly my, I sail a lot in my free time. It's my only hobby, really. And it was inevitable that I would want to write a seafaring story, even though they're perhaps a little bit out of fashion these days, but there's something so unique about being at the mercy of the elements so completely. I mean, there are many elements of [00:16:00] seafaring that are attractive from a fiction perspective. One is that it is this self-contained world, if we're talking about the Age of Sail. You're living within this community in very close quarters. of a really profound intimacy can form, but even within that intimacy there is rigid hierarchies and structures and lines of authority and lines of command.
[00:16:22] Katherine Howe: There's also an incredible technicality to it that I find interesting, and especially imagining someone like Hannah, who has no background in seafaring at all, suddenly finding herself in this universe of ropes, where every rope has a specific name and a specific purpose, and the technical aspects of it, and how much knowledge there is to acquire in order to be able to effectively make a sailing ship go has was interesting to me from a narrative perspective.
[00:16:52] Katherine Howe: And also I think there's the idea of exploration, the idea of we now live in this world of instant discovery. If I want to [00:17:00] see what a picture of New Guinea looks like, all I have to do is type it into my phone. But the idea of these undiscovered worlds or uncharted worlds, you know maps that say 'here there be monsters,' and the idea of sailing into the unknown is for me, still a very romantic idea and something that I find interesting to think about. And over the course of the story in A True Account, we encounter many different characters who are all trying to find a path towards their own self-determination. If anything, I think that is the theme of the book. There’s Hannah, obviously, who’s trying to find her own route to freedom, if you will.
[00:17:42] Katherine Howe: Many of the pirate characters that she encounters are themselves actually seizing their own authority and freedom for themselves. And something about the freedom and the rebellion of it has always been very attractive to me.
[00:17:57] Katherine Howe: And also just speaking [00:18:00] personally, I think there are only two times in my life when I'm really fully present. And both of those times, one, one is when I'm writing, if I'm really engaged in what I'm writing and I'm completely involved in it. And then the other is when I'm sailing, when I'm underway, because it is so necessary to completely focus your attention on what you're doing, on what the surroundings are, on what's going to happen next.
[00:18:25] Katherine Howe: There's no room for distraction. There's no room for worrying about something else. There's no room for preoccupation. And for someone like me who lives in the head so much all the time, that is an incredibly liberating sensation. And so my mind, I wanted to try to explore in fiction, what that sensation can be like, and what that distinctly weird world is like as well.
[00:18:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah you built the world so excellently. All of those details that you put in, [00:19:00] and I loved learning the the terminology that you were just talking about, the names of the ropes, the mizzenmast, and this and that, and they're so good.
[00:19:11] Katherine Howe: Thanks. And I, believe it or not, I don't even get all that technical. If you read Patrick O'Brien, it's simply staggering how much, he's the guy who wrote Master and Commander, simply staggering the level of detail that he's able to access. But having Hannah come into a sailing world, naive, means that I can get away without actually weighing it down with a whole lot of jargon.
[00:19:35] Katherine Howe: But I also enjoy, I think there's so many turns of phrase and idioms that we use in English that are derived from seafaring, some of which we know in an abstract way, but many of which I think we don't know. Three sheets to the wind for being drunk is a great one, or armed to the teeth means carrying a knife in your mouth because you're about to board somebody else and you need to bring your arms with you. I really enjoyed unearthing some of [00:20:00] those turns of phrase that we still have this nautical discourse that we're not even aware that we use.
[00:20:07] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, really all of that, the rich detail, really helped bring the world to life. It was like you're there experiencing all the senses. Job well done.
[00:20:18] Katherine Howe: Thank you very much. But not too jargony, right? I hope not.
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: No I was able to follow and I think I've been on boats like twice and they've been like speedboats at lakes.
[00:20:31] Josh Hutchinson: Uh,
[00:20:33] Katherine Howe: Glad to hear that, that it worked okay for you, Josh.
[00:20:36] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, my brother is in the Navy and he knows a lot about naval history, so I'm going to send him a copy of the book and see what he thinks of it. I think he'll get a kick out of it like I did.
[00:20:50] Katherine Howe: I hope so.
[00:20:52] Sarah Jack: And it allowed for us to really, as you said, experience her introduction to what she was going to [00:21:00] have to do to cope on that vessel and work. And As you can even hear in the very introduction of your book, you take us right into who Hannah Masury is. We start to learn the details about her. Who is Hannah?
[00:21:17] Katherine Howe: So Hannah Masury is, in the book, she's in her late teens. She was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, but she doesn't really remember any of her early childhood, because from when she was very small, she, it's hazy what her family situation was, but it's clear that wherever she was living, she, her parents couldn't afford to keep her, which was not unusual at that time.
[00:21:42] Katherine Howe: And so she's given to a distant relative of her mother's, and she doesn't remember if it's an aunt or a cousin, it's some kinswoman, some like long, long distance family member named Mrs. Tomlinson, who runs this inn, Ship Tavern. And Mrs. Tomlinson we understand has 13 kids, and it's a [00:22:00] boisterous kind of place.
[00:22:01] Katherine Howe: And Ship Tavern, most of their customers are Men who are sailors, who have just come rolling into town and need a place to stay, and not unlike Treasure Island, which opens in an inn, so the first, the character in Treasure Island is Jim Hawkins, and he is working in the Admiral Benbow Inn, and so I had Hannah begin her working life in a seafaring inn, which is when she first starts to encounter some of the pirate life, and similarly to early scenes, for example, in Moby Dick, you know, There's a lot of scenes there opening in where Ishmael meets Queequeg because they have to share a bunk. Because in many of these places it was very crowded and you would have to sleep in shifts or sleep two sailors to a bed head to foot or things like that.
[00:22:44] Katherine Howe: So one thing I wanted to explore a bit was the kind of, once again, I think when we look at the past we have a tendency to look at the way people with wealth lived. And it's partly because the material culture of people with wealth was more likely to [00:23:00] survive. We have a greater picture, we have a greater imagination of what a grand house might be like. House museums tend to preserve a higher class level of living. And I wanted to try to explore what was a more common way of living in around 1726.
[00:23:17] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah's days were organized by her work. She's a girl of all work. She has to wait at tables and scrub things and clean things and empty the chamber pots and do all those nasty things that she wouldn't want to do. But she also has friends who are like her. She has like girls that she hangs out with who are in similar circumstances.
[00:23:37] Katherine Howe: And early on she, she sneaks out of the inn after her mistress has told her she can't go to William Fly's hanging. She had seen them at church, because the pirates had been brought to church to be preached at by Cotton Mather, who was trying to bring them back publicly to repent. There are sins of swearing and whoring and disobedience.[00:24:00]
[00:24:00] Katherine Howe: And so it was, there was really in this time period, a unified perspective between religious leadership and government leadership to try to ensure compliance and obedience. And one of the things that I found so moving and striking about it was that in, in William Fly, Hannah sees someone who refuses to comply, who refuses to bend to what authority demands of him.
[00:24:29] Katherine Howe: And that is the moment that invites her own refusal of the circumstances in which she's living. And as she goes on her adventure, she ends up having to disguise herself as a boy, as a cabin boy, to go on this ship. And there are ways that I deal with objections, like why it might seem difficult for a girl to make it like she was a boy on in this time period, but I think it's actually quite credible, the more you think about it, the more you know about what the body would have been like after a [00:25:00] lifetime of work and after a lifetime of insufficient nourishment and things like that. And so we watch her come into herself or come into being as. As the more time she spends on the fruit packet, which we think is called the Reporter, but then is revealed to have actually been a ship called the Fancy, we watch her come into herself. She starts to learn what she's doing. She starts to learn her way around. She does things that she would never have imagined herself doing. At the beginning of the story, we see her steal a mug from a drunk person who is in her tavern, who drives her crazy. And at one point, that's the worst crime she's ever committed in her life. And then, within a few months, she committed crimes she never thought that she could possibly have imagined.
[00:25:45] Katherine Howe: And so one thing that I liked thinking about with Hannah was, not that she's proud of everything that she's done. She's still a moral being. But it's also an examination of what happens to our moral systems based on the circumstances in which we [00:26:00] find ourselves. In some context, morality is a luxury. And so I wanted to look at what it would be like, not to write an anti hero exactly, but to write someone who does things that we personally might find horrifying or objectionable, but to write it in such a way that we not only understand why she does them, but actually sympathize with her choices that she's made. I'm being a little bit deliberately vague, because I don't wanna give too many things away. And in the end, I also don't wanna give away the matter of what happens in the end.
[00:26:33] Katherine Howe: But suffice it to say, I also have fun with the pirate tropes. There's definitely a parrot, there's definitely a guy with one leg, there's definitely treasure, because you can't have a pirate story without a parrot, you've got one leg, and treasure.
[00:26:47] Katherine Howe: And one of the other things that is fun for me in this book, in A True Account and which you can see in the title, A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself, is the question of what is true?[00:27:00] Can something be emotionally true, but factually false? What does it mean to have a relationship between truth and fiction?
[00:27:08] Katherine Howe: And there's an ongoing debate about authorship and and authority, and who is writing what in the course of this story, and who is reading what in the course of this story. I get a little bit meta, but hopefully not in an exhausting kind of way. But as someone who is a historian who writes fiction, these are issues that I think about all the time, especially knitting together things that really happen, like William Fly's trial, I actually take pretty much verbatim from the trial transcripts. So all the discourse that happens on when William Fly is hanged, I didn't make it up. It's what people actually said. And Hannah herself is based on some historical antecedents, but she herself is a fictional character. So what does it mean if I'm braiding those things together?
[00:27:55] Josh Hutchinson: She's such a rich character, how hard has it been for [00:28:00] you to wait to be able to introduce her to the world?
[00:28:04] Katherine Howe: I'm very, I feel very close to Hannah. I think I'm more emotionally involved with her than I have been with a lot of my protagonists. I'm still very emotionally involved with the protagonist in my first novel, Connie Goodwin, because I think it's not unusual to feel very close to your protagonist in your first novel and because she was so personal to me, but I feel very emotionally involved with Hannah. I feel protective of her, maybe because she's younger than me, by a lot actually now. But at the same time, I feel proud of her, and, and so I'm excited for people to meet her. I'm curious. I'm very curious what people are going to think. Also cause it's not usual for me to write someone who does despicable things, and Hannah definitely does some despicable things. But at the same time I feel, I don't know, proud of her. Is that the right word? I don't even know. It's a little unusual for me to still be as [00:29:00] emotionally bound up with a fictional character.
[00:29:04] Katherine Howe: It's a shame to say that you play favorites with your protagonists, but right now I'm definitely feeling, I'm very, I'm treasuring Hannah a little bit right now.
[00:29:12] Sarah Jack: What you did with presenting her and bringing us along and what she was experiencing is incredible. Even, even when she was like needing to rest, you like felt it with her. Is she going to get enough hours to recuperate? So I can see how you would feel so proud of her. As a reader, and you start to feel like, oh, maybe she's your friend, or you want her to be your friend. You want to know her more and more. So when she takes care of things, does things to move forward and take care of yourself, you're like, it's a role model in a way for determination and moving forward.
[00:29:54] Katherine Howe: Thank you. One thing that also comes up in this book, and a lot of my fiction [00:30:00] deals with the ways that gender roles constrain or enable things that we're able to do, that we're expected to do. And this book is a little bit unusual. A True Account is unusual in being pretty explicit about about gender roles, in part because Hannah makes such a conscious decision to disguise herself. She assumes a different identity, and that identity is of a different gender.
[00:30:25] Katherine Howe: And there's another character in the book, and I don't want to give it away, it's too much of a twist. There's another character in the book who has a similar kind of fraught relationship with her own gender, with her own sexuality, at a different moment in time.
[00:30:39] Katherine Howe: And so I wanted it to be a way for the story to talk about a different perspective on the kinds of strictures that are in place, historically, but I think in the present too, we're living through this really interesting moment where so many young people are rethinking what gender can mean and what it [00:31:00] should mean and what they want it to mean and taking control of it for themselves.
[00:31:04] Katherine Howe: And in some ways, I was looking for a historical lens through which to think through some of those same kinds of questions. And, so it's inevitably different and historically grounded and rooted in sources, but it is trying to be part of that conversation. I think I've been thinking a lot about gender roles throughout my fiction writing career. But this is a another way of looking at it, as well.
[00:31:29] Josh Hutchinson: You alluded to another character. As in your other works, this is a dual timeline narrative. What's the relationship of each timeline to the other? How do they, are they echoes of the same story?
[00:31:49] Katherine Howe: Yeah, again, I don't want to give too much away, but there is a mystery that is, that surrounds Hannah's story. And there is a [00:32:00] character who is looking at Hannah's story and is trying to figure out whether it is a true account or not. And which is one reason I was so wedded to the title, A True Account, because it is insisting on its own truth.
[00:32:13] Katherine Howe: And yet anything that is trying to insist on its own truth, I think you should automatically question whether or not it is true. And so there is a kind of a framing story. And in a similar way to Hannah looking at William Fly and taking him as an inspiration for a change that she makes in her life, I have a character who's looking at Hannah and who ends up taking some of Hannah into herself and thinking about ways that it can change what her life is going to look like. And again, I don't wanna give it too much away, 'cause there's a, there is a little bit of a twist involved. There is a relationship between those two.
[00:32:51] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I definitely don't want to give away the ending, so we won't even go within 50 miles of that. I'll just say that it's such a [00:33:00] good ending. Readers will be pleased with that. Take care in the way you wrap things up.
[00:33:07] Katherine Howe: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, as usual, there are a couple of like local nonprofits I should probably like warn are in this book. I don't think the Beverly Historical Society has any idea that they're mentioned in this book, I should probably tell them as a courtesy.
[00:33:22] Josh Hutchinson: Oh yeah, and maybe they'll get some questions in there. Can we see Hannah's book?
[00:33:27] Josh Hutchinson: In addition to the dual timelines, you also do an artful job of weaving a lot of different story threads through. You've got people on a sort of a quest for independence and freedom, but there's the pirating that happens and there's other layers.
[00:33:50] Katherine Howe: One, one major character that Hannah meets, so Hannah ends up meeting some real people and some fictional people. One of the real people that Hannah meets is a guy named [00:34:00] Edward Low, who was one of, who was a real person who was based for a time in Boston in this period, and he was a real pirate, and he was a famously cruel one. He was the guy who, one of the best known kind of first person accounts of piracy in this period was actually written by a Marbleheader named Philip Ashton, who was a fisherman on the Grand Banks and who was captured by Ned Low and escaped. He ran away from him in an island in the Gulf of Honduras and ended up having to live on his own on an island before he hitched a ride home on a ship that was based out of Salem.
[00:34:37] Katherine Howe: And so we learn a lot about Ned Low's cruelty, and we get a lot of the details about life on board a pirate ship come from some of those sources. From that, we actually learned that Ned Low had a soft spot for dogs. That was true. And we learned that he refused to have married men in his crew, the [00:35:00] nominal reason being that that he felt that someone should be home with their family if they had a family, but practically, as Hannah comes to think to herself, that's, there's a less noble interpretation of it, and that is that somebody who is married has a reason not to fight, if they have something else to live for, they're not going to fight quite as hard. There are a couple of ways you can interpret Ned Lowe's perspective in that regard. So she meets Ned Lowe, and some of the details about pirating come from the truth of what happened with Ned Low and some of his raidings.
[00:35:34] Katherine Howe: And there's another character she meets who is a fictional character, but who is based on fact, and that character is a man named Seneca, who is a little bit older than Hannah, he's in his early twenties. And Seneca we gradually realize is a self-liberating person. He, we never really learn any of his backstory, but we do learn that he liberated himself from bondage and went pirating, and there are actually several examples of [00:36:00] men who took it upon themselves to flee a life in bondage and to take to the high seas in doing that.
[00:36:07] Katherine Howe: And in fact, one of the things that was so interesting to me in reading primary sources of piracy was the ways that there are so many more pirates of color than he would anticipate. In fact one of the most notorious North American pirates was Blackbeard, who was active in the Carolinas. And when he was finally taken off the coast of, I think it was Hatteras. When he was finally taken, half the crew who was with him were men of color. And in fact, there was a guy who was all set to, he was like, with, he had a flint and he was all set to blow up the gunpowder magazine and destroy the entire ship and himself out of loyalty to Blackbeard. And he was talked out of it by a guy who was like imprisoned nearby, "no, don't do it."
[00:36:50] Katherine Howe: And and it's interesting to me, because I think there's some ways in which pirates of color get overwritten if you look at a lot of pop culture, Pirates [00:37:00] of the Caribbean or whatever, every, everybody is white, but that's just not what it looked like. One of the things that was really interesting to me was to think about the way that pirate crews tended to be these mostly men of like of no country in a way, and so the crew that Hannah ends up joining are from all over the place. One of the characters that she deals with is a Spanish Creole from, who had lived in Louisiana and speaks French. One of the guys, originally from Marblehead, but it's been a lot of his time in St. Petersburg, because that's where he had ended up traveling. There, there were men from the west coast of Africa. There are men from the Caribbean. There are men who are native. There are men who are all different kinds of people. And so the thing that binds them all together is their will to self determination and perhaps a certain degree of brutality.
[00:37:49] Katherine Howe: But I was and still am very interested in the ocean as its own nation, and so one argument that the novel, that A True Account makes is [00:38:00] that it's like a different model of citizenship, in a way, that you are no longer bound to wherever you happen to have been born or even where you happen to have spent most of your time on land. You're bound to the articles you pledge yourself to live under, and you're bound to your shipmates.
[00:38:18] Katherine Howe: And one of the terms of art that I liked about piracy is the way that the collective of pirates would be called the people. The people choose this, the people elect the captain by popular acclaim, the people do this, people do that. And especially given this time period, in the early part of the 18th century, that idea of the people, of the polis, is such a unique and intoxicating idea, such a proto democratic idea, almost, that it's something that I was really interested to explore.
[00:38:49] Katherine Howe: And so Seneca ends up. We discovered that Seneca has named himself because he has cast off the name that was foisted upon him, and no one's allowed to use it. And so he has chosen [00:39:00] the name of a philosopher for himself, a Stoic, and when we first meet him, or when Hannah first meets him, she doesn't know what a philosopher is.
[00:39:08] Katherine Howe: And so I liked the idea. It was important to me to have a main character who was a person of color, who was a self liberating person, because that is a part of the history of piracy that I feel like hasn't been really sufficiently explored.
[00:39:23] Josh Hutchinson: The articles and the structure of how they organize themselves on the ship was, it's so radically different than what Hannah grew up with where she's got Mrs. Tomlinson being the authority figure, but then beyond Mrs. Tomlinson, there's the ministers and the magistrates.
[00:39:45] Katherine Howe: Everybody outranks Hannah in Boston in 1726. And so the moment that she discovers that when she's on a pirate ship, they all put their, they all sign the articles, which are loosely based, I think, on the [00:40:00] articles of war. But it is a list of rules that really existed that spelled out their obligations to each other, who the officers were and how much everyone would be paid, how much people would be paid in the event of their being maimed or otherwise hurt and offers specific outlined bonuses. So when she discovers that there's a special bonus, you get to choose the best arms on board if you are the first person to spot a prize that you end up taking. It's the first time that Hannah has ever really been in an incentive labor relationship, that where she actually has an incentive to, to apply herself and do what she's doing.
[00:40:38] Katherine Howe: And she throws herself into it very quickly. And we actually see how she is able to rise a little bit in the ranks from just being like a regular crew member to being rated able. Being an able seaman gives her like a greater sense of authority and purposefulness and belonging.
[00:40:57] Sarah Jack: When I read your [00:41:00] articles, I thought how enjoyable that must have been for you to create. And then I just, I felt like I was taking all your bait through the story. And the article that jumped out to me... You know, a few sentences after the articles, here you have Hannah grabbing onto that article. And I had already written a note for myself. Oh, this is my favorite one. We saw that as her in, know, one of her ends, one of her ways to get traction to her next step. So I really loved the articles. I loved picking one and then finding that I was following the crumbs. I was like, oh man.
[00:41:40] Katherine Howe: I'm glad. Yeah. Yeah. Hannah has freakish farsightedness, which is actually something that that I've given her for myself. There's not a whole lot of myself personally in Hannah, but I've always been farsighted. And particularly in one eye more than the others, which makes this bad for ball sports. So don't expect to throw a ball at me and have [00:42:00] me actually catch it. But can be handy when you're looking for something on the horizon.
[00:42:05] Katherine Howe: I will also mention as you can imagine, I did a lot of research for A True Account. And the fruit of that research, besides the novel itself, is that in February, I'm releasing an edited volume, The Penguin Book of Pirates for Penguin Classics. And it's going to be a primary source reader, basically like The Penguin Book of Witches.
[00:42:26] Katherine Howe: And it will include a lot of the original source materials that I read to fuel my imagination for a true account and for Hannah's adventure. And it starts in the 1500s and goes up through the Amistad, the case of the Amistad, which is in the 19th century, and I'm pretty excited for people to read that book. I think it's going to be really fun. And it also includes two excerpts from the most widespread fictional accounts of [00:43:00] pirates. One thing that's interesting to me, both as a historian, but also as obviously as a fiction writer is the way that, especially for something like piracy, the way that myth and fact can sometimes blur a little bit.
[00:43:13] Katherine Howe: So there are a few examples in The Penguin Book of Pirates that are not factual, but were so widely circulated that people mistook them for fact. And then it includes two excerpts, one from Peter and Wendy, the novel version of Peter Pan, which talks about Captain Hook. And the other is 'What I Heard in the Apple Barrel,' the chapter from Treasure Island where Jim learns that Long John Silver is actually the leader of a secret pirate crew.
[00:43:44] Katherine Howe: And it was fun to do those both, because those are both pirate stories we all know so intently, they're dramatized so much. And yet have you actually really gone back and really read them? For instance, Captain Hook [00:44:00] in Peter and Wendy, which is from 1911, we learned that he was a graduate of Eton.
[00:44:05] Katherine Howe: And so like a lot of Captain Hook's ridiculousness, like you picture him, this sort of Disney restoration flowing wig and then crazy, the crazy coat and everything. But his foppishness derives from an embedded class critique in Peter and Wendy beyond anything else.
[00:44:22] Katherine Howe: Or it's also interesting to me that there is actually an allusion in Peter and Wendy. Hook's nickname is Barbecue, or they talk about him going up against a pirate named Barbecue, and they're actually alluding to Long John Silver in Treasure Island. So they're like origin point, because Long John Silver's nickname is Barbecue in Treasure Island. So there is this intertextual aspect of even classic pirate lore, and that extends even into examples of actual piracy itself, because the generation of pirates who were active at the beginning of the 18th century, [00:45:00] like Edward Low or Blackbeard or some of these other guys that we know. They're actually a generation later then the first golden age generation of pirates from the 1680s, 1690s. So the guys who go pirating in the 1720s and teens have been hearing stories about the guys who were pirating in the 1680s and 1690s. So there's already this like meta aspect of even actual piracy.
[00:45:26] Katherine Howe: And in fact, one of the, one of the guys who's my favorite is he was the guy who was dramatized in Our Flag Means Death. So one of the guys who was an active pirate in Bermuda, I think it was, in the 1710s and 1720s, was a guy named Stede Bonnet, and Stede Bonnet is fascinating, because whereas usually men go pirating out of necessity or a desperation, Stede Bonnet is rich and decides he just feels like going pirating. He gets out a ship, he hires the crew, [00:46:00] he consciously chooses to leave his life as a wealthy plantation owner and go raiding on the high seas. And he likes to wear all red and red feathers, and there's this very self aware aspect to it that I thought was really, it was really fascinating. So that's one of the reasons that the story in a true account is very much engaged with questions of authorship and truth and fiction and the relationship between those things and what is, what counts as a trustworthy source when we're talking about piracy.
[00:46:37] Sarah Jack: What you do with your writing, your fiction writing, shows the power of historical fiction and why historical characters and fictional character representations of historical characters are so important.
[00:46:52] Katherine Howe: Thank you very much. I'm glad that you think so. I have a sort of a different approach to historical fiction, but I think it's mainly, I think it's largely rooted in being an [00:47:00] Americanist and being, as I said before, particularly interested in the kinds of stories or the kinds of histories that are largely overwritten by the archive or are harder to excavate from the archive, stories about regular people, stories about people who are not literate or are not otherwise remembered, people who maybe have dramatic and memorable lives, but maybe those lives are not written in, historical annals. And so I think that's my perspective as a historical fiction author.
[00:47:35] Katherine Howe: I'm not going to be writing any regency romances, I'm afraid. Although I do enjoy them, they are quite fun, but there's not going to be any court intrigue and no regency romance in my wheelhouse.
[00:47:48] Katherine Howe: Piracy, yes. Riots, absolutely.
[00:47:54] Josh Hutchinson: oh, wonderful, yeah,
[00:47:57] Sarah Jack: Yes.
[00:47:58] Katherine Howe: 100%.[00:48:00]
[00:48:01] Josh Hutchinson: I'm there for that,
[00:48:02] Katherine Howe: Yeah,
[00:48:02] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah I wanted to know if we could talk about Hannah's sexuality,
[00:48:08] Katherine Howe: Sure. Yeah,
[00:48:10] Josh Hutchinson: because You've mentioned a lot of the important themes in this story, but one of those is her quest for finding herself, and that's revealed partly through her sexuality.
[00:48:23] Katherine Howe: That's true. And yeah, writing Hannah as an explicitly sexual being, I'm, I tend to be a prude. And most of my fiction is very PG or PG 13. I tend to like, not have romantic scenes that much just because I don't think I'm very good at them. They're actually really hard to do well.
[00:48:43] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah is, for me, is a little bit of a departure in that she is so explicitly a sexual being. And one of the questions that I wanted to raise in thinking about her was, I think was the extent to which [00:49:00] she, because she operates because of her class status and because of her gender, she operates in a tense point between, on the one hand, she could be seen as sexually vulnerable, right? And there are moments in the course of the story where we see a picture of that vulnerability.
[00:49:22] Katherine Howe: Like at one point, she's, she's coming home from having sneaked off with her friends to watch William Fly's hanging, and she's on her way home and she doesn't want to go back to the inn because she's going to get in trouble for having sneaked out. And so she's hanging out in the street for a while by herself, but it's nighttime. But then she starts to attract attention because she is a young woman alone at night in the street, and she has to, and nothing happens in that moment, but I wanted to, us to be aware of what that choice would suggest about her.
[00:49:52] Katherine Howe: We don't get a full picture of, of her life, her tavern life, as she puts it. But, she, there is a [00:50:00] fluidity to her sexuality, also. She has a quasi-romantic relationship with one of her female friends. And she gives us to understand that she'll let people stop in her hayloft with her, but that it's her decision.
[00:50:15] Katherine Howe: And so on the one hand, she, within the context of her time, she is morally, like debased is too strong of a word, but she's not married. She is not a virgin. She is a sexual person, despite the fact that she's young and she's not married and she lives in this Calvinist, just post-Calvinist moment.
[00:50:37] Katherine Howe: But at the same time, I wanted to explore Hannah, the way that Hannah takes what could be a vulnerability and turns it into a source of power for her, a source of power, also a source of pleasure, because Hannah, in, in her life has so little of her own, right? So little of her own that she owns or that she can enjoy or that she can rely on or that [00:51:00] she can count on.
[00:51:00] Katherine Howe: She has no leisure to speak of. She has no time. She has no goods. She has very little comfort, but sexuality is a way that lots of people can find comfort or can find pleasure or can find freedom. And so I wanted to explore that a bit, and that comes into play in the pirate crew, as well.
[00:51:22] Katherine Howe: Because of course there you would think with a young, sexed person, in a crew only of, of men, there's an obvious question to be asked there. And Hannah does ask that question. She addresses that question. She's here's how I made up my mind that I'm going to deal with that eventuality or that possibility. And so I'm intrigued that you wanted to, that you wanted to ask about her sexuality because it is, there's at least one sort of scene of Hannah's sexuality being deployed.
[00:51:53] Katherine Howe: And it's not gratuitous, I don't think. I think it is important because it advances the plot in a way that the [00:52:00] plot has to advance. And of course there's an added risk of her discovery. And so that, that is part of what is at stake in the deployment of her sexuality later on in the story.
[00:52:11] Katherine Howe: But I think that's something that, that we all have to decide as we are, especially when we are in our coming of age, as it were, coming into ourselves, whether that happens in our teens, whether that happens later in life. Sometimes, as there's another character in the story who comes into her own sexuality and the deployment of her sexuality. She's at a later point in her life. But for whatever reason, this is the moment when it is happening for her. And so I wanted to make that an issue for Hannah that she had to, it is another arena for her to decide how she wants her life to be lived and how she wants to assert control over her life.
[00:52:52] Josh Hutchinson: And I think between the two eras that you choose, they're times of great sexual suppression, [00:53:00] and she's taking her independence from that.
[00:53:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah, but sexual suppression of a different kind. One thing that's interesting to think about, talking of like the colonial period, on the one hand, it was a time of sexual suppression, but on the other hand, it was also a time of sexual frankness. You would have shared rooms like a married couple would have, a kid sleeping on a trundle bed next to them and a baby in the bed next to them, right there. They're not waiting until everyone's at school. You know what I mean? They're not like, they're not waiting for date night. That's not a thing that happens. Like there was a greater, you know, there were no bathrooms. You'd go off into the corner and you'd use the pot and whatever.
[00:53:39] Katherine Howe: There was a different relationship between bodies in the late 17th and into the early 18th century than we have now. And it's partly because of the way that space was at a premium. There was a different sense of what privacy could look like at that time. Which I think is something that we forget, especially in [00:54:00] thinking about the kind of moral strictures under which Calvinists and just post-Calvinists were living.
[00:54:06] Katherine Howe: There's a weird tension between those two facts. Like there's the fact of bodies in everyday life, and there's also the fact of this like incredibly heavy, overbearing Christianity informing every aspect of everyday life. And then in the other time period that we're talking about, which is 1930, that is a slightly different time when there were, I don't want to go into too much detail about it because I don't want to give too much away from that timeline.
[00:54:33] Katherine Howe: But, it was also a time of changing sexual mores a bit, after the 1920s and into 1930, they're like, like laws were changing around sexuality to some extent, and the way that gender was performed or policed, depending on who you were and where you were and what time you were, was changing to some degree but not entirely. So it's a very different time.
[00:54:56] Katherine Howe: But both of those times are actually quite different from the time we're living in right this minute, [00:55:00] which is another thing that I think is worth considering that, we, all of these historical moments are so contingent on so many different factors and so many different things. And so things that we would assume as natural in one time period would seem profoundly unnatural in another.
[00:55:18] Josh Hutchinson: And you use that issue of privacy on, in Hannah's life on the ship also, where she's in disguise and can't be found out, but she has to share a head with dozens of men.
[00:55:32] Katherine Howe: I know.
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: yeah,
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: that gets a little awkward for a moment.
[00:55:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah. It's a little, it's a little bit awkward. At one point we address the question of of like her body and whether or not her body would give her away. And so even though she was 17 she was starving. So she was starving, and she'd spent her entire life undernourished.
[00:55:52] Katherine Howe: So she would have been skinny. She would have been almost wiry. She would not have had any body fat. Without enough body [00:56:00] fat, she wouldn't, she may have even never started menstruating, right, even at 17. She would not have had breasts to speak of. She, her body would have still looked not like a child, but like a young youth. I think her body would have read very differently.
[00:56:17] Katherine Howe: And so one thing that we, that I suggest in the story is that particularly in a time period where costume or clothing choice was so rigidly determined that if you saw someone dressed in britches and a blouse or a waistcoat, the assumption would be that you were looking at a male gendered person.
[00:56:40] Katherine Howe: That there, there was no like, oh, I feel like wearing shorts today, option, like I'm speaking to you in t shirt and shorts today, I'm wearing the exact same thing that like a 12 year old boy would wear potentially, but that simply wasn't the case in the 1720s, and so thinking about Hannah's body, but also what that [00:57:00] body would have looked like, like the way that poverty and that time period etches itself in the body in some ways independent from sex, arguably.
[00:57:10] Katherine Howe: And so that is part of how Hannah is able to be so persuasive in her disguise. And in fact, at one point I have a scene in the book where someone is looking at lots of paintings on the wall of sailors, and a lot of them are boys. And the character who's looking at them is starting, for the first time, thinks, oh, wait a minute. Are they boys? I don't know. Maybe they're not like part of it is, part of it is that you see what you expect to see.
[00:57:37] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I really enjoyed the lessons that you give about that in this story, throughout the story. I think that right now our society is grappling with that, why do we have to expect a specific, defined person. The youth and others are [00:58:00] teaching You can't count on that.
[00:58:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah. We're living through a really fascinating and exciting moment. And it's, I enjoy grappling with some of those questions in the way that I would being a, you know, a historian and a historical fiction person grappling with it and in a historically-informed way.
[00:58:20] Sarah Jack: Do we have time to talk about execution?
[00:58:22] Katherine Howe: We always have time to talk about execution. Are you kidding?
[00:58:25] Sarah Jack: I really like the parallel between the hangings of the pirates in Boston, and then you've got how the crews handle punishment.
[00:58:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah, that's true. That is also true. And this again, this goes back to the uses of terror. This is an argument that historian Marcus Rediker very generously gave me a quote for A True Account. I was really blown away that he would agree to do that. His work is very seminal to my thinking about pirates and piracy. And one of the big arguments that he has made is about the [00:59:00] role of terror in piracy. And that role was twofold. One was the terror that the pirates inflicted on the people that they were raiding. So it was actually, the threat of violence was actually their most effective tool, perhaps even more effective than the violence itself.
[00:59:19] Katherine Howe: And at one point in the course of a raid, we even learned that it's not out of, it's not unheard of for a ship to see pirates coming and just say, 'take it all, we give up,' because the threat of terror, A, and B, because of the role of insurance, actually. From a historiographic standpoint, thinking about insurance probably doesn't sound very exciting, but all the cargo that were raided by pirates, including human cargo, thank you very much, were all insured by insurance companies, and so in many cases, the mariners who are on board the ship, they have no interest in what is being taken from them. They, why would they lay their lives [01:00:00] down for a load of lumber and, or a load of breadfruit or whatever it is? Why would they lay their lives down for that when the insurance company is just going to make the syndicate whole anyway? That's the insurance company's problem. And of course, the insurance companies were then in a position to put pressure on governments to reduce the risks of piracy to maritime trade.
[01:00:19] Katherine Howe: But in many instances, the threat of violence was enough. And would give a reason for mariners to, to happily give up, not, maybe not happily, but to give up their goods. And and oftentimes if a mariner, for whatever reason, or a captain decided to fight the pirates off and was successful, I can point to at least one example of an insurance company actually rewarding the captain with a really nice silver tea service for defending their property. And so it was certainly in the insurance companies' interest for piracy to be suppressed.
[01:00:55] Katherine Howe: That being said, there's a scene where the Ned Lowe's crew [01:01:00] takes a small man of war, a small like Navy ship and hangs everybody up in the spars and in the rafters. And that was a not uncommon way of either murdering people or at times trying to torture them into getting information. So like you could hang somebody and then let them down and ask, 'okay, tell me where the goods really are,' hang them, let them down, 'no, really. I mean it', hang them, let them down because hanging, of course If it's the choking kind takes a little while.
[01:01:29] Katherine Howe: That's a grim way to think about it, but it's absolutely true. So you're right. There is a parallel, a visual parallel between the hangings of pirates at the beginning, the gibbeting of William Fly's body, the way that the state used terror to try to suppress piracy. And the ways that pirates used terror to try to get what they wanted, or the threat of terror to get what they wanted.
[01:01:54] Katherine Howe: And as I said, that argument, that sort of dual pronged uses of terror, twin uses of terror, was an [01:02:00] argument Marcus Rediker has made, not me. But which I think is a very persuasive and interesting argument, and is at work in some plot points in
[01:02:07] Sarah Jack: and it gave you then the opportunity to show the responses of the people who are experiencing the terror. And there are different ones.
[01:02:17] Katherine Howe: Yeah. There are some different ones. And yeah it's interesting because at the very, at the beginning, we see the responses to William Fly's gibbeting, particularly for Hannah, like the William Fly actually becomes kind of a recurring theme, almost like a Greek chorus in Hannah's ear a little bit, because she keeps thinking about him. She keeps turning her mind back to him. And because she was so horrified by the spectacle of his mutilated body. He had gone from being this very handsome man, who not much older than her, handsome, rebellious like playing to the crowd. One thing that William Fly really did do this, which is amazing, William Fly, he's on the scaffold, he's [01:03:00] about to be hanged, and he looks at the noose, and he says to the hangman, "don't you know your trade?" He unties the noose and reties it better, because he's a sailor and he knows how to tie knots. Which like, for my mind is ranked right up there with Sarah Good, "I'm no more witch than you are a wizard. And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink," for badass things people have done on a scaffold. Things that I would be far too terrified and pipsqueaky to possibly contemplate. But he really did do that.
[01:03:28] Katherine Howe: And so there is both the way that Hannah experiences some kind of mixture of inspiration and love and pity when she sees what's done to William Fly that then turns into a kind of determination or rebellion.
[01:03:46] Katherine Howe: And then there is a different reaction later in the story to a pretty grotesque scene of hanging that causes a pretty pronounced change in how the plot is unfolding and in the group of pirates. [01:04:00] And it shows the different ways that terror can be brought to bear on individual people. .
[01:04:08] Katherine Howe: And for that matter, it's still also for anyone who spent as much time thinking about witches and witchcraft as I have, or as your listeners have, you can't help but think about the spectacle of the hangings at Salem too. That was also a method of the state employing strategies of terror to get compliance. It was the same thing, the same strategy. And the fact that the Salem Witches bodies were cut down and then chucked into a ravine and were not, that it's not gibbeting, but it's not that different. It's treating their bodies like, like trash instead of objects in which a soul used to dwell. And so in that sense, especially given the proximity of those events in time, the fact that Cotton Mather presided over both of them is, at least for me, certainly something that was in the back of my mind while writing those scenes.
[01:04:57] Josh Hutchinson: And since you've [01:05:00] written about both witches and pirates, have you detected any other similarities between the two?
[01:05:07] Katherine Howe: I think the biggest areas of similarity are, well, now that, thinking about it, in some respect, they're both economic crimes. And one of the things, and piracy ends up being suppressed and becomes less of an issue in the late 18th century and then resumes its role into the 19th century as the politics of the slave trade changes, and witchcraft recedes as a crime with the dawning of the consumer revolution in the 1730s, and so in that instance, of course with witchcraft it's like personal household level of crime, butter not coming together, beer going off, what have you. And with piracy it, the crime is perhaps on a larger scale, because it is being, it is against nations and [01:06:00] nations' economic interests, and therefore nations have an invested incentive to suppress it and to thwart it.
[01:06:07] Katherine Howe: But other than that, there it, there's a funny, there is a funny similarity to it. They're both essentially economic crime. They're essentially economic crimes that are controlled or suppressed with methods of terror. They are crimes that are perpetrated by working people, people without a lot of economic power, a lot of, or without a lot of social power. So in that sense, maybe there are some similarities, of course, and of course, but then you have to look at the way that they're gendered.
[01:06:36] Katherine Howe: But that has to do with the universe in which each crime is unfolding, because the universe of the witchcraft crime is a domestic universe. It is the domestic sphere. And the universe of piracy is a maritime universe, which is an almost entirely male space. So in a, maybe there is more points of commonality between those two than we've thought about up until this point.
[01:06:59] Katherine Howe: It's a good question, [01:07:00] Josh. I'm glad you asked.
[01:07:01] Sarah Jack: I had thought on the side a little bit, because you had me thinking so much about gender roles. And then I was thinking, I was like, Oh, look at this over here with the piracy. That's a lot of male. And then over here in, In New England, a lot of, female witch accusation. So that's interesting.
[01:07:20] Katherine Howe: yeah, it's interesting. I don't know that I have a a particular conclusion to draw, but it is intriguing to, to juxtapose those two sets of circumstances, those two sets of extreme people, like individual regular people in extreme circumstances are, that's an interesting juxtaposition.
[01:07:37] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there's two sides of a coin, they're the female and male aspect of the supervillain, so to speak. They're menaces, and they terrorize communities.
[01:07:51] Katherine Howe: And anyone can be turned. Maybe there's another way to think about it, too, that you don't know who, who is going to, who will fall next. Who is going to, who will [01:08:00] resist like Philip Ashton and swim away to Roatan Island and camp out, and who will cave and sign the articles?
[01:08:05] Katherine Howe: And there's also a question of signing. You put, you, you put your mark on the articles just as you write your name in the devil's book. And I have actually the. The signature that I have Hannah use when she signs the article, she chooses a spiral, and because she's not literate at the time of the story. And she says she chooses it because of the pattern of stars that she sees in the night sky over her head.
[01:08:28] Katherine Howe: But actually, I chose that mark for her because it was one of the marks, one of the Salem girls made. One of the accusing girls made that mark, who wasn't It wasn't literate. I'm sure other people made that mark as well or chose that mark, but I, that is where I had seen that mark before.
[01:08:45] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's a powerful symbolism. You've certainly had a busy writing schedule and publishing schedule.
[01:08:57] Katherine Howe: I'm tired.
[01:08:58] Josh Hutchinson: Would you like to tell us anything [01:09:00] about Astor?
[01:09:01] Katherine Howe: So I have been, yeah it's a busy publishing season for me. On September the 19th, whatever that Tuesday is my next collaboration with Anderson Cooper is going to be published by Harper. It's called Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune, and like Vanderbilt, it is an unconventional look at the sweep of one person.
[01:09:27] Katherine Howe: It's about a major American family, but it also, it goes in a couple of unexpected directions, just as Vanderbilt did go in some unexpected directions. But it starts with John Jacob Astor, who immigrated first to Baltimore and then to New York from Germany, Waldorf, Germany, and became first a fur trader and then started making his money in Manhattan real estate.
[01:09:49] Katherine Howe: And then we go all the way up through the kind of conflagration that ended the Astor dynasty in New York, which was the trial of Brooke Astor's son, [01:10:00] Anthony Marshall, for elder abuse shortly after her death. And that was about 20 years ago, give or take. And in between, we have some really interesting waypoints, including an Astor being the most famous person who went down on Titanic and including some unexpected twists and turns.
[01:10:18] Katherine Howe: So we talk, we end up having a way of talking about the draft riots, which is the biggest race riot in New York city history that happened. If you saw Gangs of New York, actually, the movie, the Martin Scorsese movie. We just saw a dramatization of of, the draft riots. And we also touched on the Astor Place Riot, which happened before before the draft riots.
[01:10:37] Katherine Howe: And it looks like Vanderbilt. It looks at, What wealth can do to individuals, but it also looks at the unusual ways in which this one particular family have etched themselves into the American landscape in some regards. And I think it's going to be pretty fun. It's meant to be like an episodic history, easy to dip into and out of. You can read a [01:11:00] chapter at a time, very meant to be very readable. And if you're at all interested in the Gilded Age or in New York or riots, it's a pretty great read, and I'm really proud of it. And so that'll be out in September. And A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself comes out on November the 21st.
[01:11:20] Katherine Howe: I have to say as a native Texan where there, there is an independent bookstore on the front lines of attempts to ban books in schools for teenagers. Shout out to Blue Willow Books for all that they're doing. I think it's very important. We actually can't really overstate how important independent bookstores are for free reading. And so I would really encourage readers who are listening to this to support their independent bookstore and their local library that way.
[01:11:45] Katherine Howe: A True Account will be out on November the 21st, which is the Tuesday right before Thanksgiving. And I'm gonna be doing a couple of events that week, and then also the following week, which you can find out about on my website katherinehowe.com/events, [01:12:00] or on my Twitter, where I'm still, strangely, on Twitter, @katherinebhowe, or on Instagram which I have a little bit more fun, and there's lots of sailing pictures there, too, which is also @katherinebhowe and then The Penguin Book of Pirates will come out in February, on February 6th. So it's going to be a piratey winter in my household, and maybe then I'll have a vacation.
[01:12:23] Sarah Jack: Good. So is that what's next for you? Some
[01:12:27] Katherine Howe: We'll see I, I have, I'm already have an idea or two for a couple of novels that I would like to work on next. I think one of them might be a New York City, It's a little bit, because I've been spending so much time thinking about New York in the 19th century riot era New York, I might find that a fun time to write about, and we'll see if Anderson and I can come up with another collaboration. I think it would be fun to do, and I have a, an idea where that might go, but we'll have to see what his schedule looks like for that as well.
[01:12:55] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I know Vanderbilt is such a great book.[01:13:00] Looking forward to reading Astor.
[01:13:02] Katherine Howe: We're really proud of Astor. I think it's pretty great, and I think it's a little bit. As I say, we try to have a more critical view of history. So it's not like a straight up celebration of wealth and splendor book. There's plenty of wealth and splendor, but there's also some the other side of the coin as well, as you might expect from anything I'm involved with.
[01:13:23] Katherine Howe: Yeah. Gotta have riots. Riots.
[01:13:27] Josh Hutchinson: How can you have a book without a riot?
[01:13:29] Katherine Howe: How can you have a book about a riot? Is it even possible? Is it a book if there's no riot?
[01:13:33] Katherine Howe: Oh, that's what's up for me.
[01:13:36] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, that's awesome. Congratulations on all your successes.
[01:13:42] Katherine Howe: Thank you so much. And thank you so much for inviting me back on on your podcast. I've had such a pleasure. Such a great time visiting with you both.
[01:13:50] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[01:13:52] Mary-Louise Bingham: Dr. Charu WaliKhanna welcomed me from India in September with a smile and [01:14:00] namaste before we chatted about ongoing witch hunts. She is a Supreme Court lawyer specializing in women's rights. Dr. WaliKhanna educates on accusations against tribal, single, elderly, or widowed women who inherit or own their land. A related family will call her a Daian, the Indian term for witch. The family will kick her off her land, if she is not killed first. There is no centralized anti-witch-hunting law in India. However, there are varying anti-witch-hunting laws in different states, the strictest in the state of Assam. Anyone who accuses another as a dayan in Assam and the accused is murdered will go to trial with no possibility of being released on bail and could face seven years to life in jail.
[01:14:46] Mary-Louise Bingham: Watch Dr. WaliKhanna's interview in the video, Witch Hunting in the 21st Century. Read her book, Law on Violence Against Women. Thank you for your voice, Charu WaliKhanna.
[01:14:59] Sarah Jack: Thank [01:15:00] you, Mary.
[01:15:01] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:15:04] 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, especially with Giving Tuesday right around the corner. We have donate buttons on our websites.
[01:15:46] Sarah Jack: Our latest historical justice initiative, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is dedicated to securing formal exoneration for those wrongly convicted as witches in Boston. We are also seeking a formal apology for all documented victims of the [01:16:00] Massachusetts Colony Witch Trials. Each of these individuals has a story of innocence, injustice, and consequences due to false accusations. You can make a difference immediately by signing and sharing the petition. Do so now at change.org/witchtrials.
[01:16:16] Sarah Jack: 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.
[01:16:43] Sarah Jack: This holiday season, as you gather with friends and family, consider sparking friendly conversations about social issues, like the historical and modern implications of witch hunts. While it requires a thoughtful and respectful approach, discussing such topics within your community can be both enriching and eye opening.
[01:16:59] Sarah Jack: [01:17:00] Here's a guide to initiating a positive dialogue. Identify shared interests and experiences. Begin by finding common ground. Try asking about their podcast or reading preferences. Creating a comfortable sharing atmosphere before diving into more substantial topics. Lead with basic information, starting the topic with an informative comment, such as, 'I've recently been learning about historical and modern witch hunts.' This statement naturally invites a response and opens the door to a relaxed and friendly chat about the realities of witch hunting. Share a specific element. Choose one aspect of witch hunts that you find intriguing or important and share it casually. Whether it's a historical fact about witchcraft trials, or your interest in learning about modern violence related to witchcraft accusations, keep it simple and factual. Bring up a favorite book, podcast episode, share about relevant online resources like our website. This approach helps ease into the topic and fosters a more comfortable environment for such a layered social issue. Respect diverse perspectives, [01:18:00] especially around celebrations and get togethers with loved ones. Accept that people have diverse perspectives on social issues.
[01:18:07] Sarah Jack: Recommend additional resources. If the conversation flows smoothly and your friend or family member expresses interest, recommend additional resources on modern witch hunts. This could include documentaries, articles, more podcast episodes, or other educational materials. Always be mindful of comfort levels. Pay attention to cues from your conversation partner. If they seem disinterested or uncomfortable, respect their boundaries and avoid pushing more information. You've already successfully introduced the topic and created awareness. They may take time to think about and process what you introduced them to. Let them decide to learn more.
[01:18:40] Sarah Jack: May our suggestions serve as inspiration for you as you craft your unique approach to navigating social issue conversations. This holiday season, aim to enrich your personal growth by fostering understanding and by seeking meaningful connections, successfully weaving the social significance of witch hunting into your conversations is undoubtedly a triumph. [01:19:00] However, when you dedicate effort to learn more about those around you, recognizing their perspectives and experiences, consider that a victory as well. Whether you immerse yourself in thought provoking discussions about witch trials or focus on finding connections, both avenues actively contribute to richer social interactions.
[01:19:16] Sarah Jack: 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.
[01:19:28] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah,
[01:19:30] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:19:32] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial and Pirate Podcast.
[01:19:37] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:19:39] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:43] Sarah Jack: Visit ThouShaltNotSuffer.com.
[01:19:45] Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:19:48] Sarah Jack: Please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:52] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:20:00]
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.
Meet author Janice C. Thompson. Her debut historical novel, Dry Tinder tells the story of Sarah Towne, aka Sarah Cloyce. We share an interesting conversation with Janice about the book, the characters, the meaning behind the title and the founding of Framingham, Massachusetts. She shares her experiences researching and writing historical fiction and self publishing. You will sense her love for local history and fascinating, character-driven stories as we discuss Salem Witch Trial events and individuals. Drawing from her metaphor of a tinder box ready for a spark, we address reasons why we witch hunt, how we witch hunt and how we stop hunting witches. Dry Tinder is out now, order your copy today. Purchasing link is below.
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is Janice C. Thompson, author of the historical novel Dry Tinder: A Tale of Rivalry and Injustice in Salem Village.
[00:00:37] Sarah Jack: Dry Tinder is a chance to step back in time and use your imagination to be with the Towne family and their experiences.
[00:00:49] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. We're gonna learn about the Towne Sisters.
[00:00:53] Sarah Jack: Learn about the daughters of William and Joanna Towne, Rebecca, Mary, and Sarah.
[00:01:00] Josh Hutchinson: Especially Sarah. We'll also learn about the Putnam's and Thomas Danforth.
[00:01:09] Sarah Jack: A magistrate we don't often hear of or talk about.
[00:01:13] Josh Hutchinson: Who was at the examination of Sarah Cloyce, the protagonist of Dry Tinder.
[00:01:22] Sarah Jack: And who also founded the town that some of the refugees from the Salem Witch Trials reestablish themselves in.
[00:01:31] Josh Hutchinson: We learn about the founding of Framingham, Massachusetts, where Sarah Cloyce and her husband Peter settled after the Salem Witch trials and changed their last name to Clayes.
[00:01:46] Sarah Jack: There isn't much there historically to tell the story, but there is a road named Salem End Lane.
[00:01:57] Josh Hutchinson: And one thing that we keep encountering is just how much people care about the legacy of the Towne sisters, even people with no relation. And we know that there are quite a lot of descendants. The Towne Family Association is very active and regularly does trips back to Salem and Framingham.
[00:02:22] Sarah Jack: Yes, there are individuals who have contributed to the preservation of the history, the physical history of the Towne family, as well as, making sure the story is told.
[00:02:38] Josh Hutchinson: One thing that really interested me in this interview, as a writer, is we got to talk to Janice about her experience as a first time author and first time writing a historical fiction work and the challenges involved in that and the self-publishing process.
[00:03:02] Sarah Jack: And now you get to hear from her, Janice Thompson, a writer and also the co-founder of Harpswell News in Harpswell, Maine. She's a lover of local history and fascinating character-driven stories. Her first novel, Dry Tinder, is based on the true story of the Towne sisters-- three innocent, godly women falsely accused of witchcraft in 1692. As told through the perspective of Sarah Towne, the story becomes personal.
[00:03:28] Josh Hutchinson: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
[00:03:32] Janice C Thompson: Sure. First I have no relation to the Towne family, to my characters. People are thinking, they call me cousin, the Towne family descendants, which is cute.
[00:03:43] Josh Hutchinson: I just wanted to mention that Sarah and I are both Towne descendants.
[00:03:48] Janice C Thompson: Oh, nice.
[00:03:49] Josh Hutchinson: I'm a Mary Esty, and she's Mary and Rebecca.
[00:03:53] Janice C Thompson: Okay. Wonderful. Well, A lot of people are, and I thought, why am I so obsessed with this story? So I actually, I did that genealogical. I'm like, I must, this blood must be in me. But it's not, but I feel like I'm an honorary Towne at this point
[00:04:11] Sarah Jack: I love that. There tends to be this draw and protection towards those sisters from even outside the family. And it always means a lot to me to see that. I think that's really amazing.
[00:04:25] Janice C Thompson: I play in the local concert band. I play trombone. And there is a Nurse in the band, and I gave her the book at the end of the rehearsal last week, and I was in tears. I'm like, "you really need to have this book." So it's meaningful to me, too.
[00:04:42] Josh Hutchinson: You said you've been working on this book for 20 years. How did you come to write this?
[00:04:47] Janice C Thompson: In 2004, my then husband and my two year old child moved into a home in Ashland, Massachusetts, which is about 25 miles directly west of Boston. It's a bedroom community for Boston, a commuter town. And it abuts, it's right next door to Framingham. Most people know of Framingham, not Ashland. It's between Framingham and Hopkinton. Hopkinton is where the Boston Marathon starts, so people know that and they know Framingham.
But anyway, one of the things that really sold us on this house is that it abutted 800 acres of conservation forest with marked trails. Actually, there was a trailhead, like a trail spur that went right into our yard. So we'd often see people come out, they're like, oh, we shouldn't be here. But anyway, just very quickly, after we bought the house, some neighbors came over and we had some coffee, and they said, "oh, have you been to the witch caves out back your house?" And I said, "I don't know what that is." And they said, "oh, yes, it's, the witches escaped from Salem during the trials, and that's where they lived. They hid out in those caves." And I'm thinking, "that's weird because I'm 30 miles southwest of Salem and Salem Village, Danvers, and why would they do that? That seems really weird."
So I looked into it thinking that it was probably an urban legend. Come to find out there was some truth to it, that the story goes that Thomas Danforth, who was the deputy governor the year before, during the trials, good friends with Samuel Sewell, oversaw Sarah's initial examination. This was before the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He oversaw this and put her in jail. And as we all know, Mary and Rebecca were hanged, and Sarah survived just because it was good timing, as we know how.
Anyway, so she was let go, and then the next thing, she and her extended family, so there were some Bridges and there were some Nurses and there all the names that we know left Salem Village and they settled this wilderness to the west of Boston that was owned, these acres, thousands of acres were owned by Thomas Danforth. They had been granted to him by the colony, but he was the treasurer of Harvard. So he was always a Cambridge man. He never settled the lands. So these people came, and they settled the place. They built a meeting house, they had a burying ground, and they ended up incorporating the town of Framingham in 1700. And they called it Framingham because Thomas Danforth was from Framlingham in England. I also found out that these people had built their homes and farms along a road that still exists that's called Salem End Road. And that's the reason why, because they were from Salem.
[00:07:50] Sarah Jack: Is there anything about the experience of writing a first book that you would like to share? What that is like?
[00:08:01] Janice C Thompson: It's really hard. It's harder than I thought. And part of it is because I really wanted it to be authentic. I'm a reader. I love historical fiction. And what my pet peeve is that someone might say, oh, I'm gonna set this story in New York City in the 1880s, say, and then the characters all speak like we do. And you don't really get that sense of place and time. And so I really wanted to be authentic. And as you might have seen in the appendices, I did take liberties with some of the characters just because I can't write about people having 12 kids and having 12 characters. You know, I just can't do that.
It was hard, because I was struggling with the truth of it but also having a book that people wanted to read that was accessible. I remember showing it to Margo early on, and she said, "Janice you can't have your characters talk like they actually did, because it's very off-putting, it's not accessible."
And then I was also trying to figure out, like we have, we're in the 21st century. We have this cultural and social perspective as a result of being in the modern society. And I count myself as a feminist and I fight the man and all of that. But if you are in, if you're Sarah and Mary and Rebecca, and you're in that society in that time, would you even question anything?
Now we know in the fifties and sixties women were starting to say, "no, I don't wanna, I don't like this. I don't, I wanna live a different kind of life. I'm unhappy. I'm unfulfilled." But if you're out 300 plus years ago, and you're in the wilderness, and you don't know if you're gonna make it through the winter, and you are also in this very patriarchal society, would you even complain?
So I really wanted Sarah to be this rebel. But I also wanted it to be authentic. So I was really trying to add more nuance to all of their characters, because nothing in this story, as you probably know, is black and white. A lot of people say, "oh yeah, these girls were evil." I think that they would have PTSD, and they were suffering too. It's not black and white. And you see that all the time in movies and plays, and I just didn't wanna write that kind of book. And I also really wanted to set it up, this context, starting 20 years before that sets up this tinderbox.
And that's actually one of the reasons why I self-published, because the literary agents who were interested in the story said, "I'll take this on, but you have to cut out everything except for just the drama of what happened in 1692. That's what people wanna read. And it has to be accessible. It has to be mass marketed. It has to, you have to sell a lot of copies."
I would love for this to be a bestseller, of course, but I also wanted to write the story I wanted to write. So it was very difficult to say to these professionals, "I think I know better about my book than you do," especially as a first author with a first book. Who am I to do that? So yeah, it was fraught. It was really fraught. I'm starting to write another story that was like set in the nineties in Boston. That's not historic at all. That is so easy. You just say, woo. "What do I want my character to say right now?" It's like I could just make it up. But here I didn't wanna do it, so it was hard, and I don't think I'm ever gonna do it again, not this kind of story. Because I just was so engrossed with it, loved it all, but yeah ready to get it out there into the world.
[00:11:50] Josh Hutchinson: I can relate to a lot of that. I started writing my first novel towards the end of 2008, and I haven't got it ready for publishing yet. Other things keep happening and
[00:12:05] Janice C Thompson: Oh yeah.
[00:12:06] Josh Hutchinson: then you've gotta start over.
[00:12:08] Janice C Thompson: That was one of the issues too, 'cause I've always had to have a full-time job. And I have this notebook this thick with my notes, but you're right. You let it go, and then you have to start all over again. You have to say, "who are these characters? I have forgotten."
And then you get really into it, but then life happens, and you can't focus on it anymore. So that's the reason why I really didn't wanna work at a day job. I wanted to just get to it. That didn't happen. Since we've been up here, I haven't had a full-time job, so I did have more time to focus on it.
[00:12:41] Josh Hutchinson: That's great, and I'm glad that you did it. And I really like the attention to detail in there. And you talked about, you started the story 20 years beforehand to give the background and I think that's so important, because a lot of people just don't understand why the Salem Witch Trials happened.
[00:13:04] Janice C Thompson: Yes.
[00:13:05] Josh Hutchinson: They try to look at things like Margo's favorite thing, that ergot, and it's not that simple.
[00:13:10] Janice C Thompson: love to be in the room when someone asks her about that, because she's very good at hiding her disdain as she responds to that. But yes, and I also find that, in the various depictions and throughout the ages, it's like, it's an anomaly. It just happened and it was mysterious and, yeah, maybe there was poisoning, we don't quite know. But, and then it just disappeared into thin air.
The whole cover of the book is the map of this disputed territory. I actually started it 40 years before, but I did have to cut it down a little bit. And I focused in the original version, I focused more on that boundary dispute, but, I remember it was Marilynne who said, and she read the beginning of it too. And she said, "Janice, you and I are fascinated by this sort of stuff, but it gets very complicated, and I don't think a lot of people would like to know this much detail." So that was one big edit that I did. I cut out like maybe 50 pages. That was painful 'cause I liked the 50 pages, but I did want people to get engaged in it right off the bat.
And so when I had this scene come into my head, and it was very clear to me, a nice spring day, Sarah's walking along the river with a baby. And once that hit, once that got into my head, I'm like, okay, this is where I'm going to start. But yeah, it was difficult. And also if my eighth grade creative writing teacher could hear you, that would be very lovely because I just remember he used to say details, throw in the details, make the reader feel and hear what these characters are doing. So I learned that in eighth grade.
[00:15:01] Sarah Jack: As a descendant and a, possibly because I'm a female as well, the beginning really did pull me in a very nostalgic way, because you meet Sarah first, her motherhood, she's by herself looking for a little wiggle room from the what's pressing in on the women in that society, just in her own outfit and her hair. And then I got to listen to her and her sisters have a conversation in a kitchen. How amazing was that? I was so fascinated. I loved that I could picture Rebecca, Rebecca taking Hannah, Mary working, Sarah trying to relax from the situation that had just happened with her beverage. I just loved it.
[00:15:50] Janice C Thompson: Oh, thank you. I myself have four sisters. I'm in the middle, like Sarah, and this is probably one of the, one of the reasons why I resonated with her, because I'm very close with my sisters. We're a very tight-knit family, and they're a lot different than I am. For example, they're very religious and I'm not, so I was inhabiting Sarah at that point when she said, "why can't I be more like my sisters?" That's an experience that I've had for a very long time. So you have to walk that line between intense love and devotion and frustration, and that's what I wanted to bring out and even in that initial conversation, because Sarah was getting annoyed with them, when they chastised her for taking off her cap.
[00:16:39] Josh Hutchinson: That whole episode with the cap is so indicative of the kind of details that you put in there that really ground people in the time. So I think it was very important how you give a subtle explainer of what life is like in the 17th century for women without just doing a big data dump.
[00:17:03] Janice C Thompson: Well, and that's why these resources were so helpful. Like I have books, you probably saw in the bibliography, I think there were a hundred listings there, but some of them were like life in the Colony in the 1600s and that's what I really wanted to see. I really wanted to find out.
You know how they have those huge fireplaces with the iron thing across it that they hung pots from? I didn't know what that was called, and I didn't wanna say, oh, that iron thing that goes across, so I did a little bit quick research, and it's a crane, it's called a crane. So I'm like, "and so Sarah hung this pot on the crane." And for example, like how did they get around? Did they have a wagon? Did they have to hire a wagon? Did they have horses?
Going up to the Rebecca nurse homestead and just being able to sit there and absorb that house, which we're so lucky that it's still there. All of those resources were enormously helpful. And it was fun. I used to like it. It's, "oh, I don't know that. So let's do a little bit of Google research and figure it out." At one point they're doing like, I was wondering about games, for example, did they even have games? And then I learned about this glyphs that it's like the tongue twisters that we have, that was a, that was like what they did in the 1500s. And so I want all of those things I wanted to add into it to just add layers to it.
[00:18:34] Josh Hutchinson: It gets you into the world, so you see what the characters are experiencing, what they're up against, and yeah, it's very helpful. So you mentioned that you start the novel early. What years does the novel cover?
[00:18:50] Janice C Thompson: It starts 22 years before, so that was 1670. So that was just about the time when William died. And then I play up the whole thing about Joanna being thought of as a witch and it was known that witchcraft it would go from mother to daughter. And I was thinking what was that about?
Some scholar had traced that actual scene about when the minister drinks too much ale and that went to trial, and so when, in my book, when they're at trial, some of that is lifted verbatim from that transcript of that particular trial. That's one of the things that I then grabbed onto. It's okay, I wanna make Joanna be a rebel as well, but I wanna also explain whether, if people thought that she was a witch, why didn't she get arrested for it?
And in my book, it's because she went inward and she's I'm not gonna deal with anybody anymore because I'm so upset. So I wanted to bring that out. But William had died, and so I figured maybe she went a little bit bonkers in grief, maybe she changed her own personality because now he's gone. And I envisioned that he was a, an evening factor for her but without him she didn't know how to act anymore. So I wanted to bring that in. So I started at 20, in 1670 when, so Sarah is married to Edmund Bridges, and she has just had her first baby, Hannah.
[00:20:38] Sarah Jack: I think that is a really relatable time in a family's life that people can connect with. When the head of a family is gone, it's a huge adjustment for the widow, for the descendants. So that would've already started a transition in their lives.
[00:21:01] Janice C Thompson: yeah. I was trying to trace all of the, that went down through the years, the uncertainty and the fear, and when people live in that kind of environment, which by the way we're living in today, people make bad decisions, and they act out of fear. And yes, you're absolutely right, when it's this close-knit family and the patriarch has died.
And I think of this family, this extended family, as a very close family that's a little bit different than other families, because they just kept having babies because they needed to people to till the fields and all of that. Children were seen and not heard. But I envisioned the Towne family as somewhat different than that. Again, totally fabricated. This is the fiction part, that how do they do that and still be in this very rigid society? But I do think that William's dying was a catalyst for at least Joanna getting into trouble.
[00:22:06] Josh Hutchinson: And I wanted to ask what's the significance of the title, Dry Tinder?
[00:22:12] Janice C Thompson: Yeah. When that, it's funny because whenever I do marketing all the time, and so I'm always thinking of designs and headlines and when we do an appeal for the annual fund, or we're doing this kind of brochure or we're doing this e-blast and whatever, and usually my creative process with that is it just comes to me. It'll just, like, all of a sudden I'll be like, "okay, I want this." We're working on a booklet now. It's a tasting book for an event that I'm doing. And it's okay, I know what it's supposed to be. Throughout the entire writing of this book, the title wasn't coming to me. And I always said, it doesn't matter, because I'm so far away from publication that I don't care.
But when I thought of Dry Tinder about a year ago, and I, it really caught on because I'm trying to describe a tinder box. So in the appendices, I say something like a carelessly lit match to dry tinder, the conflagration that follows is not a surprise. So that's where it came from.
That said, I had to struggle with it, because one of the many misconceptions about this story is that these people were burned at the stake, and Dry Tinder connotes that. But I was so married to the title that I just decided to do it anyway.
[00:23:36] Josh Hutchinson: I think it's apt for the way that the conflagration of the witch trials happened. Starts with little spark and then it just, the flames fan out everywhere.
[00:23:50] Janice C Thompson: And I tried to pepper the whole thing with oh, she, the anger that ran through her felt a flame or I tried to bring that theme in a couple of little, a little places. But yeah, I do think that that's the thing that fascinated me the most, because I've been fascinated with this story for whatever reason my whole life.
And so when I started doing that research, I researched it back to England in the 1620s. In the beginning, I even had like backstories about William and Joanna when they were just meeting in their church, and because I kept going back, and I kept going, 'cause I can see the thread, but I just figured I have to stop somewhere.
In fact, I'm not gonna do this, but it would be fun to to do a prequel to about William and Joanna and where they came from. The whole Thomas Danforth, I cut 50 pages outta that backstory. I had the whole thing about how he grew up in in Framlingham and about his parents and all of this. So there is more on the cutting room floor than is in the book right now.
So that's the thing that fascinated me. It's duh, I could've, in hindsight you could see, yeah, something's gonna happen in this society that's not gonna be fun. Makes me worry about today, I have to say. Like, where is this all gonna lead to?
I was actually not as interested. The trials were like the same. Every single one was the same. They'd say, "oh, why are you hurting this girl?" "I'm not." "Obviously you are." It, how many times can you write that? How many times can you write it so that it's different every time?
That's the reason why I didn't go into the three trials, 'cause they were the same. Some of it had some twists. Like Rebecca, they said she was fine, she was innocent, and then they said, no, go back and try again. So there were little things that were different. But I really didn't, I didn't wanna write that. It bored me.
[00:25:49] Josh Hutchinson: We've talked about the Towne sisters. Who were some of the other main characters?
[00:25:57] Janice C Thompson: The, so they're the sisters, and then of course there's the Putnam clan. And I set it up, even though we know there are a lot of other people who were living there, I set it up as a rivalry between the Townes and the Putnams and who were their fans or their friends or whatever. So those were the main characters.
But then, and this was another choice too, I really wanted to write about Thomas Danforth and Samuel Sewell, because I know that Samuel Sewell is famous. You could read the apology that he's famous for giving a public apology many years later. In fact, I used to work at the Boston Athenaeum, which is right across the street from the State House, and you can see a portrait, a painting of Samuel Sewell in the State House giving that apology.
I was so intrigued with what I first found out about, like, why did Thomas Danforth invite this family? I really wanted to talk about Danforth. There's not a lot written about him. And when I was at the Athenaeum, I remember talking to the curator of paintings and sculpture, and he looked into it and he said, "yeah, Thomas Danforth doesn't have a formal portrait done," which is very unusual for magistrates at that time. That's an interesting little tidbit. We hear about Cotton Mather, we hear about Samuel Sewell, but we don't hear that much about Danforth. But he was right there. So I brought him in halfway through and the ministers, and that was another part that that's based on reality that these ministers and these magistrates actually went back and used the Bible, passages in the Bible, to belie the thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
So I just love that sort of intellectual exercise of these ministers. They had a fine line to walk, because they believed in evil, in the devil, in witchcraft, but then they thought maybe that's not happening here, and that's a cognitive dissonance there. So how did they make that dissonance go away? And they did it through biblical texts. So I really wanted to bring those in, those people in, too. I just thought that was interesting.
So there were the Boston contingent, the Boston and Cambridge contingent, the power structure. And then it was these poor people in this little village. So those were my main characters.
[00:28:25] Josh Hutchinson: Which makes me think of your appendices. You also have bios in there for the characters, so something people can refer to as they're reading.
[00:28:38] Janice C Thompson: Because I've talked to the people like Margo and Marilynne and Tad Baker and Bernie Rosenthal. I didn't want them to poo poo like to say, ugh, this is just fiction and whatever. So I figured I would bring it up in the appendices about the difference between this story and what was real. Like a beef that I have with The Crucible is that Arthur Miller names that hanging judge, who we know is William Stoughton. He named him Thomas Danforth. And so now a lot of people, they think it's, oh yes, Thomas Danforth was the hanging judge. And that's what happens when you write fiction. People don't understand that it's fiction. So I just wanted to underscore that I want to have some creative license, but I also don't want to perpetuate lies. So that's why I thought it was important to put that in.
[00:29:38] Sarah Jack: I think it's so great because we need that creative license. It's a teaching mechanism too, and, but people do need to learn to be able to recognize and do their own look into the history. We want people to have that critical thinking that they can enjoy historical fiction but not get confused, and we have to teach them that. And your book is a great example of how it can be done.
[00:30:11] Janice C Thompson: Yeah. Marilynne's book, the Six Women of Salem, does it very well, too, because she does that like those beginning chapters. She would just come up with a scene of, Rebecca was, carrying the water, whatever. You can breathe life into these characters.
We don't really know how they work, but we have some evidence, through transcripts and all of that. I just want it to be true to the story, but not mislead. The Crucible thing, Margo talks about this too, that, John Proctor was supposedly having an affair with Abigail. It was not Daniel Day Lewis, that was not John Proctor. So yeah, that was important to me.
[00:30:52] Josh Hutchinson: People do get some wrong ideas from historical fiction, interpreting it as history when you know you have to have that creative license, because we don't have a hundred percent of the details of these people's lives. So of course you've got to connect the dots and fill in the blanks.
[00:31:15] Janice C Thompson: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.
[00:31:18] Sarah Jack: What would you like readers to take away from your book?
[00:31:21] Janice C Thompson: That's a good question. If I look at it from a macro level, I think that I would like for people to think about what ignorance and fear and uncertainty can do to a community. And again, I'm looking through my current day eyes, because we have to really be careful. It could easily happen today.
On a more personal level, at the sort of coming down from 30,000 feet, I want people to fall in love with these sisters. I want them to think, "I wish I had those sisters," and I want people to understand how, again, things are not black and white sometimes, and it's important to just remember that. And I just, I want people to really enjoy it, too. It's hard when you're into a story that's based on research to write something that would actually be enjoyable and it's not gonna be like a history lesson. I want people to not be able to put this book down. And a number of people have told me that, and that's what I want. I'm not doing this to get rich.
[00:32:42] Josh Hutchinson: People are drawn in to Salem with this kind of glamorous, romanticized view of everything, and it's just so important once they're drawn in to make sure that they're leaving with the right lessons.
[00:32:58] Janice C Thompson: But my book, it is pretty serious. I was at a book signing here locally yesterday, and it Harpswell is a very touristy place. It's a tiny little town, but it doubles in population with our summer residents and then tourist, because it's beautiful. It's like a postcard. So I was at one of these gift shops with all the tourists, and somebody said, "why would I wanna read this book? It's so sad. It's so down." I said, "yeah, but it's okay 'cause you'll be dazzled with my writing style. So that'll even out the subject matter." Yeah.
[00:33:34] Josh Hutchinson: There you go.
[00:33:36] Janice C Thompson: Yeah. And the thing is, too, there is redemption with Thomas Danforth saying, "I apologize." But it is sad, because I think she lost her religion. And it would be nice to say that everyone lived happily ever after, but they didn't. They changed their name to Clayes when they went to Framingham, and the story is that she never left the house, that she became housebound, because she couldn't deal with people and she's, we think that she's in the burying ground. It's 1704 and then it just says S. So she didn't, even if she's even buried there, she didn't want anybody to come visit her. So that's a really sad story. These families were destroyed.
I'm hoping that sort of scene with a redemption with Thomas Danforth will be enough of a Oh, okay. Okay. There's some little bright spot at the end, and it's just that it's not that everybody just died and everybody was sad and, yeah, but she only lived like another 10 years. She didn't live very long in Framingham.
[00:34:50] Josh Hutchinson: And I know she must have suffered in jail and losing her sisters. The suffering must have been so intense. I can understand why you might be reclusive and not wanna go out where people might accuse you again.
[00:35:08] Janice C Thompson: Yes. Yes. Yes, that's what I imagine. Do you know the book, Currents of Malice? It's about Mary, but it's about the whole family. And there are some chapters in the end where the families, the surviving members of the families were trying to get Parris out. They were trying to get recompense, they were trying to get retribution.
And Peter was part of that, but he left, the other, they said, "oh, he's left the area." And I imagine that must've been difficult for him, too, because, yeah, you want to be there, you wanna get revenge, you wanna, but then who wants to be in this community? Who you thought was your close knit? You thought they were your family, family in Christ, and who would just turn on you? And then there was no repercussion. Like these people, the accusers were never brought to trial. They just went away, or they just stayed there. There was no retribution.
I can understand. You just wanna get out of dodge and try to forget it. She was also devastated, and I could understand why she would never wanna go outta the house.
[00:36:18] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we, when we talked to Rachel Christ-Doane, we were talking to her about Dorothy Good's life after the trials and how tragic a story that continued to be. And I think that was sadly the way it was for so many of the families and individuals. How do you just go back to normal life after that?
[00:36:42] Janice C Thompson: One of the things that was very inspiring was that PBS Three Sovereigns for Sarah. And I thought it was interesting, because at the end they were talking about, what happened to different people, and those girls did not live good lives afterward. They were pretty tragic.
And it also supports the theory that they had PTSD. And I imagine, once the hysteria died down, knowing that you just accused these people probably added to the trauma. Because a lot of them didn't have families. A lot of them were refugees. They were maids. They didn't have any agency at all.
[00:37:23] Sarah Jack: I think about the young age of some of the afflicted and even the ones that were women but young. And then you look at the timeline of when hangings ended, with witch accusations, did these girls, women ever look back and think there were adults overseeing what was going on? I don't know. It wasn't like they grew up and then they continued to be part of hanging witches for the rest of their lives.
[00:37:50] Janice C Thompson: I think that they were sorely manipulated by their parents. That's why I have the scene where the girls are upstairs and they're hearing downstairs the conversation about Rebecca, and then all of a sudden Rebecca's being called out on. I do think that was probably part of it.
And again, there was no sort of social safety net afterward. They didn't have, the Putnams had, they had families, but, I'm talking about Abigail herself and Mary Warren and people who just, they were servants. And I imagine that you get older you know and you think, "oh my God, what did I do?" I also imagine that they probably, they might've been ostracized by the very people who manipulated them. Because, again, the tide was turning, and there were people thinking, "oh, this is was not a good thing after all." So I actually in a way feel sorry for those girls. It wasn't that all of a sudden evil sprang in these kids and then they decided to just put people to death. I don't think that's what happened.
[00:38:54] Josh Hutchinson: I think they were such vulnerable people. A number of them you mentioned were refugees from the wars in Maine and had seen their families get killed and managed to escape. But, they're totally devastated like by that for the rest of their lives.
[00:39:16] Janice C Thompson: They're alone. They don't have, they have to work, 12 year olds, in a community where, in a society where you don't have any agency as a young person yeah. I do think that there's this sort of group think that happens like that.
[00:39:31] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I'm kin to Mercy Lewis. I appreciate that people taking a more balanced view of the afflicted. We have to understand the accuser side to understand why the witch trials happened and why things like that happen today. You have to understand both sides. You can't only understand the victim side.
[00:39:57] Janice C Thompson: Yes. That's right. Yep.
[00:39:59] Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned early on that we're living in a time today that's not unlike the times of yesterday. So how, what sort of parallels are you seeing?
[00:40:13] Janice C Thompson: Again, when there is a lot of uncertainty and fear, people make bad decisions. And so for example, today there is a lot of economic inequality, and while I don't agree, I understand that people who have suffered the most from that inequality feel angry and afraid. And when you're in that state, it's easier to say, "I'm just gonna find a scapegoat." They're suffering from a bigger picture of inequality, of the money goes to the owners and, blah, blah, blah.
So I think that's what's happening. And that's why we're so polarized, because we both think both sides of the politic, like we're, it's the other side that's gonna hurt it. Look at the rhetoric. Some of the rhetoric is just crazy. And you're like, where did you come up with that? But again, if you're acting out of fear and anger, that's what happens. And I do think that's what was happening.
I was very interested in, I think it was Nissenbaum and Boyer. They were talking about the sociological aspects of things and the fact that Thomas Putnam, Jr. was expecting a big inheritance from his father. And that's true. The father didn't give him anything. And then it was the same thing that happened with Mary Carr. So these two people who were expecting to be moving up in the world and having all this money now doesn't get the money and God forbid his stepbrother is getting the money instead. And then they look at people like the Nurses who were very poor in Salem Town and then all of a sudden own this big farm. What's up with that? Why are you getting ahead? And that could be very scary. And I think that was what motivated the Putnams, 'cause they were losing power in the community. So I think there are a lot of parallels.
[00:42:27] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I think what you talked about with the economic stress there is an important factor in why the witch trials happened. What are some of the other key factors we should know about? What was in the Tinderbox?
[00:42:44] Janice C Thompson: So there's the economic discrepancies, there's the border disputes that, that south of the Ipswich River. That's why I feature it in the map. There was the strict, the religious restrictions. There were the wars, worried about making it through the winter, and not being able to agree on a minister. That is weird. Because this whole community couldn't figure out, couldn't decide on a minister. And that was unusual in the colony. Usually they would have ministers who would stay there for life, what's up with that? What's going on in Salem Village?
But I think the thing that was the tipping point was when the colony lost the charter. Because you've had this government for what, 40, 50, 60 years. You've created courts, you've created structures. And then now it's okay, you don't have a charter. You might get a charter, or you might not. So your governmentless at that point. And I think that was the tipping point and then also, by the way, the whole thing about the halfway covenant that was happening in the church as well, that.
It's just so funny because when you hear the rhetoric then about, oh, kids these days, they're worse than we were. That's happening today. It happens with every, single generation. So there were some people, some ministers who said, let's come up with this Halfway Covenant so that we can bring more people into the church, because there's now more lying and fornication and thievery and all of that sort of stuff. People are moving away from God, which is another one of those pillars that people count on, and you take that away, too, and so then there were the conservative ministers like Parris saying, Uhuh, we're not gonna have the halfway Covenant. You need to follow those laws. You need to have evidence for your conversion experience and all of that. So there was a lot of tenuousness in the church, as well. I think those are the elements to the tinderbox.
[00:44:50] Josh Hutchinson: I think that's so important you brought that point up, because we think of Puritan Massachusetts as being this very homogenous society where the rules were set from the top, but no, you had different congregations, and they weren't always in agreement with each other.
[00:45:11] Janice C Thompson: I also think it's the town and country thing. In Salem town, this is a port city, and so you're getting ships coming from Spain and Barbados, and there were black people, there were people speaking different languages. There were the merchant class who were making money off of building a ship and then getting a piece of all of that haul.
And that's what happens today here, too. It tends to be the cities on the coasts. It's more diverse. And so when you're rubbing shoulders with people who are very different from you, you learn how to get along, like that there are actually other ways of looking at the world, but then you're dealing with Salem Village, and they're the farmers, that's why I tried to have when Sarah went with Edmund to have their ordinary in Salem town, like she was hearing a lot of that stuff. So she was, in my mind, she's like more worldly than the Putnams, say.
And again, that's what's happening today. So when you don't have diversity of thought you can very easily just have not necessarily good or truthful ways of looking at the world. When you're not in a diverse area, you're not encouraged to think differently. For me, in my life, I grew up in upstate New York and in a very religious family. I just didn't know anything different, because it was quite an insulated, insulated community. And then when I go to college, Oh my God. At lunchtime people would be coming from their classes and say, oh my God, did you hear about Prohibition? Or, oh, I just learned about this new mathematical theory or whatever. It like leads to this kind of intellectual discussions, which some people hate. But for me, it opened up my whole perspective, because I started talking with people who are not me, who are not like me. And when you don't have that opportunity, it's easy to be insular in your thinking.
[00:47:28] Josh Hutchinson: I thought that ordinary was such a good setting to have early in the story, because of that very reason. There's all these different people from different backgrounds. It shows you that it wasn't just the English Puritan people
[00:47:46] Janice C Thompson: Yes.
[00:47:46] Josh Hutchinson: Salem. There were other people from, and people in Salem had been to far -flung places.
[00:47:54] Janice C Thompson: And that part of the story was actually true. But it also was a great construct, because a woman in the colony would not be interested or even have access to discussions about politics. And but Sarah had her overhearing the magistrates who were coming. And so that was that. She set me up with a great construct to do that.
[00:48:18] Josh Hutchinson: Did you have anything in particular you wanted to be sure to talk about today?
[00:48:24] Janice C Thompson: I really hope that people enjoy it, and I hope people will get something out of it. Genealogical connection is so important to me, even though I'm not a descendant. I think, again, spending time with the Towne family, there's this continual closeness in this family. And people get very emotional about it.
Marker
[00:48:45] Janice C Thompson: When I was back in Framingham, I was the president of the Framingham History Center and we did this program called Voices in the Burying Ground around Halloween, even though it wasn't scary, and I reenacted Sarah complete with the outfit and everything. So we had the people of note who were buried in that cemetery. The tour would go around and visit the different graves, and we would talk about this and everything. And a bunch of the Towne Family Association members came up from Connecticut to see this. And this little girl, eight year old girl, comes up and says, "oh, hi Aunt Sarah." And she starts asking me questions and that's so cool. At the same time, I want this story to resonate with people who are not Townes, and so far that seems to be happening.
Marker
[00:49:38] Janice C Thompson: And I want people to write me reviews on Amazon, because that's the thing. I'm selling a lot of books myself, but those reviews are the things that get the public to be interested. This has really been a labor of love, and I hope that comes through.
[00:49:55] Josh Hutchinson: We encourage listeners to please do that. Pick up a copy of the book, read it, review it. That will help get the story out there. And where can people pick up the book?
[00:50:09] Janice C Thompson: It's in hardcover, paperback, and ebook on Amazon. I do sell it directly. People can contact me through my website janicethompson.net. And I'm also here in Maine. A lot of the local shops and the independent bookstores have taken it. And so if you're in Maine, I always say go to the bookstores and get it, because I want people to support independent publishing. And also if they buy it from these stores, the stores will buy more from me.
[00:50:39] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[00:50:51] Mary Bingham: Two weeks ago, four days after I was told that I had to move because my lease was going to be up in June of 2024, a tree fell and took out the courtyard attached to my apartment and damaged the overhang, missing my window by about a foot. It will cost hundreds of dollars to repair the courtyard and the overhang, I'm sure. If this was colonial times, I could have been accused of witchcraft. That's right. If this was the late 1600s, my landlord could say that my specter somehow caused that tree to fall, causing considerable damage to the property on purpose.
On a more serious note, in 1688, Rebecca Nurse confronted her neighbor, Sarah Holton, because the Holton's pigs kept breaking through their fence, charging into the Nurses' fields and destroying their crops. That was serious, destroyed crops meant less food for the Nurses. Shortly after this confrontation, Sarah Holton's husband, Benjamin, became ill and sadly died. Sarah doesn't say anything until four years later, when she offers a deposition against Rebecca in 1692. Really? Why wait? One can only speculate. Maybe Sarah believed all along that Rebecca's specter caused harm to her husband. It could be that Benjamin's illness was unknown to the doctor and that Sarah needed to believe that something caused her husband's death. This was not an uncommon belief amongst the Puritans. They believed that everything happened for a reason.
Four years later, Rebecca was accused, arrested, and removed from her home and sent to jail. Maybe it was then that Sarah said, "aha. That's it. Rebecca's specter caused my husband to die." This belief in bewitchment or someone manipulating nature to cause bad weather conditions, crop failures, harm to another person's environment, and most sadly, death to a family when scientific evidence was not known, had deadly consequences, such deadly consequences that one accused could hang. This was only one element in the case of Rebecca nurse, but it was an element of many of the cases in colonial British America. Sadly, it is an element in many of the cases of deadly witch hunts today. Luckily, I will not be accused of bewitchment because that tree fell onto the courtyard, but others living in Africa, Ghana, India, Papua New Guinea and other places are accused of affecting nature to cause harm to others at an alarming deadly rate. Please educate yourself regarding ongoing witch hunts. Thank you.
[00:53:59] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:54:02] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:54:12] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. Thank you for being a part of the journey of discovery around witch hunts past and present. Take a look at our episode catalog. It is amazing. It is amazing because historians, authors, academics, economists, advocates, artists and descendants of accused witches have generously given us insightful and meaningful conversation week after week and entrusted Josh and I with their message to you.
Have you read any of our guest's books? Have you pulled up their research and articles to continue learning? Please do. Josh and I are constantly reading to bring you the best research and conversations on witch hunts. You can be reading and talking about it, too. Find links to articles in our show notes. Find and follow our team and guests like Dr. Leo Igwe and Mary Bingham on social media. Many are sharing blogs and articles regularly. Are you following Margo Burns? She has many presentations coming up this fall. Share the links with your friends. Buy books for gifts. Find our guest titles in our nonprofit bookshop, also linked in the show notes. Buy titles at your local independent bookshop or directly from the guests. There are so many great reads, and we are very grateful that each of these academics and researchers have given their time to talk about their work on this podcast.
We want this podcast to reach the world with news that witch hunts are real but that witches are not causing harm with supernatural attacks. That witch hunting is complex and nuanced but not a mystery. Witch hunting is a current crisis, and we all need to be educated on the ways societies find themselves scapegoating those that cannot possibly be the cause of suffering. The targeted individuals become innocent sufferers themselves due to anger and fear. Every week, Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast brings both the history of the past witch trials and news and education about the current global effort of ending modern witch hunts. I hope you are being transformed by the education around witch hunts. Are you talking about our End Witch Hunts advocacy questions? Why do we witch-hunt? How do we witch-hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Thank you for being a part of the Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. We appreciate your listening and support. Keep sharing our episodes with your friends, have conversations with them about what you are learning and how you want to jump in and end witch hunts with your particular abilities, influence, and network. Community development that works to end witch hunts is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort for all of us to participate in. You can learn more by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country specific advocacy groups and development plans in motion across the globe.
Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, make a tax-deductible donation, purchase books from our bookshop, or merch from our Zazzle shop. Have you considered supporting the production of the podcast by joining us as a super listener? Your super listener donation is tax-deductible. Thank you for being a part of our work.
[00:57:18] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:57:20] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:57:21] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you so much for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:57:27] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:57:29] Josh Hutchinson: Hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this podcast.
[00:57:34] Sarah Jack: Find more episodes at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:57:38] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell everyone you know and everybody you meet about Thou Shalt Not Suffer.
