Selects: Salem Witchcraft Trials: More Bonkers Than You Know

0:01 Happy Samhain, everybody. You know, across the world, people are celebrating the day of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest. And since you can expect all the usual ghosts and jack-o'-lanterns and serial killers and the like today, for this week's special Halloween Select, I decided to go even darker with a genuine American horror story of the worst variety, the kind that really happened. Well, witchcraft always gets top billing when we talk about the Salem witchcraft trials, which makes sense because it's right there in the name. But when we dig just a little deeper, we find an isolated village that turned on itself and that the executions that took place were murder, plain and simple. It's one of the

0:48 more chilling chapters in American history, and this 2021 episode is one of our better ones. I hope you enjoy it. and that it doesn't accidentally tear the veil between living and dead where you happen to be listening to it. If so, I'm sorry in advance for the terrible fate that will befall you.

1:11 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:21 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry over here lurking around like a bit of a ghoul because it is the Halloween season after all. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

1:35 That's right. Spooky witch trials.

1:39 Yeah, yeah, it is. It's really nice to like have stuff like this that you can be removed from by a few hundred years. And, you know, it just kind of evokes that Halloween spirit or whatever. But, Chuck, I have found just in recently researching this, if you put yourself into the position of the people who are, like, walking to the gallows and, like, think about how nuts all this was, it is exponentially scarier on a much more existential level. It goes beyond, like, Halloween spooky to this is a genuinely frightening event in the history of America.

2:14 No kidding.

2:15 I mean, like, it was messed up. In every way, shape, or form.

2:21 So I take it you never read The Crucible.

2:23 I did read The Crucible, but I read it in the context. And that didn't do it? No, it really didn't. Because I don't know if it was me. Maybe I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared to accept it on that level. Who knows? But no, it was like imagining myself in the shoes of the people who are going to die that got me researching this. Yeah.

2:46 Yeah. That's dark.

2:48 No shade, though, on Arthur Miller. He was great, and his play was great, and it was very timely for the time.

2:55 Yeah. I mean, there have been so many kind of movie adaptations and TV movie adaptations about this time, and I'm still waiting for sort of the one great one that's not The Crucible.

3:09 Well, I think part of the reason why there hasn't been that great one yet is because historians are still actively competing, explaining just what exactly happened in Salem. It's such an anomaly. Even among Puritans, even among people who believe there was such a thing as witchcraft and even executed witches, this was a genuine anomaly, at least as far as American history goes. And I think because they don't understand it fully, it's difficult to really get the point across as well, you know?

3:39 I don't know, man. I think you could make a great movie. Like, look at The Witch.

3:44 That.

3:44 That danced around it so well. Like you just need a movie like that, but based on this.

3:49 Well, why don't we just say The Witch then is all we need.

3:53 Well, because it wasn't about the Salem witch trials.

3:55 But, I mean, it was so analogous to it and took place at the same time. You know, I mean, just pretend like there's a trial scene that they cut out.

4:03 Okay.

4:04 And there actually is, remember.

4:05 And a lot of other people.

4:07 They drag the father into court, basically, and excommunicate him. So there is almost like a witch trial scene right there.

4:16 Yeah, that's true. I forgot about that for 60 seconds.

4:19 The witch is the Salem witch trial movie we've always needed.

4:24 That's right.

4:25 So I'm glad we resolved that. You must feel very satisfied now.

4:29 Yeah, I completely disagree, but I'm just moving on.

4:32 So everybody knows about the Salem witch trials, right? But I think because, you know, we learn about it in American history. You hear about it as Halloween stories, all of that kind of stuff. But like I said, I mean, we really genuinely don't understand what happened. And that's despite the fact that it is really well documented because a lot of the stuff took place in the courts. And they wrote a lot of stuff down. But we only have, like, official primary documents that were written by people who were aware that these were public documents rather than, say, a trove of private journals and letters. The Puritans didn't do that that much. And so we don't have, like, kind of the underneath the official line explanation for what happened. Well, yeah.

5:15 And if people are confused by what we mean there, you know, there were other witches in other places in the young America. There were other witch trials in centuries previous in other countries. And there were mild panics and stuff. But Salem, like, collectively lost their mind for a short period of time. And that's what people still don't get.

5:41 They're like, why did that happen only there to this scope and this degree? And, you know, people have looked at various biological reasons and things like that.

5:52 But I don't know.

5:53 I think it was just sort of one of those weird things that could only happen like at one place and one time.

6:00 Yeah, exactly. And there was actually a guy who wrote a book in 1982 named John Demos. And he said, not only can it happen like under these very specific circumstances, Here are the circumstances that could happen. And his book wasn't just about Salem. It mentioned Salem. It was about like witchcraft trials and panics and accusations in New England in general. And he basically said that when a town starts out really small and it's like a colonial town, they're living like on the razor's edge of existence. A lot of them don't really know each other. They're dying.

