Welcome to the Thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

I'm Sarah Jack.

Our ancestors were examined for witch marks.

In 1618, English legal writer Michael Dalton published A handbook for magistrates instructing them that devil's marks would be found in their secretive parts and therefore required diligent and careful search.

Cotton Mather explained that familiar spirits were devils and bodily shapes that gave responses or receive orders for doing mischief.

These ideas crossed the Atlantic and became practice in Salem in June 1692.

Women like Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth Proctor were stripped and examined.

Today, we're looking at the dehumanizing practice of searching for which Marks and how it was used to convict innocent people in Salem.

So where did these ideas about witches, Marks and familiar spirits actually come from?

Let's look at the men who created the so-called evidence.

Many of the ideas used to prosecute the Salem Witch Trials came from English legal texts.

Texts by people like William Perkins and Richard Bernard and Michael Dalton who we quoted at the top and they laid out what witches marks were and familiar spirits and how to identify witches marks.

William Perkins in A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft laid out seven types of evidence that could be used to try someone for witchcraft.

One of those evidences was to find a witch's mark or its eat.

We mentioned Michael Dalton and his country Justice.

He said that witch's marks were like blue or red spots, flea bites or with the flesh sunk in and hollow.

So it's a really broad description.

It sounds like the human body to me.

He says.

Quote these.

The devil's marks, being sensible and being pricked, will not bleed and be often in their secretest parts, and therefore require diligent and careful search.

And Richard Bernard in The Certainty of the World of Spirits, says this where many witch marks have been found in witch trials in England.

They've been found on the crown of the head, on the breasts, on the thighs, on the butt, on the neck, on the chin, on the shoulder, on the flank, under the ear, under the flank, under the eyebrows, under the armpits, within the lips and in the secret parts.

He tells us the various marks were left, ranging from spots to perturbances like small nipples.

These English writers laid out detailed instructions about what to look for and where to search.

But was any of this actually in the Bible?

No, it was not laid out in the Bible.

Robert Kalos, a critic of The sandwich trials, published More Wonders of the Invisible World, and in that book he points out that the evidences that the men in court are using to identify witches are not spelled out in the scripture.

But the search for witches marks wasn't the only test authorities used.

Let's look at some of the other methods they employed to identify witches.

Yeah, there were several.

As we mentioned, William Perkins had listed 7 things to test.

Three of these were used in the Salem Witch Trials.

Witches were supposed to not be able to recite the Lord's Prayer.

You may.

Remember that Reverend George Burrows is reported to have given the Lord's Prayer at the gallows, but it didn't save his life.

Another test that they did that specifically related to witches marks was called watching.

They would keep a person awake for a couple of days, maybe a few days and they would just watch to see if a familiar or an imp came to feed from a witch's mark.

And then a third test that was often done in the courtroom was called the touch test.

And basically what would happen was if an afflicted person who had been bewitched allegedly was touched by the witch, the curse or spell that had gone into the afflicted person would go back into the witch.

And so if somebody who was having a fit stopped and became well upon touch, then the person who touched them was a witch.

The authorities, Perkins and Bernard, actually said what the teats were supposedly for.

The teats were practical in nature in that they offered nourishment for the familiar spirit or imp that accompanied the witch.

So I know there is a case in Salem where a woman fed her familiars directly through her actual breasts.

There's also there for the devil's sake to use as his brand.

He put his mark on the people that served him.

You, once you signed a contract with them, basically you were his for the length of that contract.

And so he or his devils would leave a little mark on your body in the absence of somebody actually bringing in the book to show that there was a contract signed with the devil, that mark on their body some place was the proof that they were working with the devil.

So the supposed mark was also the proof that there was a contract that there was a devil's book, that an alleged witch had signed their name in the supposed devil's book because something on their body was identified as a witch Mark bun.

Bun.

But this raises the question, knowing what the witch teat is for, what is a familiar spirit actually?

As we opened with a familiar spirit is to be able to cause a devil to take bodily shapes.

The community would identify familiars as any kind of animal that they imagined they were seeing too.

So a devil would take the form of something we might be familiar with, like a cat or a bird, and then it can give responses and it can receive orders to do mischief.

Yes, and in Salem, familiars did appear as almost every animal that was familiar to the settlers.

There were birds, cats, rats, dogs, snakes, hogs, monstrous creations that were amalgamations of different creatures, and we'll get to more details on those in a little bit.

