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Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to a free bonus episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. We'll speak with Virginia Wolf, Debra Walsh and Andy Verzosa about the upcoming play The Last Night. The Last Night was written by and stars Debra Walsh and Virginia Wolf. Debra portrays Rebecca Greensmith and Virginia portrays Mary Barnes, two women executed for witchcraft on January 25th, 1663, at the end of the Hartford Witch Panic. Andy Verzosa is executive director of Stanley-Whitman House a living [00:01:00] history center and museum of colonial life in Connecticut.
A stage reading will be performed at Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut on Saturday, January 21st. 2023 at 7:00 PM. Doors open at six 30. Tickets can be purchased at s-wh.org/Mary-Barnes-Day. The link is in the show description. A free online video showing will be presented on Wednesday, January 25th at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Information and registration is also available at s-wh.org/Mary-Barnes-Day. And now here are Virginia Wolf, Debra Walsh, and Andy Verzosa.
Virginia Wolf: I'm Virginia Wolf, and I have been working with the Stanley-Whitman House, who's hosting this event, for [00:02:00] years, and actually it was a Stanley-Whitman House that initially introduced me to the history of witchcraft here in Connecticut. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, so I knew all about that. I had no idea till I came here. And long ago I portrayed Mary Barnes, who I'm portraying for this project, for the Stanley-Whitman House in a play, and that peaked my interest to start looking at all the other stories of the women, and men, but mostly women, who are accused of witchcraft and working with Andy and again Debra, who found her way a differentway, but we've been able to collaborate writing and now performing this short but incredibly compelling play.
Debra Walsh: I'm Debra Walsh. So a few years ago I did an event called the West Hartford Hauntings through the Noah Webster House. It was going through a graveyard, and the main character was Ann Cole. And one night when we were leaving, Rebecca Greensmith's trial was mentioned in this tour. So my friend said, "these people are [00:03:00] real. They really existed." And so that I was, "wow, there's this whole history in my neighborhood and Connecticut history of people who were hanged and executed for witchcraft and were innocent."
When that was over in October, I started to look, research, Rebecca Greensmith, and I got really inspired, and the first person I got in touch with was Ginny. I knew that she'd been doing this work for a while and had seen some of her work online, and I got a grant and did a reading. I wrote a play, we did a reading of The Hanging of Rebecca Greensmith, and I just wanted to keep going. So we met with Andy, and I said, "what about The Last Night? Cause they were in prison together. What did these two women talk about? What was that night like?"
You don't know what you don't know until you [00:04:00] start figuring out what you need to know for this. I think the stories need to be told. I think, especially considering how women have usually ignored historically. And I know there were two men accused, but one of them, Rebecca just gave up, because she, we believe, Ginny and I believe, Rebecca didn't want her daughters at the mercy of him.
So it's getting exciting now.
Virginia Wolf: Many people don't know that Connecticut has a history of witchcraft, witch panics in the 17th century and, in fact, the first person to be hanged for witchcraft, I know you all know, was Alice Young.
And 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 time, and in [00:05:00] Connecticut, 1663, January 25th was the last, that was the last execution. Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith and Mary Barnes. And remembering that, and this is 30 years before the Salem Witch Trials ever happened, and how Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were executed, along with Mary Barnes, on January 25th, 1663, 360 years ago. And acknowledging that date is so important so that people are aware that this did happen and that we have, there's a lot of really cool efforts going on in Connecticut in various pockets to reveal this part of history, but the culmination of these panics and the executions. It is a celebration they ended here 30 years before Salem had their famous panic.
Debra Walsh: I think it's, um, significant from an educational point of view, like Covid and learning through Zoom. How do museums get people in to their buildings? [00:06:00] 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.
And it, I think it, for me, relates to any time someone is considered the Other. You know, 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 think about, oh, especially innocent people executed for 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? And like I'm obsessed with Rebecca, you know, her courage and her [00:07:00] loving to make stout and her dancing.
Virginia Wolf: It's been a really wonderful thing to be writing this, because there 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 anything false, but we are taking the facts and elaborating them to make them an interesting story.
Debra Walsh: It's really a pleasure for me to be working with a former student of mine. He was my student when he was in high school, who his name is Brian [00:08:00] Swormstedt. He's a writer, filmmaker, a good director, and you need a director. You need this outside ear to help us, because like I got, when you're obsessed with someone, I want everyone to know every little detail that I know, and it's not important to this story. Plus, when you work with such a talented actress as Ginny Wolf, the give and take and going back and forth. I'm an actress. I love it.
Virginia Wolf: Yes. We're, uh, having fun. And it's now that Brian and Andy have both added so much to the script, and I think I put this in an email to them, Debra and I working on this script and knowing these women, have tunnel vision and having an objective vision, which Andy and Brian both, there's too many words in it. It was like, you know what? You're absolutely right. We love every word we put here, but it, so many of 'em are unnecessary. And it's now we're at the point where it's locked in until we decide to make another change. But and we can really focus on our character development [00:09:00] and our relationships.
Debra Walsh: I hounded Andy until he met with me. He came to see The Hanging of Rebecca and said, "maybe we should work together." And yeah, I just kept pounding him because I then learned of the Mary Barnes Society through the Whitman house. And another former student of mine, who's also working on this production said, " why doesn't Connecticut have the attraction like Salem does?" "Why," and I thought, "why can't the Whitman House be the place to go, to learn about the trials, the history, the Puritans?" So I just, I kept hounding him until we met.
Virginia Wolf: I know that the the future of the Whitman house is for another story, but as far as the collaboration, so since Mary Barnes has lived in my soul for 15 years, Debra and I, and we've known each other, but we've never worked together, all of a sudden are writing a script together and have a Google document that we are [00:10:00] writing and editing and sharing ideas and it might not have worked, and it has worked beautifully. I really feel fortunate that I got to work with her, and the writing was the first step, and now the acting is the next step, the really fun step. So it's been a beautiful collaboration.
Andy Verzosa: So it's been exciting. Museums are a place where people can gather and history can be interpreted and presented. And what's exciting about Ginny and Debra is that they are presenting their interpretation of Rebecca Greensmith and Mary Barnes and what their last night would be. So there's so many different ways that you can go about this, and through their informed conjecture, through really it's a a great opportunity to interpret what that might be through our eyes in a contemporary sense with what we know. And then really tackle it and work through it.
So it's been a great opportunity for me, as the director of the museum, to invite two artists to work together. Commissioning a play is a new thing for Stanley-Whitman House. We do living history, but [00:11:00] we've not gone the artistic route and commissioned a play. And then to be able to work with two people who have really owned this internally as actors is really exciting. So they're playwrights, actors. They're doing this project. There's, like I said, a host of ways that you could approach this, and it's exciting to watch it unfold. It's still very much a cake in the oven. It has not been baked and set out on the counter to cool and to be finished off.
Anxious to see what happens on the 21st, of course, because that's where the magic happens. You present the art to an audience, and hopefully it, you have a vessel, in that room, in the Whitman Tavern at Stanley-Whitman House. Something happens and switches on ,and people leave an experience, and it should be transformative.
So I think museums are important for that to happen and to do these types of things. And I do a lot of differentthings where we try to make history come alive and engage people. [00:12:00] And again, I can't say how lucky I feel to work with Ginny and Debra to be able to do this.
So exciting for me to know that there are all these different things that are running right now, cuz this is a, I think, a seminal time, in a way, for reckoning on many different levels for many different things. And I think that's important, and we come to these processes, and we go through them, and then we come together as community. And again, I think museums are a great place for that to happen.
Virginia Wolf: I was first introduced to this 15 years ago, probably, at the Stanley-Whitman House, where Lisa Johnson, the director at the time, was working with the humanities association and Walt Woodward, the state historian, to compile at least a resource book where all of the different information is. The Wyllys papers are at the historic society. Different museums and libraries have pieces. There are books that have been written.
From there, I knew where to go to try to get the information. Once we'd embarked on this, there was about [00:13:00] four months where my dining room table was just covered with all of the books, all of the things I, because I had written a one woman show about the entire witchcraft panic. So I had all the different resource for all the different stories and all of that.
So it is available, but not so much for Mary Barnes. Mary Barnes, there really wasn't, we know she existed. We know she was hanged. There's not much about her trial. We don't know why she was accused. We don't know a lot about her, which is frustrating, freeing as well.
Rebecca Greensmith, she's a huge personality back then, because we do have from those records that one of the magistrates called her a lewd and ignorant woman and aged, although we think she was about, what, 40?
Debra Walsh: It was her former reverend who said that before she came to the colonies.
Virginia Wolf: There are some verbatim records that were taken straight from the trials. And there's a lot of guesswork that goes on, and you have to be very careful as you're reading these books and you're speaking to people that what they're putting forward [00:14:00] as fact actually is fact. And I, for my own family, we have descendants from some of these people who were hanged, and there's family legend that actually is not at all what really happened, but this is what's come down through the years in their family. It was always a struggle to, and it still is to make sure this is not a history lesson based on fact, it's engaging, and it's exciting, but that it does not mislead anyone as to what really happened. Luckily, there were enough records for us to be able to write it, but then leeway for us to, with our informed conjecture, to really make the story compelling.
Andy Verzosa: If I might, at Stanley Women House, we do a lot of living history, and so we're looking at a lot of different people in history and trying to tell their story in a engaging way. For example, we have a Connecticut Open House Day, or a Connecticut Historic Gardens Day, and we might portray people who've lived in the house and who they were and what they did. And we need to do this in a, [00:15:00] not in a wooden way, not in a boring, didactic way. So we really work hard at trying to bring those characters alive.
And oftentimes, even when we've done our books, like we've looked at different people who are buried in our cemetery, and published a book this past year. And Memento Mori Cemetery, and what we've done is oftentimes there's not information about a person directly. We've had to look around that person, the relationships they've had, the places where they lived, the time that they were living, et cetera. Without getting too deep into that it's a word called prosopography. So we're looking all around so that we can get a sense of the whole, so that we can, can inform a lot about that person. So there, there's some conjecture there, right? But it's based on reasonableness and some facts.
And so this is of what I think that Ginny and Debra have certainly done with the Witch panics and trials. There's been a lot of people who've written books. I've done [00:16:00] work. Recently, I've been on a tear reading John Demos, um, a Yale professor, and looking at what he's done, and he really looks at the family in colonial times. So sometimes, as well as the witchcraft panics In Colonial America. So there are a number of ways to do it. It's a whole field of study, so you could just, it's ongoing, right? And that's what I love about my job is that, we try to get people engaged at any level. Certainly Debra and Ginny are coming at it at a much deeper level and as actors and portray portraying these particular characters.
History is important, but there's also that element of humanity that's important. So if think about the humanities and the studies of the humanities and the liberal arts, you're really coming at it very objectively, as much as you can.
Debra Walsh: Thank you for that. I was able to spend time with Beth Caruso and another person who wrote about the history, Richard Ross, and I met someone once, this is an [00:17:00] anecdote. This couple that lives out in Texas had done a lot of, they went to every place where they think somebody might have been hanged around the country and where their bodies were dumped. And anyway, long story short, I heard from someone who said that Rebecca was hanged one mile north of where the Old State House is now. Her back was facing the mansions, and there were mansions, and I thought that was really interesting. So I'm driving, and I get a call from Beth Caruso, who wrote One of Windsor, and she she did the same thing. It's based on Alice Young and using informed conjecture, but she said, "oh my God, they just released this in this journal." A historian found a photographer, who found some ancient papers, and there was a gallow, and it was the exact same words of this woman, one mile directly north of where the Old State House [00:18:00] in Hartford is now, and their backs would've been to the mansions that were there. So I went there. It's now a playground at the Y on Albany Avenue.
So that interested me and other people's takes, like people that I was able to meet and interview. So a lot of the historic, two of them, Richard and Beth said was interesting. It's interesting to see these people brought to life as human beings, like a body telling the story instead of this historical document.
Virginia Wolf: It is important. So many stories, and I think I, I came into this as an actress really, and saying, when I learned about this, there are so many stories. These stories need to be told. And it's really satisfying to be doing it. And I find that I'll take my one woman show to, in which I portray five of the women hanged, and to museums and historical societies and schools where people don't have a clue that this ever happened. [00:19:00] And oh my gosh, what a wonderful feeling to to bring this knowledge out to, to bring out the awareness.
It's terrific.
Debra Walsh: I sat in the audience of Ginny's last show, and the people were just, " this really happened?" Some people who are direct descendants have one, a couple people who were in that audience as well and wanted more information, but just watching the audience taking this in, something that you're not aware of in your state, in your city, in your neighborhood.
Andy Verzosa: I was familiar with the Salem Witch trials, of course, but not about what was happening in Connecticut. And when I started at Stanley-Whitman House, I was aware that there's some activity and that my predecessor, Lisa Johnson, had done a lot of work, but I really hadn't seen anything.
I hadn't seen the play ,or we have a video of the play, and really didn't know until [00:20:00] I got a phone call, early on,, I'd probably been in the job like three months, from Bridgeport, and they were doing a dedication memorial for goodie nap and they said, geez, we know that your predecessor's no longer the director, but could you, as the director of Stanley-Whitman House, come down and offer some words? I obviously reached out to my predecessor, and we connected on that, and I did go down and offered words, not knowing a lot, but being thrown into it. And this is back in, I think 2018 and what I felt when I was there, because it was quite a quite a celebration and a an event, and there were descendants that were there. There were different dignitaries, and of course I met Beth Caruso there and others, and the people who organized it. And I just realized like how important it was, and that gave me a whole new perspective on what I might be able to do through the [00:21:00] museum.
Fast forward to 2023, here we are. And I'm more comfortable in this role now working with Ginny and with Debra, of course. And I'm excited for the play to happen. I'm anxious. I can't wait for it to happen. And I feel like it's really good for the museum to be doing this kind of work going forward and to continue.
We're really looking forward to people doing the online program. We can have hundreds of people on that, where we can only have 40 people at the museum for the live staged reading.
Virginia Wolf: And we'll do a live talk back after each. So Debra and I will be at the museum after the movie, for lack of a better word, and then people will be able to come on, and we'll do a talk back as well, which will be very interesting.
The stage reading will be at the Stanley-Whitman House on Saturday, January 21st. Starts at 7:00, doors open at 6:30, and you can access tickets on the Stanley-Whitman House website. It's limited, very limited seating. It's a small space for the reading, so if you are [00:22:00] interested in attending, and we'll have a live talk back afterwards or the reception. But we are very excited, this is gonna be totally new for me, that we are also filming it and I think the way it's working because of Bryan and Patrick being so well they know how to do this.
The film, I think is gonna be different from the reading, but that will be presented on the anniversary of the hangings on Wednesday, the 25th of January via Zoom. People can sign on for the webinar register, and then I think it'll be up on a YouTube channel for the Stanley-Whitman house in perpetuity.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Tickets for The Last Night can be purchased at S-WH.org/mary-barnes-day. The link is in the show description.
Have a great today. And a beautiful tomorrow.
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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
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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.
Learn with us! Damon Leff of the South African Pagan Rights Alliance Advocacy Against Witch Hunts shares about South Africa’s alleged witch situation. We learn about South Africa’s belief in the occult, magic, witchcraft and muti. This interview considers the common denominators and differences between past and present witchcraft hunts. We discuss how interventions must recognize regional and cultural nuances and the discriminative risks of law reform. “In South Africa, in almost all cases of accusation of witchcraft, the accused will: a. not be offered access to legal defense against the accusations, b. not be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, c. be driven from their communities, d. lose their homes as a result of arson, e. be forcibly separated from their families, loved ones and friends, f. be placed in custody by the South African Police Services, ostensibly for their own safety, spending at least one night in a prison cell to avoid being attacked by members of their own community, g. may never return to their homes and communities of birth, and h. be forced into unwilling exile in unofficial and unacknowledged refugee camps.” Links Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa Project 135: Review of the Witchcraft Suppression Act 3 of 1957 Witchcraft Suppression Act 3 of 1957 Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project End Witch Hunts Movement Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.
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Transcript
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: This is Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Happy New Year, and welcome to our first episode of 2023. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is Damon Leff of the South African Pagan Rights Alliance. We're going to be speaking with him about their project Advocacy Against Witch Hunts.