6:35 So there's a big population turnover as newcomers come in. And there's just not enough familiarity to say, I think you're a witch to accuse your neighbor of something like that. But then after they settle in a little while and maybe there's like some boredom and everybody gets to know each other and you have grudges, but you're still living in a really small area, that's when the witchcraft accusations can really take place. And Salem seems to have kind of followed that pattern too, that these witchcraft accusations like really took hold at a time where The colony was under tons of stress. People knew each other, had had decades-long rivalries and land disputes, and they lived still in a very small little village. And they were basically crawling

7:17 all over one another and saw one another, and you could not get away from people you didn't like.

7:22 Yeah, and this is especially true in Salem. There was Salem Village and Salem Town. And like you said, they were stacked on each other, and there were a lot of, Like, hey, your cow can't graze over this imaginary line because that's my land and you're not even allowed to build a fence over there. Like kind of common land disputes that have happened throughout history. But in Salem, they were just, they were described as a very quarrelsome people. They fought and argued a lot, kind of more so than it seems like even other Puritans in other parts of the country.

8:01 Yeah.

8:01 And the Puritans in general were deeply litigious. They took each other to court at the drop of a hat, at the drop of a hat with a belt buckle on it. But they had like the way that they supported that, that kind of litigiousness was to say, most of the courts would be like, you need to go handle this privately. And then this kind of secondary mediation kind of thing would come in and there'd be negotiations.

8:27 And then the dispute would be resolved. But the first thing that they would do is drag one another into court. That was how they would get one another's attention.

8:36 Yeah, and so this is sort of the backdrop of what's going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and particularly in Salem Village and Salem Town, which I think Salem Village today is Danvers.

8:49 That's right.

8:50 And then Salem Town is Salem.

8:52 That's right.

8:54 Still around and still has spooky connotations.

8:56 Yeah, and Danvers is where the state asylum was located. That was the setting for one of the greatest horror films of all time, Session 9.

9:05 Oh, that's right. Oh, man. That's a movie I don't even know if I want to see again.

9:10 It's so good. I saw it a year or two ago, and it's still just as good.

9:13 It's great. All right, so the Puritans were in control.

9:17 I guess the backdrop of this was there were full-on human holocausts in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. with their witch crazes, and things got really out of hand over there. But by the time folks got over here, they were mainly just arguing a lot. And there were, you know, there was a small witch panic in Connecticut.

9:39 Not small if you were one of the people accused, but it didn't quite get out of hand, certainly not like it did in Europe in centuries previous.

9:46 Yeah, and I saw an explanation. I want to give a shout out to a couple of sites, but one I got a lot of info from is called The Historic Present. And they were pointing out that, like, for the most part, yes, people generally agreed that there were such things as witches. And yes, you would accuse your neighbor of witchcraft. But it was kind of like it was a way of like getting your neighbor's attention. Like I'm serious about this. I'm publicly accusing you of being a witch. Let's talk about your cow grazing on my land.

10:16 Yeah.

10:16 You know? And that was another thing that made Salem so anomalous is it just kept going and going through these steps of like the court and trial and then finally executions. And it just got out of hand, basically. Right.

10:31 So the Puritans are in control in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They've got an iron fist on ruling. They don't like basically anybody who is not a Puritan. It seems like most of the Puritans didn't even like each other. But they certainly didn't like Quakers. They didn't like Catholics. And they did all they could to really establish themselves as the ones in charge and did so well.

10:55 Yeah, it depends on who you're talking about, though. There were some Puritans who were deeply conservative religious leaders like Increase Mather who wanted to just completely secure 100% Puritan control. But there was also like a real thread through the Puritan leadership that was willing to like give like voting rights and– the ability to be elected into office to non-Puritans who lived in town. And they had kind of a proto-democracy in a lot of ways. So like the Puritans in general, yes, were deeply intolerant of Quakers and Catholics, and they actually tortured Quakers who were unrepentant. But they also did have, they weren't just like this, the band of like theocratic thugs and that they're often painted as.

11:44 There's just more nuance to it than that. But yes, there were plenty who were like, no, we just need total puritanical control over this whole colony. Yeah.

11:53 And, you know, as we'll see, once the witch trials were conducted, you know, I said that Salem collectively lost their mind.

12:01 It's sort of true.

12:02 In a way, and that a lot of people in power and the decision makers did, but there were still people even while it was going on, it wasn't like 100% of the town was behind this. There were a lot of people, and I guess they were probably some of those reasonable people, you know, that you were talking about that were like, you know, what we're doing isn't right.

12:19 I don't think they really spoke up too vocally, but they were like, what is going on here?

12:24 This is getting out of hand and kind of crazy.

