When Hell Broke Loose in
Salem
DURING THE WINTER of 1691-92, a small group of girls met at the home of Samuel Parris, minister of the church at Salem Village, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Parris was nine years old; the others — about nine of them — ranged in age from 11 to 20. All came from respected families.
Mr. Parris owned several slaves, probably brought by him from the West Indies, where he had been in business before coming to Massachusetts and taking the church. Two of them were husband and wife (John Indian and Tituba) who brought some knowledge of the black arts or superstitions, with them. They fascinated the teenage girls during winter afternoons with palmistry and fortune telling, necromancy, magic and spiritism.
Parris was hardly a model pastor. He was coarse and arrogant, and imposed severe church discipline for trivial offenses. By 1691 the factions into which the village was divided were ready to fly at each other's throats.
Under the training of John Indian and Tituba, the girls soon learned how to go into trances, talk gibberish and act in other strange ways.
A woman about thirty years old, mother of one of the girls, high-strung and deeply involved in church dissension and village quarrels, was the
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other main participant in what happened. She was Mistress Ann Putnam, wife of a respected village official.
During the days after Christmas, 1691, these girls discovered that they could interest and worry their adult elders with such tricks as crawling on the floor, going into fits or trances, and speaking unintelligible jargon. They came to be known as "the Afflicted Children."
Perhaps the serious interest in what they were doing led them to take the next step, which was to claim that they had been bewitched and couldn't help acting this way. Or they may have been afraid of parental punishment. Or John indian and Tituba may have put them up to it. (If it was the latter, the suggestion soon boomeranged.)
When the girls claimed that witches had brought them under their power, Samuel Parris did two things: he sent his own daughter away from the village to live with friends; and he publicly commanded the others to name the witches.
The girls began by naming two forlorn old women and Tituba as their tormentors. Sarah Good was an especially apt choice, since there was a general willingness to receive any charge against her. Her neighbors considered her worthless, her husband had deserted her, and she was at times forced to wander from door to door with her children, seeking help. She had no house.
Here is the record of Sarah Good's examination, after she had been imprisoned in the Boston jail.
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THE EXAMINATION OF SARAH GOOD BEFORE THE WORSHIPFUL ESQRS. JOHN HATHORNE AND JONATHAN CORWIN.
Q. Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?A. None.
Q. Why do you hurt these children?
A. I do not hurt them. I scorn it.
Q. Who do you employ then to do it?
A. I employ nobody.
Q. What creature do you employ then?
A. No creature: but I am falsely accused.
Q. Why did you go away muttering from Mr. Parris's house?
A. I did not mutter, but I thanked him for what he gave my child.
Q. Have you made no contract with the devil?
A. No.
Hathorne next desired ["afflicted"] children, all of them, the woman's accusers, to look upon her, and see if this were the person that hurt them; and so they did all look upon her, and said this was one of the persons that did torment them. Presently they were all tormented [screams, writhing, gibberish, etc.]
Q. Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children?
A. I do not torment them.
Q. Who do you employ then?
A. I employ nobody. I scorn it.
Q. How came they thus to be tormented?
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A. What do I know? You bring others here, and now you charge me with it.Q. Why, who was it?
A. I do not know, but it was some you brought into the meeting house with you.
Q. We brought you into the meeting house.
A. But you brought in two more.
Q. Who was it then, that tormented the children?
A. It was Osburn [the other white woman].
Q. What is it you say when you go muttering away from persons' house?
A. If I must tell, I will tell.
Q. Do tell us then.
A. If I must tell, I will tell: it is the Commandments. I may say my Commandments, I hope.
Q. What Commandment is it?
A. If I must tell you, I will tell: it is a psalm.
Q. What psalm?
A. (After a long time she muttered over some part of a psalm.)
Q. Who do you serve?
A. I serve God.
Q. What God do you serve?
A. The God that made heaven and earth.
Her answers were in a very wicked, spiteful manner, reflecting and retorting against the authority with base and abusive words; and many lies she was taken in. It was here said that her husband had said that he was afraid that she either was a witch or would be one very quickly. The worshipful Mr. Hathorne asked him his reason why he said so of her, whether he had ever
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seen anything by her. He answered, "No, not in this nature," but it was her bad carriage to him; "and indeed," said he, "I may say with tears, that she is an enemy to all good."
