S1 – 12: Making Amends

she had carried throughout the ordeal. It was her pregnancy that had kept her alive the day her husband John had been led to the gallows and hanged, and now that safety net was gone, it can't have been an easy delivery. Months earlier and Procter, wife of Thomas and one of the afflicted who put so many others in jail,

had delivered her own baby. She would have prepared groaning cakes and groaning beer, the traditional provisions laid out to refresh the women of the community as they gathered by her side, coaching and supporting her through the process of labor and birth. New clean linens would have been ready nearby as well to wrap the newborn. A family cradle

would be in the room. Thomas Putnam would have stepped in among the women of the Salem Village church to bless his new child with a father's love, to share pride and joy with the weary mother, to receive the warm smiles and congratulations of his neighbors. Not for Elizabeth Proctor.

Though her birthing experience that January was as cold and unfriendly as the jail cell she sat in, she more than likely would have labored on the bare dirt floor, and unless the people around her were no longer bound by leg irons and chains, she would have had to labor alone. There were no fresh linens to swaddle her newborn son, and her husband John was never going to walk through that door and share in her joy. He was gone now, so too was her protection from execution.

There was little to look forward to, so she named him with an eye on the past, John, just like his father. Even though John would need his mother now more than ever, his birth signaled her death. Stoughton's death warrant now had power over her, and when the first session of the Superior Court convened on February one. She fully expected to be led away and never see him again. But then, of course, Phipps stopped all of that. But

the governor's message didn't stop everything. After Stoughton abandoned the courts in an angry huff, Thomas Danforth took over and shouldered the unsavory task of wrapping up all the remaining open cases. He took over as Chief Justice and began to methodically work through them, And the most talked about of them all was that of Lydia Dustin. She was one of those individuals who had been hounded for years

by accusations of witchcraft. When she was pulled into the chaos of she said very little in her own defense, which gave her the appearance of guilt in the eyes of the magistrates. But all of the evidence against her had been spectral. Tales of ghostly visitations were invisible attacks, and that was no longer permissible in the trials. The jury, of course, acquitted her, and she was ordered to pay

her jail fees and go home. And one would hope that by now the community around her would have caught on and recognized an innocent woman when they saw one. But there were a number of complaints about the verdict, so many that Dan Fourth actually begged her to confess if she was truly guilty. She did not. She returned to the jail in Cambridge, where she had been staying and waited for her family to gather the necessary funds

to purchase her freedom. While she was there, though, she became sick, and even after being brought home to be cared for, she was too old and frail to fight it off. She died on March tenth, the final victim of the Salem which trials. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. One other death that happened that winter was that of and Over rapist Timothy Swan. He had been one of the men to start the and Over accusations, claiming that he had been bewitched by some of the women in town,

causing him to become sick. When he passed away on February second, it was the day after those women were released and sent home six months earlier. That sort of coincidence would have landed those women back in jail, but the tide had shifted. Most people saw his death as

natural and expected. There were still doubts in the air in Salem, though yes, Lydia Dustin had been acquitted, but there were a handful of others still being held for trial, and everyone wondered if they would receive the same open minded treatment or if criminal charges awaited them, But they would have to wait because the Superior Court was needed

in Boston to handle other matters of governance. On February six, just five days after Governor Phipps reprieve, Salem village minister Samuel Paris led a small committee of members from his congregation along the Ipswich Road to the home of Francis Nurse, husband of Rebecca, who had been executed months before. Along the way, they stopped at the home of their son, Samuel Nurse, as well as John Tarbell, Rebecca's son in law.

The committee consisted of Reverend Paris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, Old Bray Wilkins, and three Putnams, although not Chief Instigator Thomas Putnam. They made the trip out to the Nurse farm to make a complaint about the behavior of those families. Specifically, they were upset that the men had refused to come to church or partake in Holy communion, and if Reverend Paris was to be able to do his job as shepherd

of the flock. They needed to come back. From what we know, each of the men received the message in stony silence. They didn't make excuses or explain themselves, probably because the reasons should have been clear enough. Paris helped stoke the community fears that led to the deaths of Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty, and they owed him no excuse for being angry about that. But they all did agree to come into the village the following day to

