Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem

by Rosalyn Schanzer

  Sarah Churchill, George Jacobs’s maidservant, had already confessed to being a witch to save her own self. In her desire to be let off the hook, she became Jacobs’s strongest accuser. And maybe she had another reason, too. When she had told Jacobs earlier that fits were keeping her from doing any work, he had called her a “bitch witch.” Here’s what else he said at his hearing:

  George Jacobs: You tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard! I have done no harm. The devil can go in any shape.

  Magistrate: Not without [your] consent. Why do you not pray in your family?

  Jacobs: I cannot read. Burn me or hang me I will stand in the truth of Christ.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE KING OF HELL

  In the little northern frontier town of Wells, Maine, most everybody liked and respected their minister, a short, strong, dark-haired man named George Burroughs with a history of performing heroic deeds for his neighbors. During just the previous summer, for example, he had helped his fellow citizens escape from Indian attacks when warriors snuck up to three nearby towns and laid them all to waste. One of Burroughs’s admirers called him “self-denying, generous, and public spirited.” Another who knew him well wrote that “he was an able, intelligent, true-minded man; sincere, humble in spirit, devoted as a minister, and generous as a citizen.” Also acknowledged as an excellent athlete and a scholar, Burroughs willingly ministered to people of every faith.

  Reverend Burroughs had not spent his entire life in Maine. During the early 1680s, he had served two years as the minister of Salem Village and even lived in the same house now occupied by Reverend Parris. Burroughs had headed for Maine after two grave misfortunes befell him in Salem: first, his wife died, and then he got into a bitter dispute with the Putnam family over a debt he owed for her funeral expenses. He had no money because he had never received his salary.

  Though it had been ten long years since he had lived in Salem Village, Burroughs was certainly not forgotten, because on April 20, 1692, Thomas Putnam’s daughter, Ann, swore that she had seen the apparition of a minister. Ann claimed she had been grievously afraid, crying, “Oh dreadful! dreadful! Here is a minister! Are Ministers witches too? What is your name? He told me that his name was George Burroughs.” And the next evening, Reverend Parris’s niece Abigail Williams also reported that former minister Burroughs was a wizard!

  Two weeks later Burroughs was eating dinner with his family up in Maine, when he heard a ruckus outside his door. In marched Maine’s field marshal, Jonathan Partridge, along with a small band of soldiers. Had they come to help the citizens of Wells fight off Indian attacks? Certainly not! They had come to arrest Burroughs, and arrest him they did. Despite the fact that his neighbors looked up to him as a friend and counselor, Burroughs was immediately escorted all the way down to Salem Town, where he was “Suspected to have Confederacy with the devil.”

  Even in Salem, where everyone suspected everyone else of witchcraft, people argued fervently about Burroughs’s guilt or innocence. One frontier militia leader said he was “a Choice Child of god, and God would Clear up his Innocency.” Others thought he was a wife-beater. And yet another swore he had an Evil Eye and “he was the Cheife of all the persons accused for witchcraft or the Ring Leader of them.”

  By July, a 15-year-old girl from Andover named Mary Lacy Jr., who had confessed that she was a witch, would claim that she had flown to a secret communion where 77 witches were drinking blood and eating blood-colored bread. It was there that she saw a woman named Martha Carrier, also from Andover, who was supposed to have killed 13 people and was now Hell’s own Queen. And it was there, too, that she saw the Devil make a promise: Reverend George Burroughs would soon be crowned the King of Hell.

  Burroughs was examined several times in front of enormous crowds between the day of his first witchcraft investigation on May 9 and his final official trial in Salem Town on August 5. At least 30 accusers would pile up a mountain of sworn testimony against him. What did they say? Some truly amazing things.