12:26 Yeah, I mean, it was such a dangerous situation where it was one of those kind of fascist situations where people who did dare to speak out against this and say, this is crazy, this is wrong, Or even to like testify on behalf of somebody who is accused. You were putting your own life at risk. Like there was a possibility you would be accused of witchcraft and then tried and then executed. It was that kind of a situation.

12:50 Even with people on the outside knowing that this is wrong, it was just such an inevitable machine that it was like people just stayed out of its way for a little while.

13:02 All right. I think that is a healthy preamble. Okay. Foundation is laid. I think we should take a break.

13:10 Okay.

13:11 And come back, talk about those Mather boys right after this.

13:15 I concur. Okay, Chuck, so you want to talk some Mathers? I'll talk about some Mathers.

13:51 That's the beaver.

13:53 He's still around, I believe, by the way. He still looks like the beaver.

13:56 Yeah, I don't think he died, did he? He's one of those guys that stayed the same, huh?

13:59 Yeah. Yeah. I think it doesn't help that he dresses the same still, too. But you can recognize him even in a tux, I'm guessing.

14:09 So you can't talk about the Salem Witch Trials without talking about the Mathers. I'm talking about the elder Mather, whose name was Increase. Love these Puritan names. And the younger Mather, Cotton Mather. He was the son, son of a Mather. So Increase Mather, he was, like you said, he was sort of the staunch Puritan son. who was in a position of power. He was working to establish a charter that would, you know, basically give the Puritans all the power. He was also a believer in, you know, because I mentioned the European witch trials, like this is sort of the background that allowed people like Increase Mather and Cotton Mather to really legitimately believe that demons were real and Satan could overtake and possess someone and that

14:56 there were real witches.

14:58 I mean, that was just generally the puritanical worldview, but some people were much more preoccupied with it than others, and the Mathers were both deeply preoccupied with this kind of thing. And Increased Mather gets a lot of the blame for this, and rightfully so. But there's a lot of lesser-known people who actually were way more villainous during this and really took advantage of this crazy situation and really did— just didn't care about the lives of innocent people.

15:28 But he was not good in that he helped fan the flames of this initially big time.

15:33 That's right.

15:34 So should we, I mean, we'll get a little bit more into the Mathers as we go. Cotton was certainly one of the villains of the trials. And they were both writing books about supernatural things. So this was all sort of the foundation that was laid when the first two people were accused in, what, January of 1692?

15:56 Yeah. So, to start, there were two girls ages 9 and 11. There was Betty Parris, Elizabeth Parris was her name, and Abigail Williams. And they basically started barking and convulsing and just behaving really bizarrely and strangely and would not stop. And so, Samuel Parris, who was the head of the Salem Village Church. It was actually a pretty divisive figure, apparently.

16:27 He brought in a doctor, and the doctor proclaimed this to be a bewitchment, that these girls were bewitched. And that's ultimately what kicked the whole thing off. And a lot of people have tried to figure out, like, what initially started that? Because just about everybody who has a theory about this immediately converts to mass hysteria. But you still have that first... that first case of Abigail Williams and or Elizabeth Paris to explain. And apparently it was like really prolonged stuff. They were vomiting. They were doing stuff beyond just like behaving weirdly. They were, they seemed to be physically afflicted. And that's another thing too, that I think theories that say like, it was all just

17:10 a hoax that these girls perpetrated.

17:12 Right.

17:12 That doesn't understand like just how long these girls carried out this stuff. And I think it kind of ignores the fact that There are also, like, the Puritans weren't dumb people. They were deeply religious. They believed in witches and Satan having, you know, a hand on things here on Earth. But they also were very smart, very practical.

17:33 And they would have seen right through a couple of girls just planning a hoax or carrying out a hoax. So there has to be something there at the beginning that no one has ever fully explained that kicked this whole thing off. Yeah.

17:45 Yeah. I mean, it's hard not to become a little obsessed with some sort of biological root. I know ergot poisoning has been mentioned. I saw encephalitis.

17:54 Oh, I saw that one too. That was interesting.

17:57 Yeah, and just some other possible reasons of maybe something physically was wrong with them while they also happened to be goofing around with folk magic and stuff like that.

18:07 Yeah.

18:07 Not a good combination to get sick while you're being a kid and playing around, which is essentially what they were doing.

18:17 Think about the fact that the adults were like, okay, this is significant enough that we're going to start looking around for the witches. And the girls started accusing people too. It does seem like there was something going on with at least one of them. And then, yes, it started to spread probably through mass hysteria to other girls in the village.

18:38 When you read the sort of timeline account, I feel like if that original doctor hadn't said the word witch— it could have gone in a completely different direction.

18:48 Yeah. He should have just been like, it's anti-NMDA-R encephalitis dummies.

18:54 Right.

18:55 An autoimmune disease that we'll only begin to grasp in the 2020s.

18:59 And everyone would say, you're a witch. Right.

19:01 He just used some crazy words, Doc.