meet the whole committee and discuss the matter. They extended the offer to Bray Wilkins grandson Thomas as well, and to Peter Klois, whose wife Sarah had somehow managed to outlive her sister's Rebecca and Mary. John Tarbell arrived two hours early and headed straight for the minister's parsonage. Paris led him upstairs to his study, where Tarbell raged at him for over an hour. He took months of frustration and pain and anger and swung it like a club,

pointing all of the blames squarely on Paris. If not for the words and actions of Paris, he claimed, Rebecca Nurse would still be alive, as would so many others After he left, Samuel Nurse climbed the minister's stairs and did the act same thing. The only thing that saved Paris this time was the start of the one pm committee meeting, so both men left and walked over to the meeting house. Imagine they didn't walk together, though there would have been tensioned in the air between Paris and

the others that borderlined on tangible. The group meeting was just as rough for Paris. They blamed him for everything, calling him the instrument of our miseries and the beginning and procureur of the sorest afflictions, not of this village only, but to this whole country. But Paris was quick to shift all the blame to God. It was God who sent the evil into their community to test and refine them, so Paris should be off the hook. Peter Cloy's didn't come to that meeting, but he did make a trip

to Paris's house the following day. Once upstairs in the minister's study, he did the same thing as the others. Paris, he said, helped drive a community witch hunt that had claimed the lives of both of his wife's sisters. Was it any wonder that he and the others had refused to attend church and sit under his teaching and leadership. There would be more meetings, just like the first. Paris and the men of the Nurse family met again two weeks later, and then twice in March, twice in April,

and then once again in May. Multiple meetings did nothing to calm their anger, though in fact, those same men began to lobby for the removal of Samuel Paris from Salem, and whether it was by their influence or the powers of other angry villagers, the rates committee continued to refuse to collect his salary, just as they had done for

the previous two years. Things had changed in Salem. During March and April of a full year after the first afflicted girls frightened the village with their unusual fits, a fifteen year old servant girl named Mercy Short began to have her own seizures. Cotton Mother actually took the girl into his own home and cared for her, recording her condition and behavior, where she claimed that forces were pinching her,

choking her, and tempting her with unheard whispers. But Mercy Short was the orphaned daughter of a family from Maine, where her parents had been killed in the violence of King William's War. She had been taken captive during the fighting, but when she was finally released, she moved south to Salem. Today we can see her as a grief stricken young woman dealing with the trauma of her past. But Mather diagnosed her with something different, demonic possession. That didn't stop

the stories, though. Some people who visited her during her illness claimed they could smell brimstone in the room. Others said they could feel the air move, hinting at invisible spirits at work in the house. It was the typical spectral evidence we have all come to expect from Salem. But nothing ever came of it. No one took anyone

to court over her sufferings. No names were named. Neither even wrote about her ordeal in a new pamphlet called A Brand Plucked out of the Burning, where he stated that Mercy's real recovery would happen when she learned to find safety and protection inside her new home in Salem. In other words, her torment wasn't the work of witches or spirits. It was nothing more than the cruelty of life.

The Superior Court met again on May tenth of to hear the final cases against the last remaining which suspects. Danforth was back as Chief Justice, with no sign of William Stoughton. Thankfully, the majority of the cases were dismissed by the grand jury. While five of them went to trial. All of them were found not guilty and ordered to be released upon payment of their jail fees. One of the dismissed cases was that of the Paris family slave Tichiba.

She'd been in jail for over a year, but unlike everyone else, he had yet to actually be indicted with a specific crime. But Paris, showing his true colors, once again, refused to pay her jail fees and secure her release. Here's Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stacy Schiff, you can't leave until you've paid your jail fees, and no one is willing, it seems to pay titibus until later. I think she's in jail for a year altogether. I don't know what the what the law would have been for a slave.

They certainly didn't want her back, and we have very little sense of where she could have gone after that. By the way, I mean, it's interesting because she's so completely at the heart of this and therefore would have been very much spoiled goods. It turns out Titchiba was essentially confiscated by the state, like an abandoned piece of property.