[00:57:44] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:57:49] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Introducing Alyssa G. A. Conary, Historian and Author of witchcraft, magic and 17th century New England. In this conversational episode covering Massachusetts witch trial history, Alyssa, Josh and Sarah discuss shocking aspects of these stories including the courts, magistrates, ministers, misogyny, what was written about the behavior of the accused, and the circumstances around their trials. Hear how the Boston witch trials, the Salem witch trials and the witch trials of Connecticut connect, compare and differ. Find out more about History Camp Boston 2023, where Alyssa presents her research. We address the importance of seeing and responding to humanity in all people on our planet. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson. [00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. [00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: We're going back to Massachusetts this week. [00:00:30] Sarah Jack: But not to Salem. [00:00:32] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. We're taking a field trip this week. [00:00:35] Sarah Jack: So pack a snack and enjoy the ride. [00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: You'll love this fun conversation along the way. [00:00:42] Sarah Jack: We talk about the Boston Witch Trials. [00:00:45] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. There were witch trials in Boston long before the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem. [00:00:51] Sarah Jack: We talk about Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Kendall, Alice Lake, Anne Hibbins, Goody Glover, and Elizabeth Morse. [00:01:00] Josh Hutchinson: And we learn a valuable lesson that we can all apply today. [00:01:04] Sarah Jack: Alyssa G. A. Conary is a historian and writer. She will be giving her Boston Witch Trials presentation at History Camp this month, and she was kind enough to discuss some of it with Josh and myself. Grab your beverage, pull up your chair, and lean in. [00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: We hear that there were witch trials in Boston. Is that true? [00:01:25] Alyssa Conary: Yes, there absolutely were. [00:01:29] Josh Hutchinson: And approximately what years were these held? What kind of range are we looking at? [00:01:35] Alyssa Conary: There's a little bit of a question as to when the first was. It was, usually people say 1648, but it's possible that it was 1647. And then that goes into the mid 17th century. And the last execution for the first era is 1656. And there's no executions for a really long time. There's some trials, but no executions. And then you have 1688, you have another execution. And then after that is Salem. So Salem that's just like a totally different story. [00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. [00:02:13] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:02:14] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What are some of the key differences to make that a different story? [00:02:22] Alyssa Conary: Salem is a witchcraft panic. It's funny, because you always want people to understand that witchcraft prosecution was not strange then. That was pretty normal, because people believed in witches. But even within the history of witchcraft prosecution, Salem was an outlier. Because before Salem in Massachusetts had just been like putting one or two people on trial at a time. There was periods of time in between. It was usually for some mundane misfortune or something like that, that someone would be accused. There are also more serious cases people thought people were being murdered by witchcraft, but which fascinates me, but that's, again, that's a whole other thing. So for the most part it was just these pretty simple cases, and they didn't execute many people. I don't think they liked to execute people for witchcraft. The execution rate was pretty low. Then you get to Salem, and it's a full-blown witch panic. And you have the afflicted people, mostly girls, but there were some others. Geographically, it's much wider than it had been in the past. There's way more suspects. There's tons of people in jail, and then you've got these judges who are using pretty much any kind of evidence that they wanna use and just convicting, literally everybody that they tried in 1692 was convicted and sentenced to death. So it's just something that is an outlier from the rest of the history of witchcraft in Massachusetts. [00:03:57] Sarah Jack: And you're gonna be talking a little bit about this at History Camp. What is History Camp? [00:04:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, History Camp is awesome. I think I went, I think it was maybe the first or second History Camp that I actually went to in 2015, I wanna say. And my, he wasn't my husband then, he is my husband now. We were best friends back then, but we were just like super excited about going to this, 'cause we're big history people and it sounded like perfectly nerdy and perfect for us. So we went that year and didn't speak or anything, but it was just, it's just a full day of history lectures. And you get to choose which one you wanna go to. So there are different slots and like at any given time there's like several different lectures going on. So you can choose, okay, I wanna go to listen to this topic or that topic. And then this goes all day from nine to five. So it's just basically the best thing a nerd could ever attend. [00:04:51] Josh Hutchinson: I really hope to be able to do that sometime. It sounds like a festival for history nerds. [00:04:58] Alyssa Conary: It's great. It started as just this event, and then the founders of the event went on to, I think it was in 2019, they created a nonprofit organization called The Pursuit of History to oversee History Camp, and then they started taking it to different places, like I think there's one in Virginia now, and there's one in Philadelphia. That's the latest one. Started in Boston, but it's it's spreading, like Salem witchcraft. Sorry, that was lame. [00:05:24] Josh Hutchinson: That's a perfect analogy. [00:05:27] Sarah Jack: It's a, it's an exciting and positive one, though. [00:05:31] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:05:32] Josh Hutchinson: You had mentioned early on that there was a gap in the executions between, I think 1656 and 1688. Why was there such a long period where they weren't executing anyone? [00:05:47] Alyssa Conary: I think they, like I said, they didn't like to execute people. I think for a long time that they were just, "yeah, we're not really gonna do that anymore." Maybe, you know, it wasn't a conscious decision, but it was just, they were just very, it was actually a situation where from the top, the Court of Assistants, the judges, the center of the thing in Boston, they were like a mitigating force on this witchcraft accusing, so they'd be like, you know this, okay we'll hear this case, but it was hard to prove in court. So it was hard. It was really, it was hard to get a conviction. And then you have 1688, which happens. That one's kind of weird, because you do have afflicted children, so it's like a, it's like a lead up to Salem. There is an execution in that case. But before that, I just, I think that they were just slow to wanna execute people, which I feel like the stereotype of Massachusetts puritans is probably just the opposite, but, in my opinion, they didn't wanna do it. They felt like they had to sometimes, but they didn't love doing it. [00:06:50] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, in the early years, Connecticut was the place where you were more likely to get hanged, and that really surprises people. [00:06:58] Alyssa Conary: Yes. Yeah. Connecticut in the 1660s had a big witch panic, and that was huge until Salem happened and Salem was much bigger. But yeah, Connecticut was not a good place to be accused of witchcraft. [00:07:13] Sarah Jack: And the 1688 case, was that Goody Glover? [00:07:17] Alyssa Conary: That's Goody Glover. Yep. [00:07:19] Sarah Jack: And why was she chosen as a scapegoat? [00:07:22] Alyssa Conary: She was Irish. And it's interesting, because there is that scapegoating aspect of witch hunting, but at the same time, usually the majority of people that are being accused are members of the community who are basically just like their accusers, the same religion, oftentimes they're neighbors. They're pretty much like the same people that they're accusing. It's like this purge from within a community. But you would have, once in a while, you'd have someone who was inside a community, but who was an outsider on the inside. And that's the case with Goody Glover. She was an Irish Catholic woman, and her first language was Irish Gaelic. She was someone who stood out, and that could be part of the reason why she was accused to begin with. [00:08:05] Josh Hutchinson: How many people were executed before Salem? [00:08:10] Alyssa Conary: Before Salem, in Massachusetts, it's five people. [00:08:13] Josh Hutchinson: And who was the first one? [00:08:16] Alyssa Conary: The first one, that's a little bit confusing because it could have either been, most sources say Margaret Jones, but there's some question as to when Elizabeth Kendall was executed. It could have been earlier, but we're not positive, because the sources are very bare. [00:08:32] Sarah Jack: And what are those early sources that discuss those two ladies? [00:08:37] Alyssa Conary: So for the most part, with the five who are executed, who are the ones I've done the most research and reading on, there are no trial records for any of them, any of the five. There's some kind of strange gaps in the Court of Assistants records there. They're missing basically all of the early stuff. I think it's in like the 1670s that, the record kind of begins. So they're missing the early stuff, and then strangely they're missing like 1687 and 1688, which is exactly when Goody Glover happens. So you really don't have court records for these five women, but you have contemporary accounts. So with Margaret Jones, you have Governor Winthrop, his journal, which is great. And you also have John Hale's book, Reverend John Hale's book, Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. And then for Elizabeth Kendall, I think it's just Hale. That's the only source we have for her. And so we know it was sometime between 1647 and 1651. But we can't exactly be sure when. [00:09:44] Sarah Jack: What does he say about her? [00:09:46] Alyssa Conary: For Elizabeth Kendall? Yeah. So he basically, he was very small. He actually visited some of these people in jail, John Hale, when he was a child. And I don't remember if he visited Elizabeth Kendall, it might've been actually Margaret Jones that he visited, but for Elizabeth Kendall. So what happened with her was she's interesting because, you always hear people believed in witchcraft. So I know there wasn't a lot of fraud. And I do believe that, I don't think that there was a lot of fraud, people accusing people knowing that they were lying about it. But this is a case where it's pretty obvious that's what happened. So a nurse, so Elizabeth Kendall, she was from Cambridge. A nurse from Watertown accused her of bewitching a child to death, and the nurse testified that this is what she said here, actually have her words, "Elizabeth did make much of the child, and then the child was well, but quickly changed its color and died in a few hours after." So what happened is Goodman Jennings, who was the father of the child, he was apparently unaware of the evidence that was given against Elizabeth, because after she was executed, we don't know what was said in court or what the evidence was in court, 'cause we don't have the record, but after her execution, a deputy to the general court named Richard Brown went and talked to the Jennings family. And he asked whether the family had suspected Elizabeth of murdering their child. And the father was like, no. They thought the child's death was the nurse's fault, because she had kept the child outside in the cold for too long. And this is the same nurse who testified against Elizabeth. So basically it looks like what happened was she just blamed Elizabeth for something that she had actually done. So the nurse was subsequently actually in prison for adultery, Hale says and she gave birth to a child, apparently in jail, and Richard Brown, the deputy to the general court, he visited her in jail and apparently told her, and I have that quote as well. "It was just with God to leave her to this wickedness as a punishment for her murdering Goody Kendall by her false witness bearing." So there is a very clear example, early example of a fraudulent witchcraft accusation. [00:11:57] Sarah Jack: Wow. That's so interesting, because that's like a question people have often about the different cases, and here is the story. That is the story. And then I was curious, you're calling her a nurse. How is that different than, so like for non historians who are, hear that healers or midwives are involved in which trials, what's that role of the nurse? [00:12:22] Alyssa Conary: You know what? I'm not sure to be honest why she is called mmm a nurse. I think that might have just been like a modern word that they used to call her. I'm not sure that was actually in the historic testimony that they called her a nurse. I would have to double check about that. But but yeah you get to, you're mentioning that the healer midwife sort of myth, which I've actually been thinking a lot about lately. So you can see that people in the medical profession were also accusing others. So it wasn't, it wasn't just people coming after healers and midwives. Actually midwives mostly gave evidence against accused witches, because they would be the ones who would search their bodies for witch marks. But that being said, there is something to it. There's some kernel of truth in this this myth that healers were targeted. I don't think that there's evidence in New England for the doctors going after midwives. That's one big myth. I don't think there's evidence for that, but, and Paul Moyer actually, who just recently published a book about witch hunting in the Atlantic world, he looks at New England, but he ties it into things that were happening in England at the same time. So he describes it really well. He says that there's no like clearcut connection between midwifery and witchcraft accusations. But there is this sort of connection between like healing in general and like medical practice in general, because being a healer, you'd be put in these situations where someone could end up dying under your care. And then that was the perfect opportunity for a family member to accuse you of witchcraft. So just by the nature of the profession, you were more vulnerable, I think. I don't think that there were a lot of healers accused, but it did happen. There's some truth to it. Truth for sure. [00:14:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I haven't seen many that stand out as like professional healers. I've seen a lot who seem to have had things in their medicine cabinet, so to speak, that they used to treat people within their own home. Yeah. [00:14:28] Alyssa Conary: Of course. Yeah. Which is what mainly would be the role of the woman in the house. As far as the people who were known as healers, I think out of the like 27 that are tried in Mass Bay before Salem, I think there's only four who were known as being healers in their community. So it did happen, but probably wasn't an organized conspiracy against healers and midwives. [00:14:54] Sarah Jack: We did some research when we were working on our episodes that we put out on the Connecticut history and looking at some of those individuals, and sometimes an author would label somebody a healer, but there was maybe one thing mentioned that could be viewed at in a different way even, or just as the medicine cabinet healer [00:15:25] Alyssa Conary: right. [00:15:25] Sarah Jack: there, is there record or diary or anything that ever talks about one of these women who you know was doing that for her neighbors regularly? [00:15:36] Alyssa Conary: I think with the four that are more known as healers in their communities, there's I don't know of any diaries. I just know of contemporary accounts of their accusations. I know, let's see, there's one, Mary Hale, she's a Boston widow. She had a sort of, I don't wanna call a hospital, but like a place where people came to be like cared for. And this ended up not, it didn't end well for her because she was accused of witchcraft, but she was acquitted, so she was never executed. But for the most part, like Josh was saying, it's unclear, because medical care was usually done at home by the woman in the house. So someone could be involved with healing, but not necessarily be known as a healer. [00:16:24] Sarah Jack: And Mary Hale is my 10th great grandmother. [00:16:27] Alyssa Conary: Stop it. Are you serious? [00:16:29] Sarah Jack: If like the records indicate that she was indeed Winifred Benham's mother, have you looked at that at all? [00:16:38] Alyssa Conary: No, I haven't. [00:16:39] Sarah Jack: Winifred Benham was and her daughter, Winifred Junior, were the last case tried in Hartford, in 1697. But if you go back to Mary Hale's case, her granddaughter, Joanna, ties Mary and Winifred, because Joanna is Winifred's daughter. [00:17:00] Alyssa Conary: Wow. It runs in families, right? [00:17:03] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And it's interesting, both Mary and Winifred Senior disappear from the record after their trials. There's nothing that shows when they died or where they went. Joanna, you can trace into New York and Winifred Junior, you can trace her marriage too. But both of those senior women, we know nothing after they were acquitted. [00:17:26] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, I know there's so many like that, because 17th century women, there's not much to start with. There's not that much out there about them. So yes. So many of these women, we do lose them after the trials. That's the last we hear of them. That's fascinating, Mary, so you're a Hale. Wow. Very cool. [00:17:45] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And I didn't understand that connection until our Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project started, 'cause we just were doing more research. And since that's my direct, Winifred was my interest in the Connecticut witch trials. That case, there's a lot of, it's not misinformation, but it's not primary source information that's been passed around, where she's possibly buried, which there's actually no indication of her burial, 'cause there's no indication of her death either. But there's a really great article that I found that talks about the trial records for Mary Hale and then that's how that author made the connection. And that was exciting to me, because that was like, oh, this is record because with Winifred and Winifred Junior, there's not much actual trial record. [00:18:37] Alyssa Conary: For Mary Hale there, there is an entry in the Court of Assistants that mentions her. There's not transcripts. I don't think there are trial transcripts for any of them, but yeah, I do remember seeing Mary Hale was mentioned in the Court of Assistants records as a widow from Boston. [00:18:53] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Were there other cases that you know of witchcraft being passed down in the family? [00:19:01] Alyssa Conary: Oh yeah, for sure. The one that comes to mind right now is Ann Burt from Lynn, who is one of the women actually who was known as a healer and, in the community. And she was tried and evidently acquitted. I don't know if there's an actual record of her acquittal, but she shows up later, so we know she wasn't executed, so she was probably acquitted. Her granddaughter is Elizabeth Proctor from the Salem Trials. So there was that suspicion hanging on her, because of her grandmother being accused of witchcraft. I think it is mentioned at least once. [00:19:42] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I was curious about that. How many of these earlier trials in Massachusetts maybe had some connections to Salem or other trials? [00:19:53] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. You have the same, it is the same guys in charge in the mid to late 17th century. So you have some of the same judges at the trials. Mary Hale's acquittal, you have Nathaniel Saltonstall, William Stoughton, Bartholomew Gedney, and John Richards are the judges involved, and she's acquitted. Mary Webster, 1683, you have William Stoughton and Bartholomew Gedney and also acquitted. James Fuller, acquitted in 1683, also you have William Stoughton which it just makes me wonder if he was just seething, because we know he was very enthusiastic about convicting witches. There must have been, like I said, these sort of other forces that were keeping it in check back in the 1680s, and then when Salem happened, he just got to let it rip pretty much. So yeah, you do have some of the same guys that are on the Court of Assistants. And then you have a couple of Salem victims who are actually accused for the first time earlier in the century. Susannah Martin, who's actually my husband's ancestor, she was acquitted of witchcraft in 1669. And then you have Bridget Bishop, she's acquitted in, presumably acquitted, 'cause obviously she wasn't killed until later. In 1680 so she's not Bridgett Bishop, yet, she's Bridget Oliver at that time. So you do have some people showing up in more than one story and then showing up again in Salem, for sure. [00:21:19] Sarah Jack: It was so enjoyable to hear you say who was sitting at her trial, Mary Hale's. Thank you I had not seen that yet. [00:21:27] Alyssa Conary: It's four of the guys who were on the Court of Oyer and Terminer. And I think it's interesting that Saltonstall was on there. He's the one who left early on. He is, "you know what? I don't have the stomach for this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take off," we presume. [00:21:41] Josh Hutchinson: It is fascinating. [00:21:43] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. It's the same guys, it's just something changed. Basically, what changed for Salem was that there was no one in charge after the charter was revoked. And even though they had this new charter in 1691, they hadn't reestablished the courts or the laws yet. So it was the governor, Phips, was like, "let's set up this court illegally." And the judges got to pretty much convict people however they wanted to. That's one reason why Salem got so out of hand, because these guys are, it's the inmates running the asylum here. There are no rules. There's no one in charge really. [00:22:21] Sarah Jack: It makes me think of this meme that I've seen. The guy hands a note to this officer, and the officer reads it, and it says, "oh, this just says you can do whatever you want." [00:22:32] Alyssa Conary: So basically what happens, that's what Phips gave to William Stoughton. He had carte blanc. Phips didn't want anything to do with it. He just wanted it to go away. So he just hands it over to them and is, "okay, do what needs to be done." [00:22:45] Sarah Jack: Whereas the Boston Court was running for more than just... [00:22:50] Alyssa Conary: Exactly, yep. It was a center of political power. And it was, there was checks and balances, which is not, again, what people think about Puritan New England as being this moderate place. It is obviously, it's religiously driven, but they took laws seriously, and they didn't, like I said, I, they didn't wanna execute a bunch of people. Yeah it, and it changes. It changes, and it has a lot to do with the politics. And I think the best book for understanding kind of the situation with the charter and with the political climate is Emerson Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft. If anybody's really interested in learning more about the judges and the politics, he does a really excellent job of explaining that whole dynamic. [00:23:33] Josh Hutchinson: I'm wondering, was there a lot of spectral evidence involved in cases outside of Salem? [00:23:41] Alyssa Conary: No, absolutely not. It was not seen as very reliable or valid evidence. And of course, in England you have these guys writing handbooks on how to prosecute witches. And there's some differing opinions. Some of them do put stock in spectral evidence, and others say, "no, it can't be used to prove witchcraft." But for the most part, I think in New England, in the 17th century, no, they didn't wanna use that to convict people. The big thing that would get you convicted was a confession, again, before Salem, because Salem is completely different. But before Salem, you wanna get that confession. But that doesn't happen very often. So another way to get a conviction would be to have two witnesses who witness the same sort of act of witchcraft. And that was another big way to get people convicted. But no, spectral evidence was not really seen as a reliable way to prosecute people. I think with Elizabeth Morse from Newbury, who actually was convicted in 1679 but then reprieved, actually, I think it's John Hale, who later says her being reprieved might've had something to do with the fact that the judges did use some spectral evidence to convict her and then subsequently realized, "okay, maybe we shouldn't have done that." So yeah, no, it was not reliable. And then again, like we have said a million times, and then in Salem it was just like night and day. It was just like, okay, we're just gonna use, it's, it was a free for all. [00:25:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And it's like you said, a lot of the same people making the decision to suddenly include spectral evidence. [00:25:21] Alyssa Conary: It makes you wonder what they were thinking at those earlier trials where people were being acquitted. I think about Stoughton just probably super angry every single time someone was acquitted. He had to play by the rules. [00:25:34] Sarah Jack: He was ready to unleash when 1692 came. [00:25:38] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, he was ready. He was ready. To me, he's the biggest villain. He's the biggest Salem villain in my mind, for sure. [00:25:44] Josh Hutchinson: I agree. One that judge that surprises me is Waitstill Winthrop, because his father, John Winthrop, Jr. was very opposed to spectral evidence, and he brought in the two witness rule into Connecticut witch trial cases, and then Waitstill's like, "whatever Dad." [00:26:06] Alyssa Conary: John Winthrop, Jr. It's funny. And then you go back to his father and his father was just like super haunted by all of this stuff and did some very strange things. But yeah, it is interesting that Waitstill Winthrop then, maybe it was a way to differentiate himself from his father. [00:26:24] Josh Hutchinson: Sided with granddad or something. [00:26:28] Alyssa Conary: I mean, I think Winthrop was pretty earnest in wanting to believe what he thought was the right thing to believe. But yeah, you can't read his diary without thinking, "wow, the guy was such a jerk." Yeah, he said some pretty interesting things, and the antinomian controversy, he did some pretty questionable things. Yeah, that, it is really interesting to look at those three generations and how their opinions differed and their actions differed, for sure. [00:26:55] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I noticed the victims we've talked about so far have all been women. Why were women the predominant victims of witch trials? [00:27:08] Alyssa Conary: The short answer is that they were believed to be more susceptible to the devil. And I always giggled to myself when I see that in, in a book and the scholar will say it wasn't because of misogyny, it was because they were believed to be more susceptible to witchcraft. And then I say to myself, "isn't that pretty misogynistic?" I don't know. And this isn't every book about witchcraft, but it's just a few times I've read these people dance around it. They don't want it, they don't wanna admit that it's misogyny. But it's absolutely an aspect I think it wasn't, again, just like with the midwives, I don't think it was this coordinated conspiracy like, "oh, we're gonna, call them witches just so we can kill them." No, they really believed in witches for the most part. But yeah, they thought women were more likely to be witches, and something like four out of five of people accused, I think, I wanna say it was four out of five were women. Something like 80 to 90% I wanna say. And that differed in other parts of the world. There were some places where actually more men were accused. But when we're talking about England and New England, there is an aspect of misogyny to it. Women were definitely more likely to be believed to be witches for sure. [00:28:18] Sarah Jack: I wish there was more information on Thomas Jones. There's some secondary mentioning of his being accused or arrested after his wife had been hanged for witchcraft. I don't know any more than that, but I know that's like somewhat different than some of the other situations where the husband and the wife were arrested together, and then the husband was not found guilty. That would be in Connecticut, or the couple in Connecticut where they were both found guilty. I wanted to know more of this backstory with the Jones that when his wife was hanged, it wasn't over. I wish I knew. And then is he the first man that we know of in Massachusetts who was accused? [00:29:00] Alyssa Conary: I'm not sure about that. That is pretty, pretty early. He's definitely one of the first, and he is absolutely. He is put in jail. But he's never prosecuted, I don't think. And then you get to the Parsons where it's the opposite. But yeah, you do see these sort of like married sort of duos where they'll both be accused, but generally speaking it was much more likely that the wife would be executed statistically speaking. So there you go again. [00:29:33] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and it's really similar. We've had guests on recently talking about witch hunts today, and you still see that pattern with the women in most locations. There are like regions of Papua New Guinea where more men are accused, regions of other nations where more men are accused. But overall, it's still that very high ratio of [00:30:01] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:30:01] Josh Hutchinson: women to men. [00:30:04] Alyssa Conary: And I think it's a bigger question. Why do men kill women? Like I said, it's not, the witchcraft accusations, it's not a coordinated conspiracy clearly, but there's gotta be some reason why men kill women. It's just, it's always been that way. It's still that way today. I think we have to ask those questions, like, why? And maybe instead of shying away from the misogyny piece, confront it. [00:30:30] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. [00:30:31] Sarah Jack: Yeah. We need to do it for the future victims. Discussing it, talking about it, those conversations have to become more comfortable. [00:30:41] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, absolutely. I think as far as like the witchcraft scholarship goes, the early stuff, the Margaret Murray and all of that, and the fertility cults and the, I, people wanted to react against that scholarship and didn't wanna make it about misogyny, but it's there. It's there, and we can't ignore it. [00:31:02] Josh Hutchinson: It's pretty plain when you see the comments of some of the people in the New England Witch Trials, at least, some of the comments that the men made about the women, like Cotton Mather's not my favorite guy. He's not he's not so nice when he writes about, say, Martha Carrier as a rampant hag, and John Winthrop's not so kind calling everybody a witch and everything. [00:31:34] Alyssa Conary: oh, Yeah, Winthrop, man, he writes some real misogynistic stuff. Cotton Mather, he's fascinating to me, cause initially he's telling the judges to use caution at Salem. And then he becomes the guy who does the whole government defense of the trials. But yeah, yeah, one thing, Winthrop, he really, the way he wrote about Margaret Jones to me was like, ugh. Wow. He talks about her "behavior," quote unquote, at her trial. And I have his quote here somewhere, and it's just, here it is. "Her behavior at trial was very intemperate, lying notoriously and railing upon the jury and witnesses. And in the distemper, she died. The same day and hour she was executed, there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many trees." And it's dude, like, if you were about to be executed, maybe you'd be acting intemporately, like I think, and then you get the account from Hale about her, and Hale is saying he went to visit Margaret, and they had urged her to confess, and she had insisted, "as for witchcraft," this is the quote, "as for witchcraft, she was wholly free from it, and so she said unto her death," and it just gives her like more of this like earnest sort of victim, description of her as like this earnest victim. And then you have Winthrop who's basically describing her as like this crazy woman who's yelling and screaming. But of course she was, like, she was going to be executed for something that she was denying, and she was terrified, and she was angry. And it's just like what he says, it's just just being a crazy woman, just lying and railing upon people. And yeah, that one has always really bothered me. [00:33:16] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's like blaming her for you, just saying, oh, she was hysterical. And uh, you know, he doesn't use the word. [00:33:25] Alyssa Conary: Pretty much. Yes. She's a hysterical woman. It's like women weren't allowed to be people at so many times in history and even today, but we don't even have to touch that. Obviously it's an issue. Obviously misogyny is an issue. It always has been. And it is still today. [00:33:44] Sarah Jack: I wonder how Margaret's fight for her life, since she was one of the early ones, intimidated the next women. [00:33:57] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:33:57] Sarah Jack: It didn't play out well for her. Her fight didn't, and then they're being read or reading the account that there was the hearsay of the account or they witnessed it, and then how she was recorded in history. [00:34:11] Alyssa Conary: It's terrifying. There's also this account after she's indicted of her sitting with her friend, Alice Stratton. And the account was given that she that Alice Stratton had a bible on her lap, and they were both crying, and that has always hit me pretty hard, too. Margaret Jones is fascinating to me and I just wish that we knew more about her. So you get this whole gamut of emotions from this woman who's facing this terrifying thing and it just makes it so real. [00:34:44] Sarah Jack: yeah. [00:34:44] Alyssa Conary: You read these accounts. Yeah. Makes it so immediate and scary and I'm sure people reading about that, hearing about that, more likely, would've been terrifying to hear for sure. [00:34:58] Sarah Jack: And possibly at that point she had hope that someone was gonna hear her message and hear her plea. It was worth fighting for it, because what if somebody stands up for her? [00:35:12] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. And nobody did. And apparently she made the weather really bad in Connecticut. [00:35:19] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. [00:35:20] Alyssa Conary: Silly. That, that was a big, that was a big witchcraft belief back then was that witches could control the weather. But yeah, it's just, it's very sad. [00:35:29] Josh Hutchinson: On this topic of misogyny, I was thinking about how the women were physically examined, at least at Salem. Were they physically inspected in these earlier trials, as well? [00:35:43] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. And that would actually mostly be by other women. And yeah, it, I mean it went on in the earlier trials too, to find, try to find, the witches teat or the witches mark that was not good enough to convict someone, but it was good, like corroborating evidence if they had other evidence. And God knows what they were actually looking at. I actually think Alice Stratton had something to say about that, because they did supposedly find a witch's mark on Margaret Jones. Yeah, she they found a witch's teet, and Alice Stratton says it's just an injury related to childbirth. [00:36:19] Josh Hutchinson: Like Rebecca Nurse. [00:36:20] Alyssa Conary: Exactly, yeah, exactly. They're seeing these marks or whatever, which probably have perfectly reasonable explanations, but but yeah, they are it is, it's it's an assault. It's an assault being, their bodies being searched, for sure. But like I said, it was usually women who did it, but I'm not gonna, I'm sure at some point there were men doing it as well. And that's horrifying to think about. But yeah, that's an assault, basically. [00:36:46] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's so invasive, and I've noticed in my reading of witch trials that for women, the witch's teet is almost always found in the secret parts. For men, it's on their shoulder or their neck or something. [00:37:05] Alyssa Conary: That, That. Interesting. Yeah. [00:37:07] Josh Hutchinson: So yeah, they didn't get the same [00:37:09] Alyssa Conary: like someone's just really preoccupied with a female genitalia. There's so much, there's so much here that is just so clear, so clearly, just. [00:37:21] Sarah Jack: Preoccupied but unaware at the same time. It's surprising that they couldn't start to understand it since they were looking at it [00:37:30] Alyssa Conary: interesting is If they had midwives looking for it, these midwives must have seen things like that before. So why would they be so quick to say, were they pressured into saying it ever that it was a witch, I don't know. I that's the thing is you always wish you could be there and see the things that happened that weren't written about, and I can only imagine. I can only imagine. I bet some women went through some really horrible things [00:37:55] Sarah Jack: Rebecca said, take another look. Have an actual expert look, because [00:38:01] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:38:02] Sarah Jack: is wrong. [00:38:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Her case is, that's a tough one. [00:38:07] Sarah Jack: she's she's my ninth great grandma. So I get real [00:38:11] Alyssa Conary: How many, [00:38:12] Sarah Jack: her [00:38:13] Alyssa Conary: oh, wow. Do you have any more? Is that the only two? Mary Hale and Rebecca Nurse [00:38:18] Sarah Jack: so mary, It is a lot. Mary Esty, her sister, their grandchildren married and I descend. There's a line of Russells that goes down several generations and I descend out of there. And so I knew about Rebecca since I was a teenager. And then as I started doing my own research seven years ago or so, I realized, oh, Mary is my grandmother too. and [00:38:41] Alyssa Conary: fascinating. [00:38:42] Sarah Jack: a few years after that, I discovered Winifred on my dad's, side of my tree. And then I'm like, oh, I wanna find out where her memorial is. And then the rest [00:38:51] Alyssa Conary: So when did your family leave New England? 'cause they must have been there early on. [00:38:55] Sarah Jack: They all left pretty quickly. So the Towne descendants moved into Vermont, that I come from, and then my line left Vermont about five generations back from me and moved into the Midwest. So I am, I'm an Iowan. And All of my New England ancestors, and there's a lot, they ended up coming through Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa. [00:39:22] Alyssa Conary: Oh, that's fascinating. My husband, he is his family, it's like they came over from England and they're still there. Like they never, it's, he is, oh my gosh. He's related to so many colonial people. And like I said, Susannah Martin is his ancestor, which I find, I always look at my kids and think, wow, it's really cool, because she was such a firecracker. I really think that's a plus to be a descendant of Susannah Martin. She was awesome. [00:39:50] Sarah Jack: Awesome. [00:39:51] Alyssa Conary: But he, let's see, I think he's a Towne as well, somehow not a direct descendant of one of the sisters, but one of a descendant of one of their brothers. I think. I have no ancestors that I know of that my, all my ancestors were Quaker, not, I haven't found any that were actually executed, but definitely put in jail a lot. [00:40:10] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. [00:40:11] Alyssa Conary: yeah. [00:40:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'm also a Mary Esty descendant. My grandfather was from Danvers and he just moved to California after World War II. He, the Navy sent him there and he stayed so up until two generations ago, a quarter of my family at least was Essex County [00:40:35] Alyssa Conary: You're recently from Danvers. Yeah. That's fascinating [00:40:37] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Pretty recently. Just yeah, just a couple generations ago. I feel a closeness to Danvers and that area and [00:40:47] Alyssa Conary: I love Danvers. [00:40:49] Josh Hutchinson: Uh, like dozens of ancestors and close relatives that were involved in Salem on the accuser side as well as the accused and the in-between just playing different roles, giving testimony, signing petitions. [00:41:07] Alyssa Conary: Her letter, Mary Easty's letter, that, that blows my mind. They just, the Peabody Essex Museum had a, an exhibit, a Salem Witch Trials exhibit, and they actually had the actual piece of paper on display. And that was crazy to see. Yeah. [00:41:23] Sarah Jack: Yeah. You know that no more innocent should die. She said that in 1692, and that hasn't stopped yet. So I'm really motivated by those words of her to keep pulling out the education and pushing out the word, because the innocent need to stop dying. They, those women who were pleading for their lives then didn't want others to suffer. [00:41:54] Alyssa Conary: And it's happening. [00:41:56] Sarah Jack: Yeah. [00:41:56] Alyssa Conary: again and again. Yeah. [00:41:59] Sarah Jack: I was curious if you wanted to tell us anything about the hanging site in Boston. [00:42:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Traditionally, people have believed that in the 17th century the hangings were on Boston Common. And I know that in later centuries, actually, there were a few people hanged on Boston Common, as we know it today. But in the 17th century there were other pieces of land that were common land, and if you look at the maps from the early 18th century that exist, the gallows was actually on Boston Neck on some common land there. It's likely that sort of led to the misconception that they were happening on Boston Common, because that was also Boston land. So there is evidence, at least by the mid 17th century that yeah, people were, the gallows people were being executed on Boston Neck, which was this little tiny strip of land that connected the Shawmut Peninsula to the mainland. Now there's a bunch of landfill around it, it's, there isn't a tiny little strip of land anymore, but it's clearly marked on these early 18th century maps that that was the execution site, [00:43:01] Josh Hutchinson: So basically instead of hanging them in the center of town, they're taking them out towards the edge of town. [00:43:10] Alyssa Conary: Which was usually the case in 17th century New England, is they would execute people outside of town. [00:43:16] Sarah Jack: Which is a possible detail in Connecticut, in Hartford, possibly. We don't know. [00:43:25] Alyssa Conary: Do they, I don't even, you know what, I'm so uneducated about the Connecticut trials, even though I find them absolutely fascinating. Do they have a, know of the execution site in Hartford? [00:43:34] Josh Hutchinson: We think that we have a leading contender for it. It's, there's an old land transfer from the early 18th century that references a plot of land where the gallows once stood, and you can trace that, who owned that land, through the generations up till now, how it's transferred over the years, and what it's transformed into. But there's a legend that goes along with it of the Witch Elm. And back in 1930, they tore this witch elm down. So it, that doesn't stand there anymore. But the gallows were supposedly, like near that tree. That tree was the landmark. It used to be on a rise, which has since been graded down level, but it was up above, and it's about a mile from downtown Hartford. So again, it was on the town edge, it was on a road leading to the cow pasture. And yeah, it's just at the edge of what the town was at the time. [00:44:47] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Yeah. Which that is to be expected, which is the reason why Boston Neck is such a better location than Boston Common, because it was on the outside of town. So that's at least, Anne Hibbins and Goody Glover I'm pretty sure it would've been Boston Neck. Yeah. [00:45:06] Sarah Jack: And would've they discarded the bodies right there? [00:45:09] Alyssa Conary: I think that was usually the practice with executions. I don't specifically know of any evidence, but it's probably, it's safe to say that is most likely what would've happened, yep. [00:45:21] Josh Hutchinson: Okay. The question, what lessons can we learn from the past witch trials that we could apply today? [00:45:30] Alyssa Conary: Oh man. Yeah, that's a, I actually love, as a historian, on the one hand, you have to be able to recognize that the past is unique and that it has to be looked at for the sake of looking at it. And it has to be looked at from its own perspective. But, that being said, I think, I do think that there are, lessons. I do think that if history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. Someone said that once, I cannot remember who said that, but I loved it that history rhymes. So I think it is very useful to look for lessons. And as far as witch trials go, I think the lesson is to not get carried away. If you're looking at things like Salem, singling people out and demonizing them is something that humans have always done. But we can get into this sort of mode where we're not even seeing clearly anymore, where it's just like other people aren't even people to us anymore. And I think being able to pull ourselves back and ground ourselves back in, in a place where we can look at others and actually see them as people is really important. And it's scary, because, America today and like how divided we are. It's such a cliche, but it's true. And people, I feel like people don't even really see the humanity of other people at times. So I think that's the lesson is just stay in touch with people's humanity, other people's humanity. Don't forget about it. So I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons. [00:47:13] Sarah Jack: I think that's such a good reminder, because if things are hard and ugly, which surround a lot of witch hunting situations, and you hold onto that strand of humanity, it's the lifeline. It can pull everyone through to the other side less harmed. Working together, finding the common ground, healing through something together instead of divided would be great. [00:47:43] Alyssa Conary: Absolutely. Yeah. To think more about what you have in common than what might be different. That I think that loss of humanity is, and you see it in all kinds of discrimination and singling out of people. So it's just important to not forget that we need to take care of each other. That is just like something that is just gets so lost today is there's just no concept of I think the the sort of importance of taking care of other people is just like completely lost in our political discourse today. Yeah. It's all about seeing the humanity of others for sure. [00:48:24] Josh Hutchinson: Right now there's a lack of a collective, a feeling of that our society is a collective [00:48:33] Alyssa Conary: a [00:48:34] Josh Hutchinson: society. Yes. It's more I am out for me. Yeah, and you're out for you and yeah. And then it's easy if I have a problem to go blame it on somebody else. I don't want to take responsibility. Like the case you mentioned earlier where with the nurse and the baby died, because she had it out in the cold, if that's the way it went down. It's the same kind of thing today where something bad happens and you weren't prepared for it and instead of saying, "how could I have prepared for this?" You say, "who's responsible?" [00:49:16] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's just that loss of the idea of actually being responsible for the people around you. [00:49:25] Josh Hutchinson: We talked to economist Boris Gershman about what can be done about witch trials, and he was talking about how having a social safety net is important, because people are less likely to go out looking for who to blame if they've got some kind of backup, insurance. And I've heard that the ending of the early modern witch hunts, it coincided with a lot of institutionalization, but it also coincided with the advent of insurance. [00:50:00] Alyssa Conary: I think that's valid. Absolutely. When people are without any sort of help or any sense that things are gonna get better or that they can be better, absolutely the tendency for human beings is to lash out and blame someone. But yeah, no, I think there's absolutely something to that makes sense. [00:50:20] Josh Hutchinson: To change the subject a little bit, the question that just came to me was, had to do with Matthew Hopkins of England, the infamous witchfinder general that he called himself. [00:50:36] Alyssa Conary: Okay. [00:50:37] Josh Hutchinson: He wrote his book, A Discovery of Witches. And in that book he talks about his methods that he used and those included things like watching people to see if their familiars came to feed. Were any of those techniques employed in the Massachusetts Witch Trials? [00:50:57] Alyssa Conary: Yes, Margaret Jones was watched, and that was, it's funny, because it was, that's around the same time that's happening in England. So they are reading and hearing about Matthew Hopkins and that's evidence that they're using some of the same tactics here. So that's great evidence of the sort of back and forth that's happening between England and New England at the time. She was watched while she was in jail and I mean I, it could be seen as a form of torture, really. It's Matthew Hopkins. Wow. That whole thing was horrifying. Again, Paul Moyer's book, which why can't I think of the title? [00:51:36] Josh Hutchinson: Detestable and Wicked Arts. [00:51:38] Alyssa Conary: That's it. Yes. I love it. I've read it twice. He actually does, he makes that argument that, it's not a coincidence that this all starts up in New England around, 47, 48. That they are, hearing about what he's doing and going for it. And I think that makes a lot of sense. [00:51:56] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I [00:51:57] Alyssa Conary: But as far as his methods go, I think Margaret Jones is the only one that I can think of specifically that we'd know one of his tactics was used. [00:52:05] Josh Hutchinson: okay. Yeah. I think that people have this vision of New England as really being this independent entity, but it's obviously, it was very close with England, even though not geographically. You talked about the flow of information going back and [00:52:26] Alyssa Conary: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're, they're English. These are English people living across the Atlantic Ocean, but they're still English. And there is this back and forth, around the time of the English Civil Wars and you have people going back to England to fight for Cromwell. And you even have Hugh Peters who's one of the first Salem Reverends who goes back and he becomes, he's executed. He is one of the regicides who's executed for being a conspirator in the death of Charles I so there's absolutely. And there has been some written about this. I feel like there, it's not a ton, but I feel it's an area that's probably rich for a lot more research. But you do see these events in history that really remind you that these are English people living in New England. [00:53:17] Josh Hutchinson: It is interesting, like you said, when these witch trials start in New England, because in Connecticut you have Alice Young in 1647, and that's Matthew Hopkins time right there. [00:53:32] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, it's right there. It's something that I actually wondered about years ago and was like, I wonder if that's a thing and that, Moyer's book comes out and he just really lays it all out, like in a way that is just it's so obvious, that and it's crazy that no one had ever, really explicitly stated that before. But that's another book that I highly recommend if you're interested in this, because it's just phenomenal. [00:53:56] Josh Hutchinson: Another great book on that Malcolm Gaskill's The Ruin of All Witches [00:54:02] Alyssa Conary: Yep. [00:54:02] Josh Hutchinson: And, um, [00:54:04] Alyssa Conary: that book. [00:54:05] Josh Hutchinson: He also talks about the other factor in New England's settled first in 1620 and then Salem's founded in 1626. And there's people there for a couple decades before you start to see these trials. And I thought that his explanation of it takes a lot of like neighborhood friction basically building up these tensions and suspicions build up over the years. [00:54:36] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. They don't have beefs with anyone, yet. It's, everyone's just gotten here, so it takes some time. For sure. That's a, an absolutely spot on observation. I love that book. That book is just, talk about humanizing people from the past. He really just makes it feel so immediate. That's my favorite thing. Malcolm Gaskill is not only is he this, it's gonna become like a Malcolm Gaskill lovefest. Not only is he a phenomenal torian, but he is such an incredible writer. That book, like if you wanna get if you wanna feel close to the people that this happened to. That's the book to read for sure. Either that or Marilynne Roach, Six Women of Salem is the same sort of deal. That book just makes you feel like really another example of a great historian and a fantastic writer. Those two just really make you feel close to those victims, for sure. [00:55:28] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's like reading a novel or a almost a memoir. It's so personal and, [00:55:36] Alyssa Conary: it's, [00:55:37] Josh Hutchinson: And Malcolm Gaskill and Marilynne Roach, both just the details that they put in there. It makes it just seem so real, like you're watching it unfold. [00:55:49] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, it is. It's almost like watching a movie. [00:55:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, it's, those books are so good. [00:55:56] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. They're great. I. [00:55:58] Sarah Jack: What do you think, Josh? What else should we extract? [00:56:01] Josh Hutchinson: We haven't talked about Alice Lake. Do you have [00:56:06] Alyssa Conary: Alice. Yeah. [00:56:07] Josh Hutchinson: Lake? [00:56:09] Alyssa Conary: I, she is so fascinating to me. I know I say that about everyone 'cause they're all fascinating. But Alice Lake. Wow. I try, I have tried so hard to find more information about her and I cannot find a darn thing, let me tell you. And that's probably actually something that I'll continue looking for in the future, because I just need to know more about Alice Lake. [00:56:34] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. [00:56:34] Alyssa Conary: So yeah, just to talk about so the only evidence we have for what happened to Alice Lake is Hale. It's just his explanation of her being executed for witchcraft. Okay, so Alice Lake, she's from Dorchester and she's tried and executed, we think a about 1651. What Hale says is, okay, so on the day of her execution she's visited by Reverend William Thompson of Braintree, who is trying to convince her to repent her sins. And she denied she was guilty of witchcraft. She said, I'm innocent, but and this is, this part is so sad. She said, I'm innocent, but I deserve to die basically for my past sins. And she said, and I have her quote here from Hale. "She explained that she had when a single woman played the harlot and being with child used means to destroy the fruit of her body to conceal her sin and shape." So basically she had an abortion, and she said, "I deserve to die because I had an abortion." And I just, that is just so poignantly sad to me. She saw herself as actually she believed that she was a murderer. And it just makes you think a lot about how these different, like women's issues and these events that happen in women's lives, like how those interplayed with the belief in witchcraft. And actually infanticide is something that you see a lot that coincides with witchcraft accusations. And there's also suspicions of infanticide or maybe actual infanticide. Parsons is a good example of that as well. So it's just more of that issue of like women and witchcraft. Like I feel like there's just so much more there to look into and examine. And Alice Lake, it's funny because we actually know her children end up in Rhode Island with their father. And so it's just, it is crazy that we like know what happens to them, but we know so little about her life, like almost nothing. There was one more bit of information about her and it was a letter to Increase Mather from his brother. Nathaniel told Increase, he heard Alice Lake was lured by the devil when he appeared to her in the likeness and acting the part of a child of hers than lately dead on whom her heart was much sad. So there you go. There's another just devastating event in a woman's life that could in some way be tied to an accusation of witchcraft. It's just really sad. It's you think about all the pain and then on top of that, then she is executed for witchcraft. It's just awful, and she thinks she deserves it. So yeah, Alice Lake is someone to me who is just especially fascinating and I really wish I could find out more about her. [00:59:16] Josh Hutchinson: It reminded me of some other stories of women who decide that having an accusation brought against them means that they've done something else wrong other than, they know that they're not witches, but they look what other sin did I commit that this is [00:59:38] Alyssa Conary: Right. [00:59:39] Josh Hutchinson: to me? Yeah. [00:59:40] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. Yeah. That's, [00:59:43] Sarah Jack: And in modern politics, there are some [00:59:46] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. [00:59:48] Sarah Jack: men politicians who would believe that, because they said that when we were, when we were [00:59:54] Alyssa Conary: that for sure. Hmm. [00:59:54] Sarah Jack: for the exoneration of the Connecticut victims, there were some politicians that were highly concerned that we did not touch what other moral infractions, these culprits would've participated in, that we only acknowledge the compact with the devil because surely they were bad people already. [01:00:17] Alyssa Conary: There must be something else. Yeah. That's scary. And then when you talk about lessons you can learn, it feels like it's right. It really does sometimes feel like we're ripe for something like this to happen, and I hope I'm wrong. I really do. I hope it doesn't go that far. [01:00:33] Sarah Jack: It's [01:00:33] Alyssa Conary: and I know it is happening in other places for sure. It, I just feel like [01:00:39] Sarah Jack: It's gonna come down to the people standing up. But it's that whole concept of speaking up for those that aren't in the room. That's what's gonna stop it. There, there was this one attack in Papua New Guinea where a brave son pulled his mother off of the fire who was being burned for witchcraft belief. And she was harmed and she, she is suffering from what she went through, but he was brave and saved her life. And those are the types of actions that people will have to keep stepping up and doing, because it is possible for sanctioned witch trials to happen again. It, there's, [01:01:27] Alyssa Conary: yeah. Oh 100%. Yeah, it could happen for sure. It could absolutely happen. And I spend so much time these days like just looking at that rhyming, like I was talking about, that rhyming between history and being pretty freaked out by it, honestly. It's just interesting too that we've been saying this whole time that all this stuff about women is happening, again, and it's just all feels so familiar. Really does. [01:01:57] Sarah Jack: And now Mary Bingham is back for Minute with Mary.
[01:02:08] Mary Bingham: Sarah Jack recently asked the listeners a vital question in the past episode of this podcast, Ending Sorcery Related Violence with Miranda Forsyth, as part of the End Witch-Hunt News segment. Sarah's question, is your family precious? My answer. You bet. Sarah was referring not only to each of our nuclear families, she also challenged me as a listener to place myself in families where witchcraft accusations destroyed that tight family unit. These accusations where the wrongful accused were murdered, caused harmful disruption and displacement, which not only sadly affected one generation, but many to follow. . This was the case of four year old Dorothy Good in 1692, whose story was so eloquently told in the episode of this podcast, Rachel Chris Christ-Doane on the Salem Witch Museum and the life of Dorothy Good. This was also the case for Kepari Leniata's six year old daughter who was viciously attacked for supposedly bewitching her friend who became seriously ill and died. As was the belief in 1692 when Dorothy Good's mother, Sarah was hanged for witchcraft, some still believed that witchcraft or sorcery, as it is known in Kepari's home country of Papua New Guinea, is passed down from mother to daughter. You might remember that Kepari was brutally murdered for the false accusation of sorcery herself when her daughter was only eight months old, leaving behind not only this precious infant, but a son and a husband as well. This family unit was smashed into pieces. Her daughter's vicious attack happened in 2017. However, there was hope when activists Ruth Kissam and Anton Lutz stepped in and saved the girl's life. Ruth welcomed her into her home and family. Ruth's brothers and nephews took such good care that she was able to find a new safety net. Ruth's family became her own. For more information on Kepari's story, please read my two articles regarding her case and that of her daughter on medium.com, "Kepari Leniata" and "Kepari Leniata: Her Legacy Lives On." Please listen to the two podcast episodes with Miranda Forsyth and Rachel Christ-Doane. Place yourself in these situations. Always stay tuned to listen to Sarah's End Witch Hunt News for current global News as to how communities and organizations fight daily to stop Deadly Witch Hunts. Then visit endwitchhunts.org to see how you can help to save a life. Thank you.
[01:05:11] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary. [01:05:14] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:05:24] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a Nonprofit 501(c)(3) Weekly News Update. So what exactly is this History Camp Boston that you heard about in Alyssa Conary's episode? It starts with The Pursuit of History, a nonprofit organization. They engage adults in conversation about history by connecting them with historic sites in their communities and across the country through innovative in-person and online programming. Their in-person annual events include History Camp Boston, Pursuit of History Weekends, and the weekly live, online, in-depth History Camp Discussions with noted historians and authors. History Camp Boston 2023 is about to become history, so don't miss it. It's in Boston, August 11th through the 13th, and they offer a scholarship for a free day for students for the August 12th date. See our show notes for the link. Get there. Every week, Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast brings both the history of the past witch trials and news and education about the current global effort of ending modern witch Hunts. Would you be surprised to hear that the United States is engaged in global development partnerships that can affect witch-hunt violence? In 2023, the United States has now kicked off a 10 year long-term initiative that will impact witch-hunt violence. The US Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability is a long-term initiative to redefine how the United States prevents violence and advances stability in areas vulnerable to conflict. As you have learned from our academic, economist, and activist interviews and suggested books and other research reading, addressing witchcraft-related violence begins with offering solutions for communities that may reduce gender violence and offer stability for the vulnerable. The countries and communities targeted in this strategy are Coastal West Africa, Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, and Papua New Guinea. Quote, "these plans represent a meaningful, long-term commitment by the United States to build the political and economic resilience of partner societies by making strategic investments in prevention to mitigate the underlying vulnerabilities that can lead to conflict and violence and are critical to achieving lasting peace." -- President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. March 24th, 2023. Please read about this initiative now. Click the link in our show notes to see the USAID pamphlet on this initiative. Have you heard of the US Government Agency, USAID? The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is, quote, "the world's premier international development agency and a catalytic actor driving development results. USAID's work advances US national security and economic prosperity, demonstrates American generosity, and promotes a path to recipient self-reliance and resilience." The USAID receives its funding from Congress. Thank you for being a part of the Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. We appreciate your listening and support. Keep sharing our episodes with your friends, have conversations with them about what you are learning and how you want to jump in and end Witch hunts with your particular abilities influence a network. Community development that works to end witch hunts is an ongoing long-term collective effort for all of us to participate in. You can learn by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country specific advocacy groups and development plans in motion across the globe. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. And now that it's back to school pre-game time, be sure to share a link with your teacher friends. To support us, make a tax-deductible donation, purchase books from our bookshop, or merch from our Zazzle shop. Have you considered supporting the production of the podcast by joining us as a super listener? You can be a super listener by committing to as little as $3 a month, but don't stop there if you are really excited about our programming, go ahead and add a zero to that three. Your super listener donation is tax-deductible. Thank you for being a part of our work.
[01:09:13] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah. [01:09:15] Sarah Jack: You're welcome. [01:09:17] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. [01:09:21] Sarah Jack: Please join us next week. [01:09:23] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. [01:09:26] Sarah Jack: Visit us this week at thoushaltnotsuffer.Com. [01:09:29] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show. [01:09:32] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. [01:09:35] Josh Hutchinson: Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more. [01:09:38] Sarah Jack: Please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. [01:09:43] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Learn about the latter life of Salem witch trial victim Dorothy Good and Discover what the Salem Witch Museum is all about as we chat with Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education at the Salem Witch Museum.
Rachel discusses the history of the museum and the story of the building, the exceptional online educational programming that is available and she explains what a tour of the museum is like. You even get to hear a little about the tourism of the iconic city of Salem, aka Witch City. Next Rachel discusses her recent research project that has brought shocking details to light of what life became for Dorothy Good, the four year old child that was tried for witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. During our advocacy talk we reflect on the plight of people in need in early modern New England and how we stop hunting witches.
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education for the Salem Witch Museum, about the museum, Salem, and the tragic life of Dorothy Good, youngest victim of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:40] Sarah Jack: This is such a special episode. We are talking to the Salem Witch Museum in this episode. If there is an extended tour, this might be what it's like. You're gonna learn so much about the Salem Witch Museum history, their robust educational programming, and the future of the museum.
[00:01:01] Josh Hutchinson: We'll get the behind the scenes of the Salem Witch Museum. Rachel has done a lot for the museum. She does excellent research and has put together a number of very special educational opportunities and offerings. You can find many of them on the website, salemwitchmuseum.com. Others you can experience in the museum or purchase in the gift shop, such as their descendant packets of information on the victims of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:01:41] Sarah Jack: And those packets were researched personally by Rachel and Jill Christiansen.
[00:01:47] Josh Hutchinson: They do thorough research putting together biographies of each of those individuals who were involved in the trials, and as Rachel says, coming up in the episode, it's an extended project. They're always coming out with new packets.
[00:02:08] Sarah Jack: I visited the Salem Witch Museum for the first time in May.
[00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: How was your experience there, Sarah?
[00:02:15] Sarah Jack: It was really exciting. I actually enjoyed seeing the tourists' excitement as they walked in. And it's just you're anticipating what is it you're gonna learn? What is it you're gonna see? And the staff is so welcoming.
[00:02:36] Josh Hutchinson: I was actually there at the same time you know what that experience was like. I've been to Salem several times, but that was my first time going in the museum and seeing their highly engaging presentation about the history of the Salem Witch Trials. And the tour guide was very knowledgeable. After the initial presentation, you'll be guided into another room where you'll see exhibits on the history of witch trials and the image of the witch over time, and then you'll be taken to a wall with a timeline of witch hunts over several centuries.
[00:03:28] Sarah Jack: You are left wanting more, and that is why their virtual programming is so great. You can stay in touch and keep learning.
Our visit was extra special, because we were accompanied by Dr. Leo Igwe, director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches, and that same day he did a virtual presentation for the Salem Witch Museum, which you can watch, and we have the link in our show notes.
That really was special that we got to do that with him.
[00:04:02] Josh Hutchinson: You'll remember Dr. Leo Igwe from two of our previous episodes, and we'll have links to those in the show notes.
We're also going to learn about the history of the Salem Witch Museum's iconic building.
[00:04:16] Sarah Jack: What is dark tourism? Is Salem tourism and its attractions dark tourism?
[00:04:21] Josh Hutchinson: We're gonna get an introduction to young Dorothy Good, who was four years old when she was arrested in the trials. We'll learn what happened to her and her family.
[00:04:35] Sarah Jack: Rachel has uncovered new details of Dorothy's life after the trials.
[00:04:41] Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn where she went and how she lived.
[00:04:46] Sarah Jack: You will also find out a little bit about Ann Dolliver and how some of her adult experiences mirrored what Dorothy and other women in those situations suffered through.
Welcome Rachel Christ-Doane, the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum. She holds a bachelor's in history from Clark University and a master's in history and museum studies from Tufts University. Today she's going to introduce us to the educational programming the Salem Witch Museum offers and introduce us to the recently discovered details of the life of Dorothy Good, Salem's youngest witch trial victim.
So we're gonna start with talking about the museum first. Can you tell us when it was founded?
[00:05:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: The Salem Witch Museum was founded in 1972, so last year was our 50th anniversary.
[00:05:39] Josh Hutchinson: Wow, that's a big one.
[00:05:41] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, it was very exciting. It was a lot of fun. We had a private party, but various kind of Salem officials came, and then quite a few people who were involved in actually creating the museum were here, which was really neat to meet them, because our museum's a very kind of unusual format. It's presentation-based, and especially for the seventies, that was a very unusual way to present historical information. So it was really neat hearing about what the process was like creating it and how it's endured and remained, with kind of minimal changes over the years. That's really it. It was like a series of happy accidents led to this place, which is very neat.
[00:06:24] Josh Hutchinson: We had a great time there in May, and we love the building that you're in. What can you tell us about that?
[00:06:32] Rachel Christ-Doane: We are very fortunate to have it, but it's also one of our kind of greatest obstacles. So it's a really neat historic building. It was built in mid 19th century, and it was constructed as a church. So it was originally constructed for the East Church congregation of Salem that eventually became known as the Second Unitarian Church, and it served as a church until about the like 1940s, quite, quite a long time. And then the congregation disbanded and was absorbed into other local churches. The building was then an antique car museum for a while. It was an auto and Americana museum, which the pictures from that museum were really wild, seeing these old timey cars in here. And then there was actually a really serious internal fire that destroyed a significant portion of the inside, the internal portion of the museum. So the car museum was gone, and the Salem Witch Museum was founded a couple years later.
[00:07:31] Sarah Jack: It's very fortunate that they didn't just level it and leave, start from scratch, because the image is such a iconic piece now.
[00:07:42] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, that's actually the second fire in the museum's history that we know of. We're actually internally not sure that some say there were three fires. There were definitely two. There was another one in the early 20th century, which damaged the towers. So we have those two towers in front of the museum and they actually used to be much taller, and the fire weakened one of the towers, so they both had to be taken down, reduced to their present size. So hopefully that's it for fires with the building.
[00:08:13] Josh Hutchinson: And for our listeners who haven't been able to join you there yet, what is the presentation like? What's a tour consist of at the museum?
[00:08:25] Rachel Christ-Doane: So we're a two-part presentation. So the first part, you go into a large darkened auditorium, which was actually where kind of the main congregational space when this building was a church. And you see an audiovisual presentation about the Salem Witch Trials. So it's about 20 minutes long. Large life-sized dioramas that tell you the story of the Salem Witch Trials from the very beginning to the very end, an overview of the event. It is theatrical. It's intended to be entertaining, engaging, I should say, but it is a history presentation at its core. And then our visitors go into a second exhibit, which was added in 1999. It's called Witches: Evolving Perceptions, and that's about the evolving image of the witch, the European witch trials, modern day witchcraft. And then we talk a little bit about the meaning of the word witch-hunt and why we should be learning about these events.
[00:09:24] Sarah Jack: Your social media is really strong, and you're always enticing us into the programs that you're offering. Do you wanna tell us about what programs are available and how people can experience those?
[00:09:38] Rachel Christ-Doane: One of the silver linings of the pandemic we can say is we really surged into kind of the virtual stratosphere. So one of the resources we've been offering in the past couple of years are these virtual programs, which are honestly really fun. They're maybe my favorite part of the job. Myself and our assistant education director, Jill Christiansen, work on these programs from year to year.
So we typically offer three to four programs a year, sometimes more, sometimes less. And they cover just a variety of topics from researching the Salem Witch Trials and how historians make mistakes in the research process, we did an event about that this year, to contemporary witch hunts, such as those that are going on in Africa, which we posted a guest lecture. Dr. Igwe was here this year. We do events about women's history. We did an event about race and the Salem Witch Trials a few years ago, where we talked about how contemporary conceptions of race informed the way the trials or impacted the way the trials took place and then also how ideas about race have informed the narrative of the witch trials over time. So it's a variety of different events.
We create in-house a lot of lectures, which is really fun for us. And then we also bring in guest speakers. And that's just been a way for us to widen our audience and get our information out to people who can't necessarily come visit us in person or who want to visit us in person but haven't had an opportunity yet.
[00:11:11] Sarah Jack: I just appreciate how broad and deep and enriching the program topics that you offer, and as an out of state descendant, I gleaned a lot of history and information from attending, last May, I attended the panel that you did with several of the Salem authors and that was probably my introduction to the museum, actually. And then getting to visit this May, a year later. But I really appreciate when I see that a program is gonna be happening, it's not, "oh, it's more of the same thing." It's always something that is gonna be really important for people to get to experience. So thanks for doing that.
[00:11:54] Rachel Christ-Doane: Thank you. That's always really good to hear. And that's the kind of best part about this subject is it's so rich, there's so many different angles you can come into talking about the history of witchcraft. I don't think we'll ever run out of topics for these events.
[00:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: And you have another event coming up that looks very intriguing.
[00:12:16] Rachel Christ-Doane: It's July 20th. We are offering an event called Witch Trials and Antisemitism: a Surprisingly Tangled History. So this is an event that I personally have really wanted to do for several years now. So basically we're gonna very broadly be discussing the kind of overlap in connections between the treatment of Jews in European history and witches. And essentially the kind of very short version is a lot of the stories that are used to demonize Jewish individuals in the medieval period, stories about how Jews eat children and kill babies and drink blood, things that are, of course, 100% incorrect. These are just stories used to demonize others.
Those same stories end up getting recycled and used again during the witch trials period. But instead of being used against Jews, they're used against witches. So we're gonna really dive into that overlapping history, and we felt that this was a particularly important topic to talk about, because there has been such a surge in antisemitism over the past few years, and a lot of these same stories are coming up again.
There's this secret conspiracy of people who are hiding in plain sight, and they're eating children, and it's you hear a lot of rhetoric today that could have been copied and pasted from 1200 or 1500, so we felt like this was a really important topic to really dive into.
And it's a little bit outside of our comfort zone, cuz we're really diving into the medieval period. But we've put a lot of time and effort into this research, and we've had some really wonderful outside sources consulting with us for this. So I think it's gonna be a really great program.
[00:13:59] Sarah Jack: That's wonderful. Would you like to tell us how you got started at the museum?
[00:14:05] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, I ended up here by accident. I always say. It was a fortuitous journey. So when I was in the midst of my undergrad career, I was a history major, and I was interested in women's history, and I didn't quite know how I was going to ever make money out of, find a profession that would actually pay me to do that kind of history.
I applied to a bunch of different museums across Massachusetts, thinking it would be good to just get some experience in a museum space. And I applied at the Salem Witch Museum, and they had a opening position. So I worked here on the floor as just a general staff member, and I just fell in love with Salem and with this history. And I, you know, have have been here ever since. That was 2015. So I ended up finishing out my undergraduate career really focusing on witchcraft history. And then when I graduated, I came back to the museum and was able to pursue a master's degree while working here. And I've been the director of education since about 2018.
So it's been a really fun journey and now I always joke that I'm so specialized in this now I can't leave. Not that I would ever want to, this is definitely a job like no other, which is really special.
[00:15:24] Josh Hutchinson: We're so glad that you're there. You're doing wonderful work with all these programming and the educational offerings that you have. I know summer's a busy season for you, but what is life like there in October?
[00:15:41] Rachel Christ-Doane: So I've been working here for about eight years now, and even in just that time, October has become steadily more and more difficult to manage in some ways as time has gone on. So for those who might be listening who don't know, October is by far the busiest time of year for Salem. The city sponsors an event called Haunted Happenings. It's a fall festival that goes on for the entire month of October. And it was actually envisioned as, it was created as, a one weekend event in 1982. It was just supposed to be two days. And nobody could have foreseen how popular this festival would become.
There's all kinds of things happening throughout the city throughout that time. The different businesses do special events and things like that. There's tours, there's concerts. It's a really fun time to be here. But Salem is actually quite a small city. We were never meant to be hosting a festival that's this popular.
So even in the past few years since the pandemic, last year, we had the busiest year on record. We had over a million people come in the month of October, which was just unbelievably crazy to a point where the city's infrastructure simply can't handle it. Restrooms were breaking all over the city, like the plumbing of Salem couldn't physically handle it. It's a testament to how much people love Halloween and the popularity of that particular fall holiday, which people now very strongly associate with Salem. So it's a blessing and a curse.
It's really fun to work here in October to a degree. You get to meet people from all over the world who are in full-on Halloween costumes for the entire month of October, who are just so happy and excited to be here, so that's really fun. But at the same time it's also very demanding, and people tend to get a little frustrated trying to get in and out of Salem and are maybe not so nice to the service workers while they're here. So this is a friendly reminder to always be nice to service workers wherever you go, because it's people just trying their best to make your visit fun.
So it's good, and it's stressful. And it's also what allows Salem to thrive as a community, because the revenue that's generated in October is what keeps the city going throughout the winter. So again, it's a blessing and a curse all in one.
[00:18:12] Sarah Jack: And is there any other aspects of the tourism that you might like to speak to as far as the city or your museum?
[00:18:21] Rachel Christ-Doane: So I always say that Salem is a very unique example of tourism. We're a case of what would be called dark tourism. Contemporary tourists traveling to a site associated with dark or tragic history. So Salem is this very kind of unique, strange place because when most people think of the word witch today, they don't necessarily think of the historic criminal offense of witchcraft.
Of course, they know witch trials happened here and usually are aware that resulted in the deaths of innocent people. But for most people, witches are a pop culture phenomena. They're Hocus Pocus and Harry Potter and Wicked and Charmed and all of these kind of beloved cultural figures we know today.
So that makes tourism here very tricky, because what draws people here is not necessarily a colonial history lesson. It's this kind of deeper story of the supernatural and magic and the occult and things like that. Which I always say is not a bad thing. It's very tempting to condemn the contemporary tourism industry here and say, "this is so inappropriate, none of it should happen. Why would the city feed into this at all?" And I always say, it's not a bad thing that people have this in mind. You can't criticize people, because that's just what our culture is today. The important thing to do is once they're here and they're excited about being here, is to then use it as an opportunity to educate them about the importance of this history and what really happened and what a witch really was in 1692.
And you know, I won't flatter myself to say that every person leaves our museum, for example, with this kind of more enlightened view of the witch, but we certainly hope that many of our visitors do. And again, it's this kind of really unique opportunity to educate that most historical sites only dream about. So it's an interesting place, Salem.
[00:20:26] Josh Hutchinson: And what are some of the historical points of interest that are near the museum?
[00:20:33] Rachel Christ-Doane: There's lots of stuff nearby the museum, lots of places with direct connections to the witch trials and also just to the broader history of Salem. Salem is an embarrassment of riches when we talk about the history here, beyond the witch trials.
But in terms of our witch history, we're very close to several important sites. The site where the Salem Jail stood is right around the corner from our building. The site where the courthouse was and the meeting house. Those are all very near where we are. And when you guys were here, we obviously, we did a little walking tour and showed you the sites. And we do have a witch trials online sites tour on our website, where you can see different sites in Salem and across Essex County that have these connections.
So even if a marker isn't there today, we will show you the approximate location and the history of that site. That's our assistant education director's baby. That's a project she will work on for the rest of her life. So it's an ever expanding resource. But then we also have the Witch Trials Memorial that's very close to us.
So that memorial was actually in part created by our museum. We were very involved in its creation. Our director at the time and education director were extremely involved in organizing the tercentenary and the creation of the Witch Trials Memorial. And we actually have an entire virtual lecture about the history of the memorial, if anybody is interested in it, but that site is a really special place. It's right next to the Old Buring Point Cemetery, which is one of the oldest cemeteries in America, and several of the judges from the witch trials are buried there. Yeah, if anybody's ever visiting Salem, I always recommend going to the memorial, because it's really, it's a good place to reflect on what really happened here and the real people who were involved.
[00:22:25] Sarah Jack: Yes. Thank you so much for that walking tour. It was really memorable to be able to do that with you. And we had Dr. Igwe with us, and I remember when we were at the memorial, when we walked up and he saw the quotes there from some of the victims, how much that struck him, because he hears those words now too many times where he's working. So thank you for giving us that extra little history lesson and experience when we visited.
What is next for the Salem Witch Museum?
[00:22:59] Rachel Christ-Doane: It's kind of a two-part answer. So we're in the midst of the series of very large updates, interpretive updates. This is something we've been working on for many years now. The kind of first leg of this project was updating our second exhibit, Witches: Evolving Perceptions. So when I say updating, the kind of most significant element of this is removing some dated scholarship.
So scholarship, as we know, changes all the time. We learn more and more all the time about this history and kind of particularly in regards to witchcraft history. This field is still relatively new. It doesn't become a very serious academic discipline until the mid 20th century. So a lot of research has been produced since the creation of our museum and the creation of these exhibits.
So updating the interpretation, removing some dated content, such as when that exhibit, second exhibit was created. It was widely believed that a million people were executed during the European witch trials. Now, we now know that that's actually impossible given the population of Europe and the effects of the Black Plague. And historians have come up with the more reasonable estimate that it's closer probably to about 45,000 people on the lower end of the spectrum. Getting rid of information like that, adding new information just in response to our audience and what we see people interested in learning about, adding some new artifacts back there has been a big push in recent years.
We have a first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in our section where we talk about the evolving image of the witch. We do actually have a copy of the book, The Malleus Maleficarum, which was an incredibly important text during the European witch trials. It was a manual for witch hunters. We have a copy of that and several other texts related to demonology in our collection that are not yet on display, but are hopefully going on display in the next few years.
And then the next big saga or the next chapter is updating our main presentation and doing the same thing, removing points of dated scholarship. So that presentation was created in 1972, and since 1972, we've learned a lot about the trials. We've learned a lot about the kind of story of events. So the kind of cause and effect at the beginning of the trials, particularly the role of Tituba, who's an enslaved woman who's one of the first accused. That's something we've learned a lot about and had to unlearn some narratives since 1972. Things like knowing the location of the hangings, knowing it's not Gallows Hill, it's Proctor's Ledge, these are all relatively recent elements of the scholarly conversation. So all this to say, this is the next big project.
But the project has been going on for many years now, and it's been a series of really unfortunate events. The first time we started working on this, the front of the building started to separate from the building. It started to sag off. So that was a million dollar project just to fix the structure of the building.
And that's why I say our building is a blessing and a curse, because maintenance to a 19th century building is very difficult. And then the second time we had pulled the plug on this, it was January of 2020 and a couple months later, the entire country shut down. So we are now in round three.
I swear if there are any more destructive, life-altering events, we're gonna have to burn a sage bonfire or something, cuz it's feeling like this project is a little cursed. But anyway that's the next big thing on our horizon is just finishing finally that big project so that we can move on and work on building additional exhibits and adding additional content and things like that.
[00:26:44] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for sharing so much about the museum. We absolutely enjoyed ourselves there and your programming. And you also are heavily involved in research, and you've done some very incredible research into Dorothy Good, one of your subjects. And could you introduce Dorothy to the audience?
[00:27:10] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So Dorothy is arguably one of the saddest stories from the Salem Witch Trials. So she is the daughter of Sarah Good, who's one of the first people accused. She is executed during the trials, and Dorothy is four years old, so she is accused of witchcraft not long after her mother. She is arrested and placed in prison, and she remains in jail for about eight months, seven or eight months. So she's not released from prison until December of 1692. And she is so traumatized by her experience that she is never able to recover. Her mother dies. Her infant sister, who accompanies her mother to jail, because she's too young to be separated from her mother, also dies in jail. And she's four years old, shackled in a prison cell. So the emotional trauma she carried with her through the rest of her life is just, it's very hard for us to really even imagine today.
[00:28:15] Sarah Jack: I was wondering what, were there other types of situations where they would have imprisoned and shackled a child of that age during that time?
[00:28:25] Rachel Christ-Doane: Maybe. It's very hard to envision. There are cases of extreme poverty where, they wouldn't necessarily, and this is also a little bit later after 1692, you wouldn't necessarily be arrested and shackled, but you might be sent to a poor house. But yeah, it's very difficult to envision another situation where a child that young would be arrested for a crime. It would have to be a very unusual situation.
[00:28:54] Sarah Jack: It really struck me when you were giving your presentation for History Camp and you talked about what it would've even been like to get her to the prison, that she would've not walked herself there. She would've been brought there, like physically carried, picked up.
[00:29:12] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So my research in recent years, the past couple years, has been about her adult life. And I stumbled upon these records in the Salem town selectmen record book that show she kind of, as an adult, bounces around from house to house for most of her adult life, because she's unable to care for herself. So it's this really horrible story about not only the youngest accused witch during the Salem Witch Trials but also the life of a colonial woman who couldn't contribute to society. So if you weren't able to fulfill the role of mother, wife, keeper of the house, society struggled to deal with you.
And honestly, it's, that is true to this day, right? We still have a difficult time dealing with people who can't contribute to society. And Dorothy is, it turns out, a really clear example of that, so I have been working on this research about this story of her adult life for a few years. I published an article in the American Ancestors Magazine this past, I think it was the Spring edition, where I talk about the discovery and what we know now.
And now I'm currently pivoting and trying to work on this as a full book, just really diving into what do these records really tell us about a woman in the 18th century who couldn't function, who's struggling with a mental health issue, whatever that may be in clinical terms? She's not able to care for herself, so what does that mean? So it's really depressing research, but it's really interesting, and it certainly aligns with, I've always been interested in women's history. Turns out women's history is extremely depressing.
[00:31:05] Josh Hutchinson: What does the story mean? What is the importance of this new information about Dorothy for understanding the aftermath of the Salem witch trials?
[00:31:17] Rachel Christ-Doane: Sometimes people are a little shocked when they hear that 20 people are executed and shocked in terms of they think that number should be much higher. And I think that stems from the Salem Witch Trails are just so famous. You hear about them in popular culture so frequently. They're arguably the most famous witchcraft trial in Western history. So they assume that the, quote, unquote, "body count" should be higher or it should have been more brutal or something like that. And this is a reminder of 20 people being executed is a very large amount, number one. We can't discount that, but then we also can't discount the people who lived afterwards were forever altered by this experience. You didn't just go back to your day-to-day life like nothing had happened. So many people were traumatized, would've certainly struggled to live in this community or just live out the rest of their lives. We can only imagine, especially those people who were imprisoned for months and months. So it's kind of a reminder of these events were absolutely devastating to every person involved, not just the executed but the survivors were also forever destroyed by these events.
[00:32:36] Sarah Jack: And in the Good case, prior to the execution of Sarah, their family was already really struggling. Mr. Good wasn't necessarily helping Sarah contribute to society, and now she's gone, but he is still there. So Dorothy still has a father. Did he remarry? Did he take care of Dorothy? What happened?
[00:33:03] Rachel Christ-Doane: So he does remarry. He remarries relatively quickly after the trials. I don't remember the date exactly, it's I'll have to look it up, but it's maybe a year or two later. It's pretty fast, which was not uncommon during the time, especially because he now has this very traumatized four-year-old daughter. He likely needed a partner in the house to help him. He actually submits a request for a reparations payment when the reparations process is happening in the 1700s. And previously, that request for a payment had been all that we knew about Dorothy.
So he says in that payment that he is asking on behalf of his wife who's died, his other child who has died, and then his daughter Dorothy, who was shackled in a prison for months. And he says she is "chargeable, having little or no reason to govern herself." So when you look up the phrase chargeable, it actually means she's expensive. So meaning that her care is difficult, it's taxing on him financially. And then saying with little or no reason to govern herself, we have long inferred that meant she's clearly struggling with some sort of debilitating mental illness as a result of her trauma.
So we know that she lives with her father for quite a few years after the trials and his new wife. However, she in, I think it's around 1708 or so, starts to appear in the care of other people. So he clearly is not capable of taking care of her. And when he actually is awarded his reparation payment in 1711, he directs that payment go to the person who's currently caring for her, which indicates she's not living with him, certainly by that time.
William Good does not come across as a good person in history, and it's always hard to draw those definitive lines about who's a good person and who's not, especially cuz we have such little information about them. But he's not a good provider for Sarah. We know that the couple were destitute, they were forced to beg in the years before 1692.
Then during Sarah's trial or pre-trial examinations, he comes forward, and he says that she's probably a witch. Like he implicates her. And then after the trials are over, he ends up giving up Dorothy into the care of somebody else. We don't know what's going on with him. Maybe he's struggling with his own demons. Maybe he just wasn't capable of providing for a child that was that sick. But he does abandon her ultimately into the care of someone else. And then he disappears. And interestingly, his second wife, whose name is Elizabeth, she actually appears in the Selectmen records as well and seems to be in the care of other people. So I think he abandons both of them. He either dies, and his death is not recorded, which is certainly possible, or he just disappears, and he leaves them both, and he moves away. So either way, not a great ending for William Good.
[00:36:06] Josh Hutchinson: And given the struggles that her family had with poverty and then her own challenges, I'd like to know, was there a system in place to aid people who had needs like that?
[00:36:21] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yes. And that's actually why we know why there are records about Dorothy in the years that follow. So New England's poverty laws are very much mimicking the poverty laws in England. So essentially they're supposed to have an overseer, set of overseers of the poor, people who pay attention to the poor in your area and make sure that they're being cared for.
They do have a requirement about quote, unquote, "deserving poor." So these are people who are legal residents of your town. So that's to say that if somebody wandered into your town who was from Billerica, let's say, wanders into Salem Village. Salem Village would not be legally obligated to provide for that person. They would pass them back to Billerica, because it was Billerica's duty to be the one who's caring for them.
So it's, yes, they did have a system in place to care for them, but it's, they're really trying to pass people off. They try very hard not to have to care for you if they don't have to. And basically the systems that it is in place for many years is people would be put into the care of a local family. So you would live with someone for X amount of time. Usually they're doing it year by year, and the town would pay that family for your care. So they would pay for your clothing, for your food, things like that, and then, a year later, if that family still wanted to take care of you, they would keep you, and there would be a notation about it in the selectman records, or if not, somebody else would take you in, ideally, and the cycle would continue.
So that's how I was able to find Dorothy, is I was looking in the selectman records for somebody else, for Ann Dolliver, who is also accused of witchcraft, and she lived where our museum actually stands today. I was trying to figure out when her death date is, and I knew she was involved in this system of caring for the poor. And in looking for her, I found all these records from selectman, year to year, commenting on the care of Dorothy.
[00:38:28] Sarah Jack: Who ended up taking care of Dorothy?
[00:38:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: So it's a series of people. There's a Putnam who actually cares for her for a little while. It's Benjamin Putnam. Who is in terms of, if you know anything about the witch trials, the Putnam's are the villain family. They're the chief accusers, we can say, Thomas Putnam's family is. But this is a very large family, and there's certainly members of the Putnam families who are not involved in the witch trials or are sympathetic to the victims. So Benjamin is part of the family where his father hadn't been very involved. He hadn't been very involved. His father signed a petition, in fact, in favor of Rebecca Nurse. So they seem to have been sympathetic to the victims.
So he cares for her for a while. He then passes away, and his son Nathaniel takes over her care for a little while. And then she actually disappears and comes back pregnant. So that's, we don't really know what happened, or I'm working on finding out what happens to her, but whether she got pregnant living in Nathaniel's house, whether she left the house, went somewhere else, and returned pregnant is unclear. There is no record indicating who the father of the child is, so it's a big question mark. She and the baby end up living with Nathan for a little while, and then she bounces around from a few different houses.
She ends up in the house of corrections for a little while, which is like a poorhouse. It's places that people who were impoverished, who weren't showing signs of participating in society at all, so who were not helping in the houses they were living in or being quote, unquote, "lazy." Things like that could get you a stay in the house of correction. So she's there for a little while. She ends up getting pregnant a second time and gives birth in Concord, which is very confusing. How and why she ends up in Concord is still very unclear.
And then ultimately she ends up for most of her life, or most of her adult life, in the care of a man named Jonathan Batchelder, who lives in Beverly. He's very interesting, because he actually testified against Sarah Good years before, during the witch trials. He's young at the time. He's a a teenager. But he's one of the people who offers testimony against her. So we can make all kinds of speculations about is he taking care of Dorothy, Sarah's child, out of guilt, out of Christian charity, because he feels remorse for what he did? Whatever the case, he ends up taking care of her and her second child.
And then after Jonathan dies, Dorothy disappears, no idea where she goes. That's, I have some theories about it, but no definitive proof. And we don't know when or where she dies definitively, although I'm probably gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out.
[00:41:20] Josh Hutchinson: One of those men you mentioned in your talk and in the article in American Ancestors was Robert Hutchinson, and he's my ninth great grand uncle. And thought I'd mention that. But his father, Joseph, was one of the ones who accused Sarah Good. So I always wondered, once I learned that Robert had involvement with Dorothy Good, was he making up for something? It's speculation, of course.
[00:41:49] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially because, so I will confess, I have a negative view of Robert, because Dorothy doesn't seem to wanna stay with him. So there's two or three occasions where she's, there's a record that says she's supposed to go into his care, and then she ends up somewhere else, either in the House of Corrections, or she ends up in Concord giving birth to a child.
She, it seems like there's a couple of attempts for her to stay with him, and she does maybe stay with him for some amount of time, but it's very interesting to me that it doesn't really stick. And we can make a lot of speculations as to why, so I, we all have like fictional narratives of what's going on, and then I kind of wonder if maybe she just didn't like him or didn't like living in his house for some reason. Is something going on there? But that's very interesting. If you find anything else about your relative, let me know.
[00:42:43] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:45] Sarah Jack: My speculative narrative on that situation is maybe Mrs. Hutchinson didn't want her there.
[00:42:51] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So the kind of darkest narrative, I will confess, is she does get pregnant around one of the times where she's supposed to be living with him. Is he the father of her child? That is total speculation. I have literally no reason to think that other than she's just near him. But so I don't wanna slander the name of Robert Hutchinson, but it's interesting to consider, you know, especially because we have no leads.
Normally in a case of an unwed mother, or I should say regularly in a case of an unwed mother, they would really try to figure out who the father is, because that helped with the financial situation. It was in the town's best interest to have a recorded father, because then they could be financially responsible for the child, as opposed to if no father is named, then now you've got a baby born out of wedlock, so you have to support the mother and the baby.
I have been through the records looking at cases of premarital sex and bastard children, and there's a lot of records of women and their baby daddies, for lack of a better term, that the court would force them to on record say who it was, and Dorothy just does not appear in those records. So that's really interesting. Could they just not get her to say who it was? We don't know. Given her mental state, was she capable of telling them who it was? It's unclear. We don't know how cognitive she is. We don't know how she might not have been a verbal person. It's very kinda shady the way her mental health is described.
So yeah, we can, we can, and I do, make many speculations about it on my own, but in lack of firm evidence, all we can say is there's two babies. One's a boy and one's a girl, and we have no idea who the fathers are.
[00:44:42] Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned a house of corrections. What was that?
[00:44:49] Rachel Christ-Doane: So it's like a workhouse, poorhouse. So the house of corrections in Salem is actually built as an attachment onto the jail, which is a whole other layer of kind of, a whole other disturbing layer here, because Dorothy is certainly in jail in Salem for some amount of time. I don't think she's there for the majority of her imprisonment. I think she's in Boston. But she was brought there for her initial questioning. She may have been transferred there at some point. Her mother is certainly transferred there before her trial. The fact that Dorothy is then as an adult sent to the house of correction, which is just a building added on to that jail space, that's horrible that we can only imagine how triggering that would be.
So when people who are sent there, there are some lines in the records describing other women who are there, who were set to work like spinning and things like that. So this was a place for people who, again, were not contributing to society. There's some very strong language in the Massachusetts laws that say, if you're idle, if you're slothful, things like that, you will be sent to the house of correction. So yeah, what she's actually doing in there, who can say, but other people who were in that situation were required to like spin wool and things like that.
[00:46:13] Sarah Jack: I was wondering who took care of her children.
[00:46:17] Rachel Christ-Doane: So both children become indentured servants, which was very common for children in that situation. Even if both parents were known, if they were both impoverished parents who couldn't necessarily care for the children, the kids would be sent out to work in other people's homes and be raised there.
So an indentured contract essentially says you are going to be a servant in my home for X amount of years. I believe for boys it's 18 years. For girls it's 21 years. I think I could have that backwards, but I think it's boys 18, girls 21. And in exchange, the master of the house will teach them a set of skills. So they will clothe them, they will bathe them, they will feed them, and they will teach them a trade. So for girls, domestic work, for boys, depended on the trade that person was in. And we'll teach them to read and write. We'll teach them some amount of literacy. So it was, in a way, kind of a good solution.
The idea was a child will be able to leave an indentured contract and have a trade, so be able to support themselves to some degree. So we know that her daughter is indentured to Nathaniel Putnam, and she's there for her set term, and her son, whose name is William, is indentured to Jonathan Batchelder.
And Dorothy actually disappears before Williams' indentured contract is up. So I would assume both kids stay where they're supposed to be for their full contracts. But I haven't been able to find any records of where they might go from there. Maybe they die, maybe they move away and they're just gonna appear in a different town records. They're not in the vital records at all. So that's another thing I'm gonna be hunting down for the rest of my life. I was joking with Marilynne Roach, the historian, that this is gonna deteriorate into me going selectman record to selectman record, town to town. And she laughed, cuz she wrote the Day by Day Chronicle, which took her like 30 years. So who am I to complain?
[00:48:27] Josh Hutchinson: And is it known what trades the children were being trained for?
[00:48:35] Rachel Christ-Doane: So Dorothy, the, girl is being trained as a domestic worker, so to be able to serve in a house. I don't remember off the top of my head what William's trade was. I think it might have been carpentry, but I'll have to look it up. The indentured records for both of them exist. This housewright? And there's no record of him. I have got, so he's living in Beverly at the time. So I have been to Beverly to look through their records to see if there's any indication of him working as a housewright. And nothing yet. Unfortunately, their records are missing a big chunk in the exact time I'm looking for, which that happens. Maybe there was a record of him that just hasn't survived. So we will never know.
[00:49:19] Sarah Jack: Some of the timeline of Dorothy's adult life shows that she was a wanderer. It looks like there's records that show she was warned outta town. What does that mean, warned outta town?
[00:49:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: So warned out of town is essentially somebody who is being forced to leave for one reason or another. So it oftentimes has to do with a woman becoming pregnant. And it has to do with your status as a resident. So again, if you're not considered to be a legal resident of that town and you do something that it is not favorable to the town. For example, Martha Carrier, she and Thomas Carrier are warned out of Andover after the smallpox epidemic in the 1690s. So they don't actually end up leaving, it seems. They're told to go, and it doesn't seem like they do. So it's like a kind of official notice saying you need to go.
Dorothy is warned out. In her case, which is very common, it's after she gets pregnant, there's this notice that says you have to go, we're not taking financial responsibility for you, essentially. In her case, she doesn't, she also doesn't leave. And it seems that she then immediately kind of ends up in the care of Nathaniel Putnam. So my thought is that there's this notice issued and Nathaniel steps in and says, "I will take her, and she will live with me, and that will be the solution to this."
Yeah, it's, it's just kind of part of their system of caring for the poor. It's a really kind of brutal system of care and it's, a lot of it has to do with money, as it does today.
[00:50:54] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's just another layer of this multi-layered tragedy. Just that she gets pregnant, has children, the fathers don't step up, the town won't want to assume the bills, so basically nobody does, except that, fortunately, Nathaniel Putnam does offer to take her in.
[00:51:20] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, but there's, this is just one case of, it's an interesting and really sad window into women's lives, of what happens if nobody stepped up for you. You're just left destitute. And Sarah, her mother is in that position. She's got, she does have a husband, but the husband's pretty useless. She's wandering around the town, she's, she doesn't have anywhere permanent to live, and she's got a four year old and an infant baby in 1692. And her life has deteriorated into just living off of charity.
[00:51:56] Sarah Jack: I just think that it's really gonna be incredible as you're working on your book that you can take, you know, this tale of little Dorothy from the Salem Witch Trials. But these records that are emerging are going to put a lens on the experience of women in the 17th century in these situations. So it's really a beautiful thing. She's gonna be able to teach us more about those experiences, and you're able to give that to the world. So thank you.
[00:52:29] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, and I say that there's a silver lining to this horror. It's, number one, it's, it gives us this really interesting window into the life of impoverished women in the colonial period. There has been some really excellent work about women's lives during this time. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, for example, has written some phenomenal works about being a woman and just your day-to-day life.
But it's so rare to have information about impoverished people, because they don't, they're not showing up in the records, unless they're, they have done something wrong. They're not, they're, the records of their lives don't exist. So having access to that is really incredible.
But I also, I've said a few times this discovery is meaningful, because it also tells us that Sarah Good's line might have continued. So until now, we've thought that it stopped after Dorothy and her sister, who dies, and Dorothy, we just assumed didn't have children, and we now know she has both a son and a daughter. You know, I've yet to figure out what happens from there. But the fact that she has two children certainly may suggest her line continues. So that would be really incredible to find out that she has living descendants to this day.
[00:53:48] Josh Hutchinson: We're talking about 17th and 18th century, how unfortunate people were treated, and, unfortunately, our legacy of treatment of the unhoused, the impoverished, unwed mothers hasn't been stellar since then, either.
[00:54:09] Rachel Christ-Doane: I'm thinking that's the epilogue of this book is that we, when we're talking about the 17th century or the 18th century, we tend to say, "oh, those unenlightened early colonists, they were just less intelligent than us today, more brutish, less civilized. And we have made it so far since then." And the truth of the matter is that is absolutely not the case. We have so many similarities with people living during this time. We are still struggling with the same issues they struggled with. We may have indoor plumbing, but that doesn't make us better than them or more intelligent than they were.
So that's something that I always feel like it's really important to stress. And yeah, in this case, looking at the treatment of unwed mothers, of women who struggle with a mental illness that's debilitating, there's a lot of similarities between then and now. And we can't ignore them.
[00:55:09] Josh Hutchinson: There are so many laws that really disturb me today, and more come up every day about, that almost make it illegal just to be impoverished. You can't sleep in public. People are taking benches away, so you can't even sit down in a lot of places, and it just makes it, it's an impossible situation you're in already, and it's so much harder. You end up spending a lot of time behind bars, unfortunately.
[00:55:43] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yep. And again, it's not very different. It's not so different from the 17th century, unfortunately.
[00:55:49] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and so we don't know where she went after Salem and Beverly?
[00:55:57] Rachel Christ-Doane: Not definitively. So I say at the end of the lecture there's a theory. So there is this very intriguing newspaper article that is published in New London, Connecticut that says, that's a death notice for a woman named Dorothy Good that describes her as a transient, vagrant person who has been found laying dead in a bog meadow. And it is, I don't remember the exact timing, but it's maybe like 20 years after she disappears. So I can certainly speculate.
I think maybe, and this is all super speculation, but Jonathan Batchelder may have been a consistent person in her life. She stays with him for a very long time. That's the truth of the matter. Does she feel safe with him? Does she, is that kind of becoming a home for her? And then he passes away, and she disappears? So my thought is, and she also has this recorded tendency to wander, that's something that comes up in the records a couple of times, that she's a wandering person. So my thought is he dies, and maybe she leaves, and she just ends up wandering town to town, maybe getting warned out of other places. That's my, not hope, but going forward, my last kind of thread here is looking at other notices of people being warned out to see if she appears anywhere else that would at least give us some indication of where she is.
And maybe because it's a period of numerous years, she certainly theoretically could have wandered as far as Connecticut. It's a very long period of time she's missing. That is a very far distance to go. It seems impossible, but it's, it is, it is technically possible. And just the description of her, Dorothy Good, a transient, vagrant person. It sounds like her, it sounds the way that she's described in the records in Salem.
So it's been pointed out by my colleague, this could also be her daughter, whose name is also Dorothy Good. It seems less likely to me, because Dorothy Good, Jr. is in a more stable situation. She's an indentured servant for Nathaniel Putnam. She's learning a trade. It feels to me like why would she end up being a transient person? It's possible. But yeah, it does feel like that could. I have this kind of just feeling it's her. I can't say it definitively, but, and what a horrible ending, though. Like part of me doesn't want it to be her, because if it is, she ends up dead in a bog. She ends up dead outside probably having died from exposure. And that's horrible. I really want her to have ended up somewhere where she's being cared for by a loving family. But who can say? It doesn't always work out that way, unfortunately.
[00:58:53] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's really incredible that a name was even included in that description, because then it, you could have never put this as a possibility to her story. And then I know you had mentioned how this post was in multiple news outlets. That's very interesting.
[00:59:14] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, it's republished in three other papers in addition to the one in New London, including one in Massachusetts. There's, I believe it's two in New York, one in Massachusetts. I did have a long conversation with the historian in New London or the archivist in New London about this. She very kindly is the one who helped me find the full text for it. And she was wondering, is it just because it's so sensational of a story, it could just be that's a horrible way for someone to die. Maybe that's why it's published in multiple news outlets. It also feels to me, though, like it's certainly possible people were aware of her role in the witch trials. It's a reach, because they don't say anything about the witch trials in that death notice. Maybe that's why it reaches so far is because people are aware, or maybe people regionally had been aware she was involved in the witch trials in New London, and they wanted people back home to be aware she had died. So it's a very interesting little piece of text.
And I also mentioned in the article that Good is not a very common surname at this time. If you look in vital records in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, there are very few Goods, if any, beyond this family. There's variations of the name Good, like longer versions of the name, but just to have someone with the last name Good, and then to have also the first name Dorothy. It's either a very remarkable coincidence, or it's one of the two Dorothys from Salem.
[01:00:47] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, after I had heard you mention that, I did some searching online, and it was very difficult to find anybody named Good. It, you'd think it sounds like it would be a common name, and then it's absolutely not.
[01:01:05] Rachel Christ-Doane: There's lots of Goodwins, there's no Goods. And that actually makes it very difficult. I have no idea what William's story is, Sarah's husband, where he's born, where he comes from, where he's living before he meets Sarah, that is all up in the air. Because again, there's just very, there, I have not been able to find any mentions of his family or his lineage at all.
So that's another kind of big question mark of where did he come from? Is he the one who's starting the kind of Good family name here? Because there are Goods showing up in the 19th century, so a full century later. So what is happening there? That's an interesting question.
[01:01:52] Sarah Jack: Yeah, this research on Dorothy Good and then how could pieces get filled in through identifying descendants, that is like, there's so much promise there possibly.
[01:02:07] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. That's the interesting part about a research project like this is there's a lot of possible ends, and some of them will have reward. I went to the Phillips Library looking for indentured records, not knowing if I would find anything, and I did find William and Dorothy, so that was a huge day for me. But then, going back and looking again through prison records and court records of unwed mothers and their children, nothing, dead ends. That's the kind of frustrating and rewarding part about research is you'll have a spurt where you find something and it's thrilling and then dead ends for years. So we'll see.
[01:02:53] Josh Hutchinson: I was really blown away that you found anything at all, because I had always thought that her story dead-ended with her just being chargeable and needing maintenance the rest of her life.