19:05 So, the doctor has breathed the word witch. The girls are like, they're like, hey, what's going on with you? And they said, you know, it's, Tituba. It is my father's slave, Tituba, and it's her fault and she's a witch. And so they, like you said, they started accusing and they started with her.

19:26 They started with her and then they very quickly moved on to Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. And by doing that, by accusing those two women, or actually with Tituba as well, all three of them.

19:38 Is it Tituba?

19:39 I've always heard Tituba, but I've heard, I think I've heard Tituba before too, so.

19:43 Well, tituba sounds more right.

19:46 Okay, so by accusing those. Three women, they were following, Abigail and Elizabeth were following like a well-established tradition of focusing on older women on the margins of society as witches, right?

20:07 Right.

20:07 Tituba was easy to accuse because she was a foreigner. She was brought to the colony as a slave and she worked as a slave in the Paris's house. So who knows what she was into before, you know, she came over to Massachusetts, I guess, was the thinking of the Puritans. But then also Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they were like older women who were poor and lived on the fringes of society. And like that is who you accused of being a witch typically. So at first this witch panic kind of followed the standard witch accusations that had been, you know, spread around New England before.

20:45 But what made it different is that it just started to pick up steam more and more because more and more girls and people around the colony or around the village, I'm sorry, started to suffer bewitchment and started accusing one another of bewitching them.

21:02 Yeah, if you were a person, for sure a woman, but a man or a woman who, like you said, was about middle-aged and, you know, you were over there kind of doing your own thing a little bit and maybe just kept to yourself. Maybe you didn't like hanging out in the village as much as the rest of the villagers did.

21:22 You marched to the beat of your own drum. You had a target on your back, basically.

21:28 Right, yeah. And also, apparently, one of the things that they were well-known for, these people who were accused of witches, would be, like, they needed things from their neighbors, so they would extract them by threatening to curse them. So they would actually use, like, witchy threats. They were probably also into folk magic. So there was, like, it wasn't just completely baseless other than the fact that, like, witches in that kind of puritanical conception don't exist. But it wasn't just totally out of the blue. Like these, they still, like if you, a modern person, saw the person that they were originally, that they traditionally accused of being witches, you'd be like, oh my gosh, a real life witch.

22:07 There's one right there. It would fit the bill for you. You know what I'm saying?

22:11 Yeah, for sure. So, you know, these accusations start flying around. They start mounting. The jails start filling up. The conditions in the jail were not good. It got so crazy early on. And this is sort of the first part. This is before the, like, trials and hangings and everything. This is when you were just, like, jailed and shackled and then charged for your shackles, I guess, like a rental fee. But they arrested a four-year-old named Dorothy Good.

22:40 And she was eventually released, but a four-year-old, like– It's crazy, me as a father having gone through life with a four-year-old, that you could accuse a four-year-old of being anything other than a four-year-old.

22:54 Right, exactly. But she wasn't. She was held for months. I think she was arrested in March and released in May. And, like, this wasn't, like, a pleasant— December. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so she was there for almost a year, just under a year. For the intents and purposes of exaggerating just how bad this was, she was in there for basically a year. Okay?

23:13 Yeah, yeah. Sarah Osgood died in jail, right?

23:16 She died in jail. Yeah, this is the thing. Like these jails were like dirt floors. You were chained, like you're saying, like it was just it was a place where like a life could just be lost way too easily. So to keep a four year old in there for almost a year is just horrible. There was a woman who gave birth in jail and they just left her infant daughter in there with her. So the infant didn't survive.

23:39 She died in jail. just from being born in jail, somebody who was accused of being witches. And this was before the trials had even started, Chuck. Like this was just the initial phase of the panic, which was accusation, accusation, accusation. And then suddenly the jails were overflowing with more than 100 people who were accused of being witches. And the court was totally backed up when Increase Mather and the new governor that he was coming back with, William Phipps, who he'd gotten appointed, showed back up in Salem and were like, what is going on here? And they had a choice, Chuck. They could have been like, have you all lost your mind? What are you doing? Stop this right now. Let all these people out. They didn't go

24:26 that route. They went the exact opposite route. At that moment when they decided which way to go, they chose incorrectly, basically.

24:34 Yeah. And it was also a pretty bad time. It was kind of a– what's the word? Conflagration?

24:42 Man, you nailed it.

24:45 And it sounded so confident too. Yeah. Confident?

24:49 It was a conflagration of a bunch of things happening. Politically and legally, it was a very bad time because by the time the trials rolled around, they eventually got this new charter. But previous to that, they were– the charter of the colony was temporarily suspended.

25:05 Right.

25:06 And a new charter did arrive in May of 1692 in the hands of the elder Mather. But it was brand new, and the court didn't create laws. They didn't have time to create any new laws, that is. So they basically said, all right, we need to– we got all these people in jail. We need to quickly establish a special court for this. And we'll call it the Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear and determine. And we're going to get this– these people out of jail– or kill them so they're no longer in jail. But they're getting out one way or another.

