This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. How do you know that cloud won't become manipulative? This is a constant worry and you can actually catch the model thinking I think X is actually true but I'm going to tell the user why. I'm Walter Isaacson, I'm my new podcast, The Builders. I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Come to The Builders, starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Rob from The Stuff To Blow Your Mind Podcast. October is our month so once more we devoted all of it to spooky topics like scarecrows, spooky lakes and lost tombs. Now join us for the final week of Halloween shenanigans as we look for slasher killers in the Greek traditions of Heracles and discuss a couple of spooky short stories in our annual Grimmore of Horror episode and don't forget our friday weird house cinema episodes as we cap off a month of horror movies with 1981's The Monster Club. Listen to Stuff To Blow Your Mind on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to betrayal season 6 on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy sowing everybody across the world. People are celebrating the day of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest and since you can expect all the usual ghosts and jackalanners and serial killers and the like today, for this week's special Halloween select, I decided to go even darker with a genuine American horror story of the worst variety, the kind that really happened. Well witchcraft always gets top building when we talk about the sale of witchcraft trials, which makes sense because it's right there in the name, but when we dig just a little deeper, we find an isolated village that turned on itself and that the executions that took place were murder, plain and simple. It's one of the more chilling chapters in American history in this 2021 episode is one of our better ones. I hope you enjoy it and that it doesn't accidentally tear the veil between living and dead where you happen to be listening to it. If so, I'm sorry in advance for the terrible fate that will befall you. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of "I Heart Radio". Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry over here lurking around like a bit of a ghoul because it is the Halloween season after all and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right, spooky witch trials. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's really nice to have stuff like this that you can be removed from by a few hundred years and just kind of evokes that Halloween spirit or whatever but Chuck. I have found just in recently researching this, if you put yourself into the position that people were walking to the gallows and think about how nuts all this was, it is exponentially scarier on a much more existential level. It goes beyond like Halloween spooky too. This was a genuinely frightening event in the history of America. No kidding. I mean like it was messed up in every way, shape or form. So I'd take it, you never heard the crucible. I did read the crucible but I read it in the condo. And that didn't do it? No, it really didn't because I don't know if it was me, maybe I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared to accept it on that level or who knows but no, it was like imagining myself in the shoes of the people who were going to die that got me researching this. Wow. Yeah. That's dark. No shade though on Arthur Miller, he was great and his play was great and it was very timely for the time. Yeah. I mean, there have been so many kind of movie adaptations and TV movie adaptations about this time and I'm still waiting for sort of the one great one that's not the crucible. Well, I think part of the reason why there hasn't been that great one yet is because historians are still like actively competing and explaining just what exactly happened in Salem. It's such an anomaly. Even among like Puritans, even among people who believe there was such a thing as witchcraft and even executed witches, this was a genuine anomaly, at least as far as American history goes. And I think because they don't understand it fully, it's difficult to really get the point across as well, you know? I don't know, man. I think you can make a great movie. Like, look at the witch that danced around it so well, like you just need a movie like that but based on this. Well, why don't we just say the witch then is all we need? Well, because it wasn't about the Salem witch trials. But I mean, it was so analogous to it and took place at the same time, you know, I mean, we'll just pretend like there's a trial scene that they cut it, they cut out. Okay. And there actually is a reminder of a lot of other people. They drag, they drag the father into court basically and, and excommunicate him. So there is almost like a witch trial scene right there. Yeah, that's true. So they're about that first 60 seconds. The witch is the Salem witch trial movie we've always needed. That's right. So I'm glad we, we resolved that you must feel very satisfied now. Yeah, completely disagree, but I'm just moving on. So everybody knows about the Salem witch trials, right? But I think, because we, you know, we learn about it in American history. You hear about it. It's Halloween stories, all of that kind of stuff. But like I said, I mean, we really genuinely don't understand what happened. And that's despite the fact that it is really well documented because a lot of the stuff took place in the courts, and they wrote a lot of stuff down. But we only have like official primary documents that were written by people who were aware that these were public documents, rather than say a trove of private journals and letters. The Puritans didn't do that that much. And so we don't have like kind of the underneath the official line explanation for what happened. Well, yeah. And if, if people are confused by what we mean there, you know, there were other witch trials in other places