  Ann Putnam Jr. said, “He told me he had had three wives: and that he had bewitched the first Two of them to death: and he bewitched a great many soldiers to death at the eastward.” These soldiers had died three or four years earlier during battles they lost against the Indians, and some of Burroughs’s detractors insisted that he was in cahoots with the enemy French and Indian soldiers. Since Puritans thought the Indians were devils, they believed that Burroughs must be in cahoots with the Devil, too. Then Ann said, “He told me that he was above a witch, he was a conjurer.” She embellished her story even more later on:

  …immediately there appeared to me the form of Two [dead] women in winding sheets; and they turned their faces towards Mr. Burroughs and looked very red and angry and told him that he had been a cruel man to them and that their blood did cry for vengeance. Then the Two women turned their faces towards me and looked as pale as a white wall and told me that they were Mr. Burroughs’ first Two wives and that he had murdered them: and one told me that he stabbed her under the left Arm and put a piece of sealing wax on the wound and she pulled aside the winding sheet and showed me the place.

  Next, a woman named Mary Toothaker testified that the minister had ordered a convention of 305 witches to pull down the Kingdom of Christ and set up the Kingdom of Satan. Before long, confessed witch after confessed witch claimed that they had been baptized in the name of the Devil by the King of Hell himself, Reverend George Burroughs.

  Eighteen-year-old Susannah Sheldon, another refugee from the Indian war on the Maine frontier, said Burroughs threatened that if she wouldn’t sign the Devil’s book, he would tear her to pieces, starve her to death, and choke her until her vittles gave out. And to scare her even more, he said he killed three children on the frontier, smothered and choked two of his wives to death (their ghosts again agreed), and murdered two of his own children.

  Though Burroughs was a short, slender man, some witnesses testified that he possessed superhuman strength that could only come from the Devil. Why, he could put two fingers in the bung holes of enormous barrels of molasses or cider or meat and lift them out of a canoe all by himself! He could put one finger into the seven-foot-long muzzle of a heavy fowling gun and hold the weapon straight out in front of him at arm’s length. He could run faster than any horse. He could turn into a gray cat. And a man named Thomas Ruck swore that Burroughs “could tell his thoughts.”

  But who made the most stunning accusations in the entire case? It was none other than Ann Putnam Jr.’s servant, Mercy Lewis. Unlike most of the young accusers, Lewis knew Burroughs—not from the time he lived in Salem Village, but from the time he spent as the minister of Falmouth, Maine, her hometown.

  When Lewis was three years old, Falmouth had been attacked and burned to cinders by Indians, and she and the few members of her family who were still alive had escaped to an island in Casco Bay with Reverend Burroughs’s help. Much later, when she was 16 years old, Lewis’s parents were killed (possibly right before her eyes) in another battle with the Indians, and she apparently became a servant in Burroughs’s household for a short while after that.

  Burroughs had escaped from every single Indian attack on the frontier without a scratch. Did Lewis believe he was an ally of the Indians? She thought the Indians were devils, and she certainly wanted to get him in trouble, because this is what she swore under oath on April 3:

  On the evening of May 7, before his first hearing had even begun, she had seen the spirit of Burroughs, whom she knew very well. This apparition tortured her horribly over and over again, urging her to sign her name in a mysterious book that he kept in his study. He said he had several books she had never seen, and he could use this one to raise the Devil himself. He told Lewis that the Devil was his servant and said he had even commanded the Devil to bewitch several other teenage girls.

  Again he tortured Lewis, threatening to kill her if she told anybody what he had just said and ordering her once more to sign her name in the
Devil’s book. Though he was shaking her all to pieces, she cried that she would never write in that book even if he killed her.

  Then she told a rapt audience what happened two days later:

  Mr. Burroughs carried me up to an exceedingly high mountain and showed me all the Kingdoms of the earth and told me he would give them all to me if I would write in his book, and if I would not he would throw me down and break my neck: but I told him they were not his to give and I would not write if he throwed me down on 100 pitchforks.

