The Bridgeville Area Historical Society celebrated the Halloween season by welcoming back one of its favorite guests, Todd DePastino. His subject, the infamous Salem Witch Trials, was perfect for the occasion. Although my quarantine prevented me from attending in person, it was filmed by Tim McNellie and is available on the “bridgeville.org” website.
In February, 1692, two young girls, nine year old Betsy Parris and her eleven year old cousin Abigail Williams, suddenly began to have fits and to exhibit behavior that alarmed their parents. Betsy’s father, Samuel Parris was the minister of Salem Village, a small settlement adjacent to Salem Town. Dr. William Griggs examined the girls and could find no physical evidence of any ailment.
Dr. Griggs suggested the possibility that his patients had been “possessed by an Evil Hand”. When other young women began to exhibit similar symptoms, Village residents concluded that they were being afflicted by witches. Eventually Betsy and Abigail were joined by Ann Putnam, Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard in accusing three local women of afflicting them.
The first woman arrested was Tituba, a slave owned by Samuel Parris. A South American Indian, she had come to New England via Barbados. Tituba frequently entertained the girls with fortune telling cards and exotic stories. Sarah Osborne was a widow, ostracized because she refused to attend church. She complicated matters by marrying a servant indentured to her, to prevent her son from taking his father’s inheritance from her. Sarah “Goody” Good was a classic “poor lost soul”, deep in poverty and frequently reduced to begging. Even her husband suspected her of being a witch.
These three were followed by seventeen more, including five men. A grand jury was convened, with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton as Chief Magistrate. When Sarah Good went to the witness stand, the girls accusing her immediately began to act as if possessed. She and Sarah Osborne both claimed their innocence, but Tutiba admitted that “she was the Devil’s servant” and implicated them as well.
Sarah Osborne escaped hanging by dying in prison. While in prison Sara Good gave birth to a child before being hanged, along with seventeen others. George Burroughs, who had been accused of summoning the witches with his trumpet, shocked his neighbors by reciting the Lord’s Prayer just before his hanging; it was well known that witches could not recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Eighty-one year old Giles Corey refused to plead (guilty or not guilty) and could not be brought to trial. Instead he was sentenced to “pressing”. He was stripped naked and forced to lie down. Planks were placed on top of him, with heavy rocks piled on them, in an effort to force him to plead. After two days of this torture, he finally died. By refusing to plead, he prevented the government from appropriating his estate, thus saving it for his sons-in-law.
The speaker then reported several unusual correlations between accused and accuser in many of the cases. Many of the accusers experienced major family disasters in later years; this was not true of the families of the accused. Most of the accusers lived in the western part of Salem Village; most of the accused, in the eastern part. Most of those accused had friends who were Baptists or Quakers.
He then presented a long discussion of the Puritans, implying that the whole ordeal was their fault. The Puritans were a very strict English Protestant sect, with unquestioned belief in the concepts recorded in the Bible. They strongly resented the pageantry, idolatry, and greed they saw in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.
In the early seventeenth century about twenty thousand Puritans came to the New World and founded a “plantation of religion, not trade” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They believed that religion, rather than worldly gain, should be our objective. By 1692 they had lost political control of the colony, but still had significant influence on its judicial process.
Regardless of who is to blame, the Salem Witch Trials continue to be a major black-mark in our country’s history. In the context of the time and place, that is an appropriate classification for it. Nonetheless, in the context of world history, it is an extremely minor episode.
In the century preceding the Salem Witch Trials, witch-hunting was a popular sport in Europe, a sport that was promulgated by the organized churches that the Puritans despised. Well over fifty thousand “witches” were executed, many of them by the Roman Catholic Inquisition. One is surprised that so few of these instances occurred in the New World. We find it difficult to assume that the sect that so strongly opposed worldly treasures was the specific reason for this embarrassment.
Before we twenty-first century skeptics ridicule our ignorant predecessors, we should be reminded that belief in the presence of the Devil in the real world still exists today. One year ago the Historical Society program during Halloween Week was “The Demon on Brownsville Road”. We remember Bob Cranmer discussing the haunting of his home in Brentwood and the eventual routing of Satan by a Roman Catholic exorcist.
If our new president is to be successful in bringing our strongly divided country back together again, I think we all need to take a big dose of tolerance medicine and to begin to understand factions like the Puritans, instead of pointing fingers at them and blaming them for all our ills.
Despite what is currently reported on the Historical Society website, I believe their next program meeting is scheduled for Tuesday November 24, 2020, at 7:30 pm, in the Chartiers Room at the Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department. It will be a discussion of a Pittsburgh Regiment in the Civil War, entitled “Day by Day with the 123rd PA Volunteers”. The speaker will be Chris George.
Our thanks to Todd DePastino for another entertaining presentation and to Tim McNellie for making it available to those of us “at risk”.