Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem Read online

  Then Ann Putnam Jr. singled out three more witches:

  First was the spitfire spirit of little Dorcas Good, Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, who supposedly used inhuman strength to pinch Ann, to choke her, and to try to make her sign the Devil’s book.

  Next, Ann accused a Gospel Woman who was a member of the village church. Her name was Martha Cory. Gospel Women were reputed to be the most zealous church members of all. But even though Cory was a well-liked member of the Puritan religious elite, certain people still disapproved of her because she had once borne an illegitimate mulatto son. Now she had made a major mistake; she had told people she thought the witch accusations were nonsense.

  Martha was the second wife of an 80-year-old farmer named Giles Cory, and she had fought to keep him from going to watch the questioning of Good, Osborn, and Tituba by taking the saddle right off his horse. The cantankerous old man didn’t care—he went anyway.

  When church deacon Edward Putnam (Ann’s uncle) and courtroom scribe Ezekiel Cheevers went to Martha Cory’s house to question her, she said, “I know what you have come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch, but I am none. I cannot help people talking about me.” But Ann soon exclaimed that Martha was trying to make her bite off her own tongue, that an invisible yellow bird was sucking a spot between Martha’s fingers, and that she had seen a spectral man being roasted on a spit by a spectral Martha Cory!

  The third witch Ann incriminated was Elizabeth Proctor, who had been under suspicion for years because her grandmother was supposed to have been a witch.

  And who else would rake coals over the reputations of Martha Cory, Elizabeth Proctor, and even Elizabeth’s husband, a big burly tavern keeper named John Proctor? It was the Proctors’ very own 20-year-old servant, Mary Warren.

  Now why would she do that? Was she truly ill? Was she terrified by dark shadows in her chambers? Or was she was out for revenge against her hot-tempered master? Warren had been having (or faking) fits at earlier hearings and claimed that she was afflicted by the specters of Martha Cory and John Proctor. Proctor was so furious at his servant for incriminating innocent people that he had threatened to thrust hot tongs down her throat.

  From the very beginning, John had never believed that anyone was a witch, and he thought the self-proclaimed afflicted people should be sent to the whipping post. His attitude infuriated Betty’s father, Reverend Parris; Ann’s father, Thomas Putnam; and other people who lived with the afflicted. John and Elizabeth Proctor had five children together. Two months after the Proctors were arrested, one of their daughters and two of their sons were taken into custody, too.

  The next person to join the growing list of accusers was Ann Putnam Jr.’s 19-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis. After taking care of Ann for two weeks, Lewis started having fits herself. She was being choked! Blinded! Stuck with pins! Pulled by strong forces into a blazing fireplace! And Lewis said it was all the fault of Martha Cory, the very same Gospel Woman that Ann had already accused. Like Ann, Lewis claimed that she saw Martha Cory’s spirit roasting a spectral man on a spit inside her fireplace. When Lewis struck at Cory’s spirit with a stick, she suffered “grevious pane” herself, supposedly because the spirit was hitting her with an iron rod.

  And besides Martha Cory, wealthy Elizabeth Proctor was out to bewitch Lewis. too. Or so Lewis said. Could the girls have really seen such spirits? Or did they get their story from Cotton Mather’s scary book? (Mather had written that an 11-year-old boy said he was roasted on a spit by a witch back in 1688.) Or was Lewis remembering what she saw or heard about during the Indian wars when she used to live in Maine? The Wabanaki Indians had supposedly roasted captive settlers alive over slow fires then. Or was another kind of mischief afoot?

  On Saturday, March 19, the high sheriff of Essex County arrested Goodwife Martha Cory. When she was questioned two days later, Judge Hathorn grilled her harshly from the start, constantly accusing her of lying.

  Cory: Pray give me leave to go to prayer.

  Hathorn: We do not send for you to go to prayer, but to tell me why you hurt these [children].

  Cory: I am an innocent person: I never had anything to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am a Gospel Woman.