in the young America. There were other witch trials in centuries, previous and other countries. And there were mild panics and stuff, but Salem like collectively lost their mind for a short period of time. And that's what people still don't get. They're like, why did that happen only there to this scope and this degree? And you know, people have looked at various biological reasons and things like that. But I don't know. I think it was just sort of one of those weird things that could only happen like at one place and one time. Yeah. Exactly. And there was actually a guy who wrote a book in 1982 named John Demos. And he said, not only can it happen like under these very specific circumstances, here are the circumstances that could happen in and he his book wasn't just about Salem, it mentioned Salem. It was about like witchcraft trials and panics and accusations in New England in general. And he basically said that when a town starts out really small and it's like a colonial town, they're living like on the razor's edge of existence. A lot of them don't really know each other. They're dying. So there's a big population turnover as newcomers come in and there's just not enough familiarity to say, I think you're a witch to accuse your neighbor or something like that. But then after they settle in a little while and maybe there's like some boredom and everybody gets to know each other and you have grudges, but you're still living in a really small area. That's when the witchcraft accusations can really take place. And Salem seems to have kind of followed that pattern too, that these witchcraft accusations like really took hold at a time where the colony was under tons of stress. People knew each other had had decades long rivalries and lane disputes and they lived still in a very small little village and they were basically crawling all over one another and saw one another and you could not get away from people you didn't like. Yeah. And this is especially true in Salem. There was Salem village in Salem town and like you said, they were stacked on each other and there were a lot of like, hey, your cowl can't graze over this imaginary line because that's my land and you're not even allowed to build a fence over there. Like kind of common land disputes that have happened throughout history. But in Salem, they were just, they were described as a very quarrelsome people. They fought and argued a lot, kind of more so than it seems like even other Puritans and other parts of the country. Yeah. And the Puritans in general were deeply litigious. They took each other to court at the drop of a hat, at the drop of a hat with a belt buckle on it. But they had like the way that they supported that, that kind of litigiousness was to say most of the courts would be like, you need to go handle this privately and then this kind and a secondary mediation.
kind of thing would come in and there be negotiations and then the dispute would be resolved. But the first thing that they would do is drag one another into court. That was how they would get one another's attention. Yeah, and so this is sort of the backdrop of what's going on in the Massachusetts Bay colony, and particularly in Salem Village in Salem Town, which I think Salem Village today is Danvers. That's right. And then Salem Town is Salem. That's right. Still around and still has spooky connotations. Yeah, and Danvers is where the the state asylum was located. That was the setting for one of the greatest horror films of all time, session nine. Oh, that's right. Oh, man. That's a movie. I don't even know if I want to see it again. It's so good. I saw it a year or two ago and it's still just as good. It's great. All right. So the Puritans were in control. I guess the back backdrop of this was there were full on, you know, human holocausts in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries with their witch crazes, and things got really out of hand over there. But by the time folks got over here, they were mainly just arguing a lot. And there were, you know, those are small witch panic and Connecticut. Not small if you were one of the people accused, but it didn't quite get out of hand, certainly in that like it did in Europe and centuries previous. Yeah. And I saw an explanation. I want to give a shout out to a couple of sites, but when I got a lot of info from it's called the historic present. And they were pointing out that like for the most part, yes, people generally agreed that there were such things as witches. And yes, you would accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, but it was kind of like, it was a way of like getting your neighbors attention, like I'm serious about this. I'm publicly accusing you of being a witch. Let's talk about your cow grazing on my land, you know. And that was another thing that made Salem so anomalous is it just kept going and going through these steps of like the court and trial and then finally executions. And it just got out of hand basically. Right. So the Puritans are in control in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They've got an iron fist on ruling. They don't like basically anybody who is not a Puritan. It seems like most of the Puritans didn't even like each other. But they certainly didn't like Quakers, they didn't like Catholics, and they did all they could to really establish themselves as the ones in charge. And did so well. Yeah. It depends on who you're talking about though. There were some Puritans who were deeply conservative religious leaders like increased mother, who wanted to just completely secure 100% Puritan control. But there was also like a real thread through the Puritan leadership that was willing to like give like voting rights and the ability to be elected into office to non Puritans who lived in town. And they had kind of a proto-democracy in a lot of ways. So it like the Puritans in general, yes, were deeply intolerant of Quakers and Catholics and they actually