S04E01: THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Katie: Coming up on this episode of Crime Family.

AJ: We're talking about the Salem Witch trials...

Katie: Out of nowhere, they both start feeling really sick or weird. They yelp. They start to writhe in pain. They're saying that they're being bitten or pinched by something invisible. They go into trances where they're unresponsive.

AJ: And so in this case, the spectral evidence was the girls. They would allegedly say that they were "Raving when supposedly touched by invisible ghosts."

Katie: It's spreading between the towns that there's this whole satanic witchcraft going down in their town.

AJ: None of these people were ever given proper burials, and so they were just buried in unmarked graves. The location of these graves is still unknown to this day, but speculation is that they may be buried on Gallows Hill, which for a long time is where many of the executions were believed to have taken place. People say that Gallows Hill is extremely haunted to this day.

Hi everyone. Welcome to season four of Crime Family. We're super excited to be back to share some more true crime stories with you all. We've had a great break and we're ready to get back into it. We've spent quite a bit of time in the break researching new cases and coming up with some good content for you, so we're very happy to be back. Before we start the first case of the season, we just want to let you know about our patron community that opened earlier this month. So if you like the show and you want exclusive extras, like ad free content, bonus episodes, a private community to connect with us, free merch and an exclusive new True Crime series Doc Talk, then consider becoming a patron. Doc Talk is like a book club for True Crime documentaries. Each month, we'll select a new doc to watch and we'll discuss it in full. We'll take your questions and discuss the topics that you want. You'll have access to this exclusive new series at the tier three membership level, as well as all of the other extras I mentioned. So join us on Patreon to continue the True Crime conversation and help us build a community. We'd love to have you. By signing up today, you'll get automatic access to our bonus episodes, including one about Sarah Boone, known as The Suitcase Killer, and one about all the recent updates in the Adnan Syed case. So check out the show notes for the link to become a patron today, or go to patreon.com/crime family podcast. Also, yesterday we launched our exclusive merch store on Red Bubble. We're so excited to have the official crime family logo and designs on everything from t-shirts to stickers, to mugs to hats. So check out our merch store to help support the show at the link in the show notes. So now onto the case that we're gonna cover for the very first episode. It's actually a series of cases that go back much further into history than we ever have before and probably ever will again. We're talking about the Salem Witch Trials. It is spooky season and Halloween is just around the corner, so we thought it would be fitting to go over some of the most notorious trials in history for this first episode. I just wanted to ask you guys, "What did you guys know about the Salem Witch Trials prior to doing your research for this case, if anything?"

Stephanie: I never heard of it before. So...

AJ: You never did the Salem Witch Trials? I feel like they're pretty well known. But, Okay. .

Katie: Yeah. Honestly, I heard of it, at least, but I didn't know very much about it at all. I picture Salem as the Black cat from Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. That's basically my knowledge.

Stephanie: I've heard of Salem before. Yes.

AJ: Yeah, I feel like, I didn't know a ton about the Salem Witch Trials, but I knew Salem, the name and probably the general concept.

Katie: Yeah. Like I, I knew it was a thing and that some bad stuff went down, but not details for sure.

AJ: Yeah, also I did know Salem as well too. Hocus Pocus takes place in Salem. Have you ever watched that movie? Didn't Passions take place in Salem too? There's a soap opera that does, I don't know.

Katie: Oh yeah.

AJ: It probably did. Also actually I had been to Salem before, so back in 2016 I was in Boston and Salem is a quick train ride from Boston. I think it's maybe an hour or two on the train, so I went to Salem. You know, this is Salem's claim to fame. Everything they do like, witch tours and haunted tours. I went and it was around late September, early October, so it was definitely fall. It was really cool and eerie because they have a lot of the houses that many people lived in and you can see a lot of the sites that we're probably going to be talking about today. But at the time, back in 2016 when I went there, I didn't know enough about the Salem Witch Trials, so I did the tour, but I didn't put two and two together to say, "Oh, that's the house that so and so lived in." I saw it as a house that someone lived in, so it'd be interesting to go back after I know a lot more about it to fully experience the tour, but yeah, that's what I knew about it.