  At that, Ann Putnam Jr. cried out that Cory was no Gospel Woman, she was a Gospel Witch! By now, witnesses Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and her mother, Ann Putnam Sr., were screaming at the top of their lungs and writhing around in agony at Cory’s every move. If Cory so much as bit her lip, they bit their own lips and showed bite marks and scratches on their arms and wrists, too, saying that Cory’s invisible powers had made them do it. And if Cory so much as wrung her hands when they accused her, they cried out that she had bruised them by making them wring their own hands. A woman named Mrs. Pope threw a shoe at Cory, and it hit her in the head.

  Ann claimed she had seen Cory praying to the Devil one night outside her window. Then the afflicted girls said they could hear a drum calling all the witches to gather right outside of the meetinghouse. Even Martha’s own husband, Giles Cory, testified against her, blaming her for some very strange things.

  It seems that the previous week he had fetched an ox that was lost in the woods, but it promptly lay down in his yard and couldn’t get up. It just dragged its rear end as if it had been shot in the hip. Before long, though, it got up on its own. Then his cat fell ill all of a sudden and he thought it would die for sure, so his wife told him to knock it in the head. He would not! And just as suddenly, that cat got well. Besides, he said, his wife liked to stay up after he went to bed. He even saw her kneeling in front of the fireplace as if she was saying a prayer, but he heard not a word.

  Right about that time the children cried out that a yellow bird was sitting on Martha. When Magistrate Hathorn asked her about it, she started to laugh. Back to the Salem jail went Martha.

  On March 23, Edward Putnam (Ann Putnam Jr.’s uncle) and a farmer named Henry Keney entered a complaint against a 71-year-old grandmother named Rebecca Nurse, who was sick in bed. Everybody loved and respected Goodwife Nurse, who had raised and educated her eight children to become fine, upstanding adults. Besides, she and her husband, Francis, had always been faithful and loyal to one another and to their family and their religion—how could she possibly be a witch?

  Some people thought Rebecca Nurse’s mother was a witch, so maybe she was a likely target. But was this accusation really a way to take revenge against the Nurse family? Rebecca’s father had often battled with the Putnam family over their farm boundaries. Besides that, Rebecca’s husband had been Salem Town’s constable in the 1670s, and way back then, the Putnam family was rich. The Putnams had gotten into a big legal battle with the Porters, another wealthy family, over whose timberland was whose. As constable, Francis Nurse had arbitrated their dispute, and the Putnam family lost out in the end.

  In all, 10 of 18 depositions against Rebecca Nurse were signed by Putnams, but 2 of the other accusers had grudges against the Nurse family as well. Francis Nurse was a member of the Salem Village committee that voted against paying Reverend Parris’s salary in 1691 in order to drive him out of Salem. And then there was the Putnam family’s 19-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis. Of course she always sided with Ann Putnam Jr. when it came to accusing people of witchcraft. But Francis and Rebecca Nurse had enough money to hire another man to take their son’s place as a soldier in the Indian war. Though this practice was perfectly legal, Lewis, who was orphaned when her family died fighting in the Indian war, might have resented the Nurse family’s good luck.

  To make matters even worse for Rebecca and her relatives, both Ann Putnam Jr. and her mother claimed that Nurse’s two sisters, Sarah Cloyse and Mary Easty, were also witches (and lots of other accusers chimed in). So if the Putnam family, Reverend Parris, and Lewis were out for revenge, they were about to get it.

  Rebecca was taken from her sickbed to appear before the magistrates on March 24. “I can say before my Eternal F
ather I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency,” she testified. A sympathetic audience believed her until the victims claimed to see the Devil and a whole swarm of his familiars whispering in her ear. Next thing you know, they said they spotted Nurse’s specter as it zoomed past the meetinghouse, riding upon a pole behind the evil black man. And besides, every time she moved, the girls appeared to be bitten, pinched, bruised, or bent as if their backs were broken. “I cannot help it,” cried Goody Nurse. “The Devil may appear in my shape!” Off to the Boston jail she went.

  The cold winds of March were fading, but still the chilling accusations flew. During Reverend Parris’s church services on Sunday, April 10, Tituba’s husband, John Indian, was apparently bitten so hard by the spirit of Sarah Cloyse that he started to bleed. Services got even more interesting when Abigail Williams insisted she saw the specters of Cloyse, Nurse, Cory, and Good—and a shining white male angel who made all the witches tremble.