She would have been sold off to the highest bidder, although we have no record of that transaction, but the full picture of the dehumanization of a slave in colonial New England couldn't be more clear. Meanwhile, the conflict continued between Paris and the villagers who remembered his role in fanning the flames of fear. Let's be clear, Samuel Paris did not deliberately drive the chaos forward, and he didn't

create the tension between feuding families in the area. But he did use his position to poke at those sore spots and draw attention to them. He didn't create the fear, but he certainly wielded it like a tool to advance his own causes. These people confronted Paris about his failures for over two years. Finally, in November of six Paris wrote an apology of sorts and read it out loud during a Sunday service. But it was too little, too late,

and far from an actual apology. In fact, it was more of the same old blame shifting that he loved to engage in. This wasn't really his fault, he said. The events of six two had been a rebuke by God for events that had begun inside his house. Titchuba and John Indian were both to blame because they had helped Mary Sibley make the Yearine cake to ward off the devil. Magic had been used in his house to

fight magic, and God was angry about that. In the end, his apology was really just a lot of excuses about why he wasn't to blame. It took two more years before Samuel Paris grew weary of the countless meetings and

conversations about his failures in sixteen ninety two. In April of sixteen ninety six, he informed the village elders that he would be leaving his position as minister, much to the relief of many families in the area, but he held onto the parsonage until early sixteen ninety seven, when the church finally gave him his unpaid salary as a bribe to pack up and leave. He moved to Stowe, Massachusetts to take a position in a church there, but was quickly caught up in a dispute with the elders

the issue his salary. Of course, another church experienced some change in January of sixty seven. As Samuel Willard was walking up the center aisle of Boston's Third Church, a hand reached out and handed him a letter. It was Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the men to sit on both the Court of Oyer and Terminer and the Superior Court, and the letter came with instructions to be read aloud immediately. It was an apology, not from the collective judges, just

from him. But it was a real apology, standing in sharp contrast to the blame shifting that Paris had engaged in. Sewell expressed his deep regret for what had taken place under his supervision. He asked for the blame to fall on his shoulders, and begged for prayers of forgiveness. And he used a word that had been spoken seldom in regards to the actions of the Court sin. It wasn't just that they had made mistakes, but that they had

committed crimes against God. Sewell's prayer was that the punishment for his own sin would stop with him, rather than spilling out onto the community and his own family. No other judges ever made the same sort of public apology, but others from different parts of the system joined him later. Thomas Fisk had been the foreman of the jury during the Oyer and Terminal trials, and he released a statement

along with eleven other jurymen. They acknowledged that they had been led on by the judges to do horrible things that resulted in innocent blood spilled, and they begged for forgiveness. The public was beginning to feel more and more bold with their anger about the handling of the trials. In seven, Boston merchant Robert Caliph published a collection of papers from

the trial that only he could have put together. Not only had he been a wealthy merchant, but he also served as a constable for a time, and that gave him access to documents and people that otherwise would have been out of reach. He titled his publication More Wonders of the Invisible World, a direct attack against Cotton Mather's own book of a similar title that had been written as a pr tactic defense of the trials. Half pulled no punches, making sure the utter failure of the Massachusetts

leadership was on full display. He even took another stab at Cotton Mother by naming one of his chapters another brand plucked out of the Burning, referencing Mathers report on

Mercy Short that I mentioned earlier. The book features interviews with Captain John Alden, Nathaniel Carey, and George Jacobs Jr. All of whom had escaped Salem in the chaos of the Fall of six two but had since returned, and he made it clear just how widely it was known that Sheriff Corwin was skimming from the confiscations, but in the midst of his attack on the judges and leadership, Caleff gives us one last glimpse into the story of Tichiba.

In his book, Califf reveals her own testimony about what happened in six She confirmed that Paris had indeed beaten a confession out of her, and that he coached her on what to say and how to say it. The most surprising part of her interview with Caliph is that it takes place after she was sold by the state to pay for the jail fees. We still don't know the specifics of that sale or where she ended up, but apparently Caliph knew enough about it to track her

down and speak with her. She might have been treated like a piece of property by many of the people in power, but to Robert Caliph, Titchiba was just one more reliable witness, a human being who had lived through hell and had valuable information to share. But it was nothing more than a snapshot of a wisp of smoke. After her brief mention in Caliph's book, that's the last we ever hear from her, Pitchiba has vanished from the public records forever. After every tragedy, community has to learn

to stand back up and rebuild. We see this today after natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. We see it happen in war torn countries. We see it happen in our own lives. Storms bring damage, and that damage needs repaired. Salem Village wasn't unique in that regard. Yes, their storm was unusual and unique among the pages of American history, and yes it was a storm crafted by the people who lived there. But regardless of all of that, they still had work to do if they wanted to move on.

