S1 – 5: A Higher Power

Town in the western bread basket of the community. Over the years, the Wilkins had built a micro village on a rise of land everyone called Will's Hill, and they started to shrug off outsiders. But not John Willard. The leader of the clan was an old man named Bray Wilkins. Maybe it was the loss of his timber business or the government seizure of all his company assets. Whatever the nudge was, Bray had become closed off to the outside

world over time. When young Margaret Wilkins married someone from outside their community, she was the first to do so. But John Willard wasn't going to let that be a hindrance. He had plans to win them over. He bought property near the Wilkins Clan and started into a career in land speculation by dividing it into smaller lots and selling those off. He was trying to do right for his wife and new family, to make them proud and keep up with their ambitions. But not everything was storybook perfect.

In fact, it seems that John had developed a bit of a reputation and it was catching up with him. Looking back, I wonder if he regretted coming to Salem Village. There were a lot of reasons why his marriage to Margaret was a good thing, but it toppled the first domino that set a whole series of events in motion. And now on May ten, Willard found himself trying to escape at all. John Willard, Deputy Constable to Salem Village, was on the run. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Minky,

Like I said, John Willard had a bit of baggage. First, one of John's relatives had been tried for witchcraft back in his hometown of Lancaster in western Massachusetts, and that sort of thing had a way of following people around. As I've said before, the people of Puritan New England believe that a person could inherit the spiritual disposition of their direct ancestors in the same way that people inherit hair color or facial features. This wasn't a good thing

for John at home, though. There was more trouble. John was known to beat his wife with a stick whenever she crossed him, and during his time in the Wilkins community, he had shown that same propensity toward abuse while watching over some of the Putnam children. All of those details make up a really good list of reasons why John's future might not be as bright as he hoped. But the real turning point arrived on March eight. That was the day he was selected to be a deputy constable

for Salem Village. The rumors of witchcraft had started just a month before, so perhaps he was part of an effort to bolster the ranks of the village officials. We know that John Putnam Jr. Was also sworn in that same day, so that's probably the case. They knew they were about to become very, very busy. John Willard's role gave him a front row seat to the mess that

was unfolding in the village. His name isn't on any of the legal documents, but As a deputy constable, he would have been responsible for helping Constables Herrick and Locker arrest and transport the accused witches, dragging them from their homes to the meeting house, and then from jail to jail when they were removed from Salem to Boston and back again. Maybe he was one of the men responsible for hauling the six Sarah Osburne from place to place,

or the elderly Rebecca Nurse. Maybe he was one of the men who transported little Dorothy Good, imprisoned as a witch at just four years old. No record remains of exactly what touched John's heart, but something about it got to him. There was something about jailing so many vulnerable women, children, elders, and respected churchgoers that finally broke through his conscience. What he was doing was wrong, and everything about his position

was suddenly filling him with doubt. And one of the things he felt the most doubt about was the truth of the accusations Annie Putnam and her friends were making. On April, he visited Putnam to confront her about the accusation she was making. Maybe he thought he could talk some sense into her, or at least figure out what the truth was in the middle of the chaos. Maybe he knew something about the girls that the others didn't. After all, he'd been a caretaker for the family, he

knew the girl well. His visit backfired, though. The next day, Annie began to claim that she'd been attacked by his spectral shape for days and days, but that she had stayed silent about it, hoping that he would stop. When she begged him to leave her alone. Everyone seemed to take notice of this and began to look into John's behavior for proof of the accusations. It turns out John

had already stopped serving warrants against accused witches. After his visit to Annie Putnam, those spurs of suspicion bloomed into full accusations. In the first week of May, girls all over Sale and village were attacked by his spirit. When he found out about the claims against him, John sped to Bray Wilkins house. He was positive the family patriarch,

his wife's own grandfather, would know what to do. Bray later recalled that John came to my house greatly troubled, desiring me with some other neighbors to pray for him. But John caught Bray in the middle of trying to leave for a trip, and the older man brushed him off. A few days later, when the family was having dinner together in Boston, John glared at Bray across the table, perhaps fueled by what he perceived to be as betrayal, but Bray didn't notice. All he remembered from that night

was the pain that suddenly bloomed in his bladder. Later, a doctor who examined him said that his affliction was preternatural, reminding him of the newest rumors of John Willard. When Bray had recovered enough to make the journey home to Salem, he arrived to find one of his grandchildren, seventeen year old Daniel, laid low by a mysterious illness of his own. That was enough evidence for the village. Hawthorne and Corwin scribbled out another of their warrants, this time for John Willard.

