CLASSIC: The Truth Behind the Salem Witch Trials, with Aaron Mahnke

about the Salem witch Trials. For another friend of the show, Alex Williams, and I traveled out to Boston and the area out there, you know, Salem and the places that were actually Salem, the towns that were actually Salem, and we went to libraries and saw original documents, and Aaron put all of this together in a show called Unobscured.

That is just it's really great. It's the most full picture of the Salem Witch Trials that I had ever imagined in my head when I listened to that show and helped make it, and thankfully we got to speak with Aaron about it for quite a while.

to know. Today we are exploring one of the strangest, most infamous series of events in early American history genuine real life which trials, and nowadays most people only know of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etc. So how do we separate the fact from the fancy here? How do we establish what really led to these trials, what genuinely happened to the victims, and how these events impacted our culture and history from that point onto the

modern day. This is admittedly a tall order, Matt, and luckily, very luckily, we are not tackling it alone. We are joined by the creator, producer, and host of the hit podcast Lore, which has also been adapted into a book series and a television series, and as well as the creator of the brand new podcast, Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen. Aaron Manky, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me.

But it's something I want to jump right into. Just this fact that many of us are introduced to the Salem Witch Trials usually in at least in my case, an academic setting. You take an early history class about American history, then you know you kind of have an understanding. But then all of that gets shaped by all of this pop culture and all of these other references. So how has our understanding of the real Witch Trials been modified by this pop culture?

and all that went on. You know, the sale and witch trials was a a you know, roughly thirteen or fourteen month period of time that had a lot going on, and so you think about maybe bumping into it in a high school class on early American history, and you know, it's one of, you know, a couple a dozen things that you're going to talk about that semester, and so by necessity you sort of have to brush over it and just mentioned a few things, like it happened sixteen

ninety two. Nineteen people were hanged, one was crushed to death by stones, and five died in jail. And that's that's the story you hear, you know, and maybe somebody throws in, well, you know, they believe that there were witches and the church one of those dead, and you know, we just we sort of sum it all up into a couple of sentences. And especially in this day and age of you know, small character count tweets and social media posts, it's easy to try to summarize things up

like that. The other factory coming into this. So, like you mentioned before, is pop culture, right, like films and screens like like The Crucible and TV shows and even you know, bad one hour documentaries. You can cover something like Sale and Wich trials in one hour. So you know that those things all just sort of work to force us toward an easy sound bite answer, and when you do that, you lose all of the nuance.

little bit more toward the east. But back in the late sixteen hundreds, Salem was like this territory, you know, and you have the city, but then you have the bread basket around it of all these different communities, places that exist now today as their own independent communities like Wenham and Danvers and Beverly and Andover and Topsfield and all these places slowly were chiseled off of the Salem

land mass and became their own things. So what is now today Danvers used to be Salem Village and Salem proper today used to be Salem Town because that was sort of the built up, wealthier town aspect of it all.

came from the Salem village area. So what is now Danvers And a lot of the the legal aspects, especially the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was sort of the the higher level jury plus judges system, and then moving on to the Superior court, those things all happen in Salem town. So you had victims coming from one area and that's now Danvers, and that's wildly generalized. I'm

just roughly saying it. And then in Salem, basically all the bad guys, right, all the people that sat in the jury or on the court and judge people and sentenced them to death. So you have these two towns, you know, three hundred and twenty five years ago, we're sort of sitting next to each other, and they've grown, they've grown up, but they've also grown apart culturally, and so Danver's changed its name and it sort of distances itself from the idea that the witch trials happened there

like you can find things. Rebecca Nurse is one of the victims. She was a seventy five seventy six year old woman who her crime was that she was too generous with one of her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were incredibly prejudiced against any other faiths, and so even Quakers, which we never think of Quakers as being like antagonists or bad people, but in the Puritan mind, they just they weren't Puritans, and so Quakers were bad. And she took in a Quaker orphan and that sort of sealed

her fate. Among other things. She had some rumors spread about her and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there. It's a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour. Three hundred and twenty five years later, it's still there, and it's set up more sensitively and as a as a museum as opposed to the Salem Witch Museum, which is you know, red lights and dark shadows and witches and

cauldrons and things like that. And and so there's this there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue and Danvers dodging the issue, and Salem Town sort of rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a statue of Samantha from the the old TV show Bewitched in the middle of town because she was a witch, and let's put a statue out for her. You know, Oh wow, makes sense?