Sarah Jack: Because you like the show and our guests, please share with your friends, family, and followers.
Josh Hutchinson: I hope you're all enjoying a nice 2023 and had festive holiday [00:01:00] season and aren't too cold.
Sarah Jack: We're barely into the year, and I've already had a birthday, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: Wow. Happy birthday, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: Thank you.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah's our very own New Year's baby.
In this new year, we're bringing to you a new subject. You've heard Sarah speak in her news reports about the crisis in South Africa and other nations around the world, and today we focus on modern-day witchcraft accusations and violence in South Africa.
Sarah Jack: We're able to start talking about this with you. Damon reached out to us after the launch of our podcast. After hearing our interest in sharing world witch-hunt news, he introduced himself to us and started sharing his [00:02:00] background and some powerful things that have been happening over there, and we are just so glad that we heard from him. Damon is helping us look through a new lens at his country.
Josh Hutchinson: Our conversations with Damon have been instrumental in the formation of our nonprofit, End Witch Hunts, which aims, through education of witch-hunts, both historical and modern-day, to curb the current crisis of accusations and violence against those alleged to have committed witchcraft. We hope through our group that we can amplify voices like Damon's, like Leo Igwe's, these other activists in the countries most affected by the witchcraft accusations.
Sarah Jack: Our [00:03:00] conversation with Damon is always an open door. At any time I have a question, he is willing to give me information and support. So this is the type of collaboration that is going to power the currents that are making the changes. Each of these countries have their own specific struggles around stopping Witch Hunts or improving their response for alleged witches who have been through horrible circumstances, but talking and sharing and teaching builds creative solutions. It brings experiences from different communities. End Witch Hunts wants to hear voices like Leo [00:04:00] and Damon, who are actively experiencing the witch accusation atmosphere of their country and looking for solutions.
Josh Hutchinson: Conversations like the one we have with Damon today are so critical in helping those of us who are not in the countries affected by witchcraft accusations to understand what the situation is and what needs to be done. It's important for us to echo their voices and amplify their message and support them in whatever way they need us to or want us to ask us to. We want to, stand with them against this activity, but it's important to let those [00:05:00] in the affected nations do what they need to do without getting in their way and trying to tell them what to do from the outside. They're on the ground. They've got the experience. They know the cultures, they know the language, they know the situation, they know the people involved, and they know how to get things done. So we want to just give them a platform for their voice to be heard and just stand behind them as they do this important work.
Sarah Jack: In this episode, you're going to hear from Damon the action that he and his alliance have been taking to make progress and get important things done for their community.
Josh Hutchinson: You're going to learn some of the history of the [00:06:00] Witchcraft Suppression Act that's on the books right now. You're going to learn the background and some details about how the accusations are made, why they're made, who makes them, what the result is when the accusations are made, and you're also going to learn the hopeful side of things from Damon, that voices are being heard speaking out against witchcraft accusations and change is likely. He has told us that witchcraft accusations are declining in South Africa.
Sarah Jack: When you're hearing about some of the situations, the common denominators really pop out. Listen to those, think about how what you're hearing may be reminiscent of [00:07:00] historical witch-hunts in New England and what does that mean for what we need to do for the communities and countries that aren't able to move forward right now against witchcraft violence.
Josh Hutchinson: Many in these nations are motivated by fear the same way that those involved in historic witchcraft accusations were motivated by fear. Knowing the modern-day situation gives you insight into the past, and knowing the past gives you insight into the present. And that's why we believe strongly in witch trial education. We believe it's important to understand what's happened before and what's happening now, so that we can eliminate these harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations [00:08:00] and prevent similar injustice from occurring in our own countries and elsewhere in the world.
Sarah Jack: And now Josh is going to share background information on this episode's topic.
Josh Hutchinson: Before we talk to Damon, I wanna give you a little background on a couple of the things that we'll be talking about. First, I'll describe the history of the Witchcraft Suppression Act, and then I'm going to tell you about the Occult Related Crimes Unit of the South African Police Service.
The history of the Witchcraft Suppression Act goes back to the British Witchcraft Act of 1735, which prohibited witch-hunts and executions, but also outlawed pretending, in the words of the law, to use supernatural or occult powers. [00:09:00] Between 1604, when a previous witchcraft act was passed which encouraged witch-hunting and 1735, sentiments towards witch-hunting had changed enough that the authorities believed that more harm was caused by fraudulent magical practitioners preying upon the poor and selling them a false bill of goods. And so they got rid of the killing of alleged witches and decided to focus on fraud .
That law, the Witchcraft Act of 1735, took effect in parts of southern Africa when the British occupied the Cape of Good Hope in 1795, and that law applied during subsequent British occupations [00:10:00] and remained in place following the 1814 ceding of the Cape of Good Hope from Netherlands to Britain. In 1886, the law was succeeded by the Native Territories' Penal Code, which prohibited witchcraft accusations, witch-finding, employing so-called "witch doctors," using harmful magic, and using medicines with the intent to injure.
The 1886 law was then replaced by the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1895, which was much the same, but also deemed all payment for witchcraft services to have been the result of fraud. In 1957, the Union of South Africa passed a new Witchcraft Suppression Act, which maintained prohibitions on witchcraft accusations, witch-finding, and harmful [00:11:00] witchcraft practices, while adding provisions outlawing identifying as a witch or taking money to pretend, in the language of the law, to use supernatural or occult powers.
That law has been irregularly enforced over time, with the police sometimes being able to act on witchcraft accusations and witch finding, but other times being behind the ball. And that act, through its provision to outlaw identifying as a witch, does not permit persons practicing Wicca or other pagan faiths to identify as witches.
In 1992, the South African Police Service established an Occult Related Crimes Unit. This outfit was [00:12:00] initially led by Dr. Kobus Jonker and was created in reaction to South Africa's Satanic Panic, being empowered to investigate crimes with supposed connections to occult or satanic activity. When Jonker retired, he was officially replaced by Attie Lamprecht but has apparently continued to serve. In 2006, Lamprecht announced that the unit was disbanded. However, later investigations revealed that the unit was merely reorganized and renamed the Harmful Religious Practices Unit and made up of officers trained in occult crime investigations by Jonker.
We'll hear from Damon about how they're fighting the Witchcraft Suppression Act, trying to get it repealed. However, the South African Law Reform Commission is recommending that the current law be repealed but be [00:13:00] replaced with a new Prohibition of Harmful Practices and Unlawful Accusations of Harmful Witchcraft Practices Act, which would prohibit witchcraft accusations, witch-finding, crimes associated with harmful witchcraft, and muti killings, which are murders performed to make medicine from human body parts.
The changes would be to eliminate the provisions outlawing self-identification as a witch and claims to possess supernatural powers or occult skills or knowledge, and to add the provision dealing with muti murder. As we'll hear from Damon, muti murder is a problem but can be dealt with in other ways than a new, basically a new Witchcraft Suppression Act. It's murder [00:14:00] for the sake of murder, and we'll talk to Damon about that. And it should be against the law against murder and against the law against trafficking human tissues, and Damon argues those laws that are currently on the books should be enough to deal with muti murder and other harmful actions committed peripherally to witchcraft. It's good that they'll still prohibit witchcraft accusations and witch-finding. They just need to enforce those elements of the law.
Sarah Jack: Josh, thank you for introducing important details that will be discussed in this episode.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. I hope it's of some value to the listeners to clarify [00:15:00] the situation before we get into the details with Damon.
Sarah Jack: I'm so happy to welcome Damon Leff of South African Pagan Rights Alliance and Advocacy Against Witch Hunts.
It's been extremely enriching for us to start to grasp the context of what's going on there. My mind has really started doing a lot of things, so I know this conversation's gonna be really important to my knowledge.
Josh Hutchinson: And to our audience.
Damon Leff: Hopefully, they can begin to piece connections between past events and current events and see similarities. I can already see similarities. The question that keeps being asked is what drives people to make accusations of witchcraft, and that's different for each context. Each place has its own unique variables that cause people to make accusations of witchcraft, but they are common denominators, [00:16:00] beginning to piece those together, which is why your podcasts have really helped do that.
Sarah Jack: That's what we want. And consulting with so many different researchers and such a variety of individuals is so critical now. So we're really glad we started stepping down the path the way we did.
Damon Leff: Good.
Josh Hutchinson: What is the South African Pagan Rights Alliance?
Damon Leff: The South African Pagan Rights Alliance is, at the moment, a paralegal advocacy organization. We started out as an informal gathering of like-minded individuals who realized that we needed some kind of organization that could help individual pagans challenge incidents of discrimination. And essentially we started out as an activist organization.
Very few of us had actual any experience, nevermind running an organization, but dealing with issues of [00:17:00] prejudice and discrimination. So we learned what we needed as we went along. And of course, our real focus was learning how to use the voice, the activist's voice, to promote change. And the first way we did that was to challenge media bias against paganism, against witchcraft, as well in the media.
To give you historical context before our interim constitution in 1994, which guaranteed the right to freedom of religion, and before the final constitution in 1996, there was no law on our statute book which protected the right to religious freedom. And although the Apartheid government did not exhibit any overt prejudice against non-Christian faiths, it was clearly a white Christian nationalist party that governed the country. And so their interests were very much focused on Christianity. [00:18:00] And unfortunately, it wasn't a friendly kind of Christianity. It wasn't an inviting Christianity. It was one that definitely had barriers between those who were in and those who were out.
And so if you were not Christian, you were on the out camp. And so people who practiced non-normative religions, occultism, people who were involved in magical practices, witches, specifically, were definitely on the outside. And society didn't really cater for them in any way, but this gave an opportunity to people with prejudice within institutions, with instructional institutions in government to begin to promote things like the Satanic Panic, which of course America experienced before we did. But our Satanic panic really hit us in the seventies and the eighties. It became the reason for the Occult Crime Unit's establishment under Colonel Kobus Jonker, and he led faux [00:19:00] investigations into what he alleged were occult crimes. But in the process he and members of his unit, now you must remember that this unit was firmly entrenched within the South African Police Services, so it had the full authority and backing of government. And although there wasn't any law against the practice of non-normative faiths, and again, there was no protection for non-normative faiths, there, there wasn't any real legislative requirement for the South African police service to persecute, harass, discriminate against non-normative faiths.
But they did that under the Occult Crime Unit, and the prejudice led to the publishing of a series of articles by members of the unit on alternate faiths, specifically on witchcraft, on the practice of occultism, the practice of magic. The content of these articles were not based on reality or fact. It wasn't as if they interviewed members of those faiths to find out what they believe or what they [00:20:00] practice. The approach was "Jesus is a salvation for all people who are not Christian. And these people are clearly worshiping the devil. They are satanists, and, therefore, they need to be saved." That was the philosophical motivation for the funding of the Occult Crime Unit.
So much of our first years, first 10 years of our existence we spent a lot of time browsing through media, published media and online media, and we began to challenge the ideology of the unit itself. We were partly safe because of the interim constitution. The 1994 Constitution gave us some kind of protection from persecution, direct persecution. So that's how we began the Alliance by challenging media prejudice. Eventually, we got to know a couple of the journalists, we got to know the editors of newspapers, and they began to see what we were saying about prejudice narrative. And they began to reject the prejudicial narratives, [00:21:00] because they were clearly not based in any kind of reality. This eventually led us to realize that we needed to get more involved in actual cases of discrimination.
So I studied law in my late fifties. I started studying law and became a paralegal. And currently what we are doing is we are training members of the Pagan community in South Africa to become community paralegals. So giving them the tools and the skills that they need to actually directly challenge the incidents of discrimination within their communities. This way, it's far easier to respond to incidents of discrimination. We simply need to pick up a phone and say the person is having this problem with employer, family, police, and they can intervene. That's our goal. We would like to work toward that. We spent most of our existence challenging discrimination against, religious discrimination from Christians, and then we [00:22:00] focused our attention in 2007 on the repeal of the Witchcraft Suppression Act.
Josh Hutchinson: It was the first time I heard of the Occult Crimes Unit, and I find that detail fascinating.
Damon Leff: I think they lost their reason to exist once the 1996 Constitution was enacted, because the Constitution expressly protects the right to religious freedom, belief, and opinion, and so they couldn't hold a partisan Christian position any longer. They certainly couldn't base any of their police activities on that partisan religious position. They needed to start looking at issues like equality, the right to dignity. So that certainly helped us, and eventually it took the steam out of the crime unit itself, because they no longer had any reason to exist.
Sarah Jack: What can you tell us about the current crisis?
Damon Leff: I'm happy [00:23:00] to say that in 2022 we haven't had one reported incident of a witch-hunt in our country, which is probably the first time since before two thousands, we started keeping records of incidents of witchcraft accusations that led to violent Witch Hunts in 2000 and every year we watched the numbers increase, decrease. It was sporadic.
Accusations of witchcraft in our country are sporadic, unlike in America where there were focused, targeted in specific areas, where law enforcement got involved, where there were actual trials. In South Africa, accusations of witchcraft are sporadic. They happen within communities across the country. And very often the accused is summarily killed, executed, whether stoned to death, killed with a machete, set on fire in a house, often with family members, long before the police even get involved. So the reports very often are post [00:24:00] event.
We've kept track of horrific incidents of accusations of witchcraft against mostly women. There have been exceptions of men. Thankfully, I can only recall one accusation against a child, unlike a Nigeria, where many accusations of child witchcraft occur. In South Africa, that doesn't seem to be a feature of accusations of witchcraft.
Listening to your podcast over the last couple of months has raised for me the issue of context and how certain witchcraft accusations happen in certain places around the world at certain times. Certainly we can see common denominators. In South Africa, it's difficult to find a common denominator between individual incidents other than people exhibiting emotional angst, moral panic because of unexplained illnesses, unexplained deaths.
[00:25:00] Sometimes these belief systems are culturally-based. For example, there are a number of incidences where, accusations of witchcraft were made against goats or crows. Odd animals. Animals that didn't necessarily belong in the village, that suddenly appeared randomly. One could say that those accusations were motivated by a cultural belief system, a folklore. In the most horrific cases, there were sudden deaths in a village, and an old woman who may not have been liked by that particular family was accused.
Now, most accusations are instantaneous. One family will accuse another family, and, of course, if one person in their family is accused, the entire family is implicated in the accusation, because in African traditional culture, there is a belief that witchcraft runs through the breast, which means that if the mother is a witch, her children will be a witch because of breastfeeding. [00:26:00] So the family doesn't escape the consequence of that accusation.
And in one particular incident, an old lady was accused of a major accident, in which the son of a neighboring woman was killed, and she was accused of having cast a spell on the road in which that accident occurred. And at the time of the accusation, the entire village surrounded her house. She was inside, her older daughter was inside, her older daughter's two children were inside. They were all killed. They were all murdered, one with machete, one was set alight. The two children were trapped in the house when the house was set alight. Horrific.
These are the incidents that nobody can intervene immediately to prevent, because they occur in communities in which nobody will question the narrative that one, their misfortune was caused by witchcraft, that therefore there must be a witch, a local, [00:27:00] somebody with whom you've possibly had an argument in the past, somebody with whom you've possibly not really gotten on. Perhaps that person came from a village outside recently and moved into your area. So it's a complicated phenomena. I wouldn't say that those same motivations occur in every instance of accusation, but that seems to be a common thread. They're random, sporadic moments of panic that lead to the death of someone.
Thankfully, our police do intervene. In rare cases where, they are very rare, where a woman has been accused, she may in time or her family members may in time contact the local police, and the local police will then intervene. Unfortunately, the local police haven't really been trained ever to deal with these kinds of incidences, and so the only alternative for the police, the only action they can take is [00:28:00] to take that person outside of the village and put them in a prison cell for the evening for their own safety, which is horrific. To think that the accused must sit in a prison cell for her own safety for the evening. Almost all of those cases do end up in criminal courts. Thankfully, our criminal courts have looked very badly on accusations of witchcraft. Sentences haven't been as strong as they could have been.