No one had formally approached them to request it, but the rumors were just too enticing, so they handed the slip of paper to John Putnam Jr. Who had been selected alongside John Willard on March eight. When Putnam arrived at John Willard's home the next day he found it empty. He searched all over Will's Hill, asking from house to house for anyone who might know where John had gone, but no one had a clue. At the end of his visit, Putnam left with a clear message from the

Wilkins family, John Willard had fled Salem. I want to switch is for a bit and talk about a place that isn't Salem. We've covered the differences between Massachusetts and Maine in the previous episode, but there's another colony that's going to come into play over the course of the trials, New York. Today. We picture New York City as a metropolis unlike any other. It's diverse and textured and full

of countless languages, cultures, and attitudes. It has a powerful relationship with the waters that surround it, and the people who live there have a more international mindset than most of their fellow Americans. In the late seventeenth century, though, it was pretty similar to all of that, and all of it seems to be the fault of the Dutch. In the early sixteen hundreds, a lot of European powers

were trying to colonize the New World. Most European countries tended toward authoritarian monarchies that persecuted religious outliers and expelled minority people groups, not the Dutch, though they were a different sort of country. The Dutch had discovered that a liberal government built around intellectual freedom and tolerance was much

more powerful. They prioritized commerce over religion and welcomed all of those displaced minority groups into their own population, allowing them to reap the benefit of their talents and resources. It was that sort of attitude that was woven into the foundational elements of the New York Colony. Back then, of course, it was known as New Amsterdam, but things

would begin to change in sixteen sixty seven. That was the year the Dutch handed control of the colony over to the English and renamed the territory in port after the brother of the King, the Duke of York. Goodbye New Amsterdam, Hello New York. But the English ran things very differently. Thanks to the English Civil War in the sixteen forties, the Crown lacked the funds to embark on

proper royal colonies. Instead intended to give those opportunities to private companies founded by merchants and wealthy aristocrats with royal over site. Of course, that's why the Puritans of Massachusetts were able to do what they did. They received a commercial charter from the English government prior to the Civil War, and then all of the leaders of that company transplanted themselves overseas to live right in the middle of their investment.

It was economic cover for a deeply religious experiment to live an unobstructed Puritan life far from the watchful eye of the King. New York didn't have that purposeful beginning. When the English took control in sixteen sixty seven, they had to send troops into the city to help it go smoothly. The Dutch had attracted a very diverse and liberal community there, and they chafed under the English yoke. The early governors of the colony even refused English shipping

companies in favor of their old Dutch partners. It was a mess, and England felt like it was losing control. Massachusetts sent troops and supplies to help out in an effort to seem like a team player, but their time was running out. After the devastation of King Philip's War and the related conflict up and down the main coast, England decided enough was enough. The old way of running

things was no longer working. In sixteen seventy nine, the Crown took New Hampshire away from the Massachusetts colony and issued them a new royal charter. Five years later, in sixteen eighty four, Massachusetts saw their own charter revoked, leaving them in a lawless chaos. Less than a year after that, King Charles the Second died before law and order could be restored. To help calm the colonies, Edmund Andros was sent to set up English military rule. Here's historian Emerson Baker.

He was an Anglican with a Church of England, and Puritanism no longer was special. Massachusetts was no longer special. It was part of a super colony for stretch from New Jersey to Maine. Andros wasn't a well loved governor. He had previously been governor of New York and was very outspoken against Puritans. He raised taxes, revoked Puritan laws, and appointed his own judges and sheriffs. The worst blow, however, came when Andros forced landowners to essentially re buy their

land from the Crown. The result was deep organized resistance. On April eighteenth of sixteen eighty nine, hundreds of armed Puritans flooded into Boston and captured Andros and his cadre of loyal officers. All of them were thrown into prison, and a new provisional government was set up on the foundation of the old Charter and Puritan law. It left Massachusetts defend for itself once again, and with the threat of the Native American attacks on the northern border, it

wouldn't be an easy task. But there was a new star rising in the Puritan sky. He was a son of Maine, a Puritan sympathizer, and a man willing to fight for a good cause. Folks, I'd like to introduce you to Sir William Phipps. William Phipps had the sort of upbringing that any hard working American today might connect with. We don't like the silver spoon elitists who don't have to work hard for their rewards. We want the scrapper, the fighter, the one who was going to scramble to

the top of the pile. And William Phipps seems to fit that bill, at least at first Blush He was born on the coast of northern Maine around sixteen fifty two frontier parents. His father used the family home as a sort of hub for trading goods with the Native Americans, but passed away when William was just four. When his mother remarried, it was to his father's business partner, which consolidated what little wealth they had, and then life carried on.