  Claims about the suspects were getting more and more out of hand. The next day in the meetinghouse, Abigail made Cloyse seem like she was an enormously important and ridiculously evil witch. According to Abigail, 40 witches had taken communion together in a pasture by drinking the afflicted girls’ own blood. And it was served by the two chief witches, none other than Sarah Cloyse and Sarah Good! After hearing such accusations, the real Sarah Cloyse fainted dead away. “Oh!” proclaimed the afflicted girls, “Her spirit has gone to prison to see her sister Nurse!”

  Then several girls blamed the spirits of Elizabeth and John Proctor for yanking up a spectator by her feet and for sitting upon the roof beams to harm the people below.

  Every day there were more terrible tales of torment. One of the newly accused witches was Martha Cory’s husband, Giles Cory. He was supposed to have used witchcraft against at least nine people. An angry woman swore that “the Specter of Giles Cory Murdered his first wife & would have murdered this wife too if she had not been a Witch…” Then two people testified that Cory participated in “the sacriment” at a gathering of 50 witches. Ann Putnam Jr. called Giles Cory “a dreadfull wizard” who “did torture me a great many times.” And whenever he shook his head at the accusers or waved his arms in frustration, all the victims shook their own heads and waved their own arms in apparent pain, crying out that Cory was hurting them grievously from all the way across the room.

  Ann’s father, Thomas Putnam, got in on the act by writing the judge to report that Ann had seen “a dead man in a Winding Sheet who told her that Giles Cory had Murdered him by Pressing him to Death with his Feet, and the Devil promised He should not be Hanged.”

  But something very surprising happened on April 19. John Proctor’s servant, Mary Warren, said that she had been lying when she accused people of being witches. She claimed that the other girls’ fits were faked and that they too had lied when they fingered people for witchcraft. The result? She was accused of being a witch herself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A TORRENT OF EVIL

  In late April, a deluge of new accusations spewed forth, spreading like the plague farther and farther away from Salem Village itself to 34 different towns. Between April 20 and April 30, 15 additional complaints were entered into the books, and between May 2 and June 6, 39 more people were charged with witchcraft.

  Everyone got into the act. Brothers accused brothers. Neighbors accused neighbors. Parents accused their children, and husbands accused their wives. Accusers claimed they had been scratched and bitten and maimed and pricked and disjointed and bloodied and blinded and deafened by invisible furies that no one else could see. Some poor souls said they had been dragged out of their own bedrooms and forced to soar over the treetops to a secret place where they were pressured to sign the Devil’s book of laws.

  And worst of all was this crippling fear: Seated directly beside you in your very own church might lurk even more witches cleverly disguised as pious worshipers of the Lord.

  The record books named 74 people who said they were attacked by witches, and at least 59 of that 74 were female. These so-called victims were as young as 9 years old and as old as 81 (plus another woman described in court records as being “ancient”). The afflicted accusers were not satisfied by pointing out just one witch either. Almost all of them made lots of complaints that got people arrested. For example, Parris’s niece, Abigail Williams, fingered 41 different witches for attacking her; Ann Putnam Jr. accused 53; her servant, Mercy Lewis, blamed 54; and a girl named Mary Walcott, who was Ann’s step-cousin, named an astonishing 69 witches.

  Besides all those victims, a number of Puritans suffering from fits were not officially listed. Some had confessed that they were witches themselves, some were babies too young to complain, and some were men who never accused any witches of making them sick. Since babies can’t fake their symptoms and the men didn’t claim they were bewitched, surely some of these victims were actually sick.

  All kinds of people were accused of witchcraft. There was a fortune-teller, a man who was a judge in the witch trials, and the governor’s own wife. There were three floor sweepers, a folk healer, a pirate, and a physician who practiced “counter-magic.” There were weavers and watermen, blacksmiths and bricklayers. And there were slaves, merchants, shoemakers, ministers, and servants. Plus two officers in the militia and plenty of farmers. Even the wealthiest couple in Salem Town did not escape arrest.