25:40 Right. So Ed helps us out with this. We should say we failed to mention so far. But he points out that William Phipps, the new governor, possibly went along with this idea of creating a new court to get rid of this backlog of witchcraft accusations to get these people out of jail, to get this over and done with.

26:00 And that may have happened, actually. But he was very much focused on dealing with the constant threat that the colonists lived under of being attacked by Native Americans. King Philip's War. King Philip being the guy that Punxsutawney Phil was named after that I got way, way wrong in our groundhog episode. That had just ended. There was another war that included the French and the Native Americans to the north, sweeping down all the way into Massachusetts and staging raids. So they've lived under the constant threat of death, which definitely didn't help their mindset during the witchcraft panic.

26:36 But that's what Phipps was worried about. That's what he was working on. So he threw the job of seeing this court through to his lieutenant governor, a guy named– what was his name? William what?

26:51 William Stoughton.

26:53 William Stoughton. I mentioned like some of the lesser known people who were actually villains. This guy was a bad, bad man. And he made a decision– That changed the course of everything. I think Phipps' initial idea that this would have just moved the backlogs out and freed everybody from jail would have come true had it not been for Stoughton and Stoughton's radical decision to include what's called spectral evidence. That changed everything. And that is what led to people being executed. Yeah.

27:25 So before we get into spectral evidence, I just want to point out that William Stoughton was such a bad guy.

27:30 They named a town after him. Mm-hmm. And they named a college dorm at Harvard after him.

27:35 I believe, well, Increase Mather was the Harvard president for a while too, so.

27:39 Yeah, I mean, Stoughton went to Harvard, but I think it's still, one of the dorms is still Stoughton. And I think Stoughton, Mass is most well-known now for having an Ikea.

27:51 Wow.

27:51 I don't know.

27:52 It all comes around.

27:52 It's quite a claim to fame.

27:55 So yeah, spectral evidence. Let's talk about this because this changed everything. there were different kinds of evidence that would be accepted in these courts. One was the spectral, which we'll talk about. One was confession. Two eyewitness testimonies. And then there were, we won't get really into all the tests, but there were all kinds of different tests, including the, you know, does she float? Can she swim? From Monty Python, the Holy Grail. I think they were still doing some of that. There was the witch's teat. which was, it's basically if they found a mole on a woman, they would call it a witch's teat, which was supposedly a third nipple used to feed her animal familiar.

28:39 That's what my dad always told me my moles were when I was growing up.

28:43 Witch's teats.

28:43 Yeah. He was dead serious too.

28:46 So there were.

28:47 Certain tests and all, but spectral evidence was the big one because this was basically, you could kind of make up anything and you could be in court and say as an accuser and say, This person has been possessed or their possessor is.

29:04 In the courtroom right now.

29:06 Your Honor, this ghost, this specter is sitting on your lap right now.

29:12 You just can't see it. And it would freak people out.

29:16 There was nothing you could really say to defend it because it was made up to begin with. And supposedly Cotton Mather said it should be used more sparingly. Like at the end of the day, he was like, it's enough to indict, but.

29:30 Not to convict.

29:31 Oh, really? Was that cotton or increase?

29:33 That was cotton, supposedly. Okay.

29:36 And then in the end, I think they verified that nobody. was convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence.

29:44 Oh, okay. Okay. Well then my, my hypothesis is kind of out the window that none of these people would have been executed without it.

29:51 Well, it was, you know, if, if you need it, two out of three things and that's one of them, then you're right, you know?

29:58 One of the other things, one of the more practical problems that spectral evidence presented for somebody accused of witchcraft is that it destroyed any alibi you had. Like your neighbor could be like, well, no, he couldn't have been bewitching this person. He was out working with me in the fields all day. They could say, no, no, it was a spirit. He sent his spirit to bewitch this poor person who's accusing him. And then, boop, there goes your alibi. So it was like you said, you just can't defend yourself against that kind of thing. And that was like the level of stuff that they were, that was how they were accusing people. There was one guy I read about, Philip English, who will come up again later.

30:38 He was accused of witchcraft by somebody who said that They got a nosebleed while they were discussing a lawsuit they had against Philip English with somebody else. So that it must be that Philip English had bewitched them. Like this was the kind of accusations that they were making against one another. And they were holding up in court.

30:57 That is something that you cannot look past. It's so easy to look back 300 years and be like, yeah, this whole collective group lost their mind. No, there were plenty of people who did lose their mind. But the people who were supposed to be in charge, the people who were in a position to put a stop to this actually allowed it. In some cases, fan the flames of it even further. That was the true breakdown at the Salem witchcraft trials. The grownups did not step in and halt it before it got out of hand.