Katie: Yeah, that's pretty cool. We didn't know much about it. I feel like it's one of those things that's a part of American history and they still talk about it, I guess, in American history classes in the US. Of course, we wouldn't have heard about that in Canada. Everyone in the US has at least some knowledge of it that it existed and it's part of their past, but it's one of those things that I feel they likely glazed over it. It's something that they don't really want to get into detail about, like they do with a lot of the undesirable parts of Canadian history as well. It happened. This is the surface, but we're not going to get deep into it because it wasn't a nice thing that happened. I listened, when I was doing research for this, a lot of my information comes from the History Extra Podcast, so if you really want to get in depth about the history, they talk to actual witchcraft historians and they go deep into this, so you can check out the History Extra podcast. They touch on some issues that are still present today, like allowing accusations and scapegoating people to get out of control. That's what happened in Salem and still happens today, accusations can stick with someone, whether they're legitimate or not, and they can ruin someone's life. As we've seen, sentence them unfairly. We've touched on the Adnan Syed case and the Jeffrey Deskovic case. Those are some examples of how what was happening back then, it's still happening today. Not to the same extent, but similar. We go way back in history. All of this started in 1662. So a few hundred years ago. It started with two girls in Salem named Abigail William, who was 11, and Betty Parris, who was 9. Out of nowhere, they both start feeling really sick or weird. They yelp. They start to writhe in pain. They're saying that they're being bitten or pinched by something invisible. They go into trances where they're unresponsive, they shutter and they spin around the room. They make weird gestures. Sometimes they go paralyzed. They make flying noises as they pretend to fly around the room and they make really weird speeches. So these are some of the examples of their behaviors. So if this even happened today, someone's acting like that, obviously you'd be in a panic wondering what's happening, especially as two young kids started both doing it at the same time. This is happening back then, and one thing you have to remember about back then is witchcraft and witches were common, not a common occurrence, but a common belief that people actually thought was true. It was just part of their society that yes, witches are a thing, and so someone being accused of witchcraft, while it was scary, it wasn't absurd like it would be today. Samuel Parris, he was the father of the nine year old Betty Paris and Abigail William was his niece. They were all living together and they also had two other children I believe living in their house. Samuel Parris was at odds with the community at that time. They didn't particularly like him for various reasons, and so when this broke out in his household, some historians think that maybe he liked the attention, but also some are saying that maybe, you know, it was very embarrassing for this to be happening in his house. Mixed reviews about what he thought about this. Anyway, there's all this craziness happening in his household. People are viewing it as the devil and of course witchcraft. It takes weeks of this behavior from the girls for anyone to do anything about it. Then they finally call the doctor a couple weeks later, which seems crazy, they're acting like this for weeks. Finally someone figures they should probably see what's wrong. So when they do call the doctor, he confirms that they really aren't sick and there's nothing medically wrong with them. He comes to the conclusion that there's something supernatural happening to them. Of course, basically comes to the conclusion that they're under the influence of witchcraft, which, like I said, back in the day, wasn't something that would be thought of as completely ridiculous. It was scary for them to think that witchcraft was in their town, but you know, people who believed in witches, it was a plausible explanation for them. It doesn't take too long for more children in Salem to come down with the same afflictions. There's a 17 year old named Elizabeth and a 12 year old named Anne, and they believe to also have been bewitched. The three initial people that are named and fingers are pointed at them for being witches and having cast spells or curses on these girls, the History Extra Podcast says that these three women are among the most vulnerable in Salem. It's like if you wanted to blame something on someone, these three would be the easiest just because they're, you know, the outcasts of society or nobody would really care. The first one that is named is a woman named Sarah Good, and she lived as a beggar and she was on and off being homeless. She swore a lot, a lot of profanity, and she would sometimes stay in people's barns and then she would curse them out instead of thanking them when she left. She would scare the kids, scare the people in the town. Another accused was another Sarah, Sarah Osborne, and she was a widow, but she was very litigious and she married her farm hand, who happened to be Irish. There's some speculation that maybe this has something to do with it. There's a lot of gossip and rumors and people had to be perfect back then, or there was something wrong with you, and so maybe because she had married a farm hand or maybe because she had married an Irishman that she was looked down upon. So she was accused. The final one accused at this time, was a woman named Tituba, and she was actually a slave in the Parris household, so where these girls lived. She was very close to the family. She lived in their house. She made their food, so it didn't seem that far off since she had this relationship that it would be very easy for her to have access to them. Just a side note, there's debate on whether Tituba was an African American woman, or some people even think that she was an indigenous woman from South America. Either way, she was not a white person and she was a slave in this house.

AJ: There was an article from the Smithsonian magazine that said she was from the Caribbean.

Katie: Oh, okay. So yeah, she could have come from down there. These three women were all arrested and they're interrogated, and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they deny everything right away. They say they had nothing to do with it. They don't do magic. They have nothing to do with magic. But Tituba actually, for whatever reason, completely confesses and she actually has this whole wild story that she tells about what actually happened. People think that she's taking information that the girls have said and spinning that into this big, crazy story. So she's expanding on what the girls said. She says that she would fly in the air on a stick and that she knew witches who turned into wolves. She described coming across a man who wore a dark coat and he was carrying a yellow bird, and everyone just understood this to be Satan. She had come across Satan and Tituba said that if she didn't do or obey what he said, then he would torture and kill her. So in order for her to avoid that, she on his behalf had to bewitch and torture these girls, which is what she did. Tituba is saying that this is what happened and she did this.

AJ: There was also reports that she claims that the two other women, the two Sarahs were actually forcing her to do it as well.

Katie: Yeah, I was actually just going to say that. She was saying that with this man, there were Shapeshifters that followed him around and it was actually the two Sarahs. She's going down and she's making sure that she's taking the Sarahs down with her for whatever reason. So of course it's not known how much of the story was actually forced upon her. She was probably tortured while she was captive after she was arrested. So there's speculation that she was forced to make up these stories and she agreed to go along with it. You know, whether it was all her, whether she was forced and tortured, either way, she was a great storyteller, and so she provided a lot of detail. She had an answer for everyone's questions seamlessly, as if she just knew exactly what she was talking about. So, you know, needless to say, everybody believed what she had to say. Everybody believed that they were witches and it sealed their fate at this point. Nine weeks after they were arrested, Sarah Osborne actually died in jail. She had been in a freezing prison cell for nine weeks, so she died of natural causes. Sarah Good was actually sent to the gallows to be hanged, and Tituba actually got out of the whole situation a bit later.

