S1 – 7: She Is One Of Us

in the Puritan mind. People evil enough to do horrible things, they didn't deserve a proper burial. Bridget's death might not have left a physical trace, but it certainly had a social impact. In the two weeks that followed her execution, reports of a flictions almost stopped entirely. Yes, there were a handful of exceptions, but the overall effect was like pulling the emergency brake on a speeding car. People took notice of how deadly the game had become, but nothing

lasts forever. However nice it would have been for everything to grind to a permanent halt. I think all of us are very aware that no such thing was about to happen, and one of the few instances where people still reported afflictions from a witch. A community even deepens its roots into the soil of insanity and chaos, they find themselves a witch detective. Weeks earlier, when Bray Wilkins and his grandson Daniel were sick and witchcraft was suspected,

Mercy Lewis offered to come and help. She was the refugee from Maine that had moved to sale In village years before along with George Burrows, but in she lived and worked in one of the Putnam households, and if you remember, it was she who pointed the finger at John Willard, the village deputy constable and husband of wilkins granddaughter, as the suspect. So when new afflictions were reported inside a Putnam house, Mercy Lewis was called in to offer

her observations. She immediately identified two witches at work, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Carrier, and while both of these women were already in jail, these new accusations would simply be added to their records for when their own trials began. But the momentary pause was only localized to Salem far to the north. On the day after the execution of Bridget Bishop, the French and Wabanaki launched an attack on

the town of Wells. Garrison and ships in the harbor were able to repel the attack, but the enemy managed to capture a prisoner, who was then tortured to death in full view of the defenders. Observant participants in the Salem situation couldn't help but see the symbolism. They had struck a blow against the devil on June tenth, only

to be hit back the following day. I can imagine it was frustrating to the powers that be, but also more than frightening to the rest of the community who were waiting with bated breath for it all to end. But the attack on Wells, along with the subsequent torture and murder of that single captive, also sent a powerful message to the people of Salem that was difficult to ignore. Monsters, it seems, could be found anywhere. This is unobscured. I'm

Aaron Manky. While Bridget Bishop had been executed for capital crimes, she wasn't the first to die. If you remember, it was Sarah Osborne who passed away first. While waiting in jail for her own trial, And even though the community slipped into a two week pause in the chaos on June tenth, that didn't mean more deaths weren't coming. On June, a prisoner named Roger tooth Acker died while sitting inside the Boston Jail, adding one more name to a list

that was just beginning to grow. Tooth Acker was Martha Carrier's brother in law, but had also worked as a folk healer throughout Essex County. If people needed help with a sitcow or a mysterious ailment, they would call on him to use whatever tools he had at his disposal. Here's historian Maryland k Roach. Some people did practice a lot of folk magic, maybe more in England because they

weren't all Puritans. Well, they weren't all Purans hereies. They were white witches, a blessing witches so called, meaning they did only the good magic. But if you have the idea that the source of it is really only pretending to do good for a while, until you're really thoroughly caught in this clutches, it's not something you should be fooling around with. Understandably, that gray area between witchcraft and Puritan piety was an unsettling place to be for many

of the people in the area. Roger Toothaker was essentially dabbling with magic as far as they were concerned, and that was the devil's work. Yes, he thought of himself to be one of the good guys, but enough people disagreed that he was arrested, examined, and in jail. By May, I have a feeling tooth Acker new it was coming. Though. Back in February, if you remember from episode one, the Paris family's neighbor, Mary Sibley, had baked a witch cake to try and cure the first two afflicted girls, but

the results were disastrous. Reverend Paris and his peers viewed the use of magic, even white magic meant to help others, as an invitation to the devil. By May of Roger Toothaker found himself in jail, but the long wait for his own trial only brought him sickness and death. Like Sarah Osburne before him, his life was snuffed out by the grinding gears of the witch hunt, long before he

