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A Crime House Halloween Special: The Salem Witch Trials | From Clues with Morgan Absher & Kaelyn Moore
01:24:52
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- [00:02]
Narrator/Crime House Host
Crime House has the perfect new show for spooky season Twisted Tales. Hosted by Heidi Wong, each episode of Twisted Tales is perfect for late night scares and daytime frights, revealing the disturbing real life events that inspired the world's most terrifying blockbusters and the ones too twisted to make it to screen. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts New episodes Out Every Monday, the Halloween celebration continues here at Crime House. And today we've got another chilling bonus episode just for you, Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore. In this episode, they're rewinding to 1692 and digging into the Salem witch trials. From a bizarre witch cake to coerced confessions and a court that put dreams on the witness stand. 19 executions, hundreds accused, and a panic that only ended when power felt threatened. It's Salem 1692 like you've never heard before and it's a perfect Halloween podcast to listen. I'm excited to share this episode of Clues with you now. If you like what you hear, follow Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaylin Moore on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen so you can hear them dig into more notorious crime crimes and cases.
- [01:38]
Morgan Absher
This is Crime House.
- [01:41]
Kaelyn Moore
All right, Cluminati, Halloween is upon us, so today we're going to be covering a different and spookier kind of case. We're going back, way back in time, to bring you our creepiest story yet. The Salem witch trials. In 1692, the town of Salem, Massachusetts descended into chaos when two young girls suddenly developed a bizarre set of symptoms. What began as a minor nuisance escalated into a vicious witch hunt that pitted neighbor against neighbor.
- [02:12]
Morgan Absher
By the time the bloodbath was over, around 150 people had been accused of witchcraft. 19 were brutally executed, one died while tortured, and five died in prison. The true causes of the panic remain a mystery, but today we're going to try to get to the bottom of it.
- [02:30]
Kaelyn Moore
Foreign.
- [02:43]
Morgan Absher
Guys, welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
- [02:50]
Kaelyn Moore
I'm a Pilgrim woman with a penchant for speaking my mind, Kayn Moore, and I'm going to be the one digging deeper into the timelines, the backstories, and the court files released for these cases.
- [03:00]
Morgan Absher
And I'm your Internet witch, Morgan Abshur. I'm the one who's diving into the Reddit forums to talk about the lesser known details and pulling out threads that just don't add up at Crime House.
- [03:10]
Kaelyn Moore
We value your support, so please share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow clues to help others discover the show. And for bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening. Join our Crime House plus community on Apple Podcasts.
- [03:24]
Morgan Absher
More on the case and the clues that defined it after this quick break.
- [03:30]
Kaelyn Moore
Just got a new puppy or kitten. Congrats. But also yikes. Between crates, beds, toys, treats, and those.
- [03:36]
Morgan Absher
First few vet visits, you've probably already.
- [03:39]
Kaelyn Moore
Dropped a small fortune. Which is where Lemonade pet insurance comes in.
- [03:42]
Morgan Absher
It helps cover vet costs so you.
- [03:44]
Kaelyn Moore
Can focus on what's best for your new pet. The coverage is customizable, sign up is quick and easy, and your claims are handled in as little as three seconds. Lemonade offers a package specific specifically for puppies and kittens. Get a'llemonade.com pet your future self will thank you. Your pet won't. They don't know what insurance is. Happy Halloween, Morgan.
- [04:10]
Morgan Absher
My least favorite time of the year. Usually because you get scared. I get really scared, honestly. Like, I'm scared of the dark. As you guys know. At this point, I believe in a little bit of the woo woo stuff, so I'm kind of a believer that witchcraft does exist. Is it dark? I'm not sure, but I think it's out there. I think there's some people that got some tricks up their sleeve.
- [04:32]
Kaelyn Moore
Definitely. I mean, we'll get into it today, but were the women in Salem actually witches?
- [04:38]
Morgan Absher
Let's find out.
- [04:39]
Kaelyn Moore
Let's find out. Just a quick reminder, anyone who's watching this episode on YouTube, you're going to see some photos and images and assets that will help you kind of paint a bigger picture of this case. And if you're listening, you can find those same images on our social media. That's at Clues podcast on Instagram. So I want to take you back to June 10, 1692, when a woman named Bridget Bishop lies on the cold, damp floor of a jail cell in Salem, Massachusetts. Now, Bridget's in her 50s. She's actually an immigrant from Norwich, England. As she stares at the ceiling, she wonders if that's what brought her here, if her differences are the things that landed her in this cell. Her mind wanders to thoughts of her third husband. Is he thinking of her too? Will. Will he be okay after this? And then she hears footsteps. And looking up, she sees a man named George Corwin unlocking her cage. George is related to several of the judges who put her in this jail, and now he's come to march her to her Fate. George then loads Bridget into a two wheeled cart and drives her through the streets of Salem, past all the neighbors that she once called her friends, past the tavern she used to run. The cart bumps and rattles over the rough colonial roads as it makes its way to its final destination, a rocky, secluded hillside called Proctor's Ledge. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people watch on as a court officer reads her death sentence out loud. A minister named Reverend John Hale recites a short prayer, angering some of the people in the audience, but with this fire in his eyes. And then, somewhere in the crowd, a shopkeeper yells out that no salvation awaits Bridget, only eternal hellfire. See, he believes that she's made a pact with the devil, and that's exactly who she's going to see after she's executed. When the minister finishes his prayer, she's led up a ladder next to a sturdy tree with a rope tied to the lowest branch. And we don't know if Bridget says anything at this point, if she shouts out a protest or if she begs for. For mercy. There's also the chance that she just accepted her fate in silence. But ultimately, it doesn't change the outcome of what happens. The executioner places a cloth over her head. He tightens the rope around her neck, and he pushes her off. She thrashes, some reports say for as long as 10 minutes until death eventually comes for her. A few witnesses have to turn away from the site. Others shout and cheer that justice has been done, that a witch has been killed. But not all of the townspeople would agree, because they actually think that there's more witches in Salem that haven't been unmasked yet. And the executioner, they say, is going to come for them all. I want to go back in time, and I want to set the stage for what was happening in Salem, because there's a lot of context that really helps explain why why this happened, where this happened, like what was going on in the community at the time. This did not just erupt out of nowhere, similar to basically everything that happens in history. There's a reason for it. So Bridget Bishop wasn't the first woman in the world, by a long shot to die after being accused of being a witch. And it's hard to know the exact numbers. We truly won't ever know the exact numbers. But historians believe that at least 50, 000 people had already been killed in a witch hunt craze that swept through Europe from the 1400s through the 70/1900s. I mean, Germany was particularly brutal. Some regions saw entire villages Decimated. I read stories where there were entire villages where only one woman remained, and that was just so she could reproduce.
- [08:21]
Morgan Absher
Oh, my God.
- [08:21]
Kaelyn Moore
Those were the witch trials. Towns in Russia, France, Switzerland, even Iceland all descended into violent mobs and kangaroo courts that sometimes executed dozens of suspected witches at a time. Not Iceland, I know. Nowhere was safe from it. England, obviously experienced these witch trials as well. They did tend to be a little bit less intense than what was happening throughout the rest of Europe, probably because they had a more restrained legal tradition, one that required a little bit stronger evidence for conviction. And it's worth noting here, too, that where most of the witch trials happened in England is where these pilgrims immigrated from. So they were already coming from the area of England where the witch trials were happening. And it's when these European colonists came to America that they brought their beliefs and their fear of witchcraft and the devil with them. Now, for a while, there was just a handful of cases scattered throughout the colonies. A witch executed here, a trial there. The first witch ever executed in these witch trials was Alice Young from down the street of my childhood home in Windsor, Connecticut.
- [09:28]
Morgan Absher
How are you always connected to these old cases?