And more recently there was an incident in a case in court, in which the accused claimed as mitigation in sentencing, that he only did what he did because he believed that this woman was a Witch. He believed in witchcraft as a bad thing, and this was a cultural belief that he held, and the magistrate gave him a lesser sentence because of his mitigating circumstances, which of course we've criticized because we don't think that's [00:29:00] appropriate. If you want to discourage accusations of witchcraft, you need to increase sentencing, not take a belief in witchcraft as a mitigating factor.
Josh Hutchinson: How do the local communities find the witch suspect? How do they determine who was the alleged?
Damon Leff: In South Africa, we call it witch-finding. And the legislators have been using that term in the Witchcraft Suppression Act. So that entails, if for example, you've made an accusation against the neighbor, but you are uncertain and you want some clarity, you will go to the local diviner. The local diviner is either called an insangoma. Sometimes the nyanga, the herbalist, will also act as a diviner, but usually it's a very specialist field. In traditional African religion the use of herbs to make medicine for healing and the aspect of divination are very often separated, but not always. So in this case, the family [00:30:00] would seek out the local diviner. The local diviner would then throw bones, speak to the ancestors and ask the ancestors to confirm or deny the suspicion. Ultimately, unfortunately, always there's a confirmation, and that will then automatically lead to an attack a concerted attack against the accused person.
Customary history is a really tricky subject for anyone to pronounce factually about, because customary history is memory. It's a verbal and oral history. It hasn't really been written down. So experts in the field have been saying that prior to the arrival of European colonialists, African traditional belief systems dealt with accusations of witchcraft in a concerted way. When there was a suspicion, the diviner was called in to confirm the suspicion, a local tribal court would then be set up, the accused would be taken to the local [00:31:00] tribal court. The accused was not entitled to any kind of defense, so he or she had to defend themselves. An older family member may have assisted, but that would've been very dangerous, especially if the old family member would've insisted that person was innocent. They could very well have been implicated in the accusation as well. And then tribal courts would then mete out justice. I do know that, for example, if a husband accused his wife of witchcraft, the tribal court would then divorce them, separate them, and she would then be banished from the village. But in many cases, of course, she might equally have been killed.
Now because these cultural rules were not uniform across South Africa, remember we have a vast array of different tribes, Zulu, Xhosa, Sepedi, each different group would've had their own variations on these cultural rules. They all believed in the general malevolence of witchcraft, so an accusation of witchcraft may have arisen [00:32:00] in any one of these places.
With the arrival of colonialism, of course, we have a hybrid legal system. First the Dutch arrived, and they imposed Roman Dutch law. Now, amongst magistrates in Cape Town who imposed Roman Dutch law, and of course it was company law that was being imposed, essentially, accusations of witchcraft were not tolerated, so they were never heard, and they were summarily dismissed.
When the English arrived and took over the Cape Colony, English law acknowledged that accusations of witchcraft existed, because they had dealt with their own history of accusations of witchcraft. And they had heard cases of accusations of witchcraft, but they took a very dim view of the accusers. They did not in any way give credence to the notion that real witches existed or that such persons had power to affect the world through non-natural or supernatural means. [00:33:00] So the accuser, the maker of the accusation, was generally convicted and sentenced.
In 1957, we had just become a union, I think, and the 1957 Witchcraft Suppression Act was established. It was basically a copy of British witchcraft legislation, which on the one hand denied that one could be a witch or that witches had power. So therefore, making an accusation of witchcraft became a punishable offense. But at the same time, it made confessing to being a witch also a punishable offense. Under current law, Magistrate's Courts still often refer to the Witchcraft Suppression Act when dealing with accusations of witchcraft, and they apply the sentencing given in the Witchcraft Suppression Act for incidents.
Sarah Jack: What effects do witch attacks have on the surviving [00:34:00] families?
Damon Leff: As I mentioned, the notion that witchcraft comes through the breast. When an individual in a family is accused, the entire family is suspect. Everybody in that immediate family is endangered. The potential accusation of witchcraft could be leveled against any one of them. So there is a hesitancy to defend the person who is accused, which is horrific. This immediately creates tension between members within a family. If a member of that family is accused and murdered, the entire family needs to leave. It's impossible for that family to continue to live in the same area. They will always be suspected of harboring this dark power of witchcraft. And so they need to leave the village that they live in. Very often, they would travel to a neighboring village, hopefully reaching that village [00:35:00] before news of the incident reaches that village. Because if the news of that incident reaches the village before they do, they would be denied entry to that village.
I remember, I think it was about 20 years ago, there was a documentary, Carte Blanche, a famous documentary. A film in SABC showed a couple, an old woman, an old lady, and her husband who had for a year been wandering from village to village, looking for a place where they could reestablish, because every time they arrived at a new place, there were family members of the previous village from which they had come. And so they couldn't stay there.
And that's the horrific part of it, the shame. And it isn't. We call it shame, because that's how these people feel, but it isn't really a shameful thing to be a victim of an accusation. The accuser should be shamed, but the shame, they carry that shame with them, [00:36:00] and probably they would carry that shame with them through generations, because we are never dealing with just husband and a wife. We're dealing with a husband and a wife who has, African families always live together, except in cities where there is some separation. In traditional communities, families live together. Grandmother, grandfather, daughter, husband, children, grandchildren, all live in the same place. So it's a literal move of an entire family, generations of a family.
But it doesn't just affect the family that's accused. It affects everybody in that village. The chaos unleashed by an accusation affects the youngest members of that entire village. That's traumatic. It has to be traumatic for young children to see this kind of violence and aggression, not completely to understand what's happening. And it will forever form a scar on that particular [00:37:00] group. I don't think that 10 years down the line, they could look back at what they did and feel okay with it. It's difficult for me to conceive that.
Josh Hutchinson: In traditional African practices, are there actually people for whom it's appropriate to use the label "witch?"
Damon Leff: A very good question, and it's one that we have discussed with traditional healers who joined us in our discussions on the repeal of the Witchcraft Suppression Act. In 2007, on behalf of the South African Pagan Rights Alliance, I initiated a review of the Witchcraft Suppression Act with the South African Law Reform Commission, and traditional healers were invited to join the discussion, pre-discussion, on whether or not that act should be repealed. And overall, the traditional healers felt that they agreed with us that the act should be repealed, but for very different reasons.
And in our first initial discussions, we were trying to find [00:38:00] common ground, and we did find a lot of common ground. As pagan witches and traditional healers and traditional African religion, we share an enormous amount of common belief systems. We could call them folk belief systems, but the differences were also as stark. Phephisile Maseko, who was at the time the national coordinator for the Traditional Healers Organisation, the THO's one of the largest organizations representing traditional healers in South Africa. She explained that, within her organization, they had specialists who dealt specifically with issues of witchcraft, who dealt specifically with defining around issues of witchcraft and then creating charms to counter witchcraft.
So for us, that would be, it reminds us of folk beliefs, folk magic used to counter negative witchcraft. And I asked, do you identify those people as [00:39:00] practitioners of magic, witchcraft? Definitely not, she said. Witchcraft is a negative word. Witchcraft means you harm someone using supernatural means. It never, ever means a positive. Nobody ever identifies as a witch, because it means you are admitting to harming other people.
Now, there is a huge problem here in that we are speaking English and they speak Zulu and Suju and Xhosa, and they have their own terms for that specific practice. And perhaps in their mind it does actually accord with the idea of a folk magic practitioner who uses white magic to counter dark magic. But that didn't come through in our conversation, certainly not in our English conversation.
So that's a question that still needs to be explored. [00:40:00] But as a rule, if you're a black African, you don't identify as a witch. What I've seen in a forum on Facebook for witches is that there are more and more younger black South Africans who are looking at paganism, European paganism. It's for them not unfamiliar because they see commonality between the traditional African religion, which their grandparents and mothers were raised. And they see a lot of commonalities, a lot of similarities, but they're more and more attracted to the archetype of the witch and witchcraft, the practice of witchcraft. And they're very open about it on the forum, but of course, we are mindful that they all live in very conservative families and that they actually are in danger. I don't think any of them admit to their parents that they have decided to become a witch, that they want to practice witchcraft.
So there still is definitely that fear around the word. And avoidance of [00:41:00] identifying the term with the term, using the term. In our review of the Witchcraft Suppression Act, for example, at one stage we made a point of reminding the commission that when dealing with accusations of witchcraft, they need to remember that we are self-identified witches. So we should be accorded the right to define what witchcraft means for us and our identification.
Our definition of what witchcraft is or means for us should actually carry more weight than the definition of accusations or the definition of witchcraft that is, are used in accusations. I'll give you a simple example. X might accuse Y of summoning a Tokaloshe to steal the milk from her car. Now a Tokoloshe is a local variant of a gnome or an elf, [00:42:00] a nature spirit that is attached to a magic worker and that serves the magic worker as a slave. And the magic work can send the slave out cause harm or mischief. We see those stories in European folklore. We see it in American folklore. The question is, is the belief in a Tokoloshe less valid than the European belief in elves and fairies? But is the belief that all women who are witches evil less valid than the acknowledgement that people are not evil because of what they are, but because of what they do?
We've been trying to encourage them not to stereotype people simply because we've named them witches. And this is where traditional healerism and actual witches have found conflict, sources of conflict, because they don't want to give up their prejudicial [00:43:00] definition of what a witch is. For them it's a cultural belief system, and it's as important for them as our religious ideology and identity is for us. So there is source of conflict there.
Sarah Jack: Why is the targeted group mostly vulnerable people, especially women and elderly women in particular?
Damon Leff: I wish I could answer that question. I think their vulnerability makes them easy targets. I think their vulnerability means they don't have any influence over their community. They don't have any power. The power relationship is, they are useless, not important, negligible. I think essentially it comes down to that. In South Africa, we have an extremely epidemic level of gender-based violence against women, specifically by their male partners. And I think that is an aspect of it.
Why older women [00:44:00] are often the targets of witchcraft accusation, and of course, it's not exclusively older women, but older women generally become, are more, more likely to become targets of witchcraft accusation, because of that power dynamic. Government has attempted to deal with gender-based violence by appealing to the conscience of men, and I'm not sure that's going to work. I don't see the same man who is behaving violently toward a woman waking up the following morning and thinking, "oh wow, I think I should become a better person." So I don't know how we reestablish the power balance between men and older women in traditional societies. Older, traditional African societies are patriarchal. They're governed by men, not by a woman. It's very rare that an older woman would have authority over the men in a village. So that is an important factor to consider.
Josh Hutchinson: So is it [00:45:00] usually men who are making the accusations?
Damon Leff: No. Both men and women make accusations of witchcraft. The incident I told you about, the old woman who was accused of casting a spell on the road that caused the accident, that accusation was made by the mother of the guy who was killed in the truck. No, the accusations can come from anybody. I haven't seen any accusations originating from children, but yeah, definitely men and women can make accusations of witchcraft.
We've also seen accusations of witchcraft being labeled at traditional healers, far fewer than one would think is the norm. But sometimes traditional healers will make accusations of witchcraft against other traditional healers, and that tells us that perhaps there is more economics at play. They're vying for the same commerce.
There was also an incident where a local priest who ran a small church in an urban area, there was a rumor going around that he [00:46:00] kept snakes in his church and that he used the snakes as charms against his petitioners, and his church was attacked, and they wanted to kill him, because he was now a witch. The association between snakes and witches is very common in Africa. In much of central and northern Africa, the snake is the power animal that gives the witch her or his power. Yeah, accusations of witchcraft are largely irrational in that they can come from anyone and affect anyone.
Sarah Jack: What non legislative interventions are necessary to deal with harmful witchcraft practices?
Damon Leff: I've always held that if we don't challenge the narratives that lead to accusations, we don't have any hope in any kinds of legislation preventing violence. It's the same with gender-based violence. If we don't teach men to honor the dignity of women,[00:47:00] no matter how many laws we pass to punish men for committing violence against women, I doubt very much if that violence is going to stop.
Men need to begin to look at women in a different way. And likewise, people who make accusations of witchcraft need to begin to look at the subject in a different way. It's arrogant of me to suggest that we should impose a scientific way of thinking about the world on to African people who are still bound to their cultural beliefs about witchcraft, but I'm afraid that's the only way to do it. We need to challenge the narratives around witchcraft. The idea that a person can be born evil from birth, because there they're witches, whether they're male or female. That idea is contrary [00:48:00] to the notion of from the moment of birth, we have a right to dignity, that our birth doesn't determine who we become. It doesn't determine what we end up doing. We are not just because we've been accused of being a witch from birth automatically evil. We may be very good people. We may end up doing wonderful things for a lot of people. So we need to begin to challenge those narratives, and that can only be done on a very local level, on a grassroots level. That means that people who have trust, who have the power dynamic in those communities need to be the ones to have those conversations. Priests, traditional leaders, traditional healers themselves, need to begin to have those conversations.
Can we look, for example, at the cultural narrative that we've inherited from our ancestors about witchcraft? And can we [00:49:00] challenge it? Is it true? Is everything that our ancestors told us about witches true? Tricky because all of these communities are built on veneration of ancestors. The ancestors are perfect. What they did cannot be challenged, cannot be questioned. So that narrative needs to be challenged and questioned.
That's the only way I see any kind of real change. I think by offering an alternative narrative on the subject generally does help, and it certainly has helped in attracting a younger audience to the study of magic and witchcraft generally. I don't know if that alternative narrative is going to actually get through to older generations, hopefully sufficiently so to make them stop and think, "my, my son has just died suddenly. Is it really witchcraft, or was there an underlying physiological cause for his illness?" [00:50:00] And that's gonna have to be a multifaceted approach to the subject. It's certainly not something that European witches can dictate. That would just be rude.
Josh Hutchinson: I think that's important what you said, that the traditional leaders in the communities need to inspire that change. And you've also talked about the legal side of it and how you got involved with the Law Reform Commission to review the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957. What can you tell us about the Witchcraft Suppression Act and the review that's going on?
Damon Leff: The review, the initial request was in February 2007. In January 2016, the commission concluded that the Act's prohibition of identifying as a witch and practicing divinations were unconstitutional. Okay. And, essentially the commission has confirmed [00:51:00] that they are in favor of a repeal of the Witchcraft Suppression Act.
Most of the organizations and individuals who submitted comment to the review process has supported a repeal of the act, most except for traditional healers. Traditional healers want the act to be repealed, but they want the act to be replaced with an act that will essentially give them the right to take accusations of witchcraft within their communities to a traditional court, which rings alarm bells in my ears, because it reminds me instantly of Salem. It reminds me instantly of cases of witchcraft being heard in a court, not by a court who's going to apply a skeptical approach to the subject, but by a court who is going to appeal to cultural authority, to ancestral authority to hear those cases. [00:52:00] So this is something that we felt we needed to object to, which we did. We did send you a copy of our draft objection. And we challenged the draft bull that the traditional healers presented and the commission published for comment by pointing out that the definition of the bold was called a Prohibition of Harmful Practices and Unlawful Accusations of Harmful Witchcraft practices bull.
Now, the bull defines harmful witchcraft practice as invoking a claim to the ability to use non-natural or supernatural means, whether that involves the use of physical elements or not, to threaten or to cause death or injury or disease or disability or destruction or loss of damage to property of any kind or severe psychological distress or terror. On the face of it, the definition is a mouthful, but when you break it down, [00:53:00] essentially it is based on two terms, non-natural or supernatural means, and we've challenged those two as being irrational. Our courts need to present admissible evidence that is rational, that can be proven, and our opinion, we've never seen a court be able to prove non-natural or supernatural needs. There is no way to prove supernatural agency. So essentially, the definition of harmful witchcraft practice comes down to making a claim to have supernatural power or threatening someone with a claim that one has supernatural power and one can hurt, and neither of those claims can be supported, in essence, they're beliefs.
Now the Constitution gives everybody the right to believe freely. It doesn't matter how irrational it is. Our constitutional court [00:54:00] has clearly stipulated that it doesn't matter if we think the belief is entirely irrational. People have the right to believe it, but it doesn't mean that a court should hear it as factual. All the court can prove, at the most, is that somebody believes this. A court cannot prove that somebody who believes in God is, ipso facto proof that God exists. There's a difference between proving that someone believes in a God and proving that the God exists. Allowing someone to bring an accusation of witchcraft to a court of law is ridiculous, because there is no way that anybody can prove the agency of witchcraft involved. We can prove that someone has made an accusation, but we can't prove there is any supernatural agency.
