Well, here's a question that's been asked for the last 333 years.

How could the Salem Witch trials actually happen?

It wasn't moldy bread.

It wasn't hysteria.

It wasn't a circle of girls playing with magic.

So did get the Salem witch trials going and what caused things to get so out of control?

Welcome to the thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

And I'm Sarah Jack.

Our ancestors experienced the Salem witch trials.

So next time someone tries to tell you how the Salem witch trials happened, you can tell them how it really was in 15 minutes or less.

Salem wasn't the peaceful place its name implies.

There were many pressures going on and many other factors all added together acting like gunpowder overstuffing a powder keg.

The first ingredient overstuffing that powder keg was the belief in witchcraft.

The belief in witchcraft, like just about everybody believed in witchcraft.

The ministers, the magistrates, the common folk, they all believed very deeply in this.

It was entrenched in their everyday world as part of their view of there being a visible world and an invisible world that sometimes ran together.

And you could see the invisible in this world.

And witchcraft was just part of how that world operated, with magic being an everyday concern.

But what was of the utmost concern was the diabolical.

So magic that could have been diabolical was feared and condemned.

There was a deep belief that witches made a covenant with the devil, that they signed his book in exchange for getting powers to do magic and better themselves or hurt their enemies.

In part of this diabolical pact brought along with it this fear that there was a conspiracy between Satan and the witches to overthrow Christchurch and the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to establish the Devil's own Kingdom in Christ Kingdom's place.

And something you may be familiar with, magical explanations were used to understand misfortune, and the ministers gave sanction to these fears about misfortune or why they seem to be under punishment.

And the ministers, they talked about, you had to be wary of the devil.

He was around prowling like a lion and you never knew where he was going to turn up and you had to be ready to turn him away.

The next ingredient in that powder keg was the political instability.

In 1684, King James the Second revoked the royal charter that authorized the Massachusetts Bay Colony to govern itself.

While there was not this official chartered government, the afflicted girls fell ill and all hell was breaking loose.

And that hell was breaking loose in the household of Salem Village Minister Samuel Paris, one of these ministers, who was talking about the devil prowling around his community.

So he was really stuffing that powder keg full of the gunpowder.

And this interim government was in place until May 1692, when the newly appointed royal Governor, Sir William Phipps and Reverend Increase Mather returned to Boston from London, where they had been lobbying for this new charter.

By then the jails were overcrowded and there were no courts to handle the witchcraft cases.

So the governor he established a special court of lawyer and terminer, which means to hear and determine.

On May 26th he established this court with 9 judges and a King's attorney appointed to prosecute those who were waiting in jail.

What was going on in those courts had everything to do with the turn out of the Salem witch hunt, starting with evidence.

One evidence that they were using was spectral evidence.

It was questionable, yet reliable.

How did that work, Josh?

It works because there's people like Cotton Mather who are straddling the fence on what to do about spectral evidence.

Is it proof that somebody has committed witchcraft if somebody else has seen their specter doing something?

Or is it totally unreliable because maybe the devil can fake it?

And since they weren't sure, they just went ahead and used the evidence.

They just barreled right ahead.

And under normal circumstances, the legal system of the time required people lodging complaints, criminal complaints, especially felony complaints, which could result in somebody's execution.

They were requiring the accusers to post a significant bond of money.

And if it was proven that they were making things up, or if they weren't going to see it through and come up as a witness against the person that they're accusing, then the charge could be thrown out and they could find themselves on the wrong side of the bars.

So in Salem, the magistrates very early on, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin of Salem, when they started doing the taking these complaints from the very first one, they waived this bond requirement.

They did not require a bond to accuse Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne and Zichiba.

This next part of the powder keg is something we can really relate to.

There was great socio economic anxieties and community tensions.

There was a large wealth gap between the prosperous merchants and everyone else in the colony, and that just caused some tension.

And the population of Essex County, Massachusetts, where Salem is, was strained at this point in time because there was a war going on on the frontier with the Native Americans and their French allies.

And so refugees were flooding in from Maine and New Hampshire to Essex County to be safer.

There were also great tensions over religious doctrines, such as the prolonged debate over the theology of membership called the Halfway covenant.