- [09:30]
Kaelyn Moore
I don't know. A lot of scary, spooky things happen in my town. But she was executed. They don't know exactly why she was executed, but we do know that that year there was an influenza that swept through the town, and a lot of the children around Alice died, but Alice's own child didn't. So we kind of think that people started pointing the finger at her, that she was maybe responsible for these deaths. But like I said, these were, for the most part, isolated incidents. And by the late 1600s, it felt like these witch crazes were kind of dying down. The witch trials that happened in Connecticut were over, and people were kind of moving on with their lives. Ideology was changing. People were just becoming more skeptical. In general, social and political reform was happening. And with that, there were these new laws that were put in place all over to actually ban witch hunts or at least make it harder to get a conviction. And it seemed like maybe this dark chapter of human history was finally coming to a close. But then the Salem witch trials happened. But like I said earlier, there's a specific reason why this was able to happen in a place like Salem, even as the witch trials around the country were kind of coming to a close. So let's talk a little bit more about, like, Salem. As a town Established in 1626, Salem was essentially a frontier community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And it was ruled entirely by the Puritans. Now, when people hear the word Puritan, some people think of, like, pilgrims, black clothing, the buckle on the hat, Mayflower, Thanksgiving. It was so much more than just that. They were not just European settlers. They were hardcore religious fundamentalists. They believed really strict kind of crazy things. Like, one of the things that they believed was that humans were born sinful and corrupt, and nothing you did could change that. So essentially, one of their biggest beliefs was what was gonna happen to you in the afterlife was already decided by God upon being born. So you're born into this world, you already know if you're going to hell or if you're going to heaven. And it's up to you as a person to try to decode the messages from God in your life that tell you which. So people would do things that kind of, like, bordered on witchcraft, essentially to figure out what their sign from God was.
- [11:51]
Morgan Absher
Okay?
- [11:51]
Kaelyn Moore
They would read the Bible and look for hidden words like, does anything about this say, what's going to happen to me? But also, they felt like they had to prove to each other that they were one of the ones going to heaven. So they lived these intensely devout, pure lives. And they would also point to their neighbors who they felt like weren't living these pure lives to be like, well, but those are the ones going to hell, and I'm not like that, so I must be going to heaven. So you already have this. Like, culturally, they're really, really set on kind of blaming other people for evil to prove that they're the ones going to heaven.
- [12:24]
Morgan Absher
We're seeing that even today in modern times, with some religions and blood atonement that's still out there.
- [12:30]
Kaelyn Moore
Puritans were so extreme that even the Protestant Church of England, which they descended from, kind of wanted nothing to do with them. So many of them fled England to create their own, what they called pure society in New England, where they could make their own religion the law of the land. Now, also, Puritan is just something that we call them. They called themselves good Christians. They wanted to create their own pure religion. Okay? They had beliefs that God's hand was in every aspect of daily life, from something like a successful harvest to a failed crop to a sudden death. They would cite biblical passages to settle land disputes. They thought that by being really godly people, God would reward them with an easier life. However, creating a whole brand new society from scratch in the new world was a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. I don't know what they thought it was going to Be like over here. But maybe because they felt like they were God's chosen people, they thought it was going to be easy. It was not easy for them at all. Life in colonial Massachusetts was absolutely brutal. They lived in cramped, dark houses. Entire families would share a single room, sometimes without heat. And there's all these diseases that were wiping through the communities constantly. Smallpox would just completely decimate an entire community or like kill all the children. The winters were harsh. There was something called a little ice age that happened in that part of the world from about 1400 to 1800. What we're kind of similar to today, where every summer is the hottest summer on record. Back then, every winter was the coldest winter on record. And then summer would come and there would be no rain, so the crops, everything would just freeze to death over the winter. And then nothing could be resowed in the summer to grow. So it was absolutely treacherous. A lot of people just died from the cold because of this. Food was super scarce. And then there was this constantly looming threat of violence. So one thing that came up when I was researching just like everything that was leading to Salem was King Philip's War. And King Philip's War had happened about 15 years before the Salem Witch trials started. And it was essentially, some people say that it was probably the most grizzly war fought on American soil, even more so than the Civil War. Wow. The Puritans really believed that the Native Americans were sent by Satan to destroy them. So according to them and God's plan for them, they had to destroy the Native Americans first. So they would wage war with the Native American people on American soil who had lived here for thousands of years and were way better equipped to fight back. And so what the Puritans would do is they would just essentially try to dismember the bodies as much as they could to scare off the Native Americans. So you would walk through these Puritan villages and there would be heads in the trees and arms and limbs and just body parts everywhere because they thought that was going to be the thing that scared the Native Americans away. And the Native Americans would obviously retaliate and would basically do the same thing. So it was just a really grisly time to be alive because you were seeing all of this carnage and death and despair everywhere.
- [15:41]
Morgan Absher
I'm learning so much new information from you today.
- [15:43]
Kaelyn Moore
Growing up in New England, maybe there's some listeners that can relate to this. We were just, like, taught a lot about New England history.
- [15:48]
Morgan Absher
We didn't get this in Minnesota, but I'm really. I'M feeling a little thankful that you're our resident occult studies girly over here, because this is. I'm sitting over here, like, give me some popcorn. Damn.
- [15:59]
Kaelyn Moore
I finally put my knowledge of the Pilgrims to you. Finally, for the first time in my.
- [16:03]
Morgan Absher
Life, everyone, anyone else, shaking in their boots because I'm. Wow.
- [16:07]
Kaelyn Moore
And like, on top of all of this, kind of. To make matters worse, the colony was constantly being rocked by political instability. The Puritans were still fighting with the English Crown for more independence. Massachusetts was being run by a provisional government that had been selected by the king. Remember, we didn't have the Revolutionary War yet, so they were still very much tied to the crown, bad at math.
- [16:30]
Morgan Absher
But about a hundred years away.
- [16:32]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. That government eventually was overthrown by a rebellion in Boston in 1689. It caused the legal system in Massachusetts to be thrown into really this state of limbo. It was like, we don't follow the rules of the Crown anymore, but we haven't set up our own government yet, so, like, what do we do? And nobody was quite sure at this time what laws applied to them or who even had the authority to enforce those laws, especially as it related to some of, like the witch hunts that were happening. But then this new governor was going to come from England in 1692, and he said that he was going to sort out which laws everyone was going to follow and what courts had the authority to prosecute these crimes. But until then, it was pretty much lawless. And the whole colony, Salem included, was kind of this powder keg of miserable people. People who were deeply religious and felt like they had to prove that they were worthy of heaven. People who felt like they had to point out that their neighbors were worthy of hell and that those were the ones going to hell. Just like seeing all this death and despair, it really felt like the whole area was kind of this powder keg that was going to spark one day. And no one really thought that it would be essentially two young girls that lit the match. It's early January of 1692. It is another brutally cold winter in Salem. Another record cold winter. It's the kind that gets deep, deep, deep into your bones. Especially a place where you can only heat yourself with fire. And it's especially hard for this man, this 38 year old named Reverend Samuel Paris. He is the new Puritan minister in Salem. Now, he spent most of his childhood in the warm tropics of Barbados, because, fun fact, that's where the other Puritan society was. You could go to the Freezing tundra of Salem, Massachusetts. Or you could go hang out in the tropical islands of the Barbados. And a lot of people still chose to go to Salem instead. So he comes up to Salem from Barbados. He lost his family's sugar cane fortune because essentially all of the puritans were going to the Caribbean islands and just, like, enslaving people and stealing the sugar cane and getting, like, insanely rich off of it. But his family lost that whole sugarcane fortune, and he ended up returning to Massachusetts to preach and earn money as a merchant. And he is horribly unsuccessful and unlikable as a minister. It's been really tough for him to settle into his role as Salem village's new active minister. Even among the, like, very overly zealous puritans, he kind of stands out as being unnecessarily and unusually strict to them.
- [19:17]
Morgan Absher
It got stricter.
- [19:19]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah. He. He comes in and he thinks he's going to whip everyone into shape by being very strict and telling them what they can and cannot do. He's been pushing the community towards a more religious orthodoxy, what he calls moral reform. He thinks that the puritans have gone soft, which is hysterical, because they're truly one of, like, the most pious sect of, like, any religion ever.
- [19:41]
Morgan Absher
Yeah, they're in it.
- [19:42]
Kaelyn Moore
But for Samuel, when you look at his legacy, it seems like most of what he was doing was not necessarily about church policy. It was maybe more about the power that he wanted to hold over everyone. And there's no better way to get power over people than to make them, like, insanely afraid to sin. And so that's what he was going to do. These people, basically, whatever he says within the church goes, and he wants people to start obeying him without any question. And this starts creating a lot of tension inside of the village. One thing I heard was it was really hard to recruit people to the church at the time. They're trying to, like, set up new laws where, like, kids could join the church and then their parents would kind of be part of the church, but, like, couldn't take the Eucharist, all that kind of stuff. And he had recruited one of, like, the lowest amounts of new people into the church of all time, of, like, any minister ever. So already kind of the community was frustrated with him. Also, the. The people who did go to his church initially stopped going once he became the minister. So he was just, like, trying all these different things he could do to get more people to the church, but also get them under his control. And because he's this strict with all the people inside of Salem Village. We can kind of imagine how strict he was with his own family. Now Reverend Samuel lives in a parsonage and that's a house that's provided by the church. He lives there with his wife, his 9 year old daughter Betty, and his 11 year old niece Abigail Williams. And these are described as good puritan girls. They've been raised to be quiet, obedient, pious. But in Late January of 1692, both of these girls start acting a bit strange.