The second part of that, of course, is that making a threat, threatening someone by saying that, "oh, I have supernatural power. I'm gonna curse you and your family," [00:55:00] essentially, is an act of intimidation. It's an ordinary act of intimidation. Since we can't prove any supernatural element or agency, we must simply assume that the person is attempting to intimidate the other person. Anybody can intimidate. One doesn't need to be a, a witch to be intimidating. Is there any difference, for example, if a pastor gets up on the pulpit on a Sunday and screams hell and hellfire and threatens people with hell if they don't do the right thing? Is that not intimidating? So our position is anybody can make an intimidation against anyone else. That doesn't necessarily mean that there is any supernatural agency. And if the commission really wants to deal with accusations of witchcraft as intimidation, then it needs to be dealt with in another way. There are common law remedies to intimidation common law remedies to intimidation should be used.
We, for example, have criminal defamation, which could easily be used to open a criminal defamation [00:56:00] charge against someone who's made an accusation of witchcraft against you. You just need to go to a police station and say, "so-and-so has made an accusation of witchcraft. I want to open a criminal innuere charge." Court takes it further for you.
Sarah Jack: What is that shift that's gonna kick that into gear? Does that have to be legislated, push the witchcraft issues under the other laws?
Damon Leff: I think once we've gotten rid of the Witchcraft Suppression Act, a question I've often been asked is since we've got the Witchcraft Suppression Act, but actual witches are not being arrested by the police for claiming to have knowledge of witchcraft, which according to the act is illegal. So why do we need to even bother about the act? Clearly it's not targeted at us, but psychologically it is targeted at us, because it tells people generally whether they're consciously aware of it or not, that witchcraft is a taboo subject. Look, there's a law [00:57:00] against it. So therefore people who identify as witches are treated differently.
Subconsciously, we are treated differently because there is a law against witchcraft. If we take that away, we remove the underpinnings of legitimacy that an accusation of witchcraft could have, for example, where the law supported it. If the law had said, look, we can't deal with these issues, because you have the right to believe whatever you choose to, then suddenly that suspicion disappears. Now, witches are ordinary members of society that can be treated like ordinary members of society. There isn't an unconscious bias already against them for being witches. That would be one step.
The question is, how then do we deal with future incidences of accusations of witchcraft? Do we need special legislation to deal with that? And I honestly don't believe that we do, because if we do, we'll end up just reinforcing the biases that we've been carrying with us all along. What we need to do is find [00:58:00] a different way to deal with accusations of witchcraft.
Firstly, it's a multi-pronged approach. We need the police to be more proactive. Police need to be trained to deal with incidences of civil violence like this, where one person has been accused unjustly or falsely accused. The police in the past may even have suspected that the accusation was valid and so didn't want to get involved. So police need to be sensitized towards the issues at stake.
They need to be open to the accused when they come into a police station and to tell them that an accusation of which God has been made against them. They need to be sensitive to that person, not treat that person with suspicion. They need to provide that person with comfort and safety and security.
There should be a counselor, at least, that person can sit down and talk to, to deal with their anxiety and the experiences that they've just gone through. They should be a social worker to [00:59:00] deal with the crisis that is unfolding within that immediate family. What is going to happen? Are they going to be able to live in the same house tomorrow? And if not, is there alternative accommodation until they can find alternative accommodation?
And then the process at the moment is for the accuser to be arrested, arraigned, and charged with offenses under the Witchcraft Suppression Act. In future, I foresee the accused bringing charges against the accuser directly through a common law process, an accusation of criminal innuere. Once the accusation has been made, the police and the court take over, and there is no requirement, there will not be any requirement on the accused person to get an attorney and launch a private action suit. So the state will still take care of it, just in a different way, without the intervention of the Witchcraft Suppression Act.
Let the common law deal with it. A criminal innuere charge is quite a serious charge. The [01:00:00] penalty could also include imprisonment. I think that's a good way to start with it. Keep promoting wholesome integrative narratives in the media about the subject. Keep encouraging traditional healers and traditional leaders to engage with their communities in a positive way, to offer them alternative narratives, to question the motives of accusations, to find alternative ways to settle disputes within communities. So a process, certainly not an overnight one.
Sarah Jack: Legislating a new law isn't a bandaid either.
Damon Leff: No, it's never going to be. We've had the 1957 act for how many years, 50 years plus, and it hasn't prevented accusations of witchcraft. One authority, an academic, who submitted a paper when the review [01:01:00] process first began, suggested that the existence of the act itself motivates the accusations, which I touched on briefly. Having an act that says being a witch is illegal or making accusations is illegal kind of encourages people to make accusations. I don't think legislation will ever bring an end to crime. The best thing that legislation can ever hope to do is deal with the after effects of the criminal act, is to provide justice, social justice, a restorative justice to the victims. But it could never prevent those crimes from happening.
Sarah Jack: The supports you were talking about for the victims when they go in, having a counselor, having solutions, that sounds like the supports that have come to be important for victims of sexual assault. Do you guys have those in place for those types of crimes now? And then that can be a model for [01:02:00] supporting accused witches, because it's the same. It's that whole thing. It's that shameful stigma that is there, the trauma that's occurred to the innocent individual, and then the future. They're walking into the future now with these wounds.
Damon Leff: You're absolutely right. And yes, we do have a model that we can follow. Recently the Minister of Justice instituted child courts and courts that deal specifically with gender-based violence. Those courts are staffed, hopefully, with social workers, with somebody who can approach the victim on a real level, offer support, comfort.
The victim doesn't simply want justice. They're suffering from psychological trauma. And there is no difference, as you say, in practice between a victim of rape and a victim of accusation of witchcraft, especially not after they've been beaten and threshed and maybe [01:03:00] lost a family member.
The anxiety, the fear, the trauma, I don't think we sh we can compare the trauma, but I think the trauma is equal, so yes, hopefully that could become a model, or hopefully crimes targeted specifically at women, accusations of witchcraft crimes targeted a women could be dealt with in exactly the same way that victims of gender-based violence are dealt with.
Josh Hutchinson: When you were talking about how the commission wants to replace the existing Witchcraft Suppression Act with a new bill against witchcraft and you were talking about how ineffective the Witchcraft Suppression Act has been at dealing with the violence, reading the Commission's report, it seemed like they admitted that the existing law's been ineffective, but then they're still saying, we need a new law that's basically the same thing. So why do you think that is [01:04:00] that they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth?
Damon Leff: I think the commission is attempting to appease clearly two camps. There is the camp which includes us who agree that the Witchcraft Suppression Act should be repealed, who don't think that we need any other legislation to deal with issues that we are currently dealing with.
Almost all of those people have also said, look, let the common law deal with it. We have common law remedies. They're quicker, they're more efficient, let them deal with it. But then there is definitely the other camp, the traditional healers, the Family Policy Institute, there were a couple of other smaller organizations.
The gender commission insisted on including muti crimes under this new witchcraft bull. Now, muti crimes, I have to explain. These are violent incidences in which a traditional healer most often employs the use of thugs or criminals to kidnap, [01:05:00] mutilate and kill, in that order, kidnap, mutilate and kill persons, humans for body parts for later use in magic, let's say muti, which means medicine, but essentially it's negative folk magic. And the process has generally dealt with our courts as a crime, simple common law crime, murder and the illegal possession of human body parts. So there is no real need for additional legislation to deal with those crimes. They are heard in our criminal courts. Those responsible are convicted and sentenced to prison.
The gender commission felt that, I think they were motivated more by the increasing violence against women in our society, and this muti murders is one particular way in which women in our society are brutalized, especially young girls because it's generally children who are targeted [01:06:00] for some reason. So they felt that it, perhaps it would be the opportune moment to get some kind of legislation against muti murders, because we've never had specific legislation against this kind of crime. As I said, because the common law deals with it already.
And so they included muti murders as a a harmful witchcraft practice, which is just laughable. And I'll explain why. I've looked at cases in our criminal courts involving muti murders and nowhere, not in any cases stretching back over 20 years, has any accused person in those cases identified as a witch. Nowhere has any person identified as being a practitioner of witchcraft. So why make murders a harmful witchcraft practice?
Is the commission using the term harmful witchcraft practice as a convenient catch-all to deal [01:07:00] with all the other crimes that haven't actually been legislated against yet? Because that's our approach, that's our opinion. We clearly explain to the commission that witches are not responsible for muti murders. That witchcraft itself, the practice of witchcraft, is not involved in muti murders. Traditional healers, the traditional healers who were the initiators of these crimes or who were responsible, found guilty of purchasing human body parts for use later on, did not identify as witches. They certainly didn't identify what they were doing as witchcraft.
So hopefully the commission will realize that this is not, this has nothing to do with witchcraft or witches. But to get back to your original question, I think the commission is attempting to appease both parties, not wanting to appear to be favoring witches against traditional healers, [01:08:00] especially in our society that is still really divided between white and black.
So that may be one of the reasons why the commission agreed to include it as an option. But it does beg the question whether the commissioners who decided to include it realized in including it that it was an impossible piece of law, because it was based on a false premise. This idea of there being supernatural powers or that they could be proven in a court of law. I dunno, that's one of the mysteries. I think that we've, we will have successfully convinced the commission not to adopt the recommended bill. I think they only included it to appease the other, other side.
Sarah Jack: The definition of terms and the categorizing of behaviors is [01:09:00] been such a murky situation for decades and decades. And this new bill would still have the harmful witchcraft practices not clarified.
Damon Leff: But it possibly would help to identify what witchcraft is. And as you saw in the papers, the commission was hesitant to allow itself to define once and for all what witchcraft is, because witches define it in one way and traditional healers define it in exactly the opposite way. And again, it would require the commission to take side. And so it was convenient to just skip over that and not define it at all. But that creates a problem, because it allows the other side to continue to promote that narrative that witches are automatically evil and need to be killed before they harm your family.
It would be helpful if the commission accepted, and we have a very broad definition of witchcraft. It's not a narrow religious view that [01:10:00] will exclude people who identify as witchcraft in other cultures, as witches in other cultures. We have a very broad definition of witchcraft, which we would like the commission to consider and it was actually included in the paper at some point, very briefly mentioned by them that we had submitted this definition, but then they glossed over it. I think, again, not wanting to offend traditional healers.
Sarah Jack: Do you wanna give us that definition?
Damon Leff: The sympathetic practice of magic, herbalism, and divination, either within a religious context or within a folk magic practice context. And that's a very broad definition that would include all kinds, all forms of witchcraft, whether it was because in Hinduism there is a particular branch of Hinduism, which involves a practice of magic. So you have in India, you have actual witches, Hindu witches, who identify [01:11:00] themselves as witches, because their religion does afford them that kind of practice, that kind of belief system. And that wouldn't exclude them, because they practice a sympathetic form of magic within a religious context and they practice divination.
Josh Hutchinson: That's very interesting. Wonder what legal challenges would also come up by them not defining the crime accurately. If they don't define witchcraft, how do you prosecute witchcraft?
Damon Leff: Precisely, exactly, the principle of legality, if you cannot clearly define a crime, there cannot be a crime. That has been the weakness of the Witchcraft Suppression Act since 1957. The act doesn't define witchcraft, and yet it criminalizes it. So it was convenient then for the word witchcraft to come to mean a whole lot of things, depending on who was dealing with it at the time, and that is the problem [01:12:00] we had historically with the word witchcraft. It means a vast array of different things to different people in different times.
Sarah Jack: Why did the commission feel that the European definitions of evil and witch and witchcraft didn't translate well ,because it, when our conversation first started, it sounded like malevolence and evil was a part of fears going way back in traditions.
Damon Leff: I think the commission doesn't want to offend traditionalists within the African culture, who are attempting to promote African cultural belief systems, including those around witchcraft. Unless though the convention challenges them on the basis of evidence, on rationality, I don't think the commission will, I don't think the commission feels its place to challenge what a person believes. It, it has been very open toward [01:13:00] our approach. It has been very open and accommodating of us expressing who we are as pagan witches. So I think it is trying to show the same kind of dignity to traditional African beliefs that believe in things that aren't necessarily conducive to the rule of law.
I think the job of challenging those indigenous belief systems belong to the tribal elders and the leaders within those communities. They need to re-look at what they believe in the context of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: The commission's report, they repeatedly used the word scourge to describe a scourge of harmful witchcraft practices. How do you think they determined that there is a scourge?
Damon Leff: The commission doesn't really list harmful witchcraft practices without of course [01:14:00] listing muti murders, which have nothing to do with witchcraft practices. I think that when the commission refers to the scourge of harmful witchcraft practices, they're actually referring to accusations of witchcraft, because they form the most obvious crimes that occur in the context of witchcraft in our country. Of course these are not harmful witchcraft crimes. These are harmful crimes perpetrated against persons falsely suspected of being witches. The commission is still stuck in that contextual frame, harmful witchcraft crimes, which implies that witches or people practicing witchcraft are responsible for those crimes. But perhaps they will shift their narrative once they receive our submission and look at it.
Sarah Jack: What would the impact be if they continue to regulate witchcraft?
Damon Leff: I think it's highly unlikely given the constitution's protection of the right to belief. I think it's [01:15:00] very unlikely that the commission or parliament for that matter, would recommend that we need legislation against the belief in witchcraft or against witchcraft practice or against witches. I don't think that's ever going to happen.
The question is whether Parliament is going to accept that the Witchcraft Suppression Act should be repealed and that common law can replace the mechanism of current legislation to deal with accusations of witchcraft. 10 years ago, I would've said I'm doubtful, because of the high number of accusations of witchcraft we were reporting. Today I'm more hopeful, because we see less and less accusations. Part of that process of reducing the number of accusations is the communal effort by traditional leaders and traditional elders to try and minimize moments of conflict, tension [01:16:00] within families or communities where accusations of witchcraft arise.
And that only came about as a result of the CRL Commission's intervention. That's the Commission for the Promotion of Cultural, Religious, and Linguistic Communities. We approached them to assist us in dealing with the issue of accusations of witchcraft. It was impossible for us to go directly to informal or traditional communities and engage with traditional healers and leaders and say, "look, you have to stop these accusations because we identify as witches."
We don't have any credibility. We don't, we're not outsiders, we're not unbiased participants. The commission did that on our behalf. It organized a nationally inviso gathering, advised a traditional healers and leaders. Members of Parliament where there. It invited [01:17:00] local government leaders as well. And the commission raised the issue of witchcraft accusations, raised the issue of the harm, the real harms that witchcraft accusations cause, harm to the right to equality, harm to the right to dignity, harm to the right to belief and opinion. All of those issues were discussed over a couple of days. So I think that process began a shift. It began to shift narratives, and it's taken a while for that shift to begin to settle. That doesn't mean that accusations of witchcraft won't happen again. There's always an option. But hopefully that narrative has begun to shift.
Josh Hutchinson: That would be great. In the Law Reform Commission's report, they seem to admit that the Witchcraft Act hasn't worked and that it's nearly impossible to enforce. So how would a new law be any different? How would it suddenly be enforceable?
Damon Leff: I agree with you. [01:18:00] I don't think it would. For a start, you would have to get communities, local communities to become aware of a new law, which would prevent accusations of witchcraft, but it wouldn't really be a new law, because all along making accusations of witchcraft has been illegal. So I don't think any new law would have any effect whatsoever. No.
And as I said earlier, law doesn't prevent crime. The legislation won't prevent the crimes from occurring. The legislation is there to ensure that those who have been affected by crime can find redress.
Sarah Jack: I'm very amazed. Not in a positive way, about the complexity of accusing witches. So you have the victims and their families and the community, how it's what they go through, but then how it ripples into the religious community, affecting your faith. In the United States, we talk about [01:19:00] "other" all the time, how our vulnerable "others" are treated like witches. There is this lining here where identifying people as evil has just extensive ramifications across the people. I was thinking about that.