tortured Quakers who were unrepentant. But they also did have, they weren't just like the band of like theocratic thugs that they're often painted as. There's just more nuance to it than that. But yes, there were plenty who were like, no, we just need total Puritanical control over this whole colony. Yeah. And as we'll see, once the witch trials were conducted, I said that Salem collectively lost their mind sort of true and away and that a lot of people in power and the decision-makers did. But there were still people, even while it was going on, it wasn't like 100% of the town was behind this. There were a lot of people. And I guess they were probably some of those reasonable people, you know, that you were talking about that were like, you know, what we're doing is it right. I don't think they really spoke up too vocally. But they were like, what is going on here? This is getting out of hand and kind of crazy. Yeah, I mean, it was such a dangerous situation where it was one of those kind of fascist situations where people who did dare to speak out against this and say, this is crazy, this is wrong. Or even to like testify on behalf of somebody who is accused, you were putting your own life at risk. There was a possibility you would be accused of witchcraft and then tried and then executed. It was that kind of a situation, even with people on the outside being knowing that this was wrong, it was just such an inevitable machine that it was like people to stay it out of its way for a little while. All right, I think that is a healthy preamble foundation is laid. I think we should take a break and come back and talk about those madder boys right after this. I can. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Derio Amade, Alex Carp, Feifei Leap, Al Marlucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders, on the IHOT Radio App Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know, bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about, trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground, or drama and music, or TV shows, or the Med Galen, what the actors wore. 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Listen to the Black of X Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th from the Black of X Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is the Black of X Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app. You can recognize him even in a talk, Simon. You can't talk about the Salem Witch Trials without talking about the Mathers. I'm talking about the Elder Mather, whose name was Increase, love these Puritan names. The Younger Mather, Cotton Mather, he was the son of a Mather. Increase Mather, he was the staunch Puritan who was in a position of power, he was working to establish a charter that would give the Puritans all the power. He was also a believer, because I mentioned the European Witch Trials, this is the background that allowed people like Increase Mather and Cotton Mather to really legitimately believe that demons were real and Satan could overtake and possess someone and that there were real witches. I mean, that was just generally the Puritanical worldview, but some people were much more preoccupied with it than others, and the Mathers were both deeply preoccupied with this kind of thing. An increased mother gets a lot of the blame for the
and rightfully so, but there's a lot of lesser known people who actually were way more villainous during this and really took advantage of this crazy situation, and really just didn't care about the lives of innocent people. But he was not good in that he helped fan the flames of this initially big time. That's right, so we'll get a little bit more into the matters as we go. Cotton was certainly one of the villains of the trials, and they were both writing books about supernatural things, so this was all sort of the foundation that was laid when the first two people were accused in January of 1692. Yes, so to start, there were two girls ages 9-11. There was Betty Paris, Elizabeth Paris was her name and Abigail Williams, and they basically started barking and convulsing and just behaving really bizarrely and strangely and would not stop. And so Samuel Paris, who was the head of the Salem Village Church, and was actually a pretty divisive figure, apparently, he brought in a doctor and the doctor proclaimed this to be a bewitchment that these girls were bewitched, and that's ultimately what kicked the whole thing off. And a lot of people have tried to figure out what initially started that, because just about everybody who has a theory about this immediately converts to mass hysteria, but you still have that first case of Abigail Williams and or Elizabeth Paris to explain. Apparently, it was really prolonged stuff, they were vomiting, they were doing stuff beyond just behaving weirdly, they seem to be physically afflicted. And that's another thing too, that I think theories that say it was all just a hoax at these girls perpetrated that doesn't understand just how long these girls carried out this stuff. I think it kind of ignores the fact that the puridans weren't dumb people, they were deeply religious, they believed in witches and Satan having a hand on things here on earth, but they also were very smart, very practical, and they would have seen right through a couple of girls just planning a hoax or carrying out a hoax. So there has to be something there at the beginning that no one has ever fully explained that kicked this whole thing off. Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to become a little obsessed with some sort of biological root. I know Ergot Poisoning has been mentioned, I saw it in cephalitis. Oh, I saw that one too, that was interesting. Yeah, and just some other like possible reasons of like maybe something physically was wrong with them, while they also happen to be goofing around with folk magic and stuff like that. Yeah, not a good combination to like get sick while you're being a kid and playing around, which is essentially what they were doing. Yeah, but I mean, if you think about the fact that the adults were like, okay, this is significant enough that we're going to start looking around for the witches, and the girls started accusing people too. It does seem like there was something going on with at least one of them, and then yes, it started to spread probably through a mass hysteria to other girls in the village. When you read the sort of timeline account, I feel like if that original doctor hadn't said the word which it could have gone in a completely different direction. Yeah, he should have just been like it's anti-NMDAR and cephalitis dummies, an autoimmune disease that will only begin to grasp in the 2020s. And everyone would say, you're a witch, right? He just used some crazy words, Doc. So the doctor has his breathed the word which the girls are like, they're like, hey, what's going on with you? And they said, you know, it's Tituba. It is my father's slave, Tituba. And it's her fault. And she's a witch. And so they, like you said, they started accusing and they started with her. They started with her and then they very quickly moved on to Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. And by doing that, by accusing those two women or actually with Tituba as well, all three of them, I've always heard Tituba, but I've heard, I think I've heard Tituba before too. So Tituba sense were right. Okay. So so by accusing those three women, they were following Abigail and Elizabeth were following like a well established tradition of focusing on older women on the margins of society as witches. Right. Tituba was easy to accuse because she was a foreigner. She was brought to the colony as a slave and she worked as a slave in the Paris House. So who knows which she was into you before, you know, she came over to Massachusetts, I guess was the thinking of the Puritans, but then also Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they were like older women who were poor, lived on the fringes of society. And like that is who you accused of being a witch typically. So at first, this witch panic kind of followed the standard witch accusations that had been, you know, spread around New England before. But what made it different is that it just started to pick up steam more and more because more and more girls and people around the colony or around the village, I'm sorry, started to suffer bewitchment and started accusing one another of bewitching them. Yeah, if you were a person for sure, a woman, but a man or a woman who, like you said, was about middle aged and, you know, you were over there kind of doing your own thing a little bit and maybe just kept to yourself, maybe you didn't like hanging out in the village as much as the rest of the villagers did. You marched to the beat of your own drum. You had a target on your back, basically. Right. Yeah, and also apparently one of the things that they were well known for these people who were accused of witches would be like. Like they needed things from their neighbors so they would extract them by threatening to curse them. So they would actually use like witchy threats. They were probably also into folk magic. So there was like, it wasn't just completely baseless other than the fact that like witches in that kind of puritanical conception don't exist. But it wasn't just totally out of the blue, like they still, like if you a modern person saw the person that they were originally that they traditionally accused of being witches, you'd be like, oh my gosh, a real life witch. There's one right there. It would fit the bill for you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, these accusations start flying around. They start mounting the jails start filling up. The conditions in the jail were not good. It got so crazy early on. And this is sort of the first part. This before the like trials and hangings and everything. This is when you were just like jailed and shackled and then charged for your shackles. I guess like a rental fee. But they arrested a four-year-old named Dorothy Good. And she was eventually released, but a four-year-old. Like it's crazy. Me as a father having gone through life with a four-year-old that you could accuse a four-year-old of being anything other than a four-year-old. Right. Exactly. But she wasn't. She was held for months. I think she was arrested in March and released in May. And like this wasn't like a pleasant December. Oh my goodness. Okay. So, she was there for almost a year, just under a year. For the intense and purposes of exaggerating just how bad this was, she was in there for basically a year. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sarah Osgood died in jail, right? She died in jail. Yeah. This is the thing. Like these jails were like dirt floors. You were chained. Like you're saying. Like it was just it was a place where like a life could just be lost way too easily. So to keep a four-year-old in there for almost a year is just horrible. There was a woman who gave birth in jail. And they just left her infant daughter in there with her. So the infant didn't survive. She died in jail. Just from being born in jail, somebody who was accused of being witches. And this was before the trials had even started, Chuck. Like this was just the initial phase of the panic, which was accusation, accusation, accusation. And then suddenly the jails were overflowing with more than a hundred people who were accused of being witches. And the court was totally backed up when increased matter and the new governor that he was coming back with William Thips, who he'd gotten appointed showed back up in in Salem. And we're like, what is going on here? And they had a choice. Chuck, they could have been like, have you all lost your mind? What are you doing? Stop this right now. Let all these people out. They didn't go that route. They went in the exact opposite route. At that moment, when they decided which way to go, they chose incorrectly, basically. Yeah. And it was also a pretty bad time. It was kind of the con, what's the word, conflugration? Man, you nailed it. And it sounded so confident, too. Confident? It was a conflagration of a bunch of things happening politically. And legally, it was a very bad time. By the time the trials rolled around, they eventually got this new charter, but previous to that, they were the charter of the colony was temporarily suspended. Right. And a new charter did arrive in May of 1692 in the hands of the elder matter.