would ever have a chance for freedom and justice. As you might expect, people were beginning to have doubts it was one thing to throw accusations around the village, but when those words began to draw real blood and take lives, well, it felt like a bridge too far for many people. Most of that doubt manifested as murmurs and whispers around the community, but it had official representation too. Immediately after the trial and conviction of bridget Bishop, one of the

nine judges, resigned his post. For anyone concerned about the trials getting out of hand, Nathaniel salt Install had been their source of hope, but he took that pipe dream with him when he quit, and the road ahead looked a lot less promising As a result. What happened in the days to come was a battle of wills between

those with spiritual authority and those with legal power. Religious leaders like Cotton Mather, Samuel Willard, and William Millbourne all came forward with concerns for how the trial should be handled and laced throughout. All of their arguments were liberal amounts of theology. So when the Governor's Council met three days after the first public execution, Phipps and a handful of the magistrates reached out to the ministers, then asked

for their full official response. Gathered together, they told them and discussed the challenges we all face. Then, when you're ready, bring them to us for a discussion. What they came back with was a written response known as the Return of Several Ministers. It was polite and supportive of the overall mission of the Oyer and termin Or trials, but the letter addressed a bigger concern, namely, Chief Judge William Stowton believed that specters could not impersonate innocent people, and

the ministers disagreed. There's a lot of theology at play here, and I don't want to get too deep into the nitty gritty of it all, but essentially, people were worried about wrongful accusations and convictions. Thanks to the trust the authorities replacing in the accusations of the afflicted girls, as well as allowing Mercy Lewis to serve as a witch finder, it had become all too easy to imagine that innocent

people might get caught in the crossfire. Stoton believed that if someone witnessed the spectral image of a witch, then the person they saw was the person to laim. The ministers, though disagreed, they believed that the devil could impersonate innocent people, literally putting on their appearance as a disguise, just to get those people in trouble. So obviously, the next question

was even trickier, how can you tell? It was bad enough that no one except a handful of the accused could actually see the specters of their attackers, but now they had to play detective and figure out which ones were the devil in disguise and which ones were real witches. And the solution, according to the ministers, was to avoid prosecuting virtuous people, people with blameless reputations and no history

of any wrongdoing. It was a cop out answer, though, because Stoton believed that very few people were actually of unblemished reputation. He and his fellow judges were part of that select few, naturally, But outside of that, it was difficult to imagine anyone without a sordid path, even Rebecca Nurse, who was a full member of the Salem Village Church and well respected, and as she was about to find out, when your fate rested on invisible evidence, it was hard

to see anything other than darkness. Ask most people today if they know anything about the Salem Which Trials, and the most common answer you'll get from non historians is that it was really just one big mess that revolved around property line disputes. And hopefully over the last few episodes I've put that rumor to rest for you at least. But here's where I'm going to contradict myself for a moment. When we talk about Rebecca Nurse, we have to talk

about property lines. Keep in mind, these Puritan settlers were certainly focused on the mission of establishing God's kingdom in the New World. They were deeply religious people, but they were also a notoriously difficult to get along with. That's one of the reasons they left England after all. So you can imagine living in a community in a strange place, constantly afraid of the world around them, that these settlers were on the edge and cranky about a lot of things.

Back in episode one, we talked about the differences between the Putnam's and the Porters, and I don't want to repeat myself here, but let me sum it up by saying that the Porters were the wealthy family that lived on the edge between Salem Town and Salem Village. They figuratively rode the fence, so to speak. They benefited from the high society of the town, but also benefited from

the resources and expansive land of the village. Keeping the two communities together as a single legal entity was in their best interest. But inside Salem Village was another family, the Putnam's, who didn't have a vested interest in the town. They wanted autonomy and a break from the wealthier Port community. So there is this tug of war between the two families,

and then the town family showed up. They were a family from England with seven children, three daughters and four sons, and when they arrived they purchased a tract of land along the western edges of Salem Village, or maybe it was the eastern edges of tops Field, because that's where the conflict began five decades before the Salem which trials a sloppy Massachusetts clerk, as Stacy Shift puts, it, drew part of tops Fields boundary lines right over the existing