The departure of Reverend Samuel Paris left the position of Minister vacant in Salem Village, but they soon filled it Joseph Green was a brand new graduate from Harvard and a baby at just twenty two. Reports describe him as socially outgoing and gregarious, and apparently a bit more open minded than the former minister. One of the first things he did was institute the Halfway Covenant in the village church that meant people could become full members without the

humiliation of public confession. He baptized the families that Paris had pushed out of the church, and even rearranged the seating chart for the Sunday service to place the Putnam's and the nurses on the same bench. By the early seventeen hundreds, the church in Salem Village was on the men. Reverend Green led the church in removing Martha Corey's excommunication.

They founded a community school, built a brand new, larger meeting house, and instituted an annual Thanksgiving fundraiser to support the needy among them. They had transition from selfish, inward looking people to a community that cared about the outsider. Then, in August of seventeen o six, something amazing happened. Annie Putnam, daughter of Thomas and Ann Putnam, and one of the chief instigators of the spectral evidence, approached Reverend Green and

asked to become a full member of the church. Here is one of the girls responsible for setting the village on fire with fear that took the lives of over two dozen people, and she wanted to sit beside her neighbors in church and be a part of the community. And Green agreed. He helped her craft her apology, which he then wrote down in the Minister's Record Book, a book that historian Richard Trask allowed me to hold. I see some like modern edges to the page. Know what

this is is called leaf casting. What they did was they cast on new new paper on the old. And then this is the confession of and Putnam in the early seventeen hundreds. And she says, basically, I desire to be laid low in the dust of humility for accusing people that I now believe we're innocent. And it was her way of trying to give amends so that she could become a full church member. Is there is the

confession that's in the book. Here's this in her handwriting, special signature dictated by her into the book, and then she signs it herself. That confession was also delivered to the congregation by Anne herself. She stood in her place in the meeting house on August and read the confession out loud. Here's historian Stacy Schiff. She says she was essentially led us stray right. It's a little bit the devil made me do it kind of excuse, but she

does indicate that she was. She doesn't address how she came up with these spectral images. She simply says that she was misguided and deluded, and the congregation accepted her. She became a full member in the church and attended right alongside the families of the people she helped execute. It was a powerful symbol of the healing that needed to happen, but it also belies a darker undercurrent. The families of the victims were still in agony, and they

were out to cry out for justice. The first place to start, in the minds of many was for the government to reverse the charges against the people who had been tried and convicted in Sixto, to restore their innocency, as they said, But they also wanted financial restitution. Remember, many of the people who were executed and convicted lost everything. If the husband was executed, every piece of his property was confiscated by the states, even if there was a

widow and children left behind. Single women faced the same devastation, and many others experienced death blows to their business or personal finances. Something had to be done to fix it. In seventeen oh three, the convictions of Abigail Faulkner, Sarah Wardwell, and Elizabeth Proctor were reversed, and then in seventeen ten, the Massachusetts legislature set up a committee to investigate what

else they might be able to do. The members of that committee arrived in Salem in September of that year, and during their six day visit they received forty five petitions for restitution. Every one you might have expected was part of that list. Sarah Good's husband, William, the nurses and stes and carriers. Charles Burrows, the oldest son of the executed minister from Maine, added his name to the list,

as did Philip English. In fact, he submitted a list of items stolen by Sheriff George Corwen and filed suit against the man. George Jacobs Jr. Who had returned from hiding elsewhere, also submitted a list. His included cows and pigs, sixty bushels of corn, a quantity of pewter bed rugs, blankets, pillows, and other furniture, all taken by Corwen. It took the committee more than a year to hand over a decision, but when they did, the General Court acted on it immediately.

They reversed the property seizures of twelve executed witches, along with Jihles Corey and seven others who had been convicted but not killed. But if you're trying to do the math in your head to keep up, you might have noticed a gap. Seven convictions for witchcraft still remained in place, bridget Bishop Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, and pudiator Wilma Reid, Margaret Scott and Elizabeth Johnson, and while attempts were made over the years to address their cases, it wasn't until

two thousand one that their convictions were finally reversed. Yes, I said two thousand one, three hundred years after the trials ended. Apologies and reparations aside, there was a lot of silence from the people who should have spoken out. Part of that was pride. William Stoughton, for example, never apologized and continued to believe for the rest of his life, that he had done everything right. Others might have felt shame, but they atled it up and kept quiet to avoid

the attention. But there were others who began to do something more sinister. They covered up their tracks. Here's Stacy shifted once again. There's deafening silence all around, and it's almost a conspiracy. And when you look at when you begin to look at the record, the diaries have been purged from those years. The congregations book, as you know, Paris pulls out those entries for those months, so that we don't have those entries. The court records are missing.