[01:03:07] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, me too. This, as I said, was a total accident. It was just, it was research about another person who I didn't know if I would be able to find anything about her. But, Ann Dolliver is a pretty obscure research subject. She, she, like Dorothy, is another person who struggles with mental health issues. She's the daughter of Reverend John Higginson, who is one of, he's the older minister of Salem in 1692. So I was just looking for, I knew she was in the care of the town after her father died, and I felt like logically there should be a record of the payments for her care from that point on, cuz it's a financial transaction, and theoretically when those payments stop, that means she has died. And so I was just super lucky to have access to the selectmen records. They were digitized only a few years ago, evidently. And it, you could have knocked me over the day where I started to realize that there was another very familiar name in these records that I kept coming across.
So yeah, it's, it was all just kind of luck. But and it also begs the question of what else is hiding out there, what other stories are in records that we haven't found yet?
[01:04:28] Josh Hutchinson: And Ann Dolliver also is interesting to me that she ends up in a similar situation, because of who her father was and the status of her brother, John Higginson Jr., also.
[01:04:40] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, so she actually has a lot of similarities to Dorothy, in a way. So she is married to a fisherman in Gloucester, who appears to be a horrible guy. They have three kids together, and then he abandons her. So because he has abandoned her, she ends up having to come back and live with her father.
And the similarities are in terms of the way that they're described in records indicates she's not stable to a degree, you know, and again it's such vague language, we can't really make a diagnosis of what's going on in either case. But Ann also seems to really have struggled with what they would call melancholy. She is not able to live independently or remarry. And she ends up in the care of another family, very similar, in a similar way that Dorothy does, who take care of her for the rest of her life, again indicating she's not able to support herself, and she actually ends up living away from her children like Dorothy, probably because she either couldn't or wouldn't care for them.
So yeah, it's, again, it's just a window into this is what happened to a woman if you couldn't marry and have kids and fulfill your expected role.
[01:06:00] Sarah Jack: I think it's incredible how, when historians and writers and researchers like yourself start to work on a story, records start revealing the story. It's, it really is like a voice from the past, but it's also a look into ourselves. It's such an important thing, the story. So I'm so excited about this era of research in general for our society and, but particularly with the witch hunts it, there's so much to glean from it.
[01:06:36] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, very much so. My hope is that these warned out records will show up, so that's, it's why you can never put the pen down, right? Because things will just keep coming up.
[01:06:47] Josh Hutchinson: Do you have anything that you want to add or anything else you wanted to talk about? Either the museum or anything else?
[01:06:57] Rachel Christ-Doane: I would say that just the best way to keep up with what we're doing here is following us on social media. So we are just @SalemWitchMuseum on both Facebook and Instagram, and actually TikTok, also, which kind of our new, newest addition to social media, which I still don't know if I like or not. But yeah, that's where we post about our upcoming virtual events like the antisemitism lecture, which is coming out next week. And that's where we post about new research that's going on, like additions to our online sites tour or new descendant packets. We will actually have hopefully five new descendant packets, we currently have four finished, we're going for the fifth, that will be ready in September this year. So that's where you can see what's new, what's happening, and then also just our day-to-day, what our hours are and things like that. Please follow us on social media, and then check out our website, which is salemwitchmuseum.com, which has a whole bunch of different resources for descendants, for teachers, for students, for just avid history lovers. So yeah, that's the best place to see what we're doing and what's going on here.
[01:08:04] Josh Hutchinson: I also want to plug your YouTube channel. Do put these wonderful virtual events on there, and I've gone again and again to watch video after video, so I appreciate that you do that.
[01:08:20] Rachel Christ-Doane: Thank you. Yeah, that's another one. We also have the videos on our website as well, so there's a couple different places you can see them, but we always try to record virtual lectures. The only lectures we don't record are the ones that are ticketed, which these days are not many. Almost all of them are free now. So if we can record it, we do. And then, yes, those are available on our YouTube page and also on our website.
[01:08:43] Sarah Jack: And now for Minute with Mary.
[01:08:54] Mary Bingham: Joanna Towne. I would like to address the misconception that our grandmother, Joanna, was accused of being a witch. She was not formally accused ever, but she was named in 1692, long after her death.
The misconception originated circa 1670 when Reverend Thomas Gilbert of Topsfield was accused of being drunk before Sunday service, during Sunday service, and at the dinner following the Sunday service. Actually, he was so late to service that morning that some congregants actually left, but those who stayed were in for quite a show. Thomas was seen falling as he entered the building, slurring his words, and messing with the order of the service so that Isaac Cummings stood up and declared, "Stop. You are out of order and dangerously close to blaspheming the Lord's name." Thomas told Isaac to zip it and sit down. Things got so wild that Thomas quit his ministry at Topsfield right then and stormed out of the building, only to return three weeks later.
If that wasn't enough, there was a dinner that same afternoon after the fiasco at the parsonage, where many accused the minister of swigging too generously from the communion cup he shared with the diners, one of whom was Joanna Towne. Joanna, however, was the only person in attendance at that dinner who did not notice any odd behavior displayed by Thomas, nor did she think that he drank too much from the cup.
When this matter eventually went to court, Joanna proclaimed that everyone else was wrong. According to Joanna, Thomas ate and drank in moderation that day, and he was fully aware of his behavior.
Fast forward to 1692, 10 years after Joanna died. John and Hannah Putnam's infant daughter became sick and died within two days. Sadly, the child died such a violent death, as John Putnam said, it was enough to pierce a stony heart. According to a prior conversation with his cousin-in-law, Ann Putnam, Sr. regarding Joanna Towne's daughters, he said that the apples didn't fall far from the trees. John had heard that rumors that Rebecca Nurse's and Mary Esty's mother was a witch. After all, it was a common belief that witchcraft was passed from mothers to their daughters. John concluded that since Rebecca and Mary's specters could not kill him, they killed his child.
The Putnams were distant cousins to the Goulds, who were present at that service and dinner at Topsfield in 1670. Ensign John Gould, who filed the complaint on behalf of his wife against Thomas Gilbert, does not mention Joanna Towne in his complaint, though she offers the deposition in defense of Thomas. So I can only speculate that the gossip about Joanna's role traveled via the Gould family members, most likely those female family members, to their Putnam cousins who lived five miles south in Salem Village. I imagine these families visited from time to time, therefore sharing some of the gossip from their towns.
Thank you.
[01:12:42] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:12:44] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:13:04] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. Today is July 20th. It is the day after the 331st anniversary of the hanging of five innocent alleged witches in Salem, Massachusetts on July 19th, 1692. The mother of Dorothy Good, Sarah Good, was among them, along with Sarah Wildes, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How, and Rebecca Nurse. Rebecca, an accused elderly woman, was examined the same day Dorothy was examined.
The Rebecca Nurse Homestead Facebook page posted yesterday, quote, "accounts say that Rebecca Nurse was seen to be praying while on the cart and right before execution, only stopping to look at her children and family in the crowd. Sarah Good would have none of that. When they arrived at the hill, Reverend Noyes urged her to confess so she would at least not die a liar. She denied the guilt. Noyes said he knew she was a witch. 'You are a liar,' she snapped. 'I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.' This curse was based loosely on a verse in Revelation.
What happened to these accused witches of the past is not unlike what is happening today. What you learned about Dorothy's experience as a four-year-old and the outcome of her adult life is the same story we hear today. Right now, people are targeted and hunted just like the Goods. They're believed to have used sorcery or evil to cause misfortune to their family, neighbors, or community. In many, many countries today, misfortunes like dangerous weather and unexplained or even everyday common sickness or death are still believed to be caused by humans doing supernatural harm.
In Ghana, women are hunted as witches, and thousands of them are now in refugee camps. These refugee camps are known as witch camps. The women sent away to them are alleged witches. They're innocent. They are not witches. These are not witch camps. These are refuge camps loaded with forgotten women, women who have not forgotten the life they were torn from, women who carry the visible scars and damage on their bodies from the attacks they endured. They survived brutal attacks, but now they are set aside. Their existence is buried in the past that they were plucked from. They're barely surviving. Many of them do not survive.
Multitudes of women do not supernaturally cause mischief and misfortune. Once a person, once a child, is targeted as a witch, their old life is over. Nothing is ever the same for them again, the family is never whole, they are no longer in their home with their family unit living life as it was prior to the accusations. Most often, extended family is no longer close. Family is scattered.
Awareness of the violent, modern witch Hunts against alleged witches is increasing across the world. You are aware and can take action, share the information, make a financial contribution to an advocacy organization. International media, organizations, governments, and individuals are taking action and educating about it directly in the affected communities. In Africa, India, Melanesia, and in additional affected places, many advocates are risking their lives to educate, rescue, intervene, and rehabilitate victims in the communities gripped by harmful practices and violence due to sorcery fear or witchcraft fear.
The United Nations Human Rights Council is acknowledging the crisis and urging additional efforts by all stakeholders. We are all stakeholders in efforts to stop these witch attacks and abuse crimes against men, women, and children. When you see it in the news, read about it and share it. Educate yourself and others.
Next week, you'll hear from advocate and professor Miranda Forsyth, director of the working committee of The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. Expect to hear specific ways many organized groups of people are working as advocates. Learn about Papua New Guinea's action plan for sorcery accusation-related violence. Expect to hear specific ways you can start advocating. You do not have to wait to get involved. It is everybody's business to take a stand against the violence humans endure due to the supernatural fears of other humans.
Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast supports the global efforts to end modern witch hunts. Get involved. Financially support our nonprofit initiatives to educate and intervene. Visit endwitchhunts.org to make a tax-deductible contribution. You can also support us by purchasing books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or by subscribing as a Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast super listener for as little as $3 a month at thoushaltnotsuffer.com. Keep our t-shirts, available on zazzle.com, in mind when you start to get excited about Halloween 2023, and buy some fun wear. Sport one of our awesome shirts, and introduce people to the podcast or one of our projects by leaving your house looking cool.
[01:17:57] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:17:59] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:18:01] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:18:06] Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us every week for our great episodes.
[01:18:10] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:18:12] Sarah Jack: Don't miss one. Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:18:16] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends.
[01:18:19] Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit us at endwitchhunts.org to learn what we're doing.
[01:18:26] Josh Hutchinson: And please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:18:32] Sarah Jack: Thank you.
[01:18:34] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome back local historian Dan Gagnon, who brings us the unexpected journey of Salem Witch Trial victim George Jacobs Sr., one of the men executed for witchcraft on August 19, 1692. We discuss the complicated trauma and experiences of the many members of the Jacobs household involved in the trials. Learn about the fascinating travels of George Jacob Sr’s remains. Where did his bones rest across the centuries and why were they being moved? We address the importance of victim memorials and exonerations of innocent accused witches by contrasting the way Rebecca Nurse has been remembered to the way George Jabob Sr was set aside. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead history is discussed, and this part of the conversation will be meaningful to descendants. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak again with author Dan Gagnon, who wrote the article "Skeletons in the Closet: How the Actions of the Salem Witch Trials Victims' Families in 1692 Affected Later Memorialization", which was published in the New England Journal of History in 2019. And we'll be talking to him about George Jacobs, Sr., the oldest Salem Witch Trials victim. We'll talk about how his family got caught up in the witch trials and how disruptive that was.
[00:01:03] Sarah Jack: It was really interesting to hear how when faced with charges, the different family members responded.
[00:01:10] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that was very interesting. They all have different reactions that we will get into later, but you have the whole fight or flight or freeze response, and you get all three answers when they come for the Jacobs family.
[00:01:30] Sarah Jack: I enjoyed this look at the afflicted girls. It's the older afflicted young women, and how greatly their accusations stuck.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: We'll get into how weak the evidence was and how heavily it depended upon the testimony of these girls and young women and other afflicted persons.
[00:01:59] Sarah Jack: We talk a little bit about the jail time and the execution on August 19th, 1692.
[00:02:08] Josh Hutchinson: We'll talk about who else was hanged on that date and what other events unfolded.
[00:02:16] Sarah Jack: George is highlighted in this article by Dan, because of the stark contrast between his burial and memorialization compared to someone like Rebecca Nurse's burial and memorialization.
[00:02:31] Josh Hutchinson: We'll ask why some people received physical displays of their family's memory while others were kept in their family's hearts alone. And we'll learn about the history of how all that unfolded and how he finally received some recognition.
[00:02:56] Sarah Jack: It's thought-provoking in regards to how different families have responded to the witch trial history over the years and how that plays into the remembrance of the victims, as well.
[00:03:13] Josh Hutchinson: And I don't think any of that should reflect on George Jacobs, Sr. himself. I always find him to be a heroic figure in the witch trials, one of those several people who stood against the charges against him, and he delivered some of the best lines of the witch trials in the face of the questions from the magistrates while the afflicted girls were putting on a spectacle around him.
[00:03:47] Sarah Jack: Another indication that he's someone who is a hero is even though some of his family members might have had some disappointing responses that greatly impact the outcome of his trial, you find that he made decisions in the end with his will that were favorable for his family.
[00:04:07] Josh Hutchinson: He made sure that they were going to be provided for in the future.
[00:04:12] Sarah Jack: I thought it was really good that Dan points out that these people who are facing death are still dictating their wishes on the handing down of their property and personal artifacts. They have that power left. That power, you know, is a statement.
[00:04:32] And now welcome back Dan Gagnon, local historian and author of A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. Let's take a journey with Dan to the George Jacobs, Sr. witch trial of 1692 and on the journey of his restless bones that finally found peace centuries later.
[00:04:54] Dan Gagnon: So with the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt, the era of memorialization takes place much later, really doesn't start till 200 years later, just about. The first memorial dedicated to one of the victims of the witch-hunt is the memorial to Rebecca nurse in 1885. Then in 1892, the 200th anniversary, right next to the 1885 Memorial in Nurse Family Cemetery, there's a monument constructed to those who defended Rebecca Nurse in 1692.
[00:05:33] Then after that, the next era of physical memorialization doesn't happen till 1992. In 1992 in March, the Salem Village Memorial on Hobart Street in Danvers is dedicated with the names of all of those who are killed in 1692. And it's placed right across from where the original Salem Village meeting house would've been. And then that summer of 1992, the City of Salem dedicates a memorial in kind of an empty lot in downtown Salem. Then most recently, not till 2017, on the 325th anniversary, the City of Salem dedicates a memorial near Proctor's Ledge in Salem, which is about the area where we believe the hangings probably took place.
[00:06:22] Josh Hutchinson: Great. I don't know if you've noticed, but my name is on that 1892 Memorial. It has Joseph Hutchinson, but it spells it J O S apostrophe H. So it looks like Josh. That's what got me into this whole thing, was my first visit there. I saw my own name and was like, "wow, Josh Hutchinson defended Rebecca Nurse. That's awesome."
[00:06:48] Dan Gagnon: Oh, that's cool.
[00:06:50] Josh Hutchinson: So that's how I got into it. And then I think the the 1992 Danvers Memorial might be on Hutchinson land, originally, Joseph's land across from the meeting house. He donated the land for the meeting house.
[00:07:08] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. Yeah, so definitely across the street and probably the other side of the street, too, where the memorial is.
[00:07:15] Josh Hutchinson: That's what I think just looking at the Marilynne Roach map, I got that impression. So at least to me it's on Hutchinson land, and that's my ancestor.
[00:07:26] Dan Gagnon: All good.
[00:07:27] Josh Hutchinson: That's how I got into all this stuff. But going on to the next question, you mentioned that there is a memorial for Rebecca Nurse. Why is there not a memorial or was there not originally placed a memorial for George Jacobs, Sr.?
[00:07:46] Dan Gagnon: So with George Jacobs, I always thought this was an interesting case. It's in a way maybe most interesting for what happens after he dies, after he's killed in 1692, but he is not remembered until March of 1992 when the Salem Village Memorial includes everybody's name. That's the first time that he has his name carved on any stone in his memory. Now, in terms of the reason for this, when I examined his case, the, I guess the foil of a case was I saw Rebecca Nurse as she's the first memorialized. He is not memorialized for 300 years and trying to figure out the difference.
[00:08:38] What I had come across is really, it's not through any fault of their own. They're both accused. They both say that they're innocent. They're both found guilty and executed anyway. They even have like similar language. Rebecca Nurse says she's as innocent as the child unborn. He says, "I'm as innocent as the child born tonight." It's so similar. They're both similarly old members of the community, but the only difference that could cause this seems to be their family members. With Rebecca Nurse, the Nurse family does really the greatest job out of the families of anybody accused in standing up for her, in defending her, collecting evidence, not giving up, all the way towards even after she's found guilty, trying to lobby the governor, and then after the trials are over, about two decades later, lobbying the province of Massachusetts to try to clear their names. They do everything that they can.
[00:09:37] In contrast, Jacobs family does not. With Jacobs, we have the twist where his own granddaughter essentially turns sides, testifies against him. We have that. There are other members of the Jacobs family accused, and that makes it a lot messier to remember.
[00:09:59] Sarah Jack: I was doing some digging around online trying to learn what is out there about George? What do people say about him? And I saw. That there appeared to have been a photo of possibly his home at one point. Do you know what happened to his house, if that was his home when it was destructed?
[00:10:19] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, we do have photographs of it. Some of the photographs come from the era of the New Deal as part of Roosevelt's New Deal Projects is the Historic American Building Survey that thoroughly documents the house, photographs the inside, the outside and such. The house at some point, which is fortunate that they documented it, cuz in the 1930s, it is struck by lightning and burns down, and just a hulk remains. And then in, I believe it's 1940, it was as close as I could get to the date of when it actually was taken down, it's removed then.
[00:10:57] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. That's really tragic how that ended, because it stood there for so many hundreds of years, 250 years past the trials, it's finally being torn down. But so fortunate that there are photographs, and you can see what it looked like and get a sense of how that property was. So regarding George Jacobs, where was he first buried?
[00:11:24] Dan Gagnon: So with Jacobs, he is one of the few victims of the witch-hunt that we believe, or in his case, we have much more conclusive proof, was buried by his family after his execution. The others that have strong claims to this are Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, Jacobs, and there's some theories for probably a couple others.
[00:11:50] It's believed that Jacobs is reburied on his farm. Now, his farm was in the very top of what was considered the Northfields in Salem. He actually lived on the farm next door to the one that Rebecca Nurse grew up on. They didn't live there at the same time, like he bought it after she, her family moved away, or she at least moved away. So that's an interesting coincidence. And so today it's in Danversport, part of Danvers, and it's right along the border with the city of Peabody. His farm basically like was the line?
[00:12:26] Sarah Jack: Wow. And what caused them to exhume those bones, his likely body?
[00:12:34] Dan Gagnon: So with his body, it was buried there towards the corner of his fields, and when it's buried, he doesn't get a headstone or anything with his name like that. It's just known that at this corner of the field is where they'd put him. And the family remembers this. It's not a secret. It's known that that was the case, not just by the family, but by the neighborhood, which we'll see evidence for that in a second, and just ignored. He's not buried next to a family member or in a family cemetery. It's just him alone stuck in the corner.
[00:13:12] He will be exhumed now the first time in 1854. He will be exhumed twice, and each time is weird in a different kind of way. The first time, so in 1854, his family sells that field to another guy. This person had heard that George Jacobs might be buried in this field, and as he's buying the land, he kinda wanted to see if it was true. So he digs him up. They find bones, they mention like hair, like real parts of him there. And what they do is they put him back in like, all right, he's here, and then they put him back.
[00:14:00] This, however, becomes really big news far outside of Danvers and Salem. It's reported in newspapers as far south as Virginia. It's, again, it's no secret. It's front page news, really across the country that they found one of the Salem witches, and somewhere along the line, it seems to be here, but allegedly they took a finger out and they put it in a glass bottle. This is kept by a person in Danversport who's an antiquarian, a local historian, Samuel Fowler and his family, and he keeps it, his, a brick house at the port corner in Danversport. A very nice house. It was owned by Historic New England for a while. It's very nice. And it was just kept. It had been claimed that they had somehow found this bones in the 1780s, but there's no record of it ever being exhumed in the 1780s. So it must have been here in 1854. That just seems to be the case. And, but other than that, he's reburied and he'll be left for about a hundred years.
[00:15:17] Josh Hutchinson: And then he was exhumed a second time.
[00:15:20] Dan Gagnon: Yes. So this time is an accident, whereas the first time was on purpose. The second time with his house having burned down, fallen apart and his farm open, the farm will be subdivided. And what happens is in the 1950s, they're bulldozing, flattening the land, dividing into house lots like it is today. There's the roads Jacobs Way, Jacobs Landing, and others. But those two are named after him, at least. What happens is while they're bulldozing, they find bones. They stop, of course, and try to figure out what's going on. They know that this is just at about a farm, it's not a cemetery. And by that point in time, they've forgotten about old George Jacobs.
[00:16:10] So what happens next is a little bizarre and confusing, but really what it stems from is if you put yourself in this position in the 1950s, like what the heck are they gonna do with him? There's no family that like comes to claim him 300 years, almost later. There's, can you prove at that point that it's him. Can you prove that it's not? It's just a lot of mystery. What happens is he'll be turned over essentially to a cemetery in town. It's not owned by the town, but it's associated. It's its own corporation, and they just keep 'em in a box in this granite building, which is where in the old days you'd have to keep a body when you couldn't dig a grave with the frozen ground. It's the winter. The building where they would store remains.
[00:17:10] It ends up in a couple different places. It was given to a local lawyer, Steven Weston, who was involved in purchasing Endicott Park which is actually a lot of land that was part of Salem Village that's now preserved as a park. It had been farmland. It's now a town of Danvers Park. He kept it as a lawyer, interested in historic preservation. He was trying to figure out what to do with this. And I apparently never really came to a conclusion. He had a fancy house. And as it goes, his housekeeper eventually is fed up and threatens to quit because she's dusting around the box with a human body in it, in his dining room.
[00:17:50] And so that's when he is actually the one who gives it to that cemetery to keep in the winter storage building. It's there for years, and then it will be taken out late 1960s and by another local historic preservationist who had heard it was there. You just heard a rumor, asked the cemetery people, "can I go see the box?" And they say, "sure." And then they said, "we don't want it, do you?" And he said, "sure." Trying to figure out keep it until there's a way to resolve this, but it's not gonna be resolved in the 1960s, seventies, or eighties. And it really isn't resolved until 1992.
[00:18:30] In the meantime, he's just in a box. It's even displayed a couple times. My favorite one, since I went to school there, is it ends up in the Danvers High School cafeteria at one point. The Danvers Historical Society used to have like a community antique sale, essentially. And when they would do this, they'd always have a table of exhibits, as well, so you know bring people in.
[00:18:57] And so he, him in a glass box, was on the table of exhibits, along with John Hathorne's notebooks that were borrowed from the Essex Institute, alleged George Jacobs' canes that were also the property of the Essex Institute. So interesting display table. But it's odd. He then he ends up in the Danvers archives for a while, just in a box on the shelf. While he is there, is the first time they really try to confirm, like, the identity of the remains. It's still difficult to go through and document, because you can imagine that those who had it at the time were you know concerned about this, were genuinely trying to do the right thing here and rebury him somehow, but it is a little weird. So they get a a pathologist from one of the Boston hospitals to come and look at his bones and examine them. Even here, there's no signed written report. There's a tape. It was said into a tape recorder, the doctor's examinations. So there's not a paper trail.
[00:20:04] And what he said was that, from the historical evidence that he had been given ahead of time and then his examination of the bones, that it does seem to be Jacobs, that it's an elderly man. We think Jacobs was in his early eighties. There's one record of somebody named George Jacobs being born in 1609. Many historians think that's a record for our George Jacobs. This is tough to pinpoint, but we know that he was quite old, so was an old man. He suffered terrible arthritis in his legs. We know George Jacobs had to walk with two canes, so that seems to fit.
[00:20:45] They knew it was a European man. Weird for the settlers from Europe to have just buried one person alone. That's not really typical. It's not a Native American burial from that time period or anything such as that. And so just really by eliminating variables, it seems quite credibly that it's probably him, especially with the documented family tradition that he was always there and then they found him right there.
[00:21:13] What ends up happening in the end is this is, unfortunately before DNA tests really, or anything like that, and they never as part of this examined or compared it to the bones in the bottle at the Essex Institute, now the Peabody Essex Museum. That on one hand is a missed opportunity, but on the other hand, without DNA testing, like how could you have ever actually compared them? There's really no, what could you have done?
[00:21:48] So in the end, he's buried in 1992 at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Cemetery. He has no family connection despite the Nurse Family Cemetery. The main reason for that is simply it was the only place they believed another victim of the witch-hunt was buried. It's always been thought Rebecca Nurse was buried there. Makes sense, therefore, to put him there. The volunteers at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead had, were those who were working to try to resolve this weird situation. And so of course, we're willing to do this with the help of others in the community, and so that seemed to make the most sense.
[00:22:26] With his burial, as you can probably imagine it. What would be proper? How, what service would you have? These were all really significant and complicated questions. This event was done not a hundred percent publicly. There was one part that there was a service of burial, and then he's buried in August of 1992. Then there was a like kind of remembrance ceremony that August that was published as one of the events for the tercentennial of the witch trials.
[00:23:04] With his burial, it was done by a minister at the Baptist church in Danversport. Now you might think, all right if he's a Puritan, why would you get the guy from the Baptist church? They didn't really like each other back then. That's not what you'd expect. All of his descendants had attended that church. So it seems to fit. Some of his descendants had been deacons in the church. One of 'em, my great-grandfather worked for one of the Jacobs on the farm in the early 1900s, the one who was one of the deacons there. He just worked as a farmhand for Jacobs, can't tell you which generation that was. So yeah, they had the minister from that church, who was willing, cuz he had known or think he knew the family's association. So that was the kind of service that they held.
[00:23:55] Josh Hutchinson: On the other hand, Rebecca Nurse, when she's buried on her homestead, she's left alone. They don't dig her up. They don't put her in a box.
[00:24:07] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. It's just assumed that she's there, the oldest being under just plain field stone rocks. Nobody has ever, in the sense of like DNA testing or anything? No. That grave has never been disturbed and won't be. It's just somewhere there. That's the question that people often ask who visit the Nurse house is like, "why haven't you started digging people up and DNA testing?" I was like that's very not respectful of a cemetery. And so the only reason that Jacobs has this examination opportunity is really because he wound up dug up by accident.
[00:24:43] Josh Hutchinson: I just wondered because with the memorials, Rebecca gets very different treatment than George, and then it seems like, the body itself is, it's respected and left alone.
[00:24:57] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, with their memorials, you're right to point to that. Whereas Nurse in the middle of the cemetery, again, not necessarily on top of her grave, but just the middle of the cemetery has that wonderful obilisk made outta Rockport granite. It's carved, it has a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. It is really the height of remembrance. With Jacobs, that was another question they had in 1992 is, if you bury him, how are you gonna mark it? And what they do is they have a simple, it's a reproduction of what a 1690s slate gravestone would've been. To see examples of those, the burial ground in downtown Salem is a good example of other stones such as that. They're pretty simple. It really just has his name and dates and a little skull symbol at the top, which was typical of that time. But it is very simple and in comparison. Yeah. So still now there's this kind of continuing disparity, but in a way, Jacobs is the one who actually got the most typical final resting place with a service and a typical headstone.
[00:26:08] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's interesting. Neither of their stories died. His just has been carried on by these strange circumstances around his body and land. It's very interesting, and thank you for going through that very interesting, I better come up with a better word, timeline of how it was, his resting place was considered, what do we do? What else would be special about the Rebecca Nurse Homestead burial grounds?
[00:26:44] Dan Gagnon: So being one of our earliest cemeteries around, it's significant cuz we believe it as the grave Nurse, it's the site of that first memorialization of the victims of the witch-hunt. And again, it is really significant. They later put up that monument to those who signed the petition for her. That's another aspect that really hasn't gotten its fair shake at remembrance. That's the only example of that.
[00:27:10] But the cemetery continues to be important with later generations. We assume that her husband is also buried in there, some of her sons, her son-in-law, John Tarbell, who plays a role in the witch-hunt, is buried there, as well as his son, also John Tarbell, is buried there. When we get to the American Revolution, we have Rebecca and Francis' great-grandson, also named Francis Nurse, answers the call that they've elected to Concord with the Danvers militia to go fight against the British soldiers. We have other graves in there of those who fought in the revolution, either the Nurse family connection or when they're extended family cousins, a branch of the Putnam family, buy it. Some of those were the revolutionary generation. And the last burial there, other than George Jacobs, the last regular burial is in the 1920s, so it continued to be in use for quite a while.
[00:28:10] Sarah Jack: When I recently visited the Homestead for the first time, the day of Dr. Leo's talk, getting to walk through the field out to the burial ground was very moving to me. Cuz I felt like here, here I am middle age, I've known about her since I was a teenager. I'm finally getting out here, and then getting to just walk the path where many other people who have memorialized her have walked, where family members, community members, the Nurses walked, it was really moving, and it was spring, and there were lily of the valley. I just was, that was a really wonderful experience to add onto, actually, I'm getting to go over to these beautiful monuments, and they are really beautiful, and it's been taken care of so well, and the trees are so grand. I, I love right now that they have these magnificent trees looking over everything, too.
[00:29:08] Dan Gagnon: And with that cemetery, those trees, the giant, really tall pine trees are there in 1885 when they dedicate that memorial to nurse and they're already like medium sized trees at that point. So they are much older than that. I can't really guess how old, but they're quite old. And with the cemetery, it was recently restored by the Rebecca nurse Homestead. There were some stones that had broken and fallen. Some were barely legible, and there were some stones that were missing. When the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, the current museum, it's owned by the Danvers Alarm List Company, the nonprofit group of Revolutionary War reenactors, they had purchased or started leasing and then purchased starting in the late 1970s around the bicentennial and purchased it in 81.
[00:30:02] They purchased it from Historic New England, who was putting it up like open market for sale, which was worrying and dangerous. It had been bought in 1909, originally, to be preserved. And when the Alarm List took over in the seventies, in one of the outbuildings, they just found a bunch of headstones, didn't know where they went.
[00:30:27] And so that was done really like during the pandemic, those two summers, working with Epoch Preservation that works in like historic cemeteries in Ipswich, historic cemeteries in Salem, real experts. And I had gone to Richard Trask at the Danvers Archives to see what the oldest photos he had of the cemetery, and we could match up the shape of the stones with the picture and then check, okay, that one seems to go there. Oh, and that person is a husband and wife. So that probably goes there and matched through both family evidence, the picture evidence. We have some surprisingly old photos of that cemetery from the late 1800s. And so we were able to piece together every stone we had where it belonged. So it is the most complete that it has been in like almost a hundred years, since, at least the early 1900s.
[00:31:20] Josh Hutchinson: That is remarkable. Now I want to turn to get a little background on George Jacobs, Sr. Do we know much about his early life? Do we know where he was born or when he came to New England?
[00:31:35] Dan Gagnon: So we have very sparse details. It's interesting with those involved in the Salem Witch-hunt, how the, their background information, the depth of it that's known today radically varies. With Jacobs, we believe he was born in 1609. That's the date that historians have typically gotten back to, which would make him 83 in 1692. He is the first generation to come over, like Rebecca Nurse, though he is a dozen years older that he was born in England. The 1609 date, there's a record of somebody of that name being baptized in West London. So one assumes from that area. We don't know exactly why his family comes over, but with all those early settlers, it's really puritanism. It's their religion. They're being persecuted in England. They wanna come to Massachusetts to establish their own society and be Puritans, and George Jacobs from his statements in the witch-hunt, clearly that is very important to him. So I would point to that as the main reason.
[00:32:47] Sarah Jack: And what kind of work did he do?
[00:32:50] Dan Gagnon: So Jacobs, he has a farm in the Northfields area, which at that point in time that was all entirely farmland. You had to take a ferry across the North River from downtown Salem, and then there's one main road, and it's just farms, fields, stretching out from there. I can't tell you exactly what crops he grew. Really, all of those farms had a variety. With the farm, the previous owner, Waters, Richard Waters, who it's now Water Street and it's the Waters River after him, so Waters was the one that was Rebecca Nurse's neighbor, and at that point in time, Waters raised cows. So there is the potential for that, as well, but most of it was just purely like growing crops on those farms.
[00:33:40] Josh Hutchinson: And what do we know about his family?
[00:33:45] Dan Gagnon: His family is interesting, which plays into kind of how they end up intentionally, unintentionally, a whole variety, really fragmented when the witch-hunt breaks out. We know that he lives there. His son, George Jacobs Jr., will live there. His son's wife, Rebecca Jacobs, lives there, and his granddaughter Margaret, we think among others. Those are the ones that will play a role in the witch-hunt elsewhere. He has a daughter, Ann Andrews, who lives elsewhere in Salem Village at that point in time. So he has family around. Near him there's several, which again, I would see as a similarity to Nurse. It's not quite as big, but the idea that you have a couple generations right nearby.
[00:34:35] Sarah Jack: And he mentioned in his examination that he was unable to read, when they were asking him about praying with his family. Is it unusual that at that time he was not a reader, owning land and not reading?
[00:34:51] Dan Gagnon: It's interesting. With so many of the Puritan men, that is important to them as it's, they believe, necessary for each person to read the Bible. Massachusetts is really, at that point in time, the most literate place on earth when it's the Puritans, because they wanted everybody to at least have a basic understanding of reading the Bible. With my own research, looking into different cases in the witch-hunt, he is the only one who seems to admit that, that I've ever come across, at least in, in my travels here. By contrast, there are women who might not know if they could read or not, but we know that they couldn't write, and they had other people sign for them and things such as that. So that is interesting.
[00:35:48] If he had been his son's generation, it would be very striking. Him being one of the oldest in town and knowing in England the literacy rate was way lower kinda explains it, but no, one would've thought that in his 83 years in that type of a society, that one would've picked that up, knowing that like religious importance angle. So it is a little surprising just given that one specific time and place.
[00:36:23] Josh Hutchinson: Why is it important to talk about George Jacob, Sr.?
[00:36:27] Dan Gagnon: Jacobs' case is one that we see with all of them. We have innocent people that are convicted and killed, and his somehow is all the more powerful, because his granddaughter turns against him. And as part of that saga, you see firsthand how flimsy the accusations are. This reveals it, I think, in a way that other cases don't.
[00:36:58] With Jacobs, he's accused by Sarah Churchill, who was hired servant of his in his household along with then Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams. And in terms of where he falls in the timeline, there's the first accusations. The first the afflicted begin to be afflicted late winter and then into February. They'll be the first accusations into March. His hearing is May 11th. So he's past kind of that first phase.
[00:37:35] With his case, it's interesting, because he's accused, and his granddaughter is accused simultaneously here, and they have hearings on the same day. They're hearings that appears that they're literally back to back, because we know that George Jacobs is in the next room during his granddaughter's hearing or just outside the door. So we think that they were back to back.
[00:38:01] Now, the accusation against him is, he's a, quote, "dreadful wizard," which appears in several of the testimony against him. That is probably one of those phrases that Thomas Putnam adds when he writes for these young women, their depositions. We see this in several instances, as I'm sure other others on the podcast have mentioned that. All right. These three people didn't probably use exactly the same phrase when they were talking to Thomas Putnam. He probably just wrote it that way. Just seems likely.
[00:38:35] And in particular, beyond that, the accusation is that since he walked with two canes that he used them to beat Sarah Churchill or that his specter did this. Obviously, he was not able to go around hitting anybody, cuz he needed two canes to walk around. He's not, agile enough to do this. So it's his specter, that's the accusation. With this, that's what takes him arrested, hearing on May 11th. And what happens, when I mention that they were almost at the same time as the one with his granddaughter, is he maintains his innocence. He knows nothing of it with witchcraft. She will confess, and then she goes on to testify against her own grandfather.
[00:39:24] And Jacobs, being right outside the room, is told by a witness. Someone comes out to him and tells him his granddaughter has confessed. And to paraphrase, he says, "confess to what?" and is told that she is confessing to having a contract with the devil and their definition of witchcraft.
[00:39:40] Josh Hutchinson: Through the records that we still have, is it possible to glean anything about his personality?
[00:39:48] Dan Gagnon: This is tough. So what we have is Sarah Churchill's accusation when that was one of the pieces of evidence that we might have. I would tend to totally discount that. The accusations say such wild and crazy things that I don't take any of that seriously in terms of one's personality, when the accusations are as wild as as a gentleman from what was, what's now today that the town of Middleton, who was accused of walking on a flying saucer down the North River. So I take those accusations, and think that means you can't trust any of them. I don't know.
[00:40:26] There's another example. The one time he ends up in court, and it's remarkable. It only happened once, cuz everybody in Salem Village is like suing one another. So it seems, if you read those court records, it's amazing the number of times people are in court. See him only once. He got into some kind of physical fight with one of his neighbors, we don't know the circumstances. We don't know who was right, who was wrong. We don't know what was going on. So I wouldn't quite draw a conclusion from that, either. I will say that some in the 19th century do describe him as a cantankerous old man because of that, but I'm not sure that reputation is earned. We really just don't know.
[00:41:10] Josh Hutchinson: I think that's a great way to answer that, because you can't infer so much from one isolated event, and you don't have any details about it, so why read into it? I'd seen somewhere that he's described as having a temper and being feisty, et cetera, but how do you know?
[00:41:33] Sarah Jack: One of the things that I read into, but I agree with you and Josh on not reading into things, but one of the things that I read into was when he said to the magistrates that he was as innocent as them. I wondered if that is an insight into his confidence. I know that, I, it seems like the men who would try to rise up to these levels of, that they don't belong in typically found themselves in trouble.
[00:42:04] Dan Gagnon: I think using his statements in front of the judges is a much better way to figure out his personality. From those, we do see that he's just very forthright, that not me, I didn't do it. And he's very clear and he's almost a little forceful in that. So perhaps one could read that. He's at least very determined that he is innocent with his great quote that they put on the Salem Village Memorial in Danvers, "burn me or hang me. I will stand in the truth of Christ. I know nothing of it." With "it" meaning witchcraft. So he is, he's pretty unambiguous there and very direct.
[00:42:42] Josh Hutchinson: And he is pretty witty. He says, "you tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard." So that probably didn't sit well with Hathorne and Corwin, but it's pretty funny.
[00:42:57] Dan Gagnon: Yes.
[00:42:59] Sarah Jack: And then another point that you know, you can compare Rebecca and George, they were both determined when they were facing those magistrates in the words that they said and in fighting for themselves.
[00:43:11] Dan Gagnon: It would've been so easy to back down that, Sarah. That's an important point.
[00:43:15] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, he stands out as one of the heroes of the trials because of his fortitude. He's up there with Rebecca and Mary and the others who maintained their innocence throughout. All 19 who were hanged maintained their innocence, and he goes to his death bravely, seemingly. And do we know anything more about his servant, Sarah Churchill? Do we know her background?
[00:43:47] Dan Gagnon: She is one of the, not the very first round of those who became afflicted with these. She is also slightly older. She's 20, whereas some of the very early who are afflicted, like Abigail Williams is 11, Ann Putnam, Jr.'s 12, Mercy Lewis, who also accused him, is 17, though. She's not among those who are afflicted in the first couple weeks, but as it expands out. And with her, there's a couple instances that spring during the witch-hunt where people testify that they hear, either they say directly or overheard some of the accusers essentially saying their accusations aren't true.
[00:44:32] With Sarah Churchill, we have George Jacobs' daughter, Ann Andrews, that her and Sarah Ingersoll, the wife of the Tavern Keeper. She's also a tavern keeper, but the Ingersolls run the tavern. That they overheard her saying that the afflicted accusers essentially threatened Churchill into accusing Jacobs, according to their testimony given to the court, where they claimed that she told them that she had to go tell, and she mentions Mr. Noyes, the minister in Salem. I'm not clear why him specifically, but apparently him specifically, that she thought her master, she puts it ,George Jacobs, her employer was a witch or else basically they would accuse her. This is early for us to have this sort of doubting comment, but it's interesting that the two women overhear her say this. This does not get in the way of Jacobs being convicted.
[00:45:34] And then we have something similar with his granddaughter, Margaret. Why does she confess? Why does she then testify against her own grandfather? This is strange. And so what happens is George goes to trial in August. He is put on trial on August 4th, summer. And Margaret, I mentioned that Margaret is about 17, his granddaughter's about 17 at this point in time. She goes through that spring after having confessed. Three days after her and George have their hearing, basically, the rest of their family's accused. Margaret's parents, George Jr. and Rebecca Jacobs are both accused. George Jacobs, Jr. flees. Rebecca Jacobs is arrested at home.
[00:46:29] Rebecca Jacobs seems to be, Margaret's mother, mentally unwell. So Rebecca Jacobs is described by her own mother, Mrs. Fox, as, quote, "crazed, distracted, and broken in her mind." So with this household yeah, the mother of the family appears to be unwell. You can't quite guess from that description but somehow mentally not stable.
[00:46:58] With her in jail, spring, summer testifies against George at his August 4th trial, and then he's convicted and she has a change of heart. And what she says really draws back to Sarah Churchill's statement, I would say. So at some point in the first two weeks of August, but a after the fourth, and she has a written recantation of her confession, which is interesting cause what, was she then able to write? Or did someone write this for her? We don't really know. And the reason for that is that document is something that we find copies but not to hold in our own hands an original. With her recantation, she says her quote is, "they," meaning the people that accused her back in May, quote, "told me that if I would not confess, I would be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess, I should have my life, the which did so afright me with my own vile and wicked heart to save my life, made me make the confession." So it's again just being like threatened and pressured into it.
[00:48:19] Sarah Jack: And she did end up serving time in the jail. I was thinking how scaring the young girls like that. It would be very scary. They saw little Dorothy Good was over there in the jail, so they knew it didn't matter what your age was, they're gonna lock up a witch.
[00:48:39] Dan Gagnon: The accusation against her is as real as the one against Jacobs. And we see where that led in his case, in that even though she recants after the conviction but before the hanging date, it doesn't matter. He is still hanged, even though essentially one of his lead witnesses has changed their tune, but it, that doesn't change his conviction.
[00:49:00] Josh Hutchinson: And is there any real evidence? Is it all spectral evidence? What's the evidence the jury uses to convict him?
[00:49:09] Dan Gagnon: It's really just based on words. It's words like his granddaughter's. We don't exactly have her testimony against Jacobs. We know that she has testimony, we think at the grand jury and the trials. But we don't actually know specifically what she said against him. We just know from her recantation that, yes, she apparently testified against him, but we don't know the exact words.
[00:49:37] Sarah Jack: What about Sarah's words? I'm wondering, because he does discuss the devil can take any form with the magistrates.
[00:49:49] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, he's one of the earliest with the devil can take any form that seeks to undermine the belief that some thought that the devil only takes the form of someone who's essentially a guilty person, somebody who gave him permission to do so. That is a not really a legal, but more of a theological debate going on.
[00:50:17] And it is interesting that George Jacobs is one of the first to raise that. That he sees through it. When Rebecca Nurse is examined in late March, it doesn't, she doesn't quite take a position but mentions that, like, her position is she has a comments about perhaps the devil can use my shape. She's not really taking a position. It's just, I guess that was her assumption that she, what she believed, whereas Jacobs is clear that, yeah, he thinks that could happen to an innocent person, and basically the devil could frame you.
[00:50:56] There'll be a lot more debate about this later in 1692, because it comes down to the obvious. The obvious rebuttal is, "you trust the devil? You shouldn't, you know what he's up to. You probably shouldn't be trusting his actions as evidence against somebody," which seems as though that would go to the strongest counterarguments here in 1692. But those who bring it up, it doesn't have that power that one would logically think that it would.
[00:51:26] So he's right to mention that. He's early on to mention it, but when they, his specter again is the example of the two canes allegedly attacking Sarah Churchill. Cause obviously he cannot do this physically. We know from his condition. But that he doesn't think that's him and he says it is not, and that he's innocent. It must just be someone basically impersonating him, I guess would be the way to put it.
[00:51:50] Sarah Jack: Yeah, that is interesting because Rebecca would've also been too frail to do the choking.
[00:51:57] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. With her saying she had been essentially sick in bed for eight or nine days before she was arrested in March, she's not going around whipping someone with a chain or strangling people or anything like, no. That, again, you're right to point that out as a another example of that not being logical.
[00:52:15] Josh Hutchinson: When was George Jacobs, Sr. executed?
[00:52:19] Dan Gagnon: August 19th. So he's executed along with John Proctor, along with the Reverend George Burroughs, who Margaret Jacobs also apparently testified against, because we know that she also recants her testimony against him and apparently goes in person to apologize to him in jail. So one assumes he also said that to her grandfather. But we don't specifically have a document that she also personally apologizes to him. But I guess one would assume.
[00:52:55] It's the August 19th, which interesting in that's when we see men executed for the first time in 1692. And then, of course, the last execution in September is also both women and men, which is probably one other way that Jacobs is, with your question about the significance of his case, is the majority of people accused of witchcraft in New England are women, especially pre-Salem. When we get to Salem in 1692, we have a surprising proportion of men. Still mostly women, though, but it often is that the men who are accused are, I don't know, a little bit overlooked, in that they don't fit that stereotype of it being women. And again, with this witch-hunt and with previous witch-hunts, I probably shouldn't say a stereotype, cuz that, I mean that, unfortunately, is the true pattern that it is mostly women, overwhelmingly.
[00:53:54] But the cases of the men accused are by definition kind of a different category. It's a different social background to these accusations. And so with him, I think that's significant. The only case, one of the men that really gets discussed the most is John Proctor, and, unfortunately, most people do that through The Crucible, which isn't really true and doesn't really do that any justice as to who he actually was. So that's a different category.
[00:54:31] Josh Hutchinson: The August 19th hanging, as you mentioned, is significant, because it's the first time there's four men and one woman hanged. And yeah, it's the first time they execute the men. But also Robert Calef wrote about the August execution and the supposed actions of Cotton Mather.
[00:54:55] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, the showdown with, not showdown, but the sort of last, that's a showdown, I guess the, that last moment with Reverend Burroughs who, and this is not a like legal belief at the time, it's more of a folk belief that one could not recite the Lord's Prayer if one was a witch, that somehow by signing a contract with the devil, you could not repeat those words, which has a certain logic to it that one would, if one believed you signed a contract with the devil, one could see why that would conflict with that. We first see this, I believe, in Bridget Bishop's case, where she tries to recite the Lord's prayer back in June, and she does garble a line or two, and that's seized upon. With Burroughs, though, at the gallows, he does recite it correctly. He's a minister. Of course, he knows how to say that, and it causes doubt at the last minute in the crowd, and you're right, Reverend Mather says, steps in and then says to execute him anyway, that doesn't change the situation. And again, legally, no, it did not change the situation. There's no law saying if you could do that, you weren't a witch. But in people's minds that would lead to doubt.
[00:56:14] Josh Hutchinson: And George Jacobs, I believe Sheriff Corwin confiscated some of his property.
[00:56:22] Dan Gagnon: Yes. This is a topic that is almost a rabbit hole to get down, the seizing of property during the witch trials and that so many people think that's like a cause of the witch trials, and no, people's property was not seized, other than a couple exceptions. The exceptions are for people who fled. So it's not George Jacobs, Sr. who fled. It's his son. The sheriff goes, but they're all living in the same household. So Sheriff Corwin goes there and seizes belongings that he says belonged to George Jacobs, Jr., who fled, which is a little dubious, but especially because it's really George Jacob's, Sr.'s house, and so you wouldn't assume that the belongings were the son's. This is a messy one, and it's recorded as that he even allegedly seizes the wedding ring off George Jacobs' wife's, Mary's, finger, which doesn't make sense, because he's not the one who fled. It's a son who fled. Why would you take the wedding ring from the mother of the person who fled and not their wife? This is bizarre, and he's clearly not following the law.
[00:57:48] The one clear-cut example we have of alleged or so-called forfeiture of property is Philip English and his wife Mary. They live in downtown Salem, very rich. They flee after if they had been in custody, and their belongings are seized, and they never get 'em back, even when they sue. And it is unfortunate. But in that case, that was the law that they were legally charged with the felony. If they did obviously flee, can you lose your belongings? It's definitely not fair or just, but in that case, that is following the law.
[00:58:25] With Jacobs, this is him being overzealous and not making sense and not the way that it should have been done.
[00:58:33] Josh Hutchinson: And the seizures, the property basically was seized for the king, is that right?
[00:58:39] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. It's in the name of the king. It would've gone to the government of Massachusetts, not to the sheriff. And with that process is fine with the Englishes. The Sheriff Corwin is not in the background trying to make himself rich in such a case. With this one, it's also less clear.
[00:59:02] I'm not sure I've ever come across an inventory of what was taken. So here you see something a little sketchy that, although it's one isolated incident, this is what leads people to think that was a motivation, that this was all a scheme by the sheriff and such. Whereas Corwin doesn't become the sheriff until around the time Oyer and Terminer is established at the end of May. He's brand new to the job, cuz they didn't have a sheriff until the new governor arrived. And then we had sheriffs, so he couldn't have had the job prior to that. He was not the marshal of Essex County, which was the prior name for the job. So he's new in it and no, he wasn't there when this all started. He did not have a job when it all started. So he's not a reason for the accusations starting.
[00:59:47] Sarah Jack: That's a really good point. And what was the deal with the will? Who was ultimately cut out and who was left in?
[00:59:57] Dan Gagnon: As part of that, what we know is that when Margaret Jacobs goes and apologizes in jail to the Reverend Burroughs, she does that on August 18, the day before, he and her grandfather are going to be executed. So we assume that she also talked to him, who was also in the jail, probably in the same room. But we do know that he had at least heard that she recanted, because he writes Margaret back into the will at the last minute. This again is another argument against the seizing of property is that these people in jail, that with land holding, it would only be the men who were in jail. Only men could own real estate, real property at that point. They do write their wills and that they are carried out. So he does change his will, because he knows or thinks at least it will be carried out. We see John Proctor in jail will write a will, because he knows it will be carried out and go to his heirs, that they're not losing their farms from this.
[01:01:10] And that's one of the arguments against that. But that is one of those, one of those, I don't know, misconceptions, I guess that just goes and goes, cuz in a way everybody wants a very complicated event to be easy to explain. And yet that theory would make it easy to explain. The problem is it's not true.
[01:01:34] But they always want what's the one answer that kind of unlocks the whole thing? Whether the one answer is land or the one answer is that ergot, dare I say the word, that they always want the one thing, and there, there just is no one thing.
[01:01:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I look at that, you're looking at this single bullet theory that it just took one thing, and to me it's a way of absolving humanity of having these behavioral tendencies that we have that are really what explains what happened, comes down to human behavior. And we don't want to admit. It's almost a cop out to say that, "oh, they must have been on drugs. We're not capable of doing that."
[01:02:26] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, you're right with that example, it's a way to actually, it's an excuse. It excuses what has happened.
[01:02:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Something very strange and peculiar must have happened. It can't be this confluence of all these events and situations that happen regularly. Things like the economic hardship and the warfare and the fear of being attacked in your village. Those things that still happen today and disease and childhood death, stuff that's hard to explain. People want to say, "that happens all the time. So surely that can't be the reason why that happened," but it is. It's normal situations that just converge and create these conditions.
[01:03:17] Sarah Jack: And who did end up with George Senior's property?
[01:03:21] Dan Gagnon: It does remain in the Jacobs family. They do own it through the 19 hundreds and through 1854 when it's divided. So it does continue through, which is also a, comparison to the Nurse family that the family like doesn't go anywhere, or at least one part of the family always stays on that farm.
[01:03:43] And with the family, afterwards, Margaret is in jail for months and such. Her mother Rebecca had been in jail for months. And that's when we get that document of Rebecca's mother, Mrs. Fox, asking for Rebecca to be released because of her mental health. And so the family is very much disrupted, the whole family by this. And on top of Rebecca being put in jail, Margaret does have siblings who are just left there, and the parents, one was arrested and one flees, so presumably with their grandmother, but that really wrecks the household.
[01:04:21] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about George or Rebecca or your article that you'd like to touch on?
[01:04:30] Dan Gagnon: I think one other thing to mention is with Jacobs having a strong physical legacy like Nurse and the Nurse family, but in a way even more that his farm is there till 1940, allegedly his finger exists in the storage of the Peabody Essex. Peabody Essex also has his canes that are donated at early 1900s. With the Essex Institute, the precursor to the Peabody Essex, their cataloging is not excellent, and so when it has an early 20th century date, that's when they went through and gave it a date. Who knows how long it had been in that room, but that's when they first gave it a number. So that's vague. That was allegedly given by one of the descendants still around who had kept them in the family. So that part has at least some traditional backing to it. They were recently on display last year at the PEM. And really beyond that, George Jacobs' case is famous for the giant Tompkins Matteson painting done right around 1854, and it was done because of the brief exhumation of his remains. That also now is in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. The giant painting is not with historically accurate outfits or room decor, but it's one on book covers all the time. George Jacobs down on one knee, like pleading before the judges as his accusers, the young women, are like falling down all around him.
[01:06:12] That for somebody who is so mistreated after death, as well as during his life, and weirdly almost intentionally forgotten about, that painting of him in the 1850s is one of the prime images of the Salem Witch Trials we see today. That's just not necessarily what one would expect.
[01:06:31] Sarah Jack: Here's Mary with Minute with Mary.
[01:06:34]
[01:06:41] Mary Bingham: After the executions stopped at Salem in 1692, people immediately moved forward with their lives for their survival. Soon after these horrific circumstances, the affected families found comfort within their nuclear families and from outside sources. This was evident in the Wildes family. Ephraim Wildes clearly stated in primary sources that his father, John, discussed the tremendous monetary loss the farm suffered when Sarah was incarcerated that year. Don't forget, John and Ephraim had to pay not only for her jail fees, but for her personal needs, as well as for her shackles. Ephraim also spoke to his own relationship with his mother in his petition to the court in 1710 describing his loss of, and I quote, "so dear a friend." John and Ephraim's personal conversations probably were a guiding force to help them navigate their immense grief. John Wildes was about 74 years old when Sarah was executed. Before Sarah's arrest in the April of 1692, there were only four adults, one toddler and one infant living at their house on Perkins Row. There is no evidence that the Wildes family had either slaves or indentured servants. They may have received help to run the farm from their Averill relatives, living very close by.
[01:08:17] Sarah's physical absence put the entire family at risk, and most of the household chores fell now to Mary Wildes, Ephraim's young wife. Sarah was incarcerated at Salem from April 22nd until May 13th, when she was transferred to the Boston Jail. These jails were small, overcrowded, rotten, filthy, stinking spaces not suitable for human beings to live. Sarah was housed both at Salem and the Boston jails for about two months total with her stepdaughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Edward Bishop, as well as George Jacobs, among others.
[01:09:00] John and Ephraim made the trips to the jails once or sometimes twice a week, much to Sarah's relief, one can be sure. Though the trip to the Salem jail was about eight miles, the trip to Boston jail was 26 miles, putting the entire farm at risk if both men were not at home on those days that one of them made that long journey.
[01:09:24] There are no other primary sources placing the Wildes family and the Jacobs family close in proximity during their lifetimes. Therefore, John Wildes probably first set his eyes on Mary Jacobs of Salem when they were visiting their spouses in either Salem or Boston at the jails.
[01:09:47] Here are the reasons why I believe this to be so. After his move from Ipswich to Topsfield as a very young man, John stayed close to home. It seems that only twice he physically appeared at the Salem Court, which was again eight miles south of Topsfield. His other court appearances were at Ipswich, which was about five and a half miles north of Topsfield, and John did not go often. These were mostly cases where he needed to offer witness testimony. Also, Topsfield had its own local economy after 1664, when Francis Peabody erected his gristmill and then a sawmill seven years later. Another much needed addition was that of a blacksmith, who was Samuel Howlett, making it much easier for residents to purchase horseshoes, plows, pots, hinges, and latches locally. So John and his family did not need to travel to Salem for necessary goods. Therefore, he would not have occasion to meet up with the Jacobs family. After briefly looking at all those who were incarcerated with Sarah Wildes, it might make some sense that Mary Jacobs and John Wildes would find comfort in each other, but I will let the listener decide.
[01:11:07] George Jacobs revised his will just prior to his execution, but a good time after Mary would have met John. George's earlier will stipulated that Mary would have the homestead until her death. His later will stated she would have the homestead until she remarried. This meant that when she married John Wildes June 26th, 1693, she moved to Topsfield and lived on Perkins Row.
[01:11:37] John had a companion, and there was now another woman to help take care of Ephraim's ever-growing family. Mary also now had a companion in her new husband and a place to live, but most importantly, they had a shared tragedy that no one else could possibly understand except each other. Thank you.
[01:12:01]
[01:12:09] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:12:14]
[01:12:31] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
[01:12:34] The second week of June is a significant time of remembrance for the Salem Witch Trials. This week there will be at least two events honoring two of the women hanged for witchcraft crimes during the trials of 1692, Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse. The first event is for remembering Bridget Bishop. Historians, performers, and others interested in Salem's witchcraft history will meet at the witch trials memorial off of Liberty and Charter Street Saturday, June 10th to remember her, the first of 19 accused witches executed during the Salem witch trials of 1692. She was executed by hanging at Proctor's Ledge on June 10th.
[01:13:08] Dustin Luca of the Salem News writes, quote, "remembering Bridget as a fellow human being is crucial to understanding the madness that ensued." I'm so glad Dustin wrote that important message. Let's take it a step further. Remembering Bridget and the people hanged for witchcraft convictions as fellow human beings is crucial to recognizing the children, women, and men that are attacked in madness today, also fellow human beings. These modern victims are punished as witches, blamed for misfortunes, death, sicknesses, and family disasters. Those hanged for witchcraft in the early years of the American colonies and those vulnerable people who are targets today are our fellow human beings.
[01:13:47] The second event is also on June 10th, the annual gala day at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. It is a Homestead fundraiser, and the theme is 1920s lawn party. The very first gala day and garden party bazaar was held at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in 1912, right after becoming a museum, and they continued to be held annually through the 1920s. It was a way to welcome the community to explore the newly restored historic house and learn about the local history and just enjoy the beautiful grounds and summer day.
[01:14:14] This year, they hope to raise funds to restore and improve the kitchen garden. The deadline to pre-order picnic boxes was June 7th, but you are welcome to bring a picnic lunch. Plan on enjoying vintage entertainment like era music, silent moving pictures in the meeting house, and period style table and lawn games. Explore the historic Nurse Homestead and spend the day.
[01:14:34] You can hear two important researchers speak about the stories of these two women in our previous episodes. Please listen to Marilynne Roach clarify the record on who Bridget Bishop was, and dig into the life of aged accused witch Rebecca Nurse with Dan Gagnon on the episodes called "Marilynne K. Roach on the People of the Salem Witch Trials" and "Rebecca Nurse of Salem with Dan Gagnon."
[01:14:55] On May 25th, 2023, the Connecticut General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. This happened because the majority of the house, 80%, voted yes on May 10th to pass it to the Senate. The Senate voted almost unanimously yes, only one senator voted no, completing the passage of HJ 34. HJ 34 was sponsored and passed by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Because accused witch innocency matters, Connecticut did not let the votes fall to party differences.
[01:15:29] In another state, a similar exoneration attempt failed just a few weeks before the success of HJ 34. Eunice Cole, also popularly referred to as Goody Cole, was an accused witch that spent time in trial and in jail in Massachusetts. Essentially, the colonial boundary line changing made her a New Hampshire resident, as well. She was up for a posthumous exoneration. Her bill was House Bill 89. New Hampshire House Bill 89 is listed as a democratic partisan bill, but it passed the house with bipartisan support. However, it was killed in the Senate, when the lawmakers voted down party lines. It failed 10 to 14. Eunice Cole was declined exoneration for her witchcraft convictions by four no votes. No, no, no, no. This is disheartening but not shocking.
[01:16:20] Passing HJ 34 seemed like a long shot, but many of us worked hard to keep building up education around the crisis of modern, dangerous witch persecution. We reached the Connecticut lawmakers with the message that witch hunts were wrong and witch hunts must end.
[01:16:34] We commend the New Hampshire lawmakers that voted yes to clear the name of innocent Eunice Cole. They were her voice, just as the state of Massachusetts has recognized some of their witch trial victims as innocent, and 34 indicted accused witches of Connecticut, of which 11 were hanged, have now all had their names cleared. Eunice Cole will be added to the list of children, women and men waiting for a state acknowledgement for their suffering from witchcraft trials past. The American colonies still have many victims who suffered through witch trials waiting for their names to be cleared, and Eunice is just one of them. They need lawmakers to be their voice. They said they were innocent, and the plea went unheard.
[01:17:10] Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast and End Witch Hunts will work for all names to be cleared and for all lawmakers and global leaders to become better educated about witch trials past and present. We will continue to be voices for the innocent harmed by witchcraft accusations. Lawmakers of any party can support legislation that has a real and resounding global impact. They need to be told a yes vote for innocence here saves lives now. Other countries need our leadership. They need to see us taking a deliberate stand for alleged witches in our history with expressed concern for stopping alleged witchcraft violence today.
[01:17:43] Official state acknowledgement of the innocency of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony resounds globally today. It is that important. Please learn more about the ongoing mob witch-hunts that are killing and violently abusing extensive numbers of women, men, and children in dozens of countries now.
[01:18:00] Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast supports the efforts to end modern witch-hunts. You can learn more by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country-specific advocacy groups. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
[01:18:23]
[01:18:39] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah for that enlightening report.
[01:18:43] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:18:45] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:18:49] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:18:51] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe in whatever podcast app you choose.
[01:18:56] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:19:00] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:19:07] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:19:12] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:19:15]
Esteemed historian and author Marilynne K. Roach (The Salem Witch Trials, Six Women of Salem) gives us a focused conversation on four individuals of the Salem Witch Trials: Reverend John Hale, Samuel Wardwell, Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse. She also gives us an inside scoop on the 2022 Elizabeth Johnson Jr. exoneration hearing. Get a glimpse of what her next book, Six Men of Salem has in store. Enjoy the return of “Minute with Mary” by Mary Bingham, accused witch descendant, writer and researcher. Be sure to listen all the way through the episode to hear about the opportunities to hear Dr, Leo Igwe of Advocacy for Alleged Witches during his May 2023 New England speaking tour.
[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to this episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:27] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: We're joined in this episode by acclaimed Salem Witch Trials historian and author Marilynne K. Roach. We'll be talking about two women and two men involved in the Salem Witch Trials: Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse John Hale, and Samuel Wardwell.
[00:00:47] Sarah Jack: Marilynne compiled all the biographies in Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:00:51] Josh Hutchinson: She wrote Six Women of Salem, and now she's working on Six Men of Salem.
[00:00:58] You're welcome. It's my pleasure.
[00:01:02] Sarah Jack: I'm pleased to introduce Marilynne K. Roach, author of the Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege, Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials, who is currently working on Six Men of Salem.
[00:01:21] Josh Hutchinson: You compiled the biographical notes for Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. Did that prepare you for writing your biographies in Six Women of Salem?
[00:01:30] Marilynne K. Roach: I would imagine that working on the biographies would've helped, cuz I knew more about where you can look. Genealogy books were great, if something existed for that particular person, and old town histories, as well as standard histories of the witch trials, the base, the contemporary sources.
[00:01:51] Of course that always helps, but for obscure characters, a lot of it can be luck, but just trying to look at everything you can get your hands on or over the internet or library archives when you can. That seems to be the way to find things. I think serendipity is the word that refers to find things, but you just have to keep digging.
[00:02:18] Sarah Jack: What's the difference between writing history and writing biographies?
[00:02:24] Marilynne K. Roach: A narrower focus on biographies. Well, history is the big concept, also, but it's human history, and individual humans are making it. One really leads into the other. And I think of myself as a storyteller, wanting to tell a good story, witch trials are, but getting the facts correct, being accurate, and trying to understand it in context, and then explaining it, presenting it in context, because the events of 1692 didn't take place in a vacuum in their own time. And it certainly didn't take place in a 20th or now 21st century mindset, either.
[00:03:11] So yes, you have to think about a big picture, but if it's a particular individual, also focusing it more narrowly on that first. But there's an amazing amount of connections that you could find, where if you find out who else is in the room when things happen or who they're related to or if they had a quarrel with a particular neighbor, which suddenly makes sense of a name that might show up in the testimony or some other paperwork, wills are good, deeds. But just look at everything you can. It's my advice.
[00:03:53] Josh Hutchinson: With biographies, once you've collected all the sources that are available, how do you fill in gaps? Do you just look at other people's lives?
[00:04:06] Marilynne K. Roach: The lives of the people that your subject interact with, yeah, you need that. But finding all the information, I only wish. There's always something that's missed, something you don't know about the archive, you can't get. As I write, I find, and I'm all reminded by seeing my agent, that there is something that's not explained, that there's a hole in the story, and you have to go looking in that direction and hope, hope that you find something and then backtrack and put it in, put the information in. And does it affect the other events that you've already found out about? Does it put them in a new light? It just makes it a little more interesting or complete lot there? There's really no end to it, but try to get as much as I can about people. Of course, as soon as a manuscript, let's say a publisher takes it, and they're gonna print it, and they've wrenched it out of my hands, then something always turns up. But not necessarily anything huge.
[00:05:13] Sarah Jack: Why is it important to think of the historical figures as individual people rather than statistics, stereotypes, or symbols?
[00:05:22] Marilynne K. Roach: The Salem Witch Trials particularly and history in general tend to be stock characters or two dimensional stereotypes, as you said and not for real people at all. There's just here's an example of someone who lived 2, 300 years ago. They didn't have a lot advantages. Some people it seems nowadays can't really get over the fact that people had to live differently because just because of the technology. To the point where people say things almost they weren't very smart, then they had to watch TV by candlelight because there was no electricity.
[00:06:02] And also, information turns up as various people look into an era or a personal topic so that more information does become available, and the more real a particular person will seem, and they were individuals. Assuming I'm remembered 300 years from now, I hope the book's still in print, but not necessarily. I am a person, and I would like my individuality. Not that I broadcast that. I'm always talking about some other character.
[00:06:39] Too many historical characters generally, and the Witch trials specifically, which has a lot of urban legend attached to it. The characters seem to be not real people. They're symbols of something else. They're symbols of something we don't approve of or just of the past, which is a really foreign country to most people. None of us have been there personally, but I don't think there's a great knowledge of what other eras were like, and they're all slightly different.
[00:07:13] They are individuals, and they were actual people then. If we can find out what they were like, we'd have a better understanding of what they went through and what their resources were and what they had to face.
[00:07:28] Josh Hutchinson: With the past being a foreign country, as you described, how do you get inside historical figures' heads?
[00:07:37] Marilynne K. Roach: I try to get inside my subjects by trying to find out about not just their lives, but the culture and what their particular place within it was. In my other book, Six Women of Salem, I prefaced the, and the chapters were fiction, identifiable, fictional episodes, in italics. Oh, I'm not lying about anything. This is make believe, but I believe it's based on as much as I could find. So I'm trying to get in the heads, but there's no guarantees. I don't want people to assume I'm either lying about it or believe the whole thing. With the book I'm currently working on about Six Men of Salem, a lot of that was done during Covid when I was quarantined with all six men. It seemed like ghosts, and their opinions, and I had to get down to work and go out and do things. So it made me get down to work, but it also focused me on thinking about them as I tried to do with the six women in the first book. But yes I'm still haunted by them, and I only hope I get what they might have been thinking generally accurate to their personalities. Otherwise, I could be haunted, even.
[00:09:07] Sarah Jack: When you consider what the other people in their era were saying about them and then what we can say about them now, they're not gonna haunt that. They're gonna celebrate that.
[00:09:19] Marilynne K. Roach: I hope so. You could read somebody's testimony about their terrible neighbor, and we read it, and she seems perfectly innocent, so I'm assuming the transcription of whatever they said was accurate, but the viewpoint totally different.
[00:09:36] Sarah Jack: How can we look at what an individual's perspective is versus what their experience is? For example, on the way to the gallows, they were experiencing something going there, but their perspective of what's happening to them, are those two important dynamics?
[00:10:00] Marilynne K. Roach: They're facing death. They know it's unfair. Sometimes family was in the crowd waiting to see them off, who was sympathetic to them, and they got to say a heartfelt goodbye. That was allowed. They were allowed to speak at the gallows to give last words, and that you often described as very affecting, and it moved some people to. But there's other people there who still believe that they're guilty as charged, that the person about to be hanged is guilty as charged, and they're not being sympathetic about it. I don't know which side had the more population in the crowd, probably the people who didn't like them. So I try to imagine what that would like.
[00:10:48] And besides the fact that this is gonna hurt, it's a considered a shameful death to be hanged. It's embarrassing. Certainly it hurts, it's death for crying out loud. But they're also gonna have to face God and answer their lives, which is why the people wouldn't lie and say that they were guilty. They weren't going to have that stain on their soul if they could possibly help. And they stood fast and spoke the truth to the crowd, and only some people were listening.
[00:11:20] But more and more as the summer went on, I guess I tried to put myself in their place and what would I experience? But, that's really the guesswork, because my life has been different than theirs.
[00:11:33] Josh Hutchinson: We'd like to talk about John Hale now, and how was he involved with the trials?
[00:11:41] Marilynne K. Roach: Reverend John Hale was the minister in Beverly, which is across the estuary from Salem. His house still stands, by the way. Some of his parishioners were accused by neighbors, and he was, I guess you get a summons to come to court as a witness. He did relate what the various feelings feelings of neighbors had been about those individuals.
[00:12:08] He doesn't come out and say they're witches or that he thinks they're guilty, but he's relating these suspicious events, and some of them were suspicious, and their general character in the neighborhood, but he believed that the afflictions on the supposed bewitched was real longer than others did. There's a mention in Thomas Brattle's letter explaining why things were going wrong, why he thought the court is proceeding wrong, and he said, by this time it's fall, " only Paris, Noyes, and Hale still believe that this is witchcraft." And Samuel Parris's daughter and niece have been the first to be afflicted, so he is worried sick kids in the family.
[00:12:56] Reverend Noyes is one of the ministers in Salem, which is where all the turmoil trials is going on and then Hale across the river in Beverly. You could get there in a few hours on horseback. I find him sympathetic, Hale, because although he believes that's what's going on for longer than he should have, he does come to his senses.
[00:13:22] He seems like an otherwise nice person. And after the trials are over, his congregation still thinks highly of him. They're not cutting off his pay as in some, as with Samuel Parris. They were ongoing problems with his congregation. But Hale didn't have those problems, and he wrote a book afterwards. That helps. We have his words. He wrote about witchcraft, turned out to be mistaken that they relied too much on ancient, as in pre-Christian even, opinions about what a witch was and how you identified them and later in the Christian Europe as assumptions that turn out not to be true. They're not really in scripture, but, and they really don't add up in retrospect, because 19 people have been hanged at this point and others have died by other means like disease. But I found him a sympathetic character, and he's on both sides. He's not actually an accuser. He believes them, he's on the side of the court and then it, in the end, he realizes he was so tragically wrong. The accusations get too close to home with his own family, which helps.
[00:14:48] He seems to have doubts, and every time throughout the course of the months that were consumed by this, people were confessing out of fear and the desire to live a little longer, but then someone would confess and say, "no, I really did that." And he believed them, too. Hale was caught between different information and too long trusted the wrong facts and opinions, but I think he came around, and it was too late, as you could see, to help the people who had died.
[00:15:24] Sarah Jack: I really like that you point out how his congregation was still supporting him at the end, because you definitely see how it was part of their church culture to often be in conflict with their minister.
[00:15:42] Marilynne K. Roach: It was a lot as conflict. Sometimes it stereotypes. The ministers were authoritarian, and people had to do what they said. They weren't even getting paid much of the time. Not that they wanted to be rich from being a minister in a small, rural town. But you did have to support your family.
[00:16:00] And there were conflicts. People had opinions. They spoke up, and they criticized. There was a lot of that in Salem Village, where the whole panic began, but not so much in Beverly, where Hale was the minister.
[00:16:16] Sarah Jack: And can you tell us a little bit about his family.
[00:16:19] Marilynne K. Roach: He was married to his second wife at the time of the trials. First one having died. And let's see, when his first wife was alive, the maid servant, hired girl, was stealing from them. They didn't realize that she's pretty clever about it. And the one of the neighbors was in on it and her family. They began to notice things missing.
[00:16:48] But the maid servant at least threatened Hale's daughter that she could raise the devil and that the neighbor was a witch, who would come and hurt her if she told her parents what was happening. And so, after the thefts were discovered, the maid servant, they never knew where she went. She just left.
[00:17:10] But the daughter didn't tell her father how afraid she had been until after all this was over, and he finds it out when his daughter's dead practically. That was sad. But she dies. There's a son from the first marriage, who's still alive, and he remarries some years later, and his children from that marriage, and his wife is, the second wife is going to have another baby, when somebody in the neighborhood accuses her of sending her specter to afflict them. This is at the very end of things of the panic.
[00:17:52] It's also getting into winter, and I think people's heads were cooling after the summer of everybody suspecting everybody else. But that's giving away the plot. But I mean, it's right in the history. He realizes his doubts before were what he should have been paying attention to.
[00:18:11] He wrote Modest Enquiry about in 1697, which was after the public fast that Massachusetts ordered, which is a church service. Everybody goes to their respective meeting house, and there's a religious service where people apologize to God and the community, for whatever's been going wrong, that has made life more difficult.
[00:18:35] The witch trial fiasco was one of the problems, not quite mentioned in the order for the fast, but everybody knows that's what it's about, along with other things like, oh, generally bad behavior, fractious youth and, therefore, there's international problems, because life is out of joint. But everybody knows this is about the witch trials. That was the occasion when the former high court Judge Samuel Sewall, who was on the court of Oyer and Terminer, made a personal apology in his congregation, which people noticed, cuz I guess he was the only one who stood up. But after that, Hale is thinking about what actually happened, and he begins to write the book. Let's see. I may have gotten this from Sewall's diary because he traveled to Salem now and then on court business or just cause he had relatives there, and he was talking with Hale, who mentions maybe we're writing a book. So it's 1697 when he does, but it didn't get published until after he died. So it was like 1701 that it came out, and it was not a huge seller, as I said. People get sick of the whole subject. Let's get beyond that and deal with the current topics and so forth, so on.
[00:20:02] A lot of people would really have forgotten it. Didn't wanna be reminded that they had been that wrong about so many things. But Massachusetts did finally make reparations to the survivors. Not everyone who was found guilty was hanged, because the panic ended before that happened. And also there were reparations to the families of people who didn't survive.
[00:20:31] And beginning in the early 18th century, some of the people who had been found guilty but managed to survive petitioned to have their names cleared. So just in case everything went wrong again, the death sentence would be not be reinstated, and that started them. But in 1711, the attainder, that is the guilty verdict, was reversed for the people who had petitioned for it.
[00:20:57] But not everybody got into the petitions, so actual exonerations continued and the last person was cleared by name last July, in 2022. So it took a while, but at least on paper they're clear, which was interesting to hear about and be a small part of writing letters to your legislature. But this is part of the actual paperwork of the trials. And I get the result in an email, not pen and ink with a quill, but the process had gone on through all that, those changes in history, and the history was completed in my own time.
[00:21:44] Sarah Jack: Thanks for sharing your experience.
[00:21:47] Marilynne K. Roach: It was a little thrilled when that finally happened, a lot of people who had worked on that and really worked on it.
[00:21:55] Sarah Jack: I'm so glad you got to be a part of that.
[00:21:57] Marilynne K. Roach: Middle school teacher in North Andover and her class were the driving forces behind it, in the civic class, to get justice for Elizabeth Johnson. And there was a hearing some while ago with the judicial committee in Massachusetts considered the question, and along with a whole list of other judicial questions about people who needed exoneration now, while they were still alive or other legal matters. And I was able to get a slot to speak a few words, strict time limit on it, in favor of Elizabeth Johnson, and I did it by Zoom. It helped to clear and then it went through other hoops and other commitments that other people were working on.
[00:22:49] Sarah Jack: Can you give us an idea of what you said for her during your testimony?
[00:22:54] Marilynne K. Roach: She survived, and she petitions to have her name cleared and she's left out of the names in the reversal of detainer and writes to. the General Court of Massachusetts, asking them to insert her name, and she never hears back from them again. So I told them that General Court, through the committee, that she had made this petition, and 300 years later we hoped that you finally do it.
[00:23:25] I quoted her words, because she was saying she was innocent, but a lot of people worked on that, and there's a documentary being made about process with the historians and the school kids and teacher. And it took years. It took less time for the state to declare the official dinosaur and the official cookie. But this is more important. Chocolate chip.
[00:23:53] Sarah Jack: Right now there's a bill proposed for the exoneration of the accused witches from Connecticut Colony.
[00:24:04] I descend from one of the accused, but she was not executed. Her name was Winifred Benham, and she was accused in 1697, so she was at the very tail end of Connecticut's trials, and she was the daughter of Mary Hale, who was accused in Boston.
[00:24:27] I feel very excited to be able to speak as a descendant. You were able to quote Elizabeth Johnson. We don't have a lot of that from Connecticut, because their records just are not with us. But we still have all of these other women, like Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
[00:24:49] They're an example that these women in this era that experienced this, they said they were innocent, and they asked to have their names cleared. But for the Connecticut victims, we have to say this for them, cuz, if they got a chance, we don't know what their words were, but I believe that they begged as well to be recognized as innocent.
[00:25:12] Marilynne K. Roach: In the eyes of the world, as well as in the eyes of God.
[00:25:16] Sarah Jack: We're excited for that. And it could all happen really fast, so we're on the brink of it. We're on the brink of it.
[00:25:26] Marilynne K. Roach: I look forward
[00:25:27] News at 11.
[00:25:30] Film at 11. Oh, that would be exciting.
[00:25:34] Sarah Jack: Thanks for all that great information on John Hale.
[00:25:36] Josh Hutchinson: And now it's time for your favorite segment. That's right, Minute with Mary. And here's Mary Louise Bingham to tell us more about Reverend John Hale and some of the lives that he touched.
[00:25:51] Mary Bingham: Reverend John Hale, the longtime minister at Beverly, Massachusetts, offered testimony at several trials for witchcraft in 1692 at Salem. Two testimonies of which are often spoken are those testimonies against Sarah Bishop and Dorcas Hoar, both who either lived near Beverly or in the town itself. However, he was also summoned to testify at my ancestor's trial on the 2nd of July, 1692. That was the trial of Sarah Wildes.
[00:26:29] Reverend Hale told the court about 1677 his member, Mary Herrick, brought her aging mother, Mary Reddington, to him for spiritual counsel at his home. Mary Reddington lived at Topsfield next door to Sarah and John Wilds. Mary did not like Sarah for reasons of which we can only speculate today.
[00:26:54] Could it be that Sarah had a supposed unsavory past and was now the stepmother to Mary's nieces and nephews? After all, Mary's sister, Priscilla was the first wife to John Wildes. Could it also be that John married Sarah only seven months after Priscilla died? We cannot be sure. However, according to Reverend Hale, Mary Reddington spoke of so many stories as to how Sarah afflicted or bewitched her, that he could not recount all of them.
[00:27:31] Mary, however, does tell Reverend Hale, her beloved nephew, John Wildes, Jr. did feel sorry for her. This signified to Mary that her nephew believed his stepmother was a witch.
[00:27:45] Reverend Hale continued by saying that on a separate occasion in 1672, he was invited to travel to Ipswich to pray and advise for Jonathan Wildes, Sarah's other stepson. Jonathan was possibly living with his uncle on East Street and seemed to be exhibiting strange behavior. Some neighbors thought he was strange. Others thought he was possessed, while others thought he was just a faker. After Mary Reddington's visit to him in 1677, Reverend Hale now believed that Jonathan was bewitched. Imagine if such hearsay was not acceptable as part of the court proceedings during Sarah's trial.
[00:28:34] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Mary, for those fascinating insights.
[00:28:39] Sarah Jack: Should we talk about Samuel Wardwell?
[00:28:41] Marilynne K. Roach: Samuel Wardwell was a farmer and a carpenter, but in the spare time, he was also a fortune teller, which was the problem. I think he could probably read people very well, but he would tell fortunes, and he was much addicted to it, said a neighbor who had to testify. He'd look at their hand, and he'd ponder and think about it and then come out with some kind of fortune.
[00:29:08] And enough of it came true that he had a reputation, but the orthodox line was, humans cannot do that. God's not going to tell you the future. So where is your information coming from, if not the devil? And if not deliberately palling around with satanic forces, certainly being sucked into it by buy some fast-talking devil, who you didn't realize was doing that until it's too late, and you were in their clutches. So he's known as a fortune teller. You're really not supposed to do that. It was like the end of August that he's finally named. He lives in Andover, which is north of Salem. And more people were accused in Andover than in Salem. In July, the infection of paranoia or bewitchment spreads to other communities, notably Andover.
[00:30:07] So he's named, and he is arrested on the 1st of September. Not all of the paperwork is there, but he and his wife and two eldest daughters are all arrested, and they all confess, but there's a lot of confession by then, especially among Andover, but he retracts his confession. They were led to believe, or they were just scared, said anything. At least bought them time, because if you confessed, you were held as a co-conspirator to testify against the rest of gang, which some of them acted as if they thought that they would be. That they wouldn't be killed if they turned state's evidence, but that would not have been the case. Eventually, as happened with some of the confessors, eventually they were tried and found guilty, because the confession was believed when the retraction was not.
[00:31:09] Some of the women in Andover who were questioned on a particular occasion that submitted a statement later when things were turning around and said that they didn't know what they said when they were being questioned at the hearing. They were just so frightened that they just agreed with whatever the magistrates were asking them. And they tended to lean towards really leading questions in those days, that occasion. So they just agreed with what they were being accused of to make the questions stop. Or they didn't remember what they'd said at all.
[00:31:43] One of the women said that, remember the name of the monarchs at the beginning of the whatever the clerk said. And after that they really could not remember what it said, but apparently they had confessed, and now they're going through tortures of conscience, because they've lied before God and the community and said that they were in Satan's grasp.
[00:32:04] And some of them would wonder, were they, had I really done this and not remembered it, had I really sold out to the devil? They came around to remembering that they had not. But Samuel Wardwell, did deny his confession. Some people were in jail for months, and then they tried. And the longer you were in jail, if you could stand the lack of sanitation, the better chance you had surviving for this panic to be over.
[00:32:32] But he's arrested the beginning of September. He's tried couple weeks later, where he denies his confession. He took it back. He said, "I did say those things in the written confession, but it's all false." But now the magistrates don't believe that. They believe what he said earlier. And he's tried and he's executed on the 22nd of September. So it took 22 days for the whole process, whereas his wife and the two girls held to the con fession. The wife did her, but they're not tried until the following year, January.
[00:33:11] Trials started up again, but we're not supposed to use spectral evidence. They eventually survive all this, and his wife, Sarah, is one of the first to petition to have her name cleared, so she survived. But course Samuel, he's in, I feel sorry for him. And I like the idea of fortune telling, even though it's a risky thing to try, but he's, things just don't work out for him. He keeps trying.
[00:33:41] Sarah Jack: He confided that he was afraid he would be named. Was he already worried if perhaps he had made some compact with the devil?
[00:33:53] Marilynne K. Roach: I'm not sure if he worried that he had himself compacted with the devil, but people certainly knew he was a fortune teller. He didn't seem to hide it. And that was, that prospect more and more dangerous. So he probably heard that the people were bandying his name around, as he told his brother-in-law. But after he revealed those suspicions of fears of what people might say about him, it seemed, I don't know if it made it worse, or if it was just going get bad anyway. Cause he was a known fortune teller.
[00:34:31]
[00:34:31] He did not get a premonition that he should get out of town now, but it takes money to successfully get away very far. Some people did escape, but they tended to have more money.
[00:34:46] Abigail Hobbs confessed fairly early on. Abigail Hobbs had been rather strange girl before all this panic started. But she had confessed cause she, "oh, I was out talking to devil last night." Sort of a joke. They took it seriously after things started getting really dicey.
[00:35:06] So she was witness against the other supposed witches. She'd seen so and so's spirit at such and such a witch meeting. So she was quite willing to testify against other people. But even that, eventually she was tried and found guilty, it's just that hangings were put on hold in October, so until they could get advice from England as how to proceed with the mess. And so she survives by default, even though she confessed, accused others, and was found guilty. But her name's included. She doesn't seem to have deserved it. On the other hand, she really wasn't a witch, just an inconvenient person to have around.
[00:35:56] Sarah Jack: Let's talk about Bridget. Why was she the first to be tried and executed?
[00:36:01] Marilynne K. Roach: Because she was a likely suspect, having been suspected before. She's a feisty character, but not a witch. I like her feistiness, as people tend to do now. They didn't appreciate it so much then. She had been accused of witchcraft, and the case went to the upper court . There's not enough of the paperwork left. There are only some depositions, as far as I know, by Juan, spelled, w o n n. And he says that he saw her spirit in the chicken house, and she's stealing eggs, and there was a black cat bothering people at night, while they were trying to sleep, but there really was no cat, so it was sent by Bridget Bishop.
[00:36:53] There's not a lot of specific details about the earlier case. But she had been suspected and the case referred to the upper court, which would've tried all capital cases, but then she's alive, so apparently the case was either dismissed or she was found not guilty.
[00:37:10] But neighbors remember that sort of thing. And she had had various disagreements, arguments with neighbors over boundary lines, chickens getting into the garden, a pig going amuck, and various neighborhood things. So she was probably a more likely suspect first, which she was hanged by herself, having been found guilty that was that case. Later executions, it was a group of people who had been hanged. Course of a few weeks, but after that first hanging in June, just Bridget had died at this point, one of the judges on the Oyer and Terminer Court quit, Nathaniel Saltonstall. He didn't like the overuse of spectral evidence where the supposed victims of witchcraft can see the forms, the apparitions, like a ghost, only from a living person coming at them.
[00:38:16] Only the victim can see this, not the other people in the world, they say. So he didn't think that was ironclad evidence, causing the court and Governor Phips to consult with experts on spiritual matters, the Boston-area ministers. And their answer was, you can't trust spectral evidence. It could be the devil's delusion which After the trials were all over, they realized, "we were deluded. The devil deluded us." But they ended this letter of advice by saying, "we trust your best good judgment to use proper scriptoral things.
[00:39:06] And witchcraft is illegal in England, too. And all the precautions, you know, the whole several paragraphs of precautions were pretty much ignored. And they continued with the other cases for that summer. Nobody who was tried in the summer of 1692 was found innocent. They were all found guilty. When the court convened in January 1693, it's now the Superior Court, because Massachusetts had just received a new charter to make its government legal. They did not have as much self-government as before, because the governor had to be appointed by the king, for one thing, but they had to reconsider all their laws and make sure they didn't conflict with the English code, witchcraft being illegal in England, too. Because of the way the trials had been going so wrong, the legislature established a permanent court for the capital cases and upper court, it's now a regular superior court, and also would not allow spectral evidence to be used against anyone.
[00:40:23] Those two things together, the people who were tried the following winter and the next spring, only three were found guilty, and those three were reprieved and eventually exonerated, they survived. During the summer of 1692, just the feeling was so out of hand that nobody had a chance, unless they could stay in jail for a good long time. Some of the women who were going to have babies but were condemned as witches got to wait until after they gave birth, and by then the panic was over and they got to survive and go home.
[00:41:03] Sarah Jack: There's so many layers to what was happening.
[00:41:07] Marilynne K. Roach: Stories within stories. It's not a simple story, good guys, bad guys, no.
[00:41:13] Sarah Jack: Is there anything that we need to set the record straight on around Bridget Bishop?
[00:41:19] Marilynne K. Roach: Well, her court papers were at an early date filed with another Goodwife Bishop's court papers so that they were assumed to be one person. This Bridget Bishop who lives in the middle of Salem and this Sarah Bishop who lived in the Danvers- Beverly line north of that in farming country. They're both married to men named Edward Bishop, which also makes it difficult. So Sarah and Edward Bishop ran an unlicensed, rowdy tavern. That story gets attached to Bridget, whose spector is identified by a few people as wearing a red petty coat or red bodice, which wasn't that unusual a color, if you could afford a good quality of dye. It's not considered too fancy necessarily, but the red petticoat, the tavern get put together, and she's running some dive somewhere in a lot of fiction, but yes, they're confused.
[00:42:34] Interesting character. Her second marriage before Edward was to an abusive husband, and she hit him back, and they both had to stand on the stalk, actually stand on in public as an apology for that sort of, which happened on Sunday.
[00:42:54] A genealogist figured her first husband was somebody Wasselbee, and if he didn't die just before, or on the voyage, shortly after they landed, because she gives birth in Boston to a child, who died. And there had been a child back in England who had died, also.
[00:43:19] She, at least a widow here in New England for a year before she marries Thomas Oliver. She supported herself somehow and moved to Salem and as her life there, which was apparently rocky. They do have a child, who's an adult, married woman in 1692. By then Bridget's Oliver has died.
[00:43:44] And she Bridget's married to one of the many Edward Bishops around, not necessarily related to the other Edward Bishops, but maybe someday someone will figure that out. So she's had an interesting life, and hard.
[00:43:59] Sarah Jack: She had child loss along with spouse loss. Would've that been looked at as just an experience many of the women were having, or would've that added to this list of negative things about her in people's eyes.
[00:44:17] Marilynne K. Roach: Sometimes the families where there had been a number of dead children blame the neighbors witching them too. Some other hard times that she had had to deal with, which maybe made her look cranky sometimes, I can identify. Not well, that's not my experience, but I can identify with her crankiness, but not the same reason. The crankiness seems to be standing up for her rights.
[00:44:47] Arguing with the neighbor whose chicken or Bridget's chickens got into the neighbor's garden and scratched it up, and she had words with the neighbor. But yes, she stood up for herself. Who owned the pig that was in contention? Was it hers? Should her husband have gone and sold it without asking.
[00:45:12] Josh Hutchinson: You've mentioned some trouble with her marriage to Thomas Oliver. What do we know about her relationships with him and with Edward?
[00:45:22] Marilynne K. Roach: They do have the child together, and that child survives. She grows up, but he hit her, and she hit him back. They both complained to neighbors at different times about being bruised by the other person. So she fought back. When they apparently did something in public, yelling at each other in public on a Sabbath, and they were both on the stand out in public with the crime on their hat or something. Be it stand out in public to the gaze of the populous or be fined. Thomas's grown daughter paid the fine for him and left stepmother to stand on the pillory, to the public gaze. So I guess she wasn't on the best of terms with her stepchildren, so it was odd, like Edward sounds not abusive, but on the other hand, he never shows up to speak on her behalf.
[00:46:33] Nobody speaks on her behalf. It's bad. It's, it's an interesting character. You hardly know he was still around, except she's identified as Edward Bishop's wife, something. And he shows up when Oliver's estate is settled after Bridget's death. He's living in the house that he built on the Oliver land that Bridget was given permission to use for the rest of her life, even though she was widowed, it didn't immediately pass to Oliver's heirs, interestingly enough.
[00:47:10] So he's in on the deeds and he's with probate, and the daughter inheritance, something like that. He certainly did not come to the and demand that his wife be perceived as an innocent person. John Proctor did that. He got arrested too. So there's that.
[00:47:33] Sarah Jack: Nobody was speaking up for her, but men were talking about dreaming about her, they were speaking about her. Why were they dreaming about her? Why were they complaining about that?
