The Haunting Of The Salem Witch Trials

**"The Haunting Of The Salem Witch Trials"** is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on May 19, 2017. It is the eighth episode of the second season of *BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural*, and the twenty-seventh episode overall. You can watch it here.

## Description

Did one of America’s darkest chapters leave behind spiritual evidence?

## Background

In 1641, the Puritan legal code was created, and established a hierarchy of crimes. Starting with the worst, the list goes idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, murder, poisoning, and bestiality.

Let's jump forward to January 1692, when 9 year old Elizabeth Parris and 11 year old Abigail Williams began exhibiting strange behavior. Elizabeth and Abigail were the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, respectively. Reverend Parris was Salem village's first ordained minister. The two girls behavior included making odd sounds and screaming, contorting their bodies, and throwing objects. Elizabeth and Abigail reported that an invisible being was biting and pinching them. 11 year old Ann Putnam and other girls in Salem began acting similarly shortly after. Their behavior was attributed to supernatural causes according to a doctor's diagnosis. Though, it's worth noting that there was only one doctor in Salem Village, and he could most likely read, but not write.

On February 9, 1692, the girls accused three women for causing their bizarre outbursts after Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, both magistrates, pressured the girls into naming the people afflicting them, and as mentioned before, Judge Jonathan Corwin's house is one of the places Shane and Ryan are visiting today.

Returning to the three accused women, two of them named Sarah Goode and Sarah Osborne both professed their innocence and would eventually die as a result of the trials. However, the other accused was a woman named Tituba, the slave of Reverend Parris. Strangely, unlike the other two accused woman, Tituba actually admitted to afflicting the girls saying, "the devil came to me and bid me serve him." According to a plaque that Shane and Ryan found on site, it was in this house in 1692 that Tituba, Reverend Parris' his slave, allegedly told the girls household stories of witchcraft.

It's worth mentioning that there are some who believe Tituba was forced to confess, and thereby fabricated her testimony. Regardless, Tituba's testimony is the longest in the entire Salem Witch Trials. She also detailed visions of eerie animals, including red cats, yellow birds, and black dogs. Perhaps most importantly, Tituba added that other witches were also working to harm the Puritans in Salem. With this startling confession, the trials and accusations vaulted forward, giving them a purpose and mission. Tituba was also very accommodating to the judges and claimed to go blind at one moment, a sign that the devil was punishing her for speaking so candidly about his. This showed she was at least trying to fight him. After spending a year and
three months in jail, Tituba was not indicted, and was the very last of the accused to be released.

Skipping forward, the infamous Special Court of Oyer and Terminer was established by Governor William Phipps. On May 27, 1692, eight girls from Salem were afflicted with witchcraft and making accusations. In the court, someone would warn that a witch was about to manipulate a victim, and then the victim would begin to act strangely. In the first trial of this court, Bridget Bishop, an older woman of the community that many considered to be an immoral gossip, was determined guilty of witchcraft and later became the first person executed in the Salem Witch Trials. Between the months of July and September, 1692, 18 more people were found guilty and executed, including 4 men, a rare occurrence in witch trials of the past.

One of the accused men was a man named George Burroughs, a Harvard-educated minister, who was accused by other alleged witches from Andover of being their mastermind. The claims made in court against Burroughs ranged from bizarre to batshit. The accusers claimed that he was biting them during their testimony. Their bite marks allegedly matched up with Burroughs teeth. Many people in the court, not just the accusers claim to see spirits in the room. One girl claimed the spirits were faces of Burroughs deceased wived, colored as red as blood and thirsting for justice to be served to their husband. Finally, the possibility that Burroughs had used an invisibility cloak given to him by the devil was suggested by the Chief Justice. Before being executed, Burroughs made an emotional speech, where he recited the Lord's Prayer without any mistakes. Witches were not supposed to be able to do that, which sowed the seeds of doubt in the crowd gathered.

On October 3, 1692, Increase Mather implored the court not to consider spectral evidence in the trials. Around the same time, Governor Phipps' wife was brought in for interrogation. If you recall, Governor Phipps was the man who created the infamous Court of Oyer and Terminer. After Mather's statement and Phipps' wife being interrogated, Phipps released some of the people jailed for witchcraft, halted all further arrests, and replaced the Court of Oyer and Terminer with the Superior Court of Judicature, which was not permitted to consider testimonies of spectral evidence. Overall, twenty people were executed in the Salem Witch Trials, 14 of the 20 were women and only 6 were men. Though official numbers vary, it's possible that a further 13 people perished while in jail on charges of witchcraft. Oddly, all of the accusers were women between 9 and 20 years old, an unusual fact due to the fact that most witch trials saw men doing the majority of the accusations.

Most importantly, none of the executed ever admitted to witchcraft. One interesting thing to note is that almost all of the people that were executed were not given a proper burial, and instead were buried in unmarked graves somewhere in the area. Where those graves lie, nobody knows. Some believe they may be buried somewhere on Gallows Hill, but regardless, according to Spellbound Tours, a Salem tour company, Gallows Hill has the reputation of being extremely haunted.

## Theories

* The first theory comes from Harvard PhD student, Emily Auster, who points to an economic explanation. In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Emily Auster suggests that **the Little Ice Age that lasted between 1550 and 1800, and intensified between 1680 and 1730 caused economic problems that encouraged the population to believe one another for their hardship.**
* The second theory comes from Linnda Caporael, that **the afflicted girls could have been exposed to a kind of fungus called ergot, which can be found in grains like rye, which caused convulsive Ergotism**. Convulsive ergotism effects include hallucinations, which are apparently similar to that of LSD muscle, contractions that resemble seizure, vertigo, and crawling and tingling sensations.
	+ In addition to rye being commonly grown in the colony, the moisture in the air and the grain's lengthy storage time could have increased the likelihood of an ergot infestation. However, the girls showed no other visible signs of this illness, which include disintegrating fingertips.
* **Mass hysteria played a part in the witch trials.** It's accepted in most literature written about the Salem witch trials that some level of hysteria was at work in Salem during this time. The word hysteria is used throughout most descriptions of the Salem Witch Trials.
* The fourth theory comes from one of the people in the community at the time of the trials, **a Salem merchant named Robert Calef accused Reverend Parris of exploiting the trials for socio-political gain in the community**. He proposed that Reverend Parris forced his slave Tituba to admit to witchcraft so he could use the resulting paranoia to seize back his diminishing power in Salem Village.
* There are some people out there that actually entertain the idea that **Salem witches for a real thing**.