AJ: There was also speculation that Sarah Osborne was very litigious and there was reports that she was actually in the process of suing the Parris family at the time that she was accused, which is interesting to know. Also a bit of information about Sarah Good. It's really sad because Sarah Good was pregnant at the time. She had a four year old daughter. During all of this, her husband actually testified against her and said that yes, she did turn into a witch. It says in these articles that I've read, that her four year old daughter was imprisoned as well. Her four year old daughter testified against her as well, saying that, yes, my mom was a witch. She went on to actually have her baby while she was in prison, but the baby died and then she went on to die herself shortly there after.

Katie: Tituba's story that she told, definitely terrified the town's folk of Salem, and now they were convinced that Dark Magic was plaguing their town. They were equating things that were not really relevant to anything into something evil. Panic started to overtake Salem. I guess everything that happened was proof that there was witches among them. So say their crops died or one of their farm animals died, it was like, "Oh, that's proof that there's a witch, you know, plaguing us for some reason." A bunch more young girls started to have the same conditions as the first two that I talked about and so it makes you think something is definitely going around, some sort of sickness, some sort of medical thing, but they're just equating it to witchcraft because that's all they know.

AJ: Yeah, and I think it's important, the time period is important in all of this too, because you mentioned before when the first two girls started having these afflictions, you know, the doctor would come in and examine them but couldn't find anything wrong. This is back in 1600 where I don't know how extensive examinations were. There was a lot of diseases that they wouldn't have even known of yet. So it could have been very, well, a very simple diagnosis, but just one that they were unaware of. They also didn't have the medical tools that they would have today to diagnose these things. So when in absence of anything else, it must be the Devil, Witch or Witchcraft.

Katie: Yeah, because there'd be no way to have a brain scan or something, so they can't see that there's actually something chemically or physically going on with their brain so the only way that they could really answer to why this was happening was Witchcraft. Another woman named Martha Corey, she was a middle-aged woman who really didn't have anything nefarious about her at all. She was just a farm woman. She was a member of the church, but she was accused of Witchcraft. Fingers were pointed at her by a little girl who swears that it was her that had put this curse on her. And there was two men that were questioning this little girl trying to figure out why she thought this or how she knew it was Martha Corey, and they asked the girl if she could tell them what Martha was wearing at the time that she afflicted the girl. The girl says no, because Martha blinded her in that moment so she couldn't actually see what she was wearing. This basically seals Martha's fate. It's like, "Okay, well she's a witch," because of this. They go to her door and they basically are about to tell her that she'd been accused of Witchcraft. Before they even say anything, Martha is like, "I know why you're here. I'm accused of Witchcraft." So her saying this before they could even tell her put some suspicion in their head that," Oh, she already knows because she's a witch." Martha even says, "But could the girl tell you what I was wearing?" The fact that she brought up this exact same question that these two men had asked the girl just proved that, "Yes, she knew what we were going to ask, she already knew the whole situation and so, yeah, she's definitely a witch." it's a weird coincidence or maybe that was just a common question you would ask if you accuse someone of witchcraft. But either way, it was just unlucky for Martha because now she's a witch. So Martha's husband actually turns on her instantly as soon as she's accused of being a witch. He is saying, "Oh yeah, she started acting weird lately." So no support from him at all. Later actually, her husband though is accused of being part of Satanic rituals that are believed to be happening and while he denies it completely he said he has nothing to do with it. He never confesses and he's actually put to death by being crushed to death by stones. That's horrifying and the public gets to watch this as it happens. Martha and seven others, who are accused of witchcraft are also killed a few weeks later after this. Things are just spiraling out of control.

AJ: Yeah. There's actually mention of Bridget Bishop, and she was another woman in the community. She lived in Salem, and she was looked down upon because of her alleged gossipy nature and her promiscuity, and she was accused of being a witch too, so of course she was arrested and tried and all of that, and she declared, when asked by the courts, she said that she was as innocent as "The child unborn." She was not believed, of course, and she's notorious because she actually became the first woman in Salem to be executed for Witchcraft. She was hanged on June 10th, 1692. You know, it's snowballing out of control. A couple of people are getting accused and then it almost seems like, in some ways, some people are just taking out their grievances on these people they have something against, and that was the easy cop out way was to say that they were a witch, it seems. So this hysteria that's going around is everyone is afraid of Witchcraft. Like Katie said, Witchcraft was a common thing or was something that everyone was afraid of. It was this mass hysteria that everyone was afraid that their neighbors were going to become witches or everyone that they knew would become a witch. It was a period of a lot of paranoia in Salem.