There were a lot of factors that might have helped Phipps become the man history knows him as being when of fourteen children taught him to fight for himself, and working hard on the edge of the frontier taught him that survival was much more important than social politeness. But every character trait can become a flaw if you twist it hard enough. At the age of eighteen, he quit his job as a shepherd and became an apprentice to

a group of local shipbuilders. Shipbuilders who made frequent trips to Boston, which allowed him to rub shoulders with the sort of wealthy people who ran merchant companies. It's also how he met a Puritan minister named Increase Mather, a man roughly a decade his senior. William married into a successful merchant family and then proceeded to try his hand

running his own business as a shipbuilder. It turns out he wasn't the best business man out there, and he never really achieved the level of success he aspired to. In fact, he was better at achieving debts and failures, much to the frustration of the people he dealt with. It's important to stop for a moment and call attention to one of his flaws. Phipps, it turns out, was much more of a man of passion and a man

of learning. He wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination, but he also wasn't educated and that sort of rubbed off in his business dealings. He was known as a rough talker who used abusive language like a weapon to demean and intimidate others, and he was a fortune seeker in fact. In Sight three, he managed to raise enough money in England to go on a literal treasure hunt in the Caribbean, which failed, but somehow the fact that he survived the trip earned him enough attention to get

a second round of funding. That new, better equipped expedition paid off, and he returned home with thirty tons of silver. In return, he was given the honor of knighthood. When he was ready to head back to Massachusetts, he expected that Governor Andros would welcome him with open arms as some sort of hero and give him a lofty position

in the government, but instead Androws turned him away. Months later, though, Andros was in a prison cell and the Puritans had retaken control of the colony, so Phipps offered his help in their efforts against the Native Americans to the north. The next two years were a bit of a blur. Phipps led a small attack against French troops at Port Royal Way up in modern day Nova Scotia. They found the fourth there mostly unmanned and under extensive repairs, so

their victory was incredibly easy. Phipps returned to Boston as a hero, and they rewarded him by sending him out to do it again. There was a major attack going on at the English settlement of Falmouth up in Maine. Everyone gathered in New York for a large multi colony gathering and insisted that they pushed back and end the struggle with New France for good, and they put Phips

in charge. It looked impressive. Phipps had gathered over thirty ships and more than two thousand fighting men, but he also took his time doing so, wasting the better part of two months. At one point he sent one of his officers, Captain John Alden, over to marble Head, just up the coast from Salem Town, to take their cannons for use in the battle. But marble Head refused. Here's Emerson Baker once again. This takes place, and they lead in the fall of but for numerous reasons, a bad weather,

poor planning, frankly the fortifications of Quebec. It fails disastrously. They lose hundreds of men. They bring back smallpox with him into the harbor. When they arrived, they talk about frozen dead being stacked on the ships like cordwood, and they lose hundreds of people. And of course, since Phipps was the man in charge of the entire operation, he was looked on as a failure to deal with it.

He's skipped down. In fact, he was so embarrassed that he sailed back across the Atlantic to London, where his good friend Increase Mather was currently working to get the old Massachusetts charter restored by the King. Phipps arrival, whether or not it was born on the wings of failure, gave Mather an idea. What if Phipps a man he considered to be a friend could be appointed governor by the King. An ally he would be, so that's what

they pushed for. Mather ditched over two years of diplomatic efforts to restore the old Puritan charter and instead seemed to have made a new deal, a new charter that was favorable to royal control, in exchange for Phipps in the governor's house. But of course that meant returning to Boston. Bipps loved the idea of being governor, but hated the thought of facing all of those angry colonists. He had already disappointed them once before with the failed Quebec incidents.