They're pretty fun to look at, some of those monster.

This evaluation of the body was dehumanizing to the ultimate degree.

They were invasively searching bodies and the interpretation of a witch mark was wide open.

Yeah, these searches meant being stripped, examined in private areas, having pins driven into your flesh to test whether this which is marked would bleed or whether you were sensitive when it got poked.

And this was systemic dehumanization.

So let's take a sampling of the teats and the familiars that are in the records of the Salemich trials.

I want to look at the men and then the women, and I think you'll notice a key difference in what happens with the men versus the women.

So I'll start with the men.

John Proctor, John Willard and George Burroughs were examined for witches marks in jail and they were found to have none.

But when George Jacobs senior, who is either 2 or 83 years old was examined for teats, he had three of them.

A pin was run through two of those and he did not feel it, so they were insensible.

He had one in his mouth on the inside of his right cheek, had one in his right shoulder blade that was drooping about 1/4 of an inch long when a pin was run through it.

No substance oozed out and no blood, no pus, no bio, no nothing.

And then he had a third one on his right head.

The women were searched by women.

Let's look at what those experiences were like.

Titaba was examined for her, which is marked by Hannah Ingersoll on March 1st.

She was criticized by the magistrates for holding her arm during that examination, and according to Reverend Hale's writings after this, they said Titba was again examined in prison, and being searched by a woman, she was found to have upon her body the marks of the devil's wounding of her.

Sarah Good, who was executed Later, her husband William asked Hannah Ingersoll if she saw a little wart or teeth below his wife's right shoulder.

And there's no record of whether she saw it or not.

The other recorded search of women for witch's marks occurred on June 2nd, 1692.

A jury of women came into the court in Salem and examined Alice Parker, Susanna Martin, Sarah Good, Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Proctor, and Rebecca Nurse.

This was the first day of trials in the actual Salem Witch Trials, so Alice Parker, Susanna Martin, and Sarah Good at this point in June were found to have no witch's marks.

Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, on the other hand, all had a preternatural excresence of flesh between ye pudendum and ye Anus, and Bishops was gone though when researched 3 or 4 hours later.

And Proctor's had also disappeared by this time, where Nurses still was there, but appeared as only senseless dry skin on the second search.

And Rebecca said that this mark was left after a difficult childbirth.

She also requested a reexamination by qualified individuals who would recognize that.

Another person who was found to have a witch's mark, but wasn't necessarily physically examined with the same rigor that they gave to the adult women, was the young child Dorothy Good.

She was about four or five years old in 1692, and according to Reverend Diadat Lawson, in his book about the Sandwich Trials, a Brief and True narrative quote, on the 26th of March, Mr.

Hathorne, Mr.

Kerwin and Mr.

Higginson were at the prison keeper's house to examine the child Dorothy Good, And it told them there it had a little snake that used to suck on the lowest joint of its forefinger.

And when they inquired where pointing to other places, it told them not there, but there, pointing on the lowest point of the forefinger, where they observed a deep red spot about the bigness of a flea bite.

They asked who gave it that snake, whether the great black man?

It said no, its mother gave it.

And Dorothy's supposed sake wasn't the only bizarre familiar described What other creatures did the accusers claim to see?

Here's one of my favorite ones comes to us through Tituba's examinations.

She described another thing, Harry, it goes upright like a man.

It hath only two legs.

Let's talk about John Louder's rooster thing that he saw because it was a hybrid.

He said that a black thing jumped in out the window and came and stood just before my face upon the bar.

The body of it looked like a monkey, only the feet were like a cock's feet with claws and the face somewhat more like a man's than a monkey's.

Afflicted woman Susanna Sheldon claimed Good Wife Buckley had been a witch for 10 years and that she'd opened her breast and the black man gave her two little things like young cats, and she put them to her breasts and suckled them and they had no hair on them and had ears like a man.

Yeah, witch marks were ordinarily very incriminating because like we said at the beginning, they were proof of the covenant with the devil and therefore witchcraft.

But the Court of Order and Terminer that met in Salem in 1692 convicted everyone that was tried before it.

27 of 27 people tried in the year 1692 by that court were convicted regardless of the presence or absence of a witch's deep.

Whether it was George Jacobs senior with pins driven through his flesh, Rebecca Nurse explaining postpartum scari, or 4 year old Dorothy Goods flea bite sized spot, the court convicted everyone tried in 1692.