Katie: Yeah. I'm going to go into the history of why this was a perfect mixture, why this all broke out and people believed it. Also when you think back to that podcast I mentioned earlier, they were saying from the beginning of when people can look back in history, so the farthest history goes that humans know, Witchcraft is a part of that history. Back then it was a common part of life. I think that's really important to understand when you think of someone being accused as a witch, it's not like people are going to think that it's weird, people are scared of it, but they completely believe that Witchcraft is a thing. I guess it's even in the Old Testament in the Bible, they talk about sorcery and how you know it's evil and not to accept it and things like that, so it's just very ingrained, just like a normal part of their society. When they think that witches are in their town, that's when mass hysteria breaks out. Even though there's a lot of Witchcraft happening, people are thinking the men are involved in a satanic Sabbath sort of thing. Like I was saying, Martha Corey, her husband, who was put to death because they believed he was part of the satanic rituals and things like that, and some of the other men were believed to be a part of that as well. There was a girl who was 14, her name was Abigail Hobbs, and she points the finger at a minister, in a nearby town, named George Burroughs. Her whole narrative is that this guy is a part of this satanic conspiracy that's going on. It's spreading between the towns that there's this whole satanic witchcraft going down in their town.

Stephanie: I just have a comment or a question actually. Is Salem a place people live today?

Katie: Back then it was Salem Town and Salem Village, but now I think it's just Salem and it's still called Salem. It's still a town people live in.

AJ: Yeah, people live there. Yeah, it is a small town which is very eerie and creepy. I know from being there. I guess it just has a reputation of Witchcraft and scary stuff. It has that feel and certain haunted buildings and stuff. But yeah, people still live there.

Stephanie: I was just thinking, this case, it's really interesting to me, which is why I'm not really talking much. I'm trying to take all the information in. I was just curious. I've never been there.

AJ: Yeah, it's really creepy. I actually want to go back now that I know more about the trials and actually see the historical things and know more about them.

Stephanie: Yeah, it would be really interesting to go back today to see that. I'm really interested in going.

AJ: Yeah, if you like history or if you like creepy haunted buildings, then it's definitely for you because that town is full of it.

Katie: Yeah, it would be really cool to see and I think especially if you know the history and what happened there, it gives it more relevance. That's definitely on my bucket list. I've talked about what led up to people being pointed out as witches, people being put to death. Some of the interesting parts about this is what actually happened in the trial.