lines for Western Salem. It created a small bubble of land between the two communities that technically belonged to both, and that's the land that the Town's bought. Now, as the conflict went on and grew between the Porters and the Putnam's. The Putnam started to feel the need to expand farther west and get away from the porters. The trouble was the towns were there, sort of walling them in, and as a result, the Putnam's resented them, and this led to all sorts of conflict. There was a horse

theft that forced the towns to sue the Putnams. They fought over firewood, something that every family needed an abundance to survive the cold New England winters, and they bickered about where each family might grace their livestock. Honestly, anything that could have been fought over probably was, and it went on for years. All the town kids grew up,

of course, and married into the surrounding community. Daughters, Mary, Sarah and Rebecca became Mary sty Sarah Klois, and Rebecca Nurse, all three names that should ring a bell by now, because by June of they were all in jail and no wonder. Up until July, more than half of all the witchcraft accusations had originated from a Putnam house. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why Rebecca

was particularly annoying to the Putnam's. Because she married into a Salem Town family, aligning herself with the wealthier reporters by association. Her husband, Francis, was an artist there, but years after their marriage they leased a large three acre farm in the middle of Salem Village, pushing the thorn right back into the heel of the Putnams. By the time the witch trials had ramped up, Rebecca was an

old woman in her seventies. But despite doing well for herself and building a reputation as an upstanding member of the local church and an elder in the community, Rebecca was still accused of witchcraft. Why while outside of the decades long feud between her own family and the Putnams of Salem Village, there might be two other reasons for the way some in the community turned on her. Here's Emerson Baker Rebecca Nurse. Her case is another key turning point.

Why would this wonder this, this elderly sainted grandmother who's a member of the Salem Town Church up here in Saint why would she be accused of witchcraft? Well, again, note she's a member of the Salem Town Church, not the Salem Village church. In other words, Rebecca didn't go through the rigorous membership gauntlet that the strict conservative Salem Village Church required. Instead, she had become a full member in the less strict Salem town where the halfway Covenant

was accepted. Despite that she was enjoying all the benefits of full membership right there in Samuel Paris's congregation. To a lot of people, it didn't seem fair. The second reason, though, was rooted in bigotry. If you remember, it was known that Rebecca had taken in an orphaned Quaker neighbor out of the goodness of her heart, but that child represented

something evil in the minds of her accusers. That's because, in pursuit of their mission to build a Puritan Kingdom of God in the New World, any other version of Christianity was the enemy. Catholic, Quaker, it didn't matter. They were forces of the devil. So Rebecca, through her Christian charity, had done something that many in the commune nity equated

with being a traitor. Add to this the fact that her husband, Francis, was part of the committee that was trying to remove Reverend Paris from his job as village minister. And we have a recipe for division and in fighting it was a bigger version of the story that most of the victims were living through that spring and early summer. But Rebecca had a few advantages over her fellow jail mates. Her family had decades of experience fighting back, they were

well connected, and they were tenacious. Unfortunately, they were going to need every bit of that in the coming weeks. The pump had been primed. If anyone was to blame for getting the community in an uproar about Rebecca Nurse and her sisters, it was Reverend Samuel Paris. Of course, he felt threatened. Rebecca and the others didn't care for his highly concern port of hand on the rudder, and they wanted him gone. Paris responded with scathing sermons from

the pulpit through March, April and May. Paris used his position at the head of the congregation to so discontent and fear. He preached about the devil among them, and about how anyone might be working for the enemy, even the neighbors they had known for so long. So when the Oyer and Terminer moved on from bridget Bishop and began to hear testimony and depositions in regards to Rebecca Nurse,

there were plenty of people to come forward. Mercy Lewis reported seeing Rebecca's specter attacking a Putnam boy, then another Putnam, John Jr. Claimed that his infant son died just three days after he had a public disagreement with the old woman. Thomas Putnam, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and Reverend Paris were among the respected adults who put pen to paper and wrote out their testimony against Rebecca. They were bringing out the big guns, so to speak, with the aim of damn the old