31:28 Yeah, another thing that someone might do if you had a pet that you really liked, not good. They could say, well, no, no, no, they have an animal familiar. It could be anything, like take Black Phillip from The Witch. I mean, that's taken kind of straight from this time period.

31:43 Sure.

31:45 But if you had a pet that you enjoyed hanging out with, they could accuse you of having a familiar. If they found a folk magic or folktale book in your library– that could be evidence.

31:58 And that was pretty common too. I mean, like these people didn't have, you know, local hospitals to go to, to heal themselves.

32:06 Or anything that any, like you said, with the nosebleed or whatever, anything bad that happened to you, if your crop failed or if one of your cows died, you could say it was my neighbor and they're a witch and they put a hex on me.

32:17 Right. So they established, okay, we can use spectral evidence and we're going to use spectral evidence. And this court of Oyer and Terminer it was established, I think they held their first trial on June 2nd, and they were profoundly efficient at convicting and killing people. Bridget Bishop was the first person hanged, and she was hanged on June 10th, just over a week after the first trials began. And that kicked off this new phase where this idea to clear the jails of the accused was actually now diverting them to the gallows and for being witches. We can't forget that either. Like for being witches, even though witches in this conception don't exist. Yeah.

33:08 And I think it's that efficiency and the speed that all this happened was a big part of it because it was, the train was moving so fast that once people, the more level headed people of the town realized what was going on, like, wait a minute, we're actually.

33:24 Hanging people for this.

33:26 Um, certain people started to come forward and say, no, no, no, I'm recanting my confession or let me stand up for someone's good character. But it happened so quickly that, you know, before you know it, there's, you know, a couple of dozen people have died.

33:40 Yeah. And like people got wrapped up in it too. Like there's the case of Giles Corey, I believe.

33:47 Oh man.

33:47 He testified against his wife and then later he recanted it. And after he recanted it, the Puritans apparently, viewed perjury so suspiciously that that was enough to get him accused of witchcraft. And he ended up paying for his life, which we'll talk about a little more later. But he testified against his wife. And to this day, historians are like, we have no idea why Giles Corey testified against his wife.

34:11 He didn't seem to have a grudge. They seem to have a fine marriage, whatever. It just doesn't make sense. The only way that you can explain that, at least From my perspective is that it was like you said, just this thing that people got whipped up in and it just happened so fast that it was just easy to lose yourself into that degree.

34:29 I mean, the whole thing happened over the course of what, four to six months.

34:35 Yeah, I think the first things were in January, but yeah, the first trials were June 2nd and they ultimately, I think, stopped the following like winter. So yeah, I mean, it was not a very long, prolonged thing, but it was just like this weird orgy of mind loss and death, you know?

34:53 Oh man, that sounds like some kind of album.

34:58 Fiona Apple, album title.

35:02 The other weird thing about this was that the social order was completely knocked out of whack. The Puritans, if there's one thing they didn't like, it was hearing from children about anything. Kids were just, they were meant to work and to shut up, basically, and do what they were told. And kind of like full stop. And you had a situation here where children, young girls, were accusing these middle-aged men and women of witchery, And it worked.

35:34 Like people listened to them and people were hanged because these kids were speaking up at a time when kids were barely allowed to even, you know, have any agency or speak.

35:43 Yeah. Which is another thing that perplexes historians because they're like something happened. Like there was something that was that this witch panic fulfilled. Maybe it was to let off steam from being constantly afraid of being murdered by a Native American attack. Maybe it was living too close proximity, too far away from where you called home. Like, who knows?

36:08 But there was something about it that was worth turning the social order on its head. And that was just one example. There are other examples of how the social order just totally broke down. And that was in how some of the people who were accused and executed were. Because it wasn't just the marginal women who were your prototypical witches and Living, you know, on the outskirts of society who were accused, that was just at first. It started to become extended to really surprising people like Rebecca Nurse was maybe one of the most upstanding Puritan women that town, the colony, had to offer. And she was accused, tried, and executed as a witch. And that, I think, really kind of opened a lot of people's eyes in two ways. One,

36:56 it was like, what is going on here? This could not be the case. And then to other people, it was like, if Rebecca Nurse could be a witch, then anybody could be a witch. And I think that was kind of the thread that the witch trial followed. But it also is like a really good explainer about how just completely the society broke down for these handful of months that anybody was at risk of being murdered by their fellow townspeople for being a witch, no matter what kind of background you had.

37:29 I'm picturing a Puritan, like the only Puritan that actually went on vacation that summer. And they come back, you know, they leave in early June, they come back in late September and they're like, So what's been going on, everybody?

37:41 Right. And then they get sight of what's going on. They drop their Mickey Mouse ears to the ground.

37:47 Oh, boy. All right. Well, let's take another break, and we'll come back and talk about sort of the finality of this, how it ended, and a little bit more.