Damon Leff: It removes their automatic right to dignity. When we "other" people, we say that those people are "other," they don't have any dignity, they don't need to be treated like us., They don't need to be given the same respect or the same consideration. And it's easy then to scapegoat them for the things that we wanna blame someone for. It's very easy not to take responsibility for our own actions, if we can scapegoat the "other." We are suffering misfortune, not because we are poor and the government is not giving us an opportunity to become wealthy or employed, we are poor because that woman [01:20:00] over there put a spell on us and that's keeping us poor. And we can make that accusation, because that woman isn't a woman, that woman is not part of us, she's not a human, she doesn't deserve the same kind of consideration. We don't even need to ask her. We can just make the accusation.
So that's what "othering" tends to do. It demonizes and dehumanizes the "other." We can see the same thing happening in conflict between men and women and families where men automatically become abusive to their wives. There is a lack of consideration for the wive's feeling, her right to security, her right to dignity. It's the same pattern. .
Josh Hutchinson: We've covered a lot of ground, and it's been a very rich and important discussion. What is the status currently of the new bill? Has that gone before the parliament?
Damon Leff: [01:21:00] So the bill was not drafted by Parliament. So traditionally for a bill to become legislation, it is drafted by a parliamentary portfolio committee. It is then discussed by the portfolio committee, and if they're happy with it, they will send it to the National Assembly.
The National Assembly on the first reading is happy with it, it'll then get published in the government gazette for public comment and then will go through its process there. This bill was not, it's not a national assembly bill. It was not drafted by a parliamentary portfolio committee. It was drafted by, I think, traditional healers and given to the law reform commission, or it was drafted through the guidance of traditional healers by commissioners in the Law Reform Commission.
So it wasn't published in the government gazette. It's not an official piece of legislation. It was simply a proposal. The Law Reform Commission's saying, "look, these people think that we need to replace this act with this bill. Here's an example of what [01:22:00] they mean." I think that's what it comes down to. So it isn't, doesn't have any weight.
And even if, for example, the commission. Eventually says to parliament, "look, we think that you should repeal the act, the Witchcraft Suppression Act, and we think that you should replace it with this bull." Then that would begin from scratch. The parliamentary portfolio committee would take the suggestion and begin to look at motivation for drafting a new bull.
But I don't think that's ever gonna happen at the moment. Parliament is overwhelmed by the amount of work it has, and I don't think they're going to want to include another bull dealing with something like witchcraft onto their plate. But we'll have to see. The commission is determined to resolve their investigation this year, hopefully by next year at the latest. We'll see how it goes.
Josh Hutchinson: Is the commission still accepting feedback?
Damon Leff: No, the date [01:23:00] for comment closed the end of October. Okay. I think they probably would accept feedback if they received it, but no, the official date for comment on that bill is closed. And depending on the number of submissions that they receive, if, for example, they feel that they need to have yet another public participation process, they may open an opportunity for comment again, but they seem to be determined to want to finish this investigation. It started in 2007.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, 15 years already and not finished. But it sounds like there would be another opportunity for you and others to offer comment if it were taken up by parliament.
Damon Leff: Once the commission recommends to parliament that the act be repealed ,the Parliamentary Investigation Committee of the Justice Department would have a look at that, have a look at the work that the commission has done, have a look at the motivation for why they want [01:24:00] the, or suggest that the act should be repealed. And if they agree with the commission's decision, then it's a simple process of making a recommendation to the president and the National Commission commit, that and the national House of Parliament to have the Act repealed. That should be a straightforward process.
Sarah Jack: What is the future of witch hunts and advocacy?
Damon Leff: Let's hope that it includes an end to legal prejudice against the subject of witchcraft entirely. Let's also hope that it ends accusations of witchcraft on a grassroots level. Is there a need perhaps for the states to acknowledge that there has been this historical human rights abuse as committed as a result of a belief in witchcraft as something evil? I don't know. And it's easy to talk about a monument for the victims [01:25:00] of accusations when the state was involved in the trials. I'm not sure that our parliament would see a reason for a national monument for the victims of witchcraft accusation. It could be something to consider down the line that those who have lost their lives as a result of accusations of witchcraft need somehow to be acknowledged, that the members of their family need to be acknowledged. Their pain, their suffering, their loss needs to be acknowledged, hopefully, possibly, by the members of the community that committed the atrocities. The need for restorative justice essentially. I don't think that's something that the South African Pagan Rights Alliance could lead. We could certainly encourage it, but that coming to terms with the atrocities of one's [01:26:00] past needs to happen between and by the people involved in those atrocities.
Yeah, and I think the appropriate forum to manage those discussions, negotiations would be something like the Human Rights Commission or the CRL Commission. Yeah, as far as the Pagan Rights Alliance is concerned, once the act has been repealed, hopefully by then we'll have trained enough paralegals who would be able to assist local communities irrespective of who they are, where they are, who are still dealing with accusations of witchcraft.
It might be very helpful to be able to get paralegals to form working partnerships with police in local communities where accusations are common, so that they can [01:27:00] intercede and assist police, ensure that social workers are there, that the victims are cared for in a humane way. Their might be a role for us there, but not something that, that we have any concrete on now, but it could be a role for us in the future.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah Jack, president of End Witch Hunts, director of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, host of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, bringing you an important End Witch Hunts Advocacy News report. Listen to what she says. It's very important, and we need to heed her call to action.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt's World Advocacy Report. This episode offered a snapshot of the phase of witch-hunt behaviors that South Africa now navigates. The South African Pagan Rights [01:28:00] Alliance Advocacy Against Witch Hunts has worked to promote protections and breakdown barriers around modern witchcraft violence, prejudices, and allegations in South Africa.
This organization advocates for legal protection against religious witchcraft discrimination. South Africa has seen a decline in witch attacks. South Africa moved in a positive direction towards inclusive religious tolerance for South Africans with diverse religious practices by activism and strategic efforts.
Advocates like Damon Leff are taking effective action in educating the world to accept religious diversity. They're demanding civil accountability against witch allegation crimes and human rights protections from witchcraft discrimination. Without this purposeful work, witch-hunting and hurtful religious discrimination will continue to grow its interlocked deep roots into the foundations of our communities. These harmful roots of fear and hate can be cut out and ended, but we must do the work.
As Damon Leff has demonstrated, the prejudiced and assumptive message of the media and witchcraft [01:29:00] legislation can be challenged and changed. The South African Pagan Rights Alliance Advocacy Against Witch Hunts effectively informed and impacted the message of media writers and reporters around witchcraft ideology. The Alliance took effective action to support the repeal of the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957. They have facilitated responses across complex groups like officials of the government and religious organizations.
Likewise, Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast amplifies the message that nations and communities across the world have continued to be shrouded in witch-hunt injustices. These communities have advocate networks offering solutions and education to their community leaders. They're asking the world for acknowledgement and witch-hunts are an extensive and widespread past and present violent social phenomenon. Witch-hunting has operated within official law and courts and outside the law. Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast peels back the onion layers of witch-hunt components to evaluate the connections and similarities between [01:30:00] past and present witch-hunting. Witchcraft hunts have reached every continent and continue unjust suffering into new generations.
Each community is in a unique situation for the enabling of witch-hunts. But throughout time and humanity, the worldwide perception of witchcraft has been cloaked in fear, false allegations, and violence across all times. In South Africa, advocate and media conversations, as well as legal initiatives have begun to change the course of action around modern witch fear.
Scotland and the United States are an example of nations advocating for victims in a different witch-hunt phase. These advocates are building conversations across collaborative cooperatives, calling for legislated national pardons and state exonerations to clear names of the wrongfully accused and executed men and women in their community histories.
From trials of the past to attacks in our modern time, witch-hunt chapters are wide open in our world witch-hunt story. Generations of individuals still take a casual interest in the cause and relevance of witch-hunts past and present. Witchphobia is generally [01:31:00] tolerated in most societies across the globe, and harm from witchcraft allegations is clear. People must learn and pay attention. You are intentional bystanders if you are not taking action.
We are End Witch Hunts. End Witch Hunts is the nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks around the globe. The world must stop hunting witches. The world must stop hurting women and children out of fear. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchh unts 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 insightful and critical update on the real world, modern-day situation that many countries are faced with.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: [01:32:00] 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 podcast, and never miss a moment.
Sarah Jack: Visit us often at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends.
Sarah Jack: It's really good.
Josh Hutchinson: Exciting, tantalizing, scintillating.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more about our nonprofit.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:33:00]
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]
Take a look with us into Scottish witch trial history, as well as a close look at one particular Scottish witch trial. We discuss important historic details with historian and informative author Mary W. Craig. We are so pleased to get to learn about her new book release “Agnes Finnie the Witch of Potterrow Port” available for pre-order now. Mary fills the conversation with meaningful dialog around our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?, while also sharing valuable insight into the current witch trial pardon efforts in Scotland.
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Mary W. Craig about Borders Witch Hunt, Scottish Witch Hunts, and her upcoming book, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterow Port.
Sarah Jack: I do think people should read the Borders book before they read the Finnie book. That's what I think.
Josh Hutchinson: I think that's a good idea to get you some good background on Scottish Witch Hunts to read Borders Witch Hunt and learn about the 17th century [00:01:00] witch-hunt in Scotland, why it happened, what happened, why it was so different from English witch-hunts, what they did differently, which was so much. They were brutal. It was not fun and games in Scotland. It was serious, deadly business involving a lot of violence. It was legal to torture in Scotland.
Sarah Jack: You realized it's really incredible that the accused made it to the execution, and I know we saw accused in Salem perish in the prison, but nobody endured the amount of brutal examination that the victims of Scotland endured.[00:02:00]
Josh Hutchinson: In Scotland, they could torture you, in some cases, even if you were eight years old.
Sarah Jack: And the people that were fulfilling the different steps of the trial were getting paid well to do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. We'll learn about brodders today, a. k. a. witch prickers, and what their role was in examining the suspects. We don't get into too much detail about what they did, but you can read all about it in the book, Borders Witch Hunt. She makes the medicine go down, and her approach to the book overall, it's very readable. It's informative. You learn a lot, but you enjoy the reading process of it.
Sarah Jack: We've been realizing the different nuances [00:03:00] of witch hunt management, mechanics, and behavior across the globe. And this was another one of those realizations, cuz we just aren't used to seeing the victims experience what they did here.
Josh Hutchinson: We like to remind people that in England and New England, they almost always hanged people. In Scotland, they did burn the bodies of the victims.
Sarah Jack: Her research was extensive, and her writing on it just perfectly descriptive and informative. And very visual. I felt like I could see it.
Josh Hutchinson: It is very visceral. She really takes you to Scotland, to these small borders communities in Borders Witch Hunt. And then in Agnes Finnie, she's gonna take us to the city of Edinburgh. We're going to learn about a not so great neighborhood called [00:04:00] Potterrow Port, where everyone is unfortunate and has a low income, and we'll learn how little the king cares about these people.
Sarah Jack: So after reading Borders Witch Hunt, we're getting to pull back another layer of the onion into the Scottish experience of witch hunting.
Josh Hutchinson: Her writing about Agnes Finnie, it's an intimate portrait of an individual. You get to see witch hunts through the eyes of one person. You get details on individual lives and individual case. It's not a global survey of witch hunts. It's not one page for each case. It's a whole book for one person's witchcraft trial.
Watch our [00:05:00] social media. We will be posting about this book, because our discussion coming up with Mary Craig is so enlightening, so eye-opening. It's such a pleasure to talk to her. She's one of those people, you feel like you could just talk to her all day about this topic.
Sarah Jack: We definitely could. The time flew by, but the information in the history that we gleaned from the conversation was incredible.
Josh Hutchinson: You'll want to listen to this episode more than once, I guarantee.
Sarah Jack: Borders Witch Hunt. I learned a ton about that. Like the Scotland, the England thing. I really did. I think that will be helpful to listeners. I am so happy to introduce our guest, author Mary W. Craig. We'll be talking about her book Borders Witch Hunt: 17th Century Witchcraft Trials in the Scottish Borders and her [00:06:00] upcoming project, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterrow Port.
Mary W Craig: We've just recently unveiled a memorial to those who were executed in one particular trial in Peebles. We had 24 people executed in one day and then 3 individuals who were found not proven, cuz we have a not proven verdict in Scotland. They were then executed a week later. They were all part of the one trial, so we've just unveiled that memorial, which was really nice. We managed to get a minister to come along and give a little bit of a blessing, as well. So there's been lots of work. We've had an apology from the Church of Scotland over here, and we're working in the Scottish Parliament to have a pardon for all of those convicted under the witchcraft act. Things are going well over here.
Josh Hutchinson: We were gonna start by talking to you about the Peebles Witch Memorial. We saw that on your Twitter that you were there. Did you speak at that event?
Mary W Craig: I did, yes. We had a piper and then Elisa and Simon, who live in Peebles, unveiled memorial. Then I spoke for maybe [00:07:00] about five minutes, and then we had the minister, Tony, came along. He gave a blessing, and then as he read out 27 names, we had some fiddlers playing. And then we went back up to the youth center who very kindly gave us our premises for nothing. And I gave a sort of impromptu lecture about what happened during the trial. And that was really good because we had quite a few youngsters come along. We had two or three under the age of 12, but we had quite a sort of sprinkling of teenagers, which was really good to have the young people there interested. And it's, we're trying to get youngsters interested in history, can sometimes be a bit an, so it was good that they were there. .
Sarah Jack: There's been a little bit of movement with exoneration and talking about that over here in the states, Massachusetts just did an exoneration on their last witch, and that had a lot of teenagers involved, and that was a very important part. And I saw on Twitter that you had tweeted about some younger generation that was taking care of the history and could, could go forward with the history. And I thought, yeah, that's very important.
Mary W Craig: Especially as a lot of [00:08:00] those who were executed as witches were quite young themselves. The stereotype is of the old lady at the end of the village, and no, there were youngsters in the borders. We had people as young as eight and nine being accused of being witches. It mattered. It was young people of the day that were affected as well as everybody else.
Sarah Jack: When you were writing on the witch trials in Peebles, were you anticipating that you would be at a memorial so soon?
Mary W Craig: No. Now I'm gonna have to tell you how old I am. I first wrote about the Peebles Witch Trial back in 2008, and then I wrote again in 2020. So this has been a long haul. We didn't think we'd get an apology from the Church of Scotland. We were very surprised about that. And we were surprised as to how readily the community and people said, "yes, of course there should be a memorial." So it was great that everybody said, "oh, of course we need to talk about that, and we need to address what we've done in the past." So, surprising and very pleasing.
Josh Hutchinson: And why do you think it's [00:09:00] important to have the memorials?
Mary W Craig: I think because Scotland had a very high number of executions. We prosecuted and executed 10 times the number of people that they did in England per head of population. To give you a sort of idea, the numbers, Scotland at that time had a population of just under 1 million, and we executed 4,000 people that we know of. The figure is probably closer to 8,000, but 4,000 are the ones that we can definitively see in the records. Although some of the records say things like some witches, a few witches, we don't know how many that means. But for every individual that's executed, they were somebody's daughter, somebody's son, somebody's mother, somebody's sister.
So it would be the equivalent today of executing 24,000 people in Scotland today. It's a massive thing. It happened for a long time, and even when people weren't being arrested and executed, the Kirk session became almost like a morality police. [00:10:00] Everybody was terrified of witches or of being accused of being a witch or living next door to witch.
The Highlands and Islands were slightly doing better because of their, they had retained the links to Catholicism and the clan system was different up there. But for Lowland Scotland, it was a period of absolute terror, and it's something we have to recognize we got it very wrong, acknowledge what we got wrong, apologize to those who are affected, and learn from it for the future.
So that's why I think the memorials are important to see. We have memorials. Any village in Scotland has a memorial to the Great War. We should never forget the Great War. Unfortunately we did, and we're going into the Second World War. But the idea is to say, to literally put a marker in the ground to say, "we did this, we got it very wrong, we should never do this again. This level of prejudice, this level of othering people and finger pointing and blaming and shaming." And although we don't do that today, if you look at the way again, going back to young people, [00:11:00] the venom that can be on social media that's piling onto somebody and attacking somebody. That sort of mob rule, we have to stop that and we have to use the witch memorials as an example of how bad it can get.