woman in the eyes of the judges and jury. But they were in for a surprise. Maryland k roach once again. The nurse family circulated a petition among neighbors, and lots of people signed it. It wasn't just them, so people put their names on it. This was incredibly significance. Here's

historian Richard Trask on exactly why. Of the documents that survive, we have maybe about twenty of them in which either one person, a couple, or a bunch of people would send in a deposition or a petition saying that we've known her all of our life and she never looked like she was a witch. Er, never deported her any more than a good Christian. Forty people signed the one to Rebecca Nurse. The judges went into the official Oyer and Terminator trial for Rebecca Nurse, assuming she would play

along like everyone else, but backfired. If they were going to have a cloud of witnesses to her evil nature, then Rebecca's family would bring an army of their own, and they made huge advances too. Some of the character witnesses who stepped forward to defend Rebecca Nurse also brought unusual stories that cast doubt on the testimony of the afflicted girls. Much of it centered around Elizabeth Hubbard, the teenage girl who had seen that wolf following her that

cold winter night many months before. One man claimed that during a visit to the home of Elizabeth's uncle, Dr Griggs, the girl had talked about denying the Sabbath. Another man, sixty year old farmer named Clements Coldham, recalled giving Elizabeth a ride home on his horse when the girl claimed that they were being followed by the devil. After a while, she told Coldham that she wasn't afraid because she and

the devil were on good speaking terms. A similar story with a similar message was told about one of the other afflicted girls, ab Gail Williams and a farmer named Robert Molton believed that Susannah Sheldon had lied to the court when she told them that the devil had dragged her over a stone wall, because he was there that day and he watched her climb the wall all on

her own. Rebecca's own daughter, Sarah Nurse, testified that she had watched another of the accusers, Sarah Biber, actually pulled straight pins out of her clothing and then prick herself in the knee before crying out that Rebecca had attacked her. It was all a farce, she said, and in a shocking move against her own family, John and Rebecca Putnam

stood up in her defense as well. One of the charges against Rebecca Nurse had been that she had killed their daughter and son in law, but the grieving parents made it clear that the younger couple had died from a fever and not witchcraft. It was amazing, really, in the face of the frightful charge of witchcraft, Rebecca's family not only mounted a solid defense of her character, but they attacked the very truth of the accusers at the same time. It was a one to punch that was

sure to set their friend and matriarch free. Armed with all of that testimony, the jury was sent away to make a decision. Here's Richard Trask once again. At first the jurors came back with a not guilty, and it was pandemonium in the courthouse. The afflicted children who were there, and also some older afflicted ones started going into profound fits and so forth. WILLIAMS. Stouton, he was the chief justice of the panel, He said, um, have you considered

some testimony of someone who said this of that? And the jurors asked Rebecca Nurse a question I confessed, which had given testimony that she was one of us. Rebecca said why she is one of us? And she was asked what did that mean? And she didn't say anything, and because she couldn't hear, she was almost deaf. After what must have seemed like an eternity, the members of

the jury slowly walked back into the courtroom. I can imagine the room was blanketed with a tense silence as each of them took their seat, and then they announced that they had made their decision. Rebecca Nurse. They said it was guilty. Jun was a busy day for the court of Lawyer and Terminer. Not only had they heard the case against Rebecca Nurse, but others were brought to trial as well. One of them was Sarah Good, the grumbling, homeless,

pipe smoking woman that everyone loved to hate. She'd been in jail for months, her infant child had died, and her five year old daughter, Dorothy, was still in a Boston jail, the same jail that had already claimed the lives of Sarah Osburne and Roger Toothaker. But her trial couldn't have been a stronger contrast to that of Rebecca Nurse. There was no large collection of friends and family mounting a passionate defence. There were no prominent members of the

community calling the accusations of the afflicted girls. Into question. It was just Sarah Good against the court, and she can't have felt a lot of hope about that. One of the witnesses brought to the courtroom that day was none other than Tituba, the slave woman from the Paris household. She was asked to repeat for the benefit of the jury, of course, the story she told that first examination months earlier,