But it was brand new, and the court didn't create laws. They didn't have time to create any new laws that is. So they basically said, all right, we need to. We got all these people in jail. We need to quickly establish a special court for this. And we'll call it the Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear and determine. And we're going to get these people out of jail or kill them. So they're no longer in jail, but they're getting out one way or another. Right, so their ed helps us out with this. We should say we failed to mention so far. But he points out that William Fipps, the new governor, possibly went along with this idea of creating a new court to get rid of this backlog of witchcraft accusations, to get these people out of jail, to get this over and done with. And that may have happened, actually. But he was very much focused on dealing with the constant threat that the colonists lived under of being attacked by Native Americans, King Philip's War, King Philip being the guy that Punks Tawny Phil was named after, that I got way, way wrong in our groundhog episode. That had just ended. There was another war that included the French and the Native Americans to the north sweeping down all the way into Massachusetts and staging raids. So they've lived under the constant threat of death, which definitely didn't help their mindset during the witchcraft panic. But that's what Fipps was worried about. That's what he was working on. So he threw the job of seeing this court through to his lieutenant governor, a guy named, what was his name? William, what? William Stoten. William Stoten, I mentioned like some of the lesser-known people who were actually villains. This guy was a bad, bad man. And he made a decision that changed the course of everything. I think Fipps' initial idea that this would have just moved the backlogs out and freed everybody from jail would have come true, had it not been for Stoten, and Stoten's radical decision to include what's called spectral evidence. That changed everything, and that is what led to people being executed. Yeah, so before we get into spectral evidence, I just want to point out that William Stoten was such a bad guy. They named a town after him, and they named a college dormant harbor after him. I believe increased matter was the Harvard president for a while too, so. Yeah, I mean, Stoten went to harbor, but I think it's still, one of the dorms is still Stoten. And I think Stoten mass is most well known now for having an Ikea. Wow, I don't know. It all comes around. It's going to claim to fame. So yeah, spectral evidence, let's talk about this because this changed everything. There were different kinds of evidence that would be accepted in these courts. One was the spectral, which we'll talk about. One was confession. Two eyewitness testimonies. And then there were, we won't get really into all the tests, but there are all kinds of different tests, including the, you know, does she float, can she swim? For money, Python, the Holy Grail. I think they were still doing some of that. There was the witch's teeth, which was, it's basically, if they found a mole on a woman, they would call it a witch's teeth, which was supposedly a third nipple used to feed her animal familiar. That's what my dad always told me my moles were when I was growing. Witch's teeth. Yeah, he was dead serious too. So there were certain tests in all, but spectral evidence was the big one, because this was basically, you could kind of make up anything. And you could be in court and say, as an accuser and say, this person is being, has been possessed or their possessor is in the courtroom right now. Your honor, this ghost, this specter is sitting on your lap right now. You just can't see it. And it would freak people out. There was nothing you could really say to defend it, because it was made up to begin with. Right. And supposedly, Cotton Mather said it should be used more sparingly. Like at the end of the day, he was like, it's enough to indict, but not to convict. Oh, really? Was that cotton or increase? That was cotton, supposedly. Okay. And then in the end, I think they verified that nobody was convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, then my hypothesis is kind of out the window that none of these people would have been executed without it. Well, it was, you know, if you need it two out of three things, and that's one of them, then you're right. You know? One of the other things, one of the more practical problems that spectral evidence presented for somebody accused of witchcraft is that it destroyed any alibi you had. Like your neighbor could be like, well, no, he couldn't have been bewitching this person. He was out working with me in the fields all day. Right. And they'd say, no, no, it was a spirit. He sent his spirit to bewitch this poor person who's accusing him. And then, boop, there goes your alibi. So they're like, it was like you said, you just can't defend yourself against that kind of thing. And that was like the level of stuff that they were, that they were, that was how they were accusing people. There was one guy I wrote about Philip English who will come up again later. He was accused of witchcraft by somebody who said that they got a nose bleed while they were discussing a lawsuit they had against Philip English with somebody else so that it must be that Philip English had