Just the facts, ma'am.

Did you use at any time to ride upon a stick or pull?

Yes.

How high?

Sometimes above the trees.

Do not you anoint yourselves before you fly?

No, but the devil carried us upon hand pulls.

Tell us all the truth.

What kind of worship did you do?

The Devil.

He bid me pray to him and serve him, and he said he was a God and Lord to me.

What did he promise to give you?

He said I would want nothing in this world and that I would obtain glory with him.

Why would they hurt the village people?

The devil would set up his Kingdom there and we should have happy days and it would then be better times for me if I obey him.

Did you hear the 77 witches names called over?

Yes, the devil called them.

What did he say to them?

He told them obey him and do his commands and it would be better for them and they should obtain crowns in hell.

And Goody Carrier told me the devil said to her she should be a queen in hell.

Who was to be king?

The minister.

Kind of man is Mr.

Burroughs.

A Pretty Little man, and he has come to us sometimes in his spirit, in the shape of a cat, and I think sometimes in his proper shape.

Do you hear the devil hurts in the shape of any person without their consent?

No.

Welcome to the Thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

And I'm Sarah Jack.

The interrogation we just re enacted was taken from the record of the July 21st, 1692 examinations of Mary Lacey Junior, Mary Lacey Senior Ann Foster, Richard Carrier and Andrew Carrier and was a pivotal moment which we'll have more about later in the episode.

We think of the witch hunt as a runaway train fueled by hysteria, but there were a multitude of individual actors that had free will to change the course of the events.

We'll be talking about pivotal moments in the witch trials, when a person or group could have made a different decision and LED the affair to a more peaceful conclusion.

We'll also cover sometimes when people did succeed in bringing down the temperature in the room.

Had these choices not been made, the runaway train may have gone off the rails.

So of course, we're talking about the Salem witch trials, which we think of as beginning in January 1692 with the afflictions of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris.

And it lasted until May 1693, when the final court proceedings were held and the final prisoners were released from jail.

There are a lot of these points of escalations.

We're going to highlight some of our favourites.

One early turning point was the arrests of Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good, which took place between March 21st and March 24th.

Martha was the first church member to be accused of witchcraft.

She was a member of the Salem Village Church.

Then a few days later on March 24th, my 9th great grandmother, Rebecca Nurse was arrested.

Rebecca was the first member of the Salem Town Church to be arrested.

And the same day that Rebecca was arrested, Dorothy Goode was jailed.

She was a four year old girl child, the daughter of Sarah Goode.

And all this tells us that they weren't looking for just the usual suspects anymore.

If church members and little baby children not even old enough for today kindergarten are getting accused of being witches that hurt people, anybody is open to accusation.

The next turn of events that was critical in escalating what was happening was in April.

On April 19th, Abigail Hobbes gave a confession.

GAIL, who's Sarah's favorite confessor.

She is.

Her stories are grand.

Abigail was the wild child of Topsfield, had a very interesting relationship with her stepmother and had a very interesting relationship with the devil, which she confessed to on April 19th.

And in her subsequent questioning of her in jail, she elaborated.

But being from Topsfield, that expanded the search radius for which is beyond Salem Village.

So that was a big piece of it.

And this was the first confession by anyone since Tituba had confessed on March 1st.

There's also no signs of coercion on this one.

It appears to be a voluntary confession.

Her confession was a confession of cominitine with the devil.

It was a diabolical confession.

Yeah.

And Abigail and her stepmother, Deliverance Hobbes, they filled in key details about the diabolic pact and the witch's Sabbath, how those things worked.

Yeah.

And Abigail said that she gave the devil her permission to afflict people.

So the devil went out in her specter, her likeness, but only because she said that he could.

And this was a big moment because this said that the witches had to willingly allow the devil to use their form, that the devil couldn't use anybody's shape without their permission.

In other words, he couldn't appear as an innocent person.

So therefore, the spectres that were being seen by the afflicted people were really the spectres of witches who had given the devil their permission.

So this added some cred to spectral evidence, which the ministers and others were really trying to decide.

I mean, in other witch trials even they were questioning whether a spectral form was actually the person or if it was the devil impersonating them.

A very big moment in the Salem witch Trials happened May 27th.

This was what actually led to the trial phase happening because for months the jails had been filling with witchcraft suspects.