wasn't pure enough. It hadn't tossed off enough of the Catholic trappings to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it to be more pure. Thus the name and among all of the colonies that were set up in the sixteen hundreds that were all sort of like either endeavors of the crown or business ventures. This was a business venture that was run purely by the Puritans, and they all the people that ran it essentially came over with it and set up shop here. So it wasn't being run

from afar by the owners. It was being run here. They had a charter from the king and you had to get that. But they were they were this isolated religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was potentially a witch. They were an agent of the devil. And there were all these cool little trappings that came with it that we still have pieces of in our culture today.

You know, you think about how many times you've seen a witch on TV with a black cat, right, like that's just the it's the partner in crime they always have. And that comes back to the idea of a familiar, you know, an animal that is a evil spirit in the form of an animal that follows the witch around, and that's just almost a European and American constant that

you have familiars. There are things like, well, we can tell you're a witch if you have witch marks on you, which is supposed to be like this little devil's teat this this place where the demons will will suckle from the witch and they look like freckles or moles or skin tags, and of course they found them on people

because everybody has those things. So you know, it was this really tricky thing where, yeah, they were enemies of the Puritan faith, but after that it was just kind of hard to nail it down, which created problems for them.

She wasn't respected, She didn't tow the line, she didn't follow the rules, and people then as people now lash out against the outsider, they become a scapegoat for our fears and our anxieties.

with setting up these trials? Like were the Oyer and Terminer trials specifically a law of the land kind of thing or was it a religious law thing?

was just a little different. They had a little bit more freedom and latitude, and they were able to build their faith into the laws a lot more tightly. So when the Salem witch trials happened, it happens in this you know, doctor Emerson Baker's one of our historians, and he calls his book the Storm of Witchcraft because it's this perfect storm of ingredients. Among all these other things, the fear of the wars with the Native Americans to the north, the French who were allied with them, a

harsh winter, all these different factors coming together. You also had the fact that the King kind of in a power play, takes the charter away from people shortly before the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They don't have any they don't have anything, and there's this promise of a new charter, but they haven't got it yet.

So they're literally there society that has lost all their laws, and so they're leaning on the people like John Hawthorne, who you know him and his father both worked with the Charter and they knew the law. They're kind of leaning on these people to help them. But you know, their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they

have this fear of witches. And I mean even when they sit down with a new charter and start to list out, like, all right, we have to put together a list of capital crimes, which they started doing in sixteen ninety two. You know, witchcraft falls on the capital

crime list. You're not going to find that on the books today because we have a very secular government, but back then that border between church and state was a lot more fuzzy, and so things like you know, being a witch became this capital offense and it was executed, executable by death with some exceptions. The deeper into the trials you get and it just gets more complex. Things like you know, at some point, if you used witchcraft but you didn't kill anybody, you could be punished, but

you won't be executed and whatnot. But yeah, the faith really did it permeated everything, really.

of what we would call religious extremists today. So people in a vacuum of organizational structure would tend to fall back on the number one organizational structure that they considered their core set of values, which personally, and I don't want to inject too much of my opinion here, is terrifying because it kind of it sounds as if this is something that occurs, you know, in the distant past. But it's very important for us to remember that people

are still people. We're still the same cognitive machines. And yeah, these sorts of things are not as implausible in the modern day as they were. You know, they're not any less plausible, I should say, than they were in the sixteen hundreds.