[00:47:46] Marilynne K. Roach: Pretty obviously dreams that certain men in the neighborhood had had. Either they found her threatening or alluring and therefore a threat. It's not my fault I had thoughts about her. Certainly it's all her doing in their minds, perhaps. She's identified by her clothing. They're obviously afraid of one reason or another. And the description of not being able to breathe, because she's pressing down on them in the night, supposedly, does match sleep disorder, which I think it's traditionally called the hag, where somebody dreams there's a witch on them trying to stop their breath, or sounds like those old legends of cats sitting on somebody's chest and sucking their breath out.
[00:48:42] They phrased their dreams in that manner, I think. Maybe she's so defiant. She's got fan base now. That is where you wanna be a fly on the wall.
[00:49:00] Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned that she had a daughter who survived. What happened with her?
[00:49:07] Marilynne K. Roach: She's grown up and married a Christian, their first name. She's married to a fisherman. And they have a daughter. And the daughter's daughter was a school teacher in early 19th century Salem, taught all little kids to learn to read.
[00:49:25] She does have descendants, so they would just, I don't know how they got along with the neighbors, but after a few generations, they trusted to send their kids there to learn to read. And then they'd been, you know, the apology, reversal of attainder, and so forth. Or that generation just thought, we have come so far in this, these modern times, that would be like during the China trade years, but there were quite a few children in like the fourth generation.
[00:50:09] Rebecca Nurse was quite a different character and it didn't help her that she had a good reputation generally, and people spoke up for her. She had a, an extended family around her. Lots of kids. They're married, they have kids and the neighbors, the children to pull, testify for at least on paper, don't know if they called it to court. They get petitions signed.
[00:50:36] Lots of people signed the petition, which could be risky. By signing a petition, it might seem that then you, too, were backing a witch, if she's found guilty. But a lot of people stood up for her, and it still didn't do anything in the law. Whereas Bridget had a quarrelsome reputation, probably justified, she had reason to quarrel, but she's hanged, Rebecca's hanged. It was very dangerous.
[00:51:08] Sarah Jack: How do we know that Rebecca was so pious? Her contrast was so different to Bishop's.
[00:51:14] Marilynne K. Roach: Rebecca was a full member of the Church of Salem Town, lives in Salem Village, before the Village had its own parish. Her family supported her and a lot of neighbors did think highly of of her. I would say the level of support that she had indicated what people thought of her.
[00:51:38] And she was found not guilty, actually, the first part of her trial, which caused the afflicted witnesses, first those victims, to writhe in extreme pain and cry out that they were being hurt. If she's not actually indicted for that, at least, is a reason why the uh, chief justice had the jury reconsider some evidence that hadn't been emphasized before, where she had actually made the remark when certain confessed witches had been led into the court to testify.
[00:52:23] But she commented to whoever, "why are you bringing them in? They're one of us." Meaning us accused. The jury reconsidered whether she meant one of us confessed witches. She hadn't confessed, but was she witch? So the jury sent out. They come back and they ask, "what exactly did you mean by that statement?" And she doesn't say anything. She doesn't, so they figure, alright, she's guilty, they pronounce her guilty, and that's that. Then somebody tells Rebecca what had just happened and she realizes she hadn't heard the question from jury foreman. She's hard of hearing, considered elderly in her time, exhausted by all this and she lost her chance to speak up, presumably, would've helped. And might even have turned the tide of the trials, if somebody had actually been found not guilty at this point, but guilty. And that's how the court proceeds. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but almost.
[00:53:42] Josh Hutchinson: She was nearly reprieved, wasn't she?
[00:53:47] Marilynne K. Roach: Yes. After the verdict comes down, then her family and supporters get depositions together and the petition and get it as far as Governor Phips, who does issue a reprieve, and we don't have the paperwork, but he, he did. And that caused such reactions of agony, presumably they believed it themselves, such a reaction from her supposed victims, that some gentlemen of Salem, not named but maybe the magistrates, persuaded the governor to rescind it, and she's back on the list. That was an up and down, up and down. Hopes dashed. Hopes revived. Quite a rollercoaster there.
[00:54:40] Josh Hutchinson: She has quite a number of descendants. Sarah's one. She and I are both descended from Mary Esty, and we know there's a very active Towne Cousin Association and of course there's the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. So she has quite more of a legacy than many of the other persons that were accused.
[00:55:04] Marilynne K. Roach: And lots of descendants. I've met many of them. The fact that the farm, or most of it is there, and the house, it helps make it more real if you can go to a place where things happen. And the Towne Family Association website and all that. I did give a talk on Six Women of Salem to one of the reunions several years ago.
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: Do you wanna tell us anything about your new book you're working on?
[00:55:38] Marilynne K. Roach: I've my fingers is crossed. Makes you want to work a little magic spell to attract publishers, but you know, one mustn't do that. There's still a lot of work to do on it, but just proceeding chronologically, we've reached September. I need to fill in some blanks to explain things better or just blanks that, explain something more that's been lost, and the six guys are all very real. Some, realer than others. There's more information on some than on others, but there's that they were chosen as these six women were chosen because there is some biographical information. Just the trials where there might be a few papers to somebody about being arrested and jail bill or something, but what did they say?
[00:56:41] What were the neighbors saying about, and before all this blew up and the panic started getting out of hand, what did they, what were they doing the rest of their lives? Does it show up in town records? Especially for the men who had a wider world to move around in. Military stuff going on.
[00:57:02] The problems with French Canada, the French King, the English Glorious Revolution over there. What's going on in New York? What's going on in the wilds of Maine, practically coast, not a lot of hinterland for the English yet, but the indigenous people, the French allying, the economic situation. I had to try and find out something about all that, but it all touches the story, and I hope I know enough to at least make it logical.
[00:57:39] Sarah Jack: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be really important. Thanks for taking it on.
[00:57:45] Marilynne K. Roach: It's fascinating. It's whole bunch of rabbit holes, but they're all interesting. I hope they approve. Maybe sometimes a writer is more accurate than the subject would like that to be, depending what you're saying. But there can be surprises, too of it. Hathorne for example, was praised for his mercy at one point, not by the accused witches, but you'll see when it happens.
[00:58:17] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another important update.
[00:58:20] Sarah Jack: This is End Witch Hunts News.
[00:58:22] I am so excited to announce an incredible east coast speaking tour week that we get to assist with Dr. Leo Igwe, the director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization will be in the area. Myself and Josh Hutchinson are Salem Witch Trial descendants and co-founders of End Witch Hunts Movement, our parent organization. It is an incredible honor for us to organize a week of these speaking engagements during his May speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in both the Salem, Massachusetts area and in the Hartford, Connecticut area. Both places of historical significance to Early American Colony Witch Trials History.
[00:59:01] We would like to thank friends of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, Rachel Christ-Doane and the Salem Witch Museum, for hosting a virtual presentation of Leo Igwe on Monday, May 15th. Please go to their Facebook event to RSVP.
[00:59:15] Witch persecutions and trials are ongoing incidents in Africa and other nations, reportedly at least 60. Witchcraft accusation is still a form of death sentence. Across the continent, thousands, mainly women and elderly persons or children are accused, tried, attacked, killed, imprisoned, or banished every year.
[00:59:37] Join the Salem Witch Trial Museum on May 15th for a fascinating virtual lecture given by Dr. Leo Igwe. In his presentation, he will use several cases to illustrate the range of Witch persecutions, and why this early modern phenomenon persists in contemporary Africa. The Zoom link will be shared on their event page 24 hours prior to the event. This first event at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Leo Igwe will be with us in Salem, touring the historic sites guided by a local seasoned in the history, End Witch Hunts board of directors member, and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast host of "Minute with Mary," Mary Bingham.
[01:00:15] Tuesday, May 16th is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Please see the Facebook event for details. Thank you to Dan Gagnon and the homestead director and board members for hosting us.
[01:00:33] Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars.
[01:00:37] Next you can enjoy an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17th. Thank you for hosting, Dr. Kathy Hermes, Connecticut Explored Magazine, and the University Library. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known witch trial historic sites with author and co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Memorial Facebook page, and End Witch Hunts board of directors member Beth Caruso.
[01:01:01] But wait, there is more. On Thursday afternoon, May 18th, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. This is hosted by friend of the podcast, Andy Verzosa. I want to break off to congratulate Andy and the Stanley-Whitman House. They have been selected by the award committee of the Connecticut League of History Organizations to be awarded, not one but two 2023 Awards of Merit. The first award is for the museum's book, Memento Mori: Remembered Death, and the second award is for their commissioned play, The Last Night.
[01:01:35] And last but not least, you can support the Stratford Historic Society by attending their inaugural Goody Bassett Ball on May 20th. This is not a speaking engagement for Leo, but Sarah, Josh, and Leo and other members of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project will be in attendance. And we would love to talk to you about the history, the podcast, and how the speaking tour went.
[01:01:56] Thank you to all these witch hunt and witch trial advocates and leaders of witch trial history for your thoughtful collaborations and for giving Leo a platform to amplify his message. We want to see you there, listeners. Please come hear the talk and shake hands with us. This is a very important and special opportunity that is history in the making.
[01:02:14] This is my first time to the historic sites of my ancestors, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty. This is Leo's first in-person interactions with historic witch trial communities in New England. Come join us and make this a week that magnifies the importance of witch hunt education and action against it. Look for Facebook events for all these occasions posted by our social media.
[01:02:37] Would you like to know more about Leo or any of these event hosts? You are in luck, because we have some great podcast episodes for you to listen to. For more on Leo, listen to episode, "Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe." And to learn more about Beth Caruso and Dr. Kathy Hermes, listen to episode, "Between God and Satan." And to learn more about Dan Gagnon, listen to the episode "Rebecca Nurse of Salem." And to learn more about Andy Verzosa and The Last Night play, listen to episode, "Introducing The Last Night, a Connecticut Witch Trials Play" and keep your eyes open, because another episode with Andy Verzosa will be publishing in the next few weeks.
[01:03:16] Get involved by visiting endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop. Our links are in the show description. Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there.
[01:03:31] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that information. We'll be sure to head out and attend these events.
[01:03:40] Sarah Jack: Meet you there.
[01:03:41] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shall Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:03:46] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for our next round of Connecticut Witch Trials 101.
[01:03:52] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:56] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:03:59] Josh Hutchinson: Tell all your friends, family, acquaintances, neighbors, and pets about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:04:07] Sarah Jack: Keep supporting our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org again.
[01:04:14] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:04:17]
Emerson Baker enchants us in this ineffable discussion on Early New Englander and Puritan folk beliefs, protective magic and the safeguarding of the execution grounds for the Salem Witch Trials, known as Proctor’s Ledge.
Pour your best beverage and sit back to take in this insight packed episode. Dr. Emerson Baker’s mastery of these topics are revealing, invaluable and instructive. You will walk away enlightened and excited to have a better understanding of the fear that gripped this culture. We have some laughs and heartfelt conversation while focusing on key facets of the witchcraft traditions of the 17th century. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to an exceptional episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we have the privilege of speaking with the esteemed professor Emerson W. Baker of Salem State University, Salem Witch trials expert. We get to talk to him about counter magic, material culture, protective magic, the Gallows Hill Project, which located the actual site of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials hangings,[00:01:00] and we'll hear a lot of great stories from him and learn about what kinds of objects were used to protect a home from magical invaders or invisible, spiritual, witches, demons, spiritual threats. We talk about objects found hidden in walls of colonial homes. We talk about protective magic. We talk about marks made on walls to protect the entrances, especially, doors, windows, chimneys, wells.
Emerson began his career as an archeologist, and he loves studying material culture. In fact, he teaches two classes on material culture.
We'll learn about the room in his house [00:02:00] that contains a gateway to hell. We'll talk about whether these beliefs constitute superstition, and we'll talk a little bit about our modern superstitions.
And then we'll talk about Proctor's Ledge, learn about the oral history of the location of the hangings and the oral history of the secret burials of the unfortunates who were executed. We'll get to hear Emerson's dedication speech from when they dedicated the Proctor's Ledge Memorial to the victims.
And throughout our conversation, it just comes out that Emerson is a local, feels like he's from Salem, and gives you the local [00:03:00] tour of the location, the history, his stories are evocative. You listen to it, and you feel like you're actually there in that time and place.
Sarah Jack: And now Josh will tell us about the innocent victims of the Salem Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: The following individuals died as a result of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Sarah Osborne died in jail May 10th, 1692.
Bridget Bishop, hanged June 10th.
Roger Toothaker died in jail June 16th.
Infant Good died in jail before July 19th.
Sarah Good, Susanna Martin, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Wilds, Elizabeth Howe, all hanged July 19th.
George Burroughs, John Proctor. Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., John Willard, [00:04:00] hanged August 19th.
Giles Corey pressed to death with stones September 19th.
Mary Esty, Samuel Wardwell, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, hanged September 22nd.
Ann Foster died in jail December 3rd.
Lydia Dustin died in jail March 10th, 1693.
Sarah Jack: Thank you Josh for helping us to remember the victims.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. I think it's important to know their names and what happened to them, and to never forget and work as hard as we can to avoid repeating our mistakes.
And now it's my privilege to introduce Dr. Emerson W. Baker, professor of history at Salem State [00:05:00] University, Salem Witch Trials expert, and author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience.
Emerson Baker: I'm first and foremost still consider myself to be an archeologist more than anything else, but it's with a, I would say, with a small a. And so I spent over 40 years now studying material culture of one form or another. And what's really fascinating is the different ways that you can look at the material evidence of the past to even look at witchcraft in ways that I think we're only recently realizing.
Frankly, when I was in college, one reason I decided I could actually maybe make a career into this was through material culture and archeology when I realized that there are so many things about Early America that we don't know, that maybe we have all these documents that have been studied to death. Look how long we've had available, in one form or another, at least most of the Salem Witch Trials transcripts.
So what's the new way to look at the past and something like Salem? One answer to that is material culture. So specifically we're [00:06:00] talking about things like material objects left behind, poppets, or what we colloquially call voodoo dolls, or witches bottles and other things used to ward off evil, horseshoes, old shoes, carvings essentially what we'd consider to be the graffiti in old houses.
When we first purchased our old home here in Maine about 25 years ago, it's only a little over 200 year olds, it's built about in the 1790s. Okay. After the Age of Witch Hunts, in theory, we found an odd carving in the wall. At the time, I thought it was some board kid on a rainy day, took out a jackknife or a compass and made this unusual little design.
And then only a few years later did I realize that nope, no. In fact, that was counter magic. So long way of answering that, Josh, is it can take lots of different forms. And what's exciting about it is only really in the past, really maybe 20 years or 30 years, have scholars even begun to realize that some of these weird things that they find on archeology digs or in old houses or old churches [00:07:00] is not there by accident.
Sarah Jack: Why is it important to understand the early modern New England Puritan worldviews?
Emerson Baker: In special relation to that material culture. What's I think the most important point that I would make is several, but one is what we are seeing in here regularly are evidence of what we would call white magic, right? And well in some degree, some would say, would say maybe even black magic. What it really talks about is the fact that early New Englanders, be they Puritan or whatever faith, have these underlying folkways and folk beliefs, which in many ways are pre-Christian, indeed really anti-Christian, right? And that, in fact, if the minister knew what they were doing, he would be rather upset.
And the same time, it goes along with the, and I'm sure you folks are well aware of these things, but the differences between black magic and white magic and how they were viewed. And we all know this, because we've all watched the Wizard of Oz, and we know we have the wicked witches of the east and the west. And of course, if you didn't know that they were wicked they're dressed in black. [00:08:00] And then you have Glenda, the beautiful, dressed in white, good witch from the north who's there to help Dorothy and help her find her way home, and to some degrees here's the problem. Cotton Mather and Increase Mather would say it doesn't matter, because even though Glenda's a good Witch, she's still a witch, and she's still invoking the dark powers of Satan to try to help Dorothy, right?
And so when you are using counter magic, even if it's to ward off witches, it is not God that's helping you. All that you really should need is praying to God and God will hear you and hopefully answer your prayers and will protect you from evil. As opposed to though, but when you are doing things like using witches bottles or horseshoes or things like this, you are, whether you mean to or not, you are invoking dark powers. You were invoking Satan.
So the simple fact that you have material evidence of witchcraft demonstrates these underlying folk beliefs in white magic, or really the idea of cunning women and cunning men that we assumed were there, but you don't have a lot of evidence of it, because, again, not many of these folks wanna get up in front of the congregation and announce the fact that, by the way, [00:09:00] afterwards, I'll be leading a charm circle next door or something, because it's going to get them in trouble.
So that's one important thing. But I think maybe, to me, the bigger issue is the continuation of belief. When you're dealing with old houses, and you find things like shoes buried in the wall or horseshoes buried under the sheathing or other things like this or carvings like daisy wheels, hexagrams, which is what we found in our house.
They can be incredibly difficult to date, because if you're in a house like ours as it was built in the 1790s, that daisy wheel could have been carved in 1790 when the people arrived, or frankly, it could have been carved maybe a year before someone sold the house to us. But at least you can know, for example, and a house is built in 1790 that we're talking like a hundred years after the Salem Witch trials.
And people still have some kind of belief and fear of supernatural and of witchcraft. And so it speaks to that continuation of belief, and particularly to me, it talks about the changing nature of belief and also the ways to stop witchcraft, right? People, many people, and I know you folks know better, many sort of members of the puplic would [00:10:00] just say, "wow. So the Salem Witch trials, those were the last Witch trials. So after that, people stopped trying witches, because they stopped believing in witchcraft," and no, absolutely not, right? Nothing could be further from the truth.
They stopped the witch trials, because they realized it was, well as Increase Mather said, I'll sort of paraphrase, "better that 10 witches live than one innocent life be shed." The point being that we cannot, it's so hard to be sure that we actually have a witch as opposed to an innocent person. And the fact that, of those 19 people that died, the Mathers would tell you, I'm sure, they were all guilty. Cotton Mather would say, "absolutely." Increase would say, "I hope so."
So the problem is, if after 1692, the courts have pretty much decided that they're not gonna be able to successfully try witches, especially when Massachusetts says we can't use spectral evidence, which again, frankly was, thank God.
How are people gonna protect themselves from witches, when they still know that they're real? And what you really have to go to is the home security system of colonial [00:11:00] America, which is counter magic, right? You have to protect your house with things from boughs of greenery under the threshold, horseshoes over the threshold.
I think what we see evidence is of, like, people finding other ways to try to protect themselves against witches and against Satan. And to me, the fascinating thing there is, again, it's not just houses from the 17th century. It's not just things before the Salem Witch Trials, it's houses that weren't built until the late 18th century or the 19th century.
And, in fact, a few miles from where I live here in York, Maine, and down in Elliot, there was a house museum, which was built in 1896. And when they were doing some work on it a few years ago, what did they find in the attic? But in the attic, in the louver, they actually found a bottle with a pentagram on it, scratched into the side, probably a witch's bottle. And a couple other things, too, that were clearly counter magic. We are talking about something that took place almost in the 20th century, where those beliefs continue to some degrees. And in fact, it really continued to some in that way today, too.[00:12:00]
Think of the horseshoe, right? To us it's become a symbol of good luck. But if you start pushing harder on that, you can tie it directly back to the belief that it was protection against witches. And you see them showing up in the records of some of the witch trials, particularly, the Morse case in about 1680 in Newburyport. A neighbor comes in and scolds the family for having a horseshoe over the door. And he says, "this is basically witchery and superstition." And he takes it down and then they say, "but the next day, our neighbor Goody Morse who never came in the house, all of a sudden she came in. So you see, it was warding off witches, cuz everybody knows she's a witch." To me, it's a fascinating way to try to tease out those beliefs, cuz the problem, of course, with studying witchcraft is for the most part, right? Again it's not tangible, right? It's intellectual history per se.
And to be able to find a horseshoe buried in the wall of an old house and it's not, and it never served any purpose as a barn, you can say, and we find these on my archeology sites, we say, "boy, if you find a horseshoe on a barn, it means one thing, you find a horseshoe about where the threshold of a house was, that means something very different."
Josh Hutchinson: My [00:13:00] parents several years ago purchased a house in Arizona that had a horse-themed room with a big horse mural on one of the walls, but they found a horseshoe in there, and so they hung it above the mantle, purely decoratively. A friend came over and said, "you've got your horseshoe upside down. You're letting all the magic out, or the good luck out." And that was five years ago or so.
Emerson Baker: And there's all sorts of debate over that as to whether it needs to be upside down or right side up. There's all sorts of stories about where that belief comes from, but one aspect of it seems to be that iron artifacts, in particular, believe to have magical properties. And again, if you go back to medieval Europe, iron was a pretty amazing thing, right? And particularly sharp iron objects. So horseshoes, maybe not in that sense, but, so for example, the same room of our old house here that we found the daisy wheel or hexafoil, which again is a counter magical symbol [00:14:00] carved into the doorjamb inside that room. When work was being done, we had to pull up the floor, cuz the sills were rotting. Buried in the wall of that house, we found a broad ax that was 200 years old and razor sharp, still complete with the handle. You could have gone out and hewn wood with it. And the same thing too, like in witches bottles, where you usually find nails or pins. So iron is a pretty amazing thing. It's considered to be magical.
And then also too sharp iron objects, again, are one direct way to ward off evil. So when you, again, like when you just finding that ax buried in the wall wouldn't be one thing, but when you find it in comparison with other things. And then when we pulled up the floor in in that room, what else did we find? We found that was the old laundry room in the house cuz there was a well under the floor.
Evil seems to me is not all that bright. Evil tries to get into houses kinda through the openings, through the doors, windows, the chimney. And we could have a long talk about different kinds of spirits, this could have been your Christmas show, either [00:15:00] evil or nice coming down the chimney.
But think about this. What room would you be worried about in your house if you were worried about evil coming in? How about the room that has the direct passage down into hell? Through the well, right? Again, these things and if you look at old houses, I would say, too, the other thing to me that really is fascinating about this is if you look at most old New England homes built certainly before 1800 and maybe before the Civil War, you almost invariably will find some form of magical slash superstitious kind of protection, be it a horseshoe or some carving, even one of these different types of, if not a daisy wheel or hexagram, maybe a Marion mark or was known as a demon trap, all kinds of things like that. And the issue is until people started to think about this again, like maybe 20 years ago, people said, "boy, the carpenters made this odd mark here, didn't they?" Yeah, no, they didn't.
Sarah Jack: And would've it been like the husband that would do it? The wife?
Emerson Baker: These are the kinds of things. Here's the problem again, no one writes down in their diary, "today the wife and I carved the hexafoil in the barn door to keep evil out of the [00:16:00] barn, because old Bessie hasn't been milking really well lately." We really don't know.
It probably could have been any adult member of the family. And for lots of different reasons. My former grad student, Alyssa Conary, and I just published a really short piece in a new book on Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Portsmouth in 101 Objects. And we published a piece on the the daisy wheel or hexa foil that's in a partition room upstairs at the Jackson House. Now, the Jackson House was built in 1664 or so in Portsmouth, but the upstairs room was divided in the 1710s. So again, we know this has to be an 18th century piece.
But in this case, we know that the room, one side of that room, the partition was occupied by a member of the family who had mental illness we would call it today. But at the time, in the 18th century, mental illness was the belief to be something that Satan sort of inflicted people with. So in this case, some member of the family, well-intentioned, member of the family, and again, we don't know if it was a brother or sister or aunt or uncle, were trying to protect that member of the family from evil. And I suspect it would be, it could well be any member of the family who's trying to look [00:17:00] out for them.
But these are the kinds of things that we just, we're still trying to figure out. And sometimes you can figure out by maybe who was living at the house at a certain time as who would be, but it's, I'll tell you, Sarah, it's a brave, new frontier. If people are interested, they can start studying their houses and others, and then looking at the house history and trying to figure out when and how did this get here?
Josh Hutchinson: We probably don't know then if they had a little ritual to go along with placing the object or the mark.
Emerson Baker: No, but I think you're on the right track there, Josh. I'm assuming it's not something where you just randomly do it right. If you're considering that you're like blessing and protecting the house, one would assume there would be some kind of ritual with it you know, It'd be really, be interesting to try to sort some of these things out. I just came across a talk. I think we must have been an 18th or 19th century like magic book that was just found down in the South somewhere. Have you heard about this? There's a talk being given about it.
And so I'm thinking, like, to what degree would people have had known spells and charms or would've had [00:18:00] access to physick books or those sorts of things to aid them. And again, in England too, they're beginning to find more of these sorts of things, and they go later into history than one might think into the 18th and 19th century.
I think, too, as these are things that would not have been done, again, like offhand and lightly, would've had a probably a degree of ceremony to it as well, too, right?
Josh Hutchinson: You'd think they'd at least say some words along with it.
Sarah Jack: Do you think they would've mixed maybe a prayer with the magic symbol to cover both ends?
Emerson Baker: That is a really wonderful question. I wish I knew. I will tell you this. I think a lot of these times these things are deliberately hidden. My favorite example of this is the Zerubbabel Endicott house down in what's now Danvers. And I actually have the artifacts from it in the in Storm of Witchcraft. But when that house was being disassembled by Richard Trask, and they had to make, they were in the seventies, it was the old, this is governor Endicott's grandson, it's a Harvard graduate, I believe, right? He was a doctor, Zerubbabel Endicott. [00:19:00] And he built a house in the 1680s. And, unfortunately, it had to be taken down in the 1970s when they were putting in a new shopping center and a supermarket in Danvers.
But in this case, the owners of the new plaza there allowed Richard Trask and volunteers from the Danvers Alarm Company to disassemble the frame. And it's actually reassembled today, as you probably know. That is the Rebecca Nurse Farm that is actually, they've reassembled it as a as a barn. And that's where the visitor center is. And you can go in there and see what they found. What they found when they took down the house, they took down the sheathing, the outer boards over the frame, and then nailed to the frame under the sheathing, they found a horseshoe on one side of the doorway, and on the other side was a three-pronged eel spear trident, which we would also know as the Devil's Pitchfork.
So here's a sharp iron object that has associations with Satan. So the interesting thing is, in these cases, as I mentioned, is because these were hidden under the sheathing of the house and only the Endicotts and maybe their carpenter [00:20:00] would've even known these things were ever there.
And so on the same time when Reverend Parris came over to have dinner with the Endicotts, he would've had an enjoyable dinner. And the Endicotts, when he left, they probably kind of of smiled and said, "you know what? He didn't even realize he was walking through a threshold that had magic in it, and good thing we buried into the wall cuz otherwise he would've spent the evening giving us a lecture." Because, again, white magic. But having said that, too, I think it's clear, and if you look at some of the work, oh, like David Hall's work, really, of looking like a sort of folk magic within Puritanism, some of his writings.
I think while Reverend Parris would've shuttered the thought of this even being in the house and would've been unhappy with the thought of any kind of prayer there. Who's to say what even God fearing Puritan families might have done in any effort to protect their home? So it's certainly not beyond the realm of reason.
I keep on still waiting and hoping that we'll find some kinds of diaries or something that might give us some insight into this, into how some of these, what the spells were and how they might be used and what relationship they [00:21:00] might have to the Christian faith of these folk. To me that's why it's fascinating, and to me, at least, a physical manifestation of it gives you evidence that this stuff really was taking place, and it's not just something we're making up.
Sarah Jack: Finding somebody's writing about it would be fantastic.
Emerson Baker: There is the only and there is one, it's a very famous image, at least in these circles. There is, oh, it's like a print from late 16th century German print of Walpurgisnacht, I think, the Witches Night. It shows the house that's torn down, really, and nothing's left of it except for the hearth and the fireplace and the chimney. And you have, guess what? You have all kinds of marks carved into it. Again, too, it's see it's real. But again to what degrees is someone going to want to commit to that in writing for posterity? Probably not likely, but again, maybe you can find something in a wall sometime or something that the curse or the chant that was put in there, cuz we do know that people had these sort of rituals, again, like using of poppets. We know in the Salem Witch trials transcripts, there are what, five or six of the people testify about the use [00:22:00] of poppets, including several that are using them as counter magic. The one woman even, who said, they say, " so well here, you might have poppets" and says, "oh yeah, absolutely, because I use it to get back at that witch. He's trying to get me."
Of course, this one woman I'm talking with is Reverend Higginson's own daughter, and he says that she might have been having some mental difficulties of her own, which is the reverend's excuse for it. But at the same time too, she sees it the best way to protect herself from witchcraft is to take the offensive, right, with poppets. They're used as evidence against Bridget Bishop, right? Where the carpenters say, "yeah, I've always wondered about her, cuz like 10, 11 years ago when I was working on her house and working on the foundation in the basement, found puppets in the holes in the stone foundation," right? And as I like to point out, that's one of the reasons that Bridget Bishop was one of the first, I think was the first one to be tried, because the case against her was so very strong. The crown's attorney was no fool. He knew he wanted to go from the strongest cases first. Even though people talk about 1690s people being executed for [00:23:00] witchcraft, I really think that if they'd presented the Bridget Bishop case before a court in London, sadly, she probably might have lost her life, too.
And again, by our standards, it's, "okay, so you say you saw a poppet there 10 years ago. Where is it? Do you have any evidence of it today? Can you show it to me?" And you'd say, "what?" But at that point, they would, by our standards of the day, it was the King's Justice and it was English common law, but not quite as we'd recognize it. But I really think that kind of testimony, again, made under oath, and if you're lying, you're gonna be eternally damned in hell. To make that kind of testimony, it would've probably might well have gotten someone executed in London in 1692, I think. Combined with the other complaints about all the things that Bridget had apparently done to people over the ensuing 10 or 12 years.
Josh Hutchinson: You've mentioned that the well in your house, the wells were like a gateway to hell. Why would they believe that?
Emerson Baker: It's a large hole that goes directly into the ground, right? And in that sense again, it's an any [00:24:00] opening to the house. Is dangerous. And this the, probably you've seen this, the famous illustration from Saducismus Triumphatus where he shows the demons flying around a house and trying to get in an attic window, right?
Again, if you consider that the demons are minions of Satan, Satan controls the underworld, it makes perfect sense to think that they're gonna, why bother trying to come down the chimney and we just have to come up from hell and just come right into the place? And how are you going to protect that? And in fact, again, if you read some of the literature, particularly in England and books like, Keith Thomas's work and others, they will talk to you about the magical power of wells. Look at again, today, what's the tradition? You know, there's old well, throw in a penny and make a wish, right? So again, wells have always considered to to have some sort of perhaps supernatural power to them. In the back of your mind, you said, "oh yeah, it's a wishing well." Be careful what you wish for, right?
Josh Hutchinson: I guess they work both ways.
Emerson Baker: Yeah. And that's frankly the way it is with a lot of these things about magic. Ouija boards, of course, are classic example of [00:25:00] this that are really, the 17th century it was divination with sieve and shears. It's basically the, yes, no, which way it falls is to answer the question. But again, it could be this could be used for good purposes to try to help people find lost objects or things like this, or it could be used for, more dubious ones, like, "what's my future going to be like? Am I going to marry the handsome farm boy next door?" Those kinds of things, which of course is again, is an element of course in Salem in 1692, but of course has been way overplayed.
The Crucible unfortunately, does a real bad number on this. Arthur Miller maybe is America's greatest playwright, but maybe one of its worst historians, right? In fact, no, we cannot attribute Tituba to practicing Voodoo and doing all this fortune telling. Because as my friend Mary Beth Norton, I think, has proven pretty thoroughly, is that, yeah, we only really only know of maybe one of these afflicted girls who had anything to do with sort of fortune telling and that it really does not seem to have been, there's no real evidence, contemporary evidence, that it was important to the witch trials, except to say that we do know that [00:26:00] Cotton Mather was dead set against it, and that it did seem to be very much the rage in Salem and Massachusetts in the 1690s.
Oh, and by the way, most interestingly, of course, is that when Mather writes his biography of William Phipps, he does talk about an old fortune that had been written for Phipps that was found in his sea chest, which is a really interesting thing for Mather to write, considering it's really more of a hagiography than a biography. Cotton Mather was the ultimate spin doctor of the 17th century, and here he is admitting it in a published history that, yeah, Phipps, he toyed with fortunes, as well, but then he says, but he didn't pay any attention to it. Or for something like, but he had didn't ask to have it done, he's trying to dismissing it.
When you think of what Massachusetts was like in the 1690s, people were really concerned about the future. Was it a good idea to be communing with dark spirits to try to find the future for you or the colony? No, not at all. But you can understand in those uncertain [00:27:00] times why people would really be concerned and want to know what was going on.
And it's that you really have so many bad things going on in the colony. What does this say about the future of the puritan experiment, about that city upon the hill? And so, to some degrees, again, I even see that sort of interest in fortune telling is fitting right in very much with people's fears about really the decline of their society and everything they believed in.
Josh Hutchinson: We talked to somebody who said that during the pandemic, the sale of tarot cards went up, while people were staying at home wondering about the future.
Emerson Baker: Wow. That would make a lot of sense. If you look at what factors create Witch Hunts, and I don't know if you've read Wolfgang Behringer's witch hunts book, I can't remember the exact title, but basically his world history of witch hunts. If you haven't, really good book. And of course, Behringer's German historian who's actually I think at Cambridge or Oxford, maybe, or London. And he's an expert on two things, and they closely intersect, right? But one is witchcraft, and the other's history of weather. [00:28:00]
And what he really says in this book is two things usually go wrong to cause witchcraft, witch hunts. One is historically bad weather. And in a pre-modern society, historically bad weather means crop failure, means famine, means death, means inflation. People can get by that as long as they have the other thing. And that is a strong government that they believe is there to help them and look after them. Because if they do that, they know that, okay, the king's gonna make good. He's gonna find food for us, we're gonna be okay. But if you have that central government that you don't trust, don't believe is going to help you. Yeah. Cause a problem.
And of course, the other factor that we had in Massachusetts in the 1690s, as well, yeah, pestilence, disease, epidemic. In 1690, Massachusetts is hit by a smallpox epidemic. And it's the most unfortunate named person maybe in the witch trials, Martha Carrier, right? Because it [00:29:00] is her family who are the ones that are believed to have carried smallpox into Andover, killing several members of their family, as well as others that may have singled the Carriers out for, shall we say, special attention that led to the witchcraft charges.
So in this sense, too, I think about this, right? When I think about witchcraft and belief again in supernatural, if you think of things like what we faced during the epidemic, historically bad weather, lots of concerns about stability of government, combined with epidemic. And especially, too, for our society, because here's the deal, folks, we all grew up thinking that we were gonna live long, healthy lives unless something really horrible happened. That we had antibiotics, and we had almost no one died in childbirth anymore. And unless something really horrible happened we probably would live really old lives, and all of a sudden all bets were off. And I think it caused a lot of people to turn into some really interesting ways. And I'll just say, I think, the historians of the next generation will have a really interesting time writing the [00:30:00] history.
That old Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times." It, honestly, it's really when you think about this I always wondered, is this a story, and what it might be like to live through something? Not that I wished it, but what would it be like to live through something like the Black Death where all bets are off, where you don't know if you're gonna be here tomorrow? If you don't know if your family is going to be, how does that affect your daily life? How does that affect your faith, your faith in government, your faith in the medical community, your trust of your neighbors? Really interesting thing and to some degrees, again, in many ways, a light. People have always asked me about why do you talk about outbreaks of witchcraft, right? Why do historians seem to be fascinated with comparing witchcraft and its spread to a contagion, to a disease. And I've never really tracked down the origin of who was the first to make that analogy, but it certainly seems to be something where you can certainly trace its growth, and it will spread, can spread like a disease, unless it's stopped. And as we see in a place like Salem, can be incredibly contagious.
What's fascinating to me by it [00:31:00] is the variety of objects and belief and the fact that as the physical manifestations, and also too, that you actually can read in the 17th century accounts efforts to make it, right. Like in in my earlier book, The Devil of Great Island, which is about the bizarre stone throwing devil who's supernaturally assaulting the debauched Quaker tavern. Again, that's a whole different show. It's not like in Salem Village, where they're trying to make the witch cake, but in this case, what they're trying to do is they're boiling urine up with some other things and trying to put it into a witch's bottle. And of course, what happens in the meantime is the stone throwing demon starts throwing rocks down the chimney of the house, which breaks the vessel that they're trying to cook. So you imagine you have this hot urine spattering all over the hearth, which as I like to think would've probably warded off far more than evil, right?
This is not superstitious belief. I get so upset when people talk about people in the 17th century, saying, "oh, how stupid, how superstitious could they be to believe this stuff?" Because in fact, these were God-fearing Christians, many of them college educated, and that everybody believed in witches in the 17th century, kings, [00:32:00] ministers, popes, governors, you name it, because witches were real. They're in the Bible, as you folks know, thou shall not suffer a witch to live. And even, too, there is a science to a lot of this stuff, and you see it in Thomas Brattle's letter, some of these things, the idea of the evil eye or the fact of the curse and the witches and the touch, right? The touches test.
And those are essentially, and the same thing too with the the urine, and the idea being that when a witch casts a spell, they take some of their evil and it gets transmitted to the victim and then to some degrees then. But then when a person who was afflicted by a Witch would urinate, some of that evil would come out in the urine. So that if you can find ways to harm that urine, you can harm the witch. So in this sense, in some degrees they didn't, they obviously didn't understand electricity at the time, but in some degrees, if you think of, if you think of in the 17th century, them thinking of spells being cast and evil being sent into people almost like electricity, some sort of invisible force.
Again, just so may, maybe that's the way to leave it, Josh, is like to say that these aren't crazy people that are just boiling urine up for the, cuz there's nothing else to do on it. It's a boring Saturday night [00:33:00] in Salem, so let's boil up some urine and bake a loaf of witch's cake with some of the dog's urine and have a good time. No, these are people who are, these are desperate times with people who are looking to the remedies that the leading scholars of the day and thinkers are offering them as to how to protect themselves from evil. And I guess to me, what's the fascinating about it is to some degrees is like how little we know about that today, but in large part again too is because, if you think about this, there's lots of things in our society today that are clandestined, that are not accepted by the government for various reasons or by your neighbors that you have to do in quiet. Those sorts of stories are ones that never seem to get written down.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I wanted to just comment a little bit what you were saying goes back to the importance of understanding the worldview because you have to understand that witchcraft was real to them. Not a superstition. It's just an ordinary part of their world and could happen at any time, and I think that's important to think about.
Emerson Baker: Give you the brief version of the [00:34:00] last page or so of Storm of Witchcraft, where I say, so supposing there is a terrible evil out there, and you know that it's out to get you, but you don't know who it is or how to make them stop, how to round them up, and the government is doing their best to help you, but frankly, this evil doesn't have to be present to harm you. It could destroy you and your family and your faith and your government from miles and miles away, right? Essentially, if you swap that 17th century word "witch", and this very distinctly with the 17th century and no cast, no aspersions at all to the modern Wiccan faith, which is a very different thing. But if we think of that 17th century witch in league with Satan trying to kill people with Satan's powers and swap that word "witch" for "terrorists" today, I think you have a much better understanding of the difficulty 17th century society faced when evil could be in any form and could strike at any matter.
And ever since [00:35:00] 9/11, I think every time you hear a siren go off or a large explosion, if it's just one, you don't think too much about it, maybe somewhere back in the back of your mind, right? But then if you hear a second siren or a second explosion, or you see a large, black cloud, oh boy, I think your mind takes you to some of the darkest places possible. You're absolutely right. This was their belief system, their knowledge, and it's all part of that. And just like our modern world with where our fears come from, too. So yeah. Sobering stuff, it really, this is heavy duty stuff, witchcraft and fears and the unknown. And witch hunts, right.
Josh Hutchinson: And then to say that we're not superstitious today also strikes me as funny.
Emerson Baker: Yeah. I like to point out in the good old days when the Patriots were in the Super Bowl, like just about every year I, as long as they were leading, I refused to get out of my chair. And I still attribute one or two of their losses to the fact, like at halftime I really had to get up and go to the bathroom, but [00:36:00] then again wait, you really think you have that kind of power? Yeah, no, I guess I don't. I think we all have various traditions, superstitions, whatever, habits? They're deep down, buried inside sometimes. But you put a society and individuals under pressure, and they start coming out, don't they?
Sarah Jack: Yeah, we've just started talking between us a little bit about that. Where's the line between ritual, tradition, I really try to understand, so we're not gonna reflect back as it as if it's superstitious, but in our modern time, superstition, it's very important to people. So it's like really hard to get to, to ask people to not look through their superstitious lens at what we view in the past is superstitious.
Emerson Baker: And believe me, working in Salem for almost 30 years, superstition is a fact of life.
Josh Hutchinson: And one thing that's helping us understand the fear that people experienced in the 17th century is [00:37:00] understanding the fear people experience in places like Nigeria and South Africa today, where they're still accusing people of witchcraft.
Emerson Baker: I wanna listen to that episode. There was the Salem Film Festival, I think it was it last year? They had a a really powerful film about witchcraft, a documentary about witchcraft in Africa, that the parallels to Salem were scary. I'll just leave it at that.
Sarah Jack: it is alarming.
Josh Hutchinson: We spoke to a South African activist for last week's episode, and he was talking about the parallels that he listens to our show and he hears us talk about early modern witch trials, and he's like, "that's so much what we've got going on here." And then we spoke to Leo Igwe of Nigeria, and he said that in Nigeria we're where you were in the early modern period, as far as witchcraft goes. [00:38:00] So they both see the parallels to our history.
Emerson Baker: And a lot of it, too, it sounds like, is jealousy over land ownership, which again, Boyer and Nisenbaum 101 kind of stuff.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah, do you want to take us into the Proctor's Ledge?
Sarah Jack: How did you get involved in the project to identify the location of the hangings?
Emerson Baker: Well, this goes back a long ways. There were a number of us who had worked on documentaries, several documentaries on the Salem Witch Trials that our good buddy Tom Phillips filmmaker was involved in, and Elizabeth Peterson, who of course at the time ran just the Witch House for the city of Salem and now runs the Witch House plus Pioneer Village plus the Charter Street Burial Ground. The two of them and then a few of us, myself, Marilynne Roach, Ben Ray, and also my buddy Peter Sablock geology and geo archeologist at Salem State had, most of us had worked together on a couple of these documentaries, and when Elizabeth actually had gone back and was doing some of [00:39:00] the reading, including some of Marilynne's earlier work, said, "hey, I think the city of Salem owns the execution site of the witches in 1692, and it's like the trashed backyard where everyone throws their garbage and walks their dog. And could we find out if this is like the real site? Cuz if it is, the city should do something about it." And Tom's going, " yeah, and we should actually make a documentary about this." and we all said, "Sure. Absolutely." And this was back around 2010. Of course, the long story short is again the site was never really lost. Okay. I think the city of Salem had a collective amnesia from the summer of 1692 onward, doing their best to forget this site.
Much as I think the actual site of the courthouse they actually destroyed when they built the MBTA and buried it right down Washington Street in Salem. Was that deliberate? Not necessarily, but did anybody object when they did it? Yeah, probably not. There's a lot of shame in Salem to this day over what happened in 1692, frankly, shame over [00:40:00] the commercialism over the witch trials that has replaced it. So I think Salem did this best to put this place out of its mind. But bottom line is as early as Elizabeth knew. And we all knew it, and again, Marilynne had done previous research on this. As early as 1901, Sidney Pearly had said, "hey, the site is not the top of Gallows Hill," which was one of the believed sites. It's a long debate as to where Gallows's actually was. And we can talk about this, cuz, frankly, there are almost no 17th century documents that talk about its in specifics. It seems to be almost like a taboo subject, even in 1692. But throughout the 19th and early 20th century to this, really till recently, there had been multiple sites that were considered. Was it the top of Gallows Hill? Was this lower spot on Gallows Hill, known as Proctor's Ledge? Was it over on Mack Hill, which is like the next hill over. And you could make cases by and large for any one of a number of those.
But finally, Sidney Perley, who's and to me is really the hero of this story an local antiquarian and historian who did [00:41:00] amazing work as an antiquarian, while also being a successful lawyer and raising a family. And I really, back in the days before, not even laptop computers, but even photocopy machines to transcribe and understand all the records and publish all he did as much is truly amazing. And he wrote numerous articles on Salem's history. He wrote a history of Salem, and in it in 1901 he wrote it, this piece, in 1901, which first said, if you look at all the evidence, it seems pretty clear that Proctor's Ledge is the spot. This lower piece on Gallows Hill, which of course as we know, today is really between Proctor and Pope Street and Boston Street, right behind the Walgreens, which of, ironically, of course, Walgreens motto is the corner of happy and healthy. But it's not only the location of the executions, but it's also where the Great Salem Fire broke out in the early 20th century.
Anyhow so we started, basically we started, Elizabeth said, why don't you guys all, we asked, we'd all do our research. Elizabeth and Ben and I, who were all historians of the witch trials and had been for a long time, independently [00:42:00] looked at all the evidence, went back and read Perley, looked at his evidence, looked at other documents, looked at depositions and things that Marilynne had pulled out in particular.
And we all spent a year or two chewing through the data individually and then came together and we agreed that, yeah, we all believe that based on all the factors that Sidney Perley was right. And in fact in 1921, he had published a much more definitive article locating the witch trials and what we really, we used, had to use. It is one of these sorts of things where if there's no direct evidence, again, like you don't have anybody saying, "so we took the people up to the execution site and it was such and such." No, all you have is a couple really of the writs for execution by the sheriff, saying, yes "I took Bridget Bishop to the place of execution," very vaguely.
You have a couple of distant eyewitness accounts, if you will, maybe, of what might have happened on that day. But if you triangulate three or four lines of evidence, if you take what surviving documents you have, if [00:43:00] you take the oral history and tradition of the area, in the families of the victims and the neighbors there, and three or four other different types of evidence, you can triangulate and really come into the fact to the location of the site.
And I can talk more about that. But the first thing I just wanna say is that bottom line is, ironically, even though this was named one of the top 10 archeological discoveries of 2016 by Archeology Magazine, that is discoveries in the world, we have said from day one, we did not discover anything. We only confirmed the evidence that Sidney Perley had made public that frankly, the Proctor family probably knew forever and had been lost. And our job was not to find anything. Our job was to make sure that the site was never, ever forgotten again. Because in fact, from Perley's time on up to about 2000 or so, about every 10 or 20 years, there'd be an article in the local paper, in the Salem [00:44:00] News or something saying, " oh yeah, someone says that we're, it's the wrong place. And it isn't way up here at the top of the hill. It's down here at Proctor's Ledge." And I'm more than happy to talk in any aspects of that, Sarah, what do you, ask away?
Sarah Jack: No, that was very wonderful. You're hitting so many of our questions, it's fantastic.
Emerson Baker: It's almost like I've talked about this before.
Sarah Jack: Did you do any analyzing of the ground?
Emerson Baker: Yeah. That was really important. One reason I brought Peter Sablock and his wife, Janet, are now retired, but at the time were professors in the geology department of Salem State and, maybe more important than that, they were friends and neighbors. They live near my wife and I here and are close friends and also partners in crime on archeology science, where they would do the geo archeology and the soils work for me.
And when they started talking about Gallows Hill, I immediately said, "I gotta get Peter involved in this." Because once we had the evidence that the people were, we were pretty sure this was the site, that was the time for Peter and his geology students from Salem State to go do some work on this site. And I'd like to say even before Peter and his folks were out there, [00:45:00] this was the worst kept secret in Salem, that there already were tour buses that went through that street and said, "here's the burial site and the execution site." And because again, too, there are enough sources out there from Perley and even more recently, at least one of the guides to Salem talks about this , and there's a sort of a bad photo evidence. In that sense, it's a good bad photo. It's deliberately vague, so you couldn't say exactly where it was. I think we realized right off the bat that if this was the site, it wasn't going to be enough to say the site. And I'll say this, nothing if no other reason than because yeah, this is Salem.
And probably the first question is this, "how do you know?" The next question is going to be, "where are the bodies?" I don't mean to be grim about this, but this would be the fascination. And we kept all of our work pretty much to ourselves, and Peter and his students went out there and worked off and on for a couple summers doing work in the backyard there on the city-owned parcel of land. Elizabeth was our link to the city, and the city kind of knew what we were doing, but we kept a very low profile. And when anyone asked, [00:46:00] Peter and their students gave this sort of standard archeologist, geologist answer, when people would ask what you're doing a little, maybe a little white lie, but you'd say something like, "oh, septic work." Which usually immediately people lose interest and say, okay have fun with that as they hold their nose and walk away, most of 'em, at least. There were some folks that, some of the locals who knew, cuz they knew the tradition, but they were very good at protecting the site, as well, too.
But we really knew we had to find out, okay, this is the site. Can we come up with the exact site? Was there a gallows here? Are there, in fact, any burials here? And we had to know that well before announcing this, because we had to know what we were up against. Because we knew as soon as we announced, the site would be overrun with tourists. And frankly, also people who wanted to pay honor to the victims there, as well.
Peter and his crew were out there, and over several years, they did various different types of evidence, particularly ground penetrating radar, which tells you how much soil is there, what the nature of the soil is to bedrock. He did ground penetrating radar and soil resistivity, which measures the conductivity of the soil, which basically can tell you how compact the [00:47:00] soil is and how wet it is, which tells you if it's been dug up and is really good at locating things like grave shafts.
You never think about this until you go out and dig a hole. When you put back the soil, you always have a difficult time getting it all to fit back in the hole. So issues like compaction, locations of walls or wells or things like that or graves will show up through either radar or through soil resistivity.
And what Peter and his crew found was up on the Proctor's Ledge was called Proctor's Ledge for a reason. And that is because there was almost no soil up there and that the deepest deposit he found was a shade less than maybe right around two feet. So that there really was no place to even really bury people. And of course, there's the account by Calef in 1700, where he writes about supposedly being present at the execution on August 19th or in the aftermath, describes it pretty well. And he describes, oh, George Burroughs' hand and maybe someone else's leg being shown, [00:48:00] sticking outta the ground in some sort of like hastily buried grave. We'll say this soil there were so shallow we don't think anyone could have been buried there successfully. And frankly, even if they had been, the soil was so completely perturbated through, disturbed that is, through earthworm and natural root action and natural processes. And there was such wet ground because of close proximity to ledge that there would've been absolutely no evidence of any bones whatsoever.
So that was really important work, but we also, too, then started combining that with, okay, then where would they have buried the people? Was it possible that they were buried there short-term, yes, possibly. And the first thing you find out is that on the executions on August 19th, the weather was so hot that they had to get the dead underground almost immediately.
And we, how do we know this? We know this from Samuel Sewall's diary who Sewall one of the witchcraft judges in at least the version of the diary that survives today. And I often wonder about this, right? He talks about attending every funeral on the planet and all these sorts of things, but almost nothing on the witch trials at all.
[00:49:00] But, in fact, during the execution of August 19th, Sewall, like the other judges, are back home, and Sewall's in Boston, and he writes in his diary within a day or so of that, about a friend of his dying. And he says, it was so hot the friend died in the morning, and the weather was so hot the body would not keep. They buried him before sunset. So that is to say, I could certainly understand why they might have thrown people in a crack in the rocks or whatever, and just thrown some dirt over them temporarily. But what we found out more so in studying this was that it seems pretty clear that the families came and removed their loved ones under covers of darkness.
There are traditions that survived in three of the families, ones that have really strong family traditions, right, the Proctors, the Nurses, and the Jacobs, of their loved ones being brought home for burial in the family burial ground anonymously. Only the family would've known where they were. Because again, the [00:50:00] neighbors would've gotten upset that you did what? So those traditions persist. And in fact, of course, George, the remains that we believe might have been George Jacobs were actually dug up in the 19th century, and then again, what I think in the 1970s when they put in a subdivision in Danversport. And were eventually, thanks to the work of Richard Trask, were reburied in 1992 at the Rebecca Nurse Farm with a replica gravestone.
So we know that from those families and that we think, and a matter of fact, we actually figured out pretty much where John Proctor was buried too, I think, at least originally, on what had been the only land that he owned in 1692, which was not even where his house was but was, it was down Wall Street even further. But we also put this together with the oral traditions in the people who lived in that neighborhood in Salem. And, interestingly enough, it was a largely that neck of the woods with families like the Popes who were Quaker, which is a really interesting twist, cuz about 10% of Salem's population at the time were Quaker.[00:51:00]
And we know from the accounts that were first written down by, I think, a grandson of the person who was there in 1692 that heard the families or knew the families were coming to retrieve their executed family members and went out to help them. If you think about 1692 Salem, very little source of natural light, where noise carries a long way. If you're living fifty or a hundred yards from Proctor's Ledge, which these people were, at night you'd see the light, and you'd hear the noise when they started to dig, and you'd know they were there. And we know in this case that several of the local families, mostly apparently the Quakers, went up and helped the families retrieve their loved ones, get them onboard probably small, little rowboats, because at that time you could row a boat all the way up to the site. It's right along what's now a canal. As a matter of fact, with a really bad flooding, they had last, what was it, a week or two [00:52:00] ago, that area there, which is now along the street there, was all flooded. You could have come in and wouldn't have had to carry a body more than probably a hundred feet to get them to water, put them in a rowboat, and quietly row away. And in this case, with both the Proctors and the Nurses and the Jacobs, they could have rowed to within probably a short distance of where these folks were buried, going up, following the tide along the coast and up into rivers and streams.
So armed with that kind of tradition, as well, once we knew this, there's no evidence of any bodies being up there. The oral tradition says we know where they were buried. And again, it's hidden and largely lost to time. Once we know that, then we felt it was safe to actually go ahead and make the announcement, and we did that in early January 2016. And again, we knew months before this, but we, let's just put it this way, we weren't gonna announce this during Haunted Happenings, were we?
Uh, let's wait until January, when the ground is solid and there's no tourists in town to speak of, and we can [00:53:00] control the narrative and let people know that there really is nothing there. I'll say this, people still didn't believe us. And that spring, we know at least one person who came and knocked on the door of a fellow who's a former actually fire chief in Salem who's retired and whose family had lived in the house, it was the first house built really on Proctor's Ledge in the early 20th century. He was the one who knew the tradition, knew the story well. In fact in the 1970s, he was out working in his yard, and a big, black limo pulls up. And this driver asks, "can you direct me to Gallows Hill?" And he points, and then he points up the hill to the water tower. And then the people in the backseat roll down their windows, and it was John Lennon and Yoko Ono. As he said, "it was the Beatle. It was the Beatle," because it turns out, yes, he found out later on that they were in Boston for a concert at the Garden that week. And Yoko is very interested in the world of pagan lore, and so she wanted to see the site, [00:54:00] at which point I've said, " no, for you guys, it's over here in my backyard." But nope his lip.
But having said that, so this person came up to his house, I think with a shovel, and said "hey, can I dig in your backyard?" And Tom said, "no, you can't." He said, "that's okay. I think it's public land over there that the city owns, and I'm gonna go dig over there." He said, "no, you're not, as long as we have a police force in Salem." But see, so this is the level of belief, right? Where and again, I'm saying like no one goes to Gettysburg with a shovel and says, "where can I dig?" What on earth possesses people to think it's okay to do this? So the good news was that we really don't think anybody is buried there, that there is nothing to look for. And the other good news is that, yeah, the site, people keep their eyes on it, and the police do regularly drive that route.
Josh Hutchinson: That's an amazing story.
Emerson Baker: The whole episode was an amazing story to me, I guess in part because so I didn't realize how important and big a story it would be. And frankly, actually, we were told by [00:55:00] people, "don't bother with the press conference. Just send a press release out to like the Globe and the Salem News and maybe they'll pick it up."
That was Monday morning. By Wednesday, I was being contacted by the media worldwide. My younger daughter was off at college at the time, and she texted me Wednesday night, I think it was, and said, hey, they'd made me the spokesperson for this thing. I didn't really want it, but I was cold, and I had other things to do. It's January. She said, "Dad, you and Gallows Hill are trending on. I think it was Wednesday, actually. I was on Fox News at midday, too. And like the interest in this was amazing and frankly, to me, it was overwhelming, because I had no idea just how important this was to how many people.
I don't like to admit this, because I think people think this is why I got involved in it, but I found out in the middle of writing Storm of Witchcraft that Roger Toothaker was like my ninth great uncle. And that's not why I got involved in this, but what it points out to the fact is, if your family's been in New England for more than a generation or two, you're probably related to someone involved in the trials. What I will say is to me, I took it maybe because I work in Salem and study this stuff, that wasn't unfinished business to [00:56:00] me, but it turned out it was to lots of people. And literally when I was on, I had a four minute spot on the midday news on Fox nationally on that Wednesday, I think it was.
And I checked my voicemail later that day., And it was full. It was full with what I would consider to be testimony by people, mostly elderly members of their family, who wanted to thank me, to thank the city of Salem, for what we were doing. They considered this sort of the injustice and unfinished business, and that we were righting an old wrong, and they wanted to come. I got voicemail from pretty much all over North America by people wanting us to know when we would be building a memorial and dedicating it, because they wanted to be there, because this was important to them. Again, it was important to their family.
And you just didn't realize how important this was when people would say that they basically considered this something that had worn heavily on them ever since, and in many cases, sometimes these people, sometimes they'd known since they were kids they were descendants. Other times, they'd only found out when they got old and started doing [00:57:00] genealogy. But you see this, and you may, folks may have seen this, if you visit the original Witch Trials Memorial in Salem, the 1992 Memorial, where they have the benches for each person, when you go and visit, you often see remembrances left to the individual victims. And it can be things from good luck pennies to roses to quartz crystals to notes. And the notes can be, you read them, and they really hit hard. Same sort of theme of, I remember one for for Giles Corey, were like it was a ninth or tenth great descendant saying, "we have not forgotten you. We love you. You are a member of our family. We remember, we honor you, for we know what an injustice this was." It's really powerful stuff. It really is. And again, to me, that's why I said we had to make sure that the spot wasn't ever forgotten again.
Josh Hutchinson: I've been to that memorial a few times, and I've seen all of those things that you describe. People put flowers on every, single bench and pennies, and I [00:58:00] saw a couple of notes there one time and, yeah, candles, you name it.
Emerson Baker: And you get same sense frankly of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It's a sacred place where you can reach out and be in touch with those people. And we tried to build a memorial that was reflective of that at Proctor's Ledge, as well, too. I should add, too, on the Proctor's Ledge story, that Mayor Driscoll and her staff were wonderful. When we all sat down with her, the whole team, and told her exactly what we found, we had no idea what her reaction was gonna be or the city's. We were a bunch of four historians trying to figure out how on earth we're gonna raise the money to memorialize the site. And from the start, mayor Driscoll said, who by the way now has been sworn in as Lieutenant Governor Driscoll of Massachusetts, so good for Kim, we're sorry to be losing her in Salem, but glad she's our lieutenant governor. Amita said, "no, Salem must do this. The city of Salem must properly commemorate this site. This is our business, right? This is our duty." And they took that very seriously. And [00:59:00] at which point it took us another over a year or so to get a memorial built, because then we had to start talking with the neighbors, because no one who bought a house, and you're in the backyard of six houses, as well as a Walgreens, none of those people bought in thinking that they had a mass execution site in their backyard. How do you deal with that? But also the fact realizing that again, this is an important site. The other piece of that, too, is no one wants to turn this into another tourist attraction. We don't want a stand popping up next door, Sarah, selling what I describe as fried dough and vampire fangs, right?
How do you mediate this? How do you make it a place where people can come and pay their respects? Cuz believe me, when those 10th great-grandchildren from Arizona or Canada make the trek to Salem, they want to visit that site. The other memorial is nice, but it's got nothing to do directly. It's only association with the witch trials is that it was an empty piece of land that was there when they were getting ready for the tercentenary. But the execution site is really that kind of hallowed space to them. And so we [01:00:00] mediated on that.
And again, the neighbors, we tried to come up with a low impact way, so it wouldn't bother the neighbors too much. But that'd also be a site where people who were in the know could come and go. And to this day, if you look in all of the Destination Salem materials, the official Salem tourism maps and things, the site is not listed, again, out of respect to the neighbors and frankly out of respect to the victims but that people who want to know can find it and can go there and pay their respects and take in the sense of the place and the enormity of the events of 1692.
But again, like the other memorial, I think it tends to be, it's understated, granite, not a lot going on. Martha Lyon, landscape architects, really talented, has done a lot of work in Salem, and helped us out like a Charter Street, and I think put together a really nice, very much fitting memorial even the way is how do you deal with the site when, essentially, it's all uneven rocky ground that is not easily accessible. Certainly not handicap accessible. So essentially we made it like viewing it from essentially just the sidewalk really. And to do that, and I think it turned out really well, [01:01:00] I really do as a proper way to balance all those sort of competing interests in Salem and to have a place where people could go and commune with the victims and, at the same time, not be a tourist trap, right?
My team asked me if I would say, the dedication ceremony, if I would say a few words on behalf of the team. And of course, we dedicated it on July 19th, 2017, quite deliberately the date of the first mass execution on that site. We really weren't sure we could get it ready for June 10th for the execution site of Bridget Bishop. So we went, we wanted, make sure we had plenty of time so we did it on July 19th and ended, I hoped that this could be a, I'll read the last paragraph so to you.
"Finally, it's my sincere hope that today marks a new chapter in how Salem treats the witch trials. We became the Witch City in 1892 on the bicentennial of the trials. While done largely for commercial reasons, I see it as Salem's self-imposed scarlet letter. The term Witch Hunt is synonymous with Salem, and it stands a symbol of persecution, [01:02:00] fanaticism, and rushing to judgment. But with that title also comes responsibilities. From this time forward, I hope that residents and visitors to Salem will treat the tragic events of 1692 with more of the respect they are due. We need less celebration in October and more commemoration and sober reflection throughout the year, for there are tragic lessons to be learned from this story. So our job is to make sure that this site and what happened here is never, ever forgotten. Only through actions like today, where we acknowledge and confront a troubled past, can Salem truly become the city of peace."
And of course, as you probably know, Salem is really short for Jerusalem, city of peace.
Some of my friends tell me that I was maybe being too optimistic, that maybe the city taking ownership for this and doing these things and commemorating the site was an opportunity for a new start. But they haven't seen too much change. I guess I [01:03:00] tend to be more optimistic, which I tend to be usually a pessimistic, my friends would tell you, pessimistic, glass half empty, kind of guy. But in this case, I really think this is an opportunity for Salem to more regularly and vigorously confront that past.
And I'm hopeful that we'll continue to do so more and more in the future. Cuz I really do think that Salem is a place where people tend to be less judgmental, more forgiving than most other cities. And to some degrees and think, a lot of people have come to Salem, right? Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three, come and move to Salem not long after he got out of prison. And we talked to him about this, why did you do this? And he said, always loved Salem and fascinated with it. But also, too, this sense of this is a place where you know what it's like to judge people too quickly and too harshly. And that you seem to understand that we need to accept people as they are. Again, I'm optimistic that Salem is a place where people can do that.
Sarah Jack: We share that optimism with you, even though [01:04:00] we are not local. We have that general optimism for the world to start to understand witch hunts better, why they happened, why they continue to happen, and what we are supposed to be doing for each other.
I share that same optimism with you.
Emerson Baker: As I mentioned at the top, really when I talk about this, more and more, I'm not talking about history. I'm talking about issues of social justice, of scapegoating, rushing to judgment, judging people because they look, act, or speak differently than we do.
How do we define what's normal? And how can we learn to accept others and be tolerant of others? And I think, too, the problem is, honestly, in our society today, people of all walks of life, all political persuasions, we tend to very much get into our own bubbles, right? And we're reaffirmed, because the people, most of our friends and neighbors and coworkers are in the bubble with us. And I think this is particularly bad, right, during the epidemic. But it's but what [01:05:00] about those people that don't think about like us, right? No they don't live around here. They're not one, no. Yeah, they are. How can we have some open dialogue and really try to look and try to find some common ground here? So I appreciate what you folks are doing to try to explore those issues and wish you all the success in the world in getting people to think about this in really thoughtful ways.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with an important update on the witch hunts happening now.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization working to educate you about witch trial history and working to motivate you to advocate for modern alleged witches. You'll not find our message sensational or amusing, confusing or muddied. When we talk about the witch, we are stating that the deep-rooted elemental fear of her guided the destruction of the lives of ordinary women and children in our world history. [01:06:00] That the consternation of misfortune today and continued misogynistic behaviors sustain the hate of the witch, driving a violent crisis that is so unbelievable in numbers. Today, mob style witch hunts target and brutally take down ordinary women and children in 60 nations. You heard that right. 60 world neighbor nations have witchcraft fear violence and murder threaded into their communities now.
Here's an excerpt from the most recent published report released this month at the United Nations Human Rights Council's 52nd session. But don't just catch what I highlight now. Please go to the podcast episode description for the link that will take you to the full report. Take time to read the report and share the information with your circle of influence. From the report:
"Women have been disproportionately affected, including older women, widows, women with disabilities, and mothers of children with albinism. Data on respective [01:07:00] human rights violations is under-reported, incomplete, and diffused across various entities. The secretive nature of such incidents makes it even more difficult to track them systematically. While data is hard to source, at least 20,000 victims across 60 countries were reported between 2009 and 2019.
Reportedly, accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks take place more often in conflict and post-conflict situations, areas affected by natural disasters and environmental degradation, regions with economic and public health crises, and settings where internally-displaced persons and refugees are found, including reintegration initiatives.
Conflict, instability, intercommunal hostility, and an absence of State authorities have reportedly increased the occurrence of such practices. In some countries, accusations of witchcraft have been identified as the most dominant triggers for the outbreak of intergroup armed violence.[01:08:00] In others, militia have used young girls in the frontline of combat, believed to have the power to intercept the projectiles of firearms in their skirts, while older and better equipped militiamen, even with automatic weapons, were placed in the line of combat further back. In some countries, being labeled as a witch is tantamount to receiving a death sentence. The various forms of violence related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks are often committed with impunity, related to the victims' fear of reprisal and the lack of a law enforcement response. Perpetrators include individuals, such as relatives and local community members, and in some instances government security forces or non-State armed groups. Sometimes belief in witchcraft is spread across all sections of society, affecting also police officers and judges. That reportedly results in an unwillingness to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators."
If you are becoming more familiar with witch trial history, you'll immediately sense that witch fear is being applied in the same ways today that it [01:09:00] was in the past. The same ways. Just like now, in the past, being labeled a witch was often a death sentence, but always a virtual brand, marking families for generations with scrutiny and demoralized futures. It is not a historic crisis.
Start talking about this. This information must become common knowledge and of importance to the whole world. It is your responsibility to talk about it. Remember when the Connecticut witch trial history was minimized and overlooked, not widely known as a significant part of witch hunt history? Now we must work to include the modern witch hunt horror in the everyday witchcraft conversations. We are the ones that should and can integrate this topic as an expected consideration when addressing the witch hunt phenomenon.
Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. You can shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/endwitchhunts, zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer, and shop our books at [01:10:00] bookshop.org/endwitchhunts. We want you as a super listener. You can support Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast production by super listening with your monthly monetary support of any amount. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that important update.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Find our other great episodes at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, associates, and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more and donate.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:11:00]
Take in this informative research conversation with author David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and Stoughton, MA town historian. This is a family research tip-packed episode with laughs and heartfelt dialogue about our family histories. Thoughtful reflection about descending from ancestors involved in the Salem Witchcraft Trials pulls us into an instructive talk on utilizing American Ancestors resources and expansive archives. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with the chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, David Allen Lambert. We're going to talk with him about verifying your descent from those accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt, and you can apply these same tools, many of the tips that he gives us, to genealogy in general. It'll help you [00:01:00] become a better family history researcher.
Sarah Jack: You are gonna find this conversation very motivating. You're gonna wanna open those projects back up right now and start working and using his tips.
Josh Hutchinson: His advice to you and to us is so good, it makes me want to write books about my family history right now. I wanted to immediately get on the websites and do all the things.
Sarah Jack: When you hear David talk about American Ancestors and the genealogical society, you realize what a supportive community is available with a vast amount of resources.
Josh Hutchinson: We have a fun chat. Serious advice is given [00:02:00] out. You'll want to take notes while you're listening to this one and follow the steps that he provides to confirm that you have one of these ancestors in your tree. Or if you're just starting to look at your tree and investigate who your ancestors were, he gives pointers on how you can link them to a historical event like the Salem Witch trials.
Sarah Jack: He refers to many important, available collections and databases. So you wanna take note of those.
Josh Hutchinson: Or if you're unable to take notes right now, just download the episode and listen to it again. You'll have a good time both times.
Sarah Jack: Have your friend listen to it and make them take notes for you.
Josh Hutchinson: Or pull up the transcript at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
And David also shares about his [00:03:00] own personal family connections to the witch trials and has many interesting stories to tell us.
Sarah Jack: It really shows how when you get to looking more specifically at the lives of some of these ancestors, how meaningful it can be and personal. Those personal connections are right there and you can hear that come out of David's discussion and why his connections are so meaningful to him. And he talks about where they were from and some of the things going on in their lives. And it's very interesting.
Josh Hutchinson: And you'll learn from him many ways that you can investigate the story of your ancestor and get to know them on a more personal level than you have before. If you implement David's [00:04:00] techniques and take advantage of the resources and databases that he points us all to, you will experience a new level of genealogy.
David Allen Lambert has 30 years of experience at New England Historic Genealogical Society, and yet is fresh and young and motivated by what he does, enjoys his job. You'll get a real good sense of how much he loves what he does.
Sarah Jack: And that really adds a richness to their offerings.
Josh Hutchinson: And we chat about how much things have changed in genealogy in the past 30 years, going from microfiche to internet databases and DNA, and then he gives so much good information in the show about the resources, how many there are. It's mind boggling. So much [00:05:00] information that is available now that you used to have to go do a lot of traveling and spend an extensive hours of time navigating through microfiche and old papers. And now it's available with a mouse and a keyboard from the comfort of your own home. It just, I remember going to the Family History Center in town and going to town, public libraries and historical societies and looking through collections manually. And you can still do that. There's a lot of extra records at NEHGS in Boston. It's well worth a visit, and you'll discover so much.
It's great to learn the individual stories of your ancestors and try [00:06:00] and put yourself in their place for a little while. I wanted to say getting into the heads of our ancestors whichever side they were on is so important to help us understand why witch trials took place, so we get an insight into our own behaviors and thoughts and how we treat people today. Just talking about ancestors, it reminds, you know, how instead of just putting the names in the blanks on the tree, you wanna learn the stories of the individual people and like you're learning the stories. You get into their head a little bit, and it gives you a good insight. You start thinking, why did they accuse people of this? And then you're like do I behave like that? Do I think like that? And it gives you really good, [00:07:00] valuable insight and education. And that's part of our mission, I think, to help people get to that point. So I think this episode, learning about your family history is a really good way to get connected to the history and to try to understand both sides of it. They are witches, they aren't witches.
Sarah Jack: And now you get to enjoy our guest, David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. We talk about verifying descent from those accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt. Learn about the broad scope of membership benefits, the vast and unique record collection at American Ancestors, and the professional genealogical assistance available to members.
David Allen Lambert: You guys have done some really wonderful interviews. I'm really honored to be part of this, [00:08:00] actually. One of the ironic twists of this is because my seventh-great grandmother was Ann Sewall Longfellow, the sister of Judge Samuel Sewell. He was in Boston and had his minister read his apology, and every year for the rest of his life, until 1730, he had a day of fasting and prayer, but I can tell you, our town's namesake, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, didn't seem to shed a tear that we know of. It's remiss to me why he would've not had any reason not to. But then he followed a major political career, and he died in 1701.
So maybe if he lived past, he was about 70 years old when he died. Maybe he would've later in life decided that it was wrongdoings. But in 1727, 25 years after he died, they named my community where I live after him. There's some talk that maybe have been honor of him or his father, Israel Stoughton, who actually had a mill in Dorchester on the Neponset River. And so what was the south [00:09:00] precinct of Dorchester became my hometown, Stoughton. And I'm the town historian there, but my main job is chief genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. And I've been here, this year will be 30 years. I started when I was two.
I started doing genealogy when I was seven. So there's some, great interest. I've always had. I I've always known through family stories of our connection with the witchcraft trials through Sewall. And then with my own research learning further information about Mary Perkins Bradbury, one of the fortunate to almost meet the gallows in September of 92. And she made it clear, and we don't really know if she was they bribed the jailer or her husband bribed a jailer, but she got out of there and they, we believe escaped to what is now Northern Maine or lived pretty much, we know by 1695 when her husband died, Thomas, I leaves in his will, care for my wife, so she wasn't out living in the woods still. And by then, of course it had died down by a couple of [00:10:00] years.
Sewall is somebody I've always admired. I thought, for one, the book he wrote early on, The Selling of Joseph, which is almost like an abolitionist movement, a century and a half before there really was an abolitionist movement.
And then, of course, with having that connection with the witchcraft trials with Mary Perkins Bradbury, and ironically my wife and I share some colonial New England ancestors, and the only accused witch she has is Mary Perkins Bradbury, so my two daughters have her twice. She's my 10th great-grandmother. However, Sewall was the older brother of my seventh great-grandmother. My generations are a little askew. Where some people would be their 10th or 12th great-grandparents in that generation, sometimes it's my fifth and seventh. My, in fact, my, one of my fifth great-grandfathers who I still have autosomal DNA for, was born in 1678. I still, he's my fifth great-grandfather. He had a child in the 1730s with his younger wife who had the [00:11:00] last child was my ancestor, their last child was my ancestor. So it's fascinating.
Sarah Jack: That's super fascinating.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's really close relationship for that period of time.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, to think that I have DNA alive that was actually around during the witchcraft trials is kinda scary in a little bit.
Sarah Jack: Wow. That is fascinating.
Josh Hutchinson: Really fascinating.
David Allen Lambert: I can tell you a little bit about what I do, just to give you a little background myself. So I'm the chief genealogist for the American Ancestors, the New England Historic Geological Society in Boston. We're the oldest genealogical organization in the nation, for that matter, really in the world. Europeans really didn't have a need to research their ancestors and create a library, cuz well, there most cases, they were still there. When we were created in 1845, there was a need of preserving the past of New England, getting those stories. And of course, we're American Ancestors now. So we far exceed the collection of books we started with. Our website, American [00:12:00] Ancestors, has 1.4 billion searchable records, and that's at americanancestors.org. And you can even sign up as a guest member. You don't have to be a paid member right off. We have, let's see, a quarter of a million books, local history and genealogies.
We have in our manuscript collection over 28 million manuscripts, including a letter from September 20th, 1692 between Cotton Mather and Stephen Sewell that discusses the witchcraft trials, which I'm hoping will get linked on the Salem Witch Documentary Archives down in Virginia, cuz it's, we have it on our DLA, our digital library archive. I'd be glad to share you a link to see that.
And of course one of the things that we continue to do is help people with their genealogy, no matter where in the world they come from. But I have a special place in my heart when I run across people who have someone who is accused of witchcraft. And I even still have a warm place in my heart for those descendants of the accusers. I've met a few [00:13:00] Putnams, and I don't have any anger towards them. You can't be responsible for what your ancestors do. And then when I tell them I live in a town that's named for the judge, so I guess it balances out.
Josh Hutchinson: My grandfather is from Danvers, so I have quite a lot of ties to all sides of the witch trials from Salem Village. My Hutchinsons were involved on both sides of the trials.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, I'm an Ingersoll, and I have the next generation of my immigrant, they were accusers. There's distant connections in my family with other people that were accusers. I did the honor of doing the genealogy of a few notable people. I did genealogy via NEHGS for David McCullough, Michael Dukakis, Ken Burns, and the one I did recently a few years back was for Nathaniel Philbrook. And he thanked me for the work I did, and I said, "I'm just returning a favor." And he said, "what do you mean?" And so, "one of your ancestors signed the petition to [00:14:00] save my ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury's life. I'm just returning the favor. So thank you for what your ancestor did." So that was fun.
Sarah Jack: That's
cool.
Josh Hutchinson: That's, .
It sounds like you have a very, I don't know, cool seems the best word for it. A cool job.
David Allen Lambert: It really is. I think it doesn't have any element of getting boring because every question's different. What I do now, a combination of lecturing. I travel around the country representing NEHGS. There's a big conference coming up in the beginning of March called Roots Tech in Salt Lake City, and the last one before Covid drew 27,000 people there. And now of course it's even a bigger audience, because of the virtual aspect.
I had the honor of writing 11 books, a few through NEHGS, and authoring a variety of different honorary genealogies for people that have been our keynote speakers over the past 30 years. It's really rewarding because in some cases you're connecting a person not with [00:15:00] just their distant ancestor from 300 plus years ago, but maybe it's finding what happened to their grandmother that disappeared or reconnecting people by using DNA and finding cousins that are still in Europe that survived the Holocaust.
So we have a strong element of a global outreach for genealogy that tries to serve all people, and the building's expanding. A lot of places are going forward with, just being a website per se, not to name any in particular. We actually purchased the building next door. in March, we will be closing the building at the end of the month for probably the remainder of the year it seems. But we're gonna be expanding our footprint on Newbury Street in Boston, where we're located, and putting in a new discovery center, which is actually going to introduce genealogy on a global level for the person who just walks in off the street, wants to know a little bit more.
And then, of course, we have the resources and the staff to take you on a global trip back, or if we don't have the resources, we'll tell you how to find them.[00:16:00]
Sarah Jack: What an exciting project.
David Allen Lambert: I wanna commend both of you for all the efforts you're doing to help with the exoneration of the Connecticut witches, I must say that I was one of the people who signed the thousand name petition, because I think that's wonderful. That's wonderful. My fingers and toes crossed for you. I think, I can't imagine there would be any instance where there would not be a hundred percent approval of that.
It's interesting with the last recognized Salem accused was finally just last year by the efforts of school children. And then I find out indirectly, she's a distant cousin of mine through a shared ancestor. One of my New England ancestors, Edmund Ingalls of Lynn, had quite a few family members that were tied into that.
And even with the Bradburys, there always seems to be some sort of riff, if you will, where like the Carr family had issues with my family in Salisbury, George Carr's house lot, I mean, and then of course the [00:17:00] spectral evidence is just a wonderful thing anyways, to read some of the nonsense that people are being accused of. And we think about it now and how we would not even think twice something that's just ridiculous. But the idea that my ancestor becomes a blue boar and rushes out at George Carr's horse and then disappears into thin air, it's like you would think that people were, I don't know. I would've thought more well adjusted in realizing what's rational and what's not.
And I don't know what your personal take on how the hysteria got started, but I always like to say it's a bunch of teenagers that got caught up in a lie. And and then fingers are pointed towards we need more people. There must be more. And then they're just naming people. They don't even have any common sense of, oh, it must be this person. It must be that person. And it truly a hysteria. And we're just so lucky that it didn't go on for longer. Look at what happened in Germany or in Scotland. It's un unthinkable that if that went on for another [00:18:00] decade, how many hundreds of people could have been executed or jailed? The ideas that infants died in jail, that had been born. I know I'm putting a toddler on trial. it's, but and in 300 years people look at us and think that we're archaic.
Sarah Jack: So we wanted to talk just a little bit about your webinar that you have done around Salem descendants and so what historical background on Salem Witch Trials should a family history researcher know?
David Allen Lambert: As we know about the witchcraft trials, you don't necessarily have to be from Salem Town or Salem Village. And you could have been like my ancestor from Salisbury, Massachusetts up in Essex County. You could have been from Boston, Middlesex County, like the Toothakers are over in Reading. You really were part of the New England community, and your ancestors were alive in 1692, they would've known this was going on. This would've been the talk in the church. So your [00:19:00] connection may not be going online to, say, Salem's Witchcraft Trial Documentary Archives, and finding out your ancestor was an accuser or accused for that matter. You probably had somebody who was alive that knew this. This was front page news. We didn't have a newspaper then. But we had the word of mouth.
The way to look into your genealogy, obviously you wanna start with yourself anyways, but if you know that fast forward, you have 17th century ancestors, a lot of these vital records are already published and online on American Ancestors. We have for at least Essex County and other counties, all of the pre 1850 birth, marriages and deaths, searchable, right online. We also have periodicals like the 19th century Journal of the Essex Antiquarian, the 20th century the Essex Society of Genealogists up in Lynnfield, Mass. published The Essex Genealogist. We have that online and that has plenty of articles about various witchcraft related families, accusers, accused, et cetera.
But one of the best pieces of academic scholarship was done by the late David L. Green, and [00:20:00] he was the editor of The American Genealogist. And what he did was start to do the families of the witches that had been accused and basically took their ancestry back to try to find if they could find a baptism in England or a marriage or find that voyage that came over. My ,ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury, her family arrive early into the 1630s and then settle up in Ipswich, originally.
And so looking for that type of detail, but now with the sense of the internet, we can pretty much Google a name and then put the word witchcraft after it, yup, here's your link. But it does take federal research, because unfortunately there's a lot of trees out there online where people make leaps of faith, if you will, that ancestor was this person or that person. And it turns out that it's not them at all. The worst one I ever saw was somebody had an online tree of their ancestor who died in 1802 was an [00:21:00] accused witch of Salem. And I said, "that math doesn't work at all. Did you mean 1702?" And no, the person was born in 1755 and was born 60 years or so after the trials, approximately. You have to be careful with online trees. I'm one of the people that feels that if you are gonna see something online, I wanna click on a link, see the original document, and be a hundred percent certain that all t's are crossed and i's are dotted, that I'm looking at the genuine article.
There's, there's a lot of leaps of faith being done in research online now. So when I gave my lecture, the witchcraft presentation, which is back in October, I also created a 10 page syllabus that we sold at that time. And what I decided to do is put together all the material that is in print on specific accused witches. That way you could look person by person, see what was available, see what the best scholarship. I There are some things that were done in the 19th century which are still nice to have. Samuel Gardner Drake wrote an [00:22:00] account, I think back in the 1860s, which is interesting. I Of course, stuff that Sidney Perley does is tremendous, and of course has led us to know now where the gallows were with the ledges.
So gathering up material that is already in print but also looking at new scholarship. I know that there's a new book that was just recently done on Rebecca Nurse, so we're still learning. Turning those pages of the documents are giving a fresh approach. And I think it's important. in respect to your topic on the Connecticut hysteria, I wish there was equally that much amount of scholarship written up about them.
I've been to Williamsburg, Virginia, where they do a presentation of Colonial Williamsburg called "Cry Witch" about the accused witch in colonial Williamsburg. And at the end of it, they, " do you judge her guilty or innocent?" And they don't know what happened to her, cuz they don't have the surviving court records to know that if she was executed or set free.
So there, there's a lot of gray area in research, and one of the [00:23:00] fascinating elements that a people are doing now are reconnecting other family members and having reunions of descendants and whatnot. I The Associated Daughters of American Witches, of course, are taking Connecticut, as well. And the same thing with Salem. And you're really having a good chance of combining efforts, if you will, to get more research done.
Josh Hutchinson: We see a lot of groups online about that, and sometimes they have those in-person reunions, like the the Towne cousins do reunions every year, and we are both Towne cousins, Sarah and I.
David Allen Lambert: Oh, okay. We were all in the same mix back in the day, weren't we?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly.
David Allen Lambert: And it's ironic to think that the people that our ancestors lived next to, went to church, sat in the same pew with, would turn on you just like that. For what gain? Correct me if I'm wrong, were any of the accusers given a financial kickback, compensation of any sort? I know ultimately there was thought about land, but I can't [00:24:00] recall seeing anything where would be of any, maybe they thought they were saving their soul . I don't quite understand it.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Sarah Jack: We actually have some interviews coming up soon that we'll be answering some of those questions. We just had a really good chat with a historian yesterday on some of that.
David Allen Lambert: Oh, excellent.
Josh Hutchinson: So if someone is looking at their family tree and trying to determine if they're related to one of the accused, what's their first step? How should they get started doing that?
David Allen Lambert: Again, it's looking at where geographically you're placing your ancestors. I'm not saying that there weren't accused, there weren't in Southern New Hampshire and what's now Southern Maine, but again, Essex County, Middlesex County seem to be the hotbed of where the accused and the accusers are from. You don't have to do anything more than familiarize yourself with those that were part of those lists. And again, the Documentary Archives with Virginia edu on [00:25:00] the Salem Witchcraft Trials is a great place to start, cuz you have all the cross reference to the names, et cetera.
When you look at the records, you may not find a published genealogy that gives extraordinary detail as to the person's life. A lot of early genealogies were just names and dates, children, names, dates, and children. It's more of the modern sense of genealogies probably done within the last, let's say 75 years, that people have dug a little deeper, start looking at court records and saying, "oh, wait a second. This person was an accuser during the witchcraft trials. And he may have just been at one of the trials, but it's still an important fact." So you may have to stumble across it. So I would say the first thing, Josh, would be to have people make a list of their 17th century ancestors that were in Essex County, Massachusetts, and then kind of spiral out from there. That would probably be the best opening part of the research.
Josh Hutchinson: What is your connection to Samuel Sewell?[00:26:00]
David Allen Lambert: And of course, Samuel Sewell is the older brother of my seventh great-grandmother, Ann Sewell Longfellow. She married William Longfellow, and they are actually the immigrant ancestors of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So they're the Longfellows all come from William Longfellow ,who came from a town near Leeds in England, and he unfortunately perished. The interesting thing about Sewall, he doesn't speak very highly of Longfellow. I'm not sure if he calls him a drunkard, but pretty short of that. But then in 1690, his brother-in-law perishes when the Phips expedition to Canada the ship went down in the St. Lawrence, and a lot of men from Newbury and Dorchester perished.
And I joined the Colonial War Society under William Longfellow. And then, of course, in his diary, he laments his poor brother. And at that point in time, their son, my ancestor, Stephen Longfellow, was only four or five years old. And with Longfellow's poetry, you hear [00:27:00] of the courtship of Miles Standish. And that's on his mother's side of the family. There are some historians will debate this. Some say it's a blacksmith in Cambridge. But Longfellow's son, Stephen Longfellow, he actually was the village blacksmith in West Newbury, Massachusetts in the 17th century. And in the Longfellow Mansion in Cambridge, they have Stephen's account book. So he had some influence. So I think he did one poem for his mother's side, one for his father's. Again, other people will debate that, cuz we don't have a clear answer to that. But I like to think that blacksmith, and his house is still standing.
And he definitely would've known his Uncle Samuel Sewell and that Stephen was my sixth great-grandfather. And my fifth great-grandmother, Anna Longfellow Poor would've been about 14 when her Great Uncle Samuel Sewall died. And her son went off to fight in the American Revolution, Captain Jonathan Poor, [00:28:00] and my grandmother knew his grandson. It's a really closer connection to history, if we really stop and think of the older generations that we have.
Sarah Jack: I really love the way your organization has the documents and the support to help people stitch that stuff together and see all the dimensions.
David Allen Lambert: There is, and the nice thing about our website is besides being able to just plug in a name, I like to use the the advice of looking at what categories in the databases that we have. And that's just on americanancestors.org. You come into our facility, and we have a quarter of a million books over an eight story research facility. The seventh floor is nothing but published genealogies. The fifth floor is nothing but local history for U.S. and Canada. The first floor is all international. You could get lost here for a week or two, if you've just started in your genealogy. And I can tell you that I still find things, and I've been a member since I was 17 years old, when I [00:29:00] first came in back in the late eighties.
And it, it is mind blowing to think that some people say they're done with their genealogy. I always say, come on in. I bet I can find something new. Cuz just using the FAN approach and using that with the Salem Witchcraft Trials, how, what are the connections? You have family obviously, so you might wanna see the siblings and are they related to someone who was accused, because all the girls are gonna have different married names, so you should be looking for them, as well. Then you have associates. Did somebody they went to church with get accused. And then they have their neighbors that could have been an accuser or an accused. And how that changed the dynamic of their own community. I know that we spoke before our call, and I wanted to share one connection with Mary Towne Esty. Mary Towne Esty had a son, Jacob, and he actually left the Topsfield area, and he went to the south precinct of Dorchester. And before he died, the town that he settled in became named for the man that put his mother to death, Stoughton. Is [00:30:00] that not a terrible irony?
Sarah Jack: It is. Yeah. Yeah. You just can't get away from some things.
David Allen Lambert: No, you were, like I say, in this case, he moved. I'm not sure, I'm sure that there was probably some connection for generations. I can tell you, and I have no problem with sharing this story. When I was about eight or nine years old, I bought a Ouija board and at a yard sale, thought it was cool. My friends had one, and I brought it home. And we weren't very overly religious. I was raised Congregational, some things don't change in nearly 300 plus years, right? And my mother looked at using that, and she picked it up and took it away and threw it away. And she goes, "our family doesn't use those." And I never really asked her. My mother's been gone for 25 years now, and I often think cuz she knew of the story, of our connection with the witchcraft trials. Even then, it had been passed down in somewhat that probably you didn't want to get caught with [00:31:00] something like that.
Or it could have just been my mother didn't like Ouija boards. It's set a precedent in my mind and thinking to myself, I said, "how many generations of my Bradbury's were, oh, your mother was her. Huh? Your grandmother was, oh, you're one of them." And that must have been went on until the Revolution era, if not longer in some cases, especially in small towns. I know that there's still people when you say that you're a Putnam and you're from Danvers, oh, you're one of them, but it's ,of course, that referring to an accuser. But if I had to pick any judge to be related to by an uncle, I think Sewall was the one I'd want to be connected to.
Sarah Jack: What kind of responses do your visitors and researchers have when they are surprised by a connection to Salem?
David Allen Lambert: Some of them are shocked because they're like, "oh, I love going there. I must have some connection in my family to Essex County or to Salem." And then when you find out they actually have somebody that was [00:32:00] accused or executed or was an accuser, when they find out they have an accuser, I mean, it's not with everybody, but there's some remorse. They're like, "do we have involvement in doing that?" And it's, you think of just other parts of history where a person's ancestor was on the wrong side, if you will, that you almost hold blame for something you know, your parent may have done. But this is for your great-great-great grandparents. And I think that it shows that the human spirit and people have this remorse after that many years. So that is something. So then they wanna learn more about who did their ancestor accuse, what's their story? And I think that is part of what Sewall did for his apology. I think being repentant in the respect of knowing what harm your own ancestor did is probably a good way of moving forward with some sort of healing.
When they find out that their ancestor was an accused witch, they're like, they want to know locations, they want to know where [00:33:00] the trials were. Some of them were held in the Boston Jail, and the Boston Jail is not very far from government center in downtown Boston. The ironic twist on that, if you've ever stood at where the Boston Jail is, it was later the building for the Boston School Department, and kids will sometimes associate being in jail with school. This jail was also used for pirates. William Kidd was held there later, before he was transported to London and executed. It has a plaque on it. But I always bring tell people that you don't have to go very far. Others will want to go to where they're buried. And I say unbeknownst to us, we just know of, perhaps, where Rebecca Nurse or her family, secreted her body back and buried her at the homestead. We really don't know of the others. I think there's speculation that was it that Giles Corey maybe buried on the Nurse property? There was one of the male accused.
Josh Hutchinson: George Jacobs.
David Allen Lambert: Jacobs. Yeah. And then there's the macabre. I, I remember [00:34:00] years ago where people were, " should I name my child after somebody who was involved in the witchcraft trials? Oh my gosh. I named my daughter Ann. It's one Ann Putnam." I don't think that there's a generality with that, but people may be naming their child in honor of someone who was accused and maybe giving them the middle name as their surname or something like that. Like by naming somebody Mary Bradbury Johnson or whatever. That's, that I think is touching.
The other thing with research, I think people have a tendency fixate on now they have this connection, so going to where the thanks to Emerson Baker and, the late Sydney Pearl for writing it down to begin with. Where, where the ledges are, where the gallows were in that, the lovely memorial that they've erected. And even before then, the benches were nice, by the cemetery right there. But people will misinterpret that as that's where they're buried. I'm like, no, those are just memorial benches actually.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, that's [00:35:00] good to clarify that.