on March one. Of course, she had been given plenty of opportunities to keep her story straight thanks to the repeated visits from the magistrates over those long months in jail. Thomas Newton, the Attorney General overseeing the trial, even submitted a document as evidence that came straight from Sarah's little girl, Dorothy. Despite her young age, someone had managed to convince the child to give to stimony against her own mother, and as the court proceeded, Sarah had to listen to those

words as they were read aloud. Local heavyweights contributed their own testimony against her too. Thomas Putnam and Ezekiel Chiever reaffirmed their earlier testimony, and Reverend Samuel Paris described the torment that his daughter and niece had gone through, and by doing so, Paris gave the courtroom clear permission from the church to view Sarah Good as the enemy. She was found guilty and charged with three separate counts of witchcraft,

but she wouldn't be the only one that day. A woman named Susannah Martin was also brought to the trial, and there were plenty of witnesses available to paint her in a dark light. She was like Sarah Good in many ways. She was poor and alone, but she was also an old widow from Amesbury, a community far to the north. When she was led into the courtroom, the afflicted girls fell into terrible fits. Former sale and village minister Dale Debt Lawson would later record that some of

them even vomited blood. It was sometime during this chaos that one of the afflicted shouted out to the courtroom that they were being attacked by someone new, Samuel Willard. There must have been a sharp intake of breath at the sound of his name. Willard was not someone they would have suspected of witchcraft. Not only was he the minister of the Boston First Church, but he was a close friend and adviser to many of the judges in

the trial. Thinking quickly on his feet, Stoughton suggested to the girl that she was mistaken, that she had confused John Willard with the good reverend. She was quickly removed from the courtroom, while word was passed among those seated in the crowd that it had been a mistake. It seems they were just as quick to dismiss charges against one of their own as they were to declare women like Sarah Good as guilty. Two other women were put

on trial during the same session as the others. Elizabeth Howe and Sarah Wild's I'd have seemed like disconnected players in the drama, but that was far from true. In fact, they were both deeply connected to the woman whose conviction began the day, Rebecca Nurse. Elizabeth Howe was Rebecca's sister in law, as well as being close friends with her sister Mary Esty. And if you remember that old property line issue between tops Field and Salem Village, it was

Sarah Wild's husband that had drawn it up. While both of the women had accusations of witchcraft hovering over them, it's clear looking back that there were other issues at play as well. Both were declared guilty, putting the final count for the session at five convicted witches. But the family of Rebecca Nurse wasn't ready to quitch just yet. After the court adjourned, they approached one of the jurors,

a man named Thomas Fisk, and pleaded their case. Amazingly, they managed to get a collection of documents along with a written statement from Fisk that might serve to free Rebecca from the charges. With that precious cargo of paper an ink in hand, they saddled their horses and rode hard for Boston. It was time to confront the governor. They must have had connections. Perhaps the Nurse family brought along some of their wealthy porter allies, or maybe they

already had a history with the governor. Whatever the reason was, they managed to get access to William Phipps just as they had hoped. They confronted him inside his Boston home and then spread out all of their documents for him

to look over. They explained the issue at hand and how the spectral evidence and pins and lies had all been disproven, And then they told Phipps about the not guilty verdict that came before the guilty They explained the confusion that had led to the guilty verdict, how her lack of hearing and a misunderstanding about a question led them to doubt her character, and all they wanted was

a fair decision. Bipps was instantly sympathetic. He reviewed the documents and listened to their testimony, and right there inside his Boston home, he reversed the court's ruling, issuing a reprieve. Rebecca Nurse was free for a moment, anyway. When the news of the reprieve made its way to Salem, the afflicted and their support network exploded in anger. Robert Califf was a Boston merchant whose record of the trials has come to be an essential document for understanding what happened

