Here Be Witches: The Salem Witch Trials

Buried Evidence

This episode dissects the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, tracing how a volatile mix of Puritan religious fervor, colonial legal vacuums, and post-war paranoia ignited mass hysteria in

Key takeaways

• The crisis began in Samuel Parris's household when young girls Betty and Abigail exhibited convulsions and pain, leading to initial accusations against enslaved woman Tituba and vulnerable neighbors Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
• Tituba's coerced confession, likely a survival tactic under extreme pressure, triggered a domino effect as she named others who had supposedly signed the devil's book.

Main topics

• Salem Witch Trials origins
• Puritan religious & colonial context

Notable quotes

"spectral evidence was a key feature of Salem... it was an impossible thing to argue against"

Conclusion

The episode provides a chilling yet meticulously researched account of how

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This podcast is part of The Crime Desk, the true home of true crime. Get all our episodes earlier than anyone else and listen ad-free by becoming a subscriber at thecrimedesk.com. Speaker 2 (0:20) Russell Brand, actor, comedian, celebrity. The actor and comedian Russell Brand has been charged. Speaker 1 (0:28) He denies the Speaker 3 (0:29) allegations which span 10 years. I was a fool. I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile. But what I never was, was a rapist. Speaker 2 (0:39) This is The Trial. Russell Brand. Coming to you daily from Monday. We Speaker 3 (0:45) will be continuing to discuss this matter. Praise the Lord. Speaker 4 (0:54) Welcome back to Buried Evidence, a Speaker 1 (0:57) podcast that knows where the bodies are hidden. Today we're turning to late 17th century colonial America to investigate perhaps the most famous witchcraft case of all, the Salem Witch Trials. The Speaker 4 (1:09) events in Salem would see over 200 individuals accused, dozens of confessions, 30 convictions, 19 executions, a number of deaths in prison and a 70-year-old man tortured to death by Speaker 1 (1:22) pressing. The trials have framed the way we think about mass hysteria, inspiring countless novels, TV shows and perhaps most famously, Arthur Miller's The Crucible. But what really went on? Who was accused and why? So go on, Rebecca, where is Salem exactly? So Salem is in Massachusetts. And what's interesting about this witchcraft case is that Salem has come to be. the word for it, like the geographic space that we associate with it. But actually, if we go back to 17th century colonial America, to Massachusetts, there were actually a number of villages and settlements that were involved in the trials. And just to confuse things even more, we have a Salem village, which is modern day Denver's in Massachusetts, and nearby we have Salem. town, which is what we associate now with Salem, but there are other spaces as well. So colonial America. So if Speaker 4 (2:19) I'm right, I'm thinking that the, like the first kind of colonized settlement is like 90 years prior to that. That's like Jamestown, pilgrim fathers, that kind of thing. And what about the makeup of the community? I mean, what they're obviously their Speaker 1 (2:37) religious beliefs are quite Orthodox, right? So. It's interesting because quite a lot of the people that migrated over to America initially, the early colonizers of the colony, were religious non-conformists or were people that felt that their religious liberties were at risk and they might find a better space in the so-called quote-unquote new world. When we get to areas like Massachusetts by the end of the 17th century, These places have been settled for decades. So I think it's around 1620 that we start to see spaces colonized in what is now Massachusetts. A lot of the people that traveled over, as I said, a lot were religious nonconformists or what we might refer to as Puritans. They were very strict in their belief in... the Bible and the way that they interpreted the Bible and the way that religion should function within society. Many of the people came from spaces like East Anglia. Now that's interesting because East Anglia was a particularly Puritan space in the 17th century. There's loads of reasons why. And one of the main reasons is that it was close to the coast. So we have lots of people from the continent. So maybe the Netherlands traveling over and flavoring the type of Protestantism that we have there. But also it's interesting because during the English Civil Wars or the Civil Wars, Wars of Three Kingdoms, whatever you refer to it as. We have a series of witch hunts that happen predominantly in East Anglia. You might have heard of Matthew Hopkins. Yes, the witch Speaker 4 (4:14) finder general. Speaker 1 (4:15) Exactly, exactly. So they happen in East Anglia. I'm not saying that everybody that travelled over had direct experience of him, but a lot of them are from that same space. We also have another bunch of migrants that travel across from Lancashire and spaces in the North West. Oh, Speaker 4 (4:32) my Speaker 1 (4:32) people. Speaker 4 (4:32) My people too. My people too. Speaker 1 (4:35) Yeah. And in particular, actually, part of that, part of Cotton Mather, whose name is very much associated with