- [21:20]
Morgan Absher
Which brings us to our first clue. The Paris girls symptoms. It seems like 11 year old Abigail was the first to experience what Reverend Samuel describes as odd fits. First she complained about having prickling sensations all over her body like she was being pinched and bitten by invisible hands. Then she danced around the house erratically, dove under furniture and contorted her body in these painful looking positions. Sometimes she would bark like a dog, other times she'd fall completely mute, then suddenly babble nonsense. No understand. Now I know this seems like normal attention seeking behavior for an 11 year old today. I mean I galloped around and nade like a horse when I was this age, I'm sure. But back then this was not how kids acted. It was even seen as bizarre, satanic even. And it appeared to be contagious because within a day or so, nine year old Betty was having similar episodes. The girls screamed they were being stabbed with needles and burned by invisible fire as they writhed in pain. At first Samuel thought it was a physical illness like smallpox. He prayed over them. He called for doctors like William Griggs to examine them. He even reached out to other ministers for advice. But they were all stumped. Neither girl had a fever or signs of any other illness. The only diagnosis anyone could give was that they were afflicted by some unknown quote, evil hand.
- [23:03]
Kaelyn Moore
And this is one of the. When I mentioned earlier that the puritans would do things that felt like witchcraft in order to see messages from God. That's like one of the things that these girls were doing. They would take eggs and crack them into cups and stuff so that they could see if there were any symbols in the egg whites. And they had seen something like a coffin as a sign from the devil, they thought.
- [23:27]
Morgan Absher
So I have one of my listeners on two hot takes that she does this every year. She actually, she reads tarot and her grandma's a little, a little witchy. And so every year before the year starts, New Year's Eve, their celebration, they do this egg reading, right?
- [23:43]
Kaelyn Moore
Which is so funny because you have These little girls who are deathly afraid of witches and are going to start accusing people of being witches, and they're doing the things that people today do as witchcraft. But to them, they thought it was like a puritanical thing they could do to get messages from God.
- [23:56]
Morgan Absher
Well, Samuel's main attempts at treatment were fasting and prayer, but that didn't work. The symptoms always seemed to come back. If anything, they were getting worse, which is like any kid that you kind of enable and give them attention for something bad, they'll do it again. In his sermons, he told his parishioners that God was, quote, angry and sending.
- [24:19]
Kaelyn Moore
Forth destroyers, which, if your plan to control everyone through fear wasn't working before, and now all of a sudden, you can point to your daughters and say, look, the devil is alive and well in Salem, my daughters. You start to see how, like, all of this stuff was happening at this time. Like, just like all of the groundwork being laid for this whole mass hysteria to happen. I know.
- [24:40]
Morgan Absher
And it's like, it's so fishy. Like, this guy that you don't really like, not really the best minister, you're going to believe him when he says his kids are haunted.
- [24:49]
Kaelyn Moore
They were terrified of witches back in the day. That was like, the scariest thing that could come into the community. So, yeah, I think he just really thought that this was going to be his way to control everyone, his claim.
- [25:02]
Morgan Absher
To fame, I guess. Because then in late February, he comes forward and he says that he thinks he has learned the identity of his child's attacker. Which brings us to clue number two. The witch cake. On February 25th, over a month after troubles began, Reverend Samuel and his wife Elizabeth traveled to a nearby village to attend a sermon. With them away, their neighbor, Mary Sibley, decided to stop by and check on the girls. She was a practitioner of white magic from time to time. And these were spells that could be used to help heal.
- [25:38]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, you could do witchcraft back in the day, apparently, but only if it was sanctioned by the church. Certain witchcraft, yeah.
- [25:45]
Morgan Absher
Though it didn't seem like Samuel Paris knew any of this, or he likely wouldn't have trusted Mary around his girls at all. This kind of folk healing was frowned upon by the clergy, who believed it still required Satan's help to even work. Yet there were people who used it as a last resort in times of desperation. And the Paris girls, bizarre illnesses, seemed to fall into that category. Mary suspected that an evil witch practicing black magic was behind the attacks, so she went to the Paris's family's enslaved Person, a woman named Tituba, and showed her how to make something called a witch cake. Now, this wasn't your typical dessert. It was a spell, one that would supposedly prove that witchcraft was involved. To make it, Mary first collected urine from the afflicted girls, then had teshuba bake it into a loaf of rye bread before feeding it to the family dog. The idea was that magic was present in someone's body, in their fluids, things like blood and urine. I mean, we had seen bloodletting for years prior to this to let demons out.
- [26:58]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, they really overestimated the amount of stuff in our blood. It was like the sickness gets out and the demons get out. Like, let's just get the. Get rid of the blood.
- [27:06]
Morgan Absher
I know bloodletting is crazy. And if the girls were bewitched, the magic could be transferred through fluids to another living being, like poor little, little Lassie the dog. If the dog showed the same symptoms afterwards, it would prove that the girls were actually sick. And in some cases, the dog would also point out who was responsible for the bowitching, like a little bloodhound. There's no record about what happened to the dog after eating the cake, if anything at all. But can tell you this. When Samuel Paris returned home and found out what had taken place in his house, he was furious. He yelled at Mary, calling it, quote, going to the devil for help against the devil. But the damage had already been done at this point. And Betty and Abigail said that the ritual had helped them figure out who was responsible for their agony. That's when they pointed their fingers directly at Tituba. They said that her specter, basically a ghostly projection of her mind, was chasing them around the house and tormenting them, even though she had just essentially tried to help the children. Tituba was accused of being a witch, and she was not going to be the last. Join me and follow the podcast Conspiracy.
- [28:31]
Kaelyn Moore
Theories, where we explore what's really going.
- [28:34]
Morgan Absher
On behind the official narrative. Like, what if the Loch Ness monster isn't a monster at all, but an elephant? What do the richest Rangers 1% know that we don't? Why are they building all those bunkers? And really, what the heck is going on with the Denver airport?
- [28:50]
Kaelyn Moore
Join me every week to see just.
- [28:52]
Morgan Absher
How high up this goes on the Spotify podcast Conspiracy Theories. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [29:03]
Kaelyn Moore
No, things definitely didn't end there with the Paris family. So that same day, February 25, two more people were showing similar symptoms. But on the other side of town, there was 17 year old Elizabeth Hubbard who claimed that she was being stalked by witches. Two of them, women in town named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. The accuser, Elizabeth Hubbard was Dr. Griggs servant, the doctor who's believed to have gone to visit Abigail and Betty when their symptoms first arose. So he had maybe come home and also told Elizabeth about what was going on.
- [29:38]
Morgan Absher
Yeah, they didn't have HIPAA back then.
- [29:40]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, it seemed like Elizabeth knew about this behavior and now she claimed that she was also being tormented, although in a pretty different way. Supposedly the two Sarahs had sent a wolf and hairy abominations to terrorize her. And on the exact Same day a 12 year old girl who I'm sure we'll talk about a lot. But Ann Putnam Jr also developed similar symptoms to Betty and abigail. Ann Putnam Jr. Was the granddaughter of Salem villages richest man Thomas Putnam. And like Elizabeth, Ann Putnam Jr. Named Sarah Good as her attacker. She said that Sarah's specter pinched her and tried to force her into a covenant with Satan and it took all of her strength to refuse. But let's talk about who the two Sarahs were, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, because who they were in the community of Salem and their reputations is very important to the story. Now both of them were social outcasts. They were pretty much on the fringes of society, both metaphorically and quite literally. In a way they fit the stereotype of what people expected witches to look like at the time. 39 year old Sarah Good was born into a wealthy family, but her father took his own life when she was 17 and that cast a dark shadow over her family's reputation obviously because suicide was seen as a very serious sin for the Puritans. Because of this she married this poor indentured servant and when he died she ended up going into serious debt. Her second husband had to sell his own farm to pay off Sarah's debt, leaving the two of them and their two children completely desolate. Essentially they had to work odd jobs, they had to beg for food, they sometimes had to sleep in barns and stables at night. And as a result of all this, what we imagine like Sarah became a pretty bitter person. She was known for having quite a sharp tongue and speaking her mind, not being very nice. She didn't really have a lot of friends in town. As for the 49 year old Sarah Osborne, she was also seen as a social pariah after she married an indentured servant as well. This was after the death of her first husband in which she took control of the family estate. Something women did not really do back in puritanical society. And it was very much looked down on. The fact that she tried to manage the estate on her own as a woman, compounded with her unusual choice for a second husband, led to a lot of tiffs with her sons and some land disputes with the Putnam family, one of the most wealthiest families in town. And not to mention, as of late, she had been dealing with a lot of serious health issues that had left her frail and bedridden, meaning that no one had seen that much of her late lately, especially not at church. And there's some accounts, too, that suggest that when the teen girls were all figuring out who to accuse or, you know, like, just about to accuse someone, yeah, names were coming up as to, like, who were the most believable people they could accuse in town. And it was essentially the two Sarahs. Their reputations were known all over town. It was a very small community at the time. Yeah, there were some of the most outcast women in society. They were the easiest to accuse. And then Tituba.
