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WITCHES! For centuries, these horrid creatures have invaded the nightmares of superstitious souls around the world. Who was to blame for causing a terrible, unexplained pain or an untimely death? What if your farm animals fell into a fit and began to dance and roar, or your milk jug shattered before your eyes for no reason, or your child was born deformed? A wicked witch must have been casting spells to harm the innocent or to settle a score.
In European lore, witches consorted with spirits shaped like animals; vicious cats perhaps, or wild black hogs, or birds. Far more sinister was the idea that witches were the enemies of God—and the agents of Satan himself.
But the most frightening thing of all was this: Anyone could be a witch—your own mother or father, your best friend, your tiny baby brother, or even your dog. And you might never know who was in league with the Devil until it was too late.
CHAPTER ONE
WHEREIN THE STAGE IS SET
A cross the wide ocean they came, European emigrants looking for a new beginning on American shores. Many settled in New England, and among these were the Puritans, an English religious sect hoping to live a simple, God-fearing life and to create a heaven on earth. Even before their first ships set sail for the port of Salem Town, Massachusetts, in 1629, they had bucked the British tide for years in an effort to purify their church, banishing every trace of pomp and circumstance, from priestly vestments and music to incense and colorful stained glass windows.
Yet with all their fine intentions, the voyagers had brought along a stowaway from their former home—a terrifying, ancient idea fated to wreak havoc in their new land. For the Puritans believed in the existence of two entirely different worlds.
The first of these was the Natural World of human beings and everything else we can see or touch or feel. But rooted deep within the Puritans’ souls like some strange invasive weed lurked their belief in a second world, an Invisible World swarming with shadowy apparitions and unearthly phantoms of the air.
To be sure, many spirits in this hidden world were wondrous and benevolent. These winged seraphs were the angels of the Lord, who wished only to protect the living or offer advice in times of trouble. But the Invisible World was perilous too, boiling over with fire and brimstone and legions of evil, malicious creatures. So great was their power that they dared to do battle with God’s own angels—and the leader of them all was the Devil, a fallen angel himself!
The Devil’s malice was most fierce and most cunning when he waged his wicked wars upon God’s Children. To that end, he and his brutes, each one a fiend to the bone, formed a vicious army determined to destroy everything that was good in the Natural World. Among Satan’s soldiers were foul-smelling souls of the dead, horrid imps of darkness cleverly disguised as animals, and a ghastly knot of demonic fallen angels who denounced the word of God. And perhaps worst of all were the Devil’s witches, for they could hide in the land of mortals to cast their spells upon the innocent.
The Puritans were terrified by this Invisible World, whose hideous creatures were every bit as real to them as their own families, neighbors, and farm animals.
Puritan ministers preached that it was God Almighty who controlled these two worlds, and he was fearsome, vengeful, and easy to displease. Though pious Children of the Lord might be rewarded for good behavior, any sinners who did not obey his laws would be punished along with their entire communities. And here’s a surprise: Because God was all-powerful, even the Devil and the demons and the witches were under his control. Satan was truly an instrument of the Lord, for it was God himself who loosened the Devil’s chains and allowed this horrid creature to mete out God’s punishments.
The Puritans trusted that God did everything for a reason, so they took note of the things happening all around them in the belief that he was sending them signs. And as more and more Puritans spread outward from Salem Town, Massachusetts, to build new towns and farms on Indian territory in Maine and New Hampshire, they discovered a multitude of horrifying signs in America—if only anyone could figure out what they meant!
EARTHQUAKES, DROUGHTS, FIRES, and a PLAGUE OF FLIES ravaged the land.
Fierce HURRICANES swept the seas, obliterating every ship in their path.
Blazing COMETS and SHOOTING STARS streaked across the sky, eclipses blocked out the sun, and the colorful lights of the AURORA BOREALIS danced and swirled through the night.
There was DISEASE aplenty: Deadly smallpox epidemics devastated entire populations, while malaria, yellow fever, measles, and other maladies tormented young and old alike.
Two fearsome WARS between the English and the Indians raged for 14 years all throughout New England, destroying farms and villages on both sides and causing terrified Puritans to flee back to the relative safety of Salem Town and a nearby farming community called Salem Village.
To the Puritans, every one of these signs seemed to signal God’s wrath.
And God’s wrath was exactly what was troubling Reverend Samuel Parris, the Puritan minister of little Salem Village.