  Upon hearing this testimony, the hideous clamor and screeching of the afflicted girls became so intense that they were removed from the courtroom for their own safety.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OYER & TERMINR

  On May 14, Royal Governor of Massachusetts William Phips sailed home to Boston after a long visit to London, only to discover that throngs of people were rotting in jail, awaiting their formal trials for witchcraft. So far, nobody in Massachusetts had set up an official court of law that could sentence witchcraft suspects to death. As the King of England’s royal representative in America, Governor Phips took immediate action. He asked his council to nominate some new judges so that he could establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer.* Only then could the fates of all those prisoners be determined.

  Governor Phips approved the nominations right away and officially established the court in Boston on the hot, steamy afternoon of May 27. Not one of the judges was schooled in the law. The few trained lawyers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had studied law in England, and most of them were so frustrated by the legal process in America that they went back home. The first lawyer trained in America wouldn’t even be admitted to study law at Harvard until October 18, 1692, almost five months away. What’s more, even back in England, men with very little education sometimes served as justices. English people (including American colonists) accused of criminal acts were not allowed to have a lawyer to defend them in a serious criminal trial, and neither were the accused witches.

  The court’s new chief justice was a thin-faced Harvard graduate and politician from Dorchester who had been educated to become a minister. Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, a wealthy, 61-year-old bachelor with long white hair, had inherited a lot of land and had often served as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s chief justice between 1674 and 1686. A staunch Puritan, Stoughton was absolutely unbending about his belief in witchcraft.

  These were the other judges:

  Samuel Sewall—Harvard graduate from Boston, educated for the ministry; merchant and militia officer in the Second Indian War

  Nathaniel Saltonstall—Harvard graduate and wealthy gentleman from Haverhill; active militia officer for Essex County during the Second Indian War; justice of the peace

  Peter Sergeant—Wealthy Boston gentleman without a profession

  Wait-Still Winthrop—Boston physician and active militia leader in the Second Indian War; attended Harvard but did not graduate

  Jonathan Corwin—Wealthy merchant and military advisor from Salem; a magistrate during the preliminary witchcraft investigations

  Bartholomew Gedney—Owner of a wharf and shipyard in Salem Town, mills north of Casco Bay, and land in Maine; former justice of the peace; magistrate who had occasionally acted as an interrogator during the preliminary witchcraft investigations

  John Hathorn—Salem magistrate who often acted as an interrogator during the preliminary witchcraft investigations; military advisor during the Second Indian War

  John Richards—Former servant from Boston who worked his way up to become a wealthy merchant and a major in the militia during the Second Indian War

  Back before this new court was formed, almost every single person who had landed in jail had been locked up because of evidence from the Invisible World of spirits. The legal term for this was “spectral evidence,” which meant evidence related to supernatural beings that were invisible to everybody except the afflicted accusers. Hardly a scrap of evidence had come from the Natural World of real things that everyone could touch and see.

  So how would the judges of the new Court of Oyer and Terminer conduct their trials? Would they do anything differently this time around and get rid of spectral evidence? At Sabbath services in Boston on May 29, three of the new judges listened attentively as their pastor, Samuel Willard, compared the Devil to a roaring lion who could send forth innumerable other devils to devour the innocent. His witches were so cruel and bloody, said the pastor, that it was the judges’ duty to use every weapon in the book—including spectral evidence—to see that they were hanged.

  To be sure, a number of people had always been leery about the use of spectral evidence in court, and a few brave souls were not afraid to say so out loud. But when the new court was formed, these skeptics were in the minority. The majority still agreed with Willard; to them, spectral evidence provided unvarnished proof that someone was a witch.