- [32:58]
Morgan Absher
So, yeah, like, I know I've a couple of the sources I saw, they were like, well, they picked the two most vulnerable on the fringe. I picked a woman of color and a homeless woman. And, yeah, kind of ran with that.
- [33:11]
Kaelyn Moore
So then on February 29, Thomas Putnam, Anne's father, along with three other men, rode from the rural community of Salem Village to the bustling port of Salem Town to see the county magistrates. A magistrate was kind of like a judge or a lower ranking judicial officer. And there Thomas told them stories of his child's abuse at the hand of a malevolent spirit, one that seemed to be derived from witchcraft. And the two magistrates asked very few questions, and they immediately signed arrest warrants for all three women, Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. They were ordered to appear the next morning, March 1, 1692, at Ingersoll Tavern in Salem Village for questioning. Hundreds of people showed up to watch these proceedings the following day. So many that they actually ended up having to move to a larger building because there was just not enough space. Tituba, Sarah Good, and even the very weak Sarah Osborne were marched out of their homes and into the makeshift courtroom to face their accusers. And one of the first questions that was asked was, quote, unquote, Sarah Good, what evil spirit do you have familiarity with? Why do you hurt these children? And Sarah Good said that she had been falsely accused. Everything they were saying was a lie. But the judges didn't believe her. They just kept pressing and Every time she spoke, the four afflicted girls who were all there in attendance, Abigail, Betty, Elizabeth, and Ann Jr. Fell into fits, started losing their minds in the courtroom, rolling around, screaming that they were possessed. They rise. They screamed that Sarah Good's specter was attacking them right then and there in the courtroom. The more she denied the charges, the more violently the girls reacted. And finally, Sarah Good tried to deflect her own guilt by just blaming Sarah Osborne. No, when it was Sarah Osborne's turn, she also denied the charges. But at that point, no one really believed her. And then the magistrates got to Tituba, and it was her testimony that really started ripping the whole town apart. Now, when Tituba stepped before the Pact Salem meeting house on March 1, 1692, the odds obviously were already stacked against her. Although her exact origins are murky, like many enslaved people, stories were. Stacy Schiff, who is the author of the book the witches Salem, 1692, believes that Tituba was most likely a South American indigenous woman. There are some sources that claim she could have come from Africa or perhaps the Caribbean islands. It's probably more of a reflection of kind of like the historical shift in racism at the time. Scholars today just seem to agree she was of indigenous American origin. Samuel Paris likely met Tituba during his time in the Barbados and brought her with him when he moved. But here's the thing. To the Puritans, her very identity made her a suspect. They believed, like I mentioned earlier, that all Native Americans were tools of the devil, part of a grand satanic conspiracy to destroy their godly little colony. And it didn't matter that she wasn't even from the same tribe that was at war with the English. They felt like, because she was the same skin color as them, basically, that she was just complicit in everything they were doing. And at first, she did what the other two accused women had done, and she just denied everything. She claimed that she had never even met the devil. She'd never hurt the children. But at some point, Tituba does change her story.
- [36:43]
Morgan Absher
Yeah. Which brings us to clue number three. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was survival instinct. Or maybe Reverend Samuel Paris had been beating her for weeks to get her to confess, as one witness later claimed. Either way, Tituba confessed to being a witch. The magistrate had worn her so thin by that point that she just told them what they wanted to hear. She claimed it all started when she was visited by a tall man from Boston. He said he needed her to serve him by torturing and killing Young Abigail and Betty. At first, Tituba said she refused, but Satan's minions kept at it, threatening to kill her if she didn't cooperate. When she did, the devil sent her several demonic creatures in the shape of animals to aid in her mission. It was a common belief at this time that witches had familiars. We see it in modern witch tales even these days. These were evil shape shifting spirits that would often appear in the form of animals. That's where the connection between witches and black cats comes from, actually. But really, any animal or household pet could be a familiar. When asked who else was involved, Tituba pointed to the other two accused women. She declared that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne had familiars of their own. While it's unclear which familiar belonged to who, Tituba mentioned in her statement that they ranged from a quote, hog, a great black dog, a red cat, a yellow bird, and a hairy creature that walked on two legs. This was all the crowd needed to hear to believe that these women were indeed witches. According to Tituba's confession, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were already seasoned witches when she met them, and they pulled her into their coven. They flew all over the village on broomsticks, inflicting pain upon children and villagers. She also claimed that the Sarahs wanted her to kill Ann Putnam Jr. But she resisted. Throughout her confession, she depicted herself as a reluctant co conspirator, unable to resist the forces of evil. But the most shocking revelation was the Devil's book. This was a legendary document that every Puritan had heard of by this point. Supposedly by signing your name in blood on the pages, you would bind yourself to Satan forever. Tituba claimed that she had signed the book, and when she did, she saw Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne's signatures too. But there were nine more names that she didn't recognize, though she did seem to know they were all from the Boston area. I mean, just kind of conveniently giving them everything they want more.
- [39:41]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, they really put her in a corner. I don't think she had much of a choice than to give them exactly what they were asking for. It's really this confession that sends shivers down everyone's spine because according to her, the devil had come to Salem. After Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were carted off to a Boston jail. There was this uneasy stillness that settled over Salem Village. The afflicted girls had all quieted, their fits had temporarily subdued, but it was really just the calm before the storm. According to Tituba's confession, there were at least nine more Witches out there walking amongst them. And the quiet finally shattered on March 12, when who but Ann Putnam Jr. Had another violent episode. And this time everyone rushes to her and asks, Ann, who is cursing you? And she points to someone new, a woman in her 60s named Martha Corey. Unlike the first three accused witches, Martha was a church member who did attend services regularly. So this accusation was actually pretty different. It wasn't a beggar, it wasn't a social outcast, it wasn't a woman with some illness. Like the other Sarah, Martha Corey was very much one of the people inside of Salem society. Martha even listened calmly as Anne's father Thomas privately accused her. After hearing the story, Martha just asked a single question. What clothes was she wearing when she attacked Anne? And Thomas goes and he asks Anne the same question. And Anne says that she couldn't see what clothes Martha's specter was wearing because Martha had very conveniently blinded her.
- [41:29]
Morgan Absher
Quick thinker, that one.
- [41:30]
Kaelyn Moore
Well, two days later, Thomas summons Martha back to his house. And as soon as she entered, Anne began to thrash like she was under attack by an invisible spirit. And that night, Thomas's 19 year old housekeeper, Mercy Lewis, also fell ill and nearly rocked her chair into the fireplace, supposedly pushed by these invisible hands. On March 19, the magistrates issued a warrant for Martha Corey's arrest. And things were really just getting started in Salem. That same day, Ann Putnam Jr. And Abigail Williams accused a woman named Rebecca Nurse of trying to get them to sign the Devil's book. And now Rebecca was a 71 year old grandmother and she was one of the most respected women in the community. However, it's interesting to note that her family had been feuding with the Putnams for years over land disputes. It seemed like, though at least to like the larger Salem community. If the devil could recruit Rebecca, he could recruit anyone.
- [42:34]
Morgan Absher
Everyone's at risk.