It was early January 1692, and every member of the Parris household was shivering with cold. Each night the water inside their house would turn to solid ice as a shrieking wind howled on, whistling through cracks in their walls and floorboards. Reverend Parris was extremely upset, and there were three reasons why.
First was the firewood promised in his contract with the Salem Village church (there was hardly any left).
Second was his promised pay (there wasn’t any). A church committee of wealthy merchants and landholders in Salem Village disapproved of Reverend Parris and had just voted down a tax that was supposed to provide the money. Parris was enraged and began making fiery sermons, thundering from his pulpit that these “Wicked and Reprobate men” had joined forces with the Devil to destroy the Puritan religion and all that it stood for. “…Here are but two parties in the world,” Parris proclaimed, “the Lamb and his followers, and the dragon and his followers. Everyone is on one side or the other.”
But the third reason was by far the worst of all. Something was terribly wrong with the reverend’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and his orphaned eleven-year-old niece, Abigail Williams.
Normally, the Parris household would have been a hive of activity filled with eight hard-working people. Besides Parris, who was forever sitting beneath his map of the world to write yet another terrifying sermon, there was his good-hearted but somewhat frail wife, Elizabeth. There were the couple’s three children—Thomas, age 10; Betty; and little Susannah, 4 years old—and there was Parris’s niece, Abigail.
In addition, Parris owned two slaves—Tituba, an Arawak Indian woman who was kidnapped by a slave runner in South America when she was a young child, and her husband, John Indian, who had been married to Tituba for the past three years. Tituba had helped raise the Parris children ever since they were babies.
If all had been well during this unusually harsh winter, Betty and Abigail would have spent most of their time working together indoors. There was not much playtime in Salem Village; children were expected to help out the same as adults from the time they were about four or five years old. So when there were chores to do (and there were always chores to do—except on Sunday, when everyone was in church), the two girls might have knit some warm socks, boiled laundry in their enormous fireplace, swept ashes off the floors, ladled out porridge for breakfast, or helped make a wild venison pie and some sweet pudding for lunch in their big iron cooking pot. When all this work was done, they could card some wool or linen, twist its fibers into yarn on a wooden spindle, mend torn britches, or even upholster a chair. Of course, they would spend some time studying the Bible and saying their prayers. And if they ever took a break, they might sip some pear or apple cider from large pewter cups.
But that’s not what happened one freezing day in January 1692. Not at all. For as winter’s sleet and snow heaped higher and higher outside their door, Betty and Abigail began to twitch and choke and contort their bodies into strange abnormal shapes, crouch beneath the furniture, and speak in words that made no sense.
CHAPTER TWO
A DIRE DIAGNOSIS
Days passed, but the two girls’ frightening symptoms only intensified, even though no one else in the household was getting sick. So Reverend Parris began to wonder. Maybe the children’s illness meant that God was sending him a sign. Maybe his congregation had committed some unforgivable sin and was being punished for its own good!
And did the reverend see a second sign of God’s wrath? Just one week after the awful fits first struck, and a mere 75 miles to the north, in York, Maine, the Abenaki Indians and their French allies attacked, leaving the town in flames. Even babies, women, and farm animals had been slaughtered. Puritans like Reverend Parris had long believed that Indians were devils and their shamans were witches. He may have wondered if God had unleashed the destroyers to teach his subjects a lesson.
Perhaps Parris had received a third sign as well, for early in February a homeless woman named Sarah Good came knocking at Parris’s door, begging for food for her baby and her four-year-old daughter, Dorcas. As Sarah Good turned to go, she muttered something under her breath. Was their gift too small? Were her words curses, the kind that caused crops to fail and livestock to die? The two afflicted girls soon seemed to get much worse.
Parris thought some more and began to wonder if he himself had been the sinner. Had he been lax in his duties as a minister or as a father? Parris prayed and fasted, and so did the rest of his family. He consulted with doctors and tried dosing the girls with every elixir he could find, from parsnip seeds in wine to smelling salts made from blood, ashes, and deer antlers. Nothing worked.
Then an elderly physician named William Griggs, who had lived in Salem Village for perhaps two years, examined Betty and Abigail and declared that they were most certainly “under an Evil Hand.” This was the worst of all possible news because it meant that the two girls were BEWITCHED!
Dr. Griggs had good reason to think so.