influence and things like that. But they were they were a voice for the people as a collective putting things together, and that made it a lot a lot more infallible. You had people saying, well, that idea sounds good, but here are three problems with it, and that's this is how it could go wrong, and so they could adjust things. When you move to a society that's smaller, I mean, Salem Village had about five hundred people in it, five five fifty. Salem Town I think had maybe two thousand

people in it. Now that's a smaller group of people, with a smaller pool of leaders making up laws and

trying to find their way. They're going to make a lot more mistakes, and they're going to bring a lot more personal bias into things, which is why, I mean, this is why dictatorships go wrong, and why emperors and kings have so many problems unless they have some sort of a parliamentary system around them to keep them in check, because one person making choices is going to make a lot more worse choices than that a group of people

collectively thinking being through with common sense. So this is, you know, this is partly what plays out in Salem. You have a bunch of people who they're just kind of leaning on what they know and their personal opinions and their fears and their hopes and all this stuff, and we get a mess and will pause right there for a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back. This is a little bit biographical, But what were your primary inspirations or motivations that set you on the path

to explore and clarify this story? You know, I mean I've made the podcast called Lore for about three and a half years now, and Law is essentially a dark historical podcast. You know, I look for stories from history that have a more unusual or or dark is just the best word for it, a dark bent that you know, that's the kind of stuff you're not going to learn about in history class. You're not going to learn about

the drummer of Tedworth. You know, a house haunted by a ghost that keeps making a drumming sound and possibly a haunted drum and all these You're not going to learn about these things in history class and and and that's why I I do lore because I want people to hear these great tales of things that happened and people claim that they were true, and I want to explore them. Most of the time, I'm fine finding topics

that I can do in a half an hour. That's typically the format of the show, you know, about thirty minutes long, throwing some ads and some credits and more good. And that leaves out a few topics, you know. And so from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem witch Trials fits. You know that it has all of these really great details. There's good context lessons in here, like learning about how witchcraft worked in Europe and England, all these great things, but you couldn't cover it in

an hour or a half an hour. Even so I just kind of set it aside. And so for a couple of years I had a folder on my hard drive that said it said lower the Salem Project. And I had this vision of maybe someday when I had free time, ha ha ha. Because I just got busier and busier as time went by, maybe someday I'll be able to do like a little mini series on Salem.

And I didn't know if i'd give its own RSS feed or if I would, you know, maybe make it a paid only like you could go, you know, download the thing, like an audiobook sort of thing, because I

didn't know what the material would would turn into. So it wasn't until you know, about a year ago that I started working with some of your folks over there at host Stuff Works and realized that if we were going to build a network of shows, one of those could very well be a long form documentary series that just takes time, you know, it gives these really big stories the breathing room that they need and let it go deep. And so that's that was the perfect home

for the Salem topic. And not only that, but living in it and around it here in my area, it just made sense. And it's you can't pass up a topic like this.

highly important. So to illustrate this, you know, the minister in Salem village, where a lot of the victims came from, was this guy named Samuel Parris who came from I mean, his family was English. Obviously, his uncle had purchased or somehow acquired a plantation on the island of Barbados, and then he was really bad at running the business, and so he brought his brother in, which was Samuel's dad,

and his brother saved it. You know, his uncle eventually dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and runs it well, but some natural disasters happened. There's like this massive hurricane and there's a drought, and I think some sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually Samuel Parris has found himself running the place and he doesn't want to anymore. He realizes it's going to kill him, so he sells

it and heads north. He wanted to go to Harvard, and while his dad was still alive, he was attending Harvard, which is really really old school from the sixteen hundreds outside of Boston. And so when he finally sold the place off for good, he moved back to Boston, maybe thinking that he would finish school because he had stopped a few classes, shy, maybe just looking for work some of his money to set up a business there. Finally, he ends up not doing well at business and taking

the position in Salem Village as their new minister. The negotiation process for his contract took him over a year because he was this super litigious, like we have to get all the tea's crossed and the ice dotted, and want to be taken care of. I think he had some high aspirations, but one of the things that he was super picky about was firewood that he needed his firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, it was a problem constantly with you know, farmers in the area.