the Salem witch trials, his family heralds from Lancashire originally. They were two generations, maybe three generations in by the time we get to 1690. So it's a very diverse in terms of, you know, the spaces that people have come from area. But also it's kind of got this through line of. religious, almost puritanism as well. Speaker 4 (5:07) Is there also kind of like a political background to this as well, whereby... Speaker 4 (5:14) these kind of extraordinary events kind of happen within this pressure cooker. I mean, could you tell me a bit more about that? Speaker 1 (5:22) Yeah, so it's a colonial settlement. So, I mean, the name gives away where the conflict arose from. These are British people that have travelled across to America to claim land and territory to settle. But of course, there are already people living in America so that we have ongoing conflict as a consequence of this. But also to Native Americans that are coming into conflict with the British and English settlers, but also the French are trying to make inroads as well. So we have a big and brutal war that takes place that's called it's known as King Philip's War, but it has all of these different components. And some historians have argued that it made the society within Salem or what we refer to as Salem now or within Massachusetts more. Speaker 1 (6:15) fearful of the outside, of outsiders or of things that might be seen as being not religious in the way that they view them. So there is this deep fear of the devil. So that's kind of flavouring the climate. The other thing that we've got going on as well from a legal point of view and a kind of governing point of view is that Massachusetts is still waiting on a charter. I won't get into all the specifics of it, but it means that we're in a kind of flux moment whereby... authority is not as strong as it ordinarily would be within that part of the Speaker 4 (6:48) colony. Speaker 1 (6:48) So anything goes, Speaker 4 (6:49) basically. Speaker 1 (6:50) Well, yeah, almost. I mean, almost. So you've got lots of different bits and pieces feeding into this. And so many people have gone back to each and every one of them and have said, ha, well, that's the reason why the Salem witch trials happened in the way that they did. But you know as well as I do, it's usually a combination of lots of factors. Usually as well, it's something random that just pops up and sets fire. Well, Speaker 4 (7:12) it's Speaker 1 (7:13) kind of like a perfect Speaker 4 (7:14) storm, isn't it? Because archaeologists are and historians are a bit, I think, obsessed with liminal spaces, things on the edge, right? And that's when people do amazing things. They're either extremely creative and innovation happens or it... goes wrong and the wheels fall off and i i feel like it's the latter rather than the former here so just tell me about the the events what actually happened so Speaker 1 (7:42) it starts with we've we've got the the village parish has gone through a number of um of vicars um and we have a samuel paris and that comes in to take over He's originally born in England. His family owns plantations in Barbados. So he's very much of that kind of slaving generation. He inherits this plantation. So he initially goes over to America to study in Boston at Harvard, which is only a couple of decades old by this point. Then he inherits the plantation on Barbados, spends some time there. We think there was some kind of hurricane or something that meant that he wanted to leave. He left, returned to Massachusetts. While he's there, he acquires an enslaved person that we tend to call Tituba, although her name goes through various varieties in the historical archive. But for the purposes of today, I'm going to refer to her as Tituba. The family then move to Salem, where he takes his job. He has a daughter called Betty. And within the household, they also acquire another member of the household, which is his niece, who appears to have been orphaned. She's called Abigail. The story of the witch trials and the witch fear in Salem starts within this household. So Betty and Abigail, who are young, you know, they're under the age of 12, they start to complain of feeling... pinpricks and things happening to their body. They start barking, going into convulsions, just doing very strange things, strange behaviour. Betty's father, Samuel Parris, asks for a physician to come and have a look at the girls to find out what's going on. He can't find anything physically wrong with them, but he says that they've been touched by the hand of evil or the evil hand is upon them, meaning witchcraft. Speaker 4 (9:39) I Speaker 1 (9:40) mean, Speaker 4 (9:40) as a parent, wouldn't you just think that your kids are playing up? I mean, yes, yes. We've all been there, right? Speaker 1 (9:47) We have, we have. And yes, you would. But it kind of played into these fears that people within this area were having already, and certainly individuals like Samuel Parris and others, that the devil was just waiting to get hold of him. The devil was everywhere and witchcraft could only exist with the devil. The way that witchcraft worked in the 17th century was that people understood that the devil would seduce individuals. Women would be easier targets because they're more vulnerable to seduction, according to 17th century. Of