Even Samuel Willard, who is one of the great Boston ministers, we have his compendium of sermons, which is an enormous volume, but missing are the sermons from that summer. So there's clearly a sense of shock to the system and a sense of regret, and I think of tremendous guilt at what has happened. There seems to be a realization that no one really articulates until Samuel Sewell, one of the judges, finally does, But there does seem to be this Could

we cover this up as quickly as possible? Could we make it go away feeling. And it wasn't just personal records that went missing. There were more than thirty witchcraft trials held by the Superior Court in early and we have all of those court records. But it's the Oyer and Terminer, the court that ran through most of six that seems to have fallen off the books, and what's happened to them has never been discovered. Of course, researchers

stumble upon new items from time to time. That's the sort of thing that historian Richard Trask keeps his eye out for. Once in a while. Um, we find some of the documents. Often we've just not looked hot enough within the traditional sources that they located there. Other times something pops up that became an archival astray centuries ago and it comes back in when the witchcraft was over.

Many of these documents Scott Scattered that was a governor of Massachusetts during the pre Revolutionary period, Thomas Hutchison who wrote a history of Massachusetts, and he actually was given a whole bunch of these very important documents. And Hutchison was a Tory and during the Stamp Act Crisis of seventeen sixty five, when the American provincials were mad at England. They attacked his house, and they scattered all of his

papers outside on the ground, and so forth. Some historians have seen the missing documents as an attempt to erase a terrible mistake, to save the leadership of Massachusetts from the shame that came with the aftermath. Nineteenth century author Charles W. Upham wrote the book Salem Witchcraft in eighteen sixty seven that pushes just such a notion, and it's a popular take on a historical mystery. These missing records

weren't lost, they say they were deleted. We also have three centuries of descendants involved with a lot of these cases. One of the judges in both the Oil and Terminer and the Superior Court was wait Still Winthrop. He was a prolific letter writer who traded correspondence with his brother fitz John Winthrop all through the sixteen eighties and nineties, But letters from sixteen ninety two and ninety three are missing, and many historians believe that was the work of later

generations who wanted to hide their family shame. Even Samuel Parris did a bit of track covering. He kept extensive notes of his observations of the afflicted girls and their spectral visions, as well as records of other witness testimony. And yet only one page from one of those notebooks still exists, suggesting that Paris destroyed the collection before it could be seized or found. But of course, time went

on in Salem Village. In the seventeen fifties, nearly a century after they began to ask for their independence from Salem Town. That freedom was granted. They changed their name to Danvers and have become a very distinct community from their neighbors in Salem over the past two and a half centuries, and they're very proud of that. Some people who suffered through the events of sixteen ninety two were

less proud, though. Sarah Klois had lost both of her sisters, Mary st and Rebecca Nurse, and couldn't bear to stay in the village. Afterward, she and her husband Peter moved south towards modern day, framing him setting off a sort of minor exodus. My seventeen hundred, just eight years after they'd left, they found themselves in the center of a

community of roughly fifty former Salem neighbors. Peter and Sarah became central figures in this new neighborhood of framing him known as Salem end one more interesting side note that I just can't leave out of the story. Historian Richard Trask is a Danvers native and descended from multiple victims of the sixteen ninety two which trials. He's lived within this historical narrative his entire life, but also with the unique perspective of literally living in the neighborhood where much

of it began. According to him, even up until in eighteen fifties, there was an isolated group of neighbors in the area of Center Street and Danvers that had held onto the old Salem village accent. Trask refers to it as the Center Street Twang. Just one little artifact among so many others that gives texture and character to what took place there over three d twenty five years ago.