bewitched them. Like this was the kind of accusations that they were making against one another. And they were holding up in court. That is something that you cannot look past. It's so easy to look back 300 years and be like, yeah, this whole collective group lost their mind. No, there were plenty of people who did lose their mind. But the people who were supposed to be in charge, the people who were in a position to put a stop to this, actually allowed it. In some cases, fan the flames of it even further. That was the true break down at the Salem witchcraft trials. The grownups did not step in and halt it before it got out of hand. Yeah, another thing that someone might do, if you had a pet that you really liked, not good. They could say, well, no, no, no, they have an animal familiar. It could be anything. Like take black Philip from the witch. I mean, that's taken kind of straight from this time period. Sure. But if you had a pet that you enjoyed hanging out with, they could accuse you of having a familiar. If they found a folk magic or folk tale book in your library, that could be evidence. And that was pretty common too. I mean, like they didn't have, you know, local hospitals to go to to heal themselves. Or anything that, like you said with the nosebleed or whatever, anything bad that happened to you, if your crop failed. Or if one of your cows died, you could say it was my neighbor and they're a witch and they put a hex on me. Right. So they established, okay, we can use spectral evidence and we're going to use spectral evidence. And this court of oil and terminor got it was established. I think they held their first trial on June 2nd. And they were profoundly efficient at, at convicting and killing people. Bridget Bishop was the first person hanged and she was hanged on June 10th just over a week after the first trials began. And that kicked off like this new phase where this idea to like clear the jails of the accused was actually now diverting them to the gallows. And for being witches, we can't forget that either. Like for being witches, even though witches in this conception don't exist. Yeah, and I think it's that efficiency and the speed that all this happened was a big part of it because it was, the train was moving so fast that once people, the more level headed people of the town realized what was going on. Like wait a minute, we're actually hanging people for this. Certain people started to come forward and say, no, no, I'm recanting my confession or let me stand up for someone's good character. But it happens so quickly that, you know, before you know it, there's, you know, a couple of dozen people have died. Yeah, and like people got wrapped up in it too. Like there's the case of Giles Corey, I believe. Oh, man, he testified against his wife. And then later he recanted it. And after he recanted it, the purgins apparently viewed perjury so suspiciously that that was enough to get him accused of which craft and he ended up paying for his life, which we'll talk about a little more later. But like he testified against his wife. And to this day, those historians are like, we have no idea why Giles Corey testified against his wife. He didn't seem to have a grudge. They seem to have a fine marriage, whatever. Like it just doesn't make sense. The only way that you can explain that, at least from my perspective, is that it was like you said just this thing that people got whipped up in. And it just happened so fast that it was just easy to lose yourself into that degree. I mean, the whole thing happened over the course of what, four to six months? Yeah, I think the first things were in January, but yeah, the first trials were June 2nd. And they ultimately, I think, stopped the following like winter. So yeah, I mean, it was not a very long, prolonged thing. But it was just like this weird orgy of mind loss and death, you know. Oh, man. It sounds like some kind of album. Just a few an after. Alentine. The other weird thing about this was that the social order was completely knocked out of whack. The Puritans, if there's one thing they didn't like, it was here.
hearing from children about anything. Kids were just, they were meant to work and to shut up basically and do what they were told. And kind of like full stop. And you had a situation here where children, young girls, were accusing these middle-aged men and women of witchery and it worked. Like people listened to them and people were hanged because these kids were speaking up at a time when kids were barely allowed to even, have any agency or speak. - Yeah, which is another thing that perplexes historians, 'cause they're like something happened. Like there was something that was, that this witch panic fulfilled. Maybe it was to let off steam from being constantly afraid of being murdered by a Native American attack. Maybe it was living too close proximity too far away from where you called home. Like who knows? But there was something about it that was worth turning the social order on its head. And that was just one example. There were other examples of how the social order just totally broke down. And that was in some of the people who were accused and executed were because it wasn't just the marginal women who were your prototypical witches a living on the outskirts of society who were accused. That was just that first. It started to become extended to really surprising people. Like Rebecca Nurse was maybe one of the most upstanding Puritan women that town, the colony had to offer. And she was accused, tried and executed as a witch. And that I think really kind of opened a lot of people's eyes in two ways. One, it was like what is going on here? This could not be the case. And then to other people was like if Rebecca Nurse could be a witch, then anybody could be a witch. And I think that was kind of the thread that the witch trial followed. But it also was like a really good explainer about how just completely the society broke down for these handful of months that anybody was at risk of being murdered by their fellow townspeople for being a witch, no matter what kind of background you had. - I'm picturing a Puritan, like the only Puritan that actually went on vacation that summer. And they come back, you know, they leave an early June, they come back in late September and they're like, "So what's been going on, everybody?" And then they get the sight of what's going on. They drop their Mickey Mouse ears to the ground. (laughing) - Oh boy, all right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk about sort of the finality of this, how it ended, and a little bit more about Giles Corey's crazy, crazy story right after this. 