Sarah Jack: That was so true. I'm learning so much about the Scotland trials. I just went through your book this week. And as far as descendants like over here the descendants tend to find each other, talk about it, "is there a memorial, do we need a memorial?" Do the descendants, are they a part of this? Were there descendants at the Peebles memorial? Do you hear from them?
Mary W Craig: No. What tended to happen was, because the terror was so absolute well into the 18th century, anyone who had been the son or the daughter of a witch is never going to admit it. What tended to happen was the second somebody got arrested, the family would absolutely deny any association. You'll get notes in the records of people saying, "oh no, she wasn't really my sister, she was only my half [00:12:00] sister" or, "no, she wasn't my mother, she was my stepmother." So people were so ashamed of what the person had done, because witchcraft was so evil, but obviously terrified that they themselves would get arrested.
Mary W Craig: And so within two or three generations, granny or great granny that was executed as a witch is airbrushed out of the family history. And because, of course, they weren't given Christian burial, because the church did not note their names, there is really not a way for people to go back and decide that was a relative of theirs. It's very difficult for you to trace back. And as I say, we have so many records that just say things like, "a few witches were burned." Partly fear, partly shame, and partly incomplete records. We have very few who can trace a true descent.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was a witch to the Scots in 17th century?
Mary W Craig: Okay, we could be here for some time. In the 16th century, everybody was Christian. There were a [00:13:00] few Jewish people around, but everybody was Christian. Witches were magical practitioners. They were Christians, but they were also able to do magic. So they could talk to the little people. They could talk to the kelpies or the selkies, or they could talk to the man in the black hat, and he would help you find lost property, or you might say a charm when you were trying to help a child become well. So it would be somebody who was a healer who would help you in that way.
They could also lay a spell on you if you were bad to them, but mostly they were thought of as good, and most communities knew of them. When you move into the 17th century after the Reformation and the Church of Scotland is terrified, it's got itself into siege mentality, it's surrounded by Catholics. It's not quite sure what the king's doing down in London, and we've got famine and pestilence and war going on in Scotland, which seems as if the devil is out there, using his handmaiden witches.
Then the [00:14:00] Church of Scotland takes the word "witch" and sticks it very closely, it cleaves it to the devil, because it is unnatural for women to have power. And women who do have power or claim to have power, it can only come from the devil. "Witch" changes, the meaning of the word "witch" changes from meaning being a herbal healer, wise women into this satanic follower of the devil.
We notice in the early part of the century, a lot of people who, when they're first arrested, they'll say, "yes, I'm a witch." Because they don't understand that this has now become a bad thing. By the end of the century, nobody's admitting to being a witch, unless they are kept awake and tortured. So the meaning shifts and changes and moves within that century because the church is obsessed with the devil.
Because we had a form of Calvinism that was so strict, and we had the predestination that God already knew who was damned and who was saved. And if we were God's elect and we were [00:15:00] all saved, then the devil would attack us, and he would attack us using witches. So the meaning changed, just as the meaning has changed now. There are people in Scotland today who call themselves witches today, who have, just as there are half a dozen different definitions of what to be a Christian is, there are half a dozen definitions of what a witch is today, but certainly in the 17th century, it changed from being good and healing to having that diabolical link.
And strangely enough, the people in Scotland were being told this every Sunday you'd go to the kirk on a Sunday and the minister would tell you It's witches. It's witches. It's the devil. It's the devil. And yet communities still use their witches, because what else can you do? You can't afford a doctor. There's not a doctor in your little village. If your child falls ill, or if your hens stop laying, and you think it's old Aggie at the end of the road who's cast a spell, you'll find another witch to take the spell off, because that's the day-to-day life you're living.
Sarah Jack: That's great. What did they believe the [00:16:00] diabolical witches were capable of?
Mary W Craig: Because the Kirk of Scotland were obsessed with the devil, they thought that the devil was going to bring down the new Protestant church. The Reformation happens in Scotland very quickly. In England, it was gradual. They moved from Catholicism to Anglicanism. In Scotland, we were Catholic, and then John Knox arrives and says, "no, we're now all Protestant, and all Catholics are in league with the devil." so the idea was that the devil was going to attack us all and drag us all to hell. And we had to guide against him. We had to guard against him. We had to be constantly on our watch against the devil.
And so witches were people. They were women, predominantly because women were weak and stupid and lascivious and liars and just awful creatures. And our faith was weak because of that. And so we would be easily seduced by the devil. And then we would do his bidding. We would lure men with our sexual wiles. [00:17:00] We would cast spells to make people die. We would make men impotent. It's an awful lot about sex in it with the Church of Scotland. I'm not quite sure what that says about the ministers, but there's a lot to do with sex. We would shrivel men's members, we would make men barren, we would make cattle and horses barren. We would spoil crop. We would just basically bring the whole world to its knees as servants and handmaidens of the devil. And that was why the Kirk was obsessed.
But because of this nonsense about predestination, it meant that even if you were a kirk minister, even if you were a very senior kirk minister in the General Assembly, the Kirk of Scotland, you couldn't know for absolute certainty that you were saved. So you end up in a circular argument, because if I'm the most godly person, then the devil's going to attack me. So if the devil attacks me, that proves I'm the most godly. So if I'm the most godly local [00:18:00] minister and the witches attack me, that proves I'm the most godly. But that means I want there to be witches in my area.
And so it just becomes a circular argument. You end up bringing in the witch prickers and witch brodders that we had here, and they were paid by how many witches they found, so they found lots of witches. And the ministers stood in the pulpit and screamed that this was diabolical and this was the devil and this was awful. But in a way you're saying, " see, it proves I'm a really good minister, because why else would they attack me? Why else would there be witches in my parish?" And once you're in that mindset, it's really difficult to get out of that mindset. Once you're in that circular argument, there's really no way out.
Josh Hutchinson: We read in Borders Witch Hunt about Auld Nick. Who was he?
Mary W Craig: Auld Nick was the devil. Scotland has lots of names for the Devil. He is Auld Nick. He's Auld Horny. He's Auld Jack. He's Black Clootie. [00:19:00] He's Horny Clootie. We have all these different names, and a lot of the names are from way back, from our Pagan ancestors.
There are also lots of places in Scotland named after the Devil. There's the Devil's Beeftub, which is just a very large river valley, but it's a round river valley, so it's the Devil's Beeftub. There's the Devil's Arse, there's the Devil's Bum, there's the Devil's Loo. There's the Devil's Toothpick. Not quite sure about that one.
So there's lots of, so the Devil in a way, the Devil that the church had in mind, who was Satan, who ruled over hell and fire and damnation. He wasn't quite the devil that, in Pagan times, we had believed in, he was a man that you could have a sort of, you can make a deal with the devil. You played the fiddle, you can play dice with the devil, you can play cards with the devil. There was a familiarity there that sort of lingered in folk superstition, even after the Christian Church was established. So again, when the [00:20:00] Church is railing about the Devil, and locally you say, "ah, it's just Auld Nick," that mismatch could mean the difference between life and death.
Sarah Jack: I'm very curious and I found the overlapping of the old and new beliefs quite a big deal.
Mary W Craig: Yeah, because like in all things, what people believe, ordinary people believe and what society deems as acceptable, there's always a lag of several years. I have a friend who's an elder in the Kirk of Scotland, and he still won't walk under a ladder, and he laughs at himself for that superstition. Even though he is a practicing Christian, he still has that superstitious belief, and he knows it's ridiculous, but that's what he grew up with. So these folk beliefs linger on, and I the original meaning the original Pagan meaning has been lost in time.
But you keep all, you'll say, "knock on wood," or you'll touch wood for good luck, or you won't cross a black cat's path or breaking a mirror. All of these superstitions, we've lost the original meaning, but [00:21:00] they're still there. We still all do it.
We still go out at Halloween, we go out guising, you guys go out trick-or-treating, and that's going way back. That's pre-Christian, that's a pre-Christian festival that we all still now. I mean, it's fun, and the kids get sweeties and candy. These superstitious beliefs hang on in there, and while now we smile at them and they're fine, because the Reformation was so recent for the Kirk of Scotland and because they had developed this siege mentality, they couldn't make any allowances for these old beliefs.
So it didn't make sense. So that 50 years previously your grandmother might have said a Catholic prayer as she was soothing an ill child. That was acceptable. Now, Catholicism had been tarred with the brush of being diabolical. It's very difficult to tell somebody they can't do something they've been doing for 50 years with no apparent harm.
Sarah Jack: The people's beliefs were in a transition, but what was acceptable was like a switch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. If you think about the modern day [00:22:00] laws on things like homosexuality, society had moved on from homosexuality whilst lawmakers had not. Their thinking was about 30 years behind. And social change, same-sex marriages, things like that, the lawmakers are always behind what is the societal movement of what isn't acceptable within a society.
And what we had kept onto our old pagan traditions in Scotland. We still do it today. You still throw coins in a fountain or down a wishing well. That again, it's an old pagan belief. You take metal, which is precious, you put it into water, and water is a gateway into the world of the gods. Pre-Christian, we all do it when we're on holiday. That's part of the fun. We still, you get some people who will still leave out, my grandmother would still leave out cheese and milk for the fairies that were in the wood at the back of her house, and this would be in about 1930. She was still doing that. Admittedly, most of her neighbors thought she was a bit odd, but that belief was was still with her.
Josh Hutchinson: What were [00:23:00] some factors in the high rate of witch trials and executions in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: One of the highest problems was the king. When Elizabeth I dies in 1601, and James VI of Scotland, goes down to England to become James I of Great Britain, he goes to London, cuz that's where the money's to be made, and he takes most of his court away with him. So the senior nobility all go down to London, and it leaves a power vacuum in Scotland. And that's where the Kirk of Scotland just steps into that power vacuum.
The problem was that James VI wanted a uniform faith across the whole of Britain, and he wanted to have the Episcopal faith, or the Anglican Episcopacy faith, simply because England's 10 times bigger than Scotland. It was easier to go with the majority faith. He was in London. He was in an, gonna go with the majority faith. The problem is that had a hierarchy, which included bishops, and the Church of Scotland took one look at that and [00:24:00] said, "that's Catholicism being shoved back." And so instantly they were at loggerheads.
Now, initially, James VI wasn't too stupid, so he just thought, I'll just leave the Scotch alone. His son, Charles I, comes along, wants to do the same thing, but he didn't have the same political nous as his father. So instead of leaving well alone, he decides he wants to impose this Episcopal faith onto Scotland.
At the same time, Charles has fallen out with his English parliamentarians over taxation, and he's causing bother over in Ireland. So basically you end up with the English Civil War or the War of the Three Kingdoms. So you basically got civil war going on. So because you've got a war going on, the Kirk of Scotland turned around and says, "well see, it's the Devil, it must be, because we are all good Calvinist Scots. Why would God inflict a war on us? It must be the Devil. Why is God inflicting famine on us? He wouldn't. It must be the [00:25:00] Devil." So all the external factors are pushing it to being the devil, because that's, that's your only get outta jail free card.
There is no other explanation. It's like in the 1930s in Germany, everything was a fault of the Jews. It didn't matter what, it was the fault of the Jews, because that's what people were being constantly told. It was the same thing up here, because of course, if you start to admit for one second that it might not be the devil, then maybe you have to take responsibility for yourself.
There's also the fact that in Scotland, we do have rotten weather up here. Let's be honest, it is absolutely pelting rain with me. I can see is it today, and it's supposed to be nice today. So we do have rotten weather. So if you have harvest failure and bad weather and war and famine and death, and then the 30 years religious war kicks off in the continent, and there are Catholics across in Ireland, who are coming across into Scotland and going up and causing bother with the Irish clans. The whole world is in chaos. And halfway through the century we [00:26:00] chop the king's head off. Now that's pretty serious. Your king might be mad, and your king might be bad, and your king might be mad and bad, but you don't chop his head off.
And then Scotland, we ended up, Oliver Cromwell comes up and imposed a republic on Scotland. So there were English soldiers based in Scotland. So the Scottish Covenanters say, "our only king is Jesus Christ." So they end up doing a Holy War. So in all of this chaos and confusion that you cannot control as a church, the only thing you can say for certainty is all of this is caused by the devil. And you have to believe that because if you don't, then there's nothing the church can do about the king, there's nothing the church can do about all Oliver Cromwell, they can't control the weather, they can't control the pestilence, they can't control the war in Europe, they can't control the Irish Catholics coming over. Only thing they can do is stick to their certainty, so they develop that siege mentality, and it lasts for a long time. They keep to this belief in the [00:27:00] devil and witches and witchcraft for well over 150 years because to admit anything else, then their house starts to crumble. So that's why they have fixated on that.
Sarah Jack: That was wonderful. Thanks for that very detailed explanation for that.
Mary W Craig: The 17th century was a bad century across Europe because we had the reformation in the previous century, and what you end up with in the 17th century is the counter-reformation, and you end up with the 30 years religious wars. You've got the German states fighting with each other, you've got France and Spain fighting, so there's wars all over the place.
People are jockeying for position in Europe, which is utterly terrifying. So you've got religious uncertainty and war and soldiers and famine and plague and bad weather. And you as an individual have no control. And then you go to the one person who's going to tell you what's what, and it's the minister, and they're telling you what to do.
And as I say, we had Charles I we chop [00:28:00] his head off, we ended up the protectorate. Then Oliver Cromwell dies. His son comes along, we didn't like him, we got rid of him. Charles II comes back, but oh dear, he's married to a Catholic, so we're not quite sure about him. They don't have any children. And then James VII of Scotland, or James II of Britain. We had a lot of Jameses. He comes back. Oh dear, he's a Catholic, so we don't like him, so we bump him. So we end up with Mary and William of Orange coming over from the Netherlands. So for that entire century, there is very little stable government at the time giving us anything, because it's the government that's causing half the bother. Cuz the government, whichever government, is always arguing with the church. So the only stable thing you have in Scotland is the Kirk of Scotland. Everything else is in flux all the time. And as I say, it lasts for that full century.
Josh Hutchinson: Why were women believed more likely to be witches?
Mary W Craig: Oh, there were two or three books. There was one known as the Malleus Maleficarum, [00:29:00] which was written by a chap who may have been under the name Kramer or may have been under the name Institoris. He may or may not have been a Dominican, and he was kicked about the German states in the 16th century.
There was a Witch trial in Speyer in one of the German states, and he had an argument with the bishop Speyer as to how they should conduct this trial. The bishop said, "no, it's my town. We're doing it my way." And the women there were acquitted of witchcraft. And Kramer then said, "you're an idiot. You're wrong. If you'd have done it my way, would've had them executed."
And he wrote this book called Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of the Witches, in which he basically outlined what a witch is and what you should do about it. So women are weak, lascivious, lying, deceitful, awful creatures, and therefore, we are ready tools of the devil. A man is steadfast in his faith in the Lord. A man is very seldom going to be tempted, but we are gonna be tempted, because, well, we're [00:30:00] useless and weak and awful.
He writes terrible things, like women's bodies are weak, and you can tell they're weak because they're porous. You think, oh, you're a horrible man. They produce milk, they leak, their bodies leak, therefore their faith will leak. He uses analogies like that, a terrible book. Problem is, it was a bestseller. Everybody thought this book was brilliant. Then you come in to the later 16th century, and you've got John Knox, and John Knox writes his book against the, it's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. And he was actually talking about people like Mary Tudor, who he thought was a disgraceful person and should never have been queen, cuz of course she's female, and she's a queen, and she's Catholic.
So he says that power is unnatural to women, and women who have power are in league with the devil. So you've got Institoris saying that we're weak, and our faith is weak, and we're terrible and awful. And then you've got John Knox saying, and any woman that's [00:31:00] got power is coming from the devil. And these books are read by all of the learned men right the way across Europe.
And then James I, James VI of Scotland, James I of England, just before he leaves Scotland, he comes back from Denmark with his wife-to-be in a boat, and a great storm is raised outside North Berwick. And somebody says, "oh, that storm was raised by witchcraft." So there's a huge witchcraft trial. James is involved, he's the king. And because Scotland was a little country, James wanted to be one of the big princes in Europe. Scotland's so little and so poor, he can't really do it with money, but he can do it by learning. So he writes a book called Demonology, all about Witches.