Membership in the churches declined from the first generation of settlers to the second to the third, and the ministers bemoaned this.

They were so worried for the spiritual state of the colony.

The churches had this requirement that to become a full communing member, you had to get up before the whole church and talk about your conversion experience, how you found God and developed this relationship that makes you confident that you're worthy of being a member, that you think that you're one of the elect that's been chosen to live in heaven for eternity.

And so some of the ministers were a little more progressive about membership, and they said, let's make this halfway covenant.

We'll amend the rules so more people can join the church.

Salem Town, the port city, they accepted the halfway covenant in that church.

But in Salem Village, where the farmers lived, Samuel Parris did not accept the halfway covenant.

He wanted a very rigid standard of membership that everybody was properly screened before they could come on board and take communion.

He not only like to make it really hard to get it, he made it really hard to keep it because he loved to take membership away from accused witches.

So this powder keg that we've been going through, it also included these refugees from King William's War that were so very traumatized from the violence and the fear that they were experiencing.

And there was a lot of economic calamity from the war as well.

And another factor that we touched on earlier was this belief in witchcraft and what happened with Salem that was a little different than previous witch trials in Connecticut and in Boston was this European influence, This continental witch came to Salem and attended the witch's Sabbath and flew on poles.

What do you mean this continental witch came?

It was different than the English witch.

The English witches didn't really fly on brooms or bulls, and they didn't have Sabbaths.

They had familiars, which we see in Salem.

But otherwise, some of these things, these stories that the afflicted people and the accusers and the confessors L come from tales that have been spread through writing and then word of mouth about Swedish witch trials and other witch trials across Europe.

And we've been talking about this powder keg.

It's been overstuffed.

So it's bulging and it's ready to just explode and ignite the whole colony in a firestorm.

It just needs a spark.

So in come Abigail Williams and Betty Paris.

They get afflicted in January 1692 in the household of the Reverend Samuel Paris of Samuel Village.

In February, a doctor diagnosed them as being under an evil hand, meaning that witchcraft was at work.

After this evil hand diagnosis, a neighbor decides that she wants to identify who is bewitching the girls.

She uses an English method rarely used even in England.

There's only a couple of cases of this happening.

This cake she bakes from rye meal and the urine of the afflicted girls and feeds to a dog and the dog.

Somehow something's supposed to happen and the witch is supposed to be revealed, supposedly.

So the next day, the girls claim that Tituba is bewitching them, and then they claimed that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne are also afflicting them.

And so you've got these three people accused.

And that's not an extreme witch hunt.

It's more of a typical case of a witch trial in New England where one or two, in this case, three people are accused.

And it could have just ended up that, but things escalated.

That isn't the end of it because under all this duress and stress and love for these girls that are suffering, Tituba decides to say she was coerced by the devil to hurt the girls.

But it wasn't just her, she says.

There are nine other witches.

And now since there's 9 witches instead of three, the officials have to look for these other witches.

People in the community start seeing witches all around them and just start piling on complaints.

More confessions happen and things just snowball.

So you get to a point where it's not just the usual suspects being accused, there's indiscriminate accusations against pillars of the community.

It's so evident that this was a very complicated event.

There's not a silver bullet 1 cause of the Salem witch trials.

Like Sarah's saying, it's not just explained by ergot or Lyme disease or encephalitis or any other one thing.

It's all these things coming together to create what Professor Emerson Baker calls the perfect storm of ingredients that was needed to be in place to create the environment for the sandwich trials to happen.

We're here to invite you to two special events.

Partnership of Historic Boston's has put us in their fall lineup with Professor Emerson Baker.

You'll love these wide-ranging discussions of New England witch hunts.

The first happened September 8th

at 7:00 PM Eastern.

It's online and it's about the other understanding witch hunts.

Then you can come back on the 22nd of September where we'll be discussing resistance stopping witch hunts.

Don't miss these really engaging discussions that we're going to have with renowned historian Emerson Baker.

Yeah, and if you want to hear us talk to Emerson Baker in the meantime, check out our podcast, The Thing About Witch Hunts.

We've done 2 episodes with them and they're quite informative.

Come learn about these events at historicbostons.org.

Ucoming Events.