A lot of people, when they think witch trials, they instantly think Salem.

But not all witch trials were the Salem witch trials.

There were witch trials for a very long time, and all of these witch trials that happened in Europe and America especially influence the Salem witch trials.

And that's how we got what we got, the beliefs that were shared in the accusations of what which is dead and who they were.

Those came from European and other American, especially New England witch trials because there were writings about those and they were well read and also spread through word of mouth.

Welcome to the thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

I'm Sarah Jack.

To really understand the Salem witch trials, you must know that they did not happen in a bubble.

That's right, there are many other witch trials around the world in history that influenced what happened in Salem.

We're going to focus today on British North America.

Many European, particularly English, writings were used by the justices of the Salem court and the ministers who are advising them when they were making their rulings and deciding what kind of evidences they were going to accept against the accused witches.

Yeah, and tales of European witchcraft influence the very accounts that the accusers and confessors claimed had happened.

Witch trials had actually been happening in New England since 1647.

Now keep in mind that Salem happens in 1692, so there were people being accused and tried for witchcraft in the area 45 years before Salem even happened.

In fact, allegations had been made since at least 1638 in New England when John Winthrop wrote that Jane Hawkins, an associate of Anne Hutchinson.

Different Hutchinson family, She's not your Hutchinson was believed by many to be a witch, but she didn't go to court.

She didn't go to court for that.

In this time before Salem, there's a name that you should know and her name is Alice Young.

She was from Windsor, CT and she was hanged in Hartford on May 26th, 1647.

She was the first woman hanged by the colonies.

And that's by any of the British North American colonies.

She's the very first to be hanged.

And then the following summer, Massachusetts decides to get in on the ACT and Margaret Jones of Charlestown is hanged June 15th, 1648 in Boston.

But after Margaret, it goes back over to Connecticut, where 34 people were indicted, some more than once, for witchcraft crimes.

In fact, in Connecticut, beginning in 1647, going on until 1697, there were 14 people that were convicted of witchcraft.

Three of them either were reprieved or their conviction was overturned, while the other 11, sadly beginning with Alice Young, were hanged.

Have you heard of the Hartford Witch Panic 1662 to 1663?

There were 14 people accused there.

Four of them were actually convicted and hanged.

In fact, the final hangings for witchcraft in the Connecticut colony occurred January 25th, 1663.

That's ending the hangings 29 years before the Salem witch trials started.

The witch trials that were happening in Connecticut and throughout the American colonies other than Salem were generally small affairs.

Other than the Hartford Witch panic, we're talking about 1-2, maybe three people getting arrested at the same time in a witch hunt and a couple going to trial and maybe generally one person being convicted.

Sadly, Margaret Jones wasn't the only woman that was executed by Massachusetts before Salem.

There were more witch trials and convictions that occurred.

31 individuals were indicted for witchcraft between 1648 and 1691, and those 31 indictments resulted in eight convictions.

And that was over 50 years.

That wasn't over 50 minutes like it would seems happens in the Salem where there was way more than 31 indictments.

Yeah.

Do you think about 1648 to 169131 indictments?

There's not even 1 every year, so it was sparse, sporadic, localized individual accusations going up against people in that period.

Yeah, and the 8 convicted of Boston are still awaiting their exonerations.

If you would like to sign the petition with us to promote having the General Court exonerate those 8, you can do that at change.org/witchtrials.

Those 8 convictions did lead to five executions.

Two women received lighter sentences and one man was convicted.

But his conviction was reversed and he ended up escaping to Rhode Island to get away from the accusations.

That was Hugh Parsons.

And if you would be interested in seen an exhibit about his life and his accusations, and if you're in New England this fall before I think it's November 3rd, you can go to the Springfield Museums in Springfield, MA.

It's a really excellent exhibit on his life.

And another thing about the executions in Massachusetts, they occurred in Boston.

All the witch trials before Salem occurred in Boston.

That was where any felony, any capital offense was tried by the highest court in the land rather than by some local court, and that court was reluctant to convict.

Indeed, between 1656 and 1688, there were no executions at all.

And finally, a Goody Glover was accused in 1688 because the Goodwin children were afflicted, they were acting like they were bewitched and they were modeling European afflicted people behaviors that were shared in these stories that were so popular in New England among the ministers and the people.