- [42:36]
Kaelyn Moore
The most chilling accusation really comes on March 23rd, when Sarah Good's four to five year old daughter named Dorothy gets dragged into this nightmare. The afflicted girls claimed Dorothy's tiny spectre was biting and pinching them and demanding that they sign the Devil's book too. So they arrested the little girl and they threw her into prison. And soon after, more accusations popped up from people in different houses. And by early May, the jails were filling up. Fear was spreading like a contagion creeping under doors. It was infecting every single household in Salem. And then on May 10, Salem actually saw its first casualty. Because of this fear, Sarah Osborne, one of the original three accused, did die in her prison cell. Maybe it was from the illness she was suffering previously. Maybe it was exacerbated by being in that Boston jail. By that point, she had been locked up for over two months in the disease ridden jail, having never faced trial. And it was really a grim sign of what was to come, because the witch hunt was nowhere near finished and Salem's appetite for blood was near insatiable. By late May of 1692, the jails in Suffolk county were overflowing with accused witches. But no one was exactly sure what to do with them. Remember, Massachusetts was stuck in this kind of weird legal limbo. Everyone was waiting for the new colonial governor, William Phips, to arrive from England and essentially tell them what to do and tell them what the laws were. He had this new charter with him that he was bringing, and that was going to be the thing that would define what the new laws were. It would also allow the legislature to create a new court system which would replace the ad hoc courts that they had been relying on at that point. When Governor Phips finally showed up on May 14, he thought that he had plenty of time to make all of this happen and to institute his new order. But as soon as he arrived, fresh off the boat, he was hit with this crazy situation. There were dozens of accused witches rotting in prison cells, and there were more accusations every single day. So on May 25, he creates this emergency order just for witchcraft cases. He called it the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which literally means to hear and determine. It was supposed to be temporary. It was just going to clear out this backlog. The chief justice was this guy, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, a Harvard educated Puritan zealot who was convinced that witches were real and that they were very dangerous. And most of the other judges he picked were wealthy merchants with zero legal training. Since the new official court system wasn't up yet, they could set whatever rules they wanted when it came to running their trials, which is why they allowed something called spectral evidence. This included evidence that you could bring it to court at the time, included dreams, visions, and encounters with invisible spirits that only the accusers could see. And on June 2, 1692, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was open for business. That same day, they put Bridget Bishop on trial. She was the woman we met earlier in this episode, at the beginning, and you'll see why prosecutor Thomas Newton picked her to start with. See, Bridget was really perfect scapegoat material. She was in her 50s, she was twice widowed, and her late husband had died under what they Believed to be suspicious circumstances. She also owned a tavern where people could drink cider and play shuffleboard. Even Morgan on Sunday.
- [46:14]
Morgan Absher
Not Sunday.
- [46:15]
Kaelyn Moore
You're supposed to be resting. Man. In Puritan Salem, she was basically advertising herself as a sinner. I mean, she was a woman who had a job. People could drink at her tavern, which actually Puritans were allowed to drink just a little bit, but also like working on the day of rest.
- [46:32]
Morgan Absher
Not God's day.
- [46:33]
Kaelyn Moore
Not on God's day. And so really she becomes this perfect scapegoat. She also argued with a lot of people in town. She's kind of known for not paying her bills on time. She's just like us. She had a reputation, okay, maybe not for getting into violent and public fights with her late husband. And this also wasn't her first time being accused of witchcraft. See, 13 years earlier, in 1679, she stood trial for witchcraft after an enslaved person's horses went nuts and ran into a frozen swamp. A week later, that person claimed that he saw an apparition that looked like Bridget in his barn. Bridget was acquitted, but the stink of black magic followed her ever since. On the town green in my hometown, this 19 year old guy fired off a gun and like maybe 1680, and it killed someone. And so they were like, we're not going to send you to jail because they didn't really have manslaughter charges back then. But like, you're on probation and you can't handle weapons. And then like three years later, he was like, actually, I think this woman Lydia bewitched my gun.
- [47:33]
Morgan Absher
Oh my God.
- [47:34]
Kaelyn Moore
Executed for being a witch.
- [47:37]
Morgan Absher
They were really, really freaked out by witches.
- [47:39]
Kaelyn Moore
I mean, this is a time that, like, it was just a man who made a mistake, let his horses go and they died. And he was able to blame a woman for it and say it was the specter of this witch woman that made the mistake for me and therefore she should die.
- [47:51]
Morgan Absher
As a horse girl, I'm like, it just sounds like they spooked. Yeah, horses are. They're spooky.
- [47:56]
Kaelyn Moore
They get spooked. And that's probably why in 1692, Bridget faced a lot of different accusers. Among them were Mercy Lewis, the Putnam's Maid. Also Ann Putnam Jr. She's back. At Bridget's 1692 trial, 10 people testified about everything from missing money to demons that Bridget had supposedly summoned. But the prosecutors, at least in this trial, relied on more than just hearsay.
- [48:23]
Morgan Absher
And that brings us to clue number four, the witch's marks. One of the piece of Evidence used against Bridget was the discovery of something called poppets. A poppet is another name for a voodoo doll which someone can use to torment another person from a distance. The doll is supposed to represent a person, and sticking pins in it will cause that real life person physical pain. Poppets were considered a pretty standard tool for black magic back then. A man who Bridget hired 17 years earlier to do some repairs in her cellar had allegedly discovered several of these dolls in Bridget's walls. The man didn't keep the poppets to show in court, but his testimony was apparently convincing enough without it. Another thing the prosecutors looked for was the presence of a devil's mark or witch's teat. These were skin blemishes that apparently indicated where Satan or a witch's familiar would suckle from them. Drinking blood like a baby drinks milk from the teat. Straight from the teat.
- [49:34]
Kaelyn Moore
Straight from the teat.
- [49:34]
Morgan Absher
I'm, like, thinking about that. Like, you have a mole on you, and they're like, which.
- [49:38]
Kaelyn Moore
I know. Which is teat. Yeah. They would literally see a mole and be like, that's the devil's nipple that he uses for you. There was. It's funny, like, for puritans, there's, like, weird sexual parts to some of these. But there was. In Germany, I believe it was Germany, there was one of the witch trials where the lore was that Satan would literally have you kiss his butthole. That was how you made the deal with Satan. Like, they were. It was weird.
- [50:04]
Morgan Absher
Well, I mean, this court examined Bridget's body.
- [50:08]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah.
- [50:08]
Morgan Absher
So they had a panel of women and one male surgeon. They examined Bridget's body, and they claimed to find some sort of sore near her genitals. That was all the jury needed. They didn't deliberate for long. And the same day that her trial began, on June 2nd, Bridget was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death by hanging. Again, this is like colonial times. Like, what? You don't know what kind of diseases they had back then.
- [50:34]
Kaelyn Moore
I know. And they had a lot.
- [50:36]
Morgan Absher
And to, like, strip her down like this is.
- [50:39]
Kaelyn Moore
I know, for being so pure, I'm.
- [50:41]
Morgan Absher
Like, surprised you could see another person naked.
- [50:43]
Kaelyn Moore
And it's another situation where it's women doing it to women. And I know that there's the argument, right, that women were kind of primed to be these foot soldiers for the puritanical men looking to weed out the women. But I don't know, I just get the feeling that it was a lot more cutthroat amongst the women than that. Like, they were all just trying to weed each other out.
- [51:02]
Morgan Absher
Oh, yeah, they're really taking each other out. And eight days later, Salem had its first ever execution.
- [51:11]
Kaelyn Moore
But not everyone was necessarily on board with how everything was being handled in Salem. One of the judges who was named Nathaniel Saltonstall, was disgusted by the way the court handled itself, and he ended up resigning immediately. But that didn't make the process slow enough to halt the proceedings. Actually, some of the people would go on to accuse him of being a sorcerer, but he never had to stand trial for that. So without Nathaniel, the court reconvened on June 28 for really a mass trial. Over the next three days, five more women were tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. It was Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, and three other women named Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin, and Sarah Wilds. On July 19, all five were hanged together. In her final moments, a junior minister tried to get Sarah Good to confess. And instead she spat back at him, quote, I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.
- [52:17]
Morgan Absher
Which for a town that's terrified of witches, I'm sure that did not comfort them.