David Allen Lambert: People are apt to want to download all the documents and they can get their hands on their ancestor. And then then it becomes really, truly job security when people are trying to suffer reading the 17th century court script. And I can turn and actually read it for them, but then I have to say in most cases it's already been transcribed. Cuz that ominous tome that I own that has all the documentary records from the witchcraft trial that I call that one a toe breaker. But that's, it's a great book. And that's one of the ones in my syllabus.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I've got that one beside me. And we had the privilege of speaking with Margo Burns recently, who did quite a lot of that transcription work.
David Allen Lambert: I'm looking forward to meeting with her about William Stoughton very shortly. I have mixed feelings about the gentleman myself. We've actually had people in Stoughton want to consider renaming the town over the years, and our town is about to have, its tercentary. We'll be 300 years old on the 22nd [00:36:00] of December, 2026. And it'll be interesting to see what we do with regard to William Stoughton. As town historian and on the 300th committee, I can tell you that much his memory will not be heralded. But if Margo or anyone writes a book, I know that we'll definitely want to be involved with helping out with whatever we can telling about the connection with our town.
Josh Hutchinson: Margo actually explained some of his good side, as well, that he donated quite a lot of money to charities, and a charity of his, fund he established, recently helped some people with the Covid recession. Town actually paid out a fund that he had donated 300 plus years ago.
David Allen Lambert: And of course, the Stoughton Hall at Harvard University. The original one was barracks for the Revolutionary War soldiers. And the one that's here now, I think is from 1805, but it's still called Stoughton Hall and Harvard University.
[00:37:00] The sad thing about Stoughton is that we don't know a lot about him, from the point of fact that his diary, if he kept one, doesn't exist. Many of his papers don't exist. For that matter, much of his library doesn't exist. So unlike a lot of people, where their collections, like the Sewall diaries are at the Mass Historical Society, and I'm an elected fellow of the Mass Historical Society. And I was viewing the original pages of the Sewall diary, even though it's been published for years. And just going to the entries where he talks about, I visited my sister Ann to, I'm like, wow, he just, he could have just been right there writing it right beside me. So yeah, so for Stoughton, we don't have a lot of those documents. I'm lucky myself as a collector. I have one or two documents that he signed. It's interesting, his wax seal was a black swan on some things, which is interesting, because the Associated Daughters of Colonial Witches uses a swan on the logo.
Sarah Jack: They do. Yeah. Was that incidental?
David Allen Lambert: The [00:38:00] story of Stoughton is an intriguing one, and I wish Margo luck. I, 30 years ago started to gather up stuff with the idea that I thought I would write something. But it's just, it's piecemeal, and with history, when you only have certain things, you have to leap to conclusion. But I understand that she has been over to England and may have found some things on his early ecclesiastical training. I said, I think he originally wanted to be a minister.
Josh Hutchinson: She told us she went to Oxford and did some research in basically an old castle there and had a great time doing that. On the research side of things, we wanted to talk about how do people firm up their branches and know that they've got true connections? How do people, say you're getting information from your aunt or your third cousin, how do you know, confirm that's accurate information?
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, and this is true with every aspect of genealogy. So you could create a genealogy chart. [00:39:00] Some people call them pedigree charts. And you put your lineage down. It's one thing to fill in the blanks. It's one thing to have the solid evidence. Primary sources say for the 17th century, right through the 19th century, practically about the same.
So you're gonna have your birth records, your marriage records, your death records are gonna be recorded on the town level. Some vital records like marriages and births in Essex County were recorded in the quarterly court in Salem. So you may find some vital records there, but for the most part, for prior to 1850, if we're using Massachusetts as the baseline here, they're all in print, for the most part. Starting in 1841, Massachusetts becomes the earliest state in the union to record birth, marriages, and deaths, getting returns from the town and city clerks. So we're lucky we have that checks and balances system. 1841, right down through 1920, you can search on American Ancestors every birth, marriage, and death besides the records early on.
The other thing that people want to do to find connection, when you [00:40:00] can't find a birth, is maybe find the church record. The christening record of a child would name his parents or her parents. A marriage record in a church won't necessarily name who the parents are, but a witness might be a clue, because maybe it's the father or maybe it's the mother or a married sister, who is identified as one of the children of their ancestor.
The burial records can give you some clues, obviously to where they're buried, and maybe it's the placement of that gravestone in the cemetery that groups a family together.
Probate's really a, a true cement though, Josh, because that's going to name in the probate record I leave to my daughter, Sarah, now the wife of John Taylor, so that helps. Deeds too, because you could sell a piece of property for a dollar or a pound and have it, or simply love and affection to I give to my child. So these are the main things, vital [00:41:00] records, church records, probates, and deeds, just count on one hand, let alone court records with depositions.
There's a really untapped collection that I use all the time, and it is on familysearch.org. It's the Mass Archives Collection, and this is 328 volumes that are now digitized. There is a card index, and it is petitions and letters to the governor, muster rolls. 328 volumes, and they go from 1629 to 1783 I and most genealogists I know that are researching that era have never even heard of that collection. Like for instance, volume 135 of the Mass Archives Collection is where most of the witchcraft trial documents are housed in. And in fact, you'll find them on the Salem site, as well. But familysearch.org is free, and you can register for an account there. And if you just search under records for the Secretary of State's [00:42:00] office of the Massachusetts State Archives, you'll find the Mass Archives collection pretty fairly simple.
And it's great. And again, that's gonna be a document that may say, I was there when my father died, and on his deposition, he recounted the following. And that shows you a relationship. And of course, we have that wonderful thing called DNA now, which we can use as a clue in some cases.
Josh Hutchinson: We wanted to ask about the DNA. We know that it's, you can now link it to your tree on americanancestors.org. Can you tell us about what resources are available once you've linked your DNA to your family tree?
David Allen Lambert: Sure. We have some applications under American AncesTrees, as it's called, that will allow you to see how your results pan out. So that's a tremendous added advantage. The other thing that we have on American Ancestors, is we have people like Melanie McComb, who I work with, and she is well versed in genetic [00:43:00] genealogy.
Autosomal DNA is what you typically test. Most people will test that with ancestry.com or 23andme or a variety of different other, MyHeritage. That really only goes back to your fifth great grandparents. And like I say with mine, I have that one exception of somebody born in 1678, but if you're trying to get back to the earlier generations, it's something that our grandparents and our great-grandparents probably should have done. Of course, the technology wasn't there.
Where the DNA is helping out, I think people for the accused of the witchcraft trials or accusers or whatnot is the Y-DNA, because that's the direct male line. So if your Hutchinson line, you'll have the same Y-DNA signature as your immigrant ancestor and even thousands of years, even before surnames. And that's where the strength of trying to connect links back, because if you knew that, say for instance, if using this as an example, if Giles Corey was [00:44:00] the only one that had this particular Y-DNA and a proven line to Giles Corey, what his Y-DNA is may help somebody who's a Corey in South Carolina, who suspects that they may be related to him based upon that haplogroup.
And there's a whole plethora of study projects on Y-DNA. Mitochondrial is useful, too, not to discount what our mothers give to us. And ladies, of course, have the mitochondrial DNA they can test, whereas men only have the Y-DNA and the mitochondrial. Mitochondrial will be your daughter's daughter, so you'd have to find a daughter of Mary Perkins Bradbury, daughter of that person, all the way down to a living male or daughter to test that back. Where the surnames change every generation, it makes it a little bit more difficult, but it's still a valuable tool.
Sarah Jack: What kind of organizing do you guys recommend for people? You've got the pedigree stuff people are building out, they're trying to gather records, they're trying to connect to [00:45:00] cousins, they're trying to learn about locations. Is there multiple things you have to do to organize?
David Allen Lambert: Well, it really depends what the end result is gonna be. I give a lecture called "What Time is it on Your Genealogical Clock?," because I think as genealogists, we gather, it's going to the grocery store for 30 years but never going to the checkout counter. Essentially, you get all this material ,and what happens is that people just don't publish it, don't distribute it, and then when they pass away, there are kids that are not interested, that don't know what to do with it. And I have too many horror stories where I can tell you bags upon bags of things are just thrown out. But we have also become the repository, if you will, for a lot of these genealogists works since the 1840s, that they never did do a book or they never decided how exactly they wanted to put it out.
So I always say just like anything in life, create a plan. First off, what you want to have done with it. Are you gonna create a website? Are you going to create something you [00:46:00] wanna self-publish? We have an NEHGS, for those that have the budget for what's called the Newbury Street Press, and where we take and put together the entire book. Now that does cost a quarter of million dollars, but we do have people that produce these books and we've, over the past, nearly 25 or more years.
But you can self-publish by getting your genealogy program that you buy and just print out the copies and then just put on the title page, "this is the 2023 edition." Make it a PDF and send it to other cousins. Create a tree on AncesTrees. Create a tree on ancestry.com, Family Search, and just organize it.
And then what people will do is that they occasionally, all right, what is the next step? What's right for me? A lot of times they'll have consultations with myself or my colleague Melanie McComb. They'll come in and talk to a genealogist in the library, who's on the desk and say," I really don't know what, what I should do with this". And we will help guide people to, what should [00:47:00] be the final deposition of the paperwork they have. And sometimes our archivist may suggest another repository, because it may not fit the scope of what we have.
We had somebody one time that had clipped out obituaries for generations out of newspapers in the town, but we determined that it would've been better to give it to the local historical society. The other thing is work in a group. I think just any project, it's better with more than one person. And if you can involve a child and nephew or a niece or a cousin or better yet, find out somebody who's also working on the same ancestor, combined efforts, that's a checks and balances. You're checking in with the other person. You have that end results. And of course NEHGS with a quarter of a million books, we're always welcome any new book that's being produced, so if you create something, and it doesn't have to be ready for a Pulitzer Prize. My only suggestion is if you're gonna state something in your genealogy or your work, try to put the citation to where it comes from .
That even goes true with [00:48:00] family stories. People say I never was able to solve this mystery in my family. It's only a family story. Great. Write the story out in the genealogy and footnote it and say when you heard that story from your grandmother or your grandfather on the porch in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1975. And then ask your other cousins that they've heard another version of it. And I always say there's a pound of truth, even in all the different ounces of fact and fiction that may be there. There's gotta be some story to it.
My grandmother told me it when I was a child, when I was seven, that my great-grandfather was on a whaling ship. That's a great story, but how do you prove it? I tracked down the whaling ship log and found his name on it in 1871, and then 20 years later, somebody found the log book for the ship, and there's his name right in it.
You never can give up. I think genealogy is like wet cement. It's never completely dry, solid. And there's always gonna be new material that's being found. What [00:49:00] people find now in their DNA to find that maybe their paternity or great-great-great grandfather isn't who they think it is, because DNA's disproved. And now you have to open up that can of worms in your research. And then when you write something down, like I say, if you want to do a second version or an addendum, go for it. There. There's no rules. But getting it out and getting it finished is a good thing. So if you set aside, I'm gonna get this done by the end of 2023 or by the end of 2024 or maybe five years down the road, but set yourself a goal and stick to it. And we're here at American Ancestors to help in case you need any guidance or just a nudge in the right direction.
Sarah Jack: Is it by appointment only. How far ahead does somebody need to plan to come visit you guys?
David Allen Lambert: If they're just coming in to do research and use the library, we're open Tuesday through Saturday, so Tuesdays we're open nine to one. That's our early day. Wednesday through Saturday, we're open nine to five. That being said, on March [00:50:00] 24th, we will be closed for the rest of the year, because of renovations and construction of a new building next door attached to what we have.
It's $20 a day to use the library if you're not a member. Membership ,you can do a three month membership, or you can join for a year for $99.95. And then, of course, when you're home, you have access to all of the databases that we have on American Ancestors. And we even have external databases, including Early American Newspapers, so every newspaper that was published between, I mean, there's one issue of Boston's Public Occurrences from 1690. Then you have to fast forward to the Boston Newsletter in 1704. So I always say 1690, 1704. All those early papers are searchable right through about the 1830s, and that's part of your, what you get for this subscription. And then, of course, if you're in the library, and you want to meet with one of us, the people are on the reference desk are always available there. We do paid consultations for members for 150 an hour. We book them usually four to six weeks out, but we [00:51:00] can also do them through Zoom or through a telephone call, whatever medium works best for you, and we can help people with that as well.
Josh Hutchinson: That's excellent. You have so many resources available. It's hard to grasp almost.
David Allen Lambert: It really depends on the avenue that you're going in. There are people that have ancestors involved in the witchcraft trials that live in Canada now, because two generations or so afterwards, they become planters, or three generations afterwards, they become loyalists, and they go up to Canada, and their families are still up there. So I have people that are Canadian that come down and say, "I'm related to a Salem Witch, really?" And then, of course, now they have to figure in time how they're gonna get the Salem up from, "can you walk from Boston to Salem?" I'm like, "not really, but you can take the train." I always advise people don't go to Salem during Halloween. And for just not a principle. I don't know. Personally, I try to avoid it during Halloween. I just think that isn't the best way I'm gonna remember my ancestors.
Josh Hutchinson: I've been there in October, and I remember walking into [00:52:00] the Old Burying Point, and there was like a carnival set up next to it. So people were eating funnel cake, walking through the cemetery, just walking off the path and everywhere, and that really got to me.
David Allen Lambert: I think that people are entertained by history, and then some of us respect history and try to preserve it and tell the story and get the word out. I've always think of us as historians, as sentinels of their past. We're keeping their memory alive. They have no voice anymore, so we have to apply it for them. And yeah, I don't think I approve of funnel cake or cotton candy or balloons running through a cemetery, especially in Salem, or any place for that matter.
Josh Hutchinson: I know now they control the cemetery in October. They limit how many people can be in there so they can keep an eye and make sure people stay on the paths and behave themselves. So [00:53:00] it's improved since the last time I was there.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, I've had a great love for cemeteries. One of the books I've published for NEHGS is called A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries. It started as a Rolodex when I worked at the Mass State Archives right outta high school, cuz nobody knew where all the cemeteries were in Boston, or for Salem for that matter, and how to get in contact, what was in print. So I created this book. Now it's even an app that you can have on your Kindle, but it gives every cemetery, when it was created, the alias names and anything that's been published on, it's for every town in Massachusetts. So that I have a great love for cemeteries.
Sarah Jack: That's a fascinating project that you did. That was one of your first projects maybe.
David Allen Lambert: The day after I turned 18, I went to work as an intern at the Mass State Archives, and I was hired as a genealogist to work in the reference desk. And what I did basically in my free time is people would ask about Granary Burying Ground or King's Chapel Burying Ground. I'd say, all right, where is that? [00:54:00] So I'd take the yellow pages out and look for the phone for the addresses. There was no guide to cemeteries. There wasn't a Findagrave or Billion Graves back then. And then I went to NEHGS, and we have thousands of gravestone inscriptions, and what's, why those are so valuable, a lot of those are done in the 19th century when the stone was still upright and legible. So we have these transcriptions. The DAR library in Washington also has thousands of transcriptions. So I linked all of those in the published vital records in Massachusetts, there's usually a code if they got the information from a gravestone. So here's a book done in 1902. You can't read the stone anymore, but it tells you the location from that inscription. So I linked all of those.
So it was a real labor of love. It went from being a Rolodex to a 300-page-plus book. So and I'm still finding stuff on it ,which is amazing, Sarah. It's people say, "oh, there's a graveyard out in the back woods with about four gravestones. Do you know about that one?" No. But I do now. So it's still a work in progress after 20 [00:55:00] years
Josh Hutchinson: That's a remarkable resource.
David Allen Lambert: Thank you. Yeah. It's a pleasure to work on.
Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned earlier you're also involved with the Extreme Genes Podcast and radio show. How does that show help family researchers?
David Allen Lambert: Well, we mix a little bit of sometimes black sheep in your family history makes an interesting, old, crazy Uncle Charlie that everybody used to talk about at the Thanksgiving dinner table. How do you find out why he was so crazy? It's interesting. We have a variety of topics everywhere from DNA to having guests like Henry Louis Gates on this show, leaders in the genealogical field, CeCe Moore, who's a genetic genealogist, a good personal friend of ours, is on there.
We highlight what's new in genealogy news. So what I give every week, including when I tape today, is what's called Family Histoire News, and essentially talking about what's new in the industry, what's going on, like upcoming conferences, and I help him find guests. So [00:56:00] like the two fine people I'm talking to right now that we want to talk about what you're doing, because we have to have the audience of genealogists because, genealogists, not everybody's on Twitter, on Facebook, but we're on radio, we're on 60 radio stations nationwide, and on our podcast download now we're on iHeartRadio, YouTube, Spotify, and we get on an average 20,000 to 50,000 downloads a month.
And he's been out for eight years sponsored by ancestry.com, but we're not, the mouthpiece of Ancestry, obviously, but they're one of the sponsors. But it's a lot of fun. We make it fun. I, one of the things I like to highlight are the unusual stories in genealogy or in history that will parallel or some centenarian that just passed is the last of the Dambusters from World War II that helped destroy the German dams, which were an integral part of the war effort. He just died at 101 years old, and thinking, does somebody have a [00:57:00] connection with that?
It started when I was on the show, it was Fisher thought I had a pretty good dynamic with him, and he calls me his brother from another mother. And I was telling em about friends I've had. I was lucky to be friends with over 25 years with the last passenger of the Titanic. I met her when I was a teenager, and she used to send my children Christmas gifts every year, so we fondly recalled our Auntie Millvina. She was eight weeks old when she was on the Titanic, but I knew the last first class passenger, unlike Kate Winslet's character in Titanic. There was a woman who lived to be 101 in Massachusetts. Her name was Marjorie Robe, and I remember talking with her on the phone about, were they playing "Nearer my God to Thee" on the boats and her and her stories and all that.
So I've always had a connection with trying to find something as far back as I possibly can. I mean, I remember writing to Spanish American War veterans and widows of Civil War veterans when I was a kid, silent movie actresses. I sat with Carla Lemley, whose uncle started [00:58:00] Universal Studios, when she was like 103 years old. She was in Phantom of the Opera in 1925 as the prima ballerina and was delivered the first speaking lines in a horror movie, 1931 Dracula. She is sitting in her house in Hollywood she owns since 1937, reciting her lines from all these movies as and wearing a, like a Chinese dressing gown, and we're eating Chinese food. I knew her niece, and it was great. I love touching history. I used to be a Civil War reenactor, because I wanted to know that next step to what the past was like.
Sarah Jack: I love that you just said touching history, because it is, and there's so many ways that people can, and they need to be brave and do it, reach out and get started.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. And then with genealogy, I think that, even if you sit down and somebody listens to this, and we got one person who calls up their grandmother or their mother and say, "hey, what was your grandparents' [00:59:00] name?" I mean, if you ask your grandmother who her grandparents are, you now have your great-great-grandparents.
And it's so easy, especially with younger folks or people that are fortunate to have their parents and grandparents or even great-grandparents alive, to just get started. Don't put it off, because if you put it off, they may not be there. And there are so many great stories that you can ask people. When you're doing genealogy, one of the big key questions, I always say, ask your parents how they met. Ask your grandparents how they met. You won't find that on any record. It won't be on the marriage record, won't be on the marriage license. Might have been written up in a newspaper article on their 50th wedding anniversary, but probably not. Adding the human element, and I think that's what we search for as genealogists and family historians, is we pour over these records.
The unfortunate ancestors we have that were accused and executed during the witchcraft trials, but we have their depositions, we have their words. They're more than just a name and a date. They're, they actually come alive. And it's to, to me it's so personal when you can see a [01:00:00] deposition or you can see, either pro or con against somebody, that this is their words, this is their thought process. This is what they believed in. And they're just more than a piece of paper or a gravestone.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Specifically, Rebecca Nurse, my ninth great grandmother, she said that the world would know of her innocence. And when I read that, I just, I'm like, they do.
David Allen Lambert: Have you been to her homestead?
Sarah Jack: I have not had the opportunity yet, but it won't be long. I'm gonna make it happen.
David Allen Lambert: It will be amazing. And I only have the connection by association, having someone in the trials, and it was moving for me. To think that you're in the home of somebody who was basically dragged out of bed and brought into trial on a cart. The whole story is just is amazing. But when you can have those touch points in history where you can physically see a building or be at a graveyard or now, like I say at the gallows. I think [01:01:00] that's really important cuz it's more than just reading something. So I look forward to hearing your reaction when you actually go there.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I hope I get to see that, because the Rebecca Nurse Homestead is actually what got me started in both genealogy and witch trial research, because I visited, I was fortunate to be able to visit when I was in high school, up there looking around at colleges and went there with my father and my brothers and we learned that our family was connected to the witch trials. And that got me hungry to do more research. And it was just a really powerful experience to actually be present where somebody accused had been.
David Allen Lambert: And that's usually the reaction that people get, Josh. And obviously it's the same with you, Sarah. It's like you find that you have that connection. It's like [01:02:00] a yearning. I like to attribute genealogy as a very thick book that we know the first couple of chapters cuz we know that generation, but somebody's tore all of those pages out. I like to think of places like NEHGS where I work in Boston. We have those pages, and they do all fit in there. It's just a matter of doing the work to put it back together again. We're only trying to relearn what wasn't told to us and what's been lost to us. And I can almost see where in some cases where people may not want to remember having somebody accused in the witchcraft trials because the pain and just a disassociation.
I Look at Mary Towne Esty's son going to what became Stoughton. I mean, it's, starting anew, and we don't talk about the past. I hear that all the time from people. I said did your grandfather ever tell Oh, nope. They never, they said, leave the past. In the past. We don't talk about things. We talk about now. Live in the present. And that's why a lot of this history has been lost, I think, to people. [01:03:00]
Sarah Jack: Yeah. There always seems to be somebody in a generation that really wants to dig back and find out about their family, but things are lost forever.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. Photographs specifically. And I think David McCullough, when I had the honor of work on his genealogy, he gave a presentation to us and he said, if you want to be remembered in the 22nd century, keep a journal. Think of what we're doing, Sarah. We have, everything is, a cell phone right here, we have our photos on it, we have our correspondence, we have our text. What do we print out? How many people go and print off on a quarterly basis or a yearly basis, more than maybe a handful if any of their photographs? They put 'em on Facebook, they put 'em on Twitter, on Flickr, whatever, in Instagram. They don't print out something that's going to be there for the next generation.
We don't send postcards anymore. In fact, you go to [01:04:00] most places now, you won't find a postcard. When I was in Disney World, I thought, it'll be fun. I'll send a postcard. There aren't any postcards at Disney World. You can't buy them. There are places that we would look at, alright, we're gonna get a letter when somebody had a baby born. And now we're getting, a Facebook update with a picture. Those important events should be printed out and saved. We're really not leaving much to the 22nd century in this century. There's almost gonna be a real void of information. So like I always tell people, if you want a New Year's resolution, leave the future a picture of yourself. Write down what you do. Talk about yourself. It's not vanity. It's leaving a chapter of history.
Sarah Jack: Wow. What a really important point.
David Allen Lambert: Could you imagine if we had diaries of all those people that were involved in the witchcraft trials, how the story, and think about that. How many voices do we really have from the trials that are day by day? It's Sewall's diary, and when I was turning the pages [01:05:00] reading September of 1692, I just was like, this page is as old as what he's writing about. And I'm like, I'm turning this page. And it was one thing to read it. I have the published version of his diaries, but it was one thing to see the original. And that's, I think, again, just touching history and learning about it.
Josh Hutchinson: That has to be a remarkable experience to know somebody wrote that 330 years ago, and that's amazing to connect with that.
David Allen Lambert: I mean, and that's true with probate records. You could go to the Mass State Archives and ask to see, you have to make an arrangement, but the original probate record can be taken out, and you can look through the handwritten last will and testament of an ancestor. You can go to the cemetery and see the gravestone and read that faded epitaph at the bottom that meant something to the family.
May it be biblical or just, some verse. You can sometimes stand in the doorway of your ancestor's home or the cellar hole where they [01:06:00] stood. It gives you a closer connection. I always say genealogy field trips are important. We're doing a trip to Scotland in June, and one of the things I plan on doing is reading up more on the Scottish witchcraft trials and trying to visit some of the sites that are around Edinburgh that occurred. And it just fascinates me. And again, I don't have a connection with it. In fact, I have very little Scottish heritage. My wife is a quarter Scottish, and I often think the records only go back for the most part in Scotland in, for genealogical purposes into the 1600s, sometimes if you're lucky with the church. So she could have easily had ancestors who were executed during the witchcraft trial by historians that went on in Scotland, or for those matter in Germany or something like that. And the ancestors will never know or connect to just because there's no records between that point in history and when the records start being recorded.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We learned from Mary W. Craig when we spoke with her about the Scottish Witch [01:07:00] trials that a lot of the people who are descendants of the accused and executed have no idea about it because the future generations felt such shame at their ancestors being executed. They basically erased them from the family tree.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. And that's, I think that kinda hearkens back to New England through the Victorian era. People just didn't wanna mention it because, oh, your ancestor was accused as a witch. From being teased in the schoolyard to maybe being refused employment or maybe not given that bank loan or whatever you might need. It's funny to think what may have been the trickle down for how many generations that stigma was still there. Even if, for those who weren't executed, the ones who were just accused, the humiliation of the whole thing and public scrutiny.
Sarah Jack: In the countries that we've been talking to, [01:08:00] Nigeria, South Africa, where people are experiencing accusations, family have to try to leave and find another community that doesn't know what happened to try to reestablish themselves, that the shame does follow. It's interesting how many parallels there are, but witch hunting, whether 300 years ago or this week, it has a lot of the same harmful elements.
David Allen Lambert: Are they using spectral evidence, as well? I mean, is that where the most of the accusations are coming from? Claiming somebody got sick or an animal died based upon what somebody may have done?
Josh Hutchinson: It's mostly illness and death that they attribute to extraordinary causes rather than a cause that's known to them. And it's generally, it's mob violence. It's they [01:09:00] go to a diviner or someone and have them name the witch, they call it witch finding. And so once the witch is named, they just gather their acquaintances and go over there and execute them.
David Allen Lambert: Wow not even with a trial.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. No trials. It's just mob violence, brutality, torture. If you're lucky, you just get chased outta town or you run to the police, and the police lock you up for your own safety.
David Allen Lambert: Wow. We really haven't come very far, Josh, in 300 plus years have we as a society in the world.
Josh Hutchinson: No, no. And we see parallels in America and Europe and everywhere in the world, that same mentality of treating people who we think are different from us poorly.[01:10:00]
Here's Sarah with another important update.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
Here's an update on the Connecticut witch trial exoneration bill, HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. There are currently 23 bipartisan Connecticut legislators who are supporting the exoneration by co-sponsoring the bill.
The bill must be voted on in the Joint Committee on Judiciary. Please continue to write Connecticut legislators of all political parties, asking them to sponsor the bill and vote Yes. Please go to our show description for the link for the March 8th press conference held by Senator Saud Anwar and State Representative Jane Garibay. Please listen to the statement of support by Connecticut's Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz. Take time to understand what historian Dr. Kathy Hermes states at this conference. Share the bold words that author Beth Caruso, student Catherine Carmon, and descendant Sue Bailey arm us with. Arm yourself with the facts of history, and find yourself a [01:11:00] platform to work with us and share the message.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, an organized collaboration of diverse collaborators, has been working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony. We support the Joint Committee on Judiciary's bill, HJ number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. Will you take time today to write a member of the judiciary committee asking them to recognize the relevance of exonerating Connecticut witch trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world, you should do it from right where you are. You can find the information you need to contact a committee member with a letter in the show links.
You can follow our progress by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt and visit our website [01:12:00] at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. You can order a white rose exoneration supporter pin in our merch shop at zazzle.com/store/endwitchhunts, shop our other Zazzle store, zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer, and shop our books at bookshop.org/endwitchhunts. We want you as a super listener. You can help keep Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast in production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you Sarah for that update on the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration [01:13:00] Project.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, associates, and neighbors.
Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Jump into an informative discussion about revealing research of the Connecticut and Massachusetts witch hunt with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article “Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693 which was published in the Fall 2022 issue of Connecticut History Review.
Beth Caruso, a Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast listener favorite, is the author of the books One of Windsor and The Salty Rose, and Cofounder of the CT Witch Memorial and Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project.
Dr. Katherine Hermes, J.D., Ph.D., is professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, co-host of Grating the Nutmeg podcast, and publisher of Connecticut Explored, the premier magazine of Connecticut History. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Sarah Jack: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: And I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: Today’s guests are Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article ” Between God and Satan,” which was published in the fall 2022 Issue of Connecticut History Review. It brings the witch trial bystander Thomas Thornton into focus. Although Thomas Thornton could be considered a possible bystander to New England witchcraft trials, he was a neighbor [00:01:00] of Alice Young, the first accused witch of the American colonies executed, in Connecticut Colony in the Backer Row neighborhood in Windsor, Connecticut, where he also lived.
Josh Hutchinson: He was also present at many other Witch trials, in the same place at the same time, including the Salem Witch trials towards the end of his life. So he’s the one person who connects the first witchcraft execution in New England to the last.
Sarah Jack: And this very researched and informative article is available for you to read and to continue research.
Josh Hutchinson: You’ll enjoy the conversation we have today and learn more about [00:02:00] Thomas Thornton later.
We have so much good content coming to you in this 2023.
Sarah Jack: It’s very exciting to be able to bring so many great conversations. It’s really setting the stage for a great year of content.
Josh Hutchinson: We’re having a wonderfully busy and productive year. We’ve got a lot going on with End Witch Hunts and with the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. Legislation is on the table to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, and we couldn’t be more excited about that.
Sarah Jack: I’m very excited. I’m personally excited as I descend from one of the accused victims of Connecticut, Winifred Benham, Sr. of Wallingford, and not just because of my connection to her, but [00:03:00] having my interest in the American colony witch trials has encompassed Connecticut, and there’s dozens of accused from that colony that are gonna have the opportunity to no longer be looked at as guilty.
Josh Hutchinson: And whether you’re a descendant of one of the accused or you’re just interested in seeing justice for the victims of the witch trials, please join us on our Discord server to learn how you can help get that legislation passed. We’ll have a link in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: If you are even a little bit interested in volunteering or finding a way to participate in this exoneration project, we want you. Anybody who’s interested, there’s room for you to join us.
Josh Hutchinson: We’re coming from across the country to direct our [00:04:00] message at Connecticut that we believe this legislation is important and that they should pass it and clear these names.
Sarah Jack: We believed that a collaboration would be important to fulfill this project, and it is. It’s a huge collaboration. There’s lots of Connecticut residents that want this, but we’re able to support them, and everybody’s doing it for these victims and coming together to correct a historical wrong.
Josh Hutchinson: And we’re looking to send a message about the other witch hunts going on in our world right now. We think that the legislature of Connecticut and the governor can make a powerful statement that we will not tolerate witch hunts.
Sarah Jack: When our country has completely stood against this horrible history, [00:05:00] it is a statement to the rest of the world that it needs to stop, that it was never okay, that it isn’t an acceptable behavior now.
Josh Hutchinson: As we speak, volunteers are mailing letters and sending emails to legislators in Connecticut, and there will be a hearing of the judiciary committee in February or March, we don’t have the date yet, but we’re looking for volunteers to come there and just be part of a show of strength and support for this legislation. If you’re interested in doing either of those things, again, please follow the link in the show description to our Discord server.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us and for making our efforts stronger.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, thank you. And we want to announce that we have a new [00:06:00] Zazzle store for End Witch Hunts and a Zazzle store for Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. So if you’re interested in showing your support of witch hunt victims from around the world, those in Connecticut, or you want to buy merch from the show, please head on over to our Zazzle stores, follow the links in the show description.
For additional news on what’s going on with the exoneration effort, visit Connecticutwitchtrials.org or join our Discord server.
And now I present to you a summary of the life of Thomas Thornton, the subject of today’s episode.
Thomas Thornton was a tanner who came from near London to Dorchester, Massachusetts, and then settled in Windsor, Connecticut by 1638. In 1647, there was a spate of child deaths and an outbreak [00:07:00] of influenza in Windsor, where Thomas Thornton was still living. Four of his six children died at that time. His neighbor, Alice Young, was hanged as a witch in Hartford in that same year. After that, Thomas relocated his family to Stratford, Connecticut, where Goody Bassett was tried for witchcraft in 1651 and executed. Her trial and execution led in turn to the trial and execution of Goody Knapp of Fairfield, whose trial and execution led to an accusation against Mary Staples of New Haven.
Thomas Thornton later became a minister and preached in Ireland for a time before King Charles II was restored to the throne, and Thornton was ejected as a Non-conformist. He returned to New England and settled in the Plymouth Colony in the town of Yarmouth, where he was the minister for many years. On March 6th, 1677, Thomas Thornton wrote a [00:08:00] letter to Increased Mather, which is significant because that was the same day that Mary Ingram was tried for witchcraft in Plymouth. Katherine Hermes and Beth Caruso believe that Thomas Thornton sent that letter from Plymouth on the date of Mary Ingham’s trial.
Thomas Thornton was connected to many important figures in politics, religion, and witch trials. He communicated with Connecticut Governor John Winthrop, Jr., the Mathers, including Increase and Cotton, the Cottons, John Sr. And John Jr., and witch trial Judge Samuel Sewell.
In 1692, Thomas Thornton moved to Boston, where he became a member of the Mathers’ Church. He was present at Margaret Rule’s bedside while she was dealing with her affliction, possible diabolical possession, as believed by many at the time. Later on, when Thornton was on his deathbed, which trial Judge Samuel Sewell kept [00:09:00] vigil.
Thomas Thornton had many links to Witch trials, from the first witchcraft execution in the colonies, that of Alice Young in 1647, to the last witchcraft execution in the colonies, which was in Salem in 1692. He was connected to key players involved in these trials.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that summary, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome.
Sarah Jack: And I’m excited to introduce Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article “Between God and Satan,” which was published in the fall 2022 issue of Connecticut History Review. Beth Caruso is the author of One of Windsor and The Salty Rose
Dr. Katherine Hermes, JD, PhD, is professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. She’s co-host of Grating The Nutmeg podcast and publisher of Connecticut Explored, the premier magazine of Connecticut history.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you [00:10:00] tell us about the meaning behind the title of your manuscript published in Connecticut History Review called “Between God and Satan?”
Kathy Hermes: So the title really comes from a number of sermons that talked about the fact that New England was part of the battleground between God and Satan. Cotton Mather, in particular, was famous for holding this view, but many other ministers in New England believe that because it was this godly mission that the devil took a special interest in undermining that mission.
Beth Caruso: I think in the article, that title also refers to children as being vulnerable in a space where they are vulnerable to influences by Satan, they are vulnerable to being bewitched or falling to evil. And at that [00:11:00] time, it’s the parents’ duty and responsibility and the church’s responsibility to raise them and instill the proper morals, because they’re not truly grounded in those morals at that point in time.
Sarah Jack: Who was Thomas Thornton before his exposure to witchcraft accusations?
Beth Caruso: Thomas Thornton was a tradesman, basically. He came to New England from an area outside of London, and he first settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts. And after that he settled with many others from Dorchester in Windsor, Connecticut. He had several properties in Windsor. His home lot was on Backer Row. He also had properties which were farm lots and wood lots, and also [00:12:00] probably a place where he did his tannery business, which was in the Palisade on the Farmington. We have to remember tannery can be a little stinky and needs water, but the property record for him as a home lot is on Backer Row. And his wife was Ann Tinker, who was one of several sisters who also landed in Windsor on Backer Row.
Josh Hutchinson: What was Thornton’s first experience with witchcraft?
Beth Caruso: We know in 1647 there was an epidemic that came through Windsor, and at the very same time, Thornton’s neighbor, Alice Young, was hanged for witchcraft. It just so happened that Thornton had six children, [00:13:00] possibly five. His youngest we’re not sure if he was born in Windsor during the epidemic or shortly after. But we found out through research that four of those children, three definitively died. And the fourth, because the records for him stop at the same time Alice Young was hanged. So we don’t know for sure if he had any other exposure to witch trials before that, but that incident on Backer Row was so tragic and so influential in his life that he went from being a tanner to a minister in just a short time.
I just wanna say as far as Thornton, he wasn’t [00:14:00] initially the focus. The focus was Alice Young, and there was so little information about her. There’s only three direct records about her. One was, “one of Windsor hanged as a witch in Hartford.” That was by Winthrop Sr. There was another notation by Winthrop Jr. in a disease about John Young. On the back it said, “his wife was hanged as a witch in Hartford.” And then the very last one was on the inside cover of the Matthew Grant diary, which said, “Alice Young was hanged on May the 26th, 1647.” So this whole investigation into Thomas Thornton really started out as a investigation [00:15:00] into what happened to Alice Young.
And I thought, why not investigate her neighborhood, the people where she lived? And it was in doing that that Thomas Thornton showed up, and the interesting facts about Thornton just really stood out so much. It was still difficult to find information about Alice Young, although through Thomas Thornton, we know much, much more now.
But when I was working on this for information about my book, One of Windsor, and then later to try and write a article about Alice, Kathy was mentoring me and I had tried a couple times to put out an article, but I said, “I want your honest feedback. What do you think?” [00:16:00] And, in discussing this, we realized that Thomas Thornton was really the person that we needed to focus on, because of all his connections from this first witch panic on Backer Row to what we found out later on, information where he was involved, at least on the periphery, in other witch trials, including Salem.
In investigating Thomas Thornton, the things that really jumped off the page right from the get-go were that I saw that he had a daughter, Priscilla, who died in 1647, and Cotton Mather wrote a testament to her piety. He was giving examples of children [00:17:00] who were pious, and I was amazed. I thought, “how in the world does Thomas Thornton, this tanner person, later become a minister? And Cotton Mather writes about his daughter, and his daughter is one of the ones that died in 1647 on Backer Row.” And in this description of Priscilla and her piety, there are also things about brushes with the devil and wanting to do a day of humiliation with fellow children that needed to become more good and righteous.
I thought, “that’s strange.” And then the other thing that stood out too is he’s at the bedside of Margaret Rule, which is someone who’s bewitched during that whole same Salem period in Boston. And finally, you know what really blew my mind was [00:18:00] here’s this guy, he’s dying, he lives a very old age, and Samuel Sewall, a judge during the Salem Witch trials, is at his bedside doing vigil with him. So all these things about Thornton really stood out.
Kathy Hermes: Yeah. Thornton had an extraordinary life, and we didn’t know anything about really his time in Ireland. There are big gaps in the biographical information about Thomas Thornton that I think we finally closed by finding the letter from Reverend Hook in New Haven to Cromwell saying that Thomas Thornton would be coming over to Ireland and was joining the recruits for the ministry. Finding a little documentary evidence of his time in Ireland about where he served at several garrisons, like six Mile Bridge and in Limerick and so on. And then realizing that [00:19:00] his time was coterminous with that of the Mathers themselves, that Samuel, Nathaniel, and Increase Mather were all in Dublin at that time, under the tutelage of a man named Samuel Winter. And, even though my dissertation work was on religion and law in colonial New England in the 17th century, I really hadn’t studied the input of Irish ministers or ministers who were in Ireland. Many of them were actually from England who were in Ireland. And so I hadn’t really heard of Samuel Winter, even though he had connections with the Reverend John Cotton of Boston and then, later on, the Mathers. Winter turned out to be a very fascinating character, who I think was probably greatly influential on all of the ministers who were later ejected from Ireland when the interregnum ended and King Charles II was restored to the throne of England.
Sarah Jack: [00:20:00] What else would you like us to know about Alice Young?
Beth Caruso: Alice Young was in the middle of all these Tinker sisters on Backer Row, so I thought she possibly could be related to them or maybe her husband was related to them. It was not just because of her placement on Backer Row. It was also that after this witch trial in 1647, everyone left Backer Row fairly quickly, except for one woman, Rhodie Tinker, who was then widowed and was waiting to remarry. And those days you certainly didn’t wanna be connected to a witch, a defined witch in your society, because that could come down on you later on that connection.
So I found it [00:21:00] interesting how all these people from the same family, they all left, and we know Thomas Thornton and his wife left, as well after their children died. You find them pretty early on in Stratford, and that’s the same place where John Young ends up going. His daughter ends up staying in Windsor, because we know that Alice Young had one daughter, Alice Jr., and we do know that she stayed in Windsor, because the marriage record we found is that she married Simon Beamon in Windsor before they went to Springfield together. But Backer Row during that time, there were a lot of children living there. And unfortunately, during the epidemic, there were, like I said before, four of the Thornton’s children who died, but [00:22:00] another household right up the way, there was another child who died, Sarah Sension. I thought it was interesting because piecing together the ages of the children, that there were a lot of young girls right around menarche age. Priscilla was 11 years old when she died. Her sibling Ann was nine when she died. These would’ve been the playmates of Alice Young’s daughter right next door. And then Sarah Sension, she was right around that age. Rhodie Tinker Hobbs Taylor, she had two daughters from her first marriage, and we think they probably would’ve been right around that age, too. So what’s interesting when we’re looking at this case and we’re piecing things together, is the amount of young girls. This [00:23:00] element that you see later in Salem, but also this element of illness connected to a witch panic during the Hartford Witch Panic. It all started with a young girl on her deathbed who was sick.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s a very interesting connection. So many witch trials, you have the childhood illness, and a lot of it revolves around young girls. Why do you think that might be the case?
Beth Caruso: The Puritans thought of women as the weaker sex than men. They certainly weren’t the only religion to do that or the only religious sects to do that, but in so many of these witch trials, it’s a young girl right around the age of menarche who’s bewitched. I mentioned Thomas Thornton at the bedside of Margaret Rule. She’s another young girl of that age. So [00:24:00] the young girls, they’re weak, because they’re susceptible to being bewitched.
You don’t really see that with the young boys. At least I can’t recall seeing that. It’s the adult women who tend to be accused of witchcraft. The majority of people accused were female, and they were supposed to be the weaker sex, because they were more susceptible to the devil, as well, not with the outcome of bewitchment, but with the outcome of being actual witches and signing a pact with the devil. So it was interesting to see some of those elements that pop up again and again on Backer Row.
Kathy Hermes: I kinda look at it maybe a little differently. The Puritans believed in a morphology of conversion. They really saw [00:25:00] life in terms of stages. And it’s a little like Eric Erikson’s terrible twos and so on. Where they thought the children were born really in a state of depravity without salvation, they had to be baptized as infants, and that would help as a converting ordinance.
But they would have to go through a stage of preparation, where they learned moral behavior, and these things had kind of age ranges attached to them. They weren’t hard and fast. Normally, in the teenage years people would experience, if they were going to experience it, saving grace, what they call justification. And so that conversion experience that people often expected in the teenage years was a time of great spiritual crisis. And it was often preceded by what was called a period of humiliation.
I think of it as most of us can relate to this, right? That when you’re, like in middle school or [00:26:00] whatever, you just feel like awful about yourself, and through your teenage years you’re struggling, and then you come out of them. And often you have some period of realizing you’re not so bad after all. The same kind of transformation took place with a religious understanding that, and I think that, in particular, first of all, women were more often converts. They were more likely to experience justification.
That period of crisis also is a period where they might realize that they aren’t justified, and they realize they are in fact damned. And it’s really these two things that puritans struggle with. Am I saved, am I damned? We have examples of women, for example, killing their infant children or trying to, because they can’t take the tension of not knowing whether they’re saved or damned. I see that context as well.
Sarah Jack: That’s a really great [00:27:00] layer. And Priscilla was facing this health crisis, as well as the spiritual transformation crisis at the same time, and she made statements about that.
Kathy Hermes: She’s a little bit young for a conversion experience, but sometimes the very pious have them a little earlier, or mature 11 year olds might have them sooner. And she’s on her deathbed, and it’s a critical moment.
Josh Hutchinson: What was the significance of Priscilla’s story on how she faced death and the spiritual statement she made in the story of Thomas Thornton and witchcraft?
Kathy Hermes: So Priscilla died in 1647, as we’ve said, and the story was recorded later on by Cotton Mather around 1698, published in 1700. My assumption is, and this is an inference, is that Thomas Thornton was telling that story, [00:28:00] because there’s so many details that are quite precise. And so I think he’s committing this story to memory and sharing it with people as he goes through life, because it dovetails with this critical moment of the accused witch being executed and being his neighbor. And he’s got this godly child who’s really saved from the snares of the devil, and when he finally recounts this to Cotton Mather, or when Mather writes it down, right in the late 17th century, by then mentioning witchcraft is off the table, right?
And by 1698, no one wants to talk about witchcraft anymore. And I think elements of the story are divorced from that. It’s more about her conversion. But we have another instance where that story is mentioned, or at least we believe it’s [00:29:00] the one referred to by Nathaniel Mather when he writes to his brother Increase and says, why didn’t you tell the story of the girl in Connecticut? And we thought about could this be a different girl? Could this be Mary Johnson, for example, who was executed in Weathersfield? And Johnson was a woman. She already had a child. She was not a girl. And Mather doesn’t mention an execution. “She died for the same crime,” he says, and with a conversion, a genuine conversion. And I think that what Mather’s talking about here is an earlier version of the story, in which the witchcraft was probably mentioned along with the conversion.
We were trying to piece together a kind of oral history of this narrative. So what you find in the Magnalia where Cotton Mather published it, or in the catechism that he published that was written first by a guy named Janeway. There’s no [00:30:00] mention of the witch element, but I think it’s there, I think it’s implicit in the story. She talks very much about wanting to save the other children, as Beth mentioned. And she talks about needing a day of humiliation and prayer.
Beth Caruso: I printed off what he wrote about her. And there are several references to good and evil, brushes with evil, needing to be pious and get, and this is a direct quote, “get power against their sinful natures.” And even on her deathbed, she says she was thanking her superiors and the direct quote is, “twas because they had curbed her and restrained her from sinful vanities.”
And she said, “were I now to choose my company, it should be among the people of God.” [00:31:00] There’s so many interesting polarities within that description. The other reason why, and this isn’t directly said that this is Thornton, but Cotton Mather also writes in “Enchantments Encountered,” a chapter in Wonders of the Invisible World. He mentions this, and Kathy and I believe Cotton Mather, in this, is referring to Thornton. He said, “we have been advised by credible Christians still alive that a malefactor accused of witchcraft as well as murder and executed in this place,” meaning the colonies, “more than 40 years ago, did then give notice of a horrible plot against the country by witchcraft. And the foundation of witchcraft then laid, which if it were not [00:32:00] seasonably discovered, would probably blow up and pull down all the churches in the country.” And again, this also ties into what Kathy was describing as the space between good and evil, between God and Satan.
Sarah Jack: Do you think that Priscilla could have been Alice’s accuser?
Kathy Hermes: I think it’s possible. It’s interesting that Thornton remains close to John Young. Whatever happened there on Backer Row, Thornton didn’t distance himself from John Young in any intentional way. So it’s hard to say if his daughter had been the accuser, there might have been more distance between the men, but it doesn’t appear that John Young came to his wife’s defense. So it’s also possible John Young thought the same thing. I think it’s just too speculative to know, but of course it’s possible.
Sarah Jack: And Thornton was looking out for Young’s health.[00:33:00]
Beth Caruso: We do think that they maintained a relationship, because in one of the references to Alice Young being a witch and connected to John Young that I mentioned in the beginning is a description of John Young’s disease. There is no signature on that as to who the author was, but this would’ve been somebody at the bedside of John Young describing his disease. Kathy had found a letter from Thomas Thornton to Increase Mather. And so we had his handwriting.
Kathy Hermes: Beth and I went to the Massachusetts Historical Society to look at some documents, and in particular John Winthrop Jr’s papers, because that’s where this account of John Young’s disease was. And it was considered an anonymous account. We then, from the Boston Public Library, [00:34:00] got a copy of the letter that Thomas Thornton wrote to Increase Mather. And as I was looking at the two, I thought this handwriting looks the same. And it’s pretty distinctive, because it’s more in the Elizabethan style than in the later style of handwriting that even John Winthrop himself had or someone of Thomas Thornton’s age. It’s a little bit like seeing the cursive of your grandmother, right, rather than the handwriting of, if you wrote like your grandmother, instead of someone now.
And so Beth actually did the close up comparison. She focused in on some letters, and it was pretty clear once we put the letters side by side that this was the same handwriting. And these letters provide important clues for a number of reasons, not only that Thornton wrote about this disease, but that he was in [00:35:00] communication with important people, John Winthrop Jr., Increase Mather. We don’t have many things written in Thomas Thornton’s hand. These are the two things that survive, that we know of.
Beth Caruso: And just the fact that he’s at the bedside, and he’s writing about the disease, and he sends it to Winthrop, Jr., tells us that he still has a relationship with John Young. At the time, John Winthrop Jr., he was physician to most of Connecticut, but obviously he couldn’t always be there in person to cover all that territory. So people would be at the bedside of a sick person. They would write a description of the disease and then send it to Winthrop. So we were extremely excited to make this discovery, because it did fit in with the order of where they both were at the time. It [00:36:00] reflects on their continuing relationship, but it’s also extremely exciting for the possibility of more things showing up later that may give light to more layers and more information about the witch trials in New England. This was a snippet that he had written about John Young, which he hadn’t signed. There are many other documents out there that have no signatures. His signature is very distinctive. We know he’s all over the place, as far as which trials in New England. So we’re hopeful that maybe more documents of his will show up now that there are two good examples of his handwriting.
Kathy Hermes: I’ll also say [00:37:00] about the letter, it goes into graphic detail about Young’s disease. And if Young had this in Windsor, it might have contributed to some of the feelings about Alice Young, because his skin is peeling off, and it’s in striations, and it’s a very gruesome illness. And he seemed to have experienced it while in Stratford where Thornton writes the letter, right?
He is experiencing it in Stratford, where there’s also, at the very same time witchcraft accusations going on, and this is total speculation, that this disease pops up during times of witchcraft. Cuz actually when John Young died in his final illness, we don’t know if he had this disease, but it seems like it, and that too is simultaneous with some witchcraft accusations, I think, in Hartford.
Beth Caruso: It’s Goody Bassett at the time and then Goody Knapp. [00:38:00] So there were the two hangings in the south, and Goody Bassett had been from Windsor. Thomas Thornton and John Young would have known her. She came there probably after both of them, but we just don’t know any details about that case.
But then there’s the Goody Knapp case, which is right nearby in 1653, and it was late 1653 that Thornton joined the ranks in Ireland, but by this time he had gained some clout. He was a deputy in the legislature for Stratford. If we can find some more documents, or if other researchers could really look through some of these documents from that era, from other eras connected to witch trials to see are there testimonies, are there other descriptions that are unsigned with [00:39:00] this unique handwriting, then maybe we can learn a little more. Because, unfortunately, no trial records are left for Alice Young. I don’t know if they’ll ever show up. As for so many others in Connecticut, including Goody Knapp and Goody Bassett in the South, I did just hear that the Winthrop Jr. medical records are going to go online probably this summer, and they haven’t been thus far. Because also of his atrocious handwriting, I think there are probably a lot of incredible little chunks of history that we would wanna know more about in those records, as well.
The other part of John Young’s disease that’s really interesting is that in the probate records, John Young was noted to have a disease for seven [00:40:00] months before he actually died. Yet he did not leave a will, so his property was left unclaimed in Stratford for seven years. Alice Young Junior never claimed it.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you both for such great answers. It’s been wonderful, and I’m excited to hear that Winthrop Jr.’s papers are coming online. That’s really big. And we have a friend going off to read some Winthrop papers right now, and she testified to the quality of the handwriting or lack of quality to the handwriting.
Beth Caruso: She’s the one who told me she had talked to them at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and they expect his works to be online by the summer, hopefully.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s exciting. And It’s [00:41:00] very interesting to me how Thornton shows up in all these places where witchcraft accusations are happening. He’s in Windsor for Alice Young. He’s in Stratford for Bassett and Knapp, and later on, he’s possibly connected to some others as well. Is that correct, with his time in the Plymouth Colony?
Kathy Hermes: I think it’s interesting that he went from Ireland to Plymouth, avoiding the witchcraft trials in Hartford, right? He diverts himself from there and goes to Massachusetts, and Plymouth Colony was the only colony among the orthodox colonies, we’re excluding Rhode Island here, to not have any witchcraft accusations until the one in 1677 that involved Mary Ingham, and we think he was there because of the letter to Increase Mather right at that time, [00:42:00] dated March 1st.
There’s a lacuna, a hole in the manuscript, that leaves some letters blank, and then ends with M O U T H, where it was sent from. And of course, the editors of the Mather papers assumed Yarmouth because that’s where Thomas Thornton lived and ministered from, but we believe it was Plymouth. Now again, no proof of that except that Thornton would almost certainly have had to be at that court day. It’s a court day where three native men were accused of murder and where Mary Ingham’s accused of witchcraft and where money is going to be distributed. A collection was taken up in Ireland to help people who suffered in King Philip’s War in 1676, and so that money’s going to be distributed in Plymouth Colony in the towns where Thornton [00:43:00] lived and near where Thornton lived. And so this is the guy who would clearly meet all three criteria, for taking care of the funds, having witchcraft expertise, and having experience with native men because he ministered to a praying town, Mattakeeset.
Again, speculative. It makes me think about many years ago when I was in graduate school we were all pointed to a book by Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective. And every time we present this article or talk about this, historians always say to us, “it’s really circumstantial evidence.” And yet most criminal cases are made on circumstantial evidence. The number of coincidences just can’t be accounted for any other way. And, of course, sometimes you’re wrong when you do something on circumstantial evidence, but I feel like here we’ve tried to be good detectives. We’ve tried to look at things objectively and see where there might be other possible [00:44:00] answers.
Sometimes there aren’t, but I think here the letter coming from Plymouth makes much more sense, and he also would’ve had a way for that letter to be delivered to Increase Mather, if he was in Plymouth rather than in Yarmouth. That letter’s, I think, critical to placing him at the trial of Mary Ingham.
Beth Caruso: And the other interesting thing about Thornton is he was one of the few ministers who was interested in the Halfway Covenant, which allowed for children to be baptized.
Kathy Hermes: I’ll say a little bit more about the Halfway Covenant. Children were not being baptized, because their parents had not become full members of congregations. Now, in order to become a member of a congregation to be in the church, a person had to be [00:45:00] baptized and had to have the experience of justification, which allowed the person then to take communion, right? And that created a full membership in the church. Full members had their children baptized.
Those children of the second generation wanted to baptize their own children, but many of them had not yet had the conversion experience or the justification experience. And so some churches adopted the Halfway Covenant, something championed by Increase Mather. No other churches in Plymouth Colony adopted the Halfway Covenant, except for Thomas Thornton’s church. So this, too, was a critical thing. He’s got this very close relationship with Increase Mather that I think shaped his theological views in many ways. And he was distinctive in that with respect to the adoption of the [00:46:00] Halfway Covenant.
Josh Hutchinson: And he was very interested, Thornton, in infant baptism, wasn’t he?
Kathy Hermes: Yes. There was a baptism controversy in the 1640s that eventually is resolved with the Cambridge Platform. And the minister in Windsor was away for a time that summer in 1647, in Boston discussing baptism. So this is an issue of critical concern. When he went to Ireland, he was exposed to a number of sermons and debates about infant baptism because in the Cromwellian period, the Anabaptists as they were called, or the Antipedobaptists, believed in adult baptism, not infant baptism.
And Thornton would’ve come into contact with that controversy in Ireland. It was a big thing at the time, during the Cromwellian period. [00:47:00] And then when he got back to Plymouth, they’re faced with this crisis in the 1660s of people not converting. So it would’ve been right on his doorstep. He would’ve been in the midst of that everywhere he went.
Beth Caruso: With his experience with the four tragic deaths of his children during this flu epidemic in Windsor, one could speculate about how it might have been an influence for him to see that children could die early and could die under horrible circumstances, influenced by the devil in some way, and how it would be important for children to have some kind of protection that baptism might afford them.
Sarah Jack: I’m really seeing how you have these network of ministers, these controversial spiritual things. You have the development of these [00:48:00] colonies and law. It’s all really interesting.
Kathy Hermes: The reform congregationalists, the people we call Puritans, they were really trying to dive into a kind of primitive theology, to get back to the earliest days of the Christian Church, and they wanted to be very pure about it. And the reason the Halfway Covenant, something like the Halfway Covenant, was so controversial is that some Congregationalists thought that it was getting away from the pure church, right? That it was a compromise done for social reasons, rather than for sound theological reasons. But for people who were worried about the souls of children, the Halfway Covenant allowed for, as Beth said, some protection for the children. It was considered a saving ordinance. Most Congregationalists also believed in the perseverance of the saints, that [00:49:00] is that salvation would persist in families, right? Not always, but for the most part that godly families produced godly children. And so this was a way to continue the perseverance of the saints. They really had a long-term vision in mind. They thought that they were near the end times and were interested in converting native people. Some of the English people were even what they called philosemites and believed that native people were members of a lost tribe of Israel. And so this was part of the conversion of the Jews that had to take place before the Millennium. So there are many, many complicated ideas that go into these saving ordinances like baptism.
Josh Hutchinson: We’ve talked about a lot of Thornton’s connections to witchcraft. After [00:50:00] Yarmouth, he moved to Boston and joined the Mathers’ church in the year that the Salem Witch Trials were happening. Do you think that Thornton’s views on witchcraft could have influenced the Mathers to any degree?
Beth Caruso: At this point in time, we really don’t know if he was a shadow influencer, because he certainly is in line with the thinking of theirs, coupled with his early experience. What we need is more information about what his actual views were, and that is why we are so excited to put forth this research in hopes that other researchers will get ahold of it, and it will open many more doors and that we can find more documentation about Thornton or more works that he’s written, more sermons, [00:51:00] things like that. I think there’s more to discover before we can fully answer that question.
Kathy Hermes: Yeah, I think that’s true. I do think that the Mathers were quite well educated and Thornton was not, and so he would probably have deferred to them in theological matters, at the same time that his direct experience would have been of interest to them, but how they influenced one another, we can’t say, and I think this is important. Something we came to late in writing the article was to discuss Thornton’s position as a bystander. In Holocaust studies, they talk a lot about bystanders, because bystanders are, by the mere fact that they’re there, influencing what’s going on, right? But often in ways that are intangible. We didn’t write this in the article, but it’s what we both thought of as the Forrest Gump effect, right? What [00:52:00] effect does somebody being there all the time at all these situations have in the history of the way in which these things develop? And Thornton was not a theologian. The Mathers were theologians, but by virtue of his being present at so many things and having so much direct experience, it’s unlikely he stood mute and neutral.
And what I would like to see, if I can make a plug for it to some listener, is a master’s thesis that uses maybe distant reading techniques on the writings of the ejected ministers from Ireland who wind up in the Boston area, James Allen and Bailey and some of these other folks, Thomas Walley, who was in Barnstable near Thomas Thornton. I think if you took that kind of literary approach to their writings, you might be able to find ideas that [00:53:00] connected them all. And you might be able then to determine some of the influence that these collective ideas had on the Mathers, because the Mathers were themselves in Ireland. They weren’t part of the ejected ministers, but they were there at the same time the ejected ministers were. So I think that’s actually a very promising kind of area of scholarship.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much for that plug. We think that’s important for the story to be continued. And for the research done.
We know that the spectral evidence was accepted early on in Connecticut, and then John Winthrop Jr. basically rejected it, but then it turns back up in Salem, and we’re wondering where that influence came from, that spectral evidence. Is there any, are there ideas out there of how spectral evidence came back at Salem?
Kathy Hermes: So there were only two witchcraft cases in [00:54:00] Ireland at the time that Thornton was there. And we don’t know, again, because of the fire, I think they don’t have any records of what went on. But typically Ireland was not a place that accepted the idea of specters. And what’s interesting is that I think some of the ejected ministers question the acceptance of specters in Boston. What Thornton’s view was, we don’t know. It was always a debatable thing about whether you could trust a specter. The idea that specters existed was accepted, but what to do with the presence of a specter and any information one received from the specter was the matter of debate.
Josh Hutchinson: And Cotton in his Wonders of the Invisible World seems to defend spectral evidence, [00:55:00] while Increase in Cases of Conscience says that the Devil can appear as an angel of light. And that was a big turning point in Salem rejecting the spectral evidence. But I find it interesting also that John Winthrop Jr. rejected it and then his son, Waitstill, is one of the judges at Salem. And it’s all kinds of weird connections with the spectral evidence.
Kathy Hermes: With any Puritan debate, they picked these things to death, and they loved argument. And I know that often, particularly when witchcraft trials come up, people tend to think of the Puritans as irrational and unscientific, and really nothing could be further from the truth. Cotton Mather himself was quite interested in Isaac Newton’s discoveries and things like that. They thought of themselves as rational, and they were trying to work through supernatural experiences, which [00:56:00] they believed in rational ways. And sometimes that doesn’t make sense to us in the 21st century, but I think that’s why you have these debates among people who are even very close. And obviously no two people were closer than Increase and Cotton Mather, who shared a congregation and a family linkage.
Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about Thomas Thornton’s connection to Salem?
Kathy Hermes: Beth did talk about Margaret Rule, but maybe a little clearer explanation of that incidence. Margaret Rule suffered from what appeared to be a demonic possession or a diabolical possession, which was a bit different from some other types of possessions. And many people were called to her bedside. Again this is a point where we’re in contradiction to some other historians, but we believe the Thomas Thornton who signed the evidence about Margaret Rule was Reverend Thomas [00:57:00] Thornton.
But Samuel Drake, who was one of the early publishers of documents on this case, suggested that it was a bricklayer named Thomas Thornton. And it doesn’t make sense that the bricklayer would be there . But that incidence of Rule being possessed, she levitated during the viewing and all of these men witnessed it. This was a scene that must have conjured up memories of Priscilla. And it may be again, something that shapes that final story of Priscilla, as it goes through its various oral iterations in this, because Margaret Rule is really the last case in Massachusetts where the supernatural is front and center, as far as I know, and no witchcraft accusation results from it. They’re done with that.
Beth and I debated a lot about whether Thornton [00:58:00] was a believer in witchcraft and how zealous he was in terms of rooting out witchcraft. And I think both of us feel like, and again, this is a feeling, it’s speculation, nothing definitive, that he probably had a somewhat nuanced view of it that might account for the acquittal of Mary Ingham. That there were certain tests that were applied in figuring out who in fact was a witch, according to their own ideas. Had Thornton had a vehement reaction against Mary Ingham’s acquittal, we might have seen some evidence of that, since he did write to Increase Mather on that day.
Beth Caruso: The thing is, Thomas Thornton had a very long life, so he may have started thinking about witchcraft and rooting out witchcraft crimes in one way, and [00:59:00] that may have evolved to be in a different place. Again, it’s very hard for us to know, because he never directly says how he feels about witchcraft. It’s all very circumstantial of him showing up at these different places and the whole trajectory, starting out with this personal tragedy, and then having very strong connections later on to people who were connected to the Salem trials. The biggest clue we can get to Thomas Thornton as a person and his personality is probably in his sermon that Sewall wrote down, and in it the king has taken over again, and he doesn’t seem like a bitter person. He seems [01:00:00] like a kind and loving person. He says, “have nothing but love for the king in your heart.” And of course, the king has just taken over again, and Puritans are probably not liking that so much. They’d rather have Cromwell in there. But he’s taking a charitable approach.
You can often at least tease out a little bit of someone’s personality through their letters and the way they word things. He seems like a fairly humble person. He doesn’t seem aggressive or bitter or anything like that. So combined with his showing up at these different witch trial scenes and eras, it’s difficult to know. I hope a researcher’s out there. I hope you’re listening. This is something that [01:01:00] is an invitation for you to explore.
And I, in my heart of hearts, I do really think that there are more documents that will be discovered of Thomas Thornton, and people may have those documents already, but he just hasn’t been on the radar, because, quite frankly, no one has ever connected the Thomas Thornton who’s in Salem as a minister, hobnobbing with Judge Sewell and the Mathers, with the humble tradesman in Windsor, who tragically loses all these children in 1647. Our article is the bridge between these two Thomas Thorntons, which even, you know, some descendants in the past writing about him never connected. So we hope that now that he’s on the radar with this [01:02:00] article, that there will be more discoveries and they will shed a lot more light on the New England Witch trials and about him and his attitude toward all of this.
Sarah Jack: How do people access the article?
Kathy Hermes: The article will be in the Connecticut History Review, which is published by the University of Illinois Press. So copies can be ordered through the Association for the Study of Connecticut History, A S C H, the ASH organization. And you can subscribe to Connecticut History Review. It’s the only scholarly journal for the history of Connecticut.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here’s Sarah with information on the efforts to exonerate the accused on the efforts to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut witch trial exoneration legislation news. The first [01:03:00] community led remembrance day for all Connecticut Witch trial victims was on an anniversary of Alice Young’s execution, May 26th, 2007. It was held at South Green in Hartford. Tony Griego, police officer and co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and other commemorations, memorialized the executed witch trial victims with 12 white roses, one for each of the 11 victims hanged and one for all the children Orphaned. He would like a white rose on a permanent stone memorial in Hartford.
Tony’s exoneration efforts with several descendants followed. Attempts were first launched in 2008 and 2009. These unsuccessful efforts stirred minds and produced important witch trial history, exoneration, and permanent memorial site conversations.
In the beginning of 2016, the Connecticut Witch Memorial Facebook page and effort was formed to reach the masses when Beth Caruso joined up with the education and advocacy endeavors of Tony Griego. The social media and storytelling project allowed for victim stories to be told, [01:04:00] events to be shared, and updates to be given on efforts and calls for action to be amplified. They have connected descendants and others with a common interest in witch trial justice. Next, the CT Witch Memorial team went town to town, looking for local communities to remember and acknowledge the witch trial victims from their history.
Out of this effort, a collaboration with the First Church of Windsor, and Windsor Town Council, a resolution passed nine to zero on February 6th, 2017, recognizing the town’s two victims, Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert. Stay tuned next week to hear about more localized efforts to memorialize individual victims at the local community level.
Today, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is an organized collaboration of these founding advocates and many other diverse collaborators working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony. We are also seeking [01:05:00] out all local communities to continue recognizing their local accused witches. We are all coming together, along with the state representative Jane Garibay and senator Saud Anwar, to support the proposed exoneration legislation, the Joint Committee on Judiciary’s bill, HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. This proposal could bring a public hearing shortly.
This resolution will be an example to others working to recognize and address historic wrongs. Connecticut is taking a stand against injustice. By acknowledging the mistakes of the past, we educate the public that similar actions are not acceptable today. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General assembly to hear the voices of the witch trial victims being amplified by the community today. They were not witches. We hope you will pass this legislation without delay. Our project is offering several ways for exoneration supporters to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration [01:06:00] and history. Please download our robust lineup of episodes featuring witch trial descendants, education about hanged witch Alice Young and other victims, and Connecticut Colony’s governor John Winthrop, Jr.’s positive influence against convicting Witches.
You can go to our project website for an informative and easy to understand fact sheet of the Connecticut Colony witch trial victims, places, and dates. You can follow along by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America’s first executed witch, finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor’s stories. Remember the victims in modern day facing the same unfair and dangerous situations. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and to stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our projects on social media @ctwitchhunts and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org. [01:07:00]
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational Witch trial books and merchandise. You can shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/endwitchhunts or zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer. And shop our books at bookshop.org/endwitchhunts. We want you as a Super Listener. You can help keep Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast in production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that important update. And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not [01:08:00] Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com and our Zazzle store.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all your friends and encourage them to listen to the show and buy our merch.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch-hunts. If you’d like to learn more or make a donation, visit endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Part 2 of our enjoyable Margo Burns Witch Trial talk series brings more fun and informative conversation. This information-packed two part series, includes background on her research and editing of the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Be sure to catch both talks! Discover how we know what we know from the study of historical records. We have some laughs and heartfelt conversation about some of her new project discoveries on Chief Magistrate William Stoughton of the Salem Witch Trials. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today, we feature part two of our interview with Margo Burns, associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Sarah Jack: In our conversation, you'll hear how Margo is not done researching and investigating. She has an exciting project that she is working on, the biography of William Stoughton. She even traveled across the sea to look at his handwriting.
Josh Hutchinson: She tells some wonderful stories from her research and what [00:01:00] she's been able to uncover, what she still looking for, and what she wishes still existed that unfortunately has been lost. We talked about Robert Calef's More Wonders of the Invisible World and whether or not his records can be trusted and how historians use those documents in Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: And what is it like to do one of these biographies on a main character from the Salem Witch-Hunt. We heard a little bit from Dan Gagnon on what it's like. His project's complete Margo's in the trenches with it right now, and it's very interesting.
Josh Hutchinson: And similar to Rebecca Nurse, William Stoughton didn't leave a lot of documents behind.[00:02:00] Nobody knows where his records are, if they're still in existence at all. Unlike the Mathers, where you have volumes and volumes of their diaries and their correspondence to anyone whoever wrote them a letter, you just don't have the papers there to analyze Stoughton's life. So Margo is having to use a tangential approach, I would say, where she's coming in at it sideways, looking at all of his associates to find out what they ever wrote about Stoughton and looking through other people's correspondence to see what was said about his life at the time. And she's traveled back to [00:03:00] Oxford in England to have a look at where he studied and see if he left anything behind there.
We also talk about Stoughton's other side. We know him as the villain of the Salem Witch Trials, but he did have a philanthropical side, where he did bequeath sums of money to charitable causes. So you get to learn more about that, and you get to hear all of Margo's great stories about chasing down the shadowy figure.
And we talked to her about the records that we know are missing and what could be missing, because Governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote a history of Massachusetts Bay [00:04:00] in the 18th century and included references and transcripts. He said he had the documents, the primary source documents from the Salem Witch Trials and copied them into his history, but those documents are missing, and it's believed that they disappeared in the Stamp Act Riot, when patriots stormed his house and went through all his things and threw everything out into the streets.
But how do you know what's missing? I wanna know how do we know what we don't know? So we ask both questions, how do we know what we know, and how do we know what we don't know?
Sarah Jack: Now, one thing we know is that Dorothy Good's name was not Dorcas.
Josh Hutchinson: And we know that because Margo got on the case [00:05:00] and corrected the transcription of the records about Dorothy Good, not Dorcas. There was a transcription error long ago, and people have been using the same transcription for decades and repeating the name Dorcas, until Margo came along and discovered that her real name was Dorothy.
Sarah Jack: And you'll hear Margo talk about the handwriting analysis, and it's a science, and she applied it.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll have a link in the show notes to a talk given by Salem Witch, museum Education Director Rachel Christ-Doane about Dorothy Good and what we know about her life after the trials.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Margo.
Thank you, Rachel.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, thank you Margo and Rachel for [00:06:00] setting the record straight on little Dorothy Good, the four year old child who was chained up in the prison.
We talk to Margo again and get some good stories, and it's awesome, and you're gonna love it, and it's fantastic.
Sarah Jack: And now here's some great history from Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: William Stoughton was the chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer that met in Salem to try those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts in 1692. Still, no biography has yet been written about him. What we do know about Stoughton is that he was born in 1631 or 1632, the son of Elizabeth Knight and Israel Stoughton. William's family migrated to Dorchester, Massachusetts shortly after his birth in England. William graduated from Harvard College in 1650 and Oxford University [00:07:00] in 1652. He began his working life as a minister and preached in Oxford until 1660, when King Charles II was restored to the throne.
In 1662, Stoughton returned to Dorchester and began a career as a merchant. He was first elected to the General Court in 1671 and went on to hold many significant posts in the militia, judiciary, legislative, and executive branches of the Bay Colony's government. In May 1692, Stoughton was appointed Lieutenant Governor and named Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He presided over the trials and executions in 1692 and then served as chief justice of the new Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, signing more death warrants, which fortunately were not carried out, as Governor Phips granted a reprieve. As Deputy Governor, [00:08:00] Stoughton led the colony from the death of Governor Phips in 1695 until his own death in 1701.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that great history, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
Sarah Jack: Is everybody ready for part two? Here's Margo Burns, historian, associate editor, and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: Yay. Applause.
Margo Burns: William Stoughton is responsible for just about everything. I will give some of that credit, if it's credit, to Hathorne and Corwin, the two initial magistrates who were interrogating people, because they just accepted every, single accusation, and they kept everybody in jail and just went forward. But when we finally get to the trials, William Stoughton is in charge of everything. He set down the rules. He was making sure everything went correctly, if I put it that way. So when Rebecca Nurse was [00:09:00] found not guilty, he sent the jury back to reconsider, twice. Twice! And even though it turns out that she hadn't heard a question the second time, and she couldn't answer, and that was, of course, if you get asked a question and you don't have a reply, that's tantamount to saying, "you got me."
And that's what ended up happening, but you can imagine the chaos in that courtroom when she was found not guilty. And she didn't hear. Now a lot of people say, "oh, she was deaf." I challenge just about anybody to hear over what ruckus had to have been happening in that room. And later on, we have the account of the grand jury foreman and we have her account that, no, that wasn't what it was. And they appealed. They appealed. But we have a thing in Calef saying that the governor was ready to do it, but then a gentleman of Salem talked him out of it. Stoughton was in charge. He got it exactly. Now he wasn't a gentleman of Salem. We don't know who that was that got the governor's ear [00:10:00] and said, "nah, you shouldn't do that." A lot of us speculate. We try and figure out who it could have been, but we don't know.
Sarah Jack: I've been wondering why Robert Calef's reports are given so much weight.
Margo Burns: He published them. That's the thing. You find out more about people if they left a paper trail. And he also, he and Cotton Mather were at it all the time. They were just public foes writing things about each other. So this just sorta fit right in. And Calef had access to some documents and accounts that nobody else had. We don't have a hard copy of John Alden's description of what happened to him. We only have it through Calef. And we do try and keep track of what Calef says, not just because he hated Cotton Mather, but he does have some accounts from other people. So when we have this document, as put into Calef, that is Rebecca Nurse saying this is what happened, and we have other pieces that he [00:11:00] puts into it. That's not necessarily him, but that's him picking and choosing. The joy of being an editor, you get to pick and choose what pieces you'll put in, but, generally speaking, people have found his sources credible. And also, when you leave paper trail, you're the one that people are interested in.
And there's an explanation why the Salem Village cases are more interesting to people than the Andover cases. Well, not if you're from Andover, they're more important. But part of that is the vivid descriptions from those interrogations that were done by Samuel Parris. We like vivid. We wanna see the paper trail. And when we get to Andover and just have all these things that say, "after several questions purpounded and negative answers given, she confessed." So those start sounding the same, and we're not as interested in those. So that's why the interest in the Salem Village accounts hold people. When you have a paper trail, [00:12:00] that's what you look at.
And, in my research in Stoughton, I tell people a little joke, and it goes like this. There's somebody, one o'clock in the morning, crawling around on the sidewalk underneath the streetlight.
And police car stops by to say, "excuse me, what's going on here?"
And the guy says, " I dropped my wallet. I'm looking for it."
And police officer has a nice big flashlight, looking around and going, "dude, it's not here. If you dropped your wallet here, I'd find it. Are you sure you dropped it here?"
And the guy said, "no, I dropped it in that dark alley back there."
And the officer says, "okay, what are you doing looking for here?"
And the guy said, "the light's better."
And that's what a lot of history ends up being. We have a lot of interest in Samuel Sewall, because he kept a diary. He had letters, he had ledgers, he had all sorts of stuff. He had ancestors. People are really interested in his stuff, and is he necessarily the right person that you want to say, put everything on for being a witch judge?
We also have conversion [00:13:00] narratives. That was a big thing, when you wanna become a covenanted member in a church. And Thomas Shepard wrote them all down in Cambridge, so that we have these incredible records. But was that really emblematic, or was that just, we have this, so we can talk about it? We know about a whole lot of people's lives, and are they necessarily the right people for us to be investigating and extrapolating from?
So when I decided, what can I do? I've read everything. I've read everything, and I'm going, what do I add to this? We've done Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. That's great. People are using it. That's great. But what do I get to do? What am I gonna do? And I looked for, I looked down the dark alley. I said, "what's down the dark alley, and who do we wanna know more about?" Yeah. There's this wonderful play recently on, on Nathaniel Saltonstall, then what his role was in these, but the key person is William Stoughton. He's the one who's in charge of things.
So I said, you know what, [00:14:00] I'm gonna go down that dark alley, and I've had to bring a little flashlight and tweezers to find things. And there's a reason why nobody has written about him before. There isn't a cache of documents. He did not leave a paper trail. So we get little teeny pieces about it, and people make up stuff about him.
Go, "oh, he must have hated women." "He was not married." "Oh, maybe he was gay." All these things to explain why he did what he did to convict and execute all these people. But there's really not much information. There's not much more than what you can find in Sibley's history of Harvard Graduates.
And most times when people talk about 'em, that's all they can cite. They don't have more. I decided I would keep hunting. Now when I say this, there's no cache of papers, that doesn't mean there never was one. There had to have been a cache of papers. Just his library alone, his library, he donated the bulk of it to his niece's husband, John Danforth, who was the minister in Dorchester, and his law books he gave to John [00:15:00] Temple, who was the husband of another one of his nieces.
So there were books. There were books out there. I've only been able to locate seven. Seven books from his library. That just amazes me. And somebody recently said, "oh, I found three more for you. There's a fellow who's written this book. He found them in his attic when he was a kid, and he's written a book about it." I said, "great, that's wonderful." And then I read the book and went, "oh, nope, I already knew about those three. They went up for auction in 2015." So that's a lot of stuff that I can't find.
Somebody said, "oh it'll turn up," and I'm going, "that scale." We don't have letters, we don't have anything personal. We don't have ledgers. He got his money from land. You have to keep track of that stuff. Where is it? He also had a silver ink stand. They called it a standish. And in his will, he gave that to John Danforth as well. And that doesn't exist. I've talked to all the leading colonial silver people, the curators at the Met and Yale, [00:16:00] and a silver ink stand is very rare. So if that survived, we'd know about it. We would know about it. So where did it go? For something like that, you have to have catastrophe. Otherwise it's little pieces missing here and there. But that's a lot of stuff, a lot.
And I've been looking at the family houses, and his particular mansion house in Dorchester went down through his nephew, William Taylor, who also became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. But it went down through the Taylor family, and I found records of it to 1752, when it was in a probate record, a little map. But by 1831, the maps of Dorchester, which label all the different buildings in it, there's no building there. So maybe something happened there. But then again, he gave his books to a different person. So maybe something happened to one of those houses.
But then I came across this little fact. [00:17:00] In 1764, Harvard's library burned to the ground and nothing was salvageable, nothing. The only books from their library that exist are ones that were already checked out. So I don't have evidence for this yet. I'm looking for it, but I think on the scale of the loss of primary sources and the paper trail, that there's so much missing, a catastrophe that size.
It could have been that the family gave his papers and all of his things to Harvard for safekeeping. I'm looking for anything. I'm looking for other catastrophic events. Did the Danforth house burn down or things like that, because fires happened? But I haven't found anything. That's the only working theory I have, and I have to call it a working theory, because I don't have any primary sources. How do I know this?
This one is one of those times where you have to say, "are these two things connected?" That book that came out recently that had the three books, the fellow, [00:18:00] he made a couple of these leaps. Anytime you have two pieces of things and you, two pieces of evidence, and you're trying to figure out how they're connected, and I'm making a, I'm making a leap saying it could have all burned up in the Harvard fire. He would find things and make leaps, but his tended to be more, I don't wanna say "woo," but they're, "ooh." For instance, these books that he'd found also had John Danforth's name in them. He didn't know that Stoughton had willed these books to John Danforth. And he made a conclusion that Stoughton was a mentor to John Danforth, who was a generation younger. And although true, he didn't, he missed the part where John Danforth is married to his niece. So that explains something. But later on, he said, "in a truly bizarre instance or something, John Danforth is buried in the same tomb as Stoughton." And I'm thinking that's not bizarre. It was the family tomb. So sometimes when you take two [00:19:00] pieces of evidence and try and find what connects them, you can make leaps that sometimes just show you don't know all the details. So in this case, the relationship he had with John Danforth has so many other layers. It isn't just a mentor and a young man.
But for me, my leap is what happened to all those papers, and does it have anything to do with that catastrophic fire at Harvard? Now by 1810, another descendant from the Cooper line gave Harvard the portrait that we have of Stoughton, so I know that the family felt that stuff about him belonged at Harvard. It was a different line, and you're down several generations, but that sense that his stuff belongs at Harvard. He paid to have a building made. It was Stoughton Hall. And when that fell apart, they built another Stoughton Hall. So Harvard feels very strongly about what a benefactor he was. And [00:20:00] Harvard is justifiably proud of having him.
So can I make that connection that his stuff all burned up in the fire? I wish I had some evidence to prove that, but something catastrophic had to have happened. He was well-read. He was known as being a scholar. Very intelligent. Where'd it all, where'd it all go?
And maybe that's just my silver bullet, and I'm trying to find other things that could explain it. But right now that's my working theory. I just wish I had more concrete evidence of it.
I have a great deal of fun doing the research. Recently, I was in Oxford, cuz he spent a decade of his life in England, when he was in his twenties. And I got to do some of my research, literally, in a medieval tower, a stone, medieval tower, because the records from the time he was there are still held in this medieval tower. I think that was the most exciting research [00:21:00] location that I've ever been in. I was so psyched to be in this space, but I was more psyched to look at these records that were held there. So I wasn't really looking around a whole lot. I'm going, "oh my God, look at this."
And just, it wasn't in itself really interesting. It's just so granular. How much was his charge for that particular week in that particular term of that particular year? How much was he charged for his extra food, things like that? Because you got. It came with the commons, but if you wanted more food than that, you would be charged for it if there were any other fees.
So there's these gigantic 17th century spreadsheets, essentially, that I'm picking through, and there's so many details. As I said, I do this research with tweezers, but there I was, in a medieval tower with stone walls three feet thick. You had to go up this stone, circular staircase to get up to this place. The [00:22:00] archivist was very kind, and he said they had talked about taking these records out of this place, because it's a stone, medieval tower. But the argument had been that they had survived intact for all these centuries, so why move them? I'm going, "okay, it's okay by me to go up in, in this muniment tower at New College."
My focus was more on what was actually there, but I came away from it going, "wait a minute, where was I just now?" I was in a room that, that he had spent time in. It was really one of those evocative moments to just find a place, like when I saw Samuel Parris's handwriting, writing down the account of the interrogation of Rebecca Nurse, he was part of her being executed, but going to Oxford and being in this really incredible room that he had spent time in. It was really moving, [00:23:00] but I was concentrating on what I was finding, and yeah, I have a story to tell about him at Oxford.
Josh Hutchinson: And you don't get those opportunities to go in medieval buildings in America.
Margo Burns: England has some really cool stuff. One of my challenges being at Oxford was it's all old, but how old is it? And in looking around New College, there's a big yard they go into, and on two sides, there's three stories of rooms where people would stay. But in his era there was only two stories, so trying to pick apart the things that weren't there when he was there versus the stuff that was there. Which is why, being in the muniment tower, it's going, "he was definitely here. He walked on these stairs, this little spiral staircase made of stone." That was there. It's interesting work. It's interesting work to do.
Josh Hutchinson: It sounds like you've been at it for a little [00:24:00] while.
Margo Burns: Part of it is I just retired in August, and I've been working on Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. I did that while I was fully employed. I had my summers off, but still I would come home and work on the book. Wasn't popular in my household. "Oh, you're working on the book, okay."
But now that I'm retired, one of the first things I did was decide to take a trip, and one of my locations was to go to Oxford. So I think because I have more time now, and I can have a more constant stream of research from one day to the next, I'm working on Stoughton every day now, which I never could have done while I was working. I'm hoping it goes faster now.
Sarah Jack: But take your time and do it right the way you do it. There's no, there's, yes, time matters, but it's the work that matters.
Margo Burns: And that's the thing about Stoughton. Nobody has done this before. Somebody told me, "oh, you could just write what you know now, and people would buy it." And I go, "yeah, [00:25:00] but there's more." And I haven't been able to plumb all the places that I want to go, found all the things I know I wanna find. I wanna do it right. I definitely do wanna do it right, because nobody has done this before.
And the research is that painstaking. If there's somebody who's writing a dissertation, this is not the topic they're gonna do. If somebody's trying to get out a book regularly on a topic, this is not the topic they would pick, because it's not easy to do and just come up with something, because there isn't a body of work to draw from. So I'm down in the dark alley trying to find all these little things and then make sense of it.
So part of it is, I don't know that I can even start writing it now, because I don't have a sense of everything that I want to know and trying to find all these pieces. But he's a very interesting person. I will say one other thing. It's really weird to be trying to write a biography of a [00:26:00] dead white guy, another dead white guy. Here he is, is not only just a dead white guy. He was one of those Puritans in Massachusetts. Who really wants to read about that? There are lots of people who do wanna read about it, but I also find myself saying, "dead white guy, who's gonna read this? Are my friends gonna read this?"
I have found a whole lot of things about race, class, and gender that play into his story. His investment in the Christianization of the indigenous people alone is worth a great deal of discussion. The fact that he never married and yet had a family full of blood relatives, most of whom were women. He was surrounded by women in his family, and how does that work? How does that work? And then he had slaves, he had African slaves, he owned slaves. Then at one point, performed a marriage between one of his slaves and one of the slaves [00:27:00] in the Danforth family. They're probably all living in one place, but he performed a marriage between two slaves.
Yeah. So there, there are these different things that keep popping up. And then of course, class, he has money and wealth, and anything he wanted to do, he could do because he had class and money and things like that. And how did he deal with people who are not like him? So I'm trying to address some of those things, race, class, and gender, in ways that I hope will be revealing and not just put this down as, you know, dead white guy.
Josh Hutchinson: You said in one of your talks that we've watched that you're having to look at him through other people's lives. You're looking at other people's diaries and correspondence to find out who was the Stoughton character.
Margo Burns: Right? All these parallel narratives, and what are the little points when they touched? Who did he know, and [00:28:00] who do we know for certain he knew that we don't have any other evidence for? So for instance, at Oxford, I look to the list of all the fellows and I know people he had to have known. So I have to look at those parallel lives, the parallel stories, and find those little points when they connect and hope that helps me, because I can find out more in some cases of sending these other parallel lives and just these little sparks along the way.
Josh Hutchinson: I like your analogy about the guy looking for the wallet, because people have been focused on like the Mathers, who are out in the light with their hundreds of books and diaries and letters, but you're looking for that guy who's way back in the alley where barely any light gets.
Margo Burns: And yet, very important to the whole story, there are a lot of different ways that people do history. Sometimes people try and pick somebody who's the every [00:29:00] man or somebody, Martha Ballard, Midwife's Tale. And looking at history through an ordinary human being, to pick one person and see what happened in their lives. That's a particular kind of history to do and it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
And I pick a big guy, and that's a fairly standard. You get the biography of some big guy, but I'm really hoping that I can bring some of the qualities of that kind of research into somebody who is not well known. How do you figure out what that person was like, cuz you don't have a whole lot of records about them?
So I'm hoping I can bring that to this story of somebody who is a major figure, even though we don't have a whole lot of information about 'em. I'm having fun. I really have a lot of fun doing this, and I know that the day I sent out the manuscript of records, I had to put it on, burn it to a CD and print out two copies of it to send to Cambridge University Press.
And as that day when it's just like [00:30:00] it's gone. And I was like, "I really liked working on it." That's just it. I really like this work, doing the research and getting to the other end is okay, fly, be free. And that day is far away from me on Stoughton, and I don't wanna rush it, because this is so much fun. This research is a lot of fun and I know nobody else is gonna do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Enjoy it.
Margo Burns: Oh yeah, I will also say one other thing about what I do on my work with Stoughton is that in addition to his life, he has a legacy. I've already mentioned that Harvard has Stoughton Hall, and that's the second Stoughton Hall, that they're very proud of their portrait that they have of him that was donated by the Cooper family.
There's a lot of stuff that has trickled down from his life, and one of the most fascinating ones was recent, and you don't really think about somebody who's died in 1701 having an impact on today. In his will, he [00:31:00] donated money to Dorchester, where he lived, and to the next town over, Milton, which had been part of Dorchester, but had divided in his lifetime. And one of the things he gave was a plot of land to Milton for the support of the poor in the town. And quite often what that would be is if you gave a plot of land, the town or whatever would rent it out to a farmer or something, and the proceeds from those rents would then get used to help support the poor in the town or whatever the thing was, that if he gave something to Harvard and Harvard rented out a pasture, the rents from that would support Harvard.
In this case, it was supposed to be supporting the poor in Milton. And this will from 1701, I guess it was two years ago, at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, a lot of people were having a hard time putting together their budgets and paying their bills. And in Milton, there were more people who appealed to this particular part of Milton [00:32:00] that helped support the poor, and at one point they said, "I wonder if we can get something from that fund." And sure enough, they applied to the select board to see if they could get some of the money from the endowment from that 1701 bequest to help support the people who were struggling financially because of Covid. And sure enough, they issued $85,000 toward that fund to help support people in need in Milton.
Josh Hutchinson: So something good came from Stoughton.
Margo Burns: A lot of things good came from Stoughton, a lot of interesting things, but the whole legacy from him just doesn't correlate with, oh, he was the witchcraft judge. But there's a lot that's come through the years that has been his legacy, and I've got lots of interesting stories about that. It's gonna have to be a whole chapter at the end about these things, because they, in themselves, are interesting. A bequest from his will in 1701 benefited people who were struggling [00:33:00] financially from covid.
Josh Hutchinson: Makes him a really rounded character. Really fascinating person to look at.
Margo Burns: He was a benefactor, and in a way that we can see it today, today, and just, "oh yeah, at Harvard, they built this building and whatever." Now this is real lives, real human beings today. So that part of the book goes beyond his death, but his legacy continues and in a very good way.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned what happened with Governor Hutchinson's house, and he was researching his history of Massachusetts. Do we have an idea what Salem-related documents we're missing?
Margo Burns: There are a lot of little things that he's quoting from, and most of them were interrogations. They call 'em examinations. They're interrogations. So they're little, teeny pieces, and some of them were reproduced by an antiquarian named Poole and published in, there were an awful lot of those [00:34:00] really interesting antiquarian groups that published things. So you can find little pieces, and you say well, that came out of a bigger document, and we don't have it. We know it existed, because he quoted from, and I'm, I think it had most, a lot of stuff with the Carrier boys, little, teeny pieces of that, and we really would like to know more of this, but in the Stamp Act Riot, people went through his house and trashed it. There were an awful lot.
He didn't just have Salem stuff. He had other major documents from the founding of Massachusetts, and he brought 'em all home. There's some talk that one of the draft papers, there's actually a footprint on a draft that he had been working on of his history. But things disappear.
There are a lot of things that have just disappeared. For instance, the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs, we don't have that document. We have the text, because in the early part of the 20th century there were a lot of people, libraries and stuff like that, had ways to copy them. They had photostats. People would have an [00:35:00] interesting document. They'd bring it in and say, "hey, do you wanna make a copy of this?" And it would come out with a negative and a positive. So the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs would have the positive photostat of that at the Mass Historical Society.
When we were working on our project, the microfilm for the documents that the Massachusetts State Archives were really bad. Ben had found a grant to digitize everything, but the microfilm for those was one that had been in public use. They couldn't find the master one, so it was already pretty bad.
And also the documents had been silked for preservation, and silking, you take the document and you put a layer of very fine silk on either side, into a hole in a piece of paper. And that way you can see both sides of it when you turn the pages, but it makes it a little murkier. And the microfilm was really pretty bad.
And I'd gone in to the Mass State Archives and got permission, and they brought it out and it was all in one volume as a book, this [00:36:00] big volume, and you turn the pages, and I got permission from them to photograph everything. And I had to have it on a V-shaped support because it wasn't an open flat. And I'd have to angle my camera to take each one. And I took all these pictures, front and back of all these documents. And the silking really is a problem, because it really obscures a lot of detail. But remember, this is a bound thing. Inside the front cover of it, this piece of paper falls out, and it's a negative photo stat.
