The lingering mystery at the center of the Salem Witch Trials
Forget 'The Crucible' for a moment.
By the end of the Salem Witch Trials, a rural community of farmers had executed 19 people by hanging, let five perish in jail and crushed one man to death with heavy stones.
The case would go on to become a cautionary tale about mass hysteria, at once a remnant of the distant past and a foreshadowing of later periods of societal irrationality like the Red Scare and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. And yet, 328 years after a small religious community in Massachusetts watched their friends and neighbors step to the gallows, historians still don’t have a clear understanding of the behavior of the young girls who incited all the madness.
“Witchcraft” was a common allegation at the time — levied in personal feuds about matters as inconsequential as a cow grazing outside its owners’ property — meant to intimidate neighborhood rivals into backing down. Different Puritans had different degrees of faith in the idea, with some subscribing to the idea that Satan could take human form and others seemingly understanding the value of using “witchcraft” as a political allegation.
Against that backdrop, some time in February 1692, the daughter of the local pastor in Salem started behaving strangely.
Elizabeth Parris, nine years old, began tormenting her parents by hiding under furniture, complaining of a fever, barking like a dog and screaming in pain, according to existing reports. Parris also contorted her body into “strange positions” and reacted if she had been “physically hurt,” though more specific details about the exact movements are elusive.
Soon, Parris’ cousin, Abigail Williams (played by Winona Ryder in The Crucible) started mimicking Parris’ behavior delving into “uncontrollable outbursts of screaming.” When Parris’ father consulted a local doctor, William Griggs, the physician proclaimed that the girls had been “afflicted” by an “evil hand,” complaining of bites and pinches. Via The New Yorker:
Abigail and Betty launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches.” Their bodies shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid. They interrupted sermons and fell into trances. Neither appeared to have time for prayer, though until January both had been perfectly well behaved and well mannered. At night they slept like babies.
This is the mystery that lingers more than three centuries later: Were Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams simply bored kids trying to occupy themselves by scaring their parents? Were they dealing with a mental illness? Or, was it something else?
“It’s hard to make that diagnosis 300 years in the past without the person right in front of you,” Emerson Baker, a history professor at Salem State University, told the Boston Globe in 2017.
A recent body of research suggests the girls might have been poisoned by a fungus in their food.
Ergotism is a sickness induced by the ingestion of bad grains, typically rye. A severe winter and damp spring months, as occurred in Salem in 1691 and early 1692, according to findings cited in Encyclopedia Britannica, creates conditions for the ergot sclerotia fungus, a growth that would have existed on grain-stalks and made its way onto early American dinner plates.
The poisoning displays itself in the form of “severe convulsions, muscle spasms, delusions, the sensation of crawling under the skin, and, in extreme cases gangrene of the extremities.”
A diagnosis of witchcraft from a community doctor who never could have known about ergotism — medical treatments in the 1600s had not evolved much since the Middle Ages — would have spread rapidly through the community.
Pressed to explain the source of bewitchment, Parris and Williams pointed to three older women who lived outside the traditional social norms in Salem: Tituba, who worked as a slave in the Parris household, Sarah Good, an itinerant, and Sarah Osborne, who had not attended church in three years and was tied up in litigation with the prominent Putnam family.
From there, accusations ran rampant.
One man accused another of witchcraft, saying he was the victim of demonic possession because of a bloody nose that started during a disagreement. Authorities arrested the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, leaving her incarcerated in a jail cell for months. Rebecca Nurse, a 71-year-old upstanding landowner, was hanged after an allegation that she had acted inappropriately during an argument over trespassing pigs.
If ergotism was indeed the cause of the illness that sparked strange behavior in Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, it was only a small factor in the events to come. Centuries later, scholars cite a combination of food shortages, a recent smallpox outbreak and fear of Native Americans as stressors that contributed to the multiple mass hangings carried out based on rumors and spectral evidence.
For Puritans in 1692, it was just easier to understand the difficulty of life if the devil was to blame. As Stacy Schiff put it in the New Yorker:
Witchcraft was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a parsonage. The Devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that New Englanders were the chosen people.
Fear, grave robbery and the New England Vampire Panic
recommended reading
The Lottery: Shirley’s Jackson’s classic short story about horror in a small town, (in)famous for the reactions it provoked in readers back in 1948. The story feels like it could have been written yesterday. Read it online, or listen to a podcast reading. You won’t forget it. [@NewYorker]
The Haunting of 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey: "A family bought their dream house. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it." [@reeveswiedeman]
I Bought a Witches’ Prison: What it’s like to live on a property that was once home to a medieval jail where accused heretics were burned alive. [@jeffmaysh]
What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy: Multiple cheerleaders from the same high school start experiencing body spasms. Then it started to spread, with 18 girls, boys and an older woman simultaneously dealing with an inexplicable stutter and body twitching. [@susandominus]
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