  Not all of the witches were human beings. A girl accused two dogs of belonging to the Devil and said they could cause fits by simply staring at their victims. They were hanged by the neck without benefit of trial. A third dog was bewitched in the town of Andover, supposedly by the magistrate’s own brother, who rode upon its back. This dog was executed, too. The same magistrate had refused to send anyone else to jail when more than 50 people were arrested at one time around May 14. For that reason, he was suspected of being a witch as well, so he and his wife and brother fled.

  And what did a witch look or act like? There was a hilly-faced man, a woman with “scragged” teeth, a woman who had catalepsy (which meant that she went into trances and became as rigid as a statue), a crooked-backed woman, and a woman who was “broken in her mind.” The age of a witch didn’t matter one whit. Those accused of witchcraft ranged from age 4 all the way up to age 90.

  Of course the jails were bursting at the seams, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. All of these horrible dungeons stank to high heaven. People were questioned mercilessly, and if they didn’t give the right answers they were tortured. If someone on the outside couldn’t bring food to the prisoners when they were hungry or bring them a blanket when they were freezing or bring them money to pay for their room and board, they were out of luck. What’s even worse, many prisoners had to leave their babies and young children at home without a bit of care from an adult or a single scrap of food to eat. And if any adults were still at home, how were they supposed to tend their crops alone, visit their loved ones at a far-off prison, or pay the jail fees—especially if they were poor in the first place?

  Despite the crowding, more and more people were funneled into jail every day.

  Take Bridget Bishop, for example. People had been calling her a witch for ten years, ever since an African slave named Wonn claimed that her specter had stolen some eggs, spooked a team of horses, and pinched him. Bishop ran a rowdy tavern in Salem Town that catered to sailors and other travelers who went there to spend the night, drink rum, and play the evil game of shuffleboard after the neighbors had gone to bed. Bishop was known for wearing a bright red bodice, and gossip had it that she was a prostitute, too. Worse yet, she was suspected of killing her first husband, had been beaten regularly by her second husband, and quarreled late into the night with her third.

  Bishop had never once set foot in Salem Village, but on April 18, she was placed under arrest because her specter had supposedly flown there to torture five Salem Village girls. She was questioned the very next day. First, the girls said she was a witch. Then the magistrate himself accuse
d her of bewitching her first husband to death. Bishop insisted that she knew nothing about such attacks, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in frustration. As usual, the five afflicted girls blamed Bishop’s specter when their own heads shook violently back and forth and their own eyes rolled wildly in response.

  “I am innocent,” Bishop testified. “I never saw these persons before, nor I never was in this place before. I have made no contract with the Devil. I never saw him in my life!” At that, Ann Putnam Jr. shouted out: “She calls the devil her God!”

  Recorder Ezekiel Cheevers noted that “two men told her to her face that she is taken in a plain lie. 5 afflicted persons do charge this woman to be the very woman that hurts them…all her actions have great influence upon the afflicted persons and they have been tortured by her.”

  As spring breezes warmed the air of Salem on May 10 and 11, a farmer named George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret were being questioned by the magistrates when Margaret confessed that she was a witch. Then she testified that her grandfather—and a reverend named George Burroughs—were both wizards. (By May, plenty of people knew that if you confessed, you would be treated much better than suspects who claimed they were innocent. If you named extra suspects, you even got to stay in a nicer part of the jail.)

  Now it just so happened that Margaret’s grandfather was a toothless, 80-year-old man with rheumatism who could only walk with the aid of two walking sticks. Yet despite his sorry physique, 12 screeching accusers exclaimed that Jacobs’s specter had beaten them. Lewis joined the fray: “He did torture me most cruelly by beating me with two sticks and almost put my bones out of joint, but I told him I would not write in his book if he would give me all the world.”

  This particular testimony made Jacobs laugh out loud in court. When the magistrate asked why, he said: “Because I am falsely accused. Your worships, do all of you think this is true?” he asked incredulously. “I am as innocent as your worships.”