It was like their turn that week to bring him a load of firewood, and they just they wouldn't do it. He was hard to like, it was hard to get along with, and some of them just sort of held

it back as a leverage over him. And there's these stories of him writing in his study upstairs in the middle of winter, dipping his quill in the inkwell to scratch on the book, and the ink in the inkwell being frozen because it's so cold in the house, and wood just becomes this thorn in his side for the entire time.

when they are as they explore unobscured. Is the process through which you discover these stories? Could you tell us a little bit more about the primary written records that you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and how you took this this vast amount of uncollected resources, like how did you arrange them?

is bad. In fact, at some point, the judges involved in the trial hire a minister from a prominent minister family. Their last name was Mather. Increase was the father. Cotton was the son Cotton Mather. That's right, Cotton and Cotton was hired to basically write a pr piece. It was a book in defense of the sale Witch trials and write about that time, Governor Phipps decides it will be very bad if anybody else prints things about this. We want this to be the only thing out there. And

so the governor outlaws the press. They can't talk or write about the sale Witch trials anymore. So you have that which limits the amount of stuff that's written about it in sixteen ninety two, sixteen ninety three. Then you have people with you know, let's just pick a judge out of you know, like Nathaniel Saltonstall or somebody like that, or Samuel Sewell. There are family documents that would have existed. Personal journals was a big thing for a lot of

these judges. They wrote in their journals every night, and a lot of them just go missing. Letters between judges who served on the trial and family members kind of take a break for about a year there where they just they've vanished. It's not like they stopped writing. Somebody's gone in and they've taken these sheaves of paper out

and they've destroyed them in some way. Samuel Paris himself, the Minister for you know, thirteen fourteen, fifteen months, kept notebooks of what was going on, and one page was pulled out of a notebook at some point and taken as evidence for something. We don't know how or why. But all the rest of the notebooks have vanished. It's not that they've been misplaced or you know, that the family just won't give them up. They just don't exist anymore.

There's this almost global cover up of the documentation of what happened. Once the government gets on its feet in late sixteen ninety two and the Oier Interminer is shut down and it becomes the Superior Court, essentially the state supreme Court, the documents don't go away anymore. Those become really official, and we still have all those, but all the court documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial, all through the summer of sixteen ninety two, it's just gone.

So there's not a lot to look at there is stuff. I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great resources on it. But if you go to History Unobscured dot com, there's a resources page and I can't remember if it's on there if I need to put it on there, but there's a link to is that the University of Virginia that has a like a digital scanned in library of every document relating to it. So things like the warrant that was issued for Reverend George Burrows.

Like you can see the warrant right there, written out in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on and everything. It's beautiful. It's tragic. So there are things that we have and we still find things. You know, every year, somebody's bumping into a new document, some family opens up a book in their library and finds a warrant or a letter that was tucked away, like it happens. But a lot of it's just sort of disappeared.

delete everybody's Facebook. It's over. This didn't happen. Here's the official account in this one ton or this one blog. All right, carry on. That's insane to me that that could even happen. But you know, we did. Where did we go? We went to the Danvers Archival, the Danvers Archival Center.

He's a cool guy. I like Richard a lot. And he sits as the archivist down there in the bowels of the library and he manages all these amazing things the church changed locations. They moved across the street. A few years after it was all over, they got a new minister, Reverend Green, maybe in the sixteen ninety eight ninety nine range or so. He moved the building across the street. And then eventually that was, you know, tore down and they built a bigger building because it's a church,

and they grow and populations grow. In the nineteen seventies, I think there was a fire at the church and Richard Drask went with the fire department and was able to get in and save some things. He saved the original communion where you know, like the chalice, the bowl, those things they're made out of pewter. But they were in a box right by the door, and on purpose, like he told them to keep them by the door. And there was a fire, and then two books were saved.