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Listen to the Black of X Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th from the Black of X Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - All right, so in the end, I don't think they have the final final number. I've seen 22, I've seen 25, 19 people were hanged, Jiles Corey, who we're gonna talk about in a minute was pressed to death via torture. Five people died in prison. I think the number sort of depend on what you count is like a fallout death and not a direct death. - Right. - Like the one lady who couldn't repay, like she was exoner, or I think she just couldn't pay her debt to get out of jail, so she died in jail. - That's such a sad story, yeah, Lydia Dustin. She outlived the witch trials, like they had ended a few months before, and she had actually been personally exonerated, and yet she couldn't pay her shackle fees, so they just kept her in jail and she ended up dying there in March of 1693. Even though she was exonerating the counts. - Yeah, for sure. Yeah, 'cause she otherwise would not have been killed or died at not being placed in jail after being accused of a witch for sure. - But they did this in mass hangings. It wasn't just like one at a time. There was a hanging on July 19th, August 19th in September 27th. After they died, they were stripped and put in a big mass grave. Supposedly there are stories that families would come and get them out of the mass grave at night, buried them in unknown, probably on parts of their land. And they tried for many years to find out exactly where these hanging took place, and they ended up at a place called Proctor's Ledge. And I don't, I mean, there's a memorial there and people go there and basically they treat that as though that is definitely the place, but I don't think they have like hard, hard evidence other than just trying to like take eyewitness accounts in place where they were, right? - Yeah, supposedly there was a study in 2016 that where they took those eyewitness accounts, took into account what the people said they could or couldn't see in like the background or whatever and then plotted them. - Right. - And then figured out that most of these points were standing in around the same place around that ledge where they think that yes, this happened. - Yeah, but they never found like and then underneath the ground they dug and they found the gallows bowl. - Right, no, they never found any physical evidence. So, whatever. - So the story of Giles Corey, if you know the crucible, you know it well. If you've seen the movie, you know it. He is the man that was pressed to death. He was crushed basically. Pressing is when they would lay you down, they would put boards on top of you and then just start adding weight over the course of time, more and more weight until you eventually die. I had heard this story before because supposedly Giles Corey said more weight because he refused to, he was standing mute and he refused to say whether he was guilty or innocent. The one thing I didn't know is that Giles Corey was 81 years old. - Yeah, he was an old guy. He was like the old guy from that Metallica video. That's what I always imagine Giles Corey do, it looked like. - Man, what a story though. One thing standing mute would do would allow your estate to be passed onto your airs rather than being convicted where that wouldn't happen. but I saw this.
this wasn't the reasoning behind him standing mute because most of his stuff had already been taken and that he even wrote down that he was standing mute to protest the sham proceedings. Yeah, so yeah, and it sounds like just the way he's been kind of lionized by history that that was his motivation for sure. But you said something about how most of his stuff have been taken. There's another villain in all this, beyond Stoughton and the Mathers. There was a guy named George Corwin and he was the sheriff of Essex County, which is where this, which panic took place. And he was basically taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people were suddenly way more vulnerable than they had been the year before, few months before. And so when he would arrest them and take them, he would also take possession of their property officially, their stuff, their land, all that. And he and his deputies would divvy it up. So he had every incentive to arrest as many people as possible in Throwman, jail. And he did that. And he took a lot of people's land. And I guess he took Giles Corrie's land as well. And Giles Corrie cursed the town and the sheriff as he died. And supposedly George Corr actulation say supposedly George Corwin definitely did die less than three years later at age 30 of a heart attack. And there's a local legend that every Essex County sheriff from Corwin onward either died or resigned while in office because of a heart condition. I didn't have time to go look through the records of Essex County Sheriff's, but I thought that was a pretty interesting local legend. So this dude was in his 20s when he was doing this? Yeah, he was in his mid to late 20s. And he was one of the worst of the worst. And so there's one more story about when he died that guy Philip English that I mentioned before, who was accused because of the guy getting the