But the Salem witch Trials could never stay local. The events were immediately attractive to writers and historians, and word about the tragedy spread. In seventeen twenty, the first regional history of New England to include the witch trials was published in London by Daniel Neil. It gave prominence to the events and helped a wider audience learn about what took place in sixte Neil does an admirable job of

helping people see logic over superstition. The Trials happened because of human error and misjudgments, not a satanic plot to overthrow a Puritan community. But he also put on paper of view that has clouded the public perception of the Trials ever since, that it was purely a battle between credulous bigots on one side and the advance of reason and science on the other. But Neil's approach paints in black and white a picture that had a lot more

nuance than he would admit. Those anti science religious leaders were actually very pro science. Sure, there were a few who muddied the water men like Cotton Mother come to mind, of course, but most of the ministers in Massachusetts were also the most interested in modern science. Here's historian Maryland k Roach. I think people generally see the sale in which trials is something so bizarre they can't really identify with it. That it's something foolish people did because they

didn't know any better. They didn't have computers, they didn't have this, They didn't know that. And we're smarty than there. But they were educated people and well intentioned people who, even by the lights of their own philosophy in their own time, include to have figured out that things were not proceeding as they should without converting to twenty one century skepticism. For example, the Harvard Professor of American History Jane Kamensky agrees and sees the truth as a call

to humility. These are the best minds of their generation. These are the most educated, the most advanced thinkers and scientists, the philosophers who have access to the latest findings and ways of thinking morally and ethically, acting morally and ethically in their universe. They cannot be laughed off. They are

the smartest, most privileged people of their times. Confronted with something that is awful to them, and they act in ways that come to seem, even within a couple of years, almost miraculously terribly um and yet they do it with the best of intentions and the sharpest of tools. If that doesn't encourage a kind of radical humility and second guessing and checking in with each other about who's doing what to when, whom, why, I don't know what? Does it might sound like I'm making a big deal out

of a little thing. But Neil's position influenced almost two centuries of public opinion, which contributed to how the events had become so misunderstood over time. Even more dangerous, though, his attitude about Salem lulls us into a false sense of safety, because if Neil was correct, then the events in Salem were a product of an earlier time when

superstition ranked higher than reason. And since we've grown up since then, and science has brought new advancements and pushed away the shadows of superstition, it would be easy to think that we as a culture have outgrown such a tragic failure. But oh how wrong we would be. Technology and advancements and science only gives us tools. How we

use those tools is guided by human nature. It's important to remember that advancements in ship building and cartography allowed the exploration of the New World, but also empowered the Transatlantic slave trade. Social media connects us, but it also

poisoned the well. Science alone can't save us again. We are very hard in the people of I think if you look back on on our on our perspective, in three years, people may be heard on us and again, despite the best intentions of people to create a good, orderly,

godly society. Bad things happen, and I think the lesson is if we can just try to be understanding you kind of people, you know, and try to get through it as best we can, and try to look towards the good and human nature and try to avoid those sort of base reflexes as much as possible. You know, it's not a happy ending, and we just hope people

learn from it. Historians might have spent centuries dissecting the Salem which trials and placing the blame at the feet of various notions, but there's one thing everyone can agree on. Popular culture loves to retell the story. Arthur Miller's The Crucible immediately comes to mind for many, and it's certainly

a powerful piece of entertainment. Here's Marilyn kay Roach once again atha Miller's play, which is creative fiction, but definitely on the part about not being believed when you're telling the truth, so you lie and then they believe you. That's that hits the nail on the head. Yes, Miller helped bring attention to the Salem events, but he also borrowed fictional elements from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,

treating legend as fact. He even blended individual details from the trials into new chimera, like moments that didn't actually take place and details are just playing wrong. In The Crucible, Miller portrays Dan Fourth as the chief Justice hell bent on executing as many which is as possible, while in truth that man was William Stowton. Of course, Dan Fourth and Stowton aren't the only figures from Salem to receive a massage treatment from storytellers and historians over the years.

In fact, it maybe the most mysterious one of them all that has received the most attention. Tichiba. The most obvious transformation we see in modern retellings of the Salem events happens when storytellers saw that Tichiba was a slave, and because they identify slavery with blackness, she was pushed into that mold. In the process, the role of indigenous

people's in the tale are reduced or removed completely. Other layers have been added over the years as well, giving Tichiba actual powers of witchcraft or voodoo, sometimes going as far as to put the full responsibility for what happens square early on her shoulders. I remember hearing the story of the Salem witch trials for the first time decades ago, and whoever it was that recited it to me did just that, stating as a fact that it was all