So if the king's writing about it, and John Knox is writing about it, and Kramer's writing about it, these three books do the rounds. And they just become the accepted norm that women are, by their nature, weak and silly and stupid [00:32:00] and, therefore, susceptible to the wiles of the devil. We'll just give in, because we're so hopeless. And in Scotland, about 85% of those who were persecuted as witches were women, about 15% were men.
Sarah Jack: And how were warlocks viewed differently?
Mary W Craig: Warlocks were slightly different, because there were men who followed the devil and became warlocks, but because they were men, they had to be in charge of the women. So you would maybe get three or four women, and the warlock would be in charge of them. So although he was awful and had renounced Christ and made a pact with the devil, he was in charge of the women. So that made sense, because men are supposed to be in charge of women. The reason the church was very upset about warlocks is that also tended to be men who were learned, so men who were themselves ex-ministers.
One of the famous ones is Major Weir in Edinburgh, who was this bowhead saint. And he would [00:33:00] give great sermons in the open air in Edinburgh at the Westport of Edinburgh. And then he actually turned out to have been a warlock all along. When he was executed, he threw his staff into the fire, and apparently it turned and made grimaces and uttered curses as the wood burned.
But yes, so they were very frightened of warlocks because that was just all worry. Even the devil was so powerful. He was now ensnaring men, where his women were just what can you expect? They're women. They're going to be easily ensnared.
Josh Hutchinson: Were the warlocks treated differently in the witch trials than the witches?
Mary W Craig: Yes. Now women couldn't speak in court. You weren't allowed to speak in court if you were a woman. But then one of the proofs of being a witch was to be deleted or named by another witch. So if I'm accused of being a witch, and I say, "I am and so is my sister," and then they bring my sister into court, I have to be able to say in court, "yes, I am naming my sister as a witch." So they changed the law so that [00:34:00] women could speak, but only to delate, to talk about another woman as a witch. But men as warlocks were allowed to speak in court.
And so women would be asked things like, "did you have sex with the devil?" Yet again, we're obsessed with sex. "What was he like?" And all these sorts of questions. And, "what did you do? And how did you serve him? And who was all there with you?" When men were accused of being a warlock, they would be asked, "why did you renounce your baptism? Why did you turn away from Christ? Why did you make a pact with the devil?"
It's almost as if women are just emotional. We don't really care about what they've been up to. But with the men, it was almost as if they were reasoning with them and saying, "do you not understand what you've done here? Come back to Christ. Do you not understand that this is wicked and awful?"
And there would be, the trials of warlocks could sometimes last for two or three days. The trials for women often lasted barely two or three hours. So it was quite different, yes, and a lot of men who were accused were [00:35:00] allowed to escape, shall we say? Or they would be held under house arrest, and they would often kill themselves, because your family could inherit your money, if you kill yourself. If you're executed as a witch or a warlock, your money is forfeit to the Kirk.
And a lot of men could actually challenge the accusation in the first place. If I accuse you of being a witch or a warlock, you would just turn around and say, "how dare you? I'm a man of good standing in this community. That, that Mary's outrageous. She's accused me of being a witch." And I could often be arrested for slander. So a man could often talk the accusation down at that very early stage. So that's why, there are a few, and there are a few men who went to trial and were acquitted, because they either talked themselves out of it, or they got a couple of good lawyers in there to say, "for goodness sake, this is a chap of good standing, and why we're listening to the gossip of women? Of course he's not a warlock." So the acquittal rate for men was a lot higher than women.
We also have in Scotland the not proven verdict, and we still have it in Scots law. Now, not proven doesn't mean you're innocent, [00:36:00] and it doesn't mean you're guilty. It just means that the crown has not proved its case against you. And so there are a few cases of not proven verdicts in witchcraft trials, and that tended to be for men. Men would get a not proven verdict, and if you're not proven, you're not sent to prison, you cannot be punished, because the case against you has not been proven. There are constant arguments under Scots law, whenever anybody's found not proven these days, as to whether or not we should abolish it.
Josh Hutchinson: What was the penalty for witchcraft in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: To be worriet, strangled to death, and then your dead body burnt. If you were extremely lucky, you might, in the earliest part of the century, and in the 16th century, you might get away with being branded, fined, and exiled. Oh, there are very few guilty verdicts that did not end up in an execution. And for women it was always execution after the guilty verdict, every time. Yep. And as I say, in the case of the people's [00:37:00] trial, that was 24 people executed on one day.
And of course, everybody had to come out to watch. The minister wanted everybody to see what happened to witches. The devil didn't come down and save them in the end. The devil was a lying master that if you follow the devil, this is what happens to you.
And oftentimes, if it's in some of the smaller towns, there was no public executioner. So it might be somebody like the local blacksmith, because he was a big strong lad, and he might be the one that had to, often they would put a noose around the neck and slip a little bit of wood in, and they would turn the piece of wood to strangle someone. And that's, you're having to do that face to face with somebody. It takes a long time to strangle somebody. And if it's in a small town, the chances are that blacksmith's gonna know the people that he's executing. So it was traumatic, I would think, for them afterwards to think, especially if there had been any doubt, if perhaps somebody just got caught up in it, a name was uttered, or somebody had fallen out with someone, but that was it. [00:38:00] There was no get out. Once that guilty verdict was in, you were executed, usually within a day or two days.
Sarah Jack: In your book, you noted that the people were not just expected to be there. If you weren't there observing, that was really bad for your reputation.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. The minister would notice. You had to have a very good reason to not be there and have your children there as well. Why aren't you there? Why aren't you seeing? Because executing a witch was God's work. So, "why are you not there to witness it? Why are you hiding in your house? What have you got to hide? Were you a friend of the Witch? Are you a Witch yourself?" Yes, it would be noted if you didn't, if you didn't turn up, you didn't get there. "Why are you not watching what's going on? Why are you not showing your children, your three and four year old children? Why are you not showing them this gruesome scene to say to them, 'this is what happens?'"
Yes, you had to be there, and ministers would take note of it. And these were the sorts of things that could build to a bad reputation. So that, [00:39:00] 10 years down the line, another accusation is made, and your name might be on the list, and the minister thinks, "oh yeah, they didn't turn up that execution the last time. Yeah. They've not been to the kirk a couple of Sundays in a row without a good reason. Yeah, I'm gonna keep an eye on them." So that bad reputation can follow you about. We have situations where there are people caught up in an accusation, don't make it to court, but then 10 years down the line, the fact that they were previously investigated is brought up as part of the evidence against them.
Josh Hutchinson: And why did they burn the bodies?
Mary W Craig: It was so that there was nothing left, absolutely nothing left, because you had denied your faith, and your faith is everything. You denied that. Then you are nothing. And so the body would be burnt, and it takes a long time to burn the body. It's not like today, if you have somebody who's cremated, it's done very clinically and very safely and very respectfully and, you know, in a[00:40:00] proper sort of manner. If you're talking about Scotland this time of the year, it has rained today all day. Body could take three or four days to burn, and it's burning in a public place. It's maybe burning in the marketplace where you go to buy your bread every morning, and there is a body still burning, still burning. And then, eventually, there's nothing left, or if there is anything left, if there are a pile of ashes left, they're usually thrown into water, and the water will take 'em away. Partly because it's cleansing like a baptism, and partly the fact that it physically takes them away.
Sarah Jack: And where did the methods originate of killing and burning the witch?
Mary W Craig: Initially, if you'd done a terrible crime, if you committed a murder, you'd be executed. And usually people were hanged in Scotland. We didn't tend to burn people alive. They did in some of the Catholic countries, but that was because witchcraft to them was mixed in with heresy and burning alive was a particular punishment for heresy. We tended to hang people. Occasionally you got your head [00:41:00] chopped off, but that was slightly different. That tended to happen up in Highlands a little bit more. But anyway, Lowland Scotland tended to hang people. But because you were then gonna burn the body to get rid of the body as well, because you don't want anything of the Witch left, it was a practical thing.
If you have to build a gallows and then hang somebody, and then take a body down and then put it onto a pyre to burn it, that's a lot more work. And so if you just build a pyre and have a stake and tie someone to the stake, strangle them there and then burn them, it was purely a practical method. In some areas, people were burned inside tar barrels to make sure they couldn't escape at the last minute, although the Church of Scotland didn't quite like that, so that was too much like superstition.
But it was a purely practical reason, especially if you're gonna execute 24 people in one day. That's a lot of gallows to have to construct and then take down, because often witches weren't executed in a local place of execution. So you might have a big town, and you would have a place of execution for those who were guilty of [00:42:00] murder or rape or something horrible like that. Witches weren't executed there, because they weren't even supposed to be executed alongside ordinary criminals. Cause ordinary criminals were bad, but they hadn't denied Christ. So they were separate, even in their execution and even in their death, they were separate.
Sarah Jack: And these witches didn't say they denied Christ. They just had, because they were a witch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. Oh, all of them were Christian. They were absolutely Christian. And you can hear it if you read through, the best thing I always find with the confessions is to actually read them out loud. And you can hear these women, especially the early part of the century, they're genuinely confused as to what it is they're supposed to have done, because they're not doing anything that their mother and their grandmother didn't do before them.
They went out, and they got herbs to, to help heal a child, and they said a little charm. What had this got to do with the devil? They didn't understand, and [00:43:00] occasionally they might say things like, "I met the man in the black hat." They meant a supernatural creature with a black hat. They did not mean the Devil, and they couldn't, you can hear the fact that it's almost as if the ministers and the interrogators are saying one thing, and the woman is saying another. It's like ships that pass in the night, they're just not understanding.
There are some really poignant ones where people say things like, "can I be a witch and not know it?" They were genuinely confused by what was going on. It was only as the trials continued, and by the time you got to about 1649, then a lot of people are absolutely shutting up and they're saying nothing.
They're saying absolutely nothing because they know that it doesn't matter what they say, it's gonna be turned. Now, the interrogators tended to be the minister and tended to be led by the minister. They would ask what today we would say would be leading questions, but what they would say is they wouldn't say to you, "did you meet the devil?" Cuz you're gonna say no to that. What they'll say is, "when you met the devil, who else was there with you?" [00:44:00] You said, "but I didn't meet the devil." "When you met the man in the black hat, was your sister with you? Was your mother with you? Was your daughter with you?" And so they would ask questions in a way to get the women to incriminate themselves, although they didn't really understand, and as I said, but later in this century, people understood and people were saying nothing. And that's when they start to use things like walking and watching and waking. And keeping people awake for days and days on end to get them into that mindset where they're gonna confess to anything.
Josh Hutchinson: You've talked about several methods that they used to test the witches. Were there others?
Mary W Craig: There were the four proofs. The first proof was having a really bad reputation or a reputation of doing bad things. One was to be called a witch by another confessing witch. One was to confess to being a witch, and that was usually done, they would keep you awake for days on end and be badgering you the whole time, "you're a disgrace to your family. You're a disgrace to your friends." And eventually you give in.
They would hold lighted candles to your feet. They would string you up by your thumbs. They would break [00:45:00] your arms, things like that. They would beat you to make you confess.
The other one was the Devil's mark. Cuz it was thought that the devil laid his hands on you and it's a parody of Christ. And because he was unnatural, he would leave a mark on you that was unnatural. And then a witch pricker or a witch brodder would arrive with a pin maybe about five centimeters long, and he would put that into your shoulders or your neck or your head on say, a mole or a freckle. And if you didn't cry out or it didn't bleed, that proved you had the devil's mark. And of course, acupuncture today, there are points in the body you can put a pin in. Often they would just keep on pricking somebody until they found point that didn't bleed.
You could be called a Witch by another Witch. If you had marks on your body, and that goes back to biblical times where you're talking about people being leprous with sin, and so if you were a sinful person, if you'd gone to the devil, there would be marks on you.
But it was mostly by keeping you awake and constantly talking at you the whole time. That was the main method [00:46:00] that was used against you.
Sarah Jack: It just amazes me that they survived everything to even get to the execution. It just seems like it was so harsh.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. I'm surprised at those who didn't confess, I'm genuinely surprised that those that didn't confess at all. And there were some who absolutely to the end said, "no, I'm not gonna confess." There were a lot of people who confessed and then at trial or just before the trial retracted their confession, and they said, "I confessed because of the torture I was put under."
You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were under the age of 10, but we know that happened. You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were what was known as addled in your wits, if you're mentally incompetent. But again, we know that happened. There were people who were put on trial who were quite obviously mentally incapable, and yet the local kirk minister said, "no, I want them sent to trial, and if they're mad, it's their own fault. That's what happens if you [00:47:00] hang about the devil, and anyway, they're probably faking it." And it didn't matter if your family said, " granny's been a bit wandered for years" or even if you had a doctor to say, "this person is mentally incompetent." The kirk minister should, by sheer force of personality, just say, "no, I want them brought to trial." And they were brought to trial.
But as I say, some of the confessions are so poignant. They're sort of little things like, "I left out milk for the fairies." That's it, you're witch. Or, "I was taking care of my neighbor's little boy, and I said a little rhyme over him to help him soothe him to, to sleep," which every mother and father has done that. You sing a little nursery rhyme to help your little one, if you've got a fever. That now becomes a diabolical act. It's so poignant when you read what they're actually accused of doing. But underpinning all of that, as far as the kirk was concerned, was this obsession that they had made a pact with the devil.
Josh Hutchinson: What drew you [00:48:00] to write a book about Agnes Finnie?
Mary W Craig: Oh, I wrote the book about Agnes Finnie, because I've been interested in the Witches and witchcraft for ages and ages, and the reason I'm write, I'm writing the book on Agnes Finnie, is because she doesn't fit the stereotype. She's not a nice, cute little old lady living in a cottage. She's not gathering her to take care of her neighbors. She's a nasty so-and-so. She lives in a tenement slum. She's a shopkeeper selling dodgy goods. She's a money-lender.
And it's very easy to be sympathetic to a sweet, gray-haired old granny who's gathering herbs in the countryside and who is persecuted by the church. And we all think that's terrible and awful and shouldn't have happened. It's much more difficult to be sympathetic to somebody who's not a sympathetic character, but Agnes Finnie, for all she was a nasty piece of work and for all she was quite an unpleasant person, was still deserving of justice. The law should not have treated her the way it did.
[00:49:00] And that's why I wrote about her. And also the fact that she was in the city and the book, just what life was like if you were poor. In the city of Edinburgh at that time, Agnes Finnie, is living in a place called Potterrow Port, which is, it's no longer there, but it's one of the high tenements in Edinburgh. So there's no sanitation, there's no running water, it's dark at night, it's freezing cold. Everybody's drinking as if there's no tomorrow, because the lives are so miserable.
At the same time as Agnes is alive, King Charles I has a camel, which he keeps at Corstorphine, which is the west end of Edinburgh. And this camel goes out for a walk every day, except for a Sunday, cuz it's a good Christian camel, it rests on a Sunday. And you can pay sixpence to go and see the camel. Camel has got a groom, and it's got heated stables, and it's got the best of food, and it's being fed, I dunno, sugar lumps and all sorts. And once a month, the keeper of the royal camel writes a report on how the camel's doing and [00:50:00] sends that to Charles I, and he reads this. He's not getting a report on how the poor people are living in the tenement where Agnes is. He doesn't care about them, who are starving and freezing and drinking alcohol that they've made themselves, because there's nothing else they can do to get through the day.
So that's why I wrote about Agnes, partly to say everybody's deserving of justice, nasty or otherwise, but also the fact that the king cares about his camel, but doesn't care about the poor. This is the century in which witches were living or alleged witches were living.
Sarah Jack: And what was like the population, and how many people were living like Agnes?
Mary W Craig: That's difficult to say, because not everybody was registered. You might get a tenement that had eight alleged houses in it, but you might have people who were so poor that when their husband went to work in the morning, they would get a lodger coming in off the night shift to sleep in their husband's bed. You had people sleeping in the back stairs of [00:51:00] tenements, because that was all they had. That was the problem. Nobody quite knew how many people were there.
The conditions were so bad that 50% of all children never made it to their fifth birthday. You go to Edinburgh today and you've got the amazing guides that'll take you down the old town in Edinburgh, and they talk about gardylooing. It's all done as a joke and a laugh, and everybody laughs about it. They were basically throwing excrement out of windows, and that's how people lived. There was no light. There was no heat. There was lice and fleas and cockroaches and rats. This was the life that King Charles I's subjects were living whilst his camel on the west end of the city is being fed sugar lumps.