AJ: Something that really struck me when I was doing my research for this case was how a lot of, I know Katie mentioned a little bit earlier, some aspects really do resemble a lot of what we see today. So in the trials and when people were being convicted, the criminal justice system back then was really focused on repentance because it was very religion based. It was very much like, you have to ask for God's forgiveness, you have to repent for your sins. It was very much focused on that, so a lot of the women, it was mostly women, but when they were on trial or if they were getting, I guess, plea deals or whatever, so they would be told, you know, if you confess to this crime, you'll be released under the conditions that you ask for God's forgiveness and that you promise not to engage in any more Witchcraft, then you could be let go. If you didn't accept, if you didn't acknowledge that you did it, if you didn't admit to it, then you had the punishment of being imprisoned forever or you were executed. It was a lot of forcing people to maybe confess to things that they didn't do because obviously you want to get out so, you know, you might say whatever you can to get out. I thought of how this resembles cases today, like Adnan Syed, you know, at one point he was given throughout all of his appeals, saying like, "Just admit that you did it and you'll get four more years and then you'll be out. If you keep denying it, well you're going to be in prison forever." It's almost the opposite of what you think the criminal justice system should be. You know, if you're innocent, you're going to be in prison forever, but if you're guilty, just say you are and we'll let you out. It's just this complete opposite, right, of how it should operate. So we really see that in the Salem Witch trials, which resembles what we see a lot of today too. So there's many things that haven't changed. The Salem Witch trials, the big chunk of them took place over an 18 month period from February of 1692 until the spring of 1693. During this time, like we said before, it was mass hysteria across Salem and it started to spill out into other communities too once people got word and then, you know, like I said, people were paranoid and maybe started to accuse people in their lives of Witchcraft because that was the go-to answer for everything. There's a good Ted-Ed video on YouTube that covers the trials, and basically what I got from it, the testimonies and the entire court proceedings were a complete and total sham. So the victims at that time were mostly young girls and they could testify and give what was called spectral evidence to support their claims. Spectral evidence is the term for evidence and testimony that is about one's visions or dreams. So you know, you could go into a courtroom and say, "I had a dream that this happened, or I saw this person in a vision that said they did this," and that was used as acceptable testimony. Obviously now that would never fly. Someone couldn't go on the stand and say, "Well, I had a dream that this happened." But back then, that was what they were going on and major testimony was being given by these girls like, "Oh, this happened to me in a vision. My dreams would tell me that this was going on." This was a big source of controversy for people in the community. Obviously there were people who were trying to speak out against spectral evidence and saying it was unfair. This is testimony that shouldn't be allowed. And then if you did speak up, you were shunned from the community. You were shot down, just really looked down upon. So eventually people just stopped questioning it because you didn't want to be outcast from the community. In this case, the spectral evidence was the girls, they would allegedly say that they were "raving when supposedly touched by invisible ghosts," so they were saying that these invisible ghosts were stabbing their skin or pinching them or touching them. Obviously you can't corroborate that because it's an invisible being. There's nothing to say that that did or didn't happen. You're just going about based on what these young girls are saying. Another thing that was quite contentious in the proceedings was that many people on the jury in these cases were relatives of the victims, which completely compromised their objectivity, and of course, leads to extreme bias in the proceedings. When you think about it, the lives of these women who were being tried and facing public hanging are in the hands of the young victims on admittedly invisible evidence and a jury full of the victim's family members. It's pretty wild to think that that kind of thing could exist. That was, like I said, a point of contention for many of the trials that took place. The Buzzfeed Unsolved Network, they do a really good coverage of this case. The two hosts of that show, they actually tell the story, but then they actually go to Salem and they have those ghost monitor reading things, so they go to some of the abandoned houses and try to see if they can capture any paranormal activities. It's really interesting video. They actually bring up a really interesting point. Katie had said Witchcraft was a legitimate thing that didn't sound absurd back in those days. There's a history of witch trials that go back way even further than the Salem Witch Trials like hundreds of years before that. There were witch trials in parts of Europe and in other parts of the world. What's interesting about the Salem witch trials was that all accusers in the Salem Witch Trials were between 9 and 20 years old. Historically, in other witchcraft accusations and trials around the world, it was mostly men who were the accusers, but in Salem, every accuser was a woman which is just interesting. I don't know if there's anything to that. It was always young. It was around the age of 9, 10, 11, going all the way up to 20, so very, very unique or a certain kind of population that is accusing these women. Just an interesting note. Like I said soon the chaos was spreading to communities outside of Salem and it seemed people everywhere were being accused of similar behavior. The governor of Massachusetts at the time, his wife was even accused of such crimes at the height of all of the hysteria, and he allegedly used his powers and influence in order to stop the proceedings before anything could be done to her. Interestingly, it was this governor of Massachusetts, he was the one that founded this special court of Lawyer and Determiner. Lawyer means to hear, and Determiner means to decide, and that was the name of the special court that was created for the Salem Witch Trials. It was actually him that started that, but then when his wife got accused of it, all of the stuff that he put in place was going to be working against her so he created a new court, once she was accused, and this new court would prohibit spectral evidence from the courtroom, which makes it increasingly more difficult for people to be convicted of Witchcraft. Eventually he ended up going on to releasing a lot of the people that were imprisoned for Witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials basically came to a screeching halt at this point because he was, you know, stopping the trials. He was releasing people, but unfortunately it was already too late for a lot of the people who had already been executed or had died in prison. Nobody who was ever executed, ever admitted to witchcraft, and none of them were given proper burials either. So all of the people that were executed were people that had denied it. Like I said, if you admitted to it and you were repentant then you could be let go. All the people that were hanged were people that had to the day that they were killed, had denied ever being a part of it. None of these people were ever given proper burials, and so they 're just buried in unmarked graves. The location of these graves is still unknown to this day, but speculation is that they may be buried on Gallows Hill, which for a long time is where many of the executions were believed to have taken place. People say that Gallows Hill is extremely haunted to this day, but in 2016 it was confirmed that a place called Proctor's Ledge is actually where the executions took place. There's a little unknown there, but now they're thinking it was Proctor's Ledge, but Gallows Hill is still said to be very haunted, and that's possibly the location of some of these unmarked graves, because if you were a witch then you were a disgrace to humanity. You weren't going to be given a proper burial or a gravestone so they were just buried on mass, somewhere no one really knew where they actually were.

Katie: The podcast that I mentioned earlier, History Extra Podcast, goes into a deep dive into the history of Salem and the political, religious things that were happening and why this was all maybe a perfect storm and how the witch trials and accusing people was a relief for some of these people and maybe the answer to some of their problems. So, very briefly, I'm just going to go into some of the things that were happening and like I said, if you want to go into a deep dive, then this, the podcast I mentioned is a good source for that. Salem Town and Salem Village, like I mentioned earlier, they were relatively new societies. They had only been founded for decades so it wasn't this old history in this town. It was new European settlers that had just come over and they were basically establishing a new society. A lot of these people that had come over were Puritans and this sort of religion is how it seems. These people thought they were the purist of Christians and they wanted to weed out anyone that wasn't a saint, basically.

AJ: I got that they were a subset of Christianity that was hardcore, the ones that were the most religious out of all the Christians.

Katie: Yeah, it was like a subset of Protestant is what I heard, but I don't know the difference between Protestant, Catholic, I don't know. Anyway, yeah, it was a subset of Christianity. They were the purest of the pure and could do nothing wrong, and if you did, then you were shunned. They moved from England to colonize this place as Puritans. That's what they wanted their society to be. Surprise, surprise. Religion was a big factor in some of the problems they were having.

AJ: Just another thing on the Puritans before we move on. An interesting note is that Tituba, when she was confessing to her crimes, she says in her testimony that the devil came to her and said, "The devil came to me and bid me serve him." She says that there were many other witches out there and their goal was that they were dead set on destroying the Puritans. That was what the devil wanted to do, was to destroy these Puritans, and that's why they were using these people as witches to enact towards that goal.