Now he was bringing them a charter that was the opposite of what they wanted. That's probably all he thought about on that long journey back. By the time his ship was pulling into Boston Harbor on May fourteenth of six he had a plan. It wasn't honest, and it certainly wasn't legal, but he knew how he was going to prevent the crowds from showing him the same hospitality they extended to Edmund andros. He was going to lie

to them. The arrival of increase Mather with a new charter was seen as good news in Boston, but of course they didn't know what that charter said yet. That was a bitter pill that needed a lot of sugarcoating and lies to go down smoothly. So Phipps stood before a massive crowd the night he returned and did just that. This new charter, he told them, would restore the old laws and freedoms that they had enjoyed under the first Charter.

It was what the crowd wanted to hear, and it made him a hero for bringing that news to them. But I can't help but wonder if Phipps cast a knowing glance at Mather, because both of them knew how patently false that promise was. In fact, the new Charter required new laws to be established that matched English laws back home. It would take them a while to get things set up, sure, but when he was done, the Puritan experiment in New England would essentially be over. Massachusetts

would become just one more royal colony. And Phipps needed this to work. He had his own plans and goals for his time in office, but that meant staying in office to see them through. Here's Emerson Baker once again, this is a guy that has no political experience whatsoever. He's pretty good at commanding a ship, but he's one of these fortune seekers, and frankly, one off one of his big personal goals would have been to make as

much money off the office as possible. He's all about personal profit and advancement, and if you can cut a side deal, he can. When he goes to make a treaty with the Native Americans up at Pemaquid the end of the war, he also manages to get the leading stage him of Maine, Madakawando, to deed him several thousand

acres of mainland as a part of the treaty. The same evening that Phipps arrived in Boston, Mercy Lewis and a companion visited Will's Hill, where Bray Wilkins still suffered enormous pain in his bladder and where young Daniel had fallen into paralysis without hesitation. Mercy identified the specter of John Willard afflicting them both. Two days later, Daniel would

suffocate to death in his own bed. Mercy Lewis and Mary Walcott would report that they'd both seen John Willard choke him, though of course no one else could see anything but the dying boy, grasping for air until he was finally still. Samuel Paris would record the boy's cause of death in his church records as bewitched to death. The man hunt for Willard picked up steam after that. Now he was a murderer as well as a witch.

A new warrant was issued that authorized anyone in or out of Salem to bring the former constable into custody, and with it word of his evil deeds spread far and wide. John Willard's goal had been to escape to the more liberal and irreligious New York, but he apparently took a detour along the way before heading south. He headed west, making his way out to his family land

in Lancaster along the Nashua River. He apparently had the bright idea to till the family land there and plant the crops so that he could return when everything had

blown over and have a harvest waiting for him. So the records about his capture have this head scratching detail written in Willard They say was captured while howeing his field that was May sixt The constables who found him put him on a horse and guided him back to Salem that very night in anticipation of his examination the following day, But when they arrived there were already too many people listed for examinations on so Willard would have

to wait in jail for another day. As part of Willard's examination, a coroner's jury looked over the body of Daniel Wilkins, including Nathaniel Ingersoll, Joseph Herrick, and a handful of the Putnam clan. They reported finding a collection of bruises on the boy's back, along with cuts and puncture marks all over his body. In fact, it almost seemed as if someone had pierced Daniel with an all and when they rolled the body onto its front, they noted

that blood flowed freely from the boy's mouth. This horrifying condition compelled these men to declare that he'd been the victim of violent and malicious witchcraft. Given what the Wilkins family knew about John's violent tendencies against his own wife, it seemed all too clear that this could be his handiwork. As a result, John was restrained with shackles to stop him from attacking the afflicted girls in the room, who

screamed that his specter was torturing them. Oh, and when the chains clanked onto John's legs, they say old Bray Wilkins was suddenly relieved of the piercing pain in his abdomen. That you were fled from authority is an acknowledgement of guilt, Hawthorne declared. In other words, John Willard had made his

confession through his actions. The previous afternoon in Boston was devoted to other matters, though, Phipps and the Council devoted their time to the ordering of the Massachusetts Militia and the naval fleet. They also ordered a public fast for May twenty six so that everyone in the colony could devote time to prayer for the new government. The next few days after that were taken up with an emergency as three French privateers rated up and down the coast.