37:59 About Giles Corey's crazy, crazy story right after this.

38:11 All right.

38:12 So in the end, um, I don't think they have the final, final number. I've seen 22. I've seen 25. 19 people were hanged. Giles Corey, who we're going to talk about in a minute, was pressed to death via torture. Five people died in prison. I think the numbers sort of depend on what you count as like a fallout death.

38:57 And not a direct death.

38:59 Right.

39:00 Like the one lady who couldn't repay, like she was exonerated, or I think she just couldn't pay her debt to get out of jail, so she died in jail.

39:06 That's such a sad story. Yeah, Lydia Dustin, she outlived the witch trials. Like they had ended a few months before. And she had actually been personally exonerated, and yet she couldn't pay her shackle fees.

39:23 Yeah.

39:24 So they just kept her in jail, and she ended up dying there in March of 1693, even though she was exonerated.

39:29 I mean, that certainly counts.

39:30 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because she otherwise would not have been killed or died had it not been being placed in jail after being accused of a witch, for sure.

39:39 But they did this in mass hangings. It wasn't just like one at a time. There was a hanging on July 19th, August 19th, and September 27th. after they died, they were stripped and put in a big mass grave. Supposedly, there are stories that families would come and get them out of the mass grave at night, bury them in unknown, probably on parts of their land. And they tried for many years to find out exactly where these hangings took place.

40:06 And they ended up at a place called Proctor's Ledge.

40:12 And I don't, I mean, there's a memorial there and people go there and Basically, they treat that as though that is definitely the place. But I don't think they have, like, hard, hard evidence other than just trying to, like, take eyewitness accounts and place where they were, right?

40:28 Yeah, supposedly there was a study in 2016 where they took those eyewitness accounts, took into account what the people said they could or couldn't see in, like, the background or whatever, and then plotted them.

40:41 Right.

40:41 And then figured out that most of these points were standing in around the same place around um that ledge where they think that yes this happened.

40:51 Yeah but they never found like and then underneath the ground they dug and they found the gallows bowl.

40:55 Right no they never found any physical evidence so whatever.

41:01 So the story of giles cory if you know the crucible you know it well if you've seen the movie you know it um he is the man that was was pressed to death uh he was crushed basically pressing is when they would lay you down They would put boards on top of you and then just start adding weight over the course of time, more and more weight until you eventually die. I had heard this story before because supposedly Giles Corey said more weight because he refused to– he was standing mute and he refused to say whether he was guilty or innocent. The one thing I didn't know is that Giles Corey was 81 years old.

41:39 Yeah. He was an old guy. He was like the old guy from that Metallica video. Right. That's what I always imagined Giles Corey to have looked like.

41:49 Man, what a story though. One thing standing mute would do would allow your estate to be passed on to your heirs rather than being convicted where that wouldn't happen. But I saw that this wasn't the reasoning behind him standing mute because most of his stuff had already been taken and that he even wrote down that he was standing mute to protest the sham proceedings.

42:12 Yeah, so yeah, and it sounds like Just the way he's been kind of lionized by history that that was his motivation for sure. Yeah. But you said something about how most of his stuff had been taken. There's another villain in all this beyond Stoughton and the Mathers. There was a guy named George Corwin, and he was the sheriff of Essex County, which is where this witch panic took place. And he was basically taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people were suddenly way more vulnerable than they had been the year before, a few months before. And so when he would arrest them and take them, he would also take possession of their property officially, their stuff, their land, all that. And he and his

42:56 deputies would divvy it up. So he had every incentive possible. to arrest as many people as possible and throw him in jail. And he did that. And he took a lot of people's land. Uh, and I guess he took Giles Corey's land as well. And Giles Corey cursed the town and the sheriff as he died. And supposedly, um, George Corwin, actually I shouldn't say supposedly, George Corwin definitely did die less than three years later at age 30 of a heart attack. And there's a local legend that, um, every Essex, Essex County sheriff from Corwin onward, um, either died or resigned while in office because of a heart condition.

43:34 I didn't have time to go look through the records of Essex County sheriffs, but I thought that was a pretty interesting local legend.

43:40 So this dude was in his 20s when he was doing this?

43:42 Yeah, he was in his mid to late 20s. And he was one of the worst of the worst. And so there's one more story about when he died. That guy, Philip English, that I mentioned before, who was accused because of the guy getting the nosebleed. He was a very, very wealthy merchant. in Salem town and Corwin took his stuff, like his land, a lot of his ships, just took a lot of his stuff while English was on the run evading capture. And when English came back after the Salem witch trials were over and found what Corwin had done, he tried to get his money back from Corwin. He tried to get his money, his land, his ships, all that stuff, and Corwin wouldn't give it to him. Well, Corwin dies of a heart attack And Philip English placed

44:29 a lien, basically, on this guy's body and said, you're not burying him until I get paid back.