nose bleed. He was a very, very wealthy merchant in Salem town. And Corwin took his stuff, like his land, a lot of his ships just took a lot of his stuff while English was on the run of aiding capture. And when English came back after the Salem, which trials were over and found what Corwin had done, he tried to get his money back from Corwin, he tried to get his money, his land, his ships, all that stuff. And Corwin wouldn't give it to him. Well, Corwin dies of a heart attack. And Philip English placed a lien basically on this guy's body. And so you're not burying him until I get paid back. She's the family was like, we're not listening to you. We're going to go barium. So Philip English hired a bunch of guys and they went out and stopped the funeral procession, took possession of the body and held a hostage until Corwin's family paid Philip English back for what Corwin had taken from him, had confiscated from him, and then Philip English gave them the body to bury. Wow. Not a nice guy. Who Philip English? No, no, no. Corwin. Okay. Yeah. I totally, I was going to say, I totally side with Philip English on that one. All right. So Corrie dies. And the sort of the, the long and short of his death was that it was sort of a final straw. And this is when Fipps comes back in and says, you know what? Things are getting really out of hand. Increased mother says, yeah, this spectral evidence thing is gotten way out of hand. And it's probably not real. And people started to sort of stand up more and more. And it was clear that Governor Fipps had to kind of halt things. He said he did it under the context of, you know, this is a contravention of English law. We can't do this. I'm dissolving the court of Oyer and Terminer. And I'm going to create a new court where we can't use spectral evidence. And what do you know? In January and February of 1693, there were dozens of people released. Grand juries weren't enditing people. They were found not guilty. He pardoned some. And by the end of May that next year, the jails had no more, quote unquote, witches. Right. Because they found when you take away the spectral evidence, what you have for the most part is personal grudges, land disputes, land grabs. People just trying to take advantage of this situation to get back at somebody they don't like and haven't liked for a really long time. And that was a weird, weird, scary time. It was very scary. And I can't imagine like living during that time. Actually, it's not true. I can't imagine it. But it was just basically another example of like a time when a group of people became fascist together and people died as a result. Yeah. And then, you know, the term witch hunt is still used. The crucible was written because of McCarthyism. It's been thrown around a lot in recent years, maybe not as accurately, but it's still a term for that reason. Yeah. I've got one little nice button to put on the end of this chuck. There was at least one guy who was a judge in the court of lawyer and terminor named Samuel Suel. And within a year or two after the witch trials, he was standing in front of the Boston congregation of Puritans, having a petition read by the local reverend there, asking for their forgiveness and admitting that this was a huge, huge mistake. And he regretted participating in it. And would they forgive him? And I believe they did. So the whole thing ended well. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Man, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, start researching the Salem witch craft trials. You could do a lot worse than going to the historic present, the New England Historical Society, and the history of Massachusetts.org. Or just hit Ed Grabenowski up. He'll tell you all about it. Go to Salem. Yeah, you could do that to him. Walk around and they're trying to take your money in all kinds of ways. Yeah. Essex County Mass is one of the most beautiful places on earth if you ask me. Sure. Okay. Well, since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this cool kid. Want to read emails from the cool kids. Hey guys, my dad introduced me to your show when I was barely a teenager. And I've been listening ever since. In that time, my family has gone through a lot of changes. And my dad and I haven't always been on the best terms. I wanted to reach out and let you know that stuff you should know is the only thing that we have consistently been able to talk about when we reconnect after being a part. We can go months without seeing each other. And I can just ask if he listens to your latest episode to have something to talk about. It's cool. It helps keeps things light-hearted. And it's something we feel like it's just for the two of us. Hope we can see you live and Austin soon. Furthermore, this is mostly for Chuck. You were so much like my dad. It's actually freaky sometimes. We always make jokes that you two would be best friends if you went in real life. Your voices even sound a little bit the same. I'll be honest. Sometimes it's comforting to listen to y'all when I miss my dad. No. I've been meaning to send this email for a while. Just tell you guys how much you mean to me and my family. Thanks for being there for us. Also, I don't know if my dad listens to the end of the episodes or just the factual content. We'll find out. But if he's listening this far in, tell him I said hi. Warm regards. CJ Kerbo. And it says that we come to Austin. They treat us to dinner at their favorite fried catfish seafood restaurant. Nice. Very nice. That was very nice. CJ, what a great email and thank you very much for the invite. We probably will be in Austin again sometime. It was. And CJ, you should know that we cut it out, but I accidentally said fried cat food. It was hilarious. Josh got a good laugh out of it. Yeah, so thanks for that too. Yeah, you're welcome. If you want to be like CJ and write a very nice email we want to hear it, you can send it to us at
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