But Governor William Phipps, the brand new governor for the colony, creates a special court called the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which means to hear and determine, and he appoints 9 judges to it, and they're going to start in June.

Another thing about the witch trials that I think we sometimes forget is that ministers and other men were doing a lot of deliberation around the scene world and the unseen world.

I wish they would not have had such a difficult time coming to the conclusions that they needed to come to.

But one of the significant ones is the return of the ministers on June 15th.

In the return, the ministers warned the justices about relying upon spectral evidence.

They urged the justices to avoid bulk tests for witchcraft and suggested that the justices follow the guidelines set forth in books by English Puritans such as Perkins and Renard.

The ministers also recommended that the justices hold their proceedings in calm environments, caution them against using spectral visions as proof of guilt because demons could assume the image of the innocent people.

The return also closed with a recommendation for the speedy and vigorous prosecution of the witches.

So contradicts itself basically.

First they're urging caution throughout the report, but then at the end they're saying be speedy and vigorous.

So the judges, they take this return and they say, well we like spectral evidence, we like doing folk tests and.

The judges continued to do those tests and to accept spectral evidence in mid-july.

There's another grand turning point in this.

One is really what expands the amount of people who are descendants of those who experienced the Salem witch Charles because things expanded to the community of Andover.

Yeah, Andover, including what is today the separate community of North Andover had more witchcraft accusations than any other community, including Salem.

Another catalyst in the Andover phase was the sickness of Elizabeth Phelps Ballard.

One big element of this Elizabeth Phelps Ballard sickness is that her husband at some point called down to Salem Village and got some of the afflicted girls to come up and examine his wife and determine who was bewitching her.

And so they came up, they saw spectres, they made accusations.

July 19th, Joseph Ballard complained against Mary Lacey senior and her daughter Mary Lacey Junior.

This was a renewal of arrest because there'd actually been 6 quiet weeks.

No warrants have been issued since June 6th.

And here we are, July 19th, and we've got two people getting arrested.

Then also in Andover on July 21st and Foster confessed the main aim of the witches was to replace Christ's Kingdom with Satan's Kingdom.

So here is a conspiracy unfolding.

And this conspiracy gets elaborated on.

The piece that we read at the beginning was from the examination of Mary Lacey Junior.

During this big say, how did just a group of suspects come in?

It was Mary, her mother, Andrew Carrier, and Richard Carrier being examined and they elaborated on A Celestial Game of Thrones.

They said that Martha Carrier and George Burroughs were the Queen and King in hell, and they said that the devil did not hurt in people's shapes without their consent.

Just confirming what Abigail Hobbs had said earlier and making it seem like spectral evidence was real.

Yeah, sadly, the sick Elizabeth Ballard did pass away on July 27th.

Her death just reinforced people's belief that she had been bewitched.

Now she's murdered by the witches, so that definitely turns up the heat in Andover.

Let's talk about those ministers again.

They kicked things up again.

Yeah, this time they actually did a solid increase, Mather.

It took him apparently months of deliberation and writing to come to the conclusions that he did about spectral evidence and so forth.

This important publication called Cases of Conscience by Increase Mather came out on October 3rd and a report of this publication was read to the Cambridge Assembly of Ministers at their monthly meeting at Harvard College.

So they were all wanting to know what does Increase have to say about all of this?

And their conclusions were read to congregations that week.

This work, Cases of Conscience, exemplified the shift in opinions about the trials that had happened over the summer.

As we get into the fall, there starts to be some people coming out against what's going on, the way things are being handled.

Increase suggested the afflicted persons may actually be possessed.

And then on spectral evidence increase, writes the Devil, may by divine permission appear in the shape of innocent and pious persons.

Finally, on October 29th, Governor Phipps shuts down the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Yeah.

One of the assistants, James Russell, asked Governor Sir William Phipps directly if the Court of Oyer and Terminer should stand or fall, and Phipps replied it must fall.

So we had mentioned earlier the legislature established new courts in November.

That happened November 25th, and the witchcraft cases that remained were transferred to the new Superior Court of Judicature, which held sessions in 1693 in Salem, Charlestown, Boston and Ipswich.

The last case was heard May 11th, 1693, and as soon as everyone had paid their jail fees, the jails were cleared out of these accused witches and the Salem witch trials.

We're basically over.

And you just wonder if one thing had happened differently in these turning points that we talked about, what would have happened?

How could things have been different?

How good lives have been saved?

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