Titchuba's fault. After twelve episodes, though, I think all of us know just how wrong that was. But the most common question historians are asked, hands down, is what they think the real cause was for the witchcraft panic. It's a good question, and it comes from a place of genuine interest, but it also hints at the misconception that the events in Salem can be boiled down to one single reason, like a magic pill that covers all the symptoms. Sadly,

there is no such simple answer. A lot of people like to bring up the hypothesis that the entire community fell victim to ergot poisoning. Ergot, you see, is a fungus and under the right conditions, it can grow on rye and other grains. If humans ingest the erga with the grains, it can cause medical conditions such as convulsions and fits. But history professor Mary Beth Norton disagrees. I don't see or good even if it's possible, um, which

I think is very unlikely, is a real explanation. I researched for my book cases in England and America before six in which young children began to have what were described as fits that were then attributed to witchcraft, and I discovered that it was a not unusual pattern. It was it wasn't necessary, it was common, but it was known. It was a known pattern, and it was a pattern when children were in intensely religious households, as indeed they

were in the household of Samuel Paris. Social and cultural norms aside. There are even medical reasons why er goot poisoning misses the target, because urgotism presents with certain symptoms depending on whether or not the patient has a vitamin A deficiency. If they lack vitamin A, they might have convulsions. If not, it's most likely to present as gang green and a great source of vitamin A, it turns out,

is fish. Considering the fact that Salem was a support community and many of the afflicted were from wealthy families, it's unlikely that their diets lacked vitamin A, so no no matter how attractive the idea might be, er goot poisoning was not involved. Others have suggested encephalitis, which is an infection in the brain that causes inflammation. Honestly, there have been a lot of theories. Tomorrow someone might suggest a different illness altogether, but all of them fail to

explain the actual experience of the afflicted girls. Nothing covers the hallucinations and the convulsions, all while the girls were observed by countless people around them to be healthy and fit. The less sexy answer is that the afflicted girl, and to a lesser extent, the rest of their community, we're all suffering through the intense fear and trauma of a

war that was creeping closer to their homes. They lived in a world where politics and religion were creating bitter rivalries and driving wedges between neighbors, where the line between truth and lies was becoming increasingly blurry. In the end, people were just really scared. Don't get me wrong, There's nothing inherently bad about bringing fresh eyes and new perspectives to the table. New questions about the problems inside Salem

help us move the study of it all forward. That's why we now consider King William's War to be an essential component of the Salem story, but we have to be careful to not become clouded by popular ideas that ignore the real facts. Today, if you mentioned the sale in which trials most people conjure up images of victims burning at the stake, of women being tied to stones

and tossed into water to see if they'll float. We imagine crowds of villagers with pitchforks and torches, and people pulled out of their beds in the middle of a night. And none of that ever happened in Salem. At the same time, what did happen in Salem, to some degree, keeps happening in our own world over and over again. They might not always involve accusations of witchcraft, but we've come to think of them all as witch hunts. Nonetheless,

here's Richard Trask. You have to confront your own period of witch hunts with clear vision and bravery, because this is not something that happened back in It's almost always with us. From the interment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, to the Army McCarthy hearings, the Red Scare to time and time again, these kinds of things happen. We can

spend the story of Salem however we want. We can look for outside forces like illness or drug induced to lucin nations, or point to the age old battle between superstition and science. We can invent any number of excuses, but none of it comes close to the most obvious answer on the table, the Salem which trials happened because humans were involved, and we have a very long track record of making a mess of things. History is safe because it sits in the past. It happened, and now

there's distance between us and the tragedy. After over five years, we talked more about witch hunts in the metaphorical sense than the literal, But the truth is long after Salem, real witch hunts were still threatening innocent lives. In seven there was a case in Philadelphia involving a woman who was accused by her neighbors of being a witch. An angry mob brutally murdered her out of fear. In seventeen nine, another woman was suspected of being a witch in York, Maine,

and she was viciously attacked because of it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a Methodist minister named James Monroe Buckley traveled across the United States and interviewed people about their beliefs, and witchcraft was a common feature of many of their tales. According to Buckley, there were more than fifty lawsuits involving witchcraft in the eighteen eighties.

