The DARK Truth Behind the Salem Witch Trials

In 1986, a man named Scott Maclum was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined, the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. On Carta Roy, the host of Murder True Crime Stories, if you listen to true crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. Each episode takes a deep dive into history's most notorious murders, looking beyond the crime scene to focus on the people and communities impacted the most. Their case is solved or unsolved. The goal is simple, to understand why these stories still matter. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Follow Murder True Crime Stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Every town has a dark side. They'll tell you Salem was about witches, but it wasn't, at least not technically. It wasn't about people communing with the devil and casting spells, but really, it was about all of us. And what happens when fear is spread and rumors are made official without any solid evidence. And tonight, we're stripping down the legend of Salem, and showing why this place wasn't unique. It was actually a template, and we keep replaying over and over and over again. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning into another episode of Every Town. But today, we're checking out the truth behind the trials, so let's head on over to Salem together and dig into what really went down. This whole thing began in the winter of 1692, and Salem Village, Massachusetts, when a nine-year-old girl named Betty Paris suddenly fell ill. Many miss wasn't the common cold or fever, but Betty started to come apart. It starts with a fever, but then from there, it progresses into very strange forms. They become catatonic. They start hiding under furniture. They start barking like dogs, and they feel like they're being pinched or cracked all over their bodies, even though there's no visible marks that could be seen. Before they can figure out what's wrong with her, her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams follows in the exact same pattern. Soon after, there are more girls, one after another. Anne Putnam, Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Wilcott. They clutch at the air and flinch from things no