As early as the 1640s, about 50 years before Betty and Abigail first got sick, settlers in New England had begun to suffer from violent, life-threatening fits. Even farm animals wrestled with these convulsions; many that seemed healthy one day could wind up dead the next. But why? Doctors couldn’t find any rational explanation for the victims’ bizarre contortions. Nor could they explain people’s visions of dark apparitions and bright lights; their temporary paralysis; their blindness and deafness; or their claims that they were being pinched, choked, bitten, scratched, sat upon, or pricked with pins.
Before long, the Puritans began to look for answers in the Invisible World. Was this truly some new dread disease, or could the symptoms have been caused by witches? After all, the Devil’s witches could infiltrate the Natural World. If such an invasion had occurred in New England, perhaps these dreadful creatures were working their magic on mere mortals, casting spells and stabbing images of victims from afar to inflict pain, or staring at their prey with a poisonous Evil Eye until they died. Worse yet, witches could be corrupting the innocent, who might join league with the Devil by signing his book of laws just to ease their pain—or bargain away their own immortal souls in exchange for their heart’s desire.
That’s why in 1641, 1642, and 1655, new laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut proclaimed that witchcraft was a crime punishable by death. The first so-called witch to hang was a healer from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Margaret Jones. It was said that her mere touch could cause violent pains, deafness, and vomiting, and that she had used witchcraft to kill animals. She was tried and hanged in 1648 during an epidemic of fits. But most cases like hers were thrown out of court for lack of solid evidence or because magistrates and ministers thought the witnesses were delusional or carried a grudge against the accused. Take the case of a New Haven, Connecticut, widow named Elizabeth Godman. In 1655, she was released from jail in spite of one woman’s claims that Godman was pinching her and causing dreadful fits that left her boiling hot, freezing cold, and shrieking in pain.
The rash of mysterious fits never disappeared completely, and by the 1680s, rumors about this dread disease were scaring people half to death. Fear spread even farther when a popular father-and-son team of Boston ministers named Increase and Cotton Mather wrote several astonishing books and essays about settlers who were possessed by demons or plagued by witches. One of the most terrifying tales came from Cotton Mather’s 1689 best seller, Memorable Providences. Everyone flocked in droves to read this story, especially since Mather claimed that he had watched with his own two eyes as every detail unfolded.
In the reverend’s book, four children from a pious Boston family were suffering from horrible fits. Their tongues would first be sucked down their own throats, then pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. Their jaws would snap out of joint and then clap together like a strong spring lock. They cried that they were being cut with knives, then struck with blows. Their necks were broken! Their heads were twisted almost all the way around! And they would bark like dogs or roar exceedingly loud. These tortures were blamed upon a neighbor, an old Irish Catholic washerwoman named Goody Glover, who was suspected of being a witch. Before long, she was tried in court and hanged by the neck until dead. Surely Reverend Parris and Dr. Griggs knew all about this famous tale.
The day after Dr. Griggs presented his dire diagnosis to the Parris family, Reverend and Mrs. Parris rode off to a lecture. While they were there, they hoped to invite some neighboring ministers to join them in their home for a solemn day of prayer. But as soon as the parents left, the two Parris slaves, Tituba and John Indian, did something that was strictly forbidden. They knew that in New England, people used folk magic all the time to perform cures, even though Puritan ministers railed against it. There were ways to draw out witches—by boiling snippets of children’s hair, for example—and the two slaves were apparently so worried about Betty and Abigail that John Indian accepted a set of instructions from their helpful neighbor, Goodwife Mary Sibley, telling how to bake a black magic witchcake.
Carefully following Sibley’s recipe, Tituba and John Indian mixed some rye flour with the afflicted girls’ urine, patted it into the shape of a cake, and baked it in the ashes of their fireplace. The trick was to feed this magical witchcake to a dog. Ancient European folklore alleged that dogs were the “familiars” of witches. This meant that dogs were actually imps disguised as animals to help witches do their dirty work. When a dog ate a witchcake, the witches’ spells were supposed to be broken. Then the victims could reveal the witches’ names for all to hear.
But when Reverend Parris and his wife got home and found out about the witchcake, they were absolutely furious. Using black magic was an enormous sin! Though the two slaves were probably just trying to help, black magic could not be tolerated. Parris would later preach that Goodwife Sibley had “a-going to the Devil for help against the Devil.”
Betty and Abigail must have been terrified by now; their fits and strange gibbering grew worse, and the contortions of their backs, necks, and arms were frightful to behold. Maybe Parris and his family still had not been pious enough! Parris and the neighboring ministers prayed together. He and his family fasted yet again. And he made sure that everyone in his household doubled their prayers again, too. But the minute a prayer would end, the girls’ fits began anew.