And I'm going, what is this doing in here? Nobody would've known it was there, except I actually got the book, the bound book of this volume 135 from Mass Archives Collection. And I opened it up and suddenly went, "oh, please let this be something we don't have." And it turned out to be the negative photostat of the photostat that they have at the Mass Historical Society.
So, in the years since then, though, they have taken that bound volume apart and put the individual [00:37:00] pages in archival-quality storage. But having seen this book at one point, it was just like, can't believe this is how it is. But they have since done more to help preserve them. But there was this thing inside the cover.
Josh Hutchinson: Are there certain parts of the trials that we have more documents and parts where we have fewer documents?
Margo Burns: I already mentioned that we have more for the Salem Village stuff than we do from Andover, but we also have several people are executed that we really don't have much information. Margaret Scott, there's very little information about her, and we have two documents in her case that basically have been auctioned off between collectors fairly frequently. It's, "oh, that one just came up for auction again. Okay. It's an indictment." And then there are four documents that were copied and in an 1830, 1840 history of Rowley, where she was from. So there [00:38:00] were some documents in there, maybe four, five, and trying to figure out where those were. And we've got some that were in the collection, the Essex County Court archives, but there were only like a handful of them. And some of them we had to deal with as somebody else had transcribed them.
And we included things like that in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. We didn't just take the handwritten things. Sometimes there was one and somebody else had transcribed it, and that's the only evidence we had. That's the case in a lot of the Governor Hutchinson pieces. This is all we have, but we know it came from a primary source. So we knew these other pieces that had come. I think there were a total of nine documents, and we'd known some of them only through this history of Rowley.
Fast forward after Records had been published. Matti Peikola, he was one of the ones that we'd started doing the stuff on the handwriting, and then Peter Grund joined in, and we had done all this work on the handwriting. It took three of us, and we [00:39:00] decided we wanted to see if we could identify some of the others, and Peter got a grant, and we were gonna look at other documents from that period by people doing legal stuff to see if we could figure out who some of these other documents were written by. So they came for two weeks, and we did our archive-hopping.
It was just delightful. We would make agreements ahead of time, and people would be ready for us. We went to town halls. We went to all the major archives, and they were staying down in Boston, in the Back Bay, so they were really near the Boston Public Library. They were near the New England Historical Genealogical Society. It was easy to take public transportation out to the Mass State Archives. It was great. It was really great. Oh, and also they were right around the corner from the Mass Historical Society. So they put themselves in a really great place.
So here we are looking at all these things, and at the Boston Public Library in their manuscripts and rare book section, off the top of my head, I don't remember the year, but they had this big card [00:40:00] catalog, literally a physical card catalog. And what we were doing was trying to look for people in the various towns who were where the accused were from. So Peter pulled open one of the drawers, and he is looking for Rowley, and there's a card that says "four documents in the case of Margaret Scott for witchcraft."
And he showed it to me. He said, "what do you think this is?" I said, "oh my God. More documents. That would be great. In the Margaret Scott Case, we don't, we only have a handful. More documents! Ah, too bad we didn't find this earlier." So we put in a call slip, and they brought them out. And turns out these were several other ones that had been in The History of Rowley.
So The History of Rowley had five, and these were four documents, as I remember. And so we already had the texts. So it wasn't anything new. For us, it was exciting, cuz we could look at the handwriting, because we were recognizing handwriting, and we would've put that into [00:41:00] Records of Salem Witch-Hunt. So there they are. There are things hiding in plain sight.
Now, I will say this about the Boston Public Library. They have since closed for a while to completely redo that collection. I think they were horribly embarrassed when that, was it a Dürer and a Rembrandt went missing? It made the front page of the Boston Globe. People lost their jobs over it, that these very valuable things had been missing. And it turns out they had just misshelved them. And I read about that and went, they misshelved the witchcraft papers. Because when we gave the folder back after looking at these fabulous documents and taking pictures and getting all excited having found them, Peter went back a couple of days later to look at them again, cuz they were staying right around the corner, and they couldn't find them. That took a while to get that resolved, and I found a few people to talk to there, and they had found them again. They were in fact misshelved. And then, another year later, two years later, they can't find this Dürer and Rembrandt, and I'm just laughing cause [00:42:00] I'm going, "they misshelved it."
But to their credit, the Boston Public Library has closed that. I don't know if they're open again. I hope so. But they completely redid that archive, and it's a good thing. It's really a good thing, because I can't imagine, if those documents had gone missing and somebody had taken them. And we were also a little wary about that, because that same week, one of those indictments in Margaret Scott's case that would come up periodically at auction, that one sold that week for, I wanna say $30,000. So we were a little concerned that maybe somebody connected the two, but they were just misshelved.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you believe is the next frontier in witch trials research?
Margo Burns: Oh boy. Next Frontier. We've done a whole lot in getting the primary sources, which is great. And I've also seen a lot of the current work to get the cases resolved and to clear the names of so many people, and I think that's great. [00:43:00] But. What do you do after that? Every generation finds this material, and these circumstances have value or resonance for them. It's been very interesting watching these middle school kids in North Andover working on the Elizabeth Johnson Jr. case. It's fabulous, absolutely fabulous.
And then we also see the people in Scotland working for rep. I don't know if, they're probably not doing reparations, but to go back and make amends, and then the cases in Connecticut. I think that I'll give a lot of credit to those middle schoolers in North Andover.
But there's an effort to come to terms with history, the real lives of people, and to admit things went wrong, and how do we address that? And I think that's also something that's happening just now in general, that our culture is really looking at the past and saying, "we made mistakes. What do we do?"
So that's what's going on now. It's admitting fault [00:44:00] from the past and trying to make some kind of reparations. We also see it for slavery in this country. What do we do? It was wrong. And can you make reparations? If so, how do you do it? And is it definitive?
When they started to try and overturn, they weren't overturning the actual convictions in Salem. It was something that they were overturning attainder, reversing the attainder, which is tainting of the blood, stuff like that. So during the lifetimes of a lot of the people who were involved or who were convicted or their families, there was an effort to say, "yeah, we did the wrong thing."
But not everybody came forward. If your family didn't, you'd been executed and nobody in your family came forward, your attainer was never reversed yet to the 1950s. That's when they started going to the courts at that point and say, "we really need to resolve this." But then they said one person's name and others, okay, for sure you got one person's attainder reversed, and then you [00:45:00] have to go forward and say there were others. They're just called others.
And what was the name of the acting governor? Is it Jane Swift? She. Yeah, so people kept pushing. People from Salem were pushing, and on Halloween that year, she issued a pardon or whatever it was, but I was going, "Halloween, great." But they named the others who had been and others. They gave them their names.
And then most recently, this wonderful class in North Andover said, "we don't see that Elizabeth Johnson Jr was included in that." And she was overlooked, and she was overlooked in a few other things. In her lifetime, she did speak up that she was overlooked and forgotten. Now we think we have everybody officially done, at least for Salem.
But there's this sense of looking backwards, and how do you do that? It's really interesting. And I feel sorry for the next class in middle school, cuz they don't have a project that big. They're not gonna have a project that will make it into a documentary and get that much, it'd be helpful.
But what do we do next? And I don't know, cuz right now, [00:46:00] as a culture, we're looking to figure out what we did wrong in the past and how to move forward from there. And that's our lens, that's our our cultural filter of how we're looking at some of these older things to take.
And you also get a lot of people who are just owning them, "this is my ancestor, this is important." You find the Wiccan community owning this abuse of people in the past who happen to have the same word associated with them. Wiccans now are self-defined witches, but they're not like the people who are accused of witchcraft in Salem, and yet they share a word. And I think that the Wiccan community has really come together to try to help mend things. That hasn't been the case in previous generations. What did it mean to other people and then why they looked at it? And I think this is a really good one. That as we try and come up with our past, you really can't move forward unless you know your past.
So I'm curious to see what the next wave will be. We're not, we're still in this wave of really looking at our [00:47:00] past and coming to terms with it and making amends, but what's next? I don't know. But because Salem is so interesting so many people, there will be something else that comes along.
Part of the reason I think that, oh, the stuff on moldy bread and ergot was so enticing was at the time that the first article positing it came out, it was in the middle of when people were coming to grips with the drug culture of the hippie thing. And since LSD is derived from ergot, that just resonated at the time, and it gave an explanation, because people wanna find meaning.
So if you go into the seventies and you see that, it made perfect sense that people would gravitate toward that as some kind of explanation. But right now, we're trying to figure out how do we come to terms what we did wrong? So I don't know what the next, the next one will be. I'm looking forward to it, but we're not through with this wave because we're still coming to terms and making amends. I don't know.
Have the Connecticut cases been resolved yet? Do you know? [00:48:00]
Josh Hutchinson: No, we're hoping they'll be resolved within a few months.
Margo Burns: Yeah, it's now, and do you know if the Scottish ones have been resolved at this point?
Josh Hutchinson: The pardon hasn't gone through the parliament yet. The first Minister did issue an apology. The Kirk did an apology. But the bill is still with the Parliament.
Margo Burns: And isn't that an amazing thing? And part of the reason that the past things for Salem took their time getting through is that the legislatures have lots of things on their minds. They're trying to get stuff for today done. So when somebody brings them a bill to resolve something that happened centuries ago, that sort of gets to the bottom of the pile. But trying to go back in time, the legislatures and the the people who can actually make that happen, it has to be done on their schedule. And sometimes you can really push that for political reasons and they want to get a little a little bang for your buck. They get a political [00:49:00] push to take care of something, but it has to be on a slow newsday.
Josh Hutchinson: They've gotta see what's in it for them.
Margo Burns: Absolutely. I have to say that the work that Tad Baker and Marilynne Roach and Ben Ray and others did for the public installation to identify the actual site of the hangings. The work they did, they really tried to cover every single possibility. They were looking at the primary sources, they were looking at maps, they were looking at everything they possibly could. They had ground penetrating radar. They had all sorts of stuff. They tried to do everything, because they wanted politicians to know that we all agree.
I already knew that was the place, who am I? Yes. Okay. I'm an historian, but I hadn't done, I hadn't dotted all the i's crossed the t's. Those of us who knew. But the whole idea that it was at the top of Gallows Hill or we're going, "no, not really." They did do [00:50:00] diligence, but part of the reason they had to do that is they were gonna get Salem, who owned that piece of land, to actually do something about it and create this. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful installation.
But if you're gonna get a politician to get on board and do something like that, you know that politician is looking around and goes, "there's not gonna be anybody who says not really." They didn't wanna find that after they've invested all their political power and their, all that stuff, they really wanna make sure that it reflects well on them. And they don't want somebody else to come along and say, "that's just them." That's why that group had to do their due diligence and make sure they'd covered absolutely every possibility. Because a politician was not about to commit to that, if they thought they'd get egg on their face over it.
Josh Hutchinson: And now here I am with an update on the Connecticut Witch trial Exoneration Project.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a collaborative effort to give voices to those accused of [00:51:00] witchcraft in colonial Connecticut.
Between 1647 and 1697, at least 45 people were accused of witchcraft in the Connecticut and New Haven colonies. 34 people were indicted on formal charges of witchcraft, including 24 women, 6 of their husbands, 3 men charged alone, and 1 unidentified individual. 11 victims are known to have been hanged, 9 women and 2 men. Both men were married to women who were also executed. The accused came from 10 Connecticut towns and 1 Long Island town, which is now part of New York. They came from Fairfield, Farmington, Hartford, New Haven, Saybrook, Stamford, Stratford, Wallingford, Wethersfield, Windsor, and [00:52:00] Easthampton.
The "witches" of the 17th century were not the witches we envision today. They did not wear pointy hats. They did not ride on broomsticks. They did not employ familiars in the forms of animals. They did not covenant with the Devil. In fact, they were not witches at all, by our standards or by the standards of the time.
Those accused of witchcraft were wholly innocent of the charges brought against them. They were ordinary men, women, and children, mostly women of middle age, who were swept up in tides of fear brought on by ordinary human misfortune.
The witchcraft of the early modern period had little in common with the witchcraft of today. It was an entirely malign concept, based on a belief that people could covenant with the devil and gain power to harm others. It was not a peace loving, nature-based form of Paganism. It was entirely malevolent and based [00:53:00] upon the archetype of the anti-woman, the malicious woman whose very soul was set against the virtues of femininity and motherhood commonly expected of women in those times.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project supports the exoneration of those charged with witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, an apology to all accused, memorials to the victims, and education of residents and visitors about the witch trials. The project is a collaboration of people who want to see injustice corrected. It includes dozens of descendants of witch trial victims and other advocates from both in Connecticut and around the nation.
We seek exoneration, because the victims of the witch trials were universally innocent of the impossible crimes with which they were charged. No one covenanted with the Devil. No one manipulated supernatural forces to harm others.
In righting the wrongs of the past, we [00:54:00] recognize our mistakes and enable ourselves to move past them.
Exoneration makes a statement that these actions and actions like them are not acceptable today. Exoneration of Connecticut's witch trial victims will set an example for others on understanding and correcting historic injustices. Exoneration is a stand against the mistreatment of others. Exoneration is a stand against witch hunting in all its forms, including the deadly witchcraft accusations occurring around the world today. Exoneration will resonate in other parts of the world.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will soon assemble in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the crisis of Harmful Practices Related to Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks.
In many nations, literal witch hunts continue to plague society with banishments, violence, torture, and death directed at innocent people accused of an [00:55:00] impossible crime. These accusations and extrajudicial punishments are often directed at vulnerable people, notably elderly women, children, the disabled, those with albinism, and indigenous persons.
Each year, thousands of people are targeted. They live in nations around the world on every populated continent. If they are lucky enough to survive, they face an uncertain future. From roaming village to village to being placed in prison or so-called witch camps for their own safety, their lives are never their own.
By exonerating those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut, we send a powerful message that witch-hunting will not be tolerated. By exonerating the accused, we join with other states and nations in confronting the past and righting wrongs. By exonerating the accused, we make a clear statement condemning witch-hunting, which will resonate with leaders in nations affected by witchcraft-accusation-related [00:56:00] violence today.
Let's stand together against witch-hunting. Make that strong statement. Clear the names of those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut and let the world know we oppose witch hunting in the strongest terms. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General Assembly to pass this exoneration resolution without delay.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that important news, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: You get to join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: So subscribe now, and your download will be ready for you when you wake up next Thursday.
Sarah Jack: For lots of great information and episodes, visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Support our [00:57:00] efforts and donate to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:58:00] [00:59:00]
Sit back and enjoy the day with Part 1 of our enjoyable Margo Burns Witch Trial talk. In this information-packed episode, she discusses her research and editing of the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Discover how we know what we know from the study of historical records. We have some laughs and heartfelt conversation about some of her favorite project discoveries. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
Sarah Jack: Welcome to this episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: And I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: Today our guest is Margo Burns, associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. She tells us about the project of putting the sources together.
Josh Hutchinson: She does. And you're gonna love this episode so much. She's so entertaining. She's a wonderful storyteller. You're gonna hear stories from her, as well as details about the records, what's in the volume.
Sarah Jack: This was a project that she spent over ten years [00:01:00] in.
Josh Hutchinson: She knows what records still exist and what records we're missing. She knows about the wide variety of records involved and tells us about what can be found in the records.
Sarah Jack: I can't believe we're talking about Margo Burns.
Josh Hutchinson: We're talking about the writer of the Bible for the Salem Witch Trials, the manager who actually physically put it together with her algorithms, and we get to learn about algorithms. We get to learn about her favorite surprise in the records, and that is a really entertaining story. You're gonna really get a kick out of that.
Sarah Jack: Her experiences of going into the archives and evaluating the manuscripts is so fun to hear her talk about that.
Josh Hutchinson: And she'll [00:02:00] tell us all about the massive handwriting analysis project that was associated with identifying who created each of the records.
Sarah Jack: Margo does not hold back on details and experiences from her project years. It was like a firsthand account. There's something special about hearing about the accounts out of the records, about hearing about her accounts, examining the records, because it's Margo Burns, and she was the one right there holding the records, and she does not hold back when she tells us what she read and what she examined.
Josh Hutchinson: She also tells us her Salem Witch trial research origin story and talks about her family connection to the trials.
Sarah Jack: And now enjoy the conversation with Margo Burns, [00:03:00] historian, associate editor, and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Margo Burns: I have Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, but that came out in 2009, and when it came out, and it's the size of a ream of paper with a hard cover on it, and I confess, I pulled it out of the box. And went, "is that all there is?" It took 12 of us 10 years to produce it, so I had to remind myself it had just been distilled down from all that work we had done, but it still felt small.
Josh Hutchinson: It's not small when you're reading it, though.
Margo Burns: Right? It's condensed. It's just really jam-packed, and, as the project manager, I managed all that stuff that was coming in, so I saw everything. I worked directly with Bernie as we tried to come up with the chronology of how the book was gonna get laid out, how it was gonna get organized. It was a lot of work.
Josh Hutchinson: I imagine. And one thing I picked up on your video in one of your videos that we might [00:04:00] get back to later you said you had four versions of it with, that you made with algorithms and how long did that take to produce them to produce the algorithms and the four versions?
Margo Burns: The algorithms were pretty straightforward, and it was mostly, essentially all the information was in a gigantic database, a relational database. So then I'd have to write something that would say what order things would be in, and I'd set certain variables for everything. So I'd say, okay, let's produce this, and it would make this gigantic net with 970 or whatever many holes in it. And then using features of Microsoft Word, I could take all those individual Word files and then just import them into those holes. So that was easy to just produce a whole version of it. And I printed it out all every one of those times and mailed it to Bernie, so he got to read [00:05:00] through it. I'm really granular and Bernie's very linear, and I think, as a duo, we complimented each other.
Josh Hutchinson: I used do algorithms for work, so that's why I was curious about that.
Margo Burns: Oh, there were all sorts of things, all sorts of weights for things. If you look at a page in there, and you see something that has multiple dates associated with it, the organization chronologically was just, "how do we wanna put these together? If we're gonna do it chronologically, and there are a bunch of things that happen on the same date, and what happens if the second instance from that particular document happens on another date? And how do we organize them according to the names of the people?" There were all these decisions we made all along.
And then those just got kept in the database, and I could write a little thing to say, "okay, let's sort them." And we couldn't really give each one a numeric unique identifier because we were going to put them all in order and they kept changing. So we had [00:06:00] code names for just about every single document based on what archive had them. So the Essex County Court Archives were E C C A, Ecca.
The last iteration of everything, Bernie and I got on Skype, just like a phone call, and it took us two days to go through absolutely every single item in Records to check for all of our dating all the different things that we wanted to do. So on one day, we went from eight in the morning till noon, took an hour for lunch, went one to five, took an hour for dinner, and work six to ten. And the next day, the exact same.
And we went through every single decision that we were making. And if he'd say, "Ooh, I wanna put this in this other place," I'd say, "okay, no, we have to figure out if there's anything else that will be in that kind of category that can get changed." We built ourselves up that we could actually work together that long on Skype.
And it was just [00:07:00] audio. We didn't worry about the video, because we just were talking, and we had the same things on our screens. So that was really, those two days were just, they were a lot of work, but it was just the culmination of everything we had. We finally were organizing the book and that was it.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm so glad you all did that and produced the book that you produced.
Margo Burns: It was really Bernie. Bernie had gotten stung with an incorrect transcription and had written a whole article about it, because apparently there was a date that was wrong, saying that Tituba's grand jury was May whatever in 1692. And he thought, "why would her case be done differently?" And it was a typo, cause hers was done in 1693, the last one in May. And so he'd gotten stung, and he decided that there were enough errors that they should get corrected, and he figured it would be two or three years, and it took us ten.
I keep everything in my head. There are a few of us who know all of those [00:08:00] documents intimately, and also because we were making decisions about them. "What is this document? Who is it about? What's going on?" And so having looked at every single one of those documents that just, it's all inside of me. There are times I forget some things, but I go, "oh yeah, I remember that decision."
For me doing history and doing, especially this subject that has so much popular interest, I always ask, "how do we know what we know?" That's a really important thing for me in this, because there's so many fanciful notions or things that people wanna believe. They wanna believe that the people in Salem were all midwives and there aren't midwives in that group. And they, oh, they had they were nurses and midwives and the men were jealous. It sounds nice, but I always say, "how do we know what we know?" And there's no primary source evidence to that effect.
So that's what history is for me. I was at a, [00:09:00] I'm trying to remember when it was before Records came out, and I was at a a conference, an Omohundro conference, and we were in Quebec City, and it was before the book came out, and Bernie and I were there to talk about how we were working on the book. And Ben Ray and Dick Latner, who's at Tulane, were also on our panel. Bernie and I got up there, and we described what we were doing. I said Thomas Putnam's handwriting was on over 200 of the documents, and the person who was doing comment was John Putnam Demos from Yale, so when he got up, he basically, I felt like I got a little paternalistic pat on the head for telling him something about his ancestor that he didn't know. But then Ben Ray was talking about the geography and the maps, and Dick Latner was talking about the tax rolls, and both of them were challenging what Boyer and Nisenbaum had included in their book and basically saying they got the map wrong. And for the tax rolls, how do you tell [00:10:00] somebody's family's worth is going up or down, if you only use one year? So they basically were taking it apart, and John Demos was very unhappy with them, and he said, "they had a big idea and how dare they criticize Boyer and Nissenbaum."
I'm just new to history, and I'm finding myself going, "if they got the facts wrong, isn't that a big deal?" So I was kind of really into that how do we know what we know, where he was thinking at they made a big change in how history was done. They were looking at the primary sources ,and they were looking at all this stuff, even though they did get some things wrong. For me, it was like, "I'm siding with them."
Josh Hutchinson: We were wondering about that the other day, because Sarah was pointing out in science it's always, "what do we know right now?" Not, "what's the big ideas, and how do we build on those?" It's, "does this change our understanding?"
Margo Burns: And I think John Demos did major things in his heyday, [00:11:00] but it's hard when somebody else comes along and says, "you know what? It's different." But I'm always willing to take more information in, because, as I said, "how do we know what we know?" And I know I probably said I wouldn't talk about this, when it comes to the moldy bread, ergot stuff, that was my operating principle. So many people think it's plausible, means believable, possible, but it's not really possible. And so that's why I made the video that I did that you, you posted, what do we actually know? And I still have people say, "do you believe it?" I said, "it's not about belief it's this is what happened. This is what happened." And nobody has challenged me on any of that, but I think it's a very fun video. I enjoyed making it.
Josh Hutchinson: We enjoyed watching it.
Sarah Jack: You really had me thinking about the science versus the history lens and how, science, we're always looking for the latest discovery, and with history, the latest ideas, and [00:12:00] sometimes discoveries are more challenged, but I guess science that happens, too.
Margo Burns: I think one of the problems comes from the fact that it was a scientist who was doing this, and she was just saying, "are all the pieces there for this to possibly happen?" And if one of them was missing, she would've said, "no." And I can challenge some of those things that she's using as evidence, but she was just saying, "can I rule this out?" And she basically said, "no, we can't rule it out." And then you get the historians, you get the people who really get into this and they go, "ah, she made an argument for this being the case," and she really didn't. So what a scientist will do and what a historian or the public will do with something can be very different.
I really enjoyed talking with her. We emailed back and forth a lot. The interviews I did with her were really eye-opening. So a lot of people who don't approve of the ergot stuff will say, "oh, Linda Caporeal." I had a great time talking to her. And that [00:13:00] she actually said, "I think it's Mary Matossian"
But she gets cited all the time, and then people read it and they feel like, "yes, she's on our side." And it's not about a side, it's about how do we figure out? For me, one is how do we figure out what the causes were? And there are so many of them, but the other part is why does this resonate? And it does.
Josh Hutchinson: I looked at that the latest, the IFL Science article, and I only skimmed it. I didn't read verbatim what they wrote, because it was just a rehashing of this 40-some-year-old argument.
Margo Burns: If you scroll to the bottom of it, I replied. I will sometimes go into the fray, and other times I'll just back right out. But sometimes I poke the bear. I'll poke the bear on the Crucible.
Sarah Jack: It's good to leave those crumbs for the right people who might look at that article.
Margo Burns: It just keeps popping up.
And I'm really glad that the talk has been recorded three times [00:14:00] actually. And if I wanted to do it again in Salem, I know a bunch of people say, "yep, okay, we'll do it." Then when they get into those conversations, they can just go, "okay, I've been here before. Go watch Margo's video."
Josh Hutchinson: Thinking of our questions that we have for you, they're primarily about Records. Could you start with just a bird's eye of what Records is for those people who aren't familiar with it?
Margo Burns: Certainly. Records of the Salem Witch Hunt is a collection of all the primary source records, legal records, primary source legal records of the Salem witchcraft trials. So we won't have Samuel Sewell's diary entries, but it's all the legal records. Most of them are handwritten and they're in 12 different archives. Mostly they're at the Peabody Essex and at the Massachusetts Archive, State Archives.
And we saw just about all of them in person and learned how to read their handwriting. There were over 200 [00:15:00] different handwriting examples throughout all of them. And a lot of documents had multiple people adding to them over a period of days. So we had to start recognizing them so that we could do as accurate transcriptions as possible. And when I say accurate, it isn't just was is this an A or an E?
Couple of things that we corrected were oh, names, dates. Those are really critical when you start doing things in history. You need to get those things correct. Also, there were some words, there was one that historically has been translated as basin, B A S I N and the, like some vision they were offering her this girl a basin. If you think about basin and religion, you start thinking things about baptism. And the thing is that this was, somebody's handwriting, was very kind of crab, wasn't a really polished one. And the more we looked at it, they went, "it's not basin, it's coffin," because you got a B and a K. Which one is it? [00:16:00] You've got an A, so it could be an O and then the middle one if you, it's long. So it could be the long S or an F. And then we ended with the E N. So the first three letters were really challenging and then when we really looked at it, we realized, oh my god, she's being offered a coffin, and you get a completely different sense of what was happening.
When we did these transcriptions, there were a half a dozen linguists, historical linguists from Scandinavia, most of them from Finland. And they have been at the top of their game in historical linguistics, especially with English. They've been doing that for decades and decades. And I had been in a a graduate program at the University of Southern California when we had looked at some of these legal records. And so when I met them on this project, it was like, "oh, I've already read your work before." They're like the top linguists, and they were very precise about getting everything exactly right.
And they really are [00:17:00] good at historical handwriting. And that's just, that's a critical thing when you start reading these because you can make mistakes reading something. And for us, part of our accuracy was to keep track of whose handwriting was on them, because if you've got two or three lines of something, and you find something ambiguous, how do you clarify it?
But if you have a whole page of somebody's handwriting, it's easier to resolve ambiguities. So we started keeping track of handwriting across all these documents. I remember the meeting when Matti Peikola and I looked at each other and said, "is this possible?" And we said, "yes," but it was being done, not necessarily to identify the people, but to increase our accuracy in our transcriptions. So that was part of it. We're really looking at all this handwriting to be able to make those decisions. And by the end, it was just like, we have all this wonderful information. So we decided, we picked about two dozen people whose handwriting appeared a lot, [00:18:00] and we identified them, because one of the things about legal papers is that they keep getting pieces added to them.
So if there's, for instance, on a warrant for somebody's arrest, the magistrates would write it out. It'd be two magistrates. One would write it, usually John Hathorne. And they would give this to the sheriff and say, "tell this person they have to come in, go arrest them and bring them into us." So that's got one date and one person's handwriting, but then at the bottom you find another thing, the return from that officer and in another handwriting saying, "yes, I have apprehended Rebecca Nurse, and I have brought her to you on this day," and it's a different date. So trying to take all these pieces apart and have them be a coherent whole was really a challenge, especially with these smaller things like the officer's return.
Usually there would only be one or two documents with some people's handwriting on it. Another thing that would happen, though, is if we could identify somebody's handwriting, maybe not even them, we could use that as [00:19:00] part of our chronology. When we're trying to figure out when things happened, because that's important, timelines are important. You wanna do history, it's people, it's places, it's dates.
So as we were looking at some of the indictments, we're trying to figure out what day was the grand jury? And if we could find the same handwriting from the foreman of the grand jury on multiple documents that we didn't have any evidence when these other grand jury documents were being done. If we could find the same jury foreman, that gave us a clue as to exactly what the timetable was, because that jury foreman and that jury were hearing specific people's cases.
And that was fantastic when we could figure out that, and we could look at who was in the room. That's really hard to see over history. Some of these documents, you could actually see who was in the room, who was doing the interrogating, who was writing it down. That was really important. And when we look at some of the most important documents, and I'll just say important, because they have so much [00:20:00] content and so much connection for people, the interrogations of the people early on. They're so strong. You hear the voices of people.
One of the other things, too, is when you look at it, you know who wrote it down, because that was Samuel Parris. Now he may not be in the text itself, but he's the guy writing it down. He was in the room. He has an impact on the content of what's in that document, even though you can't see him just reading the text. So these are the kinds of things that we felt were important.
We worked so hard on these things, but the transcriptions themselves, the transcriptions, the number of pairs of eyes that looked at them was phenomenal. Each document was given to a two-person team to do the first rough transcription of, and sometimes they were based on some of the transcriptions that appeared in Boyer and Nissenbaum Salem Witchcraft Papers sometimes, but a [00:21:00] base to go on.
And they would polish it up, and that would be round one, and then it would be round two when those same documents are rearranged. Sometimes trying to put some together that made sense, because the first round we just went after everything scatter. So the second round we organized them a little bit better, and then another two person team would look at the transcription and do a finer job with it.
We thought we'd have two rounds, because we just kept going through and Merja Kytö who is the wrangler of all the, all the linguists over in Finland. She just said, "we have one chance to get it right, so let's do it." And that, that was important.
I'm sure that there's some errors in there. I hope there aren't big ones, but the pairs of eyes that looked at every single thing. So if you look at, two people are looking at the first round, two people are looking at the second round, usually not the same two people. The third round, anybody could have been that. And then also just Bernie and I were working on other [00:22:00] things, so we were looking at these documents again, and it really had to be something radical for us to miss it.
Sarah Jack: I'd love to hear how you jumped on board with this project.
Margo Burns: Oh, good. It's weird. People say, "oh, you have an ancestor." Yes. One of my ancestors is Rebecca nurse, and I think most people when they find I'm interested in this, think that it was because I have an ancestor. I have to say my grandmother who did all the family genealogy, she was interested in the DAR and the Mayflower Society. That's what she was looking for.
And it must have been the early eighties, I knew somebody who was in a performance of The Crucible. He was playing Francis Nurse, and I'd just gotten all this family stuff, and I looked and went, "wait a minute, Francis Nurse, I think that's a real person." And I opened up my grandmother's research, and I'm poking around. I said, "oh, he is." And then it, for the entry on the display, it said, oh, Rebecca Nurse, asterisk. I look at the bottom of the page, asterisk, executed for witchcraft, July [00:23:00] 19th, 1692 in Salem. That was all it was to my grandmother. It was an asterisk. So it was a new thing for me to discover.
Fast forward to the early nineties, and I'd already gotten my master's in linguistics from the University of New Hampshire, and I was pursuing a doctoral degree in linguistics out there. And I was in a seminar on legal language. The professor was very interested in legal language across time, and he had finished all of his research in England and was starting with doing things about legal language in America.
So it was starting, so it was the second half of the 17th century. And so he was handing out at one point just cases for us to look at. And his name's Ed Finnegan, absolutely amazing guy. Here's a murder, here's an infanticide, here's piracy. And said, then I got witchcraft. I got Salem witchcraft trials. And I'm in California, mind you, not here in New England. He said, "I don't know if there's much stuff on this." And I said, "I'll take it. I'll just take that. My great whatever [00:24:00] was executed then." And that's the only real connect that I had toward this path that I went on to join this project. It was just like in the seminar I said, "sure, I'll take that."
Dropped outta my doctoral program and came back to New England. And when I got here I thought, " that was really interesting. Maybe my family would like to have something about that. I should write up." But not one to just go into something lightly, I just read everything I could, everything. And I was reading these things, and I said, " I can't do all of that research. There have to be people out there who have already been interested in their family members."
So this was late 1990s. RootsWeb had LISTSERVs, that tells you exactly how old it is, a LISTSERV. And I made a new one for Salem Witch List, that's all. And I think it, it, at its high point, it had maybe 300 people, and people would put little things out there. Now we have Facebook groups for that. There was [00:25:00] nothing at that time except these LISTSERVs. So I would keep track of who was signing up, and that's when I noticed one day that Bernie Rosenthal had signed up. And I just read his book, and it was like, "oh, this is cool." But, I wrote to him and I said, 'happy to have you here. This is mostly a genealogy thing. I liked your book." And I asked him, " what are you doing now that you've finished this?" And he said he really wanted to correct the errors that he had encountered in the primary sources. That's great.
Fast forward a couple years. I'm finally reading Boyer and Nissenbaum Salem Witchcraft Papers, all of the transcriptions that existed in that three-volume set. And I'm reading along, and at one point, I'm keeping track of things in my head, and I found this document that was testimony against George Burroughs, but it was a month after he'd already been executed. And I'm looking at that and [00:26:00] going, "why would somebody be testifying against him a month after he is already been tried and executed?" So I said, "ah, I wonder if that's one of those errors that Bernie had found." I wrote him an email, and I said, "is this the case? Is this one of the errors that you're gonna be fixing?"
And he wrote back and said, "no. I wrote about that in my book," and I'm thinking, "oh God, now I feel stupid." But it had been a couple of years since I'd read it. And then he said, "there's something else I want to talk to you about, but I feel I don't really like email." He really doesn't, knowing him all these years, he really didn't like email, and would I feel comfortable calling him or him calling me, so he could talk to me about this? And I'm thinking, "what the heck?" So I said, "sure". We got on the phone, and he told me that they'd just gotten this great National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
He and Ben Ray had gotten this together, cuz they both had applied for National Humanities grant. And somebody said, "oh, you guys should get together, cuz you're on the same subject." But they'd gotten it, [00:27:00] and he was about to start into it, and he had a project manager. But his project manager was Joe Flibbert from Salem State, and Joe sadly passed away very suddenly, and he was bereft to lose his friend, but also he was gonna be the project manager. And they'd just gotten this grant, and what do you do? And then out of the blue, I was writing to him about what he was doing and asking a question very specific to what he was doing and why he was doing it. And he decided to invite me to be his project manager. So that took a little bit of doing, because there was grant money and how the grant money was gonna come to me. But before I said yes, I met with him.
And he was at a chess tournament in Vermont, I think it was Stratton Mountain, and he'd driven over from New York. And I drove up there from New Hampshire and met him for the first time. And from the moment he opened a [00:28:00] computer and showed me the digital images of these documents, I was hooked, because I had already had this sense that if you could look at the actual documents, you could identify who was writing them.
And so that sort of carried forward on the whole project, because I thought that was important. Who was writing these things down? Because you put so much more of yourself into these documents than people necessarily know, and just seeing them, it was one of those moments like, I will do anything. I will do anything to be on this project. And so for the first year and a half, I got some of the money, but I didn't do anywhere nearly as much work as I did later on when I was earning nothing.
And Bernie is a fantastic human being. I will have to add that in. He is a professor of English at Binghamton University, head of the English Department. His specialty was Moby Dick and Herman Melville. But he also, more than that, [00:29:00] is really invested in social justice. And that's what caught him to do this, because he was visiting Salem and thinking, "this is really weird. These people were executed wrongly. And yet there's an ice cream stand with a witch on it. There's an image of a witch on the police cars." And so he felt very strongly about that. And so as a literary critic, being somebody interested in texts from English department kind of perspective, he decided to read everything closely.
And that's what his approach to it was. Not a historian, he was a close reader of texts, and my undergraduate degree was in English, so I knew exactly where he was coming from. So even though I didn't major in history or any of that, we had a whole lot in common on how we were approaching the texts.
It was wonderful, because we had Mary Beth Norton being a great supporter. She and Bernie are great friends, and so we had a lot of good historians with us. But I think because our background was in literature and just looking to see [00:30:00] what is in the text without bringing any preconceived notion to it, I think that really benefited everything that we were doing and putting together the book.
It just goes to show you can have all sorts of different people and perspectives and working on the same project, getting them all to integrate and it was a fantastic project to be on. There'll be nothing like that in my lifetime. And it was 10 years. I remember in my household it was just like, "oh, you're working on the book again." Okay. It was all about the book, and it was just like, yep.
One of the things about it is that there are three at the end that were in the Salem Witchcraft Papers by Boyer and Nissenbaum, and we discovered that they had nothing to do with the Salem witchcraft trials. So, we decided we couldn't leave them out, because they were in this other book, and if we left them out, inevitably there was somebody who was going to look very superficially at and compare the two and say, "oh, they forgot these [00:31:00] documents." So we included them with fine transcriptions just to make sure that people didn't think we had missed them. And then we have reasons why we don't think that they were part of the trials.
It was just, it was constant for me. As a matter of fact, we did have more than those entries in our database. We had a lot more things in the database that we had to decide whether they were gonna keep them or not. And I made the case that we needed to include some of the pieces from Deodat Lawson's accounts of the interrogations.
They weren't legal documents, but they were accounts of a legal proceeding. But there were other things that you'll find from Deodat Lawson's text that aren't in the book. And we were making a decision to just deal with the legal aspects of it. So you won't find Parris's sermon, you won't find Deodat Lawson's sermon. You won't find entries by Samuel Sewall in his diary. These were things that we felt were outside of scope of what we were trying to do. We wanted to show how the legal [00:32:00] process worked.
And it's very interesting to me when somebody said, "didn't they do blah, blah?" And I say, "let's go to the documents." And I show people what each little piece means. And it's really interesting, because people still don't quite get how legal proceedings go, and they'll make conclusions about things that really aren't there in the documents.
Here's something. It was not about Salem, but if you watched, Who Do You Think You Are?, there was something this season where one of the celebrities descended from somebody who was accused of witchcraft in Connecticut and in the promos for the show, they zoom in on a document and highlight guilty of the crime of witchcraft, but it turns out that if you thought that she was found guilty and executed and things like that, that's wrong because that's a piece of text from an accusation saying that they thought this woman was guilty of the crime of witchcraft. [00:33:00] She ended up being found not guilty, but you can take text out of context and draw conclusions. So I think that was one of those things for Who Do You Think You Are? where they had a really nice hook, just when you think, ah, she got it and it turns out she was found not guilty.
And Who Do You Think You Are? does great story arcs. And also I give them so much credit. They have the best researchers. They read all the right stuff. They talk to the right people. They ask the right questions. And I've been on the show twice, and I'm really impressed by what they do. And I'm really not impressed by a whole lot of other documentaries.
Watching them work the day before, even the morning before one of the tapings, they said, "if this celebrity asks you a question and it's an unknown, you have to say, 'we don't know,'" because they didn't want anybody making up something. "It could have been this." no. Everything had to be by the primary sources. And yes, there's a story arc for these [00:34:00] things. You get there, but you've been, I've been working with them to figure out what the documents are. They knew what they want the story arc for Scott Foley's ancestor Samuel Wardwell. They knew what the story arc was for Jean Smart and Dorcus Hoar.
And they had come up with a series of primary sources, and I'd worked on them with that. And I had a pile to my left . And I would tell the story based on those primary sources, which was just, that was right up my alley, absolutely right up my alley. And they like to put somebody who really knows what they're talking about to talk to the celebrity, because you don't know what the celebrity's gonna ask, something about their family, you never know. And they needed to make sure they have people who can field those questions and who can also say we don't know confidently. So that was just fabulous, absolutely fabulous.
And, one after another, you show a, a document that's in old handwriting, and they can say, "oh, I can't read that." Immediately we have the transcription to hand out. And I remember watching the one with Melissa Etheridge, she was up [00:35:00] in Quebec, and the records were handwritten in French. So not only could she not read the handwriting, she couldn't even read the French. So they had a translation ready for her. The preparation for that show is just fantastic, and I have nothing but good things to say about how they do it.
And again, it's primary sources. We're gonna tell the story based on the facts. How do we know what we know? When the people go away with something real and concrete, not just some kind of weird story we can tell about their ancestor, we tell them something real.
Sarah Jack: When were the records written?
Margo Burns: The actual handwritten things for the legal process, they were written as the process was going along. So when we get those first accusations in Salem Village, they sat down and started writing these things. The arrest warrants were written as the magistrates were having people arrested. Everything was just written live. So having things [00:36:00] handwritten is just fabulous, because when they did it you know who was there.
And the fact that we have so many, we have so many of the originals is absolutely fantastic. And also it isn't just, "oh, we have the indictments and this record and stuff like that." We actually have records of the bills from the blacksmiths who were making the chains and the handcuffs. That's just an amazing document that we could have that, and I don't know who was responsible for keeping all those together. It may have been that it was organized by Governor Hutchinson. We lost a lot of those documents, probably when his house was ransacked during the Stamp Act Riot, cuz he clearly had access to more documents than have survived.
But the fact that we can have something that small and that, I dunno, I think it's evocative when you can get to that, when it's just, "here's the bill, I made these chains, I fixed this, and here's the bill for it." It takes it to a level that's so much more tangible because [00:37:00] it's easier to think about a chain and an iron handcuff than it is necessarily to understand what an indictment is.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned Samuel Parris as one of the writers. Who were some of the others?
Margo Burns: In those first ones, we also have Ezekiel Cheever taking it down. We also have Jonathan Corwin taking things down. But for the interrogations that took place in Salem Village, he was the one who was taking them down. After that, you start getting an assortment of people who would record them.
If you get into the Andover ones, they all sound alike. They all sound alike. They're nothing like the ones that were taken down in Salem Village because Samuel Parris was trying to take things down word for word. The Nurse family kind of challenged him on that later on, but he could do shorthand, and he took these things verbatim as well as he could and then reconstituted it into regular English. So you actually get to hear the [00:38:00] voices of the people professing their innocence. And those are just, those are what get to people and why I think the Salem trials are so evocative and why people get so passionate about them. They see somebody saying, "I am innocent." And we know, we hear that. We read it, and we know that they're gonna die.
When we get to the Andover cases. You, if you read the, what they've done for those, it starts off with, "she was propounded several questions and gave a negative answer." So, sort of like, "are you a Witch?" "No." "And then she confessed to having a thing with the Devil." So it sounds like the whole beginning part when they were saying, making their accusations and they're doing their professions of their innocence, all those things don't matter. So they weren't taken down, and like, "several questions asked, negative answers given, and then she confessed." And that was the important part to the court. So [00:39:00] whoever was doing those, that's the part they were taking down, whereas Samuel Parris was just trying to take down everything.
And if you look at the records of the interrogations in Andover, they all start sounding the same. They're all the same. There may be a little variation in there, but if you look at them compared to the accounts of the interrogations that were done by Samuel Parris in Salem Village, those are all different. Those are really amazing documents, an attempt to capture what people actually said. Whereas in Andover, they were just putting down the stuff that they could use to convict somebody because a confession was basically the gold standard. It is today. A confession is a gold standard, and it's really hard to not convict somebody, if at some point they confess to it.
There's a lot of research that's been done about the roles of false confessions, but clearly the court wanted those confessions cuz then they could convict people more easily. Saul Kassin [00:40:00] at Williams has done a lot of work on false confessions. He just produced a book called Duped, and I was reading some of it, and he said that even in the Salem witchcraft trials, nobody that confessed falsely was executed. So I wrote to him. I said, "oh, I heard you on Hidden Brain the other day, and your book is great, but I gotta tell you, "yes, one of the people who confessed was executed. It was Samuel Wardwell." And he wrote back, said, "that's great to know. I wish I'd known this before." And so he was very gracious about it.
But that's one of the myths that the people who confessed weren't executed, weren't tried. And anytime I bring up Samuel Wardwell, they go, "he recanted his." It doesn't matter if he recanted, because once somebody confesses, that just sticks to you. And he was indicted on that charge, and he was convicted and executed. Those are the kind of details I like.
Sarah Jack: You mentioned the bill of sale from the blacksmith. What other type of records still [00:41:00] exist?
Margo Burns: There are accounts by the jailers saying what the charges were. There's one from John Arnold, one of the jailers. He was in Boston, and it's really interesting because, in addition to the names of the people, he says when they came into his jail and when they left, and then he's charging for their diet, what it costs to feed them. And as a result, we can actually find the individual stories of people. If you're tracing an ancestor or you really wanna know about a particular person, with those documents you can find when they went into jail and when they came out. And you also get who is in the same jail at the same time. Having those different timelines going together. Those documents are really helpful. Who is in the jail at the same time? So those are fabulous.
Josh Hutchinson: Going into this you said earlier that you had already read the Salem Witchcraft Papers. Were you at all surprised by any of the records that you found?
Margo Burns: [00:42:00] Actually, this one that I laughed so hard, I fell off the couch.
Okay. It comes from one of the words in it that I didn't know, and I looked it up, and I fell apart. It's in the case of Elizabeth Howe, and the Cummings family, especially Mary, the wife, really didn't like her. Elizabeth Howe wanted to join the church to become a covenanted member in it, and Mary was just dead set against it. She would invoke something that had happened years before to one of her Perley relatives. There's a family named Perley where somebody accused Elizabeth Howe, and she just never forgot it, even though the accusation went nowhere.
Fast forward. I don't know exactly when it was, but Elizabeth Howe's husband went blind. Before he went blind, so let's say six or seven years before Salem, he went to the neighbors', the Cummings', house and said he wanted to borrow a horse. And neither Mary or her husband, Isaac, he was the deacon, and neither of them were [00:43:00] home, but Isaac Junior was there. And here's this neighbor coming and asking, "can I borrow a horse?"
And as teenagers can be, he said, "we don't have a horse." And you've got Howe saying, "I'm hearing some whinnying in your barn. What do you mean you don't have a horse?" And wise guy that the guy was, he said, "we have a mare. You asked if we had a horse. We have a mare." So he says, "can I borrow your mare?" And the teenager goes, "it's Thursday. Mom and Dad usually take the mare to go visit a relative on Fridays. I'm gonna say, 'no.'" Okay. He goes away.
So on Saturday morning, Mom and Dad have taken the mare on this trip, and Saturday morning they wake up, and the animal is in their yard, not in the pasture, not in the barn, and apparently had very sore gums. It was described as if ridden with a hot bridle. Okay. And they really were trying to figure out what was going on. And it was [00:44:00] Saturday morning, and the deacon had to do something elsewhere. And Mary asked her brother to come over and take a look at the animal, cause apparently he was pretty good with animals.
So he came over, and he's looking and Isaac Sr. said, "I got stuff to do. I leave this with you." And Isaac came back later that night, and his brother-in-law was still there and said, "I've tried everything. I looked to see if maybe it was from bot flies." You know what a bot is? It basically is this, is a little worm, will burrow into the gums and flesh of animals, especially horses and maybe sheep. And it's really gross. And so he said, "I looked to see if the inflamed gums had any evidence of bot flies. And he didn't."
And but then he tells Isaac that, "there's only one thing I can think of. You might not like it." And Isaac said, "what?" He said, "okay, go get a pipe with some tobacco." At this point, Isaac is going, [00:45:00] "I don't know."
Now I have to tell you that this story comes from four accounts. Everything in here is from these sources, one from Isaac Sr., one from Isaac Jr., one from Mary, and one from her brother. He asks him to go and get some tobacco and a pipe. And this point the deacon is going, "I don't like where this is going." And his brother-in-law said, "oh no. This is legal for man or beast." And Isaac is going, "I don't know."
So they bring out the pipe, light the pipe. And then in the records it says, "and they put it under the fundament of the horse." And I'm going, "what the heck's a fundament?" It's the area underneath the tail, for lack of a better word. And they put this lit pipe underneath the tail, in front of the fundament of the horse.
And blue flames shot out of the back of this poor animal and singed the fur. I was just like, "okay." And apparently they did it two or three times. I can't quite tell from the descriptions, but they did it at least twice. [00:46:00] And then Isaac said, "you know what?" It was catching the hay on fire. They were doing it inside. They were doing it inside, and it was catching the hay on fire. Finally, Isaac said, cut" it out. No, no more. I need the barn more than I need this animal. That's enough."
Okay, next morning is Sunday morning, and people are all on their way to the meeting house. And one of the neighbors is passing by and hears this story about this poor animal that was still sick, and he goes in to look at the mare, and they're talking about it, and the neighbor said, " maybe it's bewitched." Therein always lies the tale. He said, "but we can figure it out, if we cut off a piece of the ear and burn it."
Now, this was sympathetic magic that if a witch had somehow bewitched somebody, there would be this invisible effluvia. If you listen to Thomas Brattle's account of it, this invisible effluvia would emanate from their eyes and go into the person or the animal. And if you could [00:47:00] somehow get some of that effluvia, and you could hurt it, you could hurt the witch.
So when we think about the witch cake in Salem, it had the girls' urine. Clearly some of this effluvia could have been in the urine. You also sometimes hear about witch bottles that have hair. It's easier on people to take urine and hair or fingernails, but with animals, they would say, oh, let's cut off the ear. And the idea is if you could hurt it. In this case for the witch cake, the dog biting it, or in this case with an ear, you could set fire to it. It would hurt the witch, and the witch was supposed to come and try and stop this, because they were in pain. That's how it was supposed to work.
So this neighbor is talking to Deacon Cummings about doing this with the ear of the mare, and the deacon, being a deacon, and saying, " it's Sunday, and I don't know about this. This is a little iffy, but if you wanna come back tomorrow, you know you can try it." Right then, the poor animal has been very sick and falls over, [00:48:00] almost on top of them. If they hadn't gotten out the door, this animal would've crushed them. Big horse. Oh, excuse me, mare. And the animal was dead.
Okay, so I'm going okay, "this is interesting." I am still laughing about the fundament stuff, but then I started wondering why was this tale so important that four people, four people would tell the story? And why was this being used as evidence against Elizabeth Howe? Her husband is the only one who appears in it. Why was this being used about against her? And I kept reading 'em and reading 'em, and suddenly I found something in Mary's account. Apparently, when they got to church that day, when they got to the meeting house, word had gotten around and Elizabeth Howe had said something, a really smart remark. She said, "well, of course this happened when you feed an animal brimstone and other combustible things." And I'm thinking, "why would she even say that? Why?" It turns out that to make laxatives, they [00:49:00] were using things like that, oil and brimstone, sulfur, things like that to try and get the stuff going through the animal. It turns out horses can't vomit. That's what colic is. Everything has to go in one direction. So they would try and give the animal a laxative, and it comes out the other end. It's flammable. So she was making this smart remark that of course this happened. What happens when you feed your animal combustibles?
And I think that smart remark and Mary Cummings' existing animosity against Elizabeth Howe combined, so that story of the men in her family being idiots turned into this woman is responsible for what happened. But that particular one about Elizabeth Howe, that sticks with me, Three Stooges meet Joan of Arc, so that's the story that just always gets me.
Josh Hutchinson: That caught my eye, because the Cummings are ancestors of mine and Elizabeth Jackson Howe is [00:50:00] an aunt by marriage. I always thought it was just a really gassy horse and or mare.
Margo Burns: The other part is that in this, the accusations that she had afflicted one of the Perley daughters earlier, it's interesting, because they'd brought in two ministers, Phillips and Payson. And they came over from Rowley to investigate, and they concluded that it was the younger brother egging her on to say, "ooh, Goody Howe is afflicting me."
So they actually got Phillips and Payson to testify on Elizabeth Howe's behalf to say, "no, this really didn't happen. We were there, we made this decision." So to get two really good ministers to show up and testify on her behalf and then that was ignored, that was pretty amazing. And to make it worse, this is something people don't know, Reverend Phillips was at Harvard the same time as William Stoughton, and Reverend Payson was also from Dorchester, where Stoughton [00:51:00] grew up and lived. So they were known people to him. And then they still just ignored it, so that there's a little complication in there.
Josh Hutchinson: For more tales from Margo Burns, tune in to the exciting conclusion next week. Now we go to our own Sarah Jack for another edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Legislation News. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is an organized effort of diverse collaborators working for a state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony. Many advocates have come together, along with State Representative Jane Garibay and Senator Saud Anwar to support proposed exoneration legislation. The 2023 winter session of the Connecticut General Assembly includes the bill [00:52:00] proposals of two exoneration resolutions for innocents accused and tried for witchcraft crimes during the years of 1647 to 1697. Senate Joint Resolution proposed by Senator Saud Anwar, SJ Number 5, "Exonerating the Women and Men Convicted for Witchcraft in Colonial Connecticut" and House Joint Resolution in the General Assembly, proposed by representative Jane Gariaby, HJ Number 21, "Resolution Recognizing the Unfair Treatment of Individuals Accused of Witchcraft During the 17th Century." These proposals could bring a public hearing shortly.
This resolution will be an example to others working to recognize and address historic wrongs. Connecticut is taking a stand against injustice. Connecticut is taking a stand against misogyny. Connecticut is also taking a stand against witch-hunting, which will resonate in parts of the world where witchcraft accusations continue to lead to violence today. By acknowledging the mistakes of the past, we educate the public that similar [00:53:00] actions are not acceptable today. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General assembly to pass this legislation without delay.
Our project is offering several ways for you to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration and history. Please download our robust lineup of episodes featuring Witch Trial Descendants, education about hanged witch Alice Young and other victims, and Connecticut Colony's Governor John Winthrop, Jr.'s positive influence against convicting witches. You can go to our project website for an informative and easy to understand fact sheet of the Connecticut Colony witch trial victims, places, and dates.
You can follow along by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Please keep your eye on the social media accounts of state Representative Garibay and Senator Anwar for live events and local opportunities to learn more about what's happening and show support for the bills. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch, finally be [00:54:00] acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor's stories. Remember the victims in modern day facing the same unfair and dangerous situations. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @CTwitchhunt and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts Movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. Shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/EndWitchHunts or zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer, and shop our books at bookshop.org/EndWitchHunts.
We want you as a super listener. You can support Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast production by super [00:55:00] listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you Sarah for enlightening us.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe to Thou Shalt Not Suffer wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family and boss and coworkers about how wonderful Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast is and how groovy it is to listen.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more about our organization.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:56:00]
We have the honor of discussing the book In the Shadow of Salem with author and archivist Richard Hite. This episode focuses our witch trial investigation on a distinct element of the Salem Witch-Hunt community story. We check out the neighboring town of Andover to discover what is eyebrow raising about its accusers and accused persons. Hear about large family involvements, shocking confessions and colorful accusations full of spectral claims. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Transcript
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we speak with author and archivist Richard Hite, who's written In the Shadow of Salem: the Andover Witch Hunt of 1692.
Sarah Jack: In the Shadow of Salem takes a focused look at one community that had the most accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: More accusations than Salem and Salem Village combined. And [00:01:00] a ton of confessions.
Sarah Jack: Confessions and wild accusations, full of spectral evidence.
Josh Hutchinson: The confessions featured satanic baptisms, the queen in hell, and one woman said there were 305 witches in the country, so they were looking for them everywhere. Andover wasn't a big town. But they discovered and accused at least 45 people of witchcraft. Most of the accused there confessed to witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: One of the reasons that I think descendants have really gravitated towards this book and they talk about it on social media is because so many names are talked about and placed into the story, and you see where these different [00:02:00] families fit in to what was happening. Richard does a really great job of talking about the area, the territory, where they were living.
Josh Hutchinson: In spite of the scale of the Andover phase of the Salem Witch Hunt, there hasn't been a lot written about it until Richard Hite came along and wrote In the Shadow of Salem, and it really, for the first time, shines the spotlight on this particular village in Essex County, Massachusetts.
He looks at the conclusions other historians have drawn or come to about the Andover phase and evaluates those critically and makes his own determinations based on his research. [00:03:00] And it's very enlightening and enriching and there's so many interesting things about Andover that it's really deserves its own limelight deserves its own book or even. , more can be written about it because there's just so much there and we get to learn quite a lot from our conversation.
Sarah Jack: I was surprised at how many people in these families were involved that, when you're looking at some of the other history of the Salem Witch, yes, Rebecca Nurse and her sisters are in the story. But when you're looking at the Andover phase, you've got mothers and daughters and grandchildren and sons and cousins, and [00:04:00] they're all saying something or accusing or confessing, and it's just there's a lot of voices saying a lot of things.
And if you've read the book, you're just gonna really enjoy the conversation and details that Richard shares with us when we're asking questions than discussing what we read. If you haven't read the book, you're gonna order it right away, cuz you're gonna wanna read what he has to say about these stories that we talk about in the episode.
Josh Hutchinson: We're gonna learn about the Ingalls family and how many of them were accused. Like Sarah said, it wasn't just the immediate family, it was like every branch. There were in-laws that got caught up in it. There were children, grandchildren, so many people involved from the Ingalls family. The [00:05:00] Tyler family was another of the big ones involved. We're gonna learn about those from our conversation with Richard Hite.
Sarah Jack: One of the other things that really jumped out to me is how long it involves some of the conflicts that were between families or neighbors or community members. Anthills became molehills in a lot of situations over the years. When you look at the interactions the Andover community members had with each other, there was years of disagreements or not seeing eye to eye, and it affected how the accusations played out later.
Josh Hutchinson: We're also going to take a look at the proposed conflict between supporters of Minister Francis Dane and supporters of Thomas [00:06:00] Barnard and discuss whether there was a North-South clash in Andover at the time.
We're gonna talk about Francis Dane's granddaughter Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was just exonerated this past summer by the state of Massachusetts. We'll learn how middle school classes got involved in exonerating Elizabeth Johnson Jr. and really helped push it through. So we'll discuss what middle school was involved, who their teacher was, how Richard was put in contact with that teacher, and how it all unfolded.
We're also going to learn about how Andover got caught up in this whirlwind of accusations, how afflicted girls from Salem Village were invited to Andover, what they did there, and how that really got [00:07:00] the ball rolling on accusation after accusation.
Sarah Jack: All of that information enables you to visualize how much like us they were and sense the whole struggle they were in and just the fear and it's very it just brings it that history to life when you're reading that.
Josh Hutchinson: The book and learning about the different people helps you to realize that they're basically us and we're them, and we have the same fears and desires and everything.
Sarah Jack: And then it also, that dimensional piece that I'm thinking of, it helps you understand some of the Salem Village narrative more ,too, because you had the stuff coming in from Andover impacting. [00:08:00] It broadens the understanding of the scope of the community at large. We get the Salem and Salem Village pieces in our mind, but there was actually all these other communities that were close but larger.
Josh Hutchinson: It shows you the real scale and scope of the witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: Here's Josh with some history.
Josh Hutchinson: Martha Carrier was born in Andover to Andrew Allen and Faith Ingalls in about 1650. Later on, she moved to Billerica, where she met Thomas Carrier, a.k.a. Thomas Morgan. The two were married in 1674. They returned to Andover and were blamed for a smallpox outbreak in 1690 and warned out of town.[00:09:00] Given the testimony against her, it's possible that she did not have the friendliest demeanor.
A warrant was issued for Martha carrier's arrest on May 28th, 1692.
Under examination, Mary Lacey, Jr. claimed that Martha carrier was the queen in Hell and that she initiated others into her coven, and she participated in Satanic Baptisms. Sometimes these occurred in her own well. Other times they occurred in places. She was reported to have participated in several broom flights.
Martha was tried, convicted, and condemned, and four of her children were also accused. Those were Andrew Carrier, Richard [00:10:00] Carrier, Sarah Carrier, and Thomas Carrier Jr. Martha Was hanged on August 19th, 1692.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for sharing that history with us, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. And now, before we go to Richard Hite, we'll hear a word from Virginia Wolf and Debra Walsh about their play, The Last Night.
Virginia Wolf: Many people don't know that Connecticut has a history of witchcraft witch panics in the 17th century. In fact the first person to be hanged for witchcraft was Alice Young. Arthur Miller, God bless him, has made the Salem witchcraft panics the standard by which everything is considered and people don't even realize that the history, and it's not necessarily a history to be proud of, but it is something that it happened. It was an outcome of the religious beliefs at the time, the patriarchal society of the [00:11:00] time, and in Connecticut, 1663, January 25th was the last execution, Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith and Mary Barnes. And this is 30 years before the Salem Witch trials ever happened and how. And acknowledging that date is so important so that people are aware that this did happen.
Debra Walsh: How do museums get people in to their buildings? What are the stories we can tell that happened right outside the door of the museum? How do we appeal to younger people? And I think theater can do that by having the education or the story is done theatrically and thoughtfully.
I think it for me relates to any time someone is considered the Other. When I think of the immigration crisis, and so maybe it will get us thinking about how do we treat the Other, what do we, what do we [00:12:00] think about, oh, especially innocent people executed for these crimes. A hanging? Like where is our humanity? And those questions are very important to me as an educator, as a theater educator, and also to stretch out the bonds of theater. What else can theater artists be doing?
Virginia Wolf: It's been a really wonderful thing to be writing this because aren't a lot of records of what happened at the time. There are more records based on Rebecca Greensmith in her trial and what she said. There's really virtually nothing on Mary Barnes. So we work from primary sources to write this, to make, as factual as we can, but then weaving in informed conjecture what could have happened, since we don't know what happened. And then the dramatic arc, which we've done the writing, but Andy and our director have really helped with that, so that the story is alive and it's vibrant, but it is based on history, and we are not saying [00:13:00] anything false, but we are taking the facts and elaborating them to make them an interesting story.
Josh Hutchinson: A stage reading of The Last Night will be performed at the Stanley-Whitman House at 37 High Street in Farmington, Connecticut on January 21st at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $20 for members, $25 for non-members and can be purchased at s-wh.org. The video premiere is January 25th at 7:00 PM online for free. You can register at the Stanley-Whitman House website. Again, that's s-wh.org, and we will include the link in the show description. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: I'm excited to introduce Richard Hite, state records [00:14:00] coordinator at Rhode Island State Archive and author of In The Shadow of Salem: the Andover Witch Hunt of 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: I wondered if you might take just a minute or two to summarize the Andover phase of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Richard Hite: It starts in the middle of July of 1692. Now one person from Andover had already been arrested by that point. That was Martha Carrier. She had somehow caught the attention of the uh, afflicted people in Salem Village, probably because uh, her own and her family's reputation was not the greatest. They'd been blamed for starting a smallpox epidemic in Andover a couple of years earlier.
But in mid-July, accusations had actually ground to a halt for about six weeks, because the court of Oyer and Terminer had been put in place and was [00:15:00] trying the people who had already been arrested. There were a little over 60 at that point.
But there was a woman in Andover who was gravely ill, Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. Her husband took the unprecedented step of inviting two of the afflicted girls from Salem Village to Andover to determine whether or not she was bewitched. Apparently, it wasn't his own idea. Some others had put the idea in his head, but of course, once they came, obviously they concluded that she was, in fact, bewitched. The person they initially named was a widow named Ann Foster, who was quite frail and who had experienced several tragedies in recent years, worst of which was the murder of her daughter by the daughter's husband three years earlier.
Ann Foster was arrested and questioned over a period of four days. For two days, she resisted [00:16:00] admitting guilt, but finally on the third day, her will cracked and she confessed. But as I said, there were a little over 60 people who had been arrested at that point. In her confession, she indicated that there were 305 witches throughout the region, so that throws a scare into everybody.
They go from thinking, yeah, it was very possible at that point that there could have been no more accusations. They may have just gone ahead and tried the ones who had already been arrested, but then all of a sudden you've got people thinking that only 20% of the people who were witches had been arrested. So that starts a whole new round of arrests.
As had been the case in Salem Village but became even more pronounced in Andover, once one family member was arrested, more others were vulnerable. The next two to be arrested were um, both Ann Foster's own daughter and granddaughter, both of [00:17:00] whom were named Mary Lacey. Both of them also confessed under pressure, but the younger Mary Lacey added a new wrinkle and um, implicated Martha Carrier, and she designated Martha Carrier as the future queen in hell, so to speak.
Martha Carrier has not only been accused of witchcraft, she's expected to be the queen of hell. Well, she's likely a recruiter of new witches based on that. Who's she gonna recruit? Her neighbors in Andover. Before the whole thing was over in Andover, 45 people from that one town were accused. Now I should stress what was then Andover included at that time what's today North Andover, at least part of Lawrence, and part of the town of Middleton.
But then also in Martha Carrier's own extended family, one of her sisters was accused, four of her five children, two nieces, and then it extended even further to [00:18:00] cousins and the cousins of children. Ultimately, 17 members of Martha Carrier's extended family were accused of witchcraft, which was more than any other family throughout the region. The 45 from Andover, who were accused, that was more than any other town, including Salem Village, where it all started.
Salem Village, which is today Danvers, had only 26 accused, the town of Salem 12. So that's those two places combined at fewer than Andover. A distinct feature in Andover was that very early on, people began confessing, and that was apparently because a rumor had spread in Andover that if one confessed, one would ultimately be exonerated or their life would be spared, at the very least. That is the way it turned out. It was never the intention of the court. People who confessed were being [00:19:00] kept alive longer, in order to provide evidence against others.
Now, initially, the ones primarily testifying against suspects from Andover were some of the same afflicted people, mostly teenage girls from Salem Village. But after the first month, the core of afflicted girls started forming in Andover, and some of them were coming out and testifying against suspects. A real turning point, I think, came on the 10th of September, when suddenly they began bringing confessors to trial. There were so many confessors by that time, they didn't need them all anymore to provide evidence.
A few were brought to trial and convicted and sentenced to death just like the others. The last round of hangings, there were eight people hanged on September 22nd. Those who had confessed were not hanged at that time. It was not unusual for someone who confessed to a capital crime to be given [00:20:00] additional time to prepare their souls, so to speak, for the afterlife.
And before any of the confessors got around to being executed, they got around to introducing any of the confessors, executing them, Governor Phipps suspended all further legal actions, which gave them a reprieve. But the fact that confessors were being sentenced to death scared the life outta any, any number of people in Andover who had actually encouraged loved ones to confess, believing their lives would be spared. So a series of petitions began circulating in Andover, which were ultimately signed by 72 people in town. A large number of them were family members of those who had been accused, but not entirely.
And then um, of course, Thomas Brattle, a Boston merchant, wrote a letter criticizing the trials, Increase Mather, a minister in [00:21:00] Boston, wrote a detailed critique of the process, and then a new court was constituted that had much stricter standards for conviction. It started trying people in January of 1693. Of the 52 came before the court, all but three were either acquitted or had the charges dropped. Three more were convicted, sentenced to death, all either from Andover or had ties to Andover. They and the previous confessors were slated for execution on February 1st, of 1693, but Governor Phipps intervened again, not pardoning them, but reprieving them, and because the prosecutor had said there was really no more evidence against those people than there were against the ones who had been acquitted. And while they were not at that time pardoned, they began trying more people. No one else was convicted, and, essentially, people [00:22:00] were just eventually let out, and they could pay their expenses and no one else was executed. .
Sarah Jack: I was curious about your research and archiving and what started your journey into that and what that's like for you or anything that would be important for us to know about it.
Richard Hite: I've been in the archives profession since the late 1980s and have been working for the Rhode Island State Archive since 2003. I had not lived in this region of the country prior to that, but I've had a very long-time interest in the witchcraft trials. I did two term papers on them when I was at graduate school, and then of course, moving to this region gave me easier access to material on the witch-hunt than I'd ever had.
And reading nearly all the major publications on the whole event, I came to realize that very little had been written about Andover, despite the fact that [00:23:00] it obviously had a major role in the whole thing, but previous authors seemed to just treat it as just a practically meaningless extension of what had happened in Salem Village and the town of Salem. But I thought with 45 people having accused there, that it seemed that there was a separate story to be told about it. And the more I researched it, the more I realized that there definitely was. The research into the transcribed documents of the witch-hunt, which were compiled in 2010 by a team of editors led by Bernard Rosenthal, and I should add, Margo Burns played a major role in it, was really a major source for me. But one of the things I should point out, though, that it's very much worthwhile to mention, mention that the path I expected to follow, what I thought happened in Andover turned out not [00:24:00] to really be the case at all.
There's a very well-known work on the Witch Hunt in Salem Village from the mid 1970s by historians Paul Boyer and Steven Nisenbaum. They talk about a factionalism that formed in Salem Village over the uh, minister in town with a significant faction supporting him and a significant faction opposing him. And they stress how it tended to break down on regional lines, with people more in the east end of the village, who were near the Salem town, tending to oppose it, further west in the more rural isolated area, tending to support him. I already knew that Andover had been semi-formally divided into north and south ends by that time, not not into separate towns, although the border is fairly close to what now separates North Andover from Andover. There were two ministers in what was then Andover, Francis Dane and Thomas [00:25:00] Barnard. I was expecting to find some kind of a north-south divide in Andover between accusers and accused.
And it's well known that Francis Dane was an opponent of the witch-hunt from the beginning. And some writers had hinted that Thomas Barnard, who was actually the younger of the two, had offered his support to the process. But I didn't find anything like that. In terms of the north and south ends, of the 45 accused, there were 24 from the north end and 21 from the south end, so practically an even split. And people involved in accusations in one way or another, 12 from the north end, 11 from the south end. Again, a practically an even split.
And although Thomas Barnard's attitude toward the witch-hunt was not as vocal as Francis Dane's, he signed the petitions just like Francis Dane and everyone else defending the suspects. So he didn't [00:26:00] support it anymore than Francis Dane did. I think in part, it may have been because the minister in Salem Village, Samuel Parris, played such a major role there, had just made historians may have just generally thought for it to take off in Andover like it did, at least one of the ministers had to be leading the charge, so to speak. That wasn't the case at all. I did research the lives of people involved in the witch hunt afterward, and there were people who strongly supported Barnard in the first decade of the next century, who had close family members accused of witchcraft, and two of 'em were even the sons of Samuel Wardwell, who had been hanged for witchcraft. And I just can't believe that those people would've supported Reverend Barnard if he had been a major booster of the witch-hunt. It just doesn't make sense.
Josh Hutchinson: Certainly different in Salem Village with Parris.
Richard Hite: [00:27:00] Definitely. And it just seemed more in Andover to break down along family lines, particularly among the accused. I already mentioned Martha Carrier's extended family. Her maternal grandparents were Edmund and Anne Ingalls of Lynn, Massachusetts. Of course, they were long dead by the time of the witch-hunt. But altogether they had 17 descendants accused. No other family was that heavily persecuted.
The Tyler family, in and around Andover, they had 10 members accused. Now, unlike the extended Ingalls clan, they also had some accusers, as well, within the family. But those in the family who were accusers were not accusing their own family members, with the exception of a stepdaughter of Moses Tyler named Martha Sprague. It seems to me that her accusations against some of his family may have been a reflection of a negative attitude she held [00:28:00] toward him, and there was just a way of lashing out at his family.
And I should clarify something I said. There were 45 accused from Andover, and that's correct. There were an additional 18 from surrounding communities who people from Andover played a role in accusing. So based on that, I would actually say that the Andover phase resulted in 63 accusations, and 27 out of 63 came from those two extended family groups. So not quite half, but nonetheless a significant portion.
But there were other families who had several members accused, the Barker family, for instance, they had four who were accused. You add those four in, that's 31. And then there were a few others who had at least multiple members accused as well.
Sarah Jack: And was there anything else contributing to that number of accusations other than [00:29:00] thinking, oh, confession is going to save me? What else would've contributed to that many accusations?
I
Richard Hite: think it was just that once things took off there and got some of the locals believing in, and of course again, the accusation of Martha Carrier as Queen of Hell, giving the idea that she's one of the ring leaders of the whole episode, shifted a focus to Andover in that way. Now the people who were confessing, I should point out, were not generally accusing new people. They were just offering evidence against others who had already been accused. It was just something like in Salem Village. Once it got started, it just got out of control in Andover, as well.
And yes, the fact that people were confessing was giving added credence to it in the minds of the accusers. William Barker, for example, [00:30:00] gave probably one of the more detailed confessions of the whole thing. He described how the Devil was involved. The Devil and his followers had a conspiracy to bring down the Church and the region. He went on to say that the witches were much vexed, as he put it, at the judges and the afflicted, because they were interfering with their plans. And he specifically said, to his knowledge, not a single innocent person had been accused. That was exactly what the judges and the accusers wanted to hear. And he probably said that thinking it would get him off the hook. As it worked out, it did. But again, that was just a coincidence of timing. Had governor Phipps not suspended legal actions when he did in October, some of those who had confessed but then subsequently been convicted would probably have been executed before the month was over.
I think it's worth pointing it out that [00:31:00] earlier in New England witch trials, people who confessed were in fact executed.
Josh Hutchinson: So the thing then about having their lives spared if they confessed, that was just a baseless rumor?
Richard Hite: Early on, those who were confessed, there were only a handful of those prior to Andover, but they were not being brought to trial. And so that probably just contributed to the rumor, because those who were being brought to trial were not confessing and had not confessed previously. But confessions throughout really helped spread the whole thing.
At the very beginning of the whole event, there were three accused, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the Reverend Parris's slave, Tituba, from Salem Village. Previous witch trials throughout the region, it usually would be only one or two, maybe three people accused. Those people might be convicted, might not, [00:32:00] but Tituba not only confessed, she claimed to have put her mark in a book that listed nine other names. So that gave a hint to the prosecutors. We don't have everybody.
And then by the time they had arrested about seven, six or seven more, this teenage girl from Topsfield, Abigail Hobbs, also confesses. Now she doesn't provide numbers. But yeah, Tituba said she had only signed the book a few weeks before. Abigail Hobbs said that she had given her soul to the devil three or four years earlier. So now that's telling them that this has been going on a while.
It's one of the most frustrating things about reading the whole episode is realizing how many times it reached a point where it could have died down, and then something else, usually another accusation followed by a [00:33:00] confession, suddenly starts at getting out of control again.
Sarah Jack: Why would've she and some of the other confessors said that they had been working with the devil for so many years?
Richard Hite: In the case of Tituba, is really hard to fathom why she confessed. There's a legend that her master, the Minister Samuel Parris, whipped it out of her, but I don't buy that, and I'll tell you why I don't. Because she was questioned in court over a period of two days. The first day she refused to confess, and then she spent the next night in jail. Parris wouldn't have had a chance to whip her then.
The way Judge John Hathorne phrased his questions, he was always presuming guilt. In the case of Sarah Good, for example, he did not ask her, "Sarah Good, do you have familiarity with any evil spirits?" He asked, "Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity [00:34:00] with?" In reading this examination of Tituba, it seems that he tricked her into confessing, cause he would not relent in questioning her about that. And then finally, I think she said something she thought might get her out of trouble, because she did at one point finally admit she had harmed these children through occult means but had recanted and would do so no more. But then that just caused Hathorne to press even further, twisting her words.
Of course, she was in the courtroom with these shrieking afflicted girls. I think she just cracked under the pressure. Now Abigail Hobbs, she's written about heavily, and Mary Beth Norton's book titled In the Devil's Snare, Mary Beth Norton stresses the importance of Abigail Hobbs' confession. Abigail Hobbs, she was only in her mid teens, apparently quite disturbed. She and her [00:35:00] family had been on the Maine frontier when the wars with the Native Americans broke out. They were essentially back in the Topsfield area as refugees. But Abigail Hobbs had some strange habits. Apparently, she was talked about how she would sleep in the woods at night, would publicly talk about having sold herself body and soul to the Old Boy, which was a way of describing the Devil. My suspicion is that whatever eccentricity she had, she was probably ridiculed to a degree by her peers and maybe had cultivated the reputation of a Witch in a hope of scaring them into leaving her alone. And so again, I can't be sure about that, but that seems as logical a reason as any. I think there were only three more who confessed until the confessions took off in Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned earlier that a lot of what happened in Andover took off because of what the [00:36:00] Ballards did. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Richard Hite: Sure. Actually, in a way, it almost starts, I think, with Samuel Wardwell, who ended up being hanged, but see, Samuel Wardwell was well known among the young people in Andover as a fortune teller. And he was well liked by them because of that. My suspicion is, some of Ward well's, things that he told were surprisingly accurate. What I suspect about him is that he had a very keen sense of being able to read people's thoughts by mannerisms, the way they phrased certain things, or by facial expressions.
For instance, he had told one young man named James Bridges that he knew that he was in love with a certain girl in the area. And James Bridges admitted it. Yes he was. And then other things that people believe in 'em strongly enough that can [00:37:00] become self-fulfilling. Well, Samuel Wardwell's wife was Sarah Hooper Wardwell. Her sister Rebecca was married to John Ballard. Now, John Ballard was not the husband of the woman who was sick. John Ballard was the constable of the south end of Andover, and he had already arrested Martha Carrier and taken her to jail in Salem.
Wardwell was getting worried when he heard that Elizabeth Ballard was sick. He thought people were getting suspicious of his being a fortune teller. And so he was afraid he'd be accused of witchcraft. He expressed this to his brother John, he was afraid that John's brother, Joseph, might be blaming him for Elizabeth Ballard's illness. John Ballard then went and said this to Joseph, and that was what put the idea in Joseph Ballard's head that maybe my wife is bewitched. So he sent for these girls from Salem Village,[00:38:00] and of course, they obviously said, yes she was, and Wardwell was not accused immediately, but he was about a month later. And in a sense, expressing his own concerns probably led to him ultimately being accused and executed.
A few days after people began being accused and arrested in Andover, Elizabeth Ballard died. And see, that was a first. None of the afflicted people in Salem Village had died, regardless of what might have been wrong with them or anybody else. But here, for the first time, a supposedly afflicted person had actually died. That was another hint that there were more people at large, and now there was obvious evidence these witches could actually kill.
Sarah Jack: Bringing the afflicted girls in to try to detect some supposed witches was a big deal. It really affected the next[00:39:00] circumstances?
Richard Hite: Yeah. So that was the first place where that had been, where that was done. Gloucester didn't even get involved until very late in the game. Gloucester did have nine people accused. After Andover, Salem Village, and the town of Salem, they were number four, but none of the accusations there really ended up going much of anywhere ,because it started so late in the process.
Josh Hutchinson: You talked about Anne Foster's confession, 305 witches?
Richard Hite: Where she got that number, I have no idea. The only one of the things I find myself thinking about the whole process, both in terms of confessors and accusers, is I really wondered to what extent nightmares played a role in whatever caused this. Because we have to remember that, and even 19th century writers had trouble accepting this, I think because, so many have tried to point to some kind of conspiracy [00:40:00] in this whole thing. We have to remember these people genuinely believed in it. Believing in witchcraft and that witches could bring harm to people that, that era, it was every bit as normal as believing in God is today.
But I think even 19th century writers had a hard time accepting that in some of their writings about it, because you'll run into all kinds of accounts, and I think it's based partly on fiction, that one of the reasons people were accused was because the accusers wanted the land of the people they were accusing. And that's not the case at all, because they wouldn't, it wasn't going to get them any land because it's, again, and I think this was made popular by Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The House of the Seven Gables, because that's the reason that the judge there accuses the victim of witchcraft, is because he wants his land, and he ends up getting it. But in reality, even if someone is hanged for witchcraft in that era, their heirs are still going [00:41:00] to inherit their land. Two of the people who were executed, John Proctor and George Jacobs, neither from Andover, but yeah, they wrote their will while they were in jail awaiting execution, and the terms of their wills were honored.
Sarah Jack: So there, there were nightmares in the surviving testimony. At what point in the Andover phase was that, was it throughout? Did several confessor or accusers talk about nightmares?
Richard Hite: They didn't describe it as such. I can't help but believe that's where some of the testimony came from, was people had dreamed something and dreams and reality became blurred, because they so strongly believed what was happening.
Sarah Jack: So even outside a trial scenario, those individuals would've been considering dreams real experiences?
Richard Hite: It's possible. But some would have. Yes. [00:42:00] Yes. Through much of human history, dreams have often been seen as portents of some sort. And in reality, too, some of the confessors and Ann Foster comes to mind with this, because she had experienced so much tragedy in recent years. She could have come to actually believe she had, without realizing it, become a witch and was being punished for it.
It's just as people who are devoutly religious today might have doubts about, okay, whether their souls have been saved, so to speak, or not. When one so devoutly believes in something such as witchcraft, they may actually come to believe themselves to have become witches.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I were talking about the nightmares and dreams thing the other night, and I went through a phase in my life where I had sleep paralysis several times, and it very much resembled to me some of the accuser testimony, especially, [00:43:00] of people coming into your room at night, because you wake up, but you're still in a dream state, so everything feels very real.
Richard Hite: I occasionally had dreams as a child of, and occasionally as an adult, of falling off of something and waking up as I was falling, and it felt as though I landed on my bed. And then other symptoms can manifest themselves, too. If you believe very strongly in witchcraft, and if you think that someone has a poppet that they are using a poppet that they're identifying as you and sticking pins at it, you're probably going to experience some symptoms.
A personal experience, when I've led tours, I have sometimes cited, I grew up in a religious tradition, in which 12 was considered the age of accountability for one's sins, so that, anything you did prior to age 12 was not going to be held against you, [00:44:00] so to speak. But once you're 12, you're responsible for everything. Three weeks after my 12th birthday, I broke out in a severe case of hives. My mother took me to the doctor, and they were assuming I had some sort of allergy. The doctor concluded, I think, because I had probably recently started taking adult aspirin instead of baby aspirin when I needed it, that I was allergic to aspirin. For over three decades, I believed that I was allergic to aspirin. But then, learning some of the potential medical benefits of it, I decided to go to an allergist and undergo what's called a drug challenge. I'm not allergic to aspirin, probably never was. I firmly believe that breaking out in hives was probably a nervous reaction over the idea that I was suddenly responsible for my own sins.
Josh Hutchinson: That's a great example. You talked in the book, this is about the [00:45:00] psychosomatic symptoms that people feel?
Richard Hite: Yes, absolutely. I think that was a major factor. Now, I can't help but think that some of the performances by the afflicted in the courtroom, those probably were to some degree staged, because it wouldn't be the sort of thing that someone could just easily turn on and off. But even if the ones in the courtroom were staged, what happened at home, probably psychosomatic, and by testifying as they did in the courtroom, I'm sure that many of them thought that they were bringing criminals to justice, even if they did exaggerate what was actually happening at that moment.
Sarah Jack: When you talked about Abigail Hobbs and like a perceived purification process, they were maybe exaggerating to help accomplish getting rid of the evil.
Richard Hite: Yes. I, that's what I, but that, that doesn't mean that some of [00:46:00] what they experienced was not real. But again, for psychosomatic reasons.
Josh Hutchinson: I I also wonder when they got into the courtroom and they were facing the people who they believed were witches, could they have had stress reactions then as well?
Richard Hite: That's absolutely a possibility, very much a possibility, because they were deathly afraid of these people, even though, you know, they did not have to be in that person's presence for the person to afflict them according to their belief, to actually be in their presence would be, would've been a frightening experience.
Josh Hutchinson: I wanted to talk some more about Martha Carrier, because she seems to play a very prominent role in the Andover situation. What more can you tell us about her as a person?
Richard Hite: She was she had been born in Andover and grown up there. Then, as a young adult, she, or possibly [00:47:00] even in her late teens, she went to the neighboring town of Billerica and lived with her older sister, who was married to a man from there, and she found her husband there, Thomas Carrier, and they were married. But they were not too secure financially, and in the late 1680s, they were warned out of town. It's not clear why. Now warning someone out of town did not automatically mean you had to leave, but if you were warned out of town, it meant if you fell into difficult financial circumstances, the town had no obligation to help support you.
Martha seems to have been of a bit of a turbulent spirit. She got into a quarrel with a neighbor of hers named Benjamin Abbott, and this was once they moved back to Andover over a property line. And it was after Benjamin Abbott later testified against her, saying that after this quarrel, he had become seriously ill and developed [00:48:00] some type of soar on his foot, which upon being lanced, oozed, as he described it, gallons of corruption. Most bizarrely, he also claimed to have gotten some boils on his manhood, which only left after she was arrested.
Now whether or not she really was as quarrelsome as she's been portrayed or just was very quick to defend her family, who knows? There were things that made people frightened of her. And there was a smallpox epidemic that started Andover shortly after they moved there in 1690, which led to 13 people dying in Andover, and that was apparently known in the region, because one of the young girls who testified against her, who was not from Andover but Salem Village, described an encounter with 13 ghosts, who blamed their deaths on Martha Carrier. [00:49:00] No coincidence, the exact number of people who died in the smallpox epidemic.
Now there are legends about Martha Carrier's husband, which I seriously do not believe are true. The one aspect of it that apparently is true is that he apparently changed his last name for some reason. Their marriage record even describes him as Thomas Morgan alias Carrier. The legend about him is that he had ended up fleeing England, because he was the executioner of King Charles I in 1649. But for one thing, by the time he died in 1735, he would've had to have been well over a hundred years old. His death record actually does say he was 109, but death records at that time with exaggerated ages like that are, weren't unusual in New England, particularly for people who had been born in England and come over.
I have an ancestor myself who's own grave [00:50:00] indicates he died in 1694 at age 97, which would place his birth in 1597, but his baptism in England gives his year of birth as 1611, so he was actually only 83. But even regardless of whether that story about her husband is true or not, if people around thought that it was, that wouldn't have helped the family's reputation.
Sarah Jack: Was that legend, when did it develop? Did it develop during their lifetime or did we hear about it after?
Richard Hite: To my knowledge, it only appears in print in the 1880s with a published history of Andover. Whether it was told verbally during his lifetime or not, no. A couple of historical novels have been written about it as if it was an absolute fact. One of the bad things about historical novels is that so many people are inclined to believe that they are actually [00:51:00] factual, and you know that, but you can take a historical novel and write anything.
He's also said to have been stood well over seven feet tall, for instance. And combination of that and living to be over a hundred years old, even today, extraordinarily tall people have lower life expectancies than the average person, because being that extraordinarily tall is a strain on one's circulatory system. The fact that Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, who died earlier this year at age 88, the fact that he lived that long is nothing short of miraculous. And Thomas Carrier was said to have lived 20 years longer than he did. So it's just a combination of things that are just really not believable.
Now, I know I've strayed away from Martha herself and talked about her family. Whether she was genuinely just a disagreeable [00:52:00] person, which there's evidence to suggest that she was, her children ended up being accused along with her, and they ended up confessing and implicated their mother in the confessions.
But I'm quite certain if there was a rumor of your life being spared if they did confess, she might very well have told them to implicate her, to save them and probably was willing to die herself, as long as they could be spared.
Josh Hutchinson: Now she had an interesting brother-in-law, Roger Toothaker, right? And he talked about using folk magic to actually kill a witch.
Richard Hite: That's true. He said he had taught his daughter how to do it, and his daughter Martha, who was married to a man named Emerson, ended up being arrested as well. But the way that was supposedly done was, and I don't know how they did this, was to procure the urine of a witchcraft [00:53:00] suspect and boiling it, which would supposedly kill the witch. Now, I don't count Roger Toothaker as among the ones who was as part of the Andover Witch Hunt for the simple reason that he had been arrested, and he died in jail before anybody other than Martha was accused from Andover.
But that's true. Her connection to him probably didn't help her case at all. Ultimately, I think the rest of the family being accused was because of her. But her own dubious reputation and her family's dubious reputation. It wasn't helped by the connection to him by any means.
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Wardwell and Roger Toothaker both seemed to be comfortable openly talking about magic. And why would they have felt comfortable talking about that openly before the Witch hunt?
Richard Hite: There was certainly folk magic of various types was often practiced, and generally it didn't [00:54:00] really always aros suspicion. And I think, now Roger Toothaker probably thought that, okay, if he used counter magic to kill a witch, that was maybe a positive thing. Obviously he calculated wrong.
But Samuel Wardwell had apparently done this for years without suspicion. And, in times like this, when suddenly all these accusations start happening, people who are known for things like that suddenly fall under suspicion, whereas maybe they didn't before. I think that was why he started becoming nervous that he would fall under suspicion, but by voicing his suspicions to his brother-in-law, John Ballard, it ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
Sarah Jack: And so likewise, Martha Carrier would've been fine being a little bit turbulent, because the accusations hadn't become such a problem. [00:55:00] Cause I was thinking she has this reputation, possibly she wasn't hesitant to be rude.
Richard Hite: She didn't hesitate to speak her mind, but she wasn't worried about witch trial, not until this all came about. I mean there were previous cases, of course, when only one or two people in an area would be accused, and, in fact, there were people who ultimately were accused in Salem who had fallen under suspicion previously. That was not true of Martha Carrier, but there were certainly others, but some previous examinations, not only did the accused person get off the hook, that person could then sue the accuser and in some cases even won the suit.
Susanna Martin of Amesbury was hanging in 1692, but in 1669 in her home community of Amesbury, she had been accused. Not only did the accusation [00:56:00] not go anywhere, but her husband sued the man who accused her and won the suit. But Susanna Martin was another one who didn't hesitate to speak her mind, but not everybody was accused was like that.
Sarah Jack: When she later was accused, her husband was gone, and it was men accusing her. Am I right?
Richard Hite: Men would file the formal complaints, but one mistaken idea about the whole thing, though, is that in general, the widows were more vulnerable in Salem. That was not the case. In fact, of the 19 who were hanged, see it was 14 women and 5 men. 10 of those women had living husbands, only 4 were widows. There were 45 who were accused in Andover, of which 34 were women . Of those 34, only 4 were widows.
[00:57:00] Then of course, I should also point out one thing that was different about Andover was you had a lot of younger people being accused, because among the other, and I should say females, because some of them were girls, of the 30 others, 12 of them had living husbands, and eight of the other 18 were women and girls under the age of 30 who were not yet married. A lot of them, most of them had living fathers. So it's the idea that women who did not have a man to protect them were more vulnerable than others. The statistics don't bear that out.
Josh Hutchinson: It doesn't seem like the men were able to do much to protect them when they did have the men.
Richard Hite: Not in Salem in 1692. And I should say all of Essex County. There really seems to have been very little that they could do. And in fact there were some, a few men who attempted to, who ended up [00:58:00] being accused themselves. John Proctor in Salem Village, along with Giles Corey, both their wives were accused. They ended up being accused themselves.
Andover had a unique situation in that Samuel Wardwell was accused. And then in the wake of that, his wife, one of his daughters, and a stepdaughter were all accused as well. But in that particular case, the accusation started with a male member of the family. And that was that was not the norm. It would usually be a woman who would be accused first. Really the men really could do little protective. Plenty of the men who signed the petitions in Andover starting in October of 1692 were men who had wives or daughters that had been arrested. And you know that by then it did start to have some effect.
In talking about Thomas Carrier's reputation, I've always found it very interesting that he didn't [00:59:00] sign the petitions, and I can't help but wonder if he was not, if he was shrewd enough to know that maybe his signing a petition, because if he had a bad reputation, might have done more harm than good. Now, granted, his wife Martha, had already been executed. But 4 of his children were still in jail under suspicion. It's a little surprising he was not accused himself. Why he wasn't, I don't know.
Josh Hutchinson: You talked about the confession of Abigail Hobbs and how significant that was. And in the book you mentioned that she said that she gave the devil her permission to afflict. Why was that important?
Richard Hite: That was related to spectral evidence. See, one of the real controversies of the whole thing was the use of spectral evidence. The idea that if someone's specter attacked a person, [01:00:00] whether that was acceptable as evidence of guilt or not. And the reason that was controversial was there were those who believed that the devil could not take one's shape to attack a person without that person's consent, but there were others who thought that the devil could take anyone's shape with or without permission. The court initially ultimately decided that it could only be done with the person's consent, so therefore, spectral evidence was considered acceptable.