- [52:23]
Kaelyn Moore
No, I know. Yeah. Then they think the witches are being like, vindictive. The witch hunt had also kind of become this, like, self perpetuating nightmare. At the time in March, there had only been three accused witches. But by the end of the summer, there were over 200 people, both male and female, that were named. And the accusations just were exploding after that. It wasn't just the original Salem Village girls anymore that were accusing. It wasn't just that like the afflicted teenage girls of Salem Village anymore, the mean girls. There were these new accusers that were popping up all across Essex county, where Salem was located. Adults, teenagers, even men, were now claiming to be tormented by specters. Servants accused their employers, children accused their parents and sometimes their grandparents. And each new victim widened the circle, because the real accelerant was the confessions, when the accused witches confessed in order to save their lives. Because that was really all they could do was say, yes, this is what is happening. They didn't just admit their own guilt. They were expected to name their accomplices. It's kind of a precedent that Tituba and the Sarahs unknowingly set for others. Each confession spawned new arrests. You were forced to name the other, sometimes up to 11 people that you had seen, like within the devil's book or whatever. Like you. You just had to name all the other people that were implicated in this as well. And some of those new prisoners would go on to confess, too, which has created this endless chain of accusations.
- [53:56]
Morgan Absher
Yeah, by now, it should be pretty clear that a lot of people were admitting to doing a lot of evil stuff, even though it likely wasn't true.
- [54:06]
Kaelyn Moore
No, it just seemed to become the way that people were settling their petty little disputes within Salem and now the surrounding areas. Oh, we're in a land dispute. You're a witch. Oh, you close your bar too early or whatever, like, I owe you money. You're a witch.
- [54:21]
Morgan Absher
You cut off my wagon.
- [54:23]
Kaelyn Moore
Which just everyone was crying witch for every little transgression, which is insane.
- [54:30]
Morgan Absher
Like, if you think about it like, that level of crying wolf, like, the town is not that big.
- [54:36]
Kaelyn Moore
No, it's very small.
- [54:38]
Morgan Absher
So what are you doing? And this just brings us to clue number five. All of these forced confessions, the interrogators really relied on high pressure tactics to bully and manipulate accused witches into admissions of guilt. And, like, I feel like bully is an understatement of a word, because we're probably going to get into what methods they used on some of these people. During her trial, Bridget Bishop, the woman we met in our first story, claimed she didn't even know what a witch was. In response, the magistrate asked how, if she didn't know what a witch was, she could be sure she wasn't one. After all.
- [55:16]
Kaelyn Moore
Oh, my God.
- [55:17]
Morgan Absher
Like the gaslight.
- [55:19]
Kaelyn Moore
If you don't know what one is, how do you know you're not the mental gymnastics Gaslighting.
- [55:25]
Morgan Absher
And these tricks often threw the accused off balance and got them to agree to things that they didn't understand. I mean, if we look at Tituba, like, we don't even know if there was a language barrier, potentially because of where she came from, so she might not even know what she was admitting to. Others were simply threatened with execution or assured a lighter sentence if they agreed with whatever the magistrate said and confessed. True to their word, no one who confessed was sentenced to death. That included Tituba, who was ultimately spared from execution and had her case dismissed. But we also can't ignore the psychological influence of the region. I mean, these people were told that if they confessed, their souls might be saved from damnation. I'm sitting here, I'm like, how did they believe these little girls? Like a 12 year old writhing on the floor. But it's like we. You see it in some cults even today. Like, there's podcasts on cults out there. And, like, people can be convinced of crazy things. And if there's one thing that these puritans were scared of, it was hell.
- [56:27]
Kaelyn Moore
One of the like now debunked urban legends as to why this happened was that they were suffering from ergot poisoning. Ergot was like a fungus that grew on the grain. And so the idea that they were eating this grain and actually having these hallucinations and really believing that they were witches was always a theory. But we now know that the symptoms would have been a lot worse and they would have died pretty much right afterwards. And a lot of the accusers went on to live like very long lives. But also just the idea of it being a social contagion, that they really did think they were getting these symptoms from witches when really they were kind of catching it from each other like any other mass hysteria event.
- [57:03]
Morgan Absher
Yeah. And I mean, it's hard because even family members of the accused were peer pressuring them to save their souls. So it's like for these people that are up there, they're probably starting to go crazy too, where they're like, even my family thinks I'm a witch. Maybe I am a witch. And when all of these methods failed, the interrogators could rely on torture to get the job done. And they resorted to it quite a bit. John Proctor, a 60 year old farmer and tavern owner, told the court that some of the accused, like his own son, were forced to confess when, quote, they tied him neck and heels till the blood gushed out of his nose. Some were subjected to torture for 18 hours straight, with interrogators taking shifts to keep the torment going around the clock. Sleep deprivation was huge. They would keep these suspected witches awake for days, forcing them to stand with their arms outstretched while wearing heavy shackles. Strip searches were routine, oftentimes looking for that devil's mark. But it was really just another form of humiliation designed to break these people down. When the agony became unbearable, the accused would inevitably say whatever the torturers wanted to hear. The system turned victims into accomplices, creating that endless cycle of accusing other people to save yourself. And as the weeks ticked by, the paranoia reached an epic proportion. And no one, no matter how powerful, was safe.
- [58:42]
Kaelyn Moore
The witch hunt that began on February 29, 1692 with just three outcast women had morphed into something far more terrifying. The, quote, stereotypical witch. Think the elderly, the poor, the social pariah was not the only target anymore. One of the accused was this woman, 77 year old Mary Bradbury, the wife of a very high status person in the town of Salisbury. Her husband Captain Thomas Bradbury was related to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was one of the first English settlers in town. Yet five people, including Dr. Griggs maid Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr.
- [59:22]
Morgan Absher
There she is again.
- [59:23]
Kaelyn Moore
Claimed they saw Mary spector attack a 29 year old man named Timothy Swan. But Timothy had been struck with an unknown illness since June 23. But by the beginning of July, Mary was already in chains for this alleged crime. On August 5, 1692, about five months after Betty and Abigail first accused Tituba, the frenzy reached chilling new heights with the trial of 40ish year old Reverend George Burroughs. George was a Harvard educated minister. Yes, they did have Harvard back then. How did you know?
- [59:58]
Morgan Absher
That was my thought because Harvard was around back then.
- [60:02]
Kaelyn Moore
People get are like very surprised at how old Harvard is.
- [60:04]
Morgan Absher
Also people are like Morgan, don't you know the script? I'm like, no. I actually stayed away from Caitlin's parts for this one because I wanted to be surprised. And again, she's pulling these facts out of like her brain. I'm just like again our resident occult studies girl over here.
- [60:19]
Kaelyn Moore
Oh yeah, Harvard is older than calculus. They didn't even have certain forms of math when Harvard first opened.
- [60:24]
Morgan Absher
That's not so.
- [60:25]
Kaelyn Moore
George was this Harvard educated minister and he was also a former Puritan pastor of Salem Village. He was the father of seven and he had served at a number of parishes in New England. He barely survived an attack in casco, Maine in 1688. And normally, you know, this is like a sign of God's favor to the Puritans. But now he was accused of making a pact with the devil. One of his first accusers was and Putnam, 12 year old Ann Putnam Jr. At his trial on August 5, hundreds of people crowded into the courtroom, including some of the most important ministers and politicians in the colony. There about 30 witnesses depicted him as a bloodthirsty wizard who was the ringleader of New England's witches and Satan's chief lieutenant on earth is what they called him.
- [61:16]
Morgan Absher
Wow.
- [61:17]
Kaelyn Moore
Nine people claimed that they'd seen the small framed reverend perform superhuman acts of strength. Eight confessed witches claimed the devil had promised to make George a king in hell once his work on earth was done. His supposed victims proudly displayed bite marks on their arms that matched George's mouth. They said George had a reputation for being abusive to his previous two wives. But now these rumors had escalated into stories about how he had actually kept them in chains. Meanwhile, his accusers choked and writhed when they testified, as if George was attacking them right there in the Stands. At one point they had to pause the proceedings because his accusers said they saw ghosts of his former wives in the courtroom. And like many others who refused to confess, he was quickly convicted and executed just two weeks later. I mean, especially for a man like him, he's irreverent. He's not going to admit to being a witch.
- [62:15]
Morgan Absher
No.
- [62:15]
Kaelyn Moore
Some of them were much more comfortable with dying than with just saying anything to save their lives.
- [62:19]
Morgan Absher
Yeah.
- [62:20]
Kaelyn Moore
In his last moments, he gave an eloquent speech and recited the Lord's Prayer. Something that was said to be impossible for a soon to be king of hell.
- [62:28]
Morgan Absher
Yeah.
- [62:29]
Kaelyn Moore
To say the Lord's Prayer and not catch fire.