off the books and behind the scenes. He later wrote that when the news of the reprieve became known, the accusers renewed their dismal outcries against her, insomuch that the Governor was by some Salem gentleman prevailed with to recall the reprieve. In the clinical, detached tone of the time, we can see Rebecca's last hope for justice slip away. On July nine, Sheriff George Corwin headed to the execution

site for the second time in five weeks. Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wilds, and Rebecca Nurse all rode in the back of his wagon, all hope for salvation driven from their minds. They were lost and they knew it. Beneath the gallows, each of the women had their skirts tied around their legs, and then the Salem town minister, Nicholas Noys, spoke with each of them in turn. When he reached Sarah Good, though, he used the moment

to lecture her and beg for a confession. Here's Emerson Baker. She says, you know, basically, come come, women. You know you're gonna die, but you might as well clear your conscience. She says, you know, I'm no more which than you are, and if you kill me, God will give you blood to drink. So take that. That's actually a quarter out of revelation where one of the sort of plagues that will come to the earth is the waters will turn

to blood and you'll have to drink it. So, on the one hand, one initially saw that, I thought, Wow, Sarah Good, that's pretty good. She was showing noise. You know what, I'm a perfectly good purit and here i am facing death and I'm going to quote scripture to you.

But it's more complicated than that, because, as it turns out, back in this early sixteen sixties, when the Massachusetts government is executing Quakers in Boston for simply trying to proselytize the faith, an Englishman writes a book about their behaviors and tells the magistrates that they have to stop what you're doing or God will give them blood to drink. So Sarah Good in that famous quote, was actually not just wasn't a biblical quote. She was actually quoting from

a Quaker complaint against the magistrates of Massachusetts. So there may be a lot of reasons why Sarah I'm not even I'm not sure she was a Quaker necessarily, but she certainly lived in that part of Salem that was susceptible to where the Quakers lived. Um, so she certainly would have known about them, might well have even a Quaker sympathies. After their battle of words, Noise left Sarah Good and the others to their fate. Each of them was led up a ladder where a noose was tightened

around their necks. Then, from the safety of the ground below, Sheriff Corwin began to push them off, one at a time. I imagine the crowd was stunned by the violence of it all. Execution by hanging was notoriously graphic, with sights and sounds that could unsettle even the strongest among them. These were women they had known for years, known and trusted and spoken with, and now they were writhing at the end of a rope as their lives slowly faded away.

Historian Stacy Schiff suggests that they probably didn't leave the bodies up for long. It was July and far too hot to leave a corpse out in the sun. They would have been cut down a short time later and hastily buried right there on the hill, although local legend says that the families of those women, those who had them at least returned under the cover of darkness to take their love ones away for a proper burial. Rebecca Nurse was carried back to the family homestead in Salem

Village and buried in an unmarked grave. The house and property are still there today, and if you're ever in Danvers, you can visit the museum that was once her home and stand beside the graveyard that took its place. It's a physical reminder of just how normal these people were and how tragic their final days turned out to be. Speaking of which, those words that Sarah Good tossed at Reverend Noise, the ones where she promised blood for him

to drink, those words seemed to stick around. We know Samuel Sewell remembered them, as did those who heard them spoken prior to the execution, and I have to think that Noise himself never forgot them. Years later, on December seventeen, seventeen, Reverend Noise passed away. Legend says that he suffered a hemorrhage in his head or throat, and as a result, his mouth filled with his own blood. He drowned, just as Sarah Good had promised. 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. Looking back, it's easy to see countless examples of the authorities leading the witness. They suggest answers with their questions and give the accused just enough detail to reply with answers that fit their expectations. Maybe these men were just really bad at interviewing the accused, or perhaps they allow their bias to steer the ship.

We might never know, But something else came out of the examination of Anne Foster and her family New Names From and Over. Mary Lacey Sr. Mentioned two of Martha Carrier's own children as one of their own, sending the court into a frenzy. The following day, eighteen year old Richard and sixteen year old Andrew were arrested and brought to town. What awaited them, however, was not the usual examination, we have come to expect their fate would be much

more painful than anyone thus far. Torture 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.