Now, when the original court was disbanded in October and a new court was created, that new court did not allow that type of evidence. Increase Mather wrote that it was impossible to know that the devil could not take the shape of an innocent person, and also said it was better for 10 witches to go free than for one innocent person to be put to death, so in the following January, when the new court [01:01:00] began trying people, of the 52 people they brought to the court, only three were convicted. And all those three, two of them actually lived in Andover, and the other one had family ties to Andover. But there were unique things about all three of them that made it more likely that they would be convicted.
I can elaborate on that, if you like. One of 'em was, in fact, Samuel Wardwell's widow, Sarah. Her husband had been hanged soon before that. Most of the confessors describe squeezing puppets or cloth or even their own hands and imagining the people they wish to harm. Sarah Wardwell claimed a very shocking thing. She had a child, who was not quite a year old yet at the time. One of the people she was accused of afflicting was Martha Sprague, who was the Tyler's stepdaughter I spoke of earlier. In her confession, she actually described picking up her own child in an attempt to hurt Martha Sprague and [01:02:00] squeezing her own child, effectively using her own child as a weapon of witchcraft, so to speak. That was quite a shocking thing to say.
The other two, Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post, they were both apparently mentally challenged in some way. Robert Calef, who wrote about the trials three years later, and, of course, people were much less diplomatic then in describing people who were mentally challenged, he described Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post as two of the most senseless and ignorant creatures who could be found.
Now Elizabeth Johnson was one of the extended Ingalls clan. She was the granddaughter, in fact, of the town minister, Francis Dane, whose late wife had been an Ingalls. Francis Dane, in writing his letter condemning the trials and describing his granddaughter, Elizabeth Johnson, who was in her early twenties, stated that she is but simplish at the best. And it's [01:03:00] noteworthy that Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post, both of whom went on to live long lives, neither of them ever married, which was obviously unusual in that era. It's evident from the other younger people who were accused that being accused of witchcraft in 1692, that there's no evidence that it really hurt anybody's marriage prospects later. If anything, it probably hurt the marriage prospects of the accusers more. Elizabeth Johnson, being one of the ones who was convicted, she was the one whose conviction actually remained on the books until just this past July, when she was finally exonerated by an action of the Massachusetts General Assembly.
Sarah Jack: We'd love to hear about your noticing that in your research, and you did note it in your book. Tell us about that, and did you expect her to be exonerated already?
Richard Hite: There were so many things I learned in this course of researching the [01:04:00] book. With the exception of Elizabeth Proctor, who was only ended up surviving because she was pregnant, I didn't know that there were people who had actually been convicted but not executed. But one of the things I wanted to research and with Andover was the aftermath of the witch hunt for people involved, both accusers and accused.
And in reading about it, I learned, of course, that there were people who were convicted, but not hanged. And that even as soon as eight years after started petitioning for exoneration. And those who had been convicted and survived, all except Elizabeth Johnson were ultimately exonerated in one way or another by 1711. Elizabeth Johnson did submit a petition for it, but somehow, some way it just never happened. Now, the fact that she was unmarried, apparently mentally challenged in some way, and probably lived out her life in the care of various relatives. Maybe it just wasn't considered as [01:05:00] pressing for her.
But then of course there were some, there were also, because of the efforts of family members, some of those hanged in 1692 were exonerated at that time. Those hanged who had not been exonerated then, one was exonerated in 1957, the rest in 2001. Elizabeth Johnson was probably missed at that time, because she wasn't hanged.
When I realized, okay, this one person has never been exonerated, all the rest have, and I thought maybe the Massachusetts General Assembly should actually address this. But I'm not a resident of Massachusetts. I live in Rhode Island now. Had I been a resident of Massachusetts, I probably would've just reached out to my own senator or representative. So I started asking around at the North Andover Historical Society about it. One of their boards of trustees thought getting this person exonerated would probably be a good eighth grade civics project.
There [01:06:00] was a retired teacher there named Greg Pasco, and he put me in touch with Carrie LaPierre, who teaches at North Andover Middle School. She was certainly willing to get her class interested in undertaking this project just a week before everything shut down in 2020 because of the pandemic. I went up there one day and addressed her class. And of course it ended up taking, I think two, if not three years worth of her classes to finally get it done. But they took the process from there through their own state Senator Diane DiZoglio.
The initial bill was committed to further study, so to speak, early in 2022. But then these two people from California began working on a documentary on it, which got some more attention, although the documentary has not been released in final form yet. And so they ended up just adding it to the budget bill, which was approved by both chambers of the assembly and was signed by the governor [01:07:00] on July 28th this year. Elizabeth Johnson, after nearly 330 years has finally been exonerated, and media, not only all over the country, but it was reported in news media throughout the world. So all kinds of references to it in other languages, countries all over the world.
Sarah Jack: Thanks so much for doing this for her.
Richard Hite: I'm so glad this class undertook it. I give credit where credit is due. I, yes, I discovered that it hadn't been done. I thought it should be. Once I called their attention to, the teacher's attention to it, and her students, and she did the same, they really took it from there. At least two, maybe three years worth of classes worked toward it by collecting signatures, writing their own letters to members of the committee. I wrote letters to the committees myself, how much do they care what a Rhode Island resident has to say about something? It's not like I can vote for or [01:08:00] against any of 'em, but I'm just so glad that a away was found to get around the fact that I don't live in Massachusetts and to get that many people involved, and I'm just so happy for these students. It's going to be something that they'll remember their involvement in. This is gonna be something they'll remember for the rest of their lives, and if it spurs some of them own to take up other worthy causes in the future, so much the better.
Josh Hutchinson: We're actually working on a project to exonerate the accused in the state of Connecticut, and we're hoping to follow suit. There's a middle school class that's interested in doing the same thing.
Richard Hite: Yes, I've been reading about that, and I very much hope that happens. Although of course now everybody associated with the Salem Witch Hunt has been exonerated, but yet there were witchcraft trials earlier in Massachusetts, and with some people convicted and hanged, I don't know if [01:09:00] those people have ever been exonerated or not.
Josh Hutchinson: We've looked at it, and there's no indication that they ever were, those other five individuals from Massachusetts.
Richard Hite: And I don't recall all, I don't recall all their names. I know Alice Jones was the first one was hanged on Boston Common in 1648. The last one was Goody Glover, whose first name, as far as I know, is lost to history in 1688. There was one named Elizabeth Morse in Newbury, who like Elizabeth Johnson was convicted but for some reason never hanged. I also know that a few others were hanged in Massachusetts prior to 1692, but I don't recall their names at the top of my head. The source I know of I can refer to for that is John Demos's work from the early 1970s called Entertaining Satan, because that work is totally focused on the [01:10:00] New England witch trials, apart from the events in Salem.
Josh Hutchinson: That's what we've used primarily to gather the names of the New England accused. And there were a total of five in Massachusetts before Salem and 11 hanged in Connecticut.
Now here's Sarah with an important update.
Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration News. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, an organized effort for the state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony has been led by retired police officer Tony Grego, author Beth Caruso, descendant and advocate Sarah Jack, and advocates Mary Bingham and Joshua Hutchinson.
After years of educating Connecticut residents locally and online, Tony and Beth of the CT Witch Memorial joined up with fellow advocates Sarah, Mary, and Joshua, together with state representative Jane Garibay. The exoneration project now includes [01:11:00] many witch trial victim descendants and other advocates, both in the state of Connecticut and countrywide. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project now brings an exoneration bill to the Judiciary Committee for the 2023 winter session of Connecticut's General Assembly.
Did you know this podcast was born from this exoneration effort? It was initially created as a social and educational tool to amplify and project an overlooked history. This obscure history needed to be offered in a package that educated the state, country, and the world about the known individuals that were executed by a court of law in New England's Connecticut Colony for witchcraft crimes. This colony hanged the first accused witch in the American colonies in 1647. Her name is Alice Young. She had one daughter. Her one daughter, Alice Young Beamon had eight children. She has many, many descendants, but no family association for her descendants. Her story is relatively unknown by even Connecticut residents.
We are now at the [01:12:00] winter session of 2023, getting ready to testify for an exoneration bill, asking for the exoneration of Alice Young, america's first executed witch, along with the other known accused witches of Connecticut colony. Dozens of individuals were accused, outcast from their lives, family and community, or killed by the courts. Those convicted of witchcraft crimes found themselves proven guilty by spectral evidence. It was acceptable to take their lives based on unseen or unexplained misfortune, sickness, and unexplained or sudden deaths of family and neighbors. Now you are aware of the history.
Have you been tuned into our robust lineup of episodes teaching about Alice Young and the other victims, as well as Connecticut Colony's governor, John Winthrop, Jr.'s, influence on the trials? If you haven't, when you download those episodes now, you'll learn so much and be able to share more about the Connecticut witch trial history.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is asking the judiciary committee to vote yes on this exoneration bill. The [01:13:00] Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration project is asking you to take action with us by writing letters to the legislature. You can find out more by going to our Discord community through the link in the show notes.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch, to finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor's stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt, and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah for educating us on real world events occurring as we speak.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe to Thou Shalt [01:14:00] Not Suffer wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all your friends and family and colleagues and everybody who you see about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Continue to support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
This is the Rebecca Towne Nurse podcast episode that we have all been waiting for. We discuss the monumental story of her life and the Salem witch trials with historian and Danvers native Dan Gagnon. Learn about the unique layers of this infamous witch hunt from the author of Rebecca’s biography, A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. We address the importance of victim memorials and exonerations of innocent accused witches. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to the latest episode of Thou Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Dan Gagnon, author of A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse, who happens to be my 10th great-grandaunt.
Sarah Jack: And she is my ninth great-grandmother, a history that I've known since the nineties when I was a high schooler, and this episode was very meaningful to me. Getting to read Dan's [00:01:00] biography on her, and then the conversation that we have about the details of her story is really great.
Josh Hutchinson: I learned about my connections to the Salem Witch trials on my first ever visit to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, which is one of the places where Dan spends his time as a tour guide, something he first did when he himself was in high school. I was on a high school trip with my family and went to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead and to the replica meeting house. Saw the Rebecca Nurse Memorial and the memorial to those people who signed the petition in defense of her and saw the cemetery where her body's believed to rest and learned that my Hutchinson family was involved in the witch [00:02:00] trials. Later on, I learned that Rebecca Nurse was my grandaunt through her sister, Mary, who also suffered from the Salem Witch Trials and is another of Sarah's grandmothers.
Sarah Jack: She is. She is my ninth great grandmother also. I learned of that connection more recently, in the last five years. Their grandchildren married.
Josh Hutchinson: Ah, also in recent years, I've learned that my ancestor, Joseph Hutchinson, was a friend of the Nurse family, a neighbor to them. He went around with them when they were fighting with the minister after the witch-hunt, because the minister insisted that they still go to his church, though he had done them wrong. My ancestor, Joseph, [00:03:00] accompanied them as a witness to the meetings between Nurse's family and Minister Parris.
One of the things that we learn in Dan's book is just how supportive Rebecca's family was. Her children, her sons and daughters-in-law, they all had her back. Even years after the witch-hunt, they never wavered. They never backed down. They knew she was innocent, and they supported her forever.
Sarah Jack: Dan's biography gives so much details on what life was like for them prior to the witch trials, what roles Francis had in the community, how hardworking they were, what it took for those families in that community to build Salem Village.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:04:00] One of the things Dan does well in the book is to clear up a lot of the misconceptions about why Rebecca was accused. So you'll enjoy reading about that and getting a fuller picture of Rebecca's life, from her baptism in Great Yarmouth, England, right up through the trials and her unfortunate execution. Learn about the support of her descendants and how they've been able to keep her memory alive, as well.
Sarah Jack: What has been done for her, as far as her story being known, is remarkable. What Dan has done for her and her descendants, I greatly appreciate it, and I know many people do. One of the things that Rebecca is recorded as saying is that she would like the world [00:05:00] to know of her innocency, and I see that we do, and I think that is a big deal.
Josh Hutchinson: The memory of her innocency has reached so many people. She's one of the best known of the accused. Rebecca's memory is cherished. She's a beloved figure. She's a hero to many. She stood her ground, never confessed to something that she didn't do, that she couldn't have done.
She was an older woman at the time, and she truly wondered what she had done to bring the accusations upon her herself, what sin there was in her life. That's what kind of person she was. She didn't blame the accusers. She looked inward to try and resolve the issue within [00:06:00] herself but couldn't find what transgression she had done to deserve any of that, and she hadn't. Truth is she hadn't done a single thing to merit any of what was brought upon her.
Sarah Jack: It's quite terrible to read what she went through, starting with the accusations, through the examination and the trial. The biography really gives you an idea of how harmful spectral evidence was to these victims. And with Rebecca's story, it's unbelievable how wild it got, how harmful and evil they portrayed her to be, and she stood there and listened to all of that.
Josh Hutchinson: She stood up for herself. Her family stood up for her. What happened to her was[00:07:00] grievous, was a terrible miscarriage of justice, but she stood her ground and maintained her innocency and wanted future generations, the world, to know that innocent people were being killed at Salem.
And you learn a lot about her life before the trials from Dan's book, she wasn't perfect, but she was pretty great. In the trials themselves, in many of the cases, there were multiple witnesses coming forward saying that they had had arguments with the accused over this and that. But with Rebecca, you get one single instance, and it's a stretch, that she was angry that somebody's pigs had broken into her yard and damaged her [00:08:00] garden, her crops, and that was apparently the one time that she ever got angry that is recorded.
She was a church member for many years. You'll learn about that from Dan. And she truly was astonished when she was accused. And I know her family's minds must have just been blown. Their whole world must have come collapsing around them. Everything that they thought they knew was suddenly flipped on its head, but they never wavered in their loyalty to her. They never questioned her innocence. They always brought forward in many petitions and letters and through their prolonged struggle with the minister after the trials. Reverend Samuel Parris really wanted her family to come to his church even after he had done them such a terrible wrong[00:09:00] by being one of the leaders of the accusers, in general, in starting the Salem Witch Trials. But that's where I learned that my ancestor had got involved and come along with the Nurse family to witness their encounters with the minister post-witch-hunt.
We really enjoyed our conversation with Dan, and we know you will, too.
Sarah Jack: You will probably listen to it at least twice.
Josh Hutchinson: Maybe three times.
Sarah Jack: Maybe.
I'd like to introduce Dan Gagnon, the author of A Salem Witch: the Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the Towne family?
Dan Gagnon: The Towne family is one of these first families here that settled the North Shore of Massachusetts, are are significant in the witch-hunt and significant in really the settling of Massachusetts as a whole. [00:10:00] And currently they have a big organization of descendants, so they're very, a very proud family.
But originally our one who came from England, and we think around 1635, roughly, we don't have the paperwork that we wish that we had to narrow it down further. And they leave England fleeing persecution, strife, and a lot of disputes having to do with their Puritan religion that they do not see eye-to-eye with the established Church of England, which, on the one hand is a religious issue, but after the Reformation, when the King of England separated from the Catholic Church, he put himself in charge of the Church of England. So if you disagree with them, it's also a political issue, which really leads to this persecution.
Sarah Jack: And what do we need to know about the sisters?
Dan Gagnon: So in terms of the witch-hunt in [00:11:00] 1692, there's three women from the Towne family who play key roles. The first is Rebecca Towne, Rebecca Nurse. We have Mary Towne, Mary Easty, and Sarah Towne, who becomes Sarah Cloyce, who has married more than once. So we've Edmunds in there, as well.
And with the three of them, they will settle with their parents and their other siblings in the Northfields of Salem. And really what's interesting, I find, is they seem to have reasonably ordinary lives for these first settlers. There's nothing that leaps out as being bizarre, strange, highly unusual, and I think they're interesting cases, therefore. They seem like three regular people, regular settlers here.
But when the witch-hunt breaks out, Rebecca Nurse is going to be accused and later executed. Mary Easty will be accused and later executed, and Sarah Cloyce will be accused. And really the witch-hunt ends, or at least the court stops [00:12:00] sitting before her time comes. But we have one family that has a lot of suffering in these three women. And of course the suffering affects their families too.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the notion that their mother was an accused witch?
Dan Gagnon: That is an interesting point. So in many things that I've read over the years, there's been this reference to their mother, Joanna Blessing, Joanna Towne, being previously accused of witchcraft, as a way to try to explain then the three sisters being accused of witchcraft.
There is no record that has been found from the time she was allegedly accused a couple decades before the witch-hunt saying that she actually was accused a couple decades before the witch-hunt. Where this comes up is in testimony in 1692. It's mentioned by the [00:13:00] accusers, including Ann Putnam and family, that this is somehow an explanation for their accusation.
One of Ann Putnam's family members tells the court that he had repeated a rumor he had heard about the three Towne sisters' mother, and afterwards his young child begins to be unwell, seriously ill, and he thinks this retribution from these three Towne sisters for spreading this, what he claims is information, but I would think is misinformation. But in his record, he never says what the rumor was. He just says he said something that he knew of their mother, and it's Ann Putnam who, in a different document, says he was referencing the fact that their mother was accused of witchcraft. So she's the one who's, to us, putting together, whether or not we believe her, as to what he probably said. [00:14:00] Both no documentation from the time and knowing the wild and crazy things that Ann Putnam Sr will say throughout the witch-hunt, I would not give that more credibility than any of these other wild accusations, and especially because no one else specifically says that accusation happened. It's a one-off, and it's from someone who we would not consider a very reliable source as to the truth.
Sarah Jack: I'm really excited that you covered a lot, all of this stuff in your book, and I feel like we're in a time right now where all of these pieces that have traveled through the decades, the misconceptions, we're starting to sort through them and be more familiar with who said what in the records. And I feel like your book was so timely, and I'm really glad that we get to talk about the stuff with you today.
I'm gonna move to Reverend Parris. I was wondering why did he feel besieged [00:15:00] by Judases and devils before the hunt, and why did it influence his preaching so much?
Dan Gagnon: Reverend Parris is such a key, interesting figure here, and I would also consider him to be one that's been, I don't know if misunderstood is the term, or that many people have understood him differently. When you see programs on television that might be on the more sensational side. He's the easy person to make the, quote, "bad guy," of this story that people will claim things about him as orchestrating this whole thing from the start, which I do not think there is evidence. Oh, and I think it actually really seems to catch him off guard when his daughter and niece begin to be afflicted and apparently unwell, as it appeared then.
With him feeling besieged, we get this from his collection of sermons, which is a wonderful source that kind of gives us a sense on [00:16:00] what, like in terms of mood, like what the temperature is in the community, what they would've heard each Sunday. He tends to preach darker sermons. This new church has been formally established, and he's trying to get other people to join, to baptize their children. Even if they're attending, they might not be joined as part of the congregation. And I think as other historians have looked at this, there's been this assumption that Reverend Parris was immediately controversial that I don't quite see. I see as time goes on, not everyone is up to date on their ministry taxes to support him and things like that. With prior ministers, that does seem like a sign of discontent. With him, it's not as significant in terms of the numbers of people, and other historians have looked into this, such as like Marilynne Roach, and noting that that's not actually as significant, [00:17:00] given that things like that happened in other communities, people not paying their taxes.
With Reverend Parris, it really appears to be just those last couple months before the witch-hunt when he comes into conflict with the village, really over the ownership of the parsonage is what I saw, reading the documents as the turning point. But prior to that, it does seem as though he's finally brought stability to a congregation that desperately needed some stability after the first few ministers not working out.
And when I mentioned the parsonage, the issue is the ownership, that something's discovered in the village record book that seems to imply the village voted to give the parsonage to Parris after they had signed a contract with him not doing that. And this confusion, this lack of understanding, of how that got in the book as if a town meeting had decided that, but in a New England town meeting, every voter is invited, and of all these [00:18:00] people had never heard of it. You can't have a secret town meeting. So when they get mad and riled up about this in the fall of 1691, it seems righteously so, and that is really the fracture. It it's more of a short term issue, not long term, since he got there in 1689.
Josh Hutchinson: I got the idea from your book that a lot of what we believe about factionalism in Salem Village wasn't really true, particularly about the role of the different village committees. Could you explain what the village committee was and what the other committees were responsible for?
Dan Gagnon: So this theory of factionalism, as put forward around 1970 by Boyer and Nissenbaum, has the village split among, according to the theory, two factions, one in the west, led by the Putnam family, that's more agrarian, more wanting independence for Salem Village, and one in the east, allegedly led by the Porters, who were more tied to [00:19:00] downtown Salem Town at that time. And then there's a claim that this somehow explains the accusations.
The village committee is like the selectmen of a town in New England. It's not a town, so you can't call 'em that. And what they do is they're the executive. In a New England town, the selectmen serve in place of a mayor. You have five people instead of one doing that role.
And their job is to call town meetings in the village. They set the agenda, and they're responsible for making sure that the tax is collected as the executive there. With their role, we've seen in the years before the witch-hunt, different village committees elected, and one will admit from the records, it seems interesting that they don't necessarily all seem to last the same amount of time or have the same length of a term, which I quite [00:20:00] honestly cannot entirely explain. It's not like they're elected every January 1st or something like that. But with the committee, it had been thought previously that right before the witch-hunt, in that fall of 1691, a committee that was, quote, "pro-Parris" was replaced by a committee that was, quote, "anti-Parris" and that was evidence of factionalism.
This doesn't really seem to bear out, in that the evidence used to claim that new committee is anti-Parris comes from after the witch-hunt. They only became anti-Parris because of the witch-hunt. They were not anti-Parris before the witch-hunt. So that is not a good way to characterize them. What we do see is the people chosen are those who are involved in examining the village record book, it [00:21:00] appears those who are the leaders of the group that is suddenly very angry about the parsonage public land being given to a private individual. But, for example, Francis Nurse on the Village Committee had been on one of the committees earlier, a special committee that was assigned to negotiate with Reverend Parris, and that he apparently supports Reverend Parris. Rebecca Nurse's son-in-law, John Tarbell, was on another committee that decides to hire Reverend Parris, and so they seem to be his supporters in 1689. I would not label it as an anti-Parris committee, though afterwards some of them end up being anti-Parris, but they were not at that moment in time.
Sarah Jack: Why wouldn't they give him his pay and his wood so much so that he's preaching about it, disgusted about it, it appears? Why did that happen?
Dan Gagnon: With Parris, once this issue, their dispute about the parsonage land [00:22:00] comes up, we have records in the Village Church record book, and then we have the village, like the village government record book. And the church record book is a better source, in that it's clearly in chronological order, and we understand what develops. But by looking at the two together, as well as a later deposition there, we see Parris being challenged over this alleged vote. Historians have viewed this in different ways, in terms of basically where did it leave off before the witch-hunt started?
I, in my reading of this, by putting documents in the order that logically to me seems to make sense, which is different than how, for example, Boyer and Nissenbaum in about 1970 had looked at this, really shows that [00:23:00] public outcry against Parris leading up to a town meeting in early December 1691. We have a deposition describing this town meeting, and it's signed by all of the people who were on the depositions from years later, but it's signed by the people who are on the Village committee in 1691 except Francis Nurse, because he just had passed away of old age by the time that document was written. So I wouldn't read into that any lack of support. He's simply not there to sign the piece of paper. And what they testified in court years later is that there is this town meeting, Nathaniel Putnam is the moderator, and they're talking about Parris's contract, canceling his contract.
I see that happening that year. It logically fits with the buildup we see at meetings at the church in the Village Church record book, clearly everything escalating and Reverend Parris pointing out he's afraid that the village may be taking a [00:24:00] step like this. We see at that moment, At this town meeting in that early December of 1691, outraged to the point that they invite Reverend Parris to the town meeting. Apparently, he didn't seemingly normally attend town meetings. I He could have, he lived there. But he's not at this town meeting, which is a little interesting. And when this topic of his contract comes up, they send someone to get him, would've been like a couple minutes down the road from the parsonage to the meeting house.
So they get him to come to this town meeting, and with the disputes presented as the moderator of the town meeting, Nathaniel Putnam announces basically that there is no longer a contract between the two, as it had been broken. This is a weird situation to be in, and I've described it before as him being basically like halfway fired.
What it means is his contract's canceled, and he won't get paid. But he still has a job. What [00:25:00] is a job if you're not getting paid? And it's only the core members of the village church that can fire him, and they don't. So he continues as the minister. He continues preaching, but he is outta luck in terms of being compensated that winter.
And here we get in the church book, him writing over and over, "I ask the members for firewood." He's desperate, because in that time, if you suddenly stop getting paid in December, and he doesn't really have a giant farm, he doesn't have a way to support himself, he relied on that salary. That family is in for a pretty horribly tough winter, and without outside help might not have enough food and firewood to make it through. .
Josh Hutchinson: When the witch trials started, his daughter and niece reported that they were afflicted, and then later on other people became afflicted, allegedly. What caused those afflictions?
Dan Gagnon: This here is probably like the million dollar question of [00:26:00] the witch trials, I would say, and it is an important one. It is one that we can answer, at least in part, or mostly. In terms of those who will eventually claim to be afflicted or appear to be afflicted, we're gonna end up with a couple dozen, and each of them is unique as to why they would be doing this.
But to start with the two you mentioned, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, living in the parsonage with Reverend Parris, Betty's nine, Abigail's eleven, and that winter at the beginning of 1692, they have these fits. They're screaming, yelling, crawling under furniture, walking around on all fours, saying they see these specters, these images, weird shapes, colored animals, very bizarre, and to someone who saw this, presumably really frightening and strange.
With them as the first two, I would think that we have an example of a [00:27:00] psychological cause here, and there's other historians who have written really well on this. I would say that one that I found to be a good, description of this potential would be in Dr. Emerson Baker's book. That to me, I would say, is what I read that got me down this track, as I started to then look into these possibilities, look into these potential instances and disorders that would cause this. That was what first caught my attention. And looking into other examples, cuz there are other examples, even some quite recently, I guess this decade in the 2010s, so almost this decade, within 10 years, we'll say that frightening things like this have happened. And not only have they happened, but they've spread among people, which to me, and I think to most readers, is the part that's scary and confusing. What we see in the Parris household is these two young girls would've seen their parents under a lot of stress, would've [00:28:00] seen the family under stress.
I'm sure that Reverend and Mrs. Parris are constantly talking about," we might not have enough food to last the winter." They're gonna hear this and be worried. And so we could see some sort of manifestation of anxiety that then the two of them in this house in the winter kind of builds and builds. With Abigail Williams being Reverend Parris's, quote "niece," just being some sort of female relative, her background isn't quite as known.
And we will see that with the people who it spreads to next, who live across Salem Village and will be teenage young women, women in their young twenties. Many of them had some sort of traumatic incident in their past that would set them as some prime candidates for post-traumatic stress, which would lead to that maybe next. But Abigail Williams, not really knowing a ton about her background, that could have been the case with her. Why isn't she living with her parents? Why is she living with Reverend Parris? Did something happen to [00:29:00] them? So there's an open-ended possibility, but we don't know. We can't really come to a conclusion there.
With the others, we're gonna see people, some of these young women who had lost parents, had seen them killed, and once they had witnessed, this may have awoken some of that traumatic stress. As it goes on, though, I don't think that explains everything. In part, I said each person is their own case. And I would say as time goes on in Rebecca Nurse's case, as in like the accusations against Nurse, but then especially when we get to that summer, when we get away from the winter into the summer of 1692, there are cases of just fraud, fraud and the way that it's done, it means that somebody has to be lying.
The example I note that I really think is a key moment is with Ann Putnam Jr. After Rebecca Nurse has been arrested, she, according to her uncle, one of the deacons of the church, he [00:30:00] submits records to the court saying that Ann Putnam had chain marks on her, that she had been like whipped by one of these specters, these ghostly images, and he says that she came from the other room, has like marks on her arm, and that he's seen them and there's someone, another adult there as well.
That's not all in your mind then. We have two possibilities. He's lying under oath to the court, I don't think we necessarily have evidence to prove that, or he actually did see rings on her arm and he thinks he's telling the truth, which means that either Ann Putnam Jr or somebody else pressed something to her arm to fool him. But either way it's a lie, and it's fraud. And that's relatively early on.
Sarah Jack: I'm gonna ask about Rebecca getting accused. Can you clear up the misconceptions about why?
Dan Gagnon: I'm happy you phrased it that way, in that she [00:31:00] does not fit the typical mold, and by the typical mold or the attributes that would likely get one accused of a witch. When we describe them, you do have to keep in mind this is the Puritan perspective. This is this is not my categorization.
This is what they viewed at the time would likely get you accused of witchcraft, and many historians have gone through demographics of those accused of witchcraft in colonial New England and I'm sure other witch-hunts as well. But with New England, we have cases that are pretty well documented, really just one century period of time, and so it's really ripe for study and it's wonderful what other previous historians have done. One of the best I think is Carol Karlsen's book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, describing how this is, of course, primarily a story of women, unfortunately being accused of witchcraft, though with Salem we have both.
Now, Rebecca Nurse is a woman, and that is the only demographic trait about her that would put her in a higher risk [00:32:00] category of being accused of witchcraft. Other things that could do that could be a person who gets into a lot of disputes with their family. We don't have any evidence of this, and out of all the people accused, her family goes the greatest distance to support her. No, that doesn't seem true.
People in general, but especially women who may have had different views and controversies with the local religious authorities, their minister, their congregation. She's a covenant member of the church in Salem. Very few of the people who show up every Sunday attained that status. It's really the highest status a woman could get in the Puritan congregation. And you had to be voted in by the other members who, in the short version, had to believe that you were probably going to heaven. So this is really like the opposite of having controversy or disputes with your church. She is, seems entirely on board and is a high level member.
Other things [00:33:00] could be coming to control land. 17th century New England women couldn't own land, and so how they could come to control land was if their husband died, or especially if their husband died and they didn't have any children. That's not true of Rebecca. Francis nurse is alive. She has eight children, not likely.
Things that Puritans in general look down upon could be those who were less well off, poor. In this point, I really come to Sarah Good, one of the first three women accused, who was not exactly homeless but had lived with various people over the time, had begged for goods and things. She would fall into that category. So we don't really see this fit.
And with the, when I mentioned the coming into land one, there's other things like financial jealousy that could lead one to be accused, whether they were a woman or a man. And we don't see that with the Nurses. Frequently in debt, behind in their taxes, they have what is [00:34:00] really like the world's sweetest deal of a mortgage and still cannot make those small annual payments on time, so they're not a candidate for financial envy.
Josh Hutchinson: Did Topsfield land dispute or her other land dispute about her property have anything to do with her accusation?
Dan Gagnon: The land dispute or land as an issue overall is seemingly one of the oldest theories, one of one of the longest lived. There's different like varieties or iterations of the theory. Some people will ask me, when I do walking tours of sites in Salem Village, "oh, it was all about taking, right? It was all a scheme. The people were accused to steal their farms." And there is no truth to this.
With Nurse specifically, as you ask, there's an instance where the Nurse family gets into a dispute with the Endicott family. These are the descendants of John Endicott, early governor of [00:35:00] Massachusetts. The Endicotts had a large farm, the Orchard Farm, that John Endicott had established. By this point, it's later generations living there, and this dispute actually predates the nurse family. It's the previous owner, Reverend Allen of Boston, who got into this dispute. He gets into this dispute with Zerubbabel Endicott, who's a doctor. We have his journal of recipes for medicine, I guess. It's some weird stuff like cat blood, and it's, there's weird stuff there. But he's a doctor, in theory.
And what happens is Reverend Allen comes to ownership of the Nurse farm right next door to his through a, there's a marriage. Reverend Allen's wife had inherited this land from an Endicott who she'd been married to at first. Then she marries Allen. Tries to transfer the land to them. As I mentioned previously, women couldn't own land, so it couldn't [00:36:00] pass through her hands to another person.
This is complicated. So in the Endicott family, I guess what I mean is they do think they have a strong claim to this. They will try to sue Allen, but then this happens after his wife passed away and it's left to him. But could it be left to him? This is the legal question, and there'll be a lot of disputes there.
Allen will then lease it to another person, Sanford, for a little while, and Sanford basically gives up after a short amount of time, cuz Endicott thinks he owns the whole farm. He comes into an issue with Nathaniel Putnam, who lives to the north of the Nurse family farm. There's a few acres there, and it's a mess.
Next, the Nurse family comes along into what already seems like a complicated situation, and it's safer for them, though, than what happened to Sanford. Allen has given up [00:37:00] on that land, a couple acres of Nathaniel Putnam. He's out of the picture. This is not a problem anymore. And when he will sell this to the Nurse family, a hundred percent mortgaged, but it is a sale, it's not a lease. When he sells it to the Nurse family, he promises in that agreement to defend title of the land. So for Francis Nurse and Rebecca, this is a good deal, really low annual mortgage payments, big farm. They have adult children to help farm this. It's a great opportunity, and if anybody starts complaining about who owns it, that's Allen's problem. It's not their problem.
Now, obviously in a practical matter, it is their problem, but at least not legally. And with these disputes there, there's various iterations that really seem like they're drowning in court cases. There's suits, countersuits. Then somebody wins and the other side doesn't like it, so they [00:38:00] appeal.
One that comes in particular is a trespass suit. The important part is Francis Nurse is sued for trespass in a field that he believes to be his. Okay is he trespassing or not? That depends on who owns the land. And so that's really just a venue to try to reopen this land dispute that had already been settled several times.
It really involves a strip of land with firewood, in particular the border on the Nurse farm and the Endicott farm. But in theory, there's a claim to the whole farm even by the Endicotts. We know that this doesn't lead to the accusation against Nurse, in that Zerubbable, the Endicott who was really getting into this with Allen and Francis Nurse, is not around, that he's died at that point in time. In fact, he had launched an appeal of one of the court cases, and he is too ill to actually make the appeal. And then he had died. So it's a son, Samuel, [00:39:00] who's the Endicott now living next to the nurse family. And when Rebecca Nurse is accused of witchcraft he will defend her. He will sign the petition in support of her. Maybe they weren't best friends, but he believed she was innocent enough that he would look past the fact that maybe their families hadn't been best friends, and he does not accuse her or nobody else. So that, to me, limits that.
It was Nathaniel Putnam. Again, in some strict technical sense, there was still those couple acres at issue that was not Francis's problem, that was Reverend Allen living in Boston. And Nathaniel Putnam also will defend Rebecca Nurse when she's accused of witchcraft. So I can't really see a way that plays in.
Sarah Jack: What effect did the Devil Pact, as a part of the 1604 Witchcraft Act, have on witch-hunting?
Dan Gagnon: Good legal question. I like it. So with the Witchcraft Act of 1604, we get all the way back to England. We get to King James of King James Bible fame, [00:40:00] and oh, as of course, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is a quote from the King James Bible. I don't even need to say that. I should know my audience well.
So with this act, there's an idea that the definition of witchcraft has changed at that point. Now, this is before Rebecca Nurse is born. She's not born until 1621. So this is already, will be established by this point in time. This is the law that they appear to be going under in, in 1692.
Previously witchcraft was more difficult to prove. I don't really want to use, I mean that in a legal sense, which we're not actually proving witchcraft here, but legally to prove that one had to have used witchcraft, for example, in an earlier iteration of the law, to actually kill somebody, in order for that to be legally witchcraft. And you had to prove. That's a high bar, and we know it's impossible, but from the beliefs in that day and age, highly unlikely to meet that bar.
And [00:41:00] when King James changes it to making a pact with the Devil, you had to look for kind of secondary evidence. You can't call the Devil to the witness stand. You don't actually have the contract to present to the court. And so they would try to find roundabout, peripheral things that could prove that had happened, which is really loose and not hard evidence. And this change will make it easier to prosecute someone for witchcraft.
King James was really fascinated with this stuff. He writes his book Demonology. He really thinks this is fascinating and goes to great lengths in Scotland, before he becomes King of England, when he is King of Scotland, to crack down on what he seems to believe is real. Like he seems to really believe in the witchcraft and will be involved in torturing people to get confessions and really horrible things. But that change really does open the door to what we see in Salem. And had it not happened, legally, really, [00:42:00] I'm racking my brain to think of any of the accusations that could have fit under previous versions of the law.
I can't in this moment, think of one that they would've had to have been immediately been a murder, and somebody would've been in to it through witchcraft. It could not have started the way that it does in Salem. It could not have continued, and it could not have spread to 200 people. It would've had to been one very specific accusation.
No, the Salem Witch-Hunt really couldn't have happened without this change.
Josh Hutchinson: Another thing that seemed to change with the Salem Witch-Hunt, they didn't require the accusers to post a bond when they made their complaints. Why did they waive the bond?
Dan Gagnon: So typically if one files a complaint against somebody for a capital crime, basically the colony of Massachusetts didn't want frivolous accusations of any large [00:43:00] crime, and so they made you put your money where your mouth is and put out a bond that you would follow through on this charge as that person would be arrested and sent through the court process.
It's not really clear, and I have never found a good explanation of why, and those from the first accusations on, people in Salem Village would go to Salem, meet with the two local magistrates, the local judges, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, whose house still exists as The Witch House in Salem, which is a wonderful 17th century home, and they weren't asked for money. They just filed the complaints. I cannot explain this. It is very unusual. It doesn't fit with what the law appears to be and definitely doesn't fit with prior precedence. But we see in effect, if you can make an accusation no strings attached, that'll lead to a lot more accusations [00:44:00] than you can only make an accusation if you lay out a certain number of pounds as a like surety here. So that will definitely lead to this increasing, which Salem being unique from other witch-hunts in a lot of ways, is really unique with just the sheer number of people accused.
Prior witchcraft accusations were just one people, two people. I will say I listened the other day to both of you talking to Malcolm Gaskill there, and in that, the Springfield, Massachusetts case and thought that was fascinating. But to use that as an example, there's not 200 people accused. It's small scale. Other New England witch-hunts were one or just a few people. Salem getting us to about 200 probably is because it was easier to make an accusation.
So spectral evidence is not hard evidence that can be produced in court. As was mentioned with the question about the 1604 act, when it changes to somebody being able to be accused for having a pact with the Devil, lowering the [00:45:00] threshold of an accusation, and what can you submit as evidence? If you claimed you saw somebody's specter, which would be like the ghostly image of somebody hurting you, the belief is one can only make a specter if they had signed that pact with the devil.
So this spectral evidence is meant to tie them to having made a pact with the devil. The problem is pretty straightforward in that, okay, if I say that I see the specter of somebody and nobody else can see it, you just have to take my word for it. Do you believe me or not? And so it just becomes one person's word against another. You can't prove it, which back to the number of people accused, really makes it easier to accuse people.
And it's hard to refute. If somebody says they see their specter, and it seems like people are believing them, how do [00:46:00] you disprove it? You can't. You can say, " I wasn't there. I was at home." Yeah, okay, but the belief is you can send your specter somewhere you aren't. So even if you have an alibi, it doesn't matter. Alibis don't work. With Nurse, for example, she is home sick in bed. She says she's sick in bed for eight or nine days prior to being accused. People said they'd seen her specter. Nurse has an alibi. She's been home sick. Her family can tell you this. Neighbors can tell you this, but it doesn't matter. Because you can't have an alibi with that. And so it's an accusation that can't be disproved or really refuted. Well, from our point of view, because it shouldn't be believed in the first place. But if it is believed you, you can't get out from under it.
Sarah Jack: And I was thinking as you read through Rebecca's experience, that was, she was everywhere causing harm, and so over and over she was hearing them say, yes, she had the Devil pact, and she was causing harm. That's a gut punch. [00:47:00] Every time every new person had spectral evidence against her, it was that.
Josh Hutchinson: On the subject of taking their word for it, a lot of people whose word they were taking were children. Ordinary for them to take the word of children in court?
Dan Gagnon: No. Now, socially, the Puritans had a different view of children than we do. They, for example, I described some of them as being teenagers. That word didn't exist. It doesn't exist until the mid 20th century. It's one of those 1950s words, "those teenagers," and that whole concept of categorizing people didn't really exist.
And so this, I think, is socially hard for us to kind of put ourselves in their shoes or try, because even basic understandings of like stages of human life and social development aren't really at all understood. With children, if one reads things written by like Cotton [00:48:00] Mather and such, there seems to be this belief that children have been, like less corrupted by the world than adults, which would lead one to maybe actually believe they're more likely to speak the truth.
Now, in the 21st century, we would not necessarily think this, that, there might be like, little white lies all the time with kids. I teach teenagers. I understand this well, so our view on that is different. And in terms of their evidence in court, no, you had to be a certain age, you had to be in your late teens or older to be legally admitted as evidence.
And this is not followed in 1692. Just like we noted about requiring posting of a bond in order to make an accusation, we have another irregularity. With the first accusers, we have Betty Parris who's nine, Abigail Williams, who's eleven, Ann Putnam Jr who is just on the cusp of being a preteen and a [00:49:00] teenager, and we'll have other teenagers or people in the early twenties, but they shouldn't have been allowed to really submit and swear to evidence at trial.
And as part of that, what I note as being important in Nurse's case is when not Ann Putnam Jr., who seems to be the first person to have named Rebecca Nurse, but her mother, Ann Putnam Sr., who is, we believe, in her mid thirties, when she joins the accusation, that makes it different, because there's a full-fledged adult now making the same accusations, and legally that's important. That's also why, in terms of paperwork and sources, the complaints with John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin early on against people in Salem Village, it's not written by Betty Parris. It's not written by Abigail Williams. They're all written by adults. An adult [00:50:00] had to make the accusation. Also, they're all written by their male family members, cuz they're the ones more likely to know how to write. So I, there is like a practical aspect of that. But there is an age aspect ,that no, they didn't have children testifying in capital cases regularly.
Sarah Jack: What is, you mentioned Ann Sr, which has me thinking about the fraud again, the possibility of fraud. And did the accused people claim fraud was happening?
Dan Gagnon: Yes, as time goes on. At first with Rebecca Nurse being accused early on, she doesn't openly say that this is a lie. Which is, in a way, is almost probably smart, because it was so believed by the community that probably would've just soured her public hearing against her. She says it's not true, but she doesn't go to the point of saying they're intentionally, [00:51:00] falsely accusing her. Her words as you go through seem to be more along the lines of, "this is a misunderstanding," not, "why are you doing this to me intentionally?"
As time goes on, more and more of the accusers will be called out for intentional acts. Like at Nurse's trial in June, we have an example of Sarah Bibber, a middle-aged woman, a fully-grown adult, again, to differentiate from some of those younger accusers in, and we discussed a moment ago who, at her trial, at Nurse's trial is present, as seemingly all of her accusers are, except maybe Mrs. Ann Putnam, which is interesting, and Sarah Bibber does, is, everyone in the room sees her point at somewhere in the room and say there's Nurse's [00:52:00] specter. Meanwhile, Rebecca Nurse is up front, and everybody could see where she actually is, but point somewhere and see what she claims is her specter, scream, clutch her leg, and pull out a pin. And she's bleeding, and she says, "Nurse's specter just did that. See, here's the pin, here's the blood that I was just attacked by witchcraft." She's gonna be called out. We know that Rebecca Nurse's daughter-in-law is going to write to the court afterwards. It's a document. It's not addressed to one person in particular. We believe it's sent in with the documents to her appeal, saying, "that wasn't true. I was watching Sarah Bibber, and I saw her pull the pin out of her clothing, stab herself, and then point and say there's a specter, and yell, and that, that's obviously fraud."
There's the infamous incident at Sarah Good's trial at about the same time where somebody comes forward with that part of a knife, claiming that they snapped the knife off from a specter stabbing them, and then someone else says, "oh, that's actually mine. [00:53:00] I broke it the other day," and shows the other half. And I mean of calling somebody out for lying, that is really the most public and prime example of this.
With some of Nurse's defense testimony that her family gathers, they do also approach that line of calling out people as having lied in the past and therefore being untrustworthy. We will see, for example, Abigail Williams will have her credibility, I don't even want to say tested, really destroyed, pointing out incidents where she's lied and been unreliable for like basic facts about her day. And if you can't trust her with those, you can't really trust her with an accusation that could lead to the death penalty. And she won't be used as witnesses in court after that. That's why her, really, her credibility is wrecked.
There'll be others as well [00:54:00] who've been pointed out, as Sarah Bibber and such, as having fits in the past in a way that does make them sound fake and convenient and being really dramatic about things that calls into question, which that example with the pin only builds upon it, and the Nurse family does that well.
That idea that they have defense evidence for Nurse defending her, speaking to her having a good character and being a good person, but also the category of evidence attacking the credibility of her accusers. I mean that this is a modern, like, defense strategy. It's like the textbook example. And they're doing that as, frankly, like amateurs. None of them are lawyers. There are no defense lawyers. So it is impressive how they put this together. And Nurse, because of her family, really has the best defense out of anyone at trial.
Josh Hutchinson: Why did the defense evidence carry less weight than [00:55:00] prosecution evidence?
Dan Gagnon: There's two parts to why the defense evidence carries less weight. The first is, there's just that burden of assumed guilt in the background that by this point, people were convinced, seemingly a majority or a grand part of the locals, that witchcraft was actually happening. And after seeing, like Nurse's first hearing, the behavior of the accusers couldn't be explained another way.
So already you're starting out in a hole, trying to dig yourself out. Second, we have a procedural thing with the prosecution's evidence, according to the rules of trial, at that point in time, Ann Putnam, Jr., I'll just pick as an example, had submitted written evidence. She herself did not write this, her father wrote this. She, we don't think, can write. And was brought forward. Evidence is read in front of the court. She swears an oath saying, yes, those are my words. Yes, this is true. I'm paraphrasing, [00:56:00] but that's the gist of the oath.
With the defense evidence, it could not be sworn. It's not the same status then. The prosecution evidence, someone swore under oath it's real. The defense evidence, eh, some guy just wrote it down on a piece of paper. It's not the same category and can't be, and it can't be just, you're not allowed to do that with defense evidence. It's strange. It's not something that will really continue too much past here.
As to reasons why, it's, in one way, it's often by like legal historians phrased as a way that kind of allowed you to do more for your defense. Like you didn't actually have to worry if you're telling the truth to defend yourself, written in a way that like implies this helps somebody on trial in their defense, maybe in some instances. But for a jury that's following the strict rules, yeah, you're not gonna hold that defense evidence to the same weight, cuz it's not sworn under oath. There's no penalty of perjury. [00:57:00] There's no penalty. They could be saying whatever, and there's no consequence. So that is really just a system stacked against you.
Sarah Jack: That's really clarifying, because as I've been on my journey of coming to understand more of this, the Salem Witch-Hunt, I remember how puzzled I was. These petitions were getting signed, and these people were standing up and standing for these accused, and I just thought, why was it taking so much? And it still didn't, they had to keep trying a new, someone else to back them up. Another plea. And that really speaks to why.
Dan Gagnon: Because otherwise you'd look at it, and in my look at this, they have some pretty great defense evidence. It looks like it's a lopsided case in favor of the defense, but no.
Sarah Jack: What drove your project about Rebecca?
Dan Gagnon: My project about Rebecca has really [00:58:00] early starts. My connection to the story of Rebecca Nurse goes back a lot of years. I grew up right down the road. I live in Danvers, there used to be Salem Village. I'm coming to you live from Salem Village, I suppose that could be the the billing, and being around these historic sites and the monuments.
I played soccer for years at the field behind the Salem Village Witch Trials Memorial. Lost more games than I won, but we played in that field all the time. That's where the Danvers youth soccer plays. So I was just always around these places, and in particular, my first summer job as a teenager was at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, as the guy selling tickets and then eventually the person doing tours as a tour guide. And that kind of is really the start, learning from the wonderful volunteers there. Once I started giving tours, I was trying to read all of these books to make sure I was doing it right, and you never wanted a question that would [00:59:00] stump you as the 15 or 16 year old tour guide that was a wary and happened naturally.
So that was when I first started looking into this, talking with people who came through, hearing the questions that people had. Some who would ask questions that you'd think to yourself, never would've thought of that angle. Also hearing the questions about things that were just debunked myths that somehow lived on.
I know that Margo Burns does such a great talk about why Ergotism doesn't make sense, but if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me about Ergotism, I would not need to be a public school teacher anymore. That how often that comes up, or the land grab theory, and that showed me that despite this being one of the quintessential events in American history, everybody's heard of the Salem Witch trials, many people through high [01:00:00] school with reading The Crucible, I suppose, is many people's first introduction, but despite this event being so well known, a lot of people actually don't know it. That kind of stuck with me. Another thing that was important, as I went around to other historic sites, visiting other museums on vacation and things like that, is I realized it's really weird that there's no full biography of Rebecca Nurse.
The Nurse Homestead was selling this little pamphlet written by a gentleman, Charles Tapley, a local historian in Danvers, who really just wrote it based on Charles Upham's work in the 19th century, and it's really just about her time in 1692. So it's not a biography. There's nearly nothing about the before, nothing about the after. It's just the actual time of the witch trials.
And as I went to other historic sites, I realized that every museum related to a person, they do sell a biography of that person. God, if you go to Mount Vernon, think about how many biographies of George Washington you could buy. And that makes [01:01:00] sense. That's good. That should be the norm.
With my then look at the witch-hunt I went to college, I went to graduate school. I studied contemporary Europe. It's the formation of the European Union. Not really relevant to this. When I returned home after I completed graduate school, I then turned to this project, in about 2017, and I realized that a biography also gives us a better view, I think, into how people are affected.
When I go around to museums, historical societies and give talks about the book, I always start out with, maybe in a good, Puritan way, my defense of this project, like a minister writing his book. You start with your defense of why you'd be so bold as to do something like write a book about this. And I start that way, because inevitably people would ask, there's a ton of great books about the witch trials. Why one more? And it is a good question. There are excellent ones, amazing ones, but there was no, at this point in [01:02:00] time, there was no standalone full scholarly biography of a victim of the witch-hunt on the market. That is a category that should have been filled. A biography allows us to get to what a tragedy this is.
Many of these other books written about the witch-hunt, especially the more academic ones, the way that I saw it, is they tried to cover too much. This event is too big to actually really understand it, if you try to include all 200 people who are accused. You'll never get to know them. You'll never understand them as a person, understand how an accusation affected them, affected their family. You can't, or at least I can't, keep that many people straight in my mind as I'm reading about it. But if you pick one person, you can tell it as a real narrative of a human life where they start out. In the case of Rebecca Nurse, a life being [01:03:00] fairly ordinary, she lives in a somewhat exceptional time, though, being born in England in chaos, coming to the new world, settling that is an exceptional time. But out of those who make that journey, yeah, the Towne family is reasonably average. It's nothing really exceptional.
And then have a life utterly wrecked and destroyed in the witch-hunt. And then you see, because it's a story about one human being, of course, their immediate family is key to this story, both before but especially after. How can the Nurse family try to go back to normal after people in their town are responsible for killing their mother, or wife, in the case of Francis Nurse? And we see this as a tragedy. It really should be seen as a tragedy, cuz it is. And I really think a biography is the one way you can actually, like get that true emotional understanding of how this ruins people's lives.
Sarah Jack: You definitely were able to convey the [01:04:00] lack of respect and the inhumanity that they were receiving, how she had to stand and she wasn't well, all of the ways the experience in the jail was horrible, what they were witnessing, what they were being told, what they were hearing, the conditions. So you definitely that. Thank you for putting that in there.
Josh Hutchinson: You've heard us talk about the case in Springfield, and we really love these intimate portrayals, where you get a close feeling of what happened to a person. Like you said, the big surveys, it's hard to grasp everything that happened, because there's just so much of it, and every subject has to get glossed over, basically, to fit it all in a book. So we really love that you did this book. What do you want people to take away from their reading experience?
Dan Gagnon: I would start with things that I learned along the way compared to me starting out as a teenager [01:05:00] talking to visitors about the witch-hunt and where I got through this research project to my kind of, new understanding, hopefully better understanding, but new understanding of the event is things start small.
This starts in a very tiny way, and this is true in basically all events in history that what we think of as giant historical events start one thing out of the ordinary, and it goes from there. When I talk about this on my walking tours, that's really how I phrase it. When we're standing at the parsonage site, it's one small thing. One day, two children became unwell, and that's where everything starts. We also see an element of just unfortunate things that happen to people that are not in any way their fault. Like with Nurse, there's nothing that she has done to warrant this. There's nothing that really could have [01:06:00] even set her up for this accusation.
It just happens to her and in a way that you can't anticipate. Maybe it's the history teacher in me, but whenever we study historical events, we already know the ending and we work back from there. But we really need to start at the beginning. That's why the biography narrative, I think, is important, because you need to see how it develops. The causes of things are not necessarily how you'd view it if you start at the end.
The last thing again is just the the fact that this story is about real people is really the big takeaway. That is something to be considered. And the fact that it's about real people who never did anything that they were accused of doing. They are not witches. They did nothing like that. And that it really is innocent people.
Josh Hutchinson: How does this story compare to other witchcraft cases?
Dan Gagnon: [01:07:00] So we have other witchcraft cases in New England. We have other witchcraft cases in Old England, in continental Europe. And the Salem Witch-Hunt is unique in a lot of ways. Is it the worst example of a witch-hunt ever? No. There's examples in Germany of more people being accused, more people being executed, things that lasted even longer.
Those places aren't Witch City, even though Salem is witch city, rightfully or wrongfully, but that is the way that it is labeled and billed. With the Salem Witch-Hunt. It's unique because of so many people. Out of the New England witch-hunts, at least, it's the biggest, up to about 200 people accused is wildly different than the previous ones.
The aspect of how geographically far and [01:08:00] wide it is is interesting. It's not just one town. It starts in Salem Village, now Danvers, and Salem Village does really remain the focal point throughout, but the accusations are far and wide, as far north as Maine with Reverend George Borroughs, as far south as Charlestown, today part of Boston, as far west as the towns of Billerica, Woburn or around there, it's a broad area. We will see, for example, some towns it's just one person or a handful accused there from people in Salem Village, other towns that it's people from that town accusing people from that town, like Andover that actually has the highest number of people accused. That's almost a little like microcosm of the witch-hunt in itself. It's its own category. Richard Hite's book In the Shadow of Salem does an amazing job of looking at the Andover category, cuz it really is its own category.
Other [01:09:00] ways that the Salem Witch-Hunt is unique compared to others is the ending. When you only have one or two people accused of witchcraft, you don't usually have a growing public opposition, because it's over swiftly. When you have 200 people accused, it takes a while to put all these people on trial, naturally, and so what we have here is an example of people really opposing and turning against a witch-hunt. You don't see that in every other instance. The opposition comes from families of the accused most naturally, most obviously. We could have guessed that.
One other thing that I had found that I thought was interesting is really the opposition from the high-level ministers. I think that people's understanding of the witch-hunt doesn't really have them as opponents, but they were opponents of, at least, the process. It's not that they doubted the witches were real. To them, witches were real, but they did not think the court was doing the process the right way. And so they are opponents and critics in that [01:10:00] regard.
And lastly, with the witch hunt, as I mentioned, Salem allegedly being Witch City, it really captures the American imagination in a way that others don't today. A lot of that is thanks to The Crucible, but it did even before then. With Nurse as an example, the idea that she's the first person in North America accused of witchcraft to get a memorial in 1885. Clearly there's something special and unique about this compared to other accusations and witch hunts.
Sarah Jack: I was gonna ask you what does your book do to authenticate Rebecca's fame? But you've really captured that with your answers today. And so I wanna, as one of her descendants, I really wanna thank you for that.
Dan Gagnon: I appreciate it, and I'm happy to be talking to a descendant of Rebecca Nurse. I will say that wherever I have gone, [01:11:00] every time that I have talked, anywhere that I've ever talked, whether it's online or in person, there's always people in the room who are descendants of Rebecca Nurse that turn out. And that is an amazing thing, and I think that also shows how it's important for people as yourself, who do have a connection to people involved in the witch-hunt, or as Josh mentioned, a connection to other people in Salem Village. That kind of makes the story closer to the 21st century, and I am always happy when I talk with people who have that connection.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I are both descendants of Rebecca's sister Mary, so we have that cousin connection between us that we probably wouldn't realize if it was any other great grandparent, we wouldn't have made that connection.
Sarah Jack: When you talked about the double marriage, Elizabeth, she married a Russell, and then the grandchildren of Mary and Rebecca married, and [01:12:00] that's why I connect to both of them. It's the same line that a couple other cousins in the Towne Association connect through, too. So there's a little group of us, maybe a big group.
Dan Gagnon: And there's another example of the significance of the Salem Witch-Hunt, is not just I have met descendants one off, but that there are organizations of descendants, clearly, that there's something really meaningful here, if people are forming organizations.
Sarah Jack: When it came to the exonerations in Massachusetts, it was because people petitioned for them. It would've stayed as it was without people standing up whatever time in history. They did that, and Massachusetts responded to that. And it just, it makes me think of the other descendants that are coming forward out of Connecticut and other trials. And one of the questions why is this relevant? Why is it important? But it's important for many of the things that you pointed out about the meaningfulness of the [01:13:00] story, the connection to the ancestor, and if, you know, nobody stands up and asks it, it won't happen. So I was, that resonated with me too when I was reading that in your book, how people came forward and asked.
Dan Gagnon: And with that, I really think of the scene when they dedicate the Rebecca Nurse Monument in the family cemetery, that you have the minister from the Salem Village Church, who comes out and says, "it is right for us to be reevaluating these things. It is right for us to be remembering these people," countering that claim of why does it matter that apparently exists in 1885 too, not just today. And that he really sets out, it's the Reverend Rice, that this is important to do, and it is just to build this monument. To take this day to remember that because it is important and he connects it to, we learn from it and hope to do better in the future.
Josh Hutchinson: How does this [01:14:00] story relate to the present? Do you see any parallels?
Dan Gagnon: I do. There's writers, filmmakers who have made all sorts of connections to the present, whether the present was 1980 or the present is 2022, depending on when they were writing or making their media. And there's some that are timeless. This idea of a community gripped by fear of something they don't understand is, there's millions of ways that could be relevant to basically every community on earth.
There's things about people assuming something they've been told without critically evaluating it. Witchcraft was part of their worldview, and that was something that they very much took for granted. It's not that we actually would've quite found that in 1692, but it's one of those that hopefully we've progressed past.[01:15:00]
And what we also see at the end I think of is even somewhere where there has been some awful incident where people are to blame. And in this case, meaning the accusers that yeah, a community might take a while, it might take a long while, might need some outside help, but they do need to try to go back to normal afterwards, and that I think is really hard to imagine.
We know it's hard to imagine the idea that people believed in witchcraft. Everybody can think, oh, how could they believe that? But how can you imagine them going back to normal afterwards? And I'm sure around the world there are countless examples of horrible tragedies where somebody is at blame that, through whatever circumstance, have to try to put things back together.
And in Salem Village it takes years. It takes years. [01:16:00] Maybe you could say generations, cuz people weren't really open to talking about this for generations. But it happened. There's a memorial to the victims. There was the memorial to Nurse a while back, and then the memorial in Salem Village in 1992, and then one in, in downtown Salem a couple months later in, in 1992. So it, it's eventually dealt with and recognized, but it really, it can't just be the elephant in the room. It has to be that acknowledged, and the people who are wronged should be remembered.
Sarah Jack: And it's not just moving forward, it's, as you said, dealing with it to move forward. And I think that's kind of what we're finding in Connecticut. They pushed forward, but some of the stuff is bubbling up. People have questions, they wanna know more, they wanna remember their ancestors. They want to have names made good again. So it, there's lessons to be learned for sure. And it is very relatable [01:17:00] to, like you said, horrible situations where there is bad happened, because people did bad things.
Josh Hutchinson: And we have some guests coming up that you might find interesting from other nations, where witch-hunts are still happening. And one of the things we want to talk to them about is how does a community move forward after something like that happens?
And that's something that we can learn a little from Salem and other trials.
Sarah Jack: Modernly this happens, and then you see it in some other cases in New England, where a stigma sticks with a family, and then maybe some new accusations on the new generation come up. In Salem it was that they were able to move on without a new thing erupting. Why is that?
Dan Gagnon: So I think that's another way of getting back to the Salem trials as being unique in that no, there really[01:18:00] couldn't have been future accusations in that community after this, because it was done, and it was really recognized by the majority, not every soul, but the majority of having been wrong and misguided right when it ended.
It doesn't really take time for people to realize it was wrong. They discovered it was wrong, and that's why they put pressure to get the court stopped. That realization comes first. With some of these other witchcraft accusations in New England with only one person, they are in some instances, found guilty and executed, and only later do people begin to think back, maybe that wasn't quite right. Whereas with Salem, it's the belief that wasn't quite right comes first, before the end of the event. And it's interesting in that one would think that there would've been much more immediate sort of coming to [01:19:00] terms with the whole event right away.
It doesn't happen it, there are a couple reasons that the government of Massachusetts really didn't want to get into this. I always roll my eyes when I read the act that eventually clears names and they will go on, and they'll eventually compensate, not as reparations, cuz the government doesn't admit doing anything wrong, but a level of compensation. And in these laws, they're very clear to say, you can't sue us, you can't sue the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over this. And I think that kind of stops, in a way, drags out the coming to terms with it, because that's a shifting of guilt. And so that, that lengthens it.
Sarah Jack: I was just gonna ask you, Dan, if you wanted to say anything else or share anything else before we wrap up.
Dan Gagnon: I think that I would. I would say that one thing about the witch-hunt that I also think is important, and not just with [01:20:00] my prior involvement with the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, but is the idea that so many people also come and visit the actual places where this is involved.
The people I know have gone, they go to the memorials in Salem at Proctor's Ledge in Salem, the one in Salem Village, the Salem Village Memorial in Danvers. They go to the parsonage site where Reverend Parris had lived. That's now an archeological dig. They try to go to these places and try to get a connection that way to the history of the event. And people will even do this, going to places where there isn't necessarily a house. There's people who go up to Topsfield, where some of those people who were accused lived, and some of it's still farmland and just kinda walk around to try to get a feel for the place, a connection to the event, try to remember. If there is a family connection, then trying to make a family connection.
But in the sense that these places can be visited, and I think that is a good way to learn about history. It's going to [01:21:00] those places, I'm a big proponent of you can really get a sense of a place just in a like walk around it. I think of people who walk the Freedom Trail in Boston, which has wonderful historic sites. Yeah. When you're walking along skyscrapers, lose the historic sense, though, as you're going through downtown Boston. Whereas some of the Salem Village sites, you can still feel it. The Nurse Homestead 30-acre farm. It feels like a farm. There's an accurate feel. The parsonage site isolated enough you can kind of get a feel of this place. And of course there are the memorials in downtown Salem that are busier. I would encourage people to do that or really do that with any historical event that interests them, not just this one, but by going to places I think you can learn even more than just reading.
Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah with another edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts [01:22:00] World Advocacy News. This week, you listened in on some informative conversation about the memorial projects for Rebecca Towne Nurse and the other executed accused witches of the Salem Witch trials that were organized by their descendants and community. If you have listened through the episode catalog of our podcast, you are now familiar with the enacted exonerations, requested exonerations, memorializations of those accused and executed witches. Descendants, historians, and advocates are telling the stories of the innocent victims from 330 years ago or more. Some victims now have monuments, and all are remembered because we are writing, filming, and talking about what happened. Doesn't it feel like some enduring wrongs are being righted?
The layers of circumstances that created these past witch trial situations are pulling apart under examination. We are pointing out how indoctrination of witch fear and misfortune-blaming were part of the consistent contributors that led to historical [01:23:00] witch-hunts. In many world communities, witch-hunts are past, but as much as this is to be celebrated, we have to stay focused on the witch-hunt dangers many women and children find themselves in today.
This week, Nigerian advocate and activist, Dr. Leo Igwe , wrote an article speaking about the fear and illusion of witchcraft meetings and witchphobia in his community. He's telling us that witchphobia is being perpetuated and disruptive to the end of witch-hunts in Nigeria. This is not a historical reflection.
This thriving fear of harmful witchcraft is the cause of substantial abuse and murder against children and elderly women now. Just like in early modern witch trial history, the educated and powerful are often not intervening, but today, according to the established law, they should intervene to protect the vulnerable alleged witches.
He writes, "like people in western countries, Africans should abandon the illusion that supernatural witchcraft meetings and other occult nocturnal gatherings [01:24:00] take place. They should discard this notion that supposed witches embark on magical flights to a coven where they engage in cannibalism or initiate children and other adults into the witchcraft world. These illusions drive irrational fears and horrific abuses of alleged witches in Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and other African countries."
Does this not sound like an echo of all witch-hunt history? An echo of the Salem Witch trial accusations and charges? Leo states that through socialization or indoctrination, the belief that witches metaphysically convene is pervasive. Remember you just heard in today's episode that alleged witches in Salem were found guilty of magically convening to cause harm.
The witch-hunt mentality is alive, and humanity is still gripped by illusions. Please follow Leo Igwe and read his updates. Hear what he says must be addressed. Stop believing in these illusions. Please reflect and consider his message. Share his message now. [01:25:00] These strongly held fears must be addressed so that they can be stopped immediately.
While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world. Use your social power to help them. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website at endwitchhunts.org
End Witch Hunts movement and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast support the worldwide movement to recognize and address historical wrongs.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that critical information. We need to learn more about what's going on in the world around us with these ongoing tragedies.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shult Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week for a very important guest from across the [01:26:00] ocean. Damon Leff of South Africa will be talking to us about his years of advocacy and what it's like for the victims experiencing witch-hunts in his country.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell everybody you know and everybody you meet about the show.
Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch-hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:27:00]
Presenting intimate interviews with the descendants of Connecticut witch trial victims. They discuss why the exoneration of Connecticut witch trial victims is important to them and to the accused witches in our modern world. Learn how discovering this ancestry impacted descendant lives and why the stories of their accused witch ancestors must be talked about. Grab a tissue box and get ready to feel the emotions.
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:27] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with descendants of Connecticut witch trial victims about efforts to exonerate their ancestors.
[00:00:37] Sarah Jack: I am one of those descendants.
[00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: Im not descended from anyone accused in Connecticut, but I am descended from some of the Salem accused.
[00:00:48] Sarah Jack: I am as well. That's why when I found Winifred Benham in my tree, and it said that she was the Witch of Wallingford, Connecticut, and I looked into it, and she was [00:01:00] actually an accused witch, I was very baffled, cuz I knew nothing about witch trials outside of Salem.
[00:01:06] Josh Hutchinson: Not many people know there were witch trials and Connecticut, but we're hoping to change that.
[00:01:13] Sarah Jack: That is changing.
[00:01:15] Josh Hutchinson: More people are learning every day. There's been a lot of it in the news lately. And, of course, we've done several episodes of the podcast about Connecticut. And people are finding out through social media, as well.
[00:01:29] Sarah Jack: It's a very exciting change for the history, and I'm really hoping that the descendants can start to feel camaraderie and learn about their ancestors from each other. And I'm looking forward to seeing what Connecticut decides to do with this history.
[00:01:50] Josh Hutchinson: Hopefully, they do the right thing with it and exonerate those accused and make this part of everyone's education, so people know the [00:02:00] stories, and we don't make these same mistakes again.
[00:02:03] Sarah Jack: We're gonna find out what these descendants that we've brought together have to say about those things.
[00:02:09] Josh Hutchinson: I'm sure they have some good things to say, perhaps some profound things to say about their feelings, how they felt when they discovered these ancestors, how they feel now, what they think about the ConnecticutWitch Trial Exoneration Project.
[00:02:27] Sarah Jack: Watching this exoneration project come together has been really beautiful.
[00:02:33] Josh Hutchinson: We've come a long way since May.
[00:02:37] Sarah Jack: We have. In May, there was just a few of us trying to talk about it. We were throwing it out there. Who can hear us?
[00:02:45] Josh Hutchinson: And I was just watching you tweet. But then we came together in June and formed the project. And we've had media attention. We've got the podcast going. We've got the social media going. There are eyes on it [00:03:00] now.
[00:03:00] Sarah Jack: There is, we've learned a lot from many of the descendants.
[00:03:05] Josh Hutchinson: The resolution is being discussed by members of the Connecticut General Assembly. We're hoping that they do take it up to vote on it in their next session.
[00:03:17] Sarah Jack: Which is upon us soon.
[00:03:20] Josh Hutchinson: Soon, soon. Starts the beginning of January, in fact. But I know it runs until June. So we'll just keep plugging away while they're working. We'll be trying to get their ears and to get them to focus on this and get it done, hopefully sooner rather than later.
[00:03:43] Sarah Jack: I definitely think they'll have some things to think about after hearing the powerful words of our descendants on this episode.
[00:03:51] Josh, do you have any Connecticut history for us today?
[00:03:54] Josh Hutchinson: For this episode's history segment, I'm going to talk about the witch trial victims who were the [00:04:00] ancestors of the descendants we spoke to. There are five ancestors of these eight individuals.
[00:04:08] Four of the descendants are related to Alice Young of Windsor, who was the first known person to be executed for witchcraft in the American colonies on May 26th, 1647.
[00:04:27] One of our descendants is related to Lydia Gilbert of Windsor, who was hanged in 1654.
[00:04:35] Another is related to Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford, who was hanged in 1662 or 3 with her husband, Nathaniel.
[00:04:46] And we have Mary Barnes of Farmington, who was hanged in 1663.
[00:04:52] And, finally, our Sarah Jack is descended from Winifred Behnam, Sr. of Wallingford, [00:05:00] who was the second of three generations of women to be accused of witchcraft. Her mother, Mary Hale, was hanged for witchcraft in Boston. Winifred Sr. was acquitted of witchcraft twice, and her daughter Winifred Behnam, Jr. was also acquitted of witchcraft. Their last trials were in 1697, and so they were the last two accused of witchcraft to be taken to trial.
[00:05:39] Sarah Jack: Awesome. Josh, thank you for covering all that descendant and ancestor information for us today.
[00:05:45] Josh Hutchinson: It was my pleasure. I'm really looking forward to talking to these descendants now.
[00:05:51] Sarah Jack: And here are my fellow descendants talking about their ancestors and why this project has been important to them.[00:06:00] Sherry Kuiper, descendant of Alice Young, Alse C. Freeman, descendant of Alice Young, Rosemary Lang, descendant of Mary Barnes, Morgan Leigh Kelsey, descendant of Alice Young, Sue Bailey, descendant of Alice Young, Laura Secord, descendant of Lydia Gilbert, Caitlin Golden, descendant of Rebecca Greensmith, and Sarah Jack, descendant of Winifred Benham, Sr.
[00:06:30] Josh Hutchinson: How did you find out about your ancestor who was accused of witchcraft?
[00:06:35] Sherry?
[00:06:37] Sherry Kuiper: My mom's retired, and she's the one who does all the research in our family, and I'm the one who will say, "get in the car, and let's drive to Connecticut and see what we can find." And we like it that way. It works really well. And we call it visits, right? We go visit our ancestors.
[00:06:51] So she has a cousin that they do some research together on the family, and we were all together one day, and he said, [00:07:00] "I think we have an accused witch." And I was like, "no way." I didn't believe it, and then he said, "it's on the internet. Look it up." And I was like, "okay." I mean, Google's great and all, but that's not how genealogy works, right? And my mom was like, "let's just look and see." And so we started looking, and it made some logical sense, so then my mom really started digging into it. All the way up until her daughter, we had a paper trail, and then the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, which is one of the many lineage societies out there, but this one is dedicated to those accused and hanged of witchcraft. They had that missing link from her daughter to her. So it was really just this conversation. In fact, I was the naysayer. I was like, "there's no way we have somebody who's this fascinating a part of American history. And early American history." But he was absolutely right, and we were able to do the research and prove it.
[00:07:57] Josh Hutchinson: Alse C.?
[00:07:59] Alse Freeman: [00:08:00] My sibling, who had access to the family history library, did extensive genealogical work, and somehow I had missed the bottom line of their research, which all it said was Alse Young, 1600 to 1647, parentheses, "witch." And I don't think I had even gotten to the bottom of that list, but it was in March of 2020 that I went and had a gathering with a lot of my family members on my dad's side, and they were talking about their ancestors with certain fondness.
[00:08:34] And then right after that, the pandemic hit, and I felt, "well, I, I want to go deep into this genealogy myself," and it was a chance I could do a free trial for one month on one of these websites and learn a lot more than I already knew. But my sibling had already done all this great research, so most of what I did was just corroborate, fact checking various other people's [00:09:00] accounts, making sure that there was no errors in what my sibling done. And it's led back to Alse Young, died in 1647.
[00:09:08] Josh Hutchinson: Rosemary?
[00:09:11] Rosemary Lang: This genealogy was presented to my mother when I was a baby, and when I was older, I read about it and found out about Mary Barnes being an accused witch, and in the genealogy it said she was accused of drunkenness and fornication. So I was just appalled, and I started looking into her a little bit, and that was probably 40 years ago, and I found nothing. But there seems to be a whole lot more online, especially, to find out about her. But I'm not ashamed or anything about it, because she was probably just an innocent woman.
[00:09:50] And I remember quite a few years ago there was a presentation at the old State House in Hartford. It was made as a Halloweeny event, [00:10:00] and they had a little play going, and it was about Mary Barns, and I knew that we were descended from her somehow. So I went to this play, and the Old State House was packed, and I think I was the only one that cried. I thought, "oh my God, this is my relative. It's so sad." And for everybody else, it was just a Halloween event.
[00:10:21] Josh Hutchinson: Morgan?
[00:10:23] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: So my dad passed away in 2016, and he had done a lot of genealogy. So Alice is on his father's side, and he had done up to one generation prior to Alice, to Alice's daughter, the other Alice, and when I saw Alice's name, there was some kind of knowing within me that just sparked a curiosity and a need to dig further. And so I ended up just simply googling [00:11:00] "Alice Young," and all of a sudden it brings up that she was the first in the colonies to be executed, and I felt pretty shocked by that, very shocked by that.
[00:11:12] Josh Hutchinson: Sue?
[00:11:13] Sue Bailey: A friend of Beth Caruso's from Windsor is my massage therapist, and her name's Donna, and she told me, "oh yeah, my friend wrote a book about the first accused witch that was executed, and I said, "oh, that's really cool." And I thought, "well, that's really interesting."
[00:11:31] I had my genetics done, and I see this relative that was a second cousin. I'm like, "who is this person?" So you can email someone through 23andme, which I did. He was an elderly gentleman, but his daughter answered me and said, "oh, I've done a lot of research on the family on that side," that would be my mother's father's side, "and we're related to the first person executed as a witch in the colonies." And I said, "oh my God, it must be Alice Young." And it [00:12:00] was, and then I started looking just online through all the genealogies that are available. I'm actually paying a genealogist to do a whole view of all four sides of me now, just because I wanna perhaps show my kids, and they thought it was pretty cool.
[00:12:16] Josh Hutchinson: Laura?
[00:12:18] Laura Secord: My husband is a historian, genealogist, and I think he'd gone in his family all the way back to the beginning of time, and one day he just came and he was looking at my family. I didn't even know he was looking at my family. And he came and said, "well, your great, great, great, great, great was found guilty of witchcraft in Connecticut in 1654."
[00:12:42] Josh Hutchinson: Caitlin?
[00:12:44] Caitlin Golden: So I am an avid ancestry user, like the ancestry.com, and I had found her name, but I didn't look too much into her until I got a hint that was talking about the witch trials, and of course that was eye-catching to me, and so I read about her, and I'm like, "oh my [00:13:00] gosh."
[00:13:00] I never knew about the Connecticut Witch Trials. Of course, I knew about Salem. We talked about it in school, but the Connecticut Witch Trials was never something I knew about. I knew that Salem wasn't the only trials. But then I researched her, and my jaw dropped. It's absolutely insane and horrible what she and all of these other victims went through, and it just hurts knowing like she was a mother, and I can't imagine how her children felt.
[00:13:27] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Caitlin. Finally, we have our very own host, Sarah Jack.
[00:13:34] Sarah Jack: I was working on a family line, and it was one of the first ones that took me into Connecticut, and I started reading through documents, and I saw that this person was an accused witch, and I didn't understand how that could be, because it was not Salem.
[00:13:54] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:13:55] How did you feel when you learned about your ancestor, [00:14:00] who was accused of witchcraft?
[00:14:03] Sherry Kuiper: When I was in college, I took a really amazing class at Edinboro University with a woman named Dr. Jenrette, and she did a class called History of Witchcraft, which was about the Reformation, all the way up through the Salem Witch Trials. And she took us to Salem on Halloween weekend, and it was amazing, right? Probably the coolest class trip in the world.
[00:14:23] I've always been interested in that and always fascinated by it. I don't know if I had any feelings of anything. I thought it was, I hate to say this because people died, but I thought it was really cool, because I thought that these people who did get accused and didn't die from it, they were kind of badasses, if I'm allowed to swear on your podcast. They were people who really kind of bucked the system in a lot of ways, and usually that's what got them to be an outcast, or they were different.
[00:14:53] In that respect, I thought it was really cool that my ancestor was somebody who was causing enough trouble that they felt that [00:15:00] this was the way to deal with her, and then when a lot of my friends found out, you know, a lot of them were like, "we're not surprised that you were descendant from somebody like this." So that's kind of how that initial feeling was. And then of course, you know, it just kept going from there. And then really understanding, too, like yeah, there's that kind of interesting history part of it, but then there's the reality part of it, of what really happened to these people, my ancestor and all the others, and then that kind of manifested more into a little bit of activism that all of us share today.
[00:15:32] Alse Freeman: Once I kind of knew that connection with 95% certainty, I tried to read anything I could to find out more about her, and really there just wasn't very much at all. Just putting myself in her shoes at the time, it really just struck me with extreme sadness. Like I remember getting goosebumps all over my body and just like a chill running through my body and a sinking feeling in my stomach, just [00:16:00] putting myself into her shoes and being, almost being there on the gallows, looking down at my six or seven year old daughter.
[00:16:10] And then putting myself in that daughter's shoes, who's also my ancestor, of looking up at her mother thinking, " what's going on? I don't understand what's happening." And just that moment, whether or not it's actually how things went down. I really was chilled by it, and it really stuck with me, and I wept, and part of the reason I wept, I think, is just this extreme feeling of injustice that was.
[00:16:38] And so much injustice has been done to so many people through our nation's history, but this was like a really visceral feeling for me, where I, I actually felt connected with my ancestor in a way that I hadn't felt very connected to any other ancestor that I had ever heard about.
[00:16:57] I had this connection with Alse and [00:17:00] her daughter, and so it was soon after that that I decided to carry the name Alse, or Alse C. is how I pronounce it, so I could still keep the letter C from my given name. But I felt like it was a way that I could honor my ancestor and keep her memory alive in a way.
[00:17:19] From there, I realized that there were hundreds and thousands of people potentially who were interested in the same thing, who were also descendants. I got connected with Beth Caruso's Connecticut WITCH Memorial Facebook page and started following those updates. And those updates led me to learn about the campaign to have the witch hanging victims exonerated. And so everything's just flowed from there, where I've seen that there's potentially hundreds of thousands of people, who if they knew, they are actually descended from these witch hanging victims. And potentially millions of Americans are connected in some way to this legacy through [00:18:00] their blood.
[00:18:00] Sarah Jack: I was baffled. I was very eager to get more information, and then I was quickly disappointed that there really wasn't much, and Connecticut wasn't offering information about their Witch trials, so I really had to dig around, and I found that extremely disappointing.
[00:18:23] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think your ancestor should be exonerated?
[00:18:28] Alse Freeman: There's no graveyard that I can actually go visit my ancestor. There's just a brick in Hartford in the courthouse square, and it feels not like a true memorial. It just says "witch hanging victim" and doesn't really speak to who she was as a person. We don't have very many details.
[00:18:48] I just wanna be clear that, you know, my ancestor's exoneration is not more important than other wrongfully accused people, and so I'm really grateful that your podcast is [00:19:00] also highlighting modern-day victims of the witch hunts. Another thing I just wanna mention is our country has a huge reckoning to do, in terms of understanding its past and making amends and seeking justice.
[00:19:14] Specifically focusing on the case of Alse, absolutely she needs to be exonerated by the state of Connecticut, because first of all, there's no record of any actual harm she committed upon anyone. There are no records. Secondly, if current laws do not penalize practices which can be considered witchcraft, then those who are punished for them need exoneration under the current laws, is the way I see it. And it's just as simple as the state of Connecticut allowing posthumous pardons.
[00:19:45] This should not be such a big challenge, and it should just be a stepping stone to open the door to all types of people rectifying injustice that have been committed against them and their families.
[00:19:59] Rosemary Lang: [00:20:00] Yes, of course, I think they all, all of them should be, especially because did she really do any harm to anybody? Was it just people's words that accused her? She should be exonerated, and I think they all should be. I don't think whatever she did does she deserved to be hanged for. So I hope they do exonerate them.
[00:20:26] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: I do. I do. I think that it's also complicated. There's a lot of layers there. I think that it is important to exonerate or to restore the good name. One, just to kind of bring some light to that and to bring some awareness to people. Generally, if I'm talking with anybody about that, I feel like there's always some sort of an education that ends up happening, because they're like, " I didn't know," or people just think, "oh, you [00:21:00] know, the witches, they burn the witches. They hung the witches. What are the witches, really?"
[00:21:06] What do we often do to people who might be a little different or might be the people that are the healers, the people that are bringing truth and light to situations, and nobody wants to hear or accept that sometimes. Just the fact that people could have gotten together, tortured people, then killed them, and said that that was okay, and that that was in the name of God is horrific, and I think that people really should be made aware of that.
[00:21:45] Sue Bailey: Yes, I do. And I can't even believe there was, when this was brought up in 2008 in the legislature that they didn't do it. What in the world are they thinking? That, "well, we don't have any proof they weren't [00:22:00] witches." What kinda crazy thing is that? How is it that they couldn't say, "of course we're gonna exonerate them?" Salem did it. Why in the world wouldn't we? It doesn't make sense.
[00:22:09] Laura Secord: I have like a list of reasons witches need to be exonerated, because they're innocent. First of all, the main reason is they were innocent. They were falsely accused. They were almost always women. So there was not entirely, but the bulk were women. They weren't weak. They weren't women that were easily duped by evil. They were the participants who helped to build this country, mothers, wives, helpmates, human beings, healers. Without them, we wouldn't have created what we have in this country now.
[00:22:47] Because their lives and their stories paint a clear picture of what our country's beginning was like. Because as modern persons, you and I have attained levels of knowledge and [00:23:00] education, and we now understand the science of nature behind the colonists' irrational fear. Because women were part of founding this country. Because these persons are our family and we want them remembered, celebrated, and honored, instead of carrying the stain of disgrace based in ignorance and hysteria. And because today forces of false truth, hysteria, and misogyny are rising up again, vilifying and naming women criminals, liars, and manipulators.
[00:23:41] Caitlin Golden: Just like everyone else, she was innocent. She was just trying her best to live. Just live a simple life back then, and this is just a big human rights violation. Simply because people disliked her, and she didn't have a good reputation, they figured, "hey, let's just call [00:24:00] her a witch, and that's all of her we'll see." It's wrong and it's horrible.
[00:24:05] Sarah Jack: Yes. I wanna acknowledge that they should not have been water tested, that they should not have had to flee.
[00:24:13] Josh Hutchinson: Why is it important for your ancestor's name to be cleared?
[00:24:17] Sherry Kuiper: It's not even just her name, right? It's all of their names. It doesn't matter if it was three days ago or 300 years ago, a wrong thing was done. And even though that the state of Connecticut saying, "I'm sorry, Sherry, that we did this to your grandmother" isn't gonna change anything, just that recognition that, "hey, this was a crappy thing that happened and it should have never happened." Sometimes we have to own those mistakes, even though we might have not been the ones who directly made it.
[00:24:45] Do I think anybody alive today had anything to do with this? Absolutely not. But just to, Really remind people because, you can look at some things going on in society today, and there's been references made to modern-day witch-hunts. And while we [00:25:00] might not hang people from trees like that happened to Alice, there are still things going on today, and we just need to remind ourselves how easy we can fall into those traps.
[00:25:10] It's just important for all of those people, all those ancestors. I can prove that this is my grandmother. So to say that nobody around today cares is not fair, and, frankly, I think that it's, while I'm sure there's red tape of bureaucracy, as there always is, I don't think it's as hard as they're making it to just come together and say, "these people are no longer accused, and we exonerate them." And I am glad that there are people finally in the state of Connecticut who are trying to help us move towards that resolution.
[00:25:43] Rosemary Lang: The cider goes bad, and they're accused of being a witch, or all the children in the town get sick but your own, so you must be in league with the devil to protect them. Stupid things like that. It was just so unfair. [00:26:00] Nobody listened to anything they said. I'm sure it was a jury of all men. Magistrates were all men. They were just lowly housewives, so nobody cared what they had to say. So, yes, they should all be exonerated.
[00:26:16] Sarah Jack: It's important, because although we don't know much about them, we do know that they were not witches. I don't want anybody in this country confused anymore about these victims that went through these witch trials. And if the state of Connecticut clears the names of their accused, it's a giant statement towards clarifying that these were innocent people.
[00:26:44] Josh Hutchinson: Why is exoneration relevant today?
[00:26:48] Alse Freeman: I think exoneration is relevant today because this case and these cases of the 11 witch-hanging victims in Connecticut can be a [00:27:00] teachable moment for us that these people were scapegoated in the past, most likely for something they did not do wrong, but some huge upheavals were happening in society at the time.
[00:27:15] There was a flu outbreak that was killing a lot of people, including many children, as Beth Caruso points out in her research. And so you gotta look at what's going on today with how people are being scapegoated for the various ills that are afflicting society.
[00:27:35] What I'm hopeful for is that my ancestor's case can be this way to highlight retrospectively how scapegoating is a part of our culture, how we're constantly looking for someone to blame. These days, often it's very in a very partisan way, but throughout [00:28:00] our nation's history, we have blamed others. We've blamed The Other for a lot of our collective problems that need a collective solution.
[00:28:11] Just to bring up the history of our treatment of the indigenous people of this country. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. To me, it's an even higher level of heartbreaking even than just my ancestors standing on the gallows. I know that other ancestors of mine participated in some of these colonial battles and even enslaved an indigenous child, um, one of my ancestors did. And so that for me is a great reckoning that I need to come to terms with myself. And I think it's very hard for our country to come to terms with that part of the story, so it's a little easier for us to focus on the tragedy in the colony, but the tragedy outside the colony was [00:29:00] just so monumental that, in the course of what we're doing, we need to like remember that that is a part of it, too. That is the context in which this was happening. I think just like acknowledging that the people were there before these, the colonies would be one starting point.
[00:29:20] Sue Bailey: I think the passage of time doesn't negate the wrong. Just because it's a long time ago doesn't mean that it's too late to do some sort of retroactive exoneration to right a wrong. And it would be for all the relatives. Some people might think, "oh, well that was cool that they were accused of. I like to think that they were really a Witch or something."
[00:29:49] I just can't help but think most people, when they find out they had a relative that goes back nine, 10 generations, that's a person just like we are, that [00:30:00] has all the same feelings and fears and loves people. And why would their death be any less meaningful 375 years later? It's still the fact that they were put to death wrongly, undoubtedly wrongly. It's just an injustice that needs to be addressed, even 375 years later.
[00:30:24] Caitlin Golden: While most of us look at witch trials as though that's just in my history book, it's still happening today in other countries around the world. And so if we make a good example, maybe it'll stop worldwide.
[00:30:37] Sarah Jack: I hope that when Connecticut exonerates their accused witches that it'll send a message and a signal to leaders in communities in other parts of the world, where witch-hunts are being tolerated. I want the message to be that we must stand against witch-hunting, that it's [00:31:00] no longer something that is acceptable, that it is murder, that it is destroying families, and it does not need to happen anymore.
[00:31:12] Josh Hutchinson: What would you like to say to the Connecticut General Assembly about why your ancestor should be exonerated?
[00:31:21] Sherry Kuiper: Just do it. Like, seriously, it's really that easy. And I know we can come up with lots of reasons why it's difficult , but just do it. I mean, because people said to me, "well, Sherry, it happened so long ago. Who cares?" I'm like, "well, then just do it. Who cares? Just get up there and say it. Sign the piece of paper and be done with it."
[00:31:40] It's the right thing to do and you just gotta do it. And Massachusetts has done it. Salem has fully embraced what has happened to their people, to almost to do a complete 180 or 360 really of what happened there. So I just tell state of Connecticut, just review it, do what you gotta do, but get it done. It's long overdue, and there's no [00:32:00] reason we should be waiting any longer.
[00:32:01] Alse Freeman: I think the basic requests we have are acknowledge that the injustice happened, recognize officially the innocence of these 11 victims who are executed, and recognize not only their suffering, but also their families and their descendants. Removing the ill fame from their descendants is one part of it. Reversing the charge is the bottom line.
[00:32:29] But I would add one extra thing, which is just we need to educate people on this history, not just a little paragraph on Wikipedia, but people need to be taught in schools about what happened in our country. And it's gonna be a long story to tell, but that is part of the way you can get closer to a country that has justice, which we are supposedly a country of justice and a country of laws. So you can't tell that story and then [00:33:00] hide the story where injustice was committed. And so the basic step forward is we need to move on to an education piece after we've exonerated these people, because their story needs to continue to be told. It's not just close the book and never talk about them again.
[00:33:19] Rosemary Lang: Because Mary Barnes was just a housewife and a mother taking care of her farm and her children. She was accused of something, we don't even really know what, that probably didn't harm anybody, and she should be exonerated. In all fairness, all of them should be.
[00:33:42] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: If that passes, that to me almost feels like it heals something in my DNA and in the DNA of others and in the DNA of future generations. And I think that can be thought in [00:34:00] a larger view. If you take that same principle and apply that to a whole lot of other things, if you apply that to Native Americans and you apply that to people who have been oppressed, and murdered, that's huge. So what I would say to the Connecticut General Assembly is that that is an important motion, an important movement for the future of all the people.
[00:34:32] Sue Bailey: The people that were executed were more than likely innocent, and for what comfort it can bring their souls now or their relatives who are still alive. If it can bring them comfort and some measure of closure, I think it's a small task for them. I mean, it would be a really good gesture on the part of the legislature.[00:35:00]
[00:35:00] The old Connecticut General Assembly or whatever they called themselves back then, I forgot the management of the colony, maybe they're the ones that voted on deciding that she should die. Now here, this current legislature could vote on freeing those people from that stigma of potentially a Witch or be an evil person. They were put to death. I mean, I think it's still really important. The length of time that's elapsed doesn't mute the wrong. And it's still something that's important.
[00:35:39] Caitlin Golden: I think I would again say this was a big human rights violation, and it's not fair that even after death, she and as many other people are still considered criminals, even though they were very clearly innocent. And as a descendant, it would mean the world to me to be able to have her name cleared. [00:36:00] And I'm sure she would've been ecstatic, as well as everyone else, to finally be recognized. "Hey, I didn't do anything wrong. I was just a victim."
[00:36:08] Sarah Jack: I want the exoneration to acknowledge that all the Connecticut accused should not have had their good names defamed.
[00:36:15] Josh Hutchinson: What type of memorial do you want to see?
[00:36:20] Sherry Kuiper: I would like to see a memorial. I do like them, because I do think it serves as a reminder of things that have happened. I love visiting historical places and everything, so I think it would just really be dependent on where it is.
[00:36:33] I think it would need to be Hartford Square there, where a lot of the victims were hanged. Something in a place like that, I think would be ideal, because it's in a place of significance. It's a place where people are gonna see it and actually stop. If you put it in the middle of nowhere, like I love all the small Connecticut towns, my whole family's from up there, if you go back far enough. I think it loses its value. So I think it needs to go in a significant place, where it's actually going to be [00:37:00] seen.
[00:37:00] I love Windsor, Connecticut. It's a beautiful little town. You're not going there unless you're going there for a very specific reason. Harford Square, it's in the center of town, a popular place where people go, so I think it would be great if it's put in a place that's going to actually reach people.