So Parris, the other ministers, and certain townsfolk pressed Betty and Abigail hard to reveal the witches’ names. Whose evil spirits had ventured forth from the Invisible World to torture them? How could the girls ever get well if the guilty witches were allowed to roam free?
If these two impressionable children were convinced that witches were out to get them, whom should they blame? Maybe their tormentors were the usual suspects, people their family didn’t like or respect. Tituba seemed to be a logical choice. Besides making the witchcake, she was a slave, and an Indian slave at that.
After all, everybody the girls knew was convinced that Indians were in league with the Devil. So Betty and Abigail declared that Tituba was a witch and that Tituba’s spirit, which was invisible to everybody else but themselves, had been pinching them and pricking them and chasing them around the room.
Before long, they claimed that two other women’s spirits had tortured them as well.
First, Betty and Abigail remembered Sarah Good, the muttering beggar woman who had pled for food for her two young children. In Salem Village, nobody liked a beggar, especially an ungrateful, pipe-smoking beggar. She had to be a witch.
And then they pointed the finger at a bedridden old farm woman named Sarah Osborn, whose young second husband used to be her own servant. She had not gone to church for more than a year, and rumor had it that this husband was a wife-beater. Nobody liked Osborn either, especially a certain family called the Putnams, who had fought with her for years over some land and were now leading members of Parris’s church. Betty and Abigail claimed they had seen a bird with a human head that turned into Sarah Osborn! She was obviously a despicable witch.
Tituba said she loved Betty and would never have hurt her, but Reverend Parris seemed not to believe a word she said. It was time to take action. So on February 29, 1692, the first official complaints were filed by two Salem Town magistrates, and the three accused witches were arrested.
Word traveled fast. Even as the arrests were taking place, more people began to say they were tormented by fits. And almost every one of them would claim that it was witches—or the witches’ spirits—that were torturing them.
The first of these new accusers was a clever 12-year-old girlfriend of Betty and Abigail named Ann Putnam Jr. Ann’s parents were the very strongest supporters Reverend Parris had in Salem Village. It seems that Ann was having dreadful fits, and they were all because the spirit of that beggar woman named Sarah Good was pinching her and trying to make her sign the Devil’s evil book.
Then a 17-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hubbard claimed she had been chased by a wolf that turned into Sarah Good and attacked by the bedridden old lady, Sarah Osborn. Hubbard happened to be the niece of Dr. Griggs, the very same physician who had first blamed Betty’s and Abigail’s fits on witchcraft. Not only did Hubbard live in Dr. Griggs’s house, but she was friends with Betty and Abigail, too.
CHAPTER THREE
LET THE GRILLING BEGIN
On March 1, hordes of gawkers from miles around rode on horseback or slogged on foot through the flooded coastal roads leading to a tavern in Salem Village. They could hardly wait to find out what would happen at the questioning of the three suspects. Before long, an ugly crowd grew so big that everyone had to move to the church instead.
Today’s plan was to question the suspects and decide if they should appear before a grand jury at a later date. If the grand jury determined that there was enough evidence against these three women, they would eventually face a formal trial.
Nobody could be executed for witchcraft (or anything else) before appearing all three times. But accused people could most certainly be sent to prison. In fact, they would be stuck in the jailhouse for a very long time as the process dragged on.
First, the three accused women were examined for witch’s marks; did they have warts or bumps anywhere on their bodies that could be used as teats to feed their evil animal familiars? Not a mark was found.
Next, the two magistrates began their interrogation. Only one suspect was brought into the room at a time, but even before the defendants spoke a single word, it was obvious that the magistrates thought all three of them were witches. And it didn’t help their cause a bit when all day long the four accusers kept screeching and tumbling around on the floor and crying out that the suspects’ spirits were swooping through the air to torture them.
A man named Ezekiel Cheevers wrote down the questions and answers as fast as he could. Of course he already thought the women were guilty, too, as you can tell from his comments.
THE EXAMINATION OF SARAH GOOD A
Magistrate John Hathorn (H): Sarah Good, what evil spirit is your familiar?
Sarah Good (G): None!
H: Why do you hurt these poor children?
G: I do not hurt them. I scorn the very idea.
H: Then what creature do you employ to hurt them?
G: There is no creature. I am falsely accused!
H: Why did you go away muttering from Mr. Parris’s house?
G: I did not mutter. I thanked him for what he gave my child.