- [62:32]
Morgan Absher
I mean, at this point, a lot of people in attendance started freaking out. Yeah, oh my God, we've made a mistake.
- [62:38]
Kaelyn Moore
A lot of people felt like they had made a mistake. They had these twinges of doubt, but it was just too late. Yeah. George's death really sent shock waves throughout the colony. But instead of bringing all of this madness to an end, it just accelerated it.
- [62:52]
Morgan Absher
Which is also crazy cuz he was also Paris's like biggest competition.
- [62:58]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, there you go.
- [62:59]
Morgan Absher
Like it was all of these con, like accused people were. They were either fighting over land or fighting over a job. And it's like he was the previous minister and Paris had kind of taken over.
- [63:11]
Kaelyn Moore
No, a lot of it does boil down to the Paris and Putams.
- [63:14]
Morgan Absher
Yeah.
- [63:15]
Kaelyn Moore
Just the people that were on their hit lists were the ones to go because. Yeah. Also of the over 200 people accused, 20 were executed. And a lot of them had ties. August and September were a blood soaked blur of just trials and executions. By September 22, more than 50 people had confessed to practicing witchcraft and 19 of them had been executed. Two died in prison. Once accused, your fate was pretty much sealed, either with jail time or with death if you pleaded not guilty or refused to enter a plea at all. That only made things worse. Remember the elderly woman Martha Corey, who was one of the first to be accused by Ann Putnam while her 80 year old husband Giles was accused as well. After he defended her, he tried to exploit a legal loophole by refusing to enter a plea at all. Legally, this meant that he couldn't face trial. But of course the authorities just found a way around that. They resurrected an old English practice to make him answer the question, was he guilty or was he not guilty to do this? I mean, so many people have heard this story. This is like the famous, this one story of the witch trials. They piled heavy stones on his chest which slowly crushed the life out of him. But he still resisted. His last words, gasped through his broken and breaking ribs were reportedly more weight.
- [64:42]
Morgan Absher
Yeah.
- [64:43]
Kaelyn Moore
By the end of September, hundreds of people had been accused of witchcraft across more than a dozen villages and towns, even outside of Salem.
- [64:51]
Morgan Absher
And I will say, Giles, like this was a tactic he pursued, according to a lot of historians, because by not standing trial, that by not being formally executed, his assets didn't go to the court and the town. They actually then descended to his next of kin. So a lot of people speculate he kind of took one for his team, so to ensure his children still had the estate.
- [65:18]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah. Because if you were accused of witchcraft and executed, all your property just went to the state, which was really like the Corwins and the Putnams. An opposition seemed to be forming. He criticized how the trials were being handled by the local government. And in response, the governor actually silenced him by forcing him to pay an enormous fine. They didn't want to hear it. The pleas of a Baptist meant nothing to a puritan governor, and he had no intention of stopping the trials for anyone. But as more and more wealthy and politically connected people were accused, Moore spoke out against the trials. Which is funny because you kind of see that today, like, the more the rich people are affected, the more they're going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Actually, no, we have to stop. We have to put a stop to this. One of the leaders of this movement was a man named Increase Mather. He was the president of Harvard and the most influential minister in all of Massachusetts. He visited the overstuffed jails, and he spoke to the accused. They told him about the torture. Many of them recanted their earlier confessions. And so he urged Governor Phips to outlaw spectral evidence in the court courtroom. Unlike the Baptist minister, Increase was a close advisor to Governor Phipps and held a tremendous amount of political power. So he moved the needle more than other people. Other ministers and colonial leaders started speaking out as well, and their voices were growing bolder as the body count just continued to climb. But it was one final accusation that would prove to be the end of the trials. In October, someone made the fatal mistake of pointing at an accusing finger at Governor Phipps's own wife, Lady Mary Phipps.
- [66:56]
Morgan Absher
Of course he's going to care now.
- [66:58]
Kaelyn Moore
The governor had stood by his respected citizens were dragged to the gallows. But when the witch hunt came for his own family, that was a bridge too far. On October 29, almost five months since the first execution, he declared, miraculously, that the witch trials were officially Over.
- [67:17]
Morgan Absher
Just like that?
- [67:18]
Kaelyn Moore
Just like that. Done. Actually, we're done here.
- [67:19]
Morgan Absher
No more witches.
- [67:21]
Kaelyn Moore
Needless to say, Lady Mary never even saw the inside of a courtroom. And a lot of people were obviously pretty upset with this decision, including Lieutenant Governor William Staughton. But mostly, it seemed to bring the people of Salem a whole lot of relief, because finally, this witch hunt was over. In December of 1692, new laws were passed giving suspected witches more rights, and they eliminated the death penalty for the accused witches. In January of 1693, a newly created Superior Court took over all the cases still unfinished by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. And luckily, this new court banned spectral evidence. You could no longer have ghosts as your witness. So just saying that someone's spirit attacked you was no longer good enough evidence, thank God. And they worked really quickly to acquit as many witches as they could. In the first two weeks of January, they tried 22 people, and they still convicted three, which is wild because they had already confessed, basically. So they said, okay, you guys are still convicted. But the governor quickly put an indefinite pause on their executions, which was eventually made permanent. The court heard dozens more witchcraft cases over the next several months, but every single one just resulted in an acquittal or a pardon. In May of 1693, all remaining prisoners had been acquitted and pardoned. However, their freedom still came with a really cruel price. Those who couldn't pay their prison fees remained locked away even after their acquittals. A woman named Lydia Dustin died of unknown causes in her cell a month after being declared innocent, simply because she could not afford to pay her jailer's fee, which meant that she wasn't provided things like food or bedding. Tituba, the enslaved woman who confessed first, was sent to live with a new enslaver when Reverend Paris refused to pay for her release. And perhaps one of the most heartbreaking stories of all was that of the four or five year old Dorothy Good, Sarah Good's daughter, who was accused. During her interrogation, she did claim that her mother had given her a snake that acted as her familiar, which she said sucked blood from her finger. While her confession may have saved her own life, it ruined it too. Not only did her mother die at the gallows, but Dorothy was imprisoned for about nine months, which some believe did contribute to mental illness that she suffered from later in life. The aftermath of those who were not accused was a mix of guilt, denial, and desperate attempts at redemption. Some, like Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the magistrates, and later the 26 year old Ann Putnam Jr. Publicly confessed to their errors and begged for forgiveness. But others just refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Chief Justice William Staunton, soon to be the governor, never apologized publicly until the day he died. He insisted that he had done his duty by ferreting out witches and resented those who stopped him from finishing the job.
- [70:17]
Morgan Absher
Everyone would have died with you at the helm.
- [70:20]
Kaelyn Moore
Yep. For over two and a half centuries, the state of Massachusetts itself would refuse to acknowledge the harm that it had done. As soon as the trials were over, Governor Phipps had banned the publication of books that even mentioned the whole debacle. The historian Emerson Baker called it one of the first coverups in American history. They just didn't want word getting out about what they had done. So George Corwin was the guy who brought everyone to the gallows, which is behind a Walgreens in Salem. Now. It's just like this little plot of land.
- [70:48]
Narrator/Crime House Host
Wow.
- [70:49]
Kaelyn Moore
But he died very shortly after the trials occurred, and they were so afraid to bury him because the people of Salem were so upset that the witch trials had happened. They thought that if they buried him on his property, which was customary at the time, they would just bury people on their properties, that people would come dig him up and destroy his body so that he could not rest. So they hid him in the basement of his house for years.
- [71:11]
Morgan Absher
Ooh.
- [71:11]
Kaelyn Moore
Until they finally felt like it was quiet enough. They could just bury him, and he wouldn't be dug up. So his grave is still there. You can still see where he's buried in Salem. Wow. If you ever visit. It wasn't actually until the 1950s that the state began the long process to officially exonerate the victims. And the very last one, Elizabeth Johnson Jr. Wasn't officially cleared until 2022.
- [71:37]
Morgan Absher
That's insane.
- [71:39]
Kaelyn Moore
Three years ago.
- [71:40]
Morgan Absher
What is that? 300, 330 years, basically. That's insane.
- [71:46]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [71:47]
Morgan Absher
As you can imagine, there are a lot of questions that still remain, the biggest being, why the hell did this happen? How did a couple of teenage girls nearly burn an entire English colony to the ground? I mean, Ann Putnam Jr. She just went out with a vengeance.
- [72:06]
Kaelyn Moore
And Putnam, of the 20 people executed, she named 18 of them.