[00:37:16] Just to bear their names and probably with whatever words it is that exonerates them, however the state is going to recognize that, I think would be really important. But definitely to put their names in there, because I'm a big believer that, as long as your name is out there, your legacy will live on. People will be able to look up Alice Young, it's on the internet. They can read about her and know a little bit about her.
[00:37:39] Alse Freeman: I would love to be part of coming up with what that would look like, and I would love to be present when it's initiated. My ancestor, she's dead, and she's not gonna ever be able to feel that vindication of being cleared. At least, I don't think she will. But I really like to believe that her story could be [00:38:00] an example of how we as a society can learn to make peace with the past and also learn from our errors. So I would love to see the memorial kind of speak to that, that we are learning from the past, and we are gonna move forward as a country of justice.
[00:38:17] Rosemary Lang: Well, no brooms or funny hats, for sure. Something beautiful, a little bench for people to sit and contemplate, everybody's name's inscribed. They have something like that in Salem. It's a nice, peaceful area. Something along those lines. Not religious and not halloweeny.
[00:38:41] Sue Bailey: Well, it shouldn't have a pointy hat, I'll tell you that. It was talked about, I think maybe when I was interviewed for that channel 30 thing that, it was a joke when the legislature, when they were addressing this before in 2008 and the legislature, like they didn't take it [00:39:00] seriously. I mean the people that were in the legislature reviewing it. And I think if you put a pointy hat on the statue, much as it's amusing, it doesn't take it seriously enough. Should it be a woman? Yeah. Why not it, it should be a statue of a woman. I mean, men were accused too, though. I mean, maybe you want a woman and a man.
[00:39:22] How about this? Is this too much like the Kennedy grave, like an eternal flame? That meaning you could do something like that. It would be cheaper, too. That or something peaceful but something that symbolizes the continuity of life and the fact that that tiny lapsing is of no significance. It's just as relevant today as it was then. Something to show that the memory of what they went through goes on.
[00:39:54] Caitlin Golden: If there can be like some kind of like plaque or monument maybe, or maybe since she was a mom, maybe it [00:40:00] would be possible to have a little playground. I think that would be nice, so I feel like she would like that, for children to be able to play there, and you can still have remembrance for them.
[00:40:11] Sarah Jack: I want their names on it, but I want, if other people are discovered, their names to be able to be added. I want it to be accessible. I don't want it to be a side. I want it to be a monument that is known, so that the history is known, but I want it to represent that a new page has been turned in that book.
[00:40:35] Josh Hutchinson: What does the exoneration project mean to you?
[00:40:39] Rosemary Lang: It's great that all this information is coming out. Witches aren't evil, I don't think. And I think by presenting all this information that you are will help people to realize that they're just people, and people need [00:41:00] to know that they're just innocent women, really, and men, and it was a tough time.
[00:41:07] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: I guess it's something that I never expected to be a part of that really caught me by a surprise. Just the discovery of the situation and my tie to it. To me, all of it just really feels like it's all about healing. I think whenever you can go and go look back and look at wrongs that were done and try to do something about it. I mean, you can't take it back. But I think when you educate people, when you look forward, when you look at something and say, "this can never happen again." I think that's the most important part of it.
[00:41:51] Caitlin Golden: I think for me, I always love history, and any chance I can get to volunteer or help for a cause [00:42:00] beyond me always makes me very happy. If I can get the word out and better educate myself on this and help better educate other people, I think it's just making a difference in many people's lives.
[00:42:13] Josh Hutchinson: Have you felt more connected to your accused ancestor due to the project?
[00:42:19] Sherry Kuiper: Yeah, when I do research and find these fascinating people in our history, which I believe everybody has fascinating people in their genealogy, we just have to find it and find their stories. So whether it's Alice Young, or whether it's some of the other really neat people in my history, I think it's just important to remember it and to talk about it and to really understand what their life was like. The more I learned about her and the closer I looked at some of the things and being involved in the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, it just made me realize that more needed to be done for these folks.
[00:42:52] Recently, thanks to, to the great internet and social media and stuff, I've been able to support it in a lot of ways from afar, and I find that really important [00:43:00] because even though it's what, 370 some years since since Alice Young was hanged and the ones who came after her, there's really still been no justice for a lot of them. And so it's important it's important to recognize those wrongs, even if it's 300 years later , we still, it's still important for for us to recognize that as a country, well, I guess pre country, but as colonial Americans, these things happened. They happened in Connecticut, and it would be really nice if they would just take the steps to rectify what had happened.
[00:43:34] Rosemary Lang: Definitely, I do feel connection and I really would like to learn more about her and try to go back.
[00:43:42] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: Yeah, I do feel deeply connected, and I think it's, when you go back that many generations, it seems so far back, and it's almost like having that knowledge. I guess it's more a piece that's in my heart that I [00:44:00] feel, but you feel like you're able to just reach back into the past and pull that to you. And I guess even just thinking of that's your grandmother and thinking of that female lineage and thinking of how incredibly far back that traces her. It just feels like there's this palpable line to the past and this woman that I feel like is now right here that I never knew about.
[00:44:27] Caitlin Golden: I would definitely say I feel a lot more connected, and the more I learn about her, the more, obviously, I want to, help get her exonerated, as well as everyone else. Yeah, I do, I definitely feel a lot more connected to her.
[00:44:41] Sarah Jack: I do, because I'm hearing what the project and the ancestors mean to the other descendants, and it helps me to see that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
[00:44:55] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think any differently about what you've been taught about [00:45:00] history?
[00:45:00] Rosemary Lang: I don't recall ever learning anything in history class about the witches, maybe a little bit of the witch trials. Probably we had to read The Crucible. Other than that, most of my learning has been as an adult, an older adult. I think the history classes are changing in a lot of ways, and that's one way they could present it differently to kids, just like with Columbus and all of those discoverers, supposedly. I think they should change the presentation for witches, as well. Because I think kids still, it's Halloween, it's, you know, pointy black hats and broom and things. So it'd be nice to portray them more as just women that were mistreated.
[00:45:52] Caitlin Golden: I definitely feel like I haven't learned everything that maybe should have been taught to me, [00:46:00] because I would've never known about the Connecticut witch trials, if I had never found Rebecca Greensmith in my family tree. I definitely feel like a lot of it is not discussed, because of how dark it is, or there's just some things that maybe the school systems don't feel is necessary to teach. But in cases like the Connecticut witch trials, any witch trials, I think it's really important to discuss, so that we don't repeat history ,because it's still happening that people are being accused and executed because of it, and it's wrong, so clearly we haven't learned that lesson.
[00:46:32] Josh Hutchinson: Do you feel more hopeful?
[00:46:35] Sherry Kuiper: I feel more hopeful, because I think the big shift was there is somebody in the government in Connecticut who has taken up this case. And so that to me was a big thing of hope, because with any sort of legislation of any kind, you need somebody to pick it up and look at it and say, "you know what? I think this is important enough to move forward with it." So that actually is a huge thing.
[00:46:57] And so that kind of coupled with[00:47:00] some of the press that we've been able to do over the past few months with that person picking up that piece of paper and saying, "you know what? This is worth it and I'm gonna look into this." It does give me hope, and I think we've got a lot of great forward momentum, and I think we need to keep showing this legislator why this is important, and however we need to show up for her to carry that on, I think this is really going to be it. And I think this is probably the best shot we've had ever to get something done. I am just grateful that somebody finally picked it up and said, "you know what? This is important, and we're going to take a look at it."
[00:47:32] Alse Freeman: I'm very excited that thousands of people are working on a collective solution for this one problem, and I hope that we can build off that and develop more collective actions that lift up our country's people, instead of tearing them down.
[00:47:50] Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah Jack with an important update on witch hunts happening in our world right now.
[00:47:58] Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts [00:48:00] World Advocacy News. You are living in a world with a pervasive belief in harmful witchcraft with a mass occurrence of holding women and children responsible for supernaturally causing death, illness, and misfortune. This deep-seated conclusion is delaying action for protecting alleged witches, promoting witch-hunting behaviors, and blurring the recognition that worldwide historic witch trials executed innocent humans. These are communities that are waiting to be made safe. These are behaviors that have no place in a world that seeks to protect the vulnerable. These historic victims should have their names cleared and their innocence acknowledged by the communities that prosecuted them. When any advocate asks for this, ears should be listening, minds should be realizing, and bodies should be moving to take action.
[00:48:51] I hope you have had a chance to look up Dr. Leo Igwe of the Nigerian organization, the Advocacy for Alleged Witches. Please find the website link [00:49:00] in our show notes. Here's a quote from a recent message from Leo.
[00:49:04] " Part of the objective of Advocacy for Alleged Witches is to tackle the misperceptions of witches and witchcraft, whether alleged or not. Advocacy for Alleged Witches seeks to address associated fears and suspicions. It aims to correct the pervasive misconceptions and fears associated with the term witch or witchcraft, because these misperceptions are at the root of witch persecution. Saving alleged witches cannot be realized until Nigerians disabuse their mind and free themselves from fears and suspicions that the term witches or witchcraft, engenders. So the mission of combating witch persecution and supporting victims starts in the mind. It starts by demystifying the term witchcraft or witches. It starts by clarifying misconceptions and misperceptions that are linked to terminologies such as witches, witchcraft, and supposed occult forces."
[00:49:57] Can you accept this change in thinking? [00:50:00] Consider it a message not just for Nigeria, but also for you and every human. As Leo states, misconceptions linked to the idea of witches, witchcraft, and harmful occult forces must be demystified. It is time to stop obscuring the truth and start diffusing the panic that is ignited by what we fear as malevolent.
[00:50:19] Last week, I brought attention to a situation in Ireland. The Northern Ireland Borough of Larne wants to commemorate eight Witch trial victims from the Islandmagee witch trial that took place on March 31st, 1711. A borough councillor raised questions of whether the eight women and a man who were found guilty of witchcraft were actually innocent. When criticized for his deferral of action, due to what authority he perceives the council holds, he has stated that actually he feels ambivalent about the matter of innocence. Ambivalent?
[00:50:51] He feels the council does not have authority to acknowledge innocence due to obscurity around witches and witchcraft. He is, however, interested in [00:51:00] having tourists play a game of determining guilt of these historical people that are still waiting to have their names cleared. He wants their convictions left alone, but he wants to draw tourists to the historic site by the opportunity to vote for guilt or innocence with tokens.
[00:51:14] This incident on the other side of the world from me matters, because I have asked the Connecticut legislature to exonerate the accused witches of Connecticut colony. I cannot imagine a response where the Connecticut legislature embraces ambivalence and suggests a tourist game at historical sites, instead of exoneration and memorials. Please, hear your community and the descendants of accused witches when they say that recognizing innocence matters, it matters to women and children that are being attacked as witches today. Acknowledging their innocence builds the foundation for dismantling witch-hunt mentalities that are destroying lives in our modern world.
[00:51:54] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by [00:52:00] superstitious fear. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
[00:52:18] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that update.
[00:52:23] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:52:24] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:52:33] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:52:34] Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:42] Sarah Jack: Visit at thouschaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:52:44] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell everyone you know about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:52:51] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:52:56] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today [00:53:00] and a beautiful tomorrow.
Presenting New York Times best selling author Katherine Howe. She discusses how we should view the individuals from the Salem, MA witch trial history. Katherine gives us an exciting preview of her current fiction book project on 17th century female pirates:: A True Account of Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself: a novel. We continue the conversation inquiring with our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
[00:00:03]
[00:00:24] Josh Hutchinson: 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.
[00:00:33] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is the extraordinary author Katherine Howe. We'll speak with her about the causes of the Salem Witch Hunt and about her new book on pirates. I'm excited to talk about Salem Witch Hunt again and really curious what her book is about.
[00:00:56] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it doesn't matter what time of year.
[00:00:59] Josh Hutchinson: [00:01:00] It's always Christmas for pirates.
[00:01:02] Sarah Jack: Just like Katherine's other books, you are going to be delighted by the characters and the adventure. Fun getting to hear about it, and it's gonna be hard to wait for the publishing.
[00:01:17] Josh Hutchinson: She has wild swashbuckling shenanigans. But first, on a more serious note, we talk Salem, Witch Trials, what caused them, what didn't cause them, why Katherine Howe it gets fired up about certain topics.
[00:01:37] Sarah Jack: We get to a lot of layers.
[00:01:40] Josh Hutchinson: Peeling that onion.
[00:01:42] Sarah Jack: We just take Katherine right into the depths of the mechanics.
[00:01:48] Josh Hutchinson: We talk about the different spheres that Malcolm Gaskill spoke about that are nested in each other and how each of those [00:02:00] spheres contributed to the witch-hunt.
[00:02:03] Sarah Jack: We talk about what kind of perspective do we need to be using when we look back at the individuals that were in a different time in history.
[00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: Oh yes, we do that, don't we? Wow, this is gonna be one hell of an episode!
[00:02:19] Sarah Jack: Aren't they all?
[00:02:20] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, but I have a good feeling about this one. It's gonna be something special.
[00:02:26] Sarah Jack: It's another dynamic conversation with a phenomenal author and researcher, and she does not hold back.
[00:02:36] Josh Hutchinson: She does not. The emotions come out. Be ready.
[00:02:43] I'm going to talk about the before the Salem Witch Trials, what the conditions were in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Salem Village and Andover.
[00:02:56] Colonies used to have charters, so they [00:03:00] were officially recognized by the English government to govern themselves without direct supervision from the Crown and Parliament. Massachusetts Bay lost its colonial charter in 1684, when King Charles II revoked it because they had been naughty boys. And when the witch hunt began in early 1692, they still didn't have a charter, so they were in legal limbo.
[00:03:34] In addition, they were fighting King William's War and still recovering from King Philip's War, which was the costliest and bloodiest of the colonial wars, occurring between 1675 and 1678. In fact, the Massachusetts economy did not recover to pre-war levels [00:04:00] until the 1800s, after the Revolution.
[00:04:04] Economic hardship resulting from the wars and the collapse of land speculation were also contributed to by an influx of refugees from the frontier in Maine and New Hampshire, and Essex County, where Salem's located, was especially impacted, due to its proximity to that frontier, being the northernmost county in Massachusetts. Many of the settlers of Salem had moved on to Maine and New Hampshire, only to be forced to return when their villages were burned to the ground.
[00:04:50] Beyond these issues, in Salem, the town had recently gone through a bit of a separation, [00:05:00] where Salem Village was allowed to begin its own church. In 1689, Salem Village hired the fourth in a series of unpopular ministers, and there were disputes over his contract, so there was a lot of tension in the area.
[00:05:23] There was also tension in Andover, which was the hardest hit by the witch trials, with some 45 individuals being accused. There, there was a dispute between two ministers, Francis Dane and Thomas Barnard. Francis Dane was an older gentleman with health issues, who was no longer performing full duties as minister. So they had brought in Thomas Barnard, a younger man to take over some of [00:06:00] his duties, but were still paying both men in 1692, leading to tensions within the community that may have fueled some of the allegations there.
[00:06:13] We'll get into these issues further with Katherine Howe, and specifically we'll be discussing Andover in a few weeks with author Richard Hite and get into more of whether the dispute over the ministers did or did not contribute to witch-hunt fever in that community.
[00:06:35] Sarah Jack: That was good, Josh. Thanks, Josh.
[00:06:39] Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. It was a fun one to do, and we're going to dig into that stuff some more with our guest.
[00:06:48] Sarah Jack: I am excited to introduce author Katherine Howe, whose works include The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Conversion, [00:07:00] The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs. She's an editor of The Penguin Book of Witches and co-author of Vanderbilt.
[00:07:09] Josh Hutchinson: We've read that you're actually connected to somebody accused, which is an interesting connection. So can you tell us about who it is that's your ancestor?
[00:07:22] Katherine Howe: It's a little bit of a funny story. So my last name is Howe, like, how are you? But with an "e" on the end. And one of the witches who was accused towards the beginning of the Salem panic and who was put to death was Elizabeth Howe. And she was from the same broad region that my family was from also. So it wasn't a huge surprise when my aunt, back in the nineties, she was doing some genealogical research, and she figured out that that Elizabeth Howe is, I think it's like my eighth great aunt. So it's a lateral thing, rather than a direct thing. But at the time, she discovered that Elizabeth [00:08:00] Howe was related to us that way and also that Elizabeth Proctor was also a eighth or ninth great aunt, as well.
[00:08:07] Just not all that surprising given that those communities were pretty small, and there were lots of intermarriages between different family groups and things like that. So it was in the nineties when I first learned that and thought, of course, it being the nineties and me being a grunge kid, and I thought was like, "oh, that's so badass. That's so metal." thought that was the greatest thing ever.
[00:08:27] I didn't give it much thought beyond that, until I was actually living in that region of New England, because my family left New England in the 1930s. I grew up with this sense of it as like the motherland, but I didn't actually grow up there myself. So I arrived in this region with this kind of funny twin consciousness of, oh, this is home, but I'm also a stranger here. And so it was being a stranger in this place that I felt this kinship that probably contributed somewhat to my getting started [00:09:00] writing fiction.
[00:09:00] My first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which was something I started working on when I was in graduate school at Boston University and just trying to think about the humanity of people living in this time and the, maybe a funny little detail. So one of the historians of witchcraft who I really admire the most is a woman named Mary Beth Norton, who wrote a book called In The Devil's Snare, which anyone is interested in Salem has to know Professor Norton's work, cause she's just like the kind of detail that she can bring to it. And she writes in a novelistic sort of way. It's just like the most gripping account of Salem ever. And Professor Norton has said that the more you work on witchcraft, the more superstitious you become. And I have to say that this is true. As evidenced by the anecdote I'm about to tell you.
[00:09:54] So my first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. It asked, "what if one of the Salem witches the real [00:10:00] thing?" But the real thing the way the colonists believe, which is to be not in that pointy hat fantasy, Harry Potter Sense.
[00:10:07] And I built that story around a woman named Deliverance Dane who's a real person. And she was a minor person in the Salem Witch crisis. She was accused towards the end of the panic. She was not put to death. She really, like, was a footnote, I think, in the real history of Salem. And so I felt like it was okay to build a more fantastical story.
[00:10:30] Physick Book is a magical realist story, so I wanted room to have kind of a fantastical story around a real person. And so I picked her because of her obscurity, but also because of her name. Her name is so evocative of this particular moment in time of this like subculture that she was living in, Puritan New England, Deliverance Dane. Just amazing. So that is why I chose to write about her.
[00:10:59] That book [00:11:00] came out in 2009, and so several years later I was futsing about on a genealogy website because of course, for people who are interested in family history, life's gotten a lot easier. Over the last couple of years, with the advent of digital humanities and so many more ways of doing research online. Like, when my aunt was doing research in the nineties, it was really hard to do, and now it's actually much more accessible, which is a huge gift.
[00:11:25] So I'm messing about, point, click, point, click, and I come upon Nathaniel Dane, which is actually the name of a character in the book that I wrote, and I was like, "huh, that's a weird coincidence. Who knew?" Point, click, point, click, point, click. Lo and behold, I learned that it turns out Deliverance Dane, the real one, is my eighth great-grandmother. And so she's more closely related to me, genetically speaking, than Elizabeth Howe, even though Elizabeth Howe and I have the same last name. And I had [00:12:00] zero idea, no idea whatsoever, and I'd written an entire novel about this person and found that there she was, just hanging out, waiting for me. So I definitely have gotten more superstitious the longer I've worked on witchcraft.
[00:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: That's a very strange thing to have happen to you. But it turns out that Deliverance Dane is actually my like eighth or ninth great grand aunt, and Elizabeth Jackson Howe is also an aunt, and Deliverance Dane, in her confession, says that she worked with Mary Osgood, and that's my grandmother. I connected to a lot of the people you're connected to.
[00:12:39] Katherine Howe: So we're cousins, Josh.
[00:12:40] Josh Hutchinson: And Sarah's my cousin through Mary Esty.
[00:12:44] Katherine Howe: Wow.
[00:12:45] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. It's a small world when you get back to those little towns back there.
[00:12:50] Katherine Howe: Yes. It really is, for sure. It's still pretty far back there. It's a long time ago. It was very funny. I once did a book event, and someone came out to me very emotional, [00:13:00] and they were, turns out, a descendant of a judge from the Salem trials. And this person wanted very much to personally apologize to me. And I was like, " no, it's really, it's okay". Like he's, this is not something that you need to feel badly about. This is, everything's fine, cool's fine. But it is interesting to me how close people can feel to people who are living in such a distant time period.
[00:13:26] Josh Hutchinson: We definitely feel connected to our ancestors, and we talk to a lot of descendants of which trial victims, and they have an emotional bond with those ancestors, but that was so long ago. Did you get interested in Salem because of your connection with Howe and Proctor?
[00:13:51] Katherine Howe: Partly. I went to graduate school for American and New England studies, which is like interdisciplinary American history. And I actually came to it from an art history [00:14:00] background. I have a background in visual culture, and it's a where for grad school visual culture and also material culture, which is to say, stuff, objects. On a whim, my husband and I moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is a small town on the water close to modern-day Salem.
[00:14:19] We're having this conversation in October, and there was just an article on Boston Globe about how like a hundred thousand people came to Salem for Halloween and running streets. Salem is a town of 40,000 people. I can't even wrap my head around how many people they cramming in this season. And a lot of people come to Salem for Halloween. It's like Halloween Central, and understandably.
[00:14:41] But it was interesting to me while I was living in Marblehead and I was studying history. And I was living in a house that was built in 1705. And so one thing I have to say is people associate me so closely with Salem, because I've written so much Salem fiction. I grew up in [00:15:00] Houston, Texas. Okay. So the oldest building extant in Houston, Texas is a wine bar that was originally built as a bakery, and it's from 1856. So the oldest building in the entire city that I grew up in is six years younger than the new edition of the house that I was living in in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Earlier, when I was talking about having a sense of being home but being a stranger there. I brought my new south eyes to this incredibly old environment, because Marblehead has the biggest collection of century houses in the entire country. They even have more than Colonial Williamsburg, for instance, except that in Marblehead, the houses have been continually occupied.
[00:15:46] On the second floor of the house was an apartment, but the house had been a single-family house, been carved into apartments. Pine floors were like foot wide, and the ceilings were incredibly low. Like, you couldn't stretch your arms over your head, cuz [00:16:00] the ceilings were so low. And this is actually when I learned for the first time, talking material culture, that bed headboards actually have a function. They're not just decorative. And I discovered this, because we were so broke in grad school that we would turn the heat down as far as we could manage.
[00:16:16] And so the room that we used as our bedroom, ice would form on the inside of the windows, because it was so cold, and we were so broke. And so when we were first living there, we had this futon I'd brought with me from Texas, of course. And there was no headboard on the futon. And so we were freezing, just like having your head up by this wall with ice on the window. We were freezing cold. And it wasn't until we got like a bed with a headboard, we like, "oh, this is a lot warmer. This is great." We just only then did I discover that a headboard really is important, at least if you're living in New England.
[00:16:48] And in this room, the bedroom that we had was tucked under the eaves of the lean-to part of a house. So if you're familiar with colonial architecture, houses tended to be built in stages. You'd have room here and a [00:17:00] room here, and you have maybe you'd add a second floor and you might add a lean-to in the back to add some extra space. So we were in what had been the lean-to, and there was a little door that went into the back stair, and over the back stair, there was this little horseshoe-shaped charm over the back door that had been painted over. And of course, horseshoes are something that I think all over the country, we all recognize what they mean, and they mean that they're there for luck or for protection. And you see this all over the place. This is a piece of folk magic belief that is incredibly widespread, such that we don't even really notice it, as evidenced by the fact that you can buy horseshoe necklaces at Tiffany's, wherever. We don't even think about it anymore. But it was interesting to me to see this little remnant piece of magic. It wasn't a real horseshoe. It was clearly there. It was tiny. It was a charm. It had been made as a charm, sold as a charm.
[00:17:54] And so then I started looking around and noticing horseshoes wherever I went. And it got me thinking [00:18:00] between the fact that there was this little remnant magic shred, that there was that and also the fact that I was in this physical space that people had been moving through, who had been present when the trials were happening. Like we were only one town over from Salem, and, of course, when the trials were happening, people were traveling from towns all over the place to come and see, because it was a huge spectacle. People were talking about it.
[00:18:26] So there was one day when I was sitting and thinking, like, "someone's foot has been on this board, this actual board under my hand. The same foot was standing and watching what was going on." And something about that tangibility or that proximate tangibility was really moving to me, and it got me thinking about the humanity of people who were living through that very strange moment in time, cuz I feel like much of the time their humanity is elided by our presentist biases or what have you. I feel like in [00:19:00] highly fantasy versions of witchcraft, the humanity of the people in the past is elided, and in, certainly in Arthur Miller, the actual humanity of people is alighted.
[00:19:12] I started thinking about what became the story in Physick Book from that perspective, from like occupying this very weird, specific physical space as a stranger and trying to think about what it meant to be in that space and like how it felt to be in this space, over this incredible span of years, and how, in one sense, the early modern period is this incredibly alien and remote time. Their understanding of how reality worked is very different from our understanding of how reality works. But at the same time, there are certain common elements of common humanity that persist, like lying in bed and being freezing cold, unless you have a headboard at your head, and so a lot of my fiction, my desire to write fiction came [00:20:00] from thinking about these common points of humanity across really wide, gaping spans of time.
[00:20:06] Josh Hutchinson: Can you give us a little background on what the situation was in Massachusetts Bay, when the witch trials started?
[00:20:17] Katherine Howe: A few things were happening. A question that I get a lot is, what is the proximate cause o f the Salem Witch crisis, what caused it? And the thing that I think is interesting about that question is that it suggests that it would be so much easier if there were just one cause, if we could just point to the thing, and be like, "oh, that's the thing."
[00:20:36] When we were corresponding, Josh, you mentioned the ergot hypothesis, that back in the seventies, somebody floated the idea that maybe all the afflicted girls had eaten moldy bread and were suffering from ergotism, and they were all tripping outta their mind. And that hypothesis was actually dismissed, I think, six months after it was first floated. But it still bubbles up periodically in [00:21:00] documentaries and popular discourses about Salem, because, and I think the reason that it doesn't go away is because it's so simple. It's so tidy to be like, "okay, that's the thing."
[00:21:11] And the truth of the matter is there isn't one thing. The way that I sometimes talk about it is that it's like a Venn diagram, and Salem is the point of the intersection of all the overlapping circles.
[00:21:24] So one overlapping circle is the very specific kind of religion that everyone in Salem adhered to. It was a world view that did not hold that there was anything outside of Christianity. So, for instance, the indigenous population that was already living in Massachusetts at that time, by virtue of not being adherents of Christianity in their very specific puritan worldview, that which is not Christian is by definition devilish, and it was actually Mary Beth Norton who's made the point that a lot of the language that the [00:22:00] people at Salem use to describe the devil is language that is used to describe indigenous people. So, one big Venn diagram circle is the specific religious and cultural moment that they're living in.
[00:22:15] Another diagram circle that we could point to is the weather, that the first panicky behavior that erupts with Betty Parris and with Abigail Williams, it starts in January, January, super cold in Massachusetts, cold, dark. The sun sets at 4:30 in the afternoon. And I'm not exaggerating, like it is dark AF. And and that's true in the 17th century, as it's today. And also in 1690s, North America was in miniature ice age. It was even colder and more bitter than it is now in Massachusetts.
[00:22:50] Another piece is pretty relentless class and gender context. The girls who first experienced symptoms that they describe as [00:23:00] fits are Betty Parris, daughter of Samuel Parris, who's the unpopular minister in Salem Village, Abigail Williams, who's his 11-year-old, she's described as being his niece, although that had a different meaning for them than it does for us today, but she was bound out to service.
[00:23:17] So can you imagine living in a culture where when you can't afford to feed your 11-year-old, you just give her to somebody to live with, for her to work for them? You just give her away. And so Abigail was this lonely, impoverished, starving, freezing child whose job it was to obey everyone all the time.
[00:23:42] Oftentimes, I think with great sympathy about Abigail Williams, poor Abigail, who, by the way, in Arthur Miller is turned into a 17-year-old temptress. She's a child. She's a child. And if you look at the descriptions of her behavior that are described as her being in her fits, a lot of her behavior sounds to me like playing, [00:24:00] like running around in circles and flapping your arms and saying, " whish" and saying that you're gonna fly at the chimney.
[00:24:05] Is that devilish possession, or is it an 11 year old girl being silly? And I feel like that is a, that is something that's worth thinking about. So there's the kind of class and gender politics, that's another big.
[00:24:16] So there are a number of different aspects, but you were asking about the politics and the charter. So this is another pretty big circle. So, typically in the early modern period in the colonies, if someone was accused as a witch, they would be accused and have a trial, and if they were found guilty, by the way, it's hard to find people guilty. They actually had a pretty high bar for for evidence at that time. Believe it or not, you could be tried and found guilty, and if you're found guilty, you could be put to death, and that could happen within a matter of weeks. Salem, the panic begins in January, the first hangings aren't until June. That's like a huge long span of time. And the reason for that long span of time is because the Glorious Revolution was unfolding.
[00:24:57] Back in England at that [00:25:00] time, Massachusetts Charter had expired, so they didn't have the legal wherewithal to hold a trial. That's why the Salem trial trials are conducted by a special Court of Oyer and Terminer. They basically had to convene like a special tribunal to deal with this problem that had come together. In fact, there's some historians who wondered if the Court of Oyer and Terminer didn't just deal with witchcraft. They were supposed to deal with all the rest of the backlog. But we just don't know what that backlog was, cause the records of the witch trials are what have survived.
[00:25:28] And then there's another piece of the Venn diagram, and we have to consider it. At the very beginning, the very first person who's accused as a witch is accused by Abigail and Betty and she's the only person who has less social and cultural power than they do. And they accuse Tituba or Titube Indian, who is an enslaved woman in the Parris household.
[00:25:50] So she's basically the only person who has less ability to protect herself than these children themselves do. And so Tituba's accused. She [00:26:00] has two confessions, and there's some evidence that she is beaten in between the two confessions. And in one of the confessions, Tituba introduces the idea of a conspiracy. She says that there is a group of witches at work in Salem Village. She doesn't know who they are or how many.
[00:26:20] And so at one point early on, there's actually a sermon is preached in Sermon Village that I'm gonna man the title, but it's something along the lines of "Christ Knows How Many Devils There Are." And so you have this idea of an unknown number of conspirators, who must be discovered. And when you have this undefined, invisible threat and also no legal relief, there's no like pressure valve that this tension could be released by, because of the like, unfortunate timing of the expiration of the charter.
[00:26:58] So you bring [00:27:00] all of these circles in the Venn diagram together, and that is why Salem gets as big as it does. And by the time Salem was over and done, 19 people were put to death and hundreds had been accused, hundreds in a period of time when a given town would only have a couple thousand people.
[00:27:16] Josh Hutchinson: That was a great, thorough explanation of how it took all these different factors to create the situation. It wasn't something, a single bullet theory, that you can put to rest.
[00:27:32] Katherine Howe: But I think one reason that, that we keep craving for simplicity is because with a simple explanation for why than it's easier to consign, to history. It'd be so much more encouraging or it'd be such a relief to be able to say, "Oh, it was air got poisoning. No big deal. That's all." But like the fact that it, what really was at stake was this intersection of circumstances and that everyone who was a participant in [00:28:00] Salem pretty much believed that they were doing the right thing. Not only the right thing, but the necessary thing to save their community. That to me is also a moving but also terrifying thing to remember and to realize.
[00:28:13] Because certainly we all, we've all lived through moments where we are convinced that we're doing the right thing, only to see ourselves perpetuating horrors, and that is I think that's one of the reasons we as a culture are never really able to let go of Salem.
[00:28:25] Sarah Jack: You said, " as a culture, we're never able to let go of Salem." Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, " shall we never get rid of this past? It lies upon the present like a giant's dead body." I'm wondering what you think you would write now about that.
[00:28:43] Katherine Howe: Hawthorne in particular is someone who, like he personally, so felt the weight of Salem's past in a very personal way, because he was a descendant of Judge Hathorne, obviously. And because he was living there himself, and for many [00:29:00] generations, in fact, much during much of the time period when Hawthorne was living in Salem, the witch trials were not discussed in polite society. This was true into the 20th century, actually. They were not discussed. It was not something that was brought up. It's certainly something my family never talked about until this is something that my, my aunt uncovered. There was a sense of embarrassment attached to it, I think.
[00:29:23] But I'm also intrigued by the fact that when Hawthorne has tried to grapple with it, and he has tried to grapple with it, he took the line from he, he knew what had happened. Like he took a line from Sarah Good and put it in the mouth of Matthew Maule, in The House of the Seven Gables.
[00:29:39] Was it Hawthorne who grumbled about "damn scribbling women?" I think it was. I think it was. And so this is me tweaking his nose a little bit, but Sarah Good. Sarah Good was a beggar. Okay. She was destitute. She was one of the first people accused, because she was in no position to defend herself. She was thrown into jail. She has a baby on her and like [00:30:00] toddler, essentially with her, the baby dies while they're in jail. The toddler, whose name is Dorothy, ends up losing her mind and has to be like supported by the town after the trials are all over. So like this person is in absolutely dire straits and is and suffers mightily at the hands of the community where she lives and who's supposed to be helping them.
[00:30:23] And when she's on the scaffold, she says the most badass thing anyone has ever said in history of time, my unbiased opinion. She says, "I'm no more than a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." And I wish I had that kind of wherewithal, because who has that kind of wherewithal under in those circumstances?
[00:30:45] And so Hawthorne takes this line, Hawthorne knows it's happened, and he puts this line in a guy, in a guy's mouth. I understand that he's writing in the 19th century. I get it. But at the same time, I think it's impossible to [00:31:00] look at Salem and not consider gender politics in place. The fact that virtually everyone who's accused and put to death was a woman. Any man who was accused cuz he's associated with a woman who was already accused. Giles Corey was crushed to death between stones. He's accused cuz his wife, Martha's accused first, but also the accusers are initially children, but then also women. So there's a really intense gender politics in place here.
[00:31:28] So your question was, the past lying with the weight of the giant and what would Hawthorne say today? And I'm actually curious what Hawthorne would say about it today. I think he would sympathize with, or maybe be aggravated by the fact that we're still having the conversation that he was having a hundred and fifty years ago. But at the same time, I feel like we're talking about different things from what he was concerned. And and also I think he would be really annoyed because I write novels. I'm a woman.
[00:31:58] Sarah Jack: I [00:32:00] love that you brought up that he took Sarah's words and gave them to a man, because it just dawned on me very recently that Ann Putnam didn't read her own apology. I just assumed, and I think that possibly other descendants, we read that, we think I don't know what we really think about it. We're evaluating what it says anyways, but we're doing that with her voice in our head, and no, it was not.
[00:32:30] Katherine Howe: One thing that, that continues to interest me, as a history person, about Salem is that it's one of the rare instances when regular people are at the center of the store. So much of history, especially the further you go into the past, the vast majority of people who've been alive in history of ever, have left no record of themselves. They weren't literate, they weren't of sufficient note to have their burial place noted, [00:33:00] and so much of history, even academic history, as it's gotten more serious about excavating stories, just by the nature of the way that archives come to exist, there's still going to be a bias towards power.
[00:33:13] There's gonna be a bias towards privilege and a bias towards power, and, when it comes to Salem, that is one of the rare instances where the bias towards power falls away, because the people who are at the center of the drama are regular people, and where historians have put the work in to try to excavate what is able to be excavated of these lives that otherwise would've been invisible to us.
[00:33:40] Would we have known Abigail Williams ever existed, if she hadn't been part of the Salem Witch Trials? We would not have? And in fact, even with her central position at the beginning of the panic, we don't know what happened to her. We don't know where she went. We don't know how old she was when she died. Nobody actually knows for sure.
[00:33:56] And so particularly talking about people who are not literate, Anne [00:34:00] Putnam had her confession read. If I remember correctly, Anne Putnam wasn't literate. And so you're right in saying here's this apology that she delivered in front of everybody and that it was read on her behalf. To what extent was she the author of her own apology? And it's impossible to say. It's impossible to know.
[00:34:19] And it's one of the reasons that you've touched on one of my rant buttons, I'm sorry to report, but as a writer of historical fiction, like I have so little patience for historical fiction about kings and queens. I don't give a damn about kings and queens. Who cares? They get enough attention, they have enough records, they're all literate, everyone documents every single thing that they do. And I do not give a damn, because history pays them enough attention, and I'm so much more interested in trying to excavate the history of people who would otherwise be forgotten.
[00:34:54] Sarah Jack: I caught that from you reading Conversion, because [00:35:00] your main character, Colleen, she's getting to give us the firsthand experience like no other afflicted person was able to do.
[00:35:09] Katherine Howe: Thank you for saying that. I confess I haven't looked at Conversion in kind a long time. You're making me think I should look at it again, cuz there's actually a group of high school students who are reading it right now and I'm gonna talk to next week. I should read that book.
[00:35:22] But I appreciate you saying that, because I feel like, like one question I sometimes wrestle with as a history person and someone who's a novelist is what does historical fiction have to offer that nonfiction doesn't have to offer? Like, why not just write a really good history of something?
[00:35:38] And I feel like in many instances, in the cases where a story cannot be recovered, that's where historical fiction can be a really wonderful intervention. If you can build a credible world with credible material culture, and credible details, and credible politics, and credible ideology, and then [00:36:00] people it with people who are credible people, it is a way of accessing history that otherwise is not extant, where it doesn't exist.
[00:36:11] Is there going to be some imagination involved? Obviously, but it is, I feel like that's where the opportunity lies. And I realize we've gotten off Salem a little ,bit and I apologize, but it's something that I think about a lot. Like, particularly for some, a story that's as revisited as often as the Salem story is, what does fiction have to offer? Like why tell a fictional version of this story? I feel like fiction gives you permission to fill in and shade in stories that where there just is no other shading available. And that to me seems like the real area of opportunity for storytelling.
[00:36:52] Josh Hutchinson: I wanted to ask you about the afflicted girls. Do you think it's plausible that conversion disorder could [00:37:00] explain some of the fits?
[00:37:01] Katherine Howe: Yes and no. I'll explain that hedge of an answer. For one thing I find it always a little bit tricky to apply contemporary psychoanalytic categories to people in the past. Like on the one hand, I believe very urgently in, the shared humanity of people in the past, but at the same time, like we take as natural so many habits of mind that are actually very historically contingent. The fact that you and I might casually talk about what our dreams mean or what our subconscious motivations might be for something like that is indicative of post-psychoanalytic. And I think it's tricky to try to access the interior light of people who are living in a different moment, especially a moment like the early [00:38:00] modern in Massachusetts. It's even hard for a scholar of that time period to really grasp the extent to which Christianity informed every, single aspect of existence.
[00:38:15] So for my second novel I was working on. No, it's Physick Book. I was reading up about alchemy, and like we know about alchemy as this pseudoscientific practice in early modern practice in which someone tries to turn that into gold. Okay, fine. But that's actually not what it was. It is actually a way of understanding the order of the universe that took as scientific fact the perfectability of the human soul.
[00:38:41] There's this tense layering of religion and materiality and mirroring of structures and images like, like as soon as I would get close to thinking I understood alchemical thought, it would slither out of my grasp. And I would realize this because I'm just [00:39:00] too much of someone born in the 20th century to, to I will never actually really understand that intellectual landscape.
[00:39:09] So when you ask can conversion disorder explain the girls' behavior? Like in a way yes. But in another way I don't know that we can actually really understand their selfhood, the way that these girls thought about themselves or understood themselves as individuals.
[00:39:28] It's just very different from the way that we think. It's very different. So that there's that qualification. With that qualification in place, I would say that, so conversion disorder is where you are under so much stress that your body converts it into physical symptoms. And then mass psychogenic illness is when a group of people experience strange behavior together.
[00:39:56] And there are many examples of mass psychogenic illness [00:40:00] or mass psychogenic illness expressions of conversion disorder, and many examples of it across cultures, across time, across continents, across ethnicities. And it very often happens among adolescent girls, for whatever reason. Maybe cause we are conditioned to be more like socially engaged with other people. Who knows? You can try to explain it a number of different ways.
[00:40:22] But it's not only adolescent girls. I think that it is, this is gonna be a controversial thing to say, but like the recent incidences of Havana Syndrome are pretty clearly an example of mass psychogenic illness. Now it's important to say that mass psychogenic illness is real. It counts as a real thing. It's not just people like, it's not all in your head. You know what I mean? Like the fact that it is, that it has its origin in mental disorder doesn't make it any less real to the body. Conversion disorder is a disorder. It is your body being sick. It's just that the sickness originates [00:41:00] from inside your own organism. That doesn't make it count less. You know what I mean?
[00:41:03] All of which is to say, did a group of girls start exhibiting strange behavior? Yes. Did it spread from girl to girl on networks of kinship and friendship? It did. But at the same time, their behavior, when you say "fits" today, that has a very specific connotation. And it sounds like a epileptic seizure or something like that to, to us today. If I say, "Oh my gosh, I just saw this person have a fit." You'd be like, "Oh no." And you'd imagine that they fell down twitching and foaming at the mouth, but that's not what they were doing.
[00:41:32] What they were doing was behaving out of the ordinary. So like earlier we were talking about Abigail running around flapping her wings and saying, her arms, and saying, "whish, whish, whish." That is her in her fits. Or like another instance of Abigail in her fits is when she challenges Deodat Lawson to name his text. She like gets up in the middle of church and like mouths off to this very famous divine and rolls her eyes about how boring it's gonna be when he reads his text. That's [00:42:00] not her having a fit. That's her misbehaving.
[00:42:02] But her behavior was such a challenge to the gender and economic power structure that was in place while she was living. It was so out of the ordinary that her community could only chalk it up to devilish influence because it was that unimaginable that she would behave this way.
[00:42:20] So was there a social illness aspect to the afflicted girl's behavior? I feel certain, yes. So that, that's my long and qualified example about or discussion of conversion disorder.
[00:42:34] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think that they were really afraid of witches and that the fear of witches might have also translated?
[00:42:43] Katherine Howe: Sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think the fear was real. I think it is a mistake to either chalk it up as craven opportunism or as naked stupidity or superstition. One of [00:43:00] the things that I think is important, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt who live in the past and that is that like absolutely they were afraid.
[00:43:08] Can you imagine, what does it feel like to live in a world where you really, actually, honest to gosh believe that the devil can go walk about on the earth, as a real person and that he can disguise himself as people you know and love and trust? That at any given time, I could be talking to you right now, Josh, and you could be the devil in disguise, and I wouldn't know it.
[00:43:30] That's a and if you really believe that, you really do believe that, and you actually really believe that hell is a real place that you can go there if you make a mistake. That there is no, this is another like aspect of puritan belief, that like they believed in the elect. The idea that you have no way of saving yourself. That your being saved was only up to God, and you had no control [00:44:00] over it whatsoever. Like what? You couldn't go to confession. You couldn't do penance. You could try your best to behave, but it was ultimately just up to God.
[00:44:10] What an existentially dreadful way to live your life, to have no certainty. It's a little, a really hard life, first of all, and to believe that there was such a thing as paradise after death, but to have no idea whether or not you got to go there and that nothing you did made any difference. And that everywhere, at every turn, the devil was waiting to trip you up. Like that would be a difficult and impossible mental landscape to occupy.
[00:44:44] So yes, if your question was did they really believe in witchcraft and was that fear, could not fear contribute to their behavior? Like absolutely. What a terrifying way to live, and also what a relief. Like one of the reasons that I think witches [00:45:00] was such a persuasive idea for so many people at that time was wouldn't it be great if something was going bad in your life, to be able to not try to see it as a sign of God's Ill favor, but instead to have someone to blame for it? To be like, "it's not me. I'm not messing up here. Someone's doing this to me."
[00:45:20] I think that's also very human, that human feeling. It's not just bad luck or misfortune or like the luck of the draw, and it's so much more of a, "no, this person doing something to me. They wish me ill, and that's why my life is hard." I think that's a very human way to be.
[00:45:39] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We talked a little about Anne Putnam, Jr.'s apology earlier, and she still does that in her apology. "The devil made me do it."
[00:45:49] Katherine Howe: And Samuel Sewall does the same thing, like the two big apologies that come about after Salem is over after everything's done are Ann Putnam's and [00:46:00] Samuel Sewall's apology. But Samuel's apology, too, is weird where he like, first of all, he comes to it. It's not that he stops believing in witchcraft or stops believing that there is an invisible world. He comes to it after a series of wonders and marbles, including, if I remember correctly, like his house being tilted with stones. Who knows what really happened? And maybe there was like a passing hailstorm is how it took it.
[00:46:22] But he comes to it after a series of wonders and marvels, and he comes to believe that the devil tricked them all. That it wasn't that that the devil wasn't luring people into witchcraft. Instead, the devil obscured the minds of the people who are supposed to keep the community safe. And but also what a horrifying thing to, to come to believe about yourself. To look back at your actions and think you're doing the right thing, and think that you are saving your community from the most threatening presence that your imagination can come up with, and instead to conclude that, no, what happened [00:47:00] was that threatening presence tricked you. That you were so weak that you were fooled. Like what a, what a heinous thing to believe about yourself. It's a very punishing worldview that they subscribe to.
[00:47:16] Josh Hutchinson: Do you see any modern parallels to the Witch hunt?
[00:47:20] Katherine Howe: Sure. A few years ago a historian of witchcraft named John Demos published a book about witch hunting, in which he has a chapter about the 1980s daycare satanism thing that happened, much of which I was only dimly aware of, being a small person in 1980s myself.
[00:47:41] But what happened was, a group of people were put on trial, actually put on trial and actually convicted of having you run a daycare center and used the children in satanic rituals. And at the time that it was happening, and this is preposterous, like I, it's actually just like on the surface of it, I [00:48:00] think preposterous. I think, taken out context, any of us looking at this would say, "this makes, this is ridiculous. Obviously this did not happen." And at the time that it was unfolding, John Demos saw it unfolding and he was like, "Oh my God, it's Salem all over again." Like the same pieces are in place, like the idea of a conspiracy, the idea of trusted people that you cannot trust, the idea of children being at risk.
[00:48:24] And I think that you see some of the same hysteria and language. I don't like using the word hysteria, cuz it's such a specific word, but you see some of this in like contemporary corners of the conspiracy internet, where I try not to spend any time, but Isn't that Pizzagate? Isn't there some like thing not too long ago about worrying a particular pizzeria was like putting kids at risk in this same kind of way? Like you see the same kind of like at any time that someone worries that children are at risk, there will be a lot of open-mindedness about it.
[00:48:55] But of course, here's me getting political. Like, of course, children actually literally are at [00:49:00] risk by, by school shooting, right? Like the one thing that would really keep children really safe in places where they're supposed to feel safe and trust people around them, is if they restricted access to military assault weapons. That's my opinion. My opinion is that if we really care about keeping children safe, we take those guns off the street, right, full stop. But feel free to send me hate mail. I can be reached to KatherineHowe.com/contact.
[00:49:21] Sarah Jack: So I think asking the question about are there parallels, we have these modern parallels that are popping into our heads. We have our strong feelings, but what can the understanding of the Colonial Witch trials and those before do to help us with these parallels? Can it help us? Will it help?
[00:49:43] Katherine Howe: I'd like to think that it can. One of the things that I like to say when talking about Salem is that I feel that one of the reasons we can't let Salem go. As a culture, like we come back to it and we, like we can't let it go.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] And I feel that the reason that we can't let it go, among the many reasons, but I think one of the big reasons is that it forces us to confront how fragile our ideals really are. We are an unusual country in that in many respects, we are, notwithstanding those of us who were brought here against our will, which is many of us, but broadly construed, you could argue that we are something of an intentional community.
[00:50:26] That the only thing that really holds us together is this set of shared ideals, and that some of our shared ideals include religious freedom. They include a social safety net. That we value people who are different from us, that we value people who are vulnerable. " Bring us you're tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Like that, that arguably this is an ideal that we hold in common. This is an organizing principle of the culture in which we live.
[00:50:52] And yet Salem is this instance where everybody, believing they were doing the [00:51:00] absolute right thing, instead put to death, the state put to death 19 people. That, in the course of doing the right thing, the state did the absolute wrong thing, and they also put to death people who were, many of them were vulnerable in their community. People who were more likely to be accused were those who were at the most vulnerable, who were the most out step vulnerable in community. And so I feel like Salem is an instructive moment for that, because here's this moment where, in the course of being convinced of our total moral authority and correctness, a huge miscarriage of justice took place.
[00:51:41] And I think that's a really difficult thing to reconcile. And I think especially for a country like ours, where also so many of us are brought up to look to the colonial period for our origin, that we're told, rightly or wrongly, that we are taught to look into the 18th, and to a lesser [00:52:00] extent the 17th century, and see in it the seeds of the country that we would become.
[00:52:04] Maybe that's another way of thinking about it. Like another way of thinking about it, is it more productive to think about what we want the future to look like than it is to try to think about what the past has to tell us? That's a question. That's a question that I think is interesting. One, particularly for an intentional community like ours. We have, we get to reinvent ourselves as a country, and we get to decide, and what kind of place do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects vulnerable people? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects people who are at risk, who are different from us, who are angry, who are grumpy, who read too many books? I would prefer to live in a place that protects those kinds of people. But we get to choose We choose who we protect.
[00:52:47] Sarah Jack: We can make that choice, and not only is it going to stop suffering here, there are places in this world that are still totally captured [00:53:00] by doing the wrong thing, thinking they're doing the right thing, witch hunting. This discussion it is about us here, but it's about us there.
[00:53:10] You have referred to time so much. That is such a strong piece of this. Even in Conversion, one of the simple quotes you have says, "any number of things could happen in the time it took to go down the hall." You like go right to the time thing. And today when you started talking, you talked about time. And I look at the history, I look at us now, how do we all get caught up on this witch-hunting mentality and start looking out for humanity and protecting other?
[00:53:42] Katherine Howe: It's a hard thing. It's a really hard thing. And I wish I had easy answers for it. I think simply the act of reflection and awareness is an important one. Stopping to interrogate what our assumptions are.
[00:53:56] Josh Hutchinson: We've talked about a lot of heavy things. [00:54:00] I wondered if we could switch and discuss your new book project. What can you tell us about it?
[00:54:06] Katherine Howe: Oh, so many things. So I'm obsessed with pirates, who isn't? Hopefully, the answer is everyone is obsessed with pirates.
[00:54:13] So I have a book coming out in fall, and I think they're gonna let me keep the title. And you. Okay, Josh, Sarah, you guys have to tell me what you think of the title. You ready? So get comfortable, here it is: A True Account of Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. That's the title. It's a mouthful.
[00:54:30] It starts in Boston in 1726 at a very real an actual pirate trial that really did happen. Like most of my stuff, it's, it is grounded in actual facts and then becomes what I'm describing as a little bit like Gone Girl meets Treasure Island. And I had so much fun with it, and I'm really excited about it. And it is a little bit of a departure from what I've done, but it is about a girl, Hannah Masury, who has to disguise herself in order to escape some pretty heavy circumstances. And [00:55:00] she ends up basically stealing away on what turns out to be a pirate ship. And we have to follow her on her adventures.
[00:55:06] And I have so much fun with some basic pirate tropes. There is treasure, there is a parrot. It's so much fun, and there's also some, a little bit of romance, and I have the most fun ever.
[00:55:18] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun one to read.
[00:55:22] Katherine Howe: I really hope so.
[00:55:24] Sarah Jack: I'm so delighted by what I just heard.
[00:55:28] Katherine Howe: That makes me very happy. Makes me very happy. It's weird because it's one of the, it's probably the most violent book I've written. If y'all have read my stuff, then you know I'm a teensy bit squeemish and shy away from. So there's some violence in this book, but what's strange about it is, I didn't invent any of it. It is actually all from historical record. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any of the stuff that happens in this book, because it all ripped from the headlines. It all really happened.
[00:55:55] Josh Hutchinson: And was Hannah herself based on a real person?[00:56:00]
[00:56:00] Katherine Howe: Hannah is based on a couple of people. She's inspired in part by real accounts of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who are two working-class women, who ended up disguising themselves as men and going raiding in Jamaica at the end of the 17th century. They were real people ,and there was a real Hannah Masury ,who I talk about a little bit in the author's note of the book. She was a 19th-century person, and she ended up, I was inspired when I came across her. She was the wife of a ship captain. She was married to a ship captain, and she ended up putting down a mutiny by herself, armed only with a pistol, in the Pacific Ocean.
[00:56:39] And so I read about her, and she didn't have any children, and I was like, "oh my gosh, I am obsessed with you." And so I decided to name my awesome pirate after her. Hannah, Hannah comes from a couple of different sources, but I really like her as a person. She's a tough character .
[00:56:56] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like it. You said that it's set [00:57:00] around a pirate trial in Boston?
[00:57:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah, it starts, the action starts in Boston in 1726, and in 1726, it's the end of the golden age of piracy. It's actually funny that the Salem period, like the witch craze, the end of the witch craze and golden age of piracy are at the same time period, which I think is interesting. And a guy named William Fly was tried as a pirate, and the person who ministered to him and preached about him was none other than Cotton Mather .
[00:57:32] So Cotton Mather by then was this like hugely famous, successful cleric. He was really rich. He was, like, had a very popular ministry and so he had taken it upon himself to crusade against piracy. So he tries to bring William Fly and his compatriots back to God, and he's there when they're hanged. William Fly was hanged, and then he was gibbeted. He was, his body was hung in chains on a tiny island in the Boston Harbor Islands and [00:58:00] left there to rot. He was really avid as a warning to other people who might go out on the account, which is a way of describing going, turning pirate.
[00:58:09] And so I was fascinated by this. It was only a hundred years later that excursion boats are starting to leave Boston. Like steam boats are going from Boston to Nahant. This is no time all. To think that you could go by Nixes Mate, which is where William Fly was hanged and chained. You could go by there and to see you remnant oft remain dangling there.
[00:58:29] So that's where the action begins at William Fly's trial, and things even crazier.
[00:58:36] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun ride. .
[00:58:38] Katherine Howe: I'm excited for it. I'm not sure when it's coming out. I think it's gonna be November, 2023. So it's coming up.
[00:58:46] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with an important update on what's happening now in your world.
[00:58:51] Sarah Jack: Thank you for listening a few minutes longer to hear End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News. How many innocent world citizens [00:59:00] is it okay to accept as suffering from violent brutalization, due to harmful practices related to accusations of harmful witchcraft and ritual attacks? These attacks are happening now to thousands of innocent people, who are not causing supernatural harm but are being punished by their community, as if they are the ultimate explanation.
[00:59:20] They are innocent, not dangerous witches. These attacks are happening across countries of Africa and Asia. Please see the show notes for links to read about how some countries have advocacy groups working to intercede. When there is not an answer for unexpected bad luck, unfortunate death, or personal misfortune, blaming others for supernatural malevolence is the actual crime. This witch fear is still causing unfounded, violent attacks against women, children, and sometimes men. Listen and watch for the reports. These attacks are reported on.
[00:59:55] The Northern Ireland borough of Larne wants to [01:00:00] commemorate eight Witch trial victims from the Islandmagee Witch Trial that took place on March 31st, 1711. A borough counselor raised questions very recently of whether the eight women and a man who were found guilty of witchcraft were actually innocent. In the trial era, using witchcraft was a covenant with the devil against the victims. When this counselor questioned if it is within the counsel's capacity to say they were innocent, he's questioning if the accused were indeed working with the devil himself to cause harm.
[01:00:32] Is it within human capacity to not assign witch harm guilt onto others? I want to answer that question right now. Yes, it is within our capacity to stop questioning other people about their status as a supernaturally harmful witch. It is our duty to stop questioning accused witch innocence, past or present. These accused people were not, and today's accused witches are not, causing the supernatural harm that is feared of them.
[01:00:59] [01:01:00] This week, academic research was published that is "a new global data set on contemporary witchcraft beliefs ." It has determined that witchcraft beliefs cut across sociodemographic groups, but are less widespread among the more educated and economically secure. Country-level variation in the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs is systematically linked to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics. Altogether, the resulting data set covers more than 140,000 individuals from 95 countries and territories and 5 continents. Over 40% of all survey respondents claim to believe in witchcraft. Stay tuned for a discussion on this research outcome. Find a link to the report in the show notes.
[01:01:48] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious sphere. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an [01:02:00] intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website, endwitchhunts.org.
[01:02:11] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that eye-opening update.
[01:02:16] Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:02:21] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for a special Connecticut witch trial victim descendant episode.
[01:02:31] Josh Hutchinson: And join us in our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Go to endwitchhunts.Org.
[01:02:38] Sarah Jack: Subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen.
[01:02:41] Josh Hutchinson: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:02:44] Sarah Jack: Remember to tell your friends that you love what you've been hearing on Thou Shalt Not Suffer, so that they will not miss out.
[01:02:52] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:02:56] [01:03:00]
Presenting author and communications professional Greg Houle. He discusses his upcoming novel, “The Putnams of Salem”. Listen as he gives us a glimpse of what he imagines the first person perspective could have been for Ann Putnam Jr, and her father Thomas Putnam. What role did they play in the trials? His fictional short stories are linked below. We continue the conversation inquiring with our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches? Links: Greg Houle Website
[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Exodus 22:18.
[00:00:05]
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:33] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:35] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is Greg Houle, an author currently working on a novel about the Putnams of Salem.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: Because you like the show, please share it with your friends, family, and followers.
[00:00:47] Josh Hutchinson: We hope you're enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving. Have a slice of Turkey for me.
[00:00:53] Sarah Jack: Share the mashed potatoes.
[00:00:55] Josh Hutchinson: Pass that gravy.
[00:00:58] Sarah Jack: This is a great topic for [00:01:00] Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to talking to a Putnam of Salem descendant.
[00:01:06] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and we hope this episode gives you lots of conversation ideas for your Thanksgiving dinner.
[00:01:15] Sarah Jack: Especially if you've been having boundary disputes with your friends or family.
[00:01:21] Josh Hutchinson: Make a peace offering, and be sure to watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the best Thanksgiving anything ever made, hands down.
[00:01:33] Sarah Jack: But only after you watched Holly Hunter's Home for the Holidays.
[00:01:36] Josh Hutchinson: Then get back to your Walking Dead marathon. That's what you're really watching. Or House of the Dragon.
[00:01:42] Sarah Jack: And now Josh is gonna tell us some history about the Putnams of Salem.
[00:01:47] Josh Hutchinson: The Putnams of Salem Village were instigators of the Witch Hunt. Thomas Putnam and his brother, Edward, were two of the four men who [00:02:00] filed the first complaints against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Thomas went on to make 35 complaints, testify against 17 people, and record 120 depositions, including those of his daughter Ann Putnam, Jr., who was the first villager outside of the parsonage to be afflicted. Later on, she was joined by her mother Ann Putnam, Sr. and their maid, Mercy Lewis, among the ranks of the afflicted. The Putnam family was an important family in the village for three generations. 12 out of the original 25 villagers to sign the church covenant were Putnams, and they ranked among the top taxpayers in the village, along with the Porters.
[00:02:55] After accusing many people and going through [00:03:00] all her theatrics in the courtroom, Ann Putnam, Jr. did apologize in 1706, specifically to Rebecca Nurse's family, but also to the whole village, as she joined the church under the new minister, Joseph Green.
[00:03:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you for introducing us to the Putnams of Salem. I cannot wait to get more of these details from Greg.
[00:03:23] Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. I'm also looking forward to hearing this family covered in depth. They were so heavily involved, what they did in the witch trials, which was so much. So many Putnams were involved in so many ways.
[00:03:40] Sarah Jack: I'm so happy to welcome Greg Houle, writer of short fiction and author of The Putnams of Salem, coming 2025.
[00:03:49] Greg Houle: So I came into this story, the story of Salem and the Salem witch hysteria like a lot of people do, with a personal family connection to it.[00:04:00] My mother is a Putnam. She is a direct as descendant of Thomas Putnam, Jr., who, along with his oldest daughter Ann, were probably two of the most prolific accusers during the Salem witch hysteria. But yet, despite that connection, I really didn't have any interest in exploring the story as I was growing up. And in spite of having a really intense, lifelong interest in history, I really didn't care, and I think part of that was because of the fact that Salem is such a huge story, and it has a life of its own, and it's become this kind of larger than life almost true crime story.
[00:04:44] And I think a lot of times what has happened is it's deflected a lot of the attention away from the important things, the victims, why it happened, how can we prevent it from happening in the future, that [00:05:00] sort of thing. It was always an interesting thing to be connected to, so many of us are.
[00:05:04] Everything changed in the summer of 2021. And that is that summer, I live in LA now, and my wife and daughter went back east to visit our family, and my wife's family lives in Boston. And while we were there, we decided, let's go to Salem. And we went there, I thought, "Okay I really want to connect my daughter to my, her grandmother's side of the family. I really ought to understand the story better and really dig into it. "And that's really what I did.
[00:05:35] And as soon as I did that, I became immediately enamored by what was going on in the heads of someone like Thomas Putnam, Jr. and Ann. So you have someone who's accusing all of these people, and then you have another one who is said to be afflicted. And I started exploring [00:06:00] that. And this is the part that's unknowable for a historian. So we all wish we could be inside their heads and understanding what's going on during that time. I thought the best way to explore it would really be to look at the environment in which they were in, the things that led to Salem and what happened there and then really just use fiction at that point to tell the story, and, of course, no historian would ever use conjecture , but the beauty of fiction is you can do that. And I think what I tried to do initially in this short story and then now to much greater depth in the novel, is really explore that and look at the forces that created this really tragic event.
[00:06:54] The short story and the novel, at least a tentative title of the novel is The Putnams of Salem. [00:07:00] And there is a sort of subtitle that I'm throwing around. That's really The Fall of an American Family. Not sure how my family will feel about that, but it's what we find out in this story.
[00:07:14] And I think it's really quite fascinating when you think about all the different forces involved in the world that they were living. One of the major themes of the short story and the novel is really fear and the way in which fear drives a lot of what happens and the various types of fear and various sources of fear, from the fear that's inherent within the Puritan religion to fear of the native population. In the case of Thomas Putnam, there's fear of losing your place in society. The sense that throughout history there's the common case of [00:08:00] the patriarch of a family kind of building something, the second generation making it stronger, and then the third generation messing it up somehow. Thomas Putnam Jr. was the third generation of the Putnams in America, and it really does follow that trajectory. And I think it's really interesting when you insert this man into these circumstances and you see the way in which it drove him to do some pretty awful things.
[00:08:30] Josh Hutchinson: You've touched on it already, but how did you go from where you were doing your research into your family to deciding to write stories and then a novel about them?
[00:08:43] Greg Houle: Yeah, it's a great question. I, again, a lot of the impetus for this was my 12 year old daughter at the time and really wanting to connect her to this story in a way that I thought was meaningful. For me it was about really trying to get behind any [00:09:00] lore that existed within our family to the actual story, and it's not always easy to do when you're dealing with 17th century America. You can't always get every detail.
[00:09:14] In my family, there was not a lot of detail. I think there was always the sense of we are connected to this great American story, "great" in quotes, by the way. And isn't that fascinating? But I think, for me, my interest in history has always been about the fact that it is multi-dimensional and dynamic. I think what tends to happen with history is over time we flatten it out, and it becomes very one dimensional. So the sort of typical story of Salem is that it's these sort of fundamental crazy puritans who experience something one [00:10:00] day, start accusing women of witchcraft, and then put them to death. And while the basic facts may be true, there's so much more involved in that story. They lived in a different world than we live in today, obviously, but they still wanted to succeed.
[00:10:21] They laughed sometimes. They cried. They had fights, and they, wanted to be successful. And I think a lot of times we forget that. And in looking at the story, the part that really fascinated me was thinking about the context of this tragedy within that parameter.
[00:10:43] And so for me that's my entry point into this. And so when I really thought about both Thomas and Ann, I kept thinking, " what must be going on in our heads?" I think a lot of times our simple answer is Thomas [00:11:00] is a devout Puritan, and he believes wholeheartedly that all these people he's accusing are witches. And isn't that crazy? But the reality of the fact is that's probably not true, right? He was very strategic in his efforts. Again, we don't wanna have too much conjecture here and assume that we know everything that was going on, but, for me, I was fascinated by that.
[00:11:26] And then you also have Ann, who, in my writing of her, tried to present her as the sort of typical, idealized Puritan girl who's really trying to do all the right things and failing because of her affliction. We know that her afflictions are probably not a real thing, but they are something, and it's it's a sort of interesting juxtaposition between [00:12:00] the two of them. And that was what really fascinated me.
[00:12:03] Josh Hutchinson: For our listeners who aren't as familiar with the Putnams, can you explain Thomas's role in the trials?
[00:12:11] Greg Houle: The sort of patriarch of that family was John Putnam, who came over during the great Puritan migration, came over from England probably in the early 1630s. He was one of, not the initial group of settlers that settled Salem, but he was there a few years later. Pretty prominent landowner. But one of the things that the Putnams at least say that they always wanted to do was create this kind of communal society in Salem, where it was a little bit more, " we're not worried about individual wealth, we're gonna just try to bring everyone up."
[00:12:51] But again, this was at a time where everyone, where Puritans were much more sanguine about their prospects and in the new [00:13:00] world. And I think by the time we get to the witch hysteria 60 years later, everything, the shine has come off a little bit. But so John was the initial patriarch of the family, and then Thomas Sr. was, of course, Thomas Jr.'s father, and he built their land holdings. They were farmers. He was pretty privileged person, but things were different for him, and they weren't quite so easy. By the time we get to 1692, Thomas is still doing pretty well, and his family is pretty prominent.
[00:13:39] He was known as Sergeant Thomas Putnam, because he fought in King Philip's War, which was, some say, the bloodiest war in colonial American history, where it was, in many ways, almost like a akin to a world war in some respect. [00:14:00] It was fought throughout New England between the colonists and their Native allies and other native communities. I think by the time of the Salem witch hysteria, 1692, Thomas was a much different person than his father and his grandfather.
[00:14:21] I think that there are a couple of things that, that are going on. One is the realization that the Puritans are not going to have a shining city on the hill like they initially thought. Now, that doesn't mean that, that they weren't still trying, or they didn't still believe that they were superior in many ways. But I think they realized at that point that wasn't gonna be easy.
[00:14:49] The relationships that they had with the native populations in New England had really soured to the point where that [00:15:00] had created a lot of fear. You may have talked about the fact that they that Massachusetts did not have a charter at that time, had lost its charter. So there's a lot of uncertainty there. So I think, the way I portrayed in the novel and the short story, to some extent, is that Thomas is really this fading patriarch but family that is still prominent, but like a lot of people with power, he wants to do whatever it takes to keep that power, and this opportunity arises, and he takes advantage of it.
[00:15:35] Josh Hutchinson: What were some of the things that he did during the witch-hunt that stand out to mark him as a prominent figure?
[00:15:43] Greg Houle: So he accused many people of witchcraft. He also pretty much wrote all of the documents that needed to be submitted to court for Ann, so he was really orchestrating a lot of that. There [00:16:00] was also, as I'm sure you're aware, quite a rift in the community and had been for generations about who leads the church, and Thomas was very much in favor of the head of the church, Samuel Parris, but others were not. There was a lot of choosing sides there, and that became a big part of it as well.
[00:16:26] In terms of his actual role, he was there during the very first examinations of the first three witches when they were examined by the magistrates. The first three were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, who were three kind of outcasts. But he was there and playing a very prominent role. I think that he saw himself as a leader. He was, a military [00:17:00] leader and a fairly wealthy person with land, and I think he saw his role as being someone who should take a prominent role during a time like this. And he certainly did. And I think, certainly, as I explore in the novel, he uses that as an opportunity to really reshape the nature of his relationships.
[00:17:26] Sarah Jack: What you had just said about growing and securing their wealth with that land, I think that was a really big part of the fight, as well as having a stake in what was happening with the church.
[00:17:40] Greg Houle: That's a great point. I think that another interesting component with Thomas is his father, Thomas Sr., remarried at a very older age, so Thomas had a half brother who ended up inheriting a lot of what he was expecting to inherit. In many [00:18:00] ways, he comes across by 1692 as really just having this series of just one after another of what he would think are tragedies. But again, the thing I kept coming back to and what was fascinating to me was this idea that, you have this privileged person who's then throwing a fit because he's not getting his way every time.
[00:18:23] Maybe I'm projecting something that's 330 years old to today, but I really, that was the thing that I kept coming back to, and a lot of it is tied up in those land disputes and the endless lawsuits and the just no way to ever solve these problems, either in court or outside of court. And it really brought it to the forefront that you realize that they have a lot of these kind of frivolous and difficult problems that we all deal with [00:19:00] today. And I think, again, going back to what I said earlier, we tend to just have this very one dimensional view that they were this sort of whole community block that just all did, were in lockstep with each other, and it's just not like that.
[00:19:17] The other thing I explore in the novel and have fun with is their desire to gossip and just really spread these, rumors and innuendo and all of this other stuff. Obviously, a lot of it was part of the driving force of the accusations of witchcraft, but it's really tied up in the same disputes, those family squabbles. They were a big deal obviously, but they go back generations. When you start digging into it, you realize, you know, what a mess it actually is.
[00:19:56] Sarah Jack: And it sounds like getting to look inside [00:20:00] the Putnam family the way you are doing it with your novel is a way to redeem them.
[00:20:05] Greg Houle: That's a really great point. I hope so. There's a lot of redeeming that needs to be done. The one thing that I've never really been able to quite put my finger on, and I think it's really difficult, because we don't have full knowledge in the historical record, and that sort of thing is what role someone like Thomas really did play. I think, obviously, it's clear he made a lot of accusations.
[00:20:34] I'm making a lot of conjecture that was purposeful and political and driven by anger and annoyance and all these other things, but we don't really know how true that is. And we don't know if he got caught up with the people on his side of the argument. And so it's really one of those things where I want to be a little [00:21:00] careful. I certainly don't pull any punches and protect my family members, but I don't really know, and I've never really been able to pinpoint the role precisely that the Putnams played.
[00:21:15] And, for me, what's more interesting actually is to think about the role that Ann played as a 12 year old , because, you imagine a scenario where she is really believing that she has done something wrong, or she, like a lot of Puritans at the time, thinking that they've let the devil into their being and into their world. But then there's a part of me that thinks, "or was she just doing what her father wanted her to do?" so it becomes one of those things where those are the unknowable questions that I think are challenging for us to understand.
[00:21:55] But you can certainly, looking at the history, looking at [00:22:00] the situation of the Putnam family, you can see where they may have said, "hey, let's just make this thing happen. Let's just keep pushing it forward and see what we can do." And perhaps that was what happened, and that's what's so challenging about this, because we never really will know. But part of what's fun about writing historical fiction is you can then tell the story the way you want to tell it, right?
[00:22:27] Josh Hutchinson: I think the way that you're telling it is so important, because to understand how witch hunts happen, we need to get into the head of both sides of them. So we need to know the people who were making the accusations, what were they thinking, what was going on in their minds, so we can learn from that, and I think it's just terrific that you are exploring, getting inside the heads of Thomas and Ann in the way that you [00:23:00] are.
[00:23:00] Greg Houle: Thank you. I think you're right. That's the part that is just so fascinating. I think a lot of it, and certainly the work that you're doing here with the podcast is really touching on this as well, but I think we live in modern times, and I think we can't help but think about the way that works today, the way, you know, people are exposed to certain media and develop certain beliefs, and then that manifests itself in certain actions. And so I think the whole time that I've been working on this, that's always been in my mind is it's easy for us in a one dimensional world to say Thomas was just a leader in the community. He was a devout Puritan. He firmly believed that these women were evil, and he just [00:24:00] wanted to cleanse Salem, which, by the way, the novel is a dual narrative between, first person narrative with Thomas and Anne, and he's basically saying that the whole time, he's saying, "no, I'm just trying to cleanse our community."
[00:24:14] But I think as intelligent people, we know that cannot possibly be the case, that it isn't just black and white, that there may be an inkling of that there. We don't want to completely dismiss it, but it's just too convenient for him not to have taken the opportunity to, essentially, engage in behavior that resulted in the deaths of many needlessly.
[00:24:45] Josh Hutchinson: I like the way you frame it as, in the terms of, dimensions that we look at, history as this one dimensional black and white thing. And I like how you're getting into [00:25:00] the persons of these complicated people, getting into their minds and their characters to analyze them from a human perspective and make them three dimensional. I think that's very important to our modern understanding of how we operate today.
[00:25:18] Greg Houle: Yeah, that's right. I think it's a really important component anytime we look at history, I think, for anyone, and I'm sure you both feel the same way. Anyone who has real interest in history tends to be interested in the fact that it's really about people, right? And it's about decisions they make and then how those decisions affect other decisions. And this kind of long stretch of what occurs. And I think, a lot of times, people think of history as a series of events and things that happen at certain dates. And it really is about taking that three dimensional or [00:26:00] multidimensional view and really trying to understand what was going through the minds of people when these things were happening.
[00:26:07] I think the probably any legitimate historian listening to me would be very angry, because without actual historical record or information, you can't extrapolate what is actually happening. But I do think the value of something like historical fiction, in this case, is really trying to use your knowledge and the information you have to make those leaps a little bit and try to understand it.
[00:26:39] One thing I'll say about the novel is that I really tried hard to make it plausible. Obviously, I wasn't privy to what was going on inside of Thomas or Ann's mind, wasn't privy to a lot of conversations that they may have had with other people, but the world in which they lived [00:27:00] and the thinking that they had were, it's legitimate, and I'm trying to create something is realistic in terms of, how they would respond to those things. And I think, when you look today, at similar manifestations of persecution, you really do the same thing.
[00:27:23] Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about Ann Jr. And her struggles during all of this?
[00:27:31] Greg Houle: She, very early on, was afflicted, and I'm using the air quotes, and struggled a lot with various manifestations of that affliction. But one thing about Ann that you can tell from what sparse information is available about her, is that she was pretty well liked. And she seemed to, at [00:28:00] least the way I present her is, she was a good girl, I guess you could say, for lack of a better way of putting it, that she tried to live the way Puritan girls were meant to be living.
[00:28:15] What is very interesting, though, about Ann is in 1706, when she went back to the church in Salem and requested to take communion and become a member of the church. And that was when she essentially apologized, although it was a semi apology.
[00:28:42] Sarah Jack: I think readers would love to hear what she was thinking around that. We have the apology, but I wanna know what she was thinking. I've seen so many family researchers or descendants of the accused talk about that, and they have different [00:29:00] perspectives, which I always enjoy reading. Some feel that it was very acceptable, especially based on what her beliefs of the devil's work in her life would've been. Others think it was not really good enough. Getting to hear what was going on in her mind around the apology would be really interesting.
[00:29:20] Greg Houle: I agree. It's a very rare example for us to hear from someone who was involved so early on being also involved at the end like this. My view is that Ann was a broken woman at that time, and my thinking, and again I wanna preface this by saying, "of course I could be completely wrong here," but my thinking is that, by that point, everyone knew, of course, that what happened in 1692 was this horrible thing, and she was this last vestige of that. And so [00:30:00] my read of the situation is that she is this outcast, and at the end of the novel, there's a sort of epilogue where this comes up, and the pastor, Pastor Green at the time, is hesitating and thinking, "do I really wanna let this person back into the church? I worked so hard to try to bring us back together." And, ultimately, of course, does, because she really has nothing else.
[00:30:29] Both her parents died the same year, in 1699. She never married. By all accounts, her experience was the kind of thing that basically ruined her life. And by the time 1706 rolls around, she basically just realizes that the only thing she has is the church, and she'll do anything to be a part of it. So that's my read. Now, whether or not it is sincere,[00:31:00] I think it's really hard to speculate about. I think that it's very plausible that it was not, but it's also plausible that, there is a way of thinking about it where Ann truly was an innocent victim. Not saying that's the case, but she may very well have manifested all of these afflictions and challenges and that she was encouraged by her father and others and that by the time they were all gone, she thought it was safe now to beg for mercy and try to live a life where she could be member of the church again.
[00:31:43] Sarah Jack: I had mentioned family researchers and descendants. I'm wondering, are you ready for other Putnam descendants and other descendants to reach out to you about the book you're writing?
[00:31:54] Greg Houle: You know, I really would love to hear what they have to say. I'm sure I could learn a lot [00:32:00] from those folks. So I really am interested in that. You know, I'm not someone who wants to defend the Putnams or what occurred here. So I'm happy to have those discussions. I think that's a very dangerous thing, so I would not wanna do that at all, but I would definitely love to hear what others know, and the Putnam family has a very important long legacy in New England, and there's a lot to be proud of, but this is not one of those events that anyone should be proud of.
[00:32:33] Sarah Jack: One of the things that you can be proud of is that there were seven Putnam that signed Rebecca Nurse's petition.
[00:32:41] Greg Houle: I think, you know, it speaks to another aspect of the Salem witch hysteria that really fascinates me, is how quickly it seemed to go south, right? The whole collection of events took place in a very short period of time, but it was like [00:33:00] all of a sudden the bottom fell out and everyone realized it was as if they woke up and realized what were we doing? And so that's something that I'm not really that knowledgeable about, would love to know more about, because I think it's really like a community of people realizing at that moment that they were on the wrong side of history and saying, "what are we doing? What have we done? How can we get out of it?" And I think, that's why we see some of this stuff happening so quickly after, and even maybe why we saw Ann petition to, to want to join the church again.
[00:33:40] Josh Hutchinson: I can totally relate to that. I'm a descendant of, among others, Joseph Hutchinson, who was one, along with Thomas Putnam, who complained against the original three suspects, but then later on he changes sides and defends Rebecca nurse. [00:34:00] So I've been exploring that a lot in my own mind, how you start off believing in this witchcraft and then at some point you realize you are on the wrong side of history.
[00:34:14] Greg Houle: The one thing I'll add to that is, when you think of the first three women who were accused, they were clearly outside the norm of late 17th century Puritan society. Tituba is a slave from the West Indies. Sarah Good is essentially homeless, for the most part. Sarah Osborne was always outside of the norms. In the beginning you think, "of course they're gonna be the ones who were accused." But it's interesting as the accusations continue to fly going forward. When you get to someone like Rebecca Nurse, who is not like those folks, and that she was [00:35:00] well respected, it's almost like the fire burned out of control, and you had a point where maybe people realized, "what are we doing at that point?" I think maybe some of that was what was happening, and that's where you get people switching sides ,and there are multiple cases of that sort of thing. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that, I don't know if anyone really expected it to become this kind of inferno that ended up really engulfing the entire community.
[00:35:39] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think about that too, cuz I think about when I first realized that people were writing testimony and defense of Rebecca and signing some petitions for her, and there were a lot, I remember thinking, "how was this not enough?" And also, [00:36:00] when her verdict was changed on her. I just remember, I'm like, "how could that happen?" And it's just another tell of how out of control, when a fire takes off, sometimes you just don't have enough water to put it out right then, and that was definitely happening.
[00:36:20] Greg Houle: Yeah I think in many ways this goes back to the kind of perfect storm that existed, where you have, you know, a community appearance that is moving away from their original purpose, or they know that they're not as pious as they should be at this point, three generations on, you have fear of, " what's gonna happen to our charter? Are we going to remain a colony of England?" And then you have this really burgeoning concern over the native population and the conflicts that were existing there. You have just the [00:37:00] inherent concern that exists within the Puritan religion of, " am I going to heaven?" This idea of predetermination and that you don't even really know and it's all determined. "Am I on God's path? I don't know."
[00:37:15] And I think it was almost like this perfect storm, where some things happen. Some people who are outcast get accused as. One would expect in a case like this, and then it just took off from there, and I would contend that people like Thomas Putnam were fanning the flames. There were others, as well. But I think that is part of what speaks to this, is that convergence of all of those different things and the kind of fear and concern about the future and what their world was gonna be like.
[00:37:54] I think, also, this may be a reach, they're going into a new century soon, and I think there was a [00:38:00] lot of concern about, " who are we gonna be?" There was, after King Philip's War, there was a lot of concern that it was so gruesome that, "are we turning into these savages, who we claim they are?" So there's all kinds of components here, and I think it's interesting how they all play together.
[00:38:18] Josh Hutchinson: It was a grand conflagration. In previous witch trial cases, you'd have one, maybe two people get accused at a time. And I think that's what they expected in the beginning, when you had those first three outsiders accused. But then you get things like Tituba's confession, where she says there's nine witches, and you have people like Samuel Parris fanning the flames every week in church. And, like you said, a perfect storm of ingredients had to come together for it to continue and to expand the way it did.[00:39:00]
[00:39:00] Greg Houle: Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up Tituba, because I think that was really the linchpin of a lot of this. And that scene is portrayed in the novel, and the way I portray it is they, it's almost like boiler plate. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, of course they're gonna deny it, but we know they're witches. And then Tituba comes and says, "yeah, the devil came to me. Yeah, he wanted me to kill these girls. Yes, there was a yellow bird," and saying all this stuff that they are suddenly thinking, "whoa, wait a minute, we weren't expecting this."
[00:39:36] So I think in many ways her saying the things that she said to the magistrates really helped get the wheels turning in the heads of a lot of people like Thomas Putnam. Again, it's conjecture, I know, but I think that it's an interesting concept to think about that, that really helped turn the tide a little [00:40:00] bit and fan the flames further.
[00:40:02] Sarah Jack: And, like you said, there was this uncertainty with the charter. We know there was deceit with the new charter that ended up coming, but the court that was opened that, that was certain, that had procedure. It gave the powerful men power. So you had that piece sliding in when everything else was uncertain.
[00:40:27] Greg Houle: Yeah, that's a really important point. It was a sense of certainty at a time of great uncertainty. And that helps push the process along. And, also, and maybe we're gonna touch on this, but the other aspect that really fascinates me is how, the new governor's wife suddenly gets accused and everything falls apart at that point. So it also is a nice button to the story in the sense that you realize these external forces [00:41:00] are really what is driving this, rather than the Satan, the underworld, these dark forces. It's endlessly fascinating, but there are all kinds of those markers along the way that you see, where you realize, "okay, this is why this happened, or this is why this didn't happen, and et cetera."
[00:41:21] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm thinking, when would've the devil have got his foot in the door on some of this? It was already full.
[00:41:28] Greg Houle: I don't know. Yeah. I think again, looking at it from our eyes now with everything we see and just seeing the, maybe some of it, and it's not, not trying to be political, and the novel is not political in that regard, but I think it's, we see divisions in our own society and you see how those divisions are further exploited. And so it's very easy to look back through that lens and [00:42:00] see where that is happening. And I think I was doing a lot of that as I was researching and writing this, this novel.
[00:42:08] Josh Hutchinson: So what does it boil down to? What you are trying to say through your writing on the Putnams?
[00:42:16] Greg Houle: That's a really great question. For me, the biggest thing that I want to say, I think about the Putnam's is that it's the story of this privileged family who was losing its privilege. And in many ways, as that happened, you see what the family did in order to try to retain that power. For me, that's what I kept coming back to, is that there is this sort of multi-generational, pretty powerful family that is losing its power in [00:43:00] that moment, and the years leading up to the Salem witch hysteria, it's a fading family. That's why I said earlier that a good subtitle for the book would be The Fall of an American Family, because I think it really is that kind of story, and so for me it's about telling that story through this sort of famous American tragedy. And that's, I think, probably the biggest thing that I want to try to do.
[00:43:32] Sarah Jack: When you talk about their fall, and when one reads about all of their tactics with what was happening with all the families and the boundaries and stuff, they were really put trying to push forward. They were really fighting tooth and nail to not lose footing.
[00:43:51] Greg Houle: That's something that I really try to explore through various flashbacks and so forth. And the novel is just the [00:44:00] idea that Thomas Jr., In particular, has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His father did so much to try to build it up, and now it's all on him, and you can feel it slipping away. But he's very arrogant, and he's got a lot of hubris, and he just is gonna keep saying that he's great. And what's interesting about how it appears during the witch hysteria at Salem is that you see there, you witness the fall, you witness the way in which he was trying to take advantage of this opportunity and failing, ultimately.
[00:44:44] And that's what I really enjoyed exploring, even though it is a tragic story within my own family. And of course, again, a lot of this is fiction. I don't wanna sound like I know everything that went on inside his [00:45:00] head, but I do think that it's all plausible, and I think, the way the story sort of progresses before and after Salem, you see it, as we already talked about with Ann, you see what happens to her. She fades from history at that point. And that's, in many ways, a metaphor for the entire family. Now, I don't mean to say that my Putnam family no longer exists. They're fine. They're all over the country, but it's not the same. So that is what I was trying to tell that story through this major event.
[00:45:38] Josh Hutchinson: What do you hope people take away from your stories and your novel?
[00:45:43] Greg Houle: I think the biggest thing I'd like for them to take away is realize that what we've been talking about in terms of the multi-dimensional aspect of history is real. When we think of [00:46:00] the Salem witch hysteria, we often think about it as, "well, there was witchcraft and these, this monolithic group of puritans then went crazy and accused witches and then put them to death," but the reality, of course, is that there were a lot of things that led up to that and a lot of things that happened after it. And I think for me the biggest takeaway's for people to see this story as a larger story, as the story of various things occurring at the same time, rather than just this one snapshot of an event.
[00:46:46] Because, going back to what I said earlier, my feeling with Salem is that it is often almost like a caricature of what we talk about, this idea that this thing happened [00:47:00] and isn't that crazy? But the reality is it happened for a variety of reasons. And to me the biggest takeaway that someone reading the novel would get would be, "wow, I understand that there are multidimensions to this. And isn't that an interesting way of thinking of it?
[00:47:20] Sarah Jack: I think right now as a society, there's a growing number of people who are learning to look at history dimensionally. So many of us were taught it as a snapshot, and I think everyone is ready. Not everyone, I think the amount of people ready to take a deeper look is now, and I think that's why historical fiction is important, and the history's important, but I think it's great timing. I think your book is coming at a great, I know it's, you still have a little while before it's released, but that just means more people are gonna be ready to receive it.
[00:47:56] Greg Houle: I think the same is true with podcasts. I think that's why we're having a [00:48:00] moment with podcasts. I think that's why, even when you look at like true crime series and things that really take a deep dive into these stories that were often very flat and one dimensional, I think that is, you're right that we're at a time where a lot of people are interested in that, and for me that was really what I was trying to do here is create some dimension to this story. Now, I don't claim to be the first person ever to do that, many others have, but I think that there needs to be as much of that as possible, in order for people to be able to connect to the elements that we hopefully will learn from and avoid, as we go into the future.
[00:48:45] Josh Hutchinson: I think your writing is so important to help people understand what really happened. I know it is fiction, but it gets people into the right mindset to [00:49:00] start exploring possibilities of what happened and to reflect on what's happening now. So I highly recommend that everybody read it. How can people access your writing currently?
[00:49:14] Greg Houle: I guess the easiest way is they can visit my website, which is greghoule.info, that's g r e g h o u l e.info. There are links to some of my writing about the book, and I'll continue to build that up prior to publication.
[00:49:32] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. We very much appreciate you and your wisdom, and you've gone a long way towards answering the fundamental questions that are behind the podcast. We like to get in every episode part of the how do we hunt witches why do we hunt witches, how can we turn away from hunting witches? And your [00:50:00] answers have been quite elegant, speaking on those questions.
[00:50:05] Greg Houle: Obviously, it was much different, but they had the same sensibilities. They wanted to succeed. They wanted to defeat their enemies, and they wanted to make sure that their kids succeeded. And there were a lot of the same fears that they had that are very familiar to us today.
[00:50:27] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I like to point out that witch hunting in one form or another has been going on as long as humans have been around, because we, though the technology evolves and our beliefs evolve, at the core of us, we still have those same insecurities and fears that you point out.
[00:50:51] And now Sarah's here with another update on real-life witch-hunts happening in the present day.
[00:50:58] Sarah Jack: Welcome to this [00:51:00] episodes Witchcraft Fear Victim Advocacy Report, sponsored by End Witch Hunts News. Today's Thanksgiving 2022 in the United States. I thank you for tuning into our weekly End Witch Hunts News. Thank you to the advocates across the globe standing in the gap. For those who can't, thank you for being an activist against witchcraft.
[00:51:21] On its 47th session, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on July 12th, 2021 for the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economics, social, and cultural rights, including the right to development. Here is what they resolved regarding the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. It requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize an expert consultation with states and other relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations [00:52:00] Secretariat and relevant bodies, representatives of subregional and regional organizations, international human rights mechanisms, national human rights institutions, and non-governmental organizations, the result of which will help the office of the High Commissioner to prepare a study on the situation of the violations that abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization and to inform further action by existing mechanisms at the United Nations and to submit a report thereon to the Human Rights Council at its 52nd session.
[00:52:39] Mr. Volker Turk is the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He took up official functions as high commissioner on October 17th, 2022. His Twitter handle is @ V O L K E R _ T U R K. Let him know you support his taking a suggested action on the [00:53:00] resolution. Let him know people like you stand against these violations and support finding solutions. Thank him for his work and accomplishments.
[00:53:07] Next, support the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. You can support the project by sharing @_endwitchhunts, CT Witch Hunt, and CT Witch Memorial social media, and especially the news interviews in the first three Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast episodes. You can support the project by signing your name on the change.org petition. All these links are in our show episode notes. Go to the links, learn, support, and share.
[00:53:36] When the state of Connecticut moves forward with an exoneration for their accused witches, they're taking state action that stands with the promotion and protection of all human rights. Their exoneration decision is for Connecticut, but it is also for Africa and Asia. Their decision shows where they stand on violations and abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as [00:54:00] well as stigma.
[00:54:01] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims 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. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
[00:54:25] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:54:26] Sarah Jack: You're welcome. Join us next week.
[00:54:29] Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get podcasts.
[00:54:32] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com often.
[00:54:35] Josh Hutchinson: And join our Discord for rousing discussions of the show.
[00:54:41] Sarah Jack: Follow us on social media, links in description.
[00:54:45] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, and anybody else you run into about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:54:53] Sarah Jack: Catch you next time.
[00:54:55] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:54:59] [00:55:00]
[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]
Presenting Dr. Danny Buck, Norfolk research historian who examines how witch-hunting was tied to the rise and fall of Presbyterian religious and political hegemony in Great Yarmouth. Join us now as we discuss the English community of Great Yarmouth and its ties to the New England Salem Witch Trials. We discuss how the two communities show sometimes similar and other times unique witch trial dynamics. We look for answers to our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack present historian Maya Rook. She is a cultural historian, educator, and host of Illusory Time and Salem Oracle, and a yoga and meditation instructor. We discuss Salem Witch Trials folklore, divination, and magic facts in depth, along with the pop culture portrayal of the witch. Find out what can be known by the records about accused witch and slave Tituba. What is Sympathetic Magic? Was Counter Magic being used? We also look for answers to our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Listen as we talk with actor and playwright Michael Cormier and Punctuate4 president and artistic director Myriam Cyr about their upcoming play Saltonstall’s Trial.
This is a cover up story. It’s the story that takes a look at a Salem Witch Trial Judge that most people have never heard of, Nathaniel Saltonstal. He stood up against social injustice and questioned the legitimacy of the trial proceedings. Due to his intervention, he was able to bring prevailing common sense into the accused witch hunt debate.
Don’t miss the Boston Massachusetts staged-reading of the updated script on October 27, 2022 at 7 pm. It is at the Modern Theater, 525 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111. Thanks to the Ford Hall Forum admission is free. Registration for free tickets available at link below. Limited tickets. Wheelchair accessible entrance.