Time was slipping away from Phipps and it was starting to become clear that governing would be nothing more than handling one crisis after another. All the while, Hawthorne and Corwin continued to examine multiple accused witches every day, and the flow of prisoners to the Boston jail couldn't have escaped Phipps notice. On May he finally gave his first official orders regarding the trials, he instructed the prison keeper the buy more shackles. I don't know about you, but

that sort of response wouldn't have sat well with me. Finally, on ma Phipps and the Council met with Hawthorne and Corwin, who had traveled down to Boston for the occasion. Their main goal was to discuss judicial appointments and the schedule for when all of the governing bodies would start operating, but it looked like it was going to take a

few weeks. That was time they didn't have. After three days of discussion, Phipps finally realized that the sale of matter couldn't wait for the General Court to be set up in operational so on, he declared that because they had no official Massachusetts courts ready to go, he was ordering a special court that would follow English laws in regards to the Salem troubles. Soon enough, the Oyer and

Terminal trials would begin. You're probably wondering at this point, what in the world is an Oyer and Terminer trial. I'll let historian Richard Trask explain that to you. By May, the new Governor, William Phipps, comes together with a lot of the learned people in Massachusetts and establishes a court of Oyer and Termina to hear and determine these cases, because now the jails are being clogged by a number of people who have been accused, and at the preliminary

hearing they've just been put in jail. So what they then do is have just the same legal system that's done in Old England. You have a grand jury that listens to the Attorney General of Massachusetts give the case. You have a pool of jurors from among the towns in Massachusetts who will be the jury. You have this eight or nine person special court court of Oyer and Termina who will be the judges, and they are supposed to have I think at least three or four of

these magistrates there. They can ask questions and can kind of mole what they want to have happened. But it's basically the Attorney General who gives the information. So then you have the trial, and trials are very fast, usually within two days maybe three, All of the evidences in the jury goes out, makes us determination, and in almost every case the people have found guilty. So an Oyer

and Terminer is essentially an English high court. The name literally means to hear and determine, and that's what they were calling into existence, an official, well staffed court that could hear these cases in an official capacity and then determined guilt or innocence. And for the nearly forty people still waiting in jail on May four, that sounded like progress. Of course, word got out that this new, more official

version of justice was about to be implemented. But the people from the area around Salem didn't sigh with relief and let down their guard. No. Instead, in the two weeks between the order to establish the court and the date of the first session, new accusations flooded in. In fact, that figure of thirty eight nearly doubled just because the court had been announced. The new wave of accused came from Salem, as you might expect, but also from Topsfield,

ip Switch, marble Head, and even Boston. The names were coming in so quickly that Hawthorne and Corwin couldn't keep up with their warrant process. Of course, that didn't mean the arrests were slowing down, and sometimes they put the cart before the horse. A great example is the story of Captain John Alden. Today, he would be perfect in the role of that sixty year old action hero. He

was strong, brave, and a career fighter. He was a merchant who ran the dangerous route between the civilized Salem area and the wild Maine frontier, but also served in the militia for decades. In fact, when Phipps sailed up the coast to attack Quebec, Captain John Alden was right there with him. In time between that failed military expedition and the start of the Oyer and Terminer, Alden had managed to get captured by the French along with his

entire ship, including his own son. Everyone had been taken back to French territory in the North in September, but at some point they picked John Alden as their representative to go to Salem and collect a ransom for the ship and the sailors. So that's why. On May thirty one, John Alden was in Salem village when a massive crowd of people surrounded the little meeting house, filling the room and spilling out into the grass surround it. John wandered

over for a closer look. More people were being examined ahead of the Oyer and Terminer, and I can't help but assume that John was curious about who was inside at the front of the room. That's when a hand shot out of the crowd and grabbed him by the wrist. It was one of the local constables, and he informed Alden that he was up next for examination. It happened so quickly that his warrant was drafted after he was

inside the meeting house. Rushing to make everything as official as possible, Alden was stunned as they dragged him into the meeting house and held him at the edge of the crowd. Hawthorn and Corwin were seated up front as usual, joined that day by a new judge, bartholem you Gedney. The usual crowd of accusers were seated near the front as well. When they were ready to begin, the judges asked the girls to look at the crowd and identify Captain John Alden, the man they had accused of sending

his spectral form to attack them. The girls failed to point to the correct man, though much to John's delight. Rather than assumed that was because they really didn't know what Alden looked like, the judges assumed it was because the meeting house was so dimly lit, so they dragged the girls and a group of the accused outside into the daylight for a better look. Along the way, someone must have coached one of them, because they were finally able to point a finger at Alden. The actual examination

didn't go any better for him. We might look on Alden's capture by the French with pity and see his release and plans to return to his son to be noble. The magistrates, though, saw it as a sign that he was in league with the nevill The French were Catholic, and they had allied themselves with the Native Americans, two groups of people viewed as tools of Satan by the Puritans. John Alden wasn't the only suspect to leave the meeting house in shackles that day, though. One of them was