44:34 Jeez.

44:34 The family was like, we're not listening to you. We're going to go bury him. So Philip English hired a bunch of guys, and they went out and stopped the funeral procession, took possession of the body, and held it hostage until Corwin's family paid Philip English back for what Corwin had confiscated from him. And then Philip English gave them the body to bury. Wow.

44:55 Wow.

44:56 Isn't that nuts?

44:57 Not a nice guy.

44:59 Who, Philip English?

45:00 No, no, no, Corwin.

45:02 Okay, yeah, I was going to say, I totally side with Philip English on that one.

45:06 All right, so Corey dies, and sort of the long and short of his death was that it was sort of a final straw, and this is when Phipps comes back in and says, you know what, things are getting really out of hand. Increase Mather says, yeah, this spectral evidence thing has gotten way out of hand and is probably not real. And people started to sort of stand up more and more. And it was clear that Governor Phipps had to kind of halt things. He said he did it under the context of, you know, this is a contravention of English law.

45:43 We can't do this. I'm dissolving the court of Oyer and Terminer.

45:47 And I'm going to create a new court where we can't use spectral evidence.

45:51 And what do you know?

45:53 In January and February of 1693, there were dozens of people released. Grand juries weren't indicting people. They were found not guilty. He pardoned some. And by the end of May that next year, the jails had no more, quote unquote, witches.

46:11 Right.

46:11 Because they found when you take away the spectral evidence, what you have for the most part is personal grudges, land disputes, land grabs. people just trying to take advantage of this situation to get back at somebody they don't like and haven't liked for a really long time.

46:28 What a weird, weird, scary time.

46:30 It was very scary, and I can't imagine living during that time. Actually, it's not true. I can't imagine it. But it was just basically another example of a time when a group of people became fascist together and people died as a result.

46:46 Yeah, and the term witch hunt is still used that the crucible was written because of McCarthyism. It's been thrown around a lot in recent years, maybe not as accurately, but it's still a term for that reason.

47:02 Yep. I've got one little nice button to put on the end of this, Chuck. There was at least one guy who was a judge in the court of Oyer and Terminer named Samuel Sewell. And within a year or two after the witch trials, he was standing in front of the Boston congregation of Puritans having a petition read by the local reverend there asking for their forgiveness and admitting that this was a huge, huge mistake and he regretted participating in it and would they forgive him. And I believe they did. So the whole thing ended well.

47:39 You got anything else?

47:41 I got nothing else.

47:42 Man, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, start researching the Salem witchcraft trials. You could do a lot worse than going to the historic present the New England Historical Society, and the historyofmassachusetts.org. Or just hit Ed Grabinowski up. He'll tell you all about it.

47:58 Go to Salem.

47:59 Yeah, you could do that too.

48:00 Walk around. They're trying to take your money in all kinds of ways.

48:04 Yeah, and Essex County Mass is one of the most beautiful places on earth, if you ask me.

48:09 Sure.

48:11 Okay, well, since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.

48:16 I'm going to call this Cool Kid. Cool Kid.

48:19 I like to read emails from the cool kids. Hey, guys, my dad introduced me to your show when I was barely a teenager, and I've been listening ever since. In that time, my family has gone through a lot of changes, and my dad and I haven't always been on the best terms. I wanted to reach out and let you know that Stuff You Should Know is the only thing that we have consistently been able to talk about when we reconnect after being apart. We can go months without seeing each other, and I can just ask if you'd listen to your latest episode to have something.

48:43 To talk about.

48:43 That's cool.

48:44 It helps keep things lighthearted. And it's something we feel like it's just for the two of us. Hope we can see you live in Austin soon. Furthermore, this is mostly for Chuck. You are so much like my dad, it's actually freaky sometimes. We always make jokes that you two would be best friends if you met in real life.

49:02 Your voices even sound a little bit the same. I'll be honest, sometimes it's comforting to listen to y'all when I miss my dad. I've been meaning to send this email for a while just to tell you guys how much you mean to me and my family. Thanks for being there for us. Also, I don't know if my dad listens to the end of the episodes or just the factual content we'll find out. But if he's listening this far in, tell him I said hi. Warm regards, CJ Kerbo.

49:26 And it says if we come to Austin, they treat us to dinner at their favorite fried catfish seafood restaurant.

49:33 Nice. Very nice. That was very nice, CJ. What a great email, and thank you very much for the invite. We probably will be in Austin again sometime.

49:41 It was, and CJ, you should know that we cut it out, but I accidentally said fried cat food.

49:46 It was hilarious.

49:47 And Josh got a good laugh out of it.

49:49 Yeah, so thanks for that, too.

49:51 Yeah, you're welcome.

49:52 If you want to be like CJ and write a very nice email, we want to hear it. You can send it to us at stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

49:59 Thank you. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.