Josh Hutchinson: So why did you choose to write a book about one particular individual after the borders witches was many trials and many people, so why focus on just one?
Mary W Craig: I wanted to focus in on one person's life to look at the ordinary life of the person in a bit more detail. And I went [00:52:00] through the records with the National Archives and the National Library in Scotland, and I was fortunate enough to find Agnes Finnie's entire trial records. So that allowed me to look at that in some detail, but also the fact that she lived just at the outbreak of the Scottish Civil War and the chaos and what is sort of throughout that because of the rising tension all the time. And we've got the wars going on in Ukraine and Russia at the moment. There's a war over there, but it's far away. We hear about it on the news, but it doesn't affect us on a daily basis.
The war was right there in Edinburgh. Young men were getting called up. You might just be an ordinary person. All of a sudden your son has to go to fight either for the king or against the king. There were roving gangs around the city, armed men in the city. So there's all sorts of things bubbling up, and the fact that I could focus in on this one individual and see what her life was like and how she starts off just as a shopkeeper, maybe doing a little bit of money-lending, all the way up to the time when [00:53:00] she's arrested, where there are 20 accusations of witchcraft being laid against her by her neighbors.
So I was able to look at it in a lot more sort of microscopic detail of one individual and how that came to pass.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking how you probably just saw her coming, like who she was,, coming together before you because of all of your extensive research and your expertise on all of these things you're talking about. And then you find her and all these records. I'm sure she just jumped right out at you.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. And the fact that she wasn't in a little cottage and she wasn't a sweet little old lady, because that would've been a very different book, because from page one, everybody would've gone, "oh, that's a shame. Poor, sweet, little old lady, what's the big bad church gonna do?" Whereas this is, "okay, Agnes, oh I see. You're like that. Are you?" And that's the challenge. The challenge of this is the reality.
I'm not saying that Agnes was a horrible person, because she was horrible. I'm saying that she wasn't a nice person, [00:54:00] but she wasn't living in a nice time. She was trying to cope the best she could. And of course she had all of the, she's a woman on her own, she's a widow, and women are only supposed to do certain things and act in certain ways. So that drew me to her because, she's trying to struggle through and do the best she can, but because she was that slightly more unpleasant character, she was much more fascinating than a sweet, little old lady.
Sarah Jack: Why was she chosen to be an accused?
Mary W Craig: She was accused, she was finally accused by her neighbors. Her neighbors went to the minister and complained about her. And then when the minister started to investigate, he ended up with these 20 accusations going back years and years.
So there were neighbors saying things like, "I had an argument with her and she made me go lame" or, "I had an argument with her and she blinded my husband." And all of these accusations then start to come out, and Agnes ends up arrested and sent to trial. So it's a sort of accumulation of different things that had happened, [00:55:00] because at one point, she's known in the neighborhood as a witch.
They know she's a witch. There's a couple called the Buchanans, and they go to her when they're little boy is unwell. And you think, why else are they going to the witch? I mean, Agnes is known to be a bad tempered so-and-so. Why are they going to this woman to try and help the little boy?
Because there was nowhere else for them to go. They're poor. They can't afford a doctor. There's no doctor going down to the tenements. The minister from the Kirk doesn't even go down to the tenements. They're basically a little world on their own in a little squallid corner of Edinburgh. They're in the capital city, and yet they're living a miserable life, and they have nothing else to do but go to Agnes. You think why would anybody borrow money from her if she's so horrible? Where else can they go? They can't go to a bank. They haven't got anywhere else to go.
The only person they can go to is Agnes, because they're all living life on the edge. One bad day, you fall over and break your leg. You can't work, you can't pay your rent, you're [00:56:00] put out your house. You try living on the streets in a Scottish winter, you're gonna die. Witch she might have been, bad tempered so-and-so she might have been, but there was nobody else for these people to go until finally they've had enough of her temper. And also finally, the fear of the witch tips the balance against the usefulness that she has, because of the rising tension of the war. And so all these things come together, and eventually they've had enough, and they go to the minister.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was the evidence used against her?
Mary W Craig: The evidence against her was what you and I would probably just think of as the accusation. So somebody would say, "I had an argument with her in the street. She yelled at me, "I'll send you halting hame." And I developed a limp. And as far as the court, as far as the minister was concerned, that was proof positive. And if the minister says so, then the court just agrees. So it was actually just the accusation.
I [00:57:00] think in Agnes's case, because there were so many of these accusations, it just piled up and piled and piled up. But interestingly, the jury took a long time to find her guilty. It took a long time. You'd expect with 20 odd accusations that they would've said guilty straight away. Now, they took a good few weeks to think about it and think about whether or not Agnes was guilty, but I think it was just accumulation. As I say, in the vast majority of witchcraft trials, there was no proof, because how can you prove something like a spell? It's very difficult to prove a spell.
You can say, "we asked Agnes to take care of our little boy, and then our little boy died." But how do you prove that Agnes killed the child? You could say, "Agnes yelled at my father, and then he had a stroke." But how do you actually prove that? Yeah, the link between cause and effect was very tenuous then, but it was enough because you had power from the devil. Then that gave you the power to lame someone [00:58:00] or blind someone.
Sarah Jack: Was Agnes executed?
Mary W Craig: She was, yes. If you're ever in Edinburgh, going up just before you hit the castle esplanade on the right hand side, you'll see the Witches' Well. And that's where the witches were executed in Edinburgh. So yes, she was executed.
Sarah Jack: Was she executed alongside other witches that day?
Mary W Craig: No. She was executed on her own, and interestingly, her daughter was not. And yet within the accusations, the 20 accusations, her daughter was named as a witch as well. And yet she was not executed, which is a curious point.
When I looked at the sort of aftermath of her trial, what was interesting was that the minister, who had never gone near the Potterrow in his time as a minister, nothing was ever said against him. Nobody said to him, "why did you not know about this witch?" Nothing was said. And he thereafter never went down to Potterrow. The local bailey, who was like the police officer for the beat, they said to him, "why did you [00:59:00] never see any of this happening?" Nobody said anything to him, and he just continued to be the police officer on the beat. They didn't do anything. No doctor went down to Potterrow. It was a case of, "we've found your witch, we've executed your witch. Now go back to your slum, because we don't care about you." And that's what happened. They were just left to continue living in the slum. That was a Potterrow.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you want people to take away from your book?
Mary W Craig: To understand that everybody deserves justice no matter what personality they have. Sometimes we should look at the way people live. We think of Edinburgh as the capital city of Scotland and oh, it's wonderful and oh, it's fantastic. It's got its poor areas well, and everywhere does. And to look at the trial and think about the difference, look at what is cause and effect, what is just an accusation, and look at the way the law is used and can be [01:00:00] abused by some people.
Sarah Jack: Will the story of Agnes help the cause of pardoning and memorializing the witch trial victims in Scotland? Is that something you support?
Mary W Craig: I think it might help towards the pardon. The pardon is being run by Claire Madison Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi. And Claire is a KC, she's a King's Counsel. In the appellate court, she deals with appeals and miscarriages of justice. And that's why she's interested in this. And I think looking at the way the law is used and abused and looking at the fact that you have to have proof, proper proof to convict somebody of any crime, and that's what was lacking in the witchcraft trials.
I understand the religious belief in the Devil. I understand the theological knot that the Kirk of Scotland got itself tied into with this Calvinist predestination, but to then take that theological [01:01:00] argument and get the secular authorities and get the law to use it, that was what was wrong. And that's why we need the pardon today.
We don't do exonerations in Scotland, but we need to pardon these women and men for what happened to them under the law and to use it as an example of us always keeping an eye on the law and making sure that the law and the justice system is kept out of the hands of people like the Kirk of Scotland and kept out of the hands of politicians. It should stand alone that if you are accused of something, you go to trial, you have a fair trial. That's, what's it? It's nobody else's business. It's not politicians, not the religious people, nobody else. Let the law be the law, and let faith be faith. So I think that's something that's really important.
And as I say, we have had an apology from the Kirk of Scotland. I think the pardon would be a good idea, because it would again strengthen that. And then what we're looking for is a national [01:02:00] memorial, as well as lots of people are putting up small local memorials. But I think a national memorial. And I personally would also like this part of Scottish history to be taught in our schools. We quite rightly teach the children in Scotland about her our involvement in slave trade. This, to me, stands alongside that. It's a very dark part of our past. It's not something we should be proud of, but it's something we should teach and learn from.
Josh Hutchinson: I agree a hundred percent with what you've said. We're working on exonerating the accused in Connecticut and hopefully memorializing and getting some more education about that. Even though there were much fewer in number than Scotland, we still feel that they're important.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. One is one too many. Absolutely, yes. Especially when you look at the ages of some of them. Some of these, it was right across the age range, and as I say, every one of them had a family, [01:03:00] had friends, had communities ripped apart by this constant fear, so yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Jack: We really see the parallels in the history in what's happening in Scotland with the pardoning, what needs to happen in the state of Connecticut. It's all part of a very big message, educational message. And thanks for talking about this stuff with us. I want all of these, Agnes and others, to be known so that what you're saying of the changes that need to happen can happen based on the injustices that we know and that we see now.
Mary W Craig: One of the other reasons why I think we need to talk about apologies and pardons and memorials is the fact that there are still people today who are killed as witches. It's still happening to this day, and that is something. You can believe anything you want, but you can't [01:04:00] use that belief to persecute another individual. And that's a really strong message that I think we still need to get across because there are still women and men today being executed as witches around the world.
Josh Hutchinson: We've recently spoke with an activist from South Africa, and he explained the situation there, and it's really eye-opening. There's so many people that are still tortured and killed.
Mary W Craig: Was that Leo Igwe?
Josh Hutchinson: This was Damon Leff that we spoke with. We're hoping to speak with Leo pretty soon.
Mary W Craig: Leo's excellent. That's the saddest part is the fact that we, we're 400 years on and it's still happening, so human beings can be so nice and so fantastic and so wonderful to each other. And we can produce amazing things like, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the Mona Lisa. And yet we can equally be absolutely awful to one another, and we need to recognize that part of our personality and guard [01:05:00] against it whenever we can.
Josh Hutchinson: Is there anything that we could do to stop hunting witches in the present day?
Mary W Craig: That's a difficult one, because the witch hunts that are happening today have different roots. So a lot of the ones in Africa are rooted in evangelical church, so it's coming from Christian belief. But there are witchcraft trials in places like Nepal and Saudi Arabia, countries like that, where it's not coming from a Christian perspective. So I'm not sure what their concept of witchcraft is.
I think it's a case of talking about it, keeping it in a public domain, getting it recognized as what it is, which is terror. And speaking to people like Leo Igwe, speaking to campaigners who are working in these actual countries and finding out what's going on there. I'm currently researching a book about colonial India and the witchcraft [01:06:00] trials that took place there under British rule and the parallels that are still happening in some of the Indian states today.
So it's difficult to pick apart exactly what's meant by witchcraft and Witches in some of these areas, but it's speaking to local campaigners and making sure it's on the internet, it's on social media, it's in the news. I think that's what those of us here can do about it.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things that we're starting to do, we're trying to speak with Leo and Damon and those kinds of people who are on the ground in those nations and know what's going on and get their voices on our podcast. And we find every day stories of these atrocities happening in so many countries, and we share those on social media and try to get the word out the best that we can, and so far that's the thing that we're able to [01:07:00] do.
Sarah Jack: It feels like there should be more to say about that, because it's such a huge, the scope is so wide, but I don't know. It's also silencing when you think about it.
Mary W Craig: I think the problem is the fact that most people, certainly in Scotland, think, "oh, we did it then, and it's all over." And then you'll say, "and there are witchcraft trials happening today" or, "there are witch executions happening today." And people say, they don't know, quite know what to say, because we think of it in the past, I almost liken it to modern day slavery, because up until, I would say 10 years ago, I would reckon most people in Britain thought that slavery was over and done with, was over and done with over 150 years ago.
And it's taken a long time for people in Britain to understand about modern slavery and what that means. For a long time people thought, "oh no, but we abolished the slave trade. There isn't any slavery anymore." And then you discover that the young lady in the nail salon that you go to [01:08:00] might be a modern day slave or the lad that's washing your car.
And that took a long time for people to get that understanding. And I think it's the same with modern witch persecutions. I think is gonna take a bit of time for people to accept it. And then once they say, "oh yes, that is still happening. And so we need to put a stop to that, we need to stop that."
In a way it's quite tied together. It's persecution of people who can't stand up for themselves, because of poverty and or ignorance or political unrest in their home countries. And they are then very quickly victimized, and they could be victimized as a witch, or you could end up being a slave doing my nails in the local salon or something. All of these things are quite interlinked now. So raising the profile and making people understand that it is still happening. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big thing to do, but it's something I think we all should be doing.
Sarah Jack: I'm really hopeful that these messages that we're starting to pull together are [01:09:00] going to just keep reaching more ears and those people are gonna talk about it, too. But there's a parallel, too, with the family of the victims. When I asked about descendants in Scotland, and they didn't want to be connected to those who had been executed. I think in some of the nations today that are having witch attacks, they have to also find a way to carry on in the aftermath and not also be attacked because their grandmother was or their cousin was.
Josh Hutchinson: It was a real eye-opening discussion and very important discussion, and you spoke eloquently to the problems that are still going on today and why it's important to memorialize and pardon. And I want to thank you for that. And thank you for being our guest.
Sarah Jack: I'm really looking forward to getting to know Agnes Finnie.
Mary W Craig: It will be available as a [01:10:00] paperback, hardback, and also in a Kindle version on Amazon, or you can get it direct from the publishing house, Luath Press.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another update on Witch. Hunts happening in modern times.
Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News.
As you just heard from Mary Craig, Scotland is actively attending to the damage the witch trials brought to their ancestors. Activists are seeking justice for the innocent people accused and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. As you learned, there is much to make amends for, as much as can be done.
Many individuals and groups have collaborated over recent years to build an effective campaign across the country of Scotland. This effort can heal the massive trauma from their alleged witch executions and trials. Today I want to briefly catch you up on their official progress and point you to the sources of information.
The Scottish Parliament established a precedent of pardoning convictions of innocent past [01:11:00] individuals when it passed the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) Act of 2018. Recognizing this precedent, King's Counsel Claire Mitchell submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament for the pardoning of Scotland Witches. She states, "history still records these people as convicted witches -- justice demands that this is put right. History should properly reflect what these people were -- innocent, vulnerable people, caught up in a time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly."
This petition has a strong message, and it's being heard. Two official apologies have been declared to Scotland from within its leadership this year. First, on International Women's Day, March 8th, 2022, the Scottish First Minister on behalf of the Scottish Government issued a formal apology stating, "I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal posthumous apology to all of those accused, convicted, vilified, or executed under [01:12:00] the Witchcraft Act of 1563." The second apology occurred at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, when a unanimous motion was accepted based on a report by its theological forum to apologize for its role in the murders of thousands of people, mostly women, who were accused of witchcraft between the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Following these landmark apology statements by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland, Member of Scottish Parliament Natalie Don submitted a member's proposal for a bill requesting a formal pardon, stating, "to build the fairer, more equal, and forward thinking Scotland that we all want to see, we must address the historic abuses of our past. Under the Witchcraft Act of 1563, an estimated 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland, with approximately 2,500, executed between 1563 and 1736."
As Claire Mitchell so clearly pointed out in her petition, Scotland's victims were caught up in a [01:13:00] time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly. The world today must admit that thousands of living alleged witches are caught up now in a time where allegations of witchcraft are widespread and deadly. The deadly time is still here. It's called today. Actions must be taken to intervene for alleged witches in Africa and the Asian Pacific that are being attacked, tortured, and killed in this deadly time.
Can you accept that witch hunt thinking has not ended? It has not disappeared, it has not stopped. These strongly-held fears must be addressed and 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.
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 [01:14:00] worldwide movement to recognize and address historical wrongs.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for that informative news segment, Sarah.
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: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcast.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all the people in your life about our show.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.Org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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