Recorder’s note: Hathorn asked the children to look upon Sarah Good and see if this were the person who had hurt them, and so they said this was one of the persons that did torment them. Presently they were all tormented by fits.
H: Sarah Good, do you not see what you have done? Why don’t you tell us the truth? Who do you serve?
G: I serve God. The same God that made heaven and earth!
Recorder’s note: Her answers were given in a very wicked, spiteful manner, retorting against the authority with foul and abusive words and many lies. Her husband said that he was afraid she either was a witch or would become one very quickly. “And indeed,” said he, “I may say with tears that she is an enemy to all that is good.”
THE EXAMINATION OF SARAH OSBORN
The girls in the courtroom announced that Sarah Osborn was one of the three witches who were torturing them in this very room. Then they began to shake violently and tumbled to the floor.
When grilled by the furious magistrate, Osborn cried that she had never seen an evil spirit or met with the Devil in her life. She was not tormenting anyone!
“Sarah Good sayeth it was you that hurt the children,” argued the magistrate.
“I have not seen her for two years,” Osborn replied, insisting that for all she knew, the Devil had the power to make himself look exactly like her. Then he could go around in her shape to attack the girls, but she would have to take the blame.
Three people reported that the bedridden woman thought she was more likely to be the victim of witchcraft than to be a witch herself. When asked to explain, Osborn replied that she had dreamed she saw a black Indian who pinched her and pulled her to the door. Hathorn was not impressed. Implying that she was unfaithful to God, he asked why Osborn hadn’t come to church for the past two years. “Alas! I have been sick and not able to go,” she cried.
THE EXAMINATION OF TITUBA
The afflicted girls again began to writhe around, screech, and howl when the slave Tituba’s turn came to be questioned. At first she said she was completely innocent and that she and the children would never hurt each other. But a little later, she completely changed her tune and confessed that she was guilty!
The recorder who wrote down everyone’s testimony didn’t bother to say so, but it’s possible that the questioning stopped for a while and then started up again after a break, because many months later Tituba would reveal that she had lied when she told the court she was a witch. She claimed Reverend Parris had beaten her to make her confess and to make sure that she accused the two women Parris called her “sister-witches.” He even threatened not to pay any of the fees required to get her out of jail unless she told the magistrates that she was guilty. Tituba must have followed her master’s orders:
Magistrate (M): What doth the Devil look like?
Tituba (T): Like a man. Yesterday he told me to serve him & I told him no, I would not do such a thing.
Tituba charged that Sarah Osborn and Sarah Good were torturing the children and wanted her to hurt them, too. And she said she had seen two more witches from Boston just last night when she was cleaning. They told her she had to hurt the children, and if she refused they would hurt her themselves. At first she agreed to hurt Betty and Abigail, but afterward she was very sorry and told the women she wouldn’t do it any more.
T: The creature that looked like a man came to me just as I was going to sleep. He said he would kill the children and they would never get well if I would not serve him.
M: What other creatures hath appeared to you?
T: Sometimes a hog. Four times a great black dog who told me to serve him. I told him I was afraid, then he told me he would do worse tortures unto me.
Tituba said that the man had pretty things and offered her a little yellow bird if she would become his servant. Then he sent her two cats: one red and one black and as big as a dog. But when she said her prayers and tried not to pinch Betty and Abigail, the cats scratched at her eyes, pulled her across the room, and almost threw her into the fire. Tituba felt even worse when the man appeared with Dr. Griggs’s niece and made her pinch this girl, too.
M: Did you ever go along with these women Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn?
T: Yes, they are very strong & pulled me & made me go with them up to Mr. Putnam’s house to hurt his Child. The man pulled me, too. But I am sorry.
M: How did you get there?
T: We Rode upon a stick with Good & Osborn sitting behind me & taking hold of one another. I Saw no trees nor path, but was presently there. They Told me I must kill Thomas Putnam’s Child with the knife.
Ann Putnam Jr. confirmed Tituba’s story, saying that they would have made Tituba cut off her own head if the slave refused to kill her.
Then, said Tituba, Good had tried to give her the yellow bird or a cat. Tituba refused to take them, though she wished she could give the pretty bird to the children.
M: What did Osborn have?
T: She hath two creatures. One hath wings & two Legs & a head like a woman’s. The other thing was all over hairy, all the face was hairy & had a long nose & I don’t know what it is. It was about two or three feet high & walked upright like a man, and at night it stood before the fire in Mr. Parris’s hall.