  And another circumstance did not bode well for the accused witches. Several of the judges had served together on the Maine frontier as councillors or officers during the Second Indian War. The English were losing the war in a big way, often because of the judges’ own blunders—blunders that had gotten people killed. But instead of taking the blame, they attributed their defeats to “the awfull Frowne of God,” for it was God who had loosened the Devil’s chains to let him work his evil deeds upon New Englanders as a punishment for their sins. Therefore all those lost battles—and even the attacks by witches—must have been the fault of sinners in their midst, not the fault of the judges’ military errors. Why? If the Puritans had behaved themselves, God would have been on their side, the war would have been won, and witchcraft would never have erupted. To the judges, it apparently made sense to blame the lost battles on witches, who were the Devil’s representatives in the Natural World.

  It was June 2, 1692, and the time to begin the first formal trial for witchcraft had arrived at last. The first person to be tried was Bridget Bishop, the keeper of Salem Town’s rowdy tavern.

  Bishop seemed doomed from the start. As she was led from the jail toward the court, she glanced over at an empty church just as something came crashing down inside its walls. The spectators were sure that her spirit had caused all the trouble. This was not a good sign.

  The moment Bishop arrived in court and pled innocent, another torrent of accusations poured forth—and nothing had changed from the previous hearings because every single bit of the evidence against her was spectral. One man claimed that Bishop had bewitched his child; he said the boy had been stupefied for 12 years. Another man said that 14 years earlier Bishop had hired him to do some work and paid him well, but by the time he got 15 or 20 yards away from her house, he realized that the money had vanished out of his pocket. Not long after that, the man saw her again, and his wagon “plumped or sunk down into a hole upon plain ground” and his wagon wheel fell off. He even testified that Bishop’s spirit had been hopping around on his bed wearing a black cape and hat.

  A woman who had given Bishop a tongue lashing for stealing her spoon ten years earlier was convinced that Bishop’s specter was trying to drown her. Crazed with fear, she had lost her sanity. Bishop’s spirit had supposedly snatched a girl from her spinning wheel and tried to drown her, too. And some people even claimed to have met ghosts who said they were killed when Bishop stared at them with her evil “eye beams.” One field hand said he saw Bishop’s spirit stealing eggs again and then stared in wonder as she transformed herself into a cat.

  Two workers who had repaired Bishop’s house testified that they had found some old stuffed dolls called poppits hidden inside a wall. Nobody really knew who owned them, but they were made out of rags and boar bristles, and lots of headless pins had been stuck into them. This was bad news because people had also found pins stuck into the accusers’ skin right there in the courtroom. Could Bishop’s spirit have put pins into the dolls in her house in order to torture her victims from afar?

  But here’s the story that sealed her f
ate. According to Bishop’s neighbor, a hairy, black thing with the face of a man, the body of a monkey, and the feet of a rooster jumped into his window carrying a message from the Devil, who was out to kill him. The neighbor struck at this monster with a stick, but it was like striking thin air. The monster flew out of the window and vanished, so the neighbor ran outside, and there was Bishop walking toward her orchard next door. Some strange force made it impossible for him to move a single step in her direction, and at last he turned around to shut his door. Just then, the beast flew toward him yet again, sprang back, and then flew over an apple tree, flinging dust with its feet against his stomach and scattering apples as it sped away. The man was so terrified that he couldn’t even speak for three days.

  Apparently only one of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, believed that Bishop was innocent. Chief Justice Stoughton and the rest of the men believed every single detail in this mountain of spectral evidence. So the end had come for Bridget Bishop. She was found guilty and condemned to death.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE END IS NEAR

  On the morning of June 10, Bishop was loaded into a cart surrounded by guards and officers on horseback and was driven away from the Salem Town Prison down Prison Lane. The procession then headed toward Salem Village, past crowds of gawking onlookers, and after crossing a bridge, it wound its way to the top of a ledge above a salt marsh. As Bishop continued to proclaim her innocence, guards wrapped her skirt around her feet and tied it tightly at the bottom. Then Essex County’s high sheriff, George Corwin, made her stand halfway up a ladder, where she was blindfolded and a noose was placed round her neck. Corwin kicked the ladder out from under her, and the noose jerked tight! She was hanged by the neck until dead.