The foregoing was in the handwriting of Ezekiel Cheever. Following are comments by John Hathorne, one of the two magistrates.
Salem Village, March the first, 1692
Sarah Good, upon examination, denied the matter of fact (viz.) that she ever used any witchcraft, or hurt the abovesaid children, or any of them.
The abovenamed children, being all present, positively accused her of hurting them sundry times within this two months, and also that morning. Sarah Good denied that she had been at their houses in said time or near them, or had done any hurt. All the abovesaid children then present then accused her face to face; upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time [in the meeting house courtroom] and, the affliction and torture being over, they charged Sarah Good again that she had so tortured them, and came to them and did it, although she was personally then kept [in the courtroom] at considerable distance from them.
Sarah Osburn maintained her innocence during subsequent questioning; but Tituba declared herself guilty and accused the other two of having been in league with the Devil with her. When she
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confessed, the teen-age girls subsided and were quiet for the first time.
The women were remanded to Boston jail, where they were kept in chains. Mrs. Osburn died less than three months later.
The teen-age girls had now experienced notoriety and power. They could hardly be expected to return from this pinnacle to ordinary housework and afternoon group meetings.
So a series of accusations and trials began. From the lowliest women in the village they moved to the most respected, the most saintly. And they even accused Sarah Good's daughter, Dorcas, "between four and five years old."
When the little girl was led into the courtroom for questioning, three of the girls charged her with biting, pinching and almost choking them. They showed marks that they claimed were of her teeth on their arms; they shrieked with pain, and pins with which they said she pierced them were discovered on their bodies.
The evidence was considered conclusive. Dorcas, not yet five years old, was remanded to Boston jail with her mother, where she was probably chained, too. Extraordinary fastenings were thought necessary to hold a witch.
When saintly women, in old age, and even a clergyman were accused, Salem village fell apart. Suspicion and malice reigned; no one trusted his neighbor.
Before the matter ended, nineteen persons were hanged, in addition to Mrs. Osburn, who died of ill-treatment in prison. Many more — as many as
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160 — were imprisoned, some ruined by their experience.
After it had all blown over, Tituba said that her master, Reverend Samuel Parris, beat her and otherwise abused her, to make her confess and accuse (as he claimed) her sister-witches. When it came time for her release, Parris refused to pay the jailer for her room and board, and she was sold to a new slave-owner for these costs.
One of the wretched children, Ann Putnam, humbled herself 14 years later before the church in Salem, when she was 26 years old. She declared that, with others, she had been instrumental in bringing upon the land the guilt of innocent blood, "though that was said or done by me against any person, I can truly and uprightly say before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against any one of them, but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded of Satan."
The Salem witch trials are a classic example of mass hysteria, the sort of social movement that occasionally appears in history and blots the page. Hitler's persecution and destruction of Jews had many similar elements.
The incident is also one that confirms C.S. Lewis's statement, "Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it." (Reflections on the Psalms, Harcourt-Brace).
But underneath the event runs a stream of darkness, in Ann Putnam's words, "a delusion of Satan."
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Who were the Salem witches? We might suggest that they were John Indian and Tituba, and the teen-age girls who learned from them their spirit craft, rather than Christian women who were accused, imprisoned, and — in some instances — hanged.
Salem was too much for the New World to stomach. Salem drove witchcraft underground for almost three centuries of "Enlightenment."
Now it's been exhumed on a new winter's afternoon before the fire, as fun and games.
This game could hurt us all before it ends.