Martha Carrier from nearby and over. Accusations about her involvement in witchcraft began after she refused to leave town after her family contracted smallpox, which upset her neighbors, never mind the fact that the outbreak was really the fault of Phipps and his failed military expedition. Everyone was carted off to jail that afternoon, but unlike all the previous examinations that had taken place, these suspects could at least see

the light at the end of the tunnel. With the oyer and terminer announced, they knew their time in jail wouldn't go on for months. Finally there was an end in sight, but that tunnel would be much more dark and dangerous than any of them could have imagined. I think it's interesting to point out just how upside down these examinations were. In typical Puritan society, women and children had almost no voice, and yet here was a group of young women who practically guided the entire debacle toward

its dark destination. And I'm not alone in noticing that hypocrisy. Here's Jane Kaminsky, professor of American history at Harvard, with more thoughts on the matter. That is, to me the great mystery of the Salem proceedings. How in a world that devalues women's utterances and that tends to keep maybe especially young women within their channels, this group of adolescent that's anachronistic term, but women in their teens and early twenties come to be this, this sort of star witness

coterie is completely ineffable. I think there is pretty convincing evidence that they are to a certain extent, coordinating with each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. It's also interesting to note just how frantic things became so early on, and how that chaos provided another reason for why these young women were able to take such control over the proceedings.

It seems like a moment where the normal sources of authority holds so poorly, and the need for answers two questions that seem profound feels so urgent, and that people begin listening to unexpected witnesses who say they have answers. It's hard to be definitive about it, but looking back on this phase of the Salem Trials, it really seems

like the magistrates were simply overwhelmed by it all. An ever increasing flow of suspects and a nearly constant barrage of new afflictions and unexplainable episodes combined to make it all just too much to handle logically. At some point they had to have just given in. When they were wrapping up the examination of Captain John Alden, they asked him to stand on a chair with his arms limp at his sides, and look toward the girls who had

accused him. The moment his eyes fell on them. The girls toppled over and began to writhe on the floor in agony, just as they had done before in his presence and in the presence of so many other accused individuals. The newest judge at the front of the room ar aleam you. Gedney motioned towards the girls and glared at Alden as if to say, do you see what you have done? But Alden stood his ground. He turned his gaze from the girls and aimed his eyes straight at Gedney.

After a brief pause to let this significant sink in, Alden spoke up in his own defense. If his gaze was so powerful as to afflict the girls over there, he suggested, why did Gedney not also fall over in pain. The stumping of the judges enraged Salem's junior minister, Nicholas Noyes, who launched into a tirade, fueling that Alden dared to speak of God while bringing calamity to the colony. With the minister on the side of the girls, the judges

ordered George Herrick to escort John Alden to jail. Neither his standing in the community nor his wealth as a merchant would serve to render him free. Instead, like so many others, he was sent to Boston to away justice. Whether they believed God would finally step in and intervene, or their faith was in the newly appointed Governor Phipps, a higher power was about to take over the official trials we're about to begin. That's it for this week's

episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured, Mercy Lewis and Annie Putnam both had claimed to see Bridget spirit in their home. They stated as if it were indisputable fact that she had bewitched her second husband, Thomas to death. It was damning evidence given the circumstances, but Bridget had also lied to

the magistrates, and that didn't help her case. When they asked her if she was a witch, she denied it and claimed that she didn't even know what a witch was. She also claimed she hadn't known anyone else confessed to being agents of the devil, but that wasn't exactly true. On the morning of her examination back in April, she had been told that Abigail Hobbs and Mary Warren had confessed, and if Bridget was willing to lie about that, what else was she lying about? It was all word games.

It was all a classic example of Bridget being considered guilty even before she was examined on April nineteenth. Nothing she could say would change the public perception of her. All she could do was deny it, as each question was fired at her, one by one. I am innocent.

I Am innocent. I Am innocent. Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron Bankey 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 are listening.