One is think of them both as like ship's logs, you know, you think like Picard talking to the computer in his ready room, you know, ship's log date whatever. So there was there was a log for the church itself, and a lot of people wrote in it, whoever were officers and important people would write in there, like you know, we excommunicated you know Martha Corey on this date, or we brought in this member this date. It's sort of

a happenings of the church. That book from sixteen ninety two was saved as well as the Minister's Book, which is sort of a ship's log for the minister, and that has Samuel Parris's writing in it, detailing things that are going on, writing about the events, and when he left and Reverend Green came in, that book was handed off to Reverend Green and then he takes over writing in it, and it's almost like a diary for whoever holds the position of minister.

was highly complex. So one of the most common questions that I get, whether it's social media or in person, regarding the Salem witch trials is well, why did it happen? You know? And I think that that's our inclination. It's a noble question, it's good, But it's people saying, give me that one sentence that explains why. What's the one answer? And there isn't There isn't a one answer. Again, I harken back to what doctor Baker wrote for his book

The Storm of Witchcraft. It's got this great introduction by somebody else that talks about how it's the perfect storm. Of all these elements that come together before I go on to what maybe they were misconceptions. You know, the big one that I always get is, oh, it was just rotten bread, right, It was that ergot poison stuff, right, I thought. We started doing the show, hopefully you have learned. Yes, But you know, ergot is this fungus that grows on grains.

We hear about it as rye, and people make bread out of rye, among other things. He makes a good bourbon on a rye. But this, this fungus can cause hallucinations. And the idea was put forward in the mid seventies that hey, what if these people were having hallucinations and that explains why they were behaving so bad. They can have convulsions too, and you know, some of the afflicted girls as we call them, the people who were showing symptoms of being attacked by the witches, they had convulsions

and fits. They would fall on the floor and thrash around. So, you know, hey, sounds like Ergo explains this. And the very next month after that was published in a journal, the same journal published a debunking of it. You know, two more scientists came on board and said, no, look, it can't be er goot point and here's why. Or got poisoning reacts to you one of two ways, depending on how you eat. If you are deficient in vitamin A, you will probably have hallucinations and convulsions. They call it

convulsing or got poisoning something like that. But that's only one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves. The other way would be gangreen. And I get that those are wildly disparate responses for something in your body. You know, you can either have convulsions and hallucinations or you can have gangreen, you know, like pick and I would certainly grab the convulsions myself and skip the gangreen. But you have to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,

and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of the victims, the afflicted girls who have these symptoms are wealthy, and they could have afforded to have good food and would have been eating food from the sea. They would not have been deficient to invite them in a so because nobody ever gets reported as having gangreen, we can ride away right off or got poisoning. I sometimes hear people, Yeah. I mean it's kind of like a oh you pop

my bubble, why'd you do that? But we want there to be the magic pill, right, We want to say, oh, it was the one thing. And if we could go back in time in a time machine and like in one day, fix everything and make it not happen, we'll just take away their grain because it's got focus on it right. Well, it wouldn't work. It's more complex than that,

you know. And you have a lot of people suffering from what was essentially post traumatic stress disorder, refugees coming from the middle of Maine down the coast back to New England, back to Salem where they had come from years before, because they kept trying to settle the coast of Maine. But up there you had the Wabanaki and the Algonquin, and you had the French who were allied with them, and they were constantly hammering back down to

the south. And these refugees, like they'd go up and they'd settle, and they'd lived for a couple of years, and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would flee back south, having lost everything they ever took with them and it was horrible. It was it was warping. Some of them watched their parents die, some of them lost children. And so they come back to Salem and they tell their stories, and you know, they passed this

trauma on to the people there. Everything outside their borders was darkness and evil and danger and they were afraid. And of course we mentioned the lack of the charter. They didn't have a government at the time. It was very, very tricky. One of the things the government was doing is I think it was with when Governor Andros took over before Phipps, Like they started to re tax property that had already been taxed and so you had paid your tax and you had your profit leftover and now

you're going to get taxed again. So financially they were getting hammered. They had an incompetent leader who didn't understand how to goned because he had never done it before. Governor Phipps. All these all these pieces helped to kind of mix in the bawl and be this perfect storm that that in that window of time, that's that's when it could have happened, and it did.

in some case. This is I think one of the specific quotes is that the accusers and the accused were in a way in a negotiation about the legitimacy of female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far of an assumption to say this was probably a severely patriarchal society.