Cotton Mather wrote about the Goodwin children and their afflictions and his disgust for Goody Glover.

That witch trial was very unlike the Salem witch trials because this woman English was not her first language.

She was Irish Catholic.

Yeah, and the behaviors of the children, because Cotton Mather wrote about this.

He published his book Memorable Provinces in 1689, and then he published a second edition in 1691, just the year before Salem.

So the stories fresh in everybody's minds and imaginations, including the children who become afflicted in Salem Village in January 1692.

Their behavior really mimics the behavior of the Goodwin children.

Flying around rooms, flapping their wings, making animal sounds, being repulsed at the idea of doing work or learning any good things but being rambunctious.

I guess you could say Goody Cole is well known in New Hampshire for her witchcraft trials.

That's right.

I said trials.

She's tried multiple times in Massachusetts because New Hampshire is under the control of Massachusetts for a large chunk of the 17th century.

And so she keeps having to go down to Boston for trial and stay in jails in Boston.

And she lives in Hampton, NH, where today she's memorialized.

A couple other notable witch trials elsewhere in the American colonies are what happened in Virginia.

The very first accusation was in 1626.

That was Joan Wright.

And that's a great story.

It's a sad story, but it's interesting.

Wow, that's 66 years before the Salem Witch Trials.

Somebody down in Virginia as being accused of witchcraft.

There was a indentured servant who was convicted there.

His name was William Harding and he was whipped and banished in 1656.

And another very well known woman who's like the Goody Cole of Virginia Grace Sherwood, the so-called witch of Pungo, she was tried by the water ordeal in 17 O 6.

So this is going on after Salem.

They're putting her in a body of water to see whether she floats through sinks.

And if she floats, that means the water's rejecting her.

And so she's a witch.

And guess what?

She floated.

But unfortunately there was a fire in the courthouse later on.

And if there was a trial, the records of it were destroyed in this fire.

And we're not going to leave Maryland out today.

They have not exonerated.

They're convicted, but they do have two.

And one man was named John Common.

He was also an indentured servant, convicted, not hanged.

But there was a woman, her name was Rebecca Fowler, and she was convicted and hanged in 1685 in Maryland.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is how the Salem witch hunts didn't just affect Salem.

We call it the Salem Witch hunt in the Salem Witch trials because the trials happened in the townhouse in Salem.

That's where they actually physically took place.

But many of the 9 judges on the court of Warrior and Terminer were from Boston, and the rest worked in Boston a lot of the time because they were elected legislators as well as justices.

Beyond that, people were accused of witchcraft in 25 different communities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine during the Salem Witch trials.

So there was a really wide geographical distribution of all of these, and in fact, the town of Andover had more accusations than Salem itself.

Definitely not a bubble, it sounds more like a Dome.

It is now you're reminding me of Stephen King Under the Dome and they're in there just accusing each other of witchcraft.

Then another effect that Salem had.

Actually, the Salem Witch trials were so popular that the producers decided to launch a spin off on the Connecticut Channel.

And so in Connecticut, a girl named Catherine Branch who was a maid in another family other than her own, she started getting afflicted in the summer of 1692 in just the ways that the girls in Salem Village and surrounding communities were being afflicted.

She starts seeing spectral visions and seeing people coming to her that she knows, but now she knows them as witches and they're supposedly hurting her.

So this one resulted in several accusations but only two trials and 1 conviction, and that one conviction was actually overturned.

So other than a woman spinning about a year in jail, which is pretty bad, especially those jails at the time, less damage done in Connecticut thankfully than what could have been done based on potentially another Salem starting there.

All of these years previous, prior to 1692, are full of stories of families and neighbors and women and men and children affected by witch trials long before Salem happened.

That's a lot to go back and look at and to consider and to understand the context of witch hunting in colonial New England.

We have another podcast, The Thing About Witch Hunts, which conveniently you can go to to learn more history about the witch house that we've touched on today and more in America, as well as the witch hunt in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

We also have a bookshop online and it's full of witch trials stories.

There's a book that we have authored by Dick Ross.

We've interviewed on our other podcasts called Before Salem.

That's one of the only recent coverages of the Connecticut witch trials.

Our bookshop is full of great books to help you get a fuller understanding of the context of witch trials.

O do some more reading and help support our projects at endwitchhuntsorg by shopping.