- [72:10]
Morgan Absher
I mean, I have a hard time imagining myself in colonial America, but I'm like, I would just, like, look at Anne. I'd be like, honestly, what An's doing is a little suspicious. An's the witch.
- [72:22]
Kaelyn Moore
I wonder if other teen girls thought that about an. If they were like, oh, she kind of does this, like, you know, I. Someone must have caught on to what she was doing.
- [72:31]
Morgan Absher
Yeah, I mean, you try taking away screen time from an addicted toddler, you're going to get the same reaction.
- [72:37]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah. Like.
- [72:39]
Morgan Absher
Yeah. And it's just like, how did kids act? Like, I mean, there's I, I could have been accused of being a witch based on my reactions.
- [72:46]
Kaelyn Moore
There's maybe even people watching this today. It's not just women, it's also men that feel like if they lived at the time, whether you were an outcast, whether people just didn't like you, if you spoke your mind too much, if you were ambitious, if there was anything that set you apart from the crowd, at least at the beginning because eventually it was just everyone. But like you would have been accused of being a witch.
- [73:05]
Morgan Absher
Yeah.
- [73:06]
Kaelyn Moore
So I think it was a lot of us.
- [73:08]
Morgan Absher
There's a lot of like actual theories about why this happened. There's a big one. The first kind of being fraud, at least on one occasion, a witness testified that she had heard an afflicted girl admit she lied for sport. Even some of the accused called out the girls for faking it. I mean, Ann accused a lot of her father's adversaries. I mean, it did seem very intentional and purposeful and maybe these kids weren't getting enough attention. As crazy as that, like sounds that that's a reason for all of this. But yeah, who knows? Another theory is the ergot poisoning that you briefly mentioned. Like that comes up a lot, but there has been a lot of modern science to kind of disprove that and demonstrate that they would have died actually and not gone on to live happy, healthy lives afterwards.
- [73:59]
Kaelyn Moore
One of the symptoms I think of ergot poisoning is you just develop really severe dementia almost immediately. So like Ann Putnam would have just gotten really bad dementia and died? Yeah, very quickly after that.
- [74:09]
Morgan Absher
She lived a long time.
- [74:10]
Kaelyn Moore
She lived a long time.
- [74:11]
Morgan Absher
Another big theory is mass conversion disorder. As we mentioned, the doctors who examined all these patients, like couldn't really find anything wrong with them. But when you look at how the accusations spread, it seemed to move from person to person, house to house. So some kind of speculate that this epidemic wasn't physical, it was psychological. Which is this mass conversion or mass hysteria as we kind of hear it. And it is a form of mental illness, basically psychological stress that manifests into physical symptoms and it can actually sometimes spread like the flu. And it might sound far fetched, but you can just google Leroy New York and you'll see something pretty creepy. Basically. In 2011 there was a high school Cheerleader that woke up from a nap and started making weird jerky movements, like muscle spasms that just wouldn't go away. About a month later, one of her friends woke up from a nap with odd symptoms of her own. She could barely speak. Stuttering, twitching, flailing. One by one, other girls on the cheer squad came down with similar twitches and spasms. The doctor ruled out any illness. Some girls were put on antibiotics, others received psychiatric treatment, and some simply recovered on their own. It's hard to say what did the trick. And scientists still don't really understand how this phenomenon works. But some historians have suggested that what happened in Salem was similar only in their situation. They assumed all this was due to witchcraft. And besides those ones, there's also a lot of historical theories.
- [75:47]
Kaelyn Moore
Yeah, historians have been studying the context that surrounded the Salem Wood trails for decades, and they've come up with a couple different potential causes. One is the social situation. Like we said, Salem was basically a powder keg of petty grudges, class warfare. You had Salem Village, which was poor rural farming area that was feuding oftentimes with Salem Town, which was a wealthy maritime hub. And then there were the family rivalries, especially between the Putnams and several other families in town who were locked in this epic battle over land and power. And at the center of all of this was Samuel Paris, father and uncle of the very first accusers. One of Samuel's biggest supporters, even when the people in town didn't like him when he first showed up, was the Putnam family. A number of the people that they accused were threats to Reverend Samuel's authority. Other targets were the Putnam family foes, like Reverend George Burroughs, the so called future King of Hell. Turns out nine years before George was accused, Captain John Putnam had George arrested for failing to repay a debt. And of course, there's the religious aspect of all of this. Without that, the witch trials would have never happened. Even though it's hard to point to one thing to say, the witch trials happened because of this. It was kind of this whole ecosystem of things that were happening at the same time. But they were hardcore zealots. They blamed Satan even if their food spoiled. And they also believed without a shadow of a doubt that witches were 100% real. In the midst of every awful tragedy happening at the time. War, famine, political upheaval. The idea of witches in their midst wasn't a very big leap. And from their perspective, any sign of witchcraft was a real test of their faith. If they could purge themselves of spiritual impurities like black magic, maybe it would prove something to God and specifically that they weren't as vile and corrupt as the rest of the world and that their souls could go up to heaven.
- [77:45]
Morgan Absher
All this being said, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to point to one concrete cause for the Salem witch trials. Obviously, that answer is very nuanced. It's got a little bit of everything involved here. Political rivalries, religion, social class, everything. And it's very clear that all of these factors created this toxic brew that really poisoned the minds of settlers and watered the soil with a lot of blood of innocent people. I mean, this was a cauldron of paranoia, and it twisted every sense of reality and turned neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. I mean, it was a dark day. And, you know, a lot of historians about how this really didn't teach Salem a lesson. Like when they looked back at this, there wasn't a lot they learned. They kind of went forward still believing in witchcraft and if anything, and this is a hot take from one historian on a documentary I watched, he said it just made them learn to believe young women less.
- [78:50]
Kaelyn Moore
Yikes. That hurts to hear.
- [78:53]
Morgan Absher
I know. But on that note, we are closing our case files on the Salem witch trials and moving on to our Missing Person of the week. Our Missing Person of the Week this week is Lovett L.J. moore. Lovett is described as a 33 year old black male, about 5 6, 140 pounds. 33 year old Lovett L.J. moore went missing from Sacramento, California. Surveillance footage shows him inside the Aisle 1 fuel station on Arena Boulevard. His family states that he is disabled, at risk, and blind. The Sacramento Police Department is still working to locate Lovett after more than a month. They've been in contact with his family and are working with local and regional partners to help find him. The Sacramento Police Department is asking for the community's assistance in locating lj. If you see Lovett or know his whereabouts, please contact the Sacramento Police Department immediately. They can be reached at 916808 5471. Thank you guys for joining us on another episode of Clues. If you have any other missing people we should highlight, please put them in the comments. That's really how we're finding a lot of these cases and getting the word out. And a lot of the other commenters are seeing them like it's really. It's spreading the news. So make sure you keep sending us those.
- [80:08]
Kaelyn Moore
No, thank you guys so much for that. And that is really all that we have for this episode of clues. Thank you for helping us understand unravel this case. I hope you all have a very safe and very spooky Halloween. And now we want to hear from you all your thoughts, theories, feedback, all of that's what makes this community so special.
- [80:24]
Morgan Absher
At Crime House, we really value your support. Again, share all those thoughts on social media. Maybe some other spooky Salem facts that we haven't touched on. I'm doing paranormal stuff over on two hot takes this season and if you've been to Salem and done and any of the tours or had an experience, I know Galen has had one. Yes, you stayed in a haunted Airbnb there.
- [80:46]
Kaelyn Moore
I stayed in a haunted Airbnb and I talked to a ghost while I was in there.
- [80:50]
Morgan Absher
No, it was great. If you have any of these experiences, please comment them on this one. I know this is a true crime channel, but we can get a little spooky and paranormal over here. But again, rate, review and follow clues. Help others discover our show. And if you're hungry for even more bonus content content, we've got you covered. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening, join our Crime House plus community on Apple Podcasts.
- [81:15]
Kaelyn Moore
And we're going to be back next week with another case to unravel. All right, we'll see you guys then. Bye bye.
- [81:23]
Narrator/Crime House Host
Follow Clues with Morgan Absher and Kayin Moore a Crime House original now. New episodes release every Wednesday. Again, that's Clues Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaylin Moore. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen. There's also a link to the show in this episode description that will take you there. And for early ad free access, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Happy Halloween. Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong is perfect for spooky season. Dive into the real events behind the world's most terrifying blockbusters and beyond. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes out every Monday.