New @ MPL: Welcome to Salem

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Welcome to Salem

I have the unfortunate feeling that my lifelong fascination with the Salem witch trails probably started when I saw the film Hocus Pocus, a somewhat corny, but nonetheless entertaining, family comedy about a trio of witches (played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and and Sarah Jessica Parker). Tried for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, they return to life three hundred years later -- and set about casting a spell over the town when they're not busy trying to figure out how to get around in the modern world.

It's a fun, funny little movie for the whole family -- which means it's a pretty far cry from the real witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem. The result of a string of accusations from (initially) two young girls, the Salem witch craze saw more than 200 people accused of witchcraft -- twenty of whom were executed. The colony would eventually admit that the trials had been a terrible mistake, and provided compensation for the families of the trials' victims, but the anger, accusations, and paranoia fueling the witch craze would never be erased.

The Salem witch trials of 1692 were hardly the first time people (usually women) had been accused and stood trial for witchcraft. Witch trials were a regular part of the "witchcraft craze" that spread through Europe from the 1300s through the 1600s, with tens of thousands of people hanged or burned at the stake.

In 1692, tensions had already arisen in the colony of Salem, Massachusetts, thanks to an influx of colonists that strained Salem's resources to the breaking point. Furthermore, Reverend Samuel Parris had become the village's first ordained minister three years ago, and all were not happy with the appointment -- many found him rigid, strict, and even greedy.

And then Reverend Parris's daughter (Elizabeth, age 9) and niece (Abigail Williams, age 11) began throwing fits. They screamed, wailed, contorted their bodies into odd positions, and threw things. A local doctor could find nothing physically wrong with them and eventually proclaimed the cause to be supernatural. Soon a third child -- Ann Putnam, age 11 -- began having similar symptoms. On February 29th, the girls were pressured by the local magistrates into revealing those were "attacking" them. The girls named three women: Tituba, a Carribean woman and slave to the Parris family, and two beggar women named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

Those who were poor or enslaved were easy targets. Tituba was particularly easy prey for the courts, as she had served as nanny to young Elizabeth and had told her folklore stories of omens and voodoo. All three women were interrogated by the Magistrates, but while both Good and Osborne maintained their innocence, Tituba -- most likely afraid of either her interrogators or of the Parrises -- confessed to using witchcraft. And all three women were arrested.

The first person to actually stand trial for witchcraft was Bridget Bishop, who was known throughout Salem as a promiscuous gossip. Although Bishop, like Good and Osborne, maintained her innocence to the end, she was eventually found guilty of witchcraft and, on June 10, became the first person to be hanged in the Salem witch trials.

Poor Bishop was only the first. Executions of "witches" continued throughout the summer, with five people hanged in July, five in August, and eight in September. One seventy-year-old man, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea of innocence or guilt, knowing that if he was tried and then convicted, his family would almost certainly lose any inheritance he might hope of leaving them. Corey was therefore pressed to death with massive rocks and stones, his interrogators hoping to coerce a plea or confession out of him. Corey is reported to have said nothing but, "More weight" -- entreating his executioners to add more rocks to the load. (Contrary to popular belief, none of those executed for witchcraft in Salem were ever burned at the stake.)

Massachusetts governor Phipps would eventually step in (after Phipps's own wife had been questioned about witchcraft), ending further arrests and releasing many of those who had already been accused and imprisoned. By 1693, all those who were in prison on charges of witchcraft had been pardoned and released. But for Corey, Bishop, Good, and Osborne (who died in prison) -- as well as the rest of the falsely-accused "witches" of Salem -- the end to the witch-trials hysteria came too late.

In 1976, Professor Linnda R. Caporael published an article with an intriguing hypothesis for the initial cause of the witch trials. Muscle spasms, delusions, and hallucinations are all symptoms of food that has been contaminated by the fungus ergot. Had Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris consumed rye or wheat that had been affected by the fungus -- a distinct possibility, given the warm and damp climate of Salem Village -- their symptoms and paranoia could have been the trigger leading them to make their accusations. It's a fascinating theory -- and one that more and more scientists and historians are beginning to suspect to be accurate.

Nowadays, the Salem Witch Trials have become such a part of America's cultural imagination that thoughts of the trial conjure up funny movies and Halloween festivals. Salem itself has even made itself a tourist attraction, not just with history museums but with ghost tours, magic shops, and haunted houses open year-round. But whatever the cause of the Salem witch trials, one thing remains certain: this dark -- and darkly fascinating -- period in America's early history was certainly no fairy tale. It serves, instead, as a harsh and grim cautionary tale about the dangers of suspicion and mass hysteria -- making it a story worth learning.