So we wanted. We wanted a perspective, a historical perspective on what sort of a voice did women have in that age, what was their place in society, what was seen as wrong, what was seen as good? You know, things like women in sixteen ninety two would have been able to read because they needed to read the scripture to their family, but they wouldn't necessarily have been able

to write. So, you know, years later, when Reverend Green takes over the one of the afflicted girls, one of the girls who accused people and got them killed, wanted to join the church. And her confession is in that churches book that I talked about that saved from the fire, but it's in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls her signature underneath it because she couldn't write. She could read, but she couldn't write, And that was pretty common for

women back then. It was, you know, partly out of this, you know, what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary. There's a little bit of control in there too. If they can't read or if they can't write, then they can't you know, get involved in government and things like that. And so there was a patriarchal you know, push down

on that as well. It is really bizarre what happens in the Salem witch trials because in effect, you have not only women, but you have young women, girls twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, who begin to guide the process of the court like their word is taken as law. And these judges, these educated men, a lot of them had gone to Harvard Divinity School, like they were either just shy of being ministers themselves or could very well go out and get a job as a minister, who were

some of the most educated people of the day. They were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And so these roles are reversed. There's the shift there, and you have to wonder, like you said, in a time when women are told to shut up and be quiet, sit down, and do what you're told, that they have this opportunity all of a sudden, they notice an opening right that they're being listened to and things are being done based

on their stories. And you have to think at least some of them sort of leaned into that that I have freedom right now, and I'm going to use this freedom right now. And you know, I haven't seen any study that looks at the list of victims who are

accused by these people. But you know, I wonder how many of them were sort of like pro traditional women, sort of women like you know, Rebecca Nurse was seventy six, and maybe she was one of those people that tow the line and say, look, I'm a good, quiet Christian woman, I'm not going to speak up. I have to wonder if there's a little bit of a social battle going on there. You know, we know that twenty years before the Saling witch Trials, there was an event in Grotten.

One of the ministers who pops up in the witch trials is this guy named Samuel Willard. I think twenty years before he was in Groton, and he had a household servant who was having fits and seizures and was speaking about the devil and the book like it's all these elements that come right from the Sailing Witch Trials, but it was twenty years before, and I see a lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice for you know, a few months. And that's a pretty

easy way to view these things. I don't know if I'm reading into it, if I'm applying my own perceptions onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.

readers and learned men of the time. And it really does bring home that idea of these young women fighting back in any way they possibly could to be seen and to be heard and to be known.

like in sixteen ninety two. I want to be careful with leading people to believe that the afflicted girls were a social movement, because there might have been part of that, but again, it's not a neat and clean, black and white thing. Some of the afflicted girls were literally refugees from Maine who had come down having watched their entire families killed and were afraid for their life every single day.

There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were some social things going on, some of the better off families versus competitive families, you know. So it's this big mix. But I think it would be wrong to say that there isn't some aspect of this rebellion against the patriarchy going in there. It's not the only thing, it's not even the primary thing, but there's an element of that in there for sure.

And so when we get back into the new year, we're gonna take those six interviews we did with the six historians doctor Emerson Baker, doctor Richard Trask, doctor Jane Kaminski, Mary Beth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey, I got them all, and we're gonna we're gonna publish them weekly, one at a time, all six of the interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,

because Unobscured is narrative storytelling. It's me telling a story for forty five minutes, and then every now and then you'll hear like doctor Baker jump in and talk for fifteen seconds to get a point across for me. But we never get all of his interview, and it's it's a great interview. So this is our way of sharing those big conversations with people. And you can just sit in front of the fire hose and drink and it's awesome. I concur sounds like a plan.

all of those pieces. I think we would all do the same thing. And I think it's important for us in any historical situation, but especially the same witch trials to look back at it and say, these are just people. They have hopes and they have dreams, they have fears, they have insecurities, they have talents, they have desires to be on stage, they have desires to slip and hide under the radar, whatever it is like, these are just normal people like us. And if we forget that, that's

when we start to misunderstand history. And that's one of the biggest lessons that I can take away from this.

a widely misunderstood period of American history. You can find Unobscured in its entirety now wherever you find your favorite shows and Aaron mentioned earlier the website, which is chock full of some excellent additional resources, including for our more visually driven audience members, maps and diagrams of the surrounding area to really put you in the place.