Old beliefs. It seems we're far from gone. Those later witchcraft accusations were always pointed at the usual suspects, the outsiders in society. Irish Americans accused their New Scottish immigrant neighbors, German American communities accused immigrants from Eastern Europe, and most common of all, white colonizers and settlers accused the Native Americans around them. But Salem still sits on the pedestal for most people. It's become the popular icon of witch

hunts in most people's minds. Then Professor of history Emerson Baker sometimes wonders why that is why Salem, Because by European standards, Salem unfortunately is a fly speck. You know, in the Great Age of witch hunts over several hundred years in Europe, we know that about a hundred thousand people were prosecuted and about half of them were executed for witchcraft, you know, in in in in Cologne, Germany.

There was a tenure witchcraft outbreak from the sixteen twenties to the sixteen thirties where hundreds and hundreds of people lost their lives. And I've been I don't know if you've been a clone. It's a beautiful city, but no one calls it the witch city. So and you know, why is it that that's that? Salem, right is the witch city? So? And again to me, I think it's live.

It has to do with this confluence of of things coming together in this supposedly utopian Puritan place and that we're we're sort of living, still living in many ways in the aftermath of the the attraction to Salem is undeniable. If there were a disneyland devoted to witchcraft, Salem, Massachusetts would be it. Museums and tours and list shops and monuments all devoted to the idea of witchcraft. But outside of Salem, that phrase witch hunt has an altogether different meaning.

In the run up to the Civil War, when Northern politicians were condemning slavery as evil and a curse, their Southern counterparts used the events in Salem in their defense of it. According to them, it was the ancestors of the North that burned witches by the cord. They claimed that Northern abolitionism was just another version of that same misguided, fanatical movement, and said the witch hunt had simply shifted to slave owners, Setting aside the fact that no victims

were ever burned in Salem. Those Southern politicians demonstrated just how easy it was to take a specific concept and apply it to anything we want. But just because someone claims to be the victim of a witch hunt doesn't make it true. Even today, the term which is still used as a slur, although there are some who wear it proudly as a badge of honor. But it's the underlying concept that's the most common, the belief that there are people in society who prey on our fears, who

represent that dreaded insider threat. We don't always do it intentionally, but labeling someone the enemy is a lot easier the more diverse the world around us becomes. Historical witch hunts targeted the other in society, the people who didn't tow the line or play by the rules. It singled out the newcomers and the foreigners, the irreligious, and the poor. It always happened in places where communities felt as if their worldview and identity were under attack, and when humans

feel threatened, we look for scapegoats to target. If only there was a way for us to leave the darkest parts of our past behind us, or find some magical elixir that would create the kind of well ordered, critical thinking society that we all idealize. But if all the lessons that Salem teaches us that one is the most bitter, there is no easy solution. The events in Salem ended over three years ago, but the reasons behind them have never really gone away. They've never let go or lost

their powerful hold over us. The forces that led a community to kill twenty innocent people and allow five others to die in jail will never go away because they're inside each and every one of us. In the end, all we can hope to do is remember and learn from the past. Nothing is guaranteed, but perhaps with a bit of humility and compassion, we can be better. And that's it for Season one of Unobscured. I hope you've enjoyed the journey as much as my team and I

have enjoyed creating it for you. If you love the show, don't forget to head over to Apple Podcasts dot com slash Unobscured to leave a written review and a star rating to tell the world why they need to be listening to this show. But we're not finished just yet. First season two is already in development, so be sure to stay subscribed to the show so you don't miss

any announcements about that. Second, our six historians had a lot more to say than we were able to fit into the storytelling this season, and I really want to share those conversations with you. Thankfully, we recorded all of them and we're turning them into bonus episodes as I speak. Starting on January second, we'll begin to publish those full, complete interviews for you to listen to, one interview each week, always on Wednesdays, just like the main show, and you're

gonna learn so much from them. In fact, if you stick around after this brief sponsor break, I'll give you a taste of what's to come next time on Unobscured, you'd get these heroic words from these average people. And to me, that's so important. That is how this goes off the rail is so quickly. Really, is that no one is willing to raise his hand and say, but wait, have you considered? Or but wait, that doesn't make sense. People tend to think of it as spooky Halloween stuff,

especially in October. I like Halloween, but this is not that. How does the community heal after a period of mutual recrimination, profound upheaval. It's not as though, especially in the wake of nine eleven, that we are free from fears of the mysterious unknown. How much of our liberties of our faith are we willing to sacrifice to try to save

everything that we believe in? Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron Mankey and produced by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams in partnership with How Stuff Works, with research by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians further reading material, resource archive and links to our other shows at History Unobscured dot com. Until next time, thanks for listening, m HM.