How do residents of salem define witchcraft

Others who might have testified about the musket handling were dead. The girls delivered up their own reports with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs bit them. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay, Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant.

What, he asked, did Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the Devil. A brainteaser of a question, it left Burroughs without an answer. He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded justice. By no account an agreeable man, Burroughs managed to join abusive behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad.

He monitored their correspondences. He made them swear never to reveal his secrets. He berated them days after they had given birth. All evidence pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard. At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions hollered for him in vain.

They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence.

Burroughs does seem to have bungled his defense. He stumbled repeatedly, offering contradictory answers—a luxury afforded only the accusers. Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket. He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths.

A tussle ensued. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard around the time Burroughs was born—recognized the lines at once. Burroughs had lifted them from the work of Thomas Ady. Though witches existed, they were rare. The Bible nowhere connected them with murder, or with imps, compacts, or flights through the air.

Ady believed that witches were a convenient excuse for the ignorant physician. He suggested that when misfortune struck we should not struggle to recall who had last come to the door. Burroughs denied having borrowed the passage, then amended his answer. A visitor had passed him the text in manuscript. He had transcribed it. He had already several times agreed with the justices that witches plagued New England. It was too late for such a dangerous gambit.

Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. They hoped that the real witches would soon be revealed.

Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms. Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did not pray with witches. Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession.

A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines.

For a few moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution. Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished beam.

The life had not gone from his body when Mather, on horseback, pressed forward to smother the sparks of discontent. He reminded the spectators that Burroughs had never been ordained. That was also true of others on the hill that day, but at least made the dying minister seem unorthodox. To the last, George Burroughs was condemned for his gifts. The protests quieted, as did the minister hanging in midair. The execution of a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister, protesting his innocence to the end, created nearly as much disquiet as had the idea that a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister recruited for the Devil.

It raised qualms about the court and on the bench. And it sent Cotton Mather to his desk. On September 2nd, he wrote to the chief justice. Already, Mather claimed, he had done far more behind the scenes than Stoughton could possibly know. He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end to the sulfurous assault.

He felt that the Massachusetts ministers ought to support the court in its weighty, worthy task; none had sufficiently done so. Increase Mather, too, was at work on a book. As father and son wrote, confessions and concerns multiplied. Reports circulated that seven hundred witches preyed on Massachusetts. A prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls, incurring the wrath of Increase Mather.

On October 4th, for the first time, seven suspects, all under the age of eighteen, went home on bail. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey, Jr. Grappling with the future of the court, which was scheduled to reconvene in two weeks, he insisted that the justices had always ruled with empirical evidence, but admitted that many now condemned their work.

He placed a ban on witchcraft books. That ban applied only to volumes that did not bear the name Mather on the cover. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately composed! Weeks earlier, he had promised that his work would in no way interfere with that of two colleagues, whom he effectively cut off at the pass. What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft?

Father and son disagreed. When credible men and women could attest to these things, the evidence was sound. He had no patience for mewling teen-age girls. Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than about allowing a witch to walk free. He chose that trial with reason: it was one in which spectral evidence had served to convict. Mather seems occasionally to have embroidered on court reports with details that appear nowhere in the surviving pages: the smell of brimstone, money raining down, a corner of a sheet ripped from a spectre.

He expressed his fervent hope that some of the witches in custody might prove innocent. He wrote up five trial accounts in all; Burroughs alone was so powerful a wizard that he could not be named. Governor Phips disbanded the witchcraft court at the end of October. All three women were brought before the local magistrates and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, Osborne claimed innocence, as did Good.

But Tituba confessed, "The Devil came to me and bid me serve him. She admitted that she signed the book and said there were several other witches looking to destroy the Puritans. All three women were put in jail. With the seed of paranoia planted, a stream of accusations followed for the next few months. Charges against Martha Corey, a loyal member of the Church in Salem Village, greatly concerned the community; if she could be a witch, then anyone could.

Magistrates even questioned Sarah Good's 4-year-old daughter, Dorothy, and her timid answers were construed as a confession. The questioning got more serious in April when Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth and his assistants attended the hearings. Dozens of people from Salem and other Massachusetts villages were brought in for questioning. The first case brought to the special court was Bridget Bishop, an older woman known for her gossipy habits and promiscuity.

When asked if she committed witchcraft, Bishop responded, "I am as innocent as the child unborn. Five days later, respected minister Cotton Mather wrote a letter imploring the court not to allow spectral evidence—testimony about dreams and visions. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village present-day Danvers, Massachusetts at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in , a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town present-day Salem.

In January , 9-year-old Elizabeth Betty Parris and year-old Abigail Williams the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr.

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse—both regarded as upstanding members of church and community—and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good. In May , the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer to hear and Terminer to decide on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September.

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence or testimony about dreams and visions , his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. The Salem Witch Museum Timeline. An overview of The Salem Witch Museum from its founding in to the present. Witches: Evolving Perceptions. The tour concludes with a discussion of a formula for a witch-hunt and how this formula may be applied to three twentieth-century examples.

When studying the history of witchcraft, it is important to understand that witchcraft was a crime created and imposed on innocent people. No individual actually had the power to cause hailstorms, spread mass disease, or fly through the night to a gathering of evil beings.

This was a crime imposed on innocent people during times of mass fear and hysteria. While the legal prosecution of witchcraft came to an end in the eighteenth century, the pattern of behavior that caused witch-hunts can be identified throughout history and in the modern day. Salem Haunted Happenings. Official Guide to Salem. Salem Motor Coach Route Map. Derby Square Tours. Massachusetts Office of Tourism. Hawthorne Tours, Custom Group Tours. The Go Boston Card.