Katie: Okay. Yeah. So that definitely seems like a motive that they would have. And I mean, at this point when it ended, there was almost like they're pointing fingers at 500 people, and people are thinking, "How is there this many witches in our little town or our little village?" That's where it came to a halt. People just were like, "This is a bit, you know, too many people." They were just trying to get rid of, they thought that the witches were trying to get rid of the Puritans and so pointing fingers at people was a way to purify, I guess, their community. Like I mentioned before, Salem was a newly colonized village and there were conflicts between the Native Americans and the European colonists that were happening and not that long before the witchcraft issues erupted in Salem, there were very violent and horrific conflicts between the Native Americans and the Europeans. Some of the most brutal European colonist history happened very recently, and so there was definitely this tension between Native Americans, European colonists, and so this was probably fuel for maybe pointing fingers at people who maybe were of Native American descent, or maybe people that you know were accepting of them or something like that, so it was, you know, this tension that was still very fresh for everybody. Maybe pointing fingers at people relieved some of the stress. Another thing was Witchcraft was a common thing in this society. The belief was there. Superstition was huge. The people definitely believed it and like I said before, if your cows were dying or your crops died, people thought that that meant there was a curse put on them. They felt that pointing the blame was helpful to relieve some of, you know, their misfortune or put an explanation to what was happening to them. That was very much what was happening. Another thing that was happening, AJ briefly mentioned this before, was there were grudges between family members. It's known that there were grudges between different families that had been passed down from generations. Maybe people were using these witch trials as a way to get rid of their enemy once and for all. A few generations ago, your family wronged my family, so now I'm going to point you out as a witch and that's my payback. I mean, these grudges were held for, like I said, generations. This could have been their way of finally settling that score with people. The final factor was around this time, 1692,1693, there was climate issues happening. They called this time the Little Ice Age. The winters were very harsh, things were colder than normal, crops just weren't, you know, as hardy. You could literally starve or freeze to death if you just didn't work hard enough, or if your crops weren't doing well. This was stressful. Maybe people who were thinking, you know, if they had less mouths to feed or their family wasn't as big, or they didn't have to provide things for other people, it would lessen their burden so they're pointing fingers just to get rid of people maybe. These are all factors that were happening. This snowball effect, like we said, was just mounting on this little town and created this perfect storm for what happened.

AJ: To this day nobody knows what really caused the strange symptoms that was displayed by the victims. Reports suggest that it may have been a condition caused by a rare fungus that can be found in grains like rye called Ergot. So there was this, you know, the crops and stuff were big back then and they depended on that. If some of these crops had gone bad, there was a fungus called Ergot that could grow on it and ingesting and eating those crops could result in symptoms that were similar to this. That's one theory or conditions that cause swelling in the brain that could also cause these symptoms. My question is, well, one thing I was thinking of at the time when I was first going through the case and all this information was could it have been some type of a mental illness? Logically there could have been hundreds of conditions or diseases that were simply not known at the time, like I said before and couldn't be diagnosed. It could have been a virus that was to blame as well, like Katie said, obviously there was something that was going around that was causing all these symptoms. The lack of a concrete diagnosis led to this sort of thing. I was thinking, and obviously mental illness would be something that was not heard of or even spoken of at the time. Do you think it could have been some sort of, maybe in the older girls, the teens, they were exhibiting some sort of mental illness and nobody knew what these symptoms were. Hallucinations and seeing visions and all of this kind of stuff. People had never heard of mental illness, probably or certainly didn't talk about it. It could have been that. That was my thought. I just wanted to see what you guys thought of that.

Stephanie: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of when I first was reading about this. Back then they probably didn't know what mental health was or if there were mental issues going on. But yeah, I can totally, I can see why a lot of people would go and say mental illness. It does have a lot of the same characteristics. Witchcraft is such a weird thing and you never think it's a real thing that could happen. I just find it so fascinating. Not the mental illness part of it, but just Witchcraft itself. I find it so interesting.

AJ: I was just thinking, when I was reading these symptoms, people were seeing hallucinations and being touched by these invisible ghosts and all this stuff, it's like, you know, somebody were to say that this day and age you would say, you know, they might be having some sort of mental break, so I was just wondering if maybe that was also something that was just so unknown at the time that it was never even in consideration.

Katie: So yeah, I definitely thought about that too, but what made me think maybe not is the coincidence that it would be afflicting them at the same time. Those two girls that broke out almost at the same time with these issues. It's like, well, what are the odds that they're two different ages. They're not sisters, they're related. Mental illness is showing up at the same time for two girls that live in the same house and the exact same way, that is weird. Then how people are showing the exact same symptoms, but weeks later. Maybe it was more common than people were saying and they just thought that was happening to them. Maybe not everybody stepped forward. It just looked like things were sprouting up, but maybe people were suffering from this way before they stood up and talked about it. You know what I mean? Before this all happened. It could be an explanation, but to me just seems weird that it all happened around the same time to the same people in the house.

AJ: Yeah that's a good point. Back to that fungus and the grains and stuff, it's also weird that if, you know, it's in the communal crops that everyone's eating that it would only be these specific people that would come down with this sort of illness if it was caused by this fungus. Right? If everyone's eating the same rye. You know what I mean? So that's a little bit weird as well. And if it was also a pandemic, like you said, you know, the plague, or not something like that dramatic, but something, you know, a physical disease that's going around, it's also weird that it's only affecting a certain number. Most of the accused, like I said, they were all women. Most of them were young girls, like 9, 10, 11, up to 20, so it was this very specific demographic, which is just weird.

Katie: Yeah, it is weird. It definitely points towards some sort of virus that maybe everybody had, but everybody didn't show symptoms. You know? Maybe it's like Covid, you could have it and show symptoms and have it and also not. Maybe it was something like that happening. Also, it could be like the group mentality where you see something happening and then you can affiliate it with yourself and latch onto that. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this, but it reminds me of the dancing plague from the 1500s. Have you guys ever heard of that?

AJ: No.

Katie: Okay. It was this plague that happened where people literally started dancing and couldn't stop. They would dance for weeks and then just die of exhaustion. They would just keep dancing and could not stop. It was contagious. And people in the village were just dancing themselves to death.

AJ: What! Is this real?

Katie: Yeah, this actually happened in history. This is an actual thing. I forget where it started. Some people, they're just equating it to like, it was all in their heads. They think they had caught this thing and they just couldn't stop themselves and they just died of exhaustion. It happened to a bunch of people. So maybe it was something like that where it's like, oh, you see something, you latch onto that in your head. Make it up to be more than it is. That could be something as well.

AJ: That's true. That is super weird. I've never heard of that dancing thing. I'm going to go look that up.

Katie: Look it up, the dancing plague of the 1500s. Yeah, it's super weird.

AJ: So that would've been before this too, right? Because yeah, this is the 1600s. That's super weird.

Katie: Yeah.

AJ: There are a lot of theories out there about what happened besides the fungus or whatever, but there is a lot of different theories about what could've possibly have happened. One of these theories, like Katie had said, that Reverend Parris was not really looked upon greatly at the time that this all happened. One of the theories was that, because it was his daughter and his niece I believe that were the first two to come down with these afflictions, there was a theory going around that they think Reverend Parris actually forced his slave Tituba to come forward in order to begin this mass paranoia about Witchcraft so that he could exploit all of this hysteria in order to gain power in Salem Village. That was one thing that was going around saying that maybe he wanted to exploit, because you know where there's chaos, you can exploit it. If you're the creator of it, you know how you can also exploit it too, so maybe he knew that it would set off this mass panic and this domino effect, if he really wanted to somehow rise to power and if he had very specific targets in mind of who he wanted to accuse. One of the Sarahs, she was in the process of suing his family at the time that this all happened, so it's coincidental that she's one of the first to get accused. Maybe he was taking out these people who could have, you know, got in his way so to speak. Just an interesting theory that I did see out there.

Katie: Yeah, that's interesting too because when I was talking before, there are debates from historians when they talk about him and where some were saying, you know, he could have been embarrassed. That's why it took him weeks to report it to a doctor. But then also some were saying that maybe he was proud of it, that it was happening or not so much proud, but yeah, maybe he did perpetuate or make up the whole situation to benefit him. There are debates about what actually was going on with him. That is a good theory, I think.

AJ: Yeah. If it's true that people may have been using Witchcraft as this cop out against people they had vendettas against or generations of hatred. All it takes is, you know, the one thing to set off the whole chain reaction, right? If he knew that he, you know, he started that and then it snowballed out of even out of his control, who knows? So whether it was politically motivated or if Witchcraft was a very real thing that was happening in Salem during this time, we'll never know. It wasn't until 1957 when the state of Massachusetts formally apologized for the Salem Witch Trials and in 1992, so that would've been exactly 300 years from when the trial started to take place, there was an official memorial went up to acknowledge and honor the people that were lost in the whole ordeal. I think the whole takeaway from this story is that the system at that time used literally invisible evidence and testimony from young children as the basis for the complete demolition of these women's reputations. Also, the Ted Ed YouTube video that I mentioned says that these trials act as a cautionary tale about the, "dangers of group think and scapegoating, and the power of fear to manipulate human perception," which obviously proved to have deadly consequences in this case. I guess I just want to ask you guys, "What did you guys think was really happening at the time? Do you think it was mental illness or a physical illness that was causing these symptoms? Or do you believe in Witchcraft? What do you guys think?"

Katie: I definitely think there was some actual sickness or virus that was causing the actions of these young girls. Then of course, Witchcraft was believed to be real. So obviously I don't think that's real today, but it was a real belief back then. So either the kids knew about it or were, you know, forced by their parents to accuse people because they obviously were making that up that somebody, you know, cursed them. That wasn't true. So they had a vendetta or whatever, just picked some random person they wanted to accuse. So yeah, to sum up , I feel like it was a combination of this virus going around. People having personal vendettas. The stress of the whole situation like I mentioned, all that stuff that was happening, snowballed into this thing that I think went further than even that Reverend Parris was planning at all. It got out of his control. Another point I think is also interesting is that when the Governor's wife was accused, it all stopped. This isn't acceptable, we're going to stop it. Another thing that other people pointed out, was at that time winter was starting to come again so it was, if people are spending all their time in these witch trials, they're not going to survive the winter. They have to go, you know, prepare their food for the winter. They have to go chop their wood and if they literally just sit in these trials the whole time they're going to die in the winter. So they like, "We better stop this because we're all going to die." It was very much like, "Mm, this is the end. Okay, that's it."

AJ: But, I guess they must have went through, because it started in February of 1692 and went to the spring of 1693, so, I mean, there was a winter in there that, I don't know what they did for that winter.

Katie: Well maybe a lot of people backed out at that point or weren't as interested and didn't sit in the courts. Maybe it was losing momentum. That's maybe one of the reasons why it was over. People were over it. .

AJ: Yeah, that's true. It's just really creepy, when you hear this, think of this story. The dark winter in Salem with Witchcraft. To me it's a very eerie and creepy story, just picturing it. I don't believe that witchcraft is a real thing. I don't think it was then either. Like Katie said, it was probably a mixture of all of those things, this physical illness that was going around that no one could understand. Also too, I feel like it's a coping mechanism in general of when things feel out of your control and there's something you can't understand, you are going to make up things to make it make sense. This was what they latched onto. Like you said, it got way out of control more than they even thought that it ever could.

Stephanie: I don't believe in Witchcraft. I think it was mental illness that was happening and people just didn't recognize it back then. To me this whole Witchcraft thing just seems too far fetched. But then again, I don't really know a lot about Witchcraft, so who knows? It's very interesting. Then for it to just go away after the Governor stepped in just seems really odd to me. It just doesn't really seem real to me. I think it was not real and just more of a mental illness type thing.

Katie: Well, I wonder what happened after they let all those apparent witches go that were in prison. The trials were over they let them all go. Another point they made was a lot of people accused their own family members, so it's like they had to go back home, have like family dinners with this person that like literally tried to hang them.

AJ: Yeah.

Katie: Anyway, I just wonder if the bewitching or the convulsions and stuff from the young girls stopped, people stopped accusing people, did they just think that there were witches among them but just didn't do anything about it? Or did they accept that it wasn't real? I just wonder what happened after?

AJ: Yeah, and there's never anything on what happened after. It's like in 1693, they were all released, the trials ended, and then 300 years later they finally apologized. It's like gaps missing in here. I don't know what happened. Yeah, after all of that stuff. It's also creepy too, to think about all the unmarked graves that are from these people that were executed, that we don't know where they're buried and if they'll ever be found. These graves in Gallows Hill is super haunted, which is creepy.

Katie: Yeah, that would be a creepy place to go.

Stephanie: Yeah.

AJ: I'm just picturing like on Halloween at nighttime you go to Gallows Hill.

Katie: And it'd be definitely foggy.

AJ: Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh for sure. Like an old cemetery somewhere. Yeah, Salem is...

Stephanie: Yeah it'd be cool to go to.

AJ: It would be fun. I do want to go back to Salem now and I wish I knew all this information when I went the first time so I could have appreciated. Also in that buzzfeed, Unsolved Mysteries video that I mentioned about this case, they go to where the Reverend lived, his old house. The foundation is still there, everything else is gone, but they just stand and it's winter when they go so it's dark and wintery and they're just standing in this, you know, old abandoned foundation trying to talk to ghosts. It's super creepy. I don't know. I couldn't do that, but I do want to go back to Salem.

Katie: Yeah, I guess if you believe that there's ghosts there, then maybe you believe in witches too. So it's all even more real for some people. It's interesting.

AJ: Definitely an interesting topic. Also I was going to say it is crazy to think it is a lesson in scapegoating and fear, what fear can cause people on mass to do. These large groups of people, if you're really scared and all this hysteria is an interesting cautionary tale like I mentioned before.

Katie: Yeah, I mean, this is just an early example of what the crowd effect or ...

AJ: Mob mentality.

Katie: Like we've seen that recently with some of the Trump protests and stuff.

AJ: Ohhh!.

Katie: It's like when people share the same crazy idea as you, how easy it is to roll with that and people latch on. I think that was happening here as well. This was a thing that people were just, you know, latching onto was a way to scapegoat for sure.

AJ: Yeah, it's definitely interesting.

So that does it for this episode of Crime Family. We hope you enjoyed our coverage of the Salem Witch Trials. We hope you learned something that you didn't know before. Thank you for joining us. If you like the show, you can definitely follow us on all the social medias, crimefamilypodcast on Instagram, we're @ crimefamilypod1 on Twitter. Our Facebook is Crime Family Podcast, and also our website, check it out@crimefamilypodcast.ca. Like we mentioned at the beginning of the show, if you are a fan of the show and you want to help support us, definitely join us on Patreon. So we're on patreon.com/crime family podcast to join us at tier one, two or three. Lots of exclusive benefits for patrons and also our merch store. Check that out. We'll put a link in the show notes to our merch store on Redbubble. There's lots of good stuff there too. So lots of ways that you can show your support for the show. Thank you so much and Halloween's in a few days so happy Halloween and hope you have a safe and scary Halloween. Bye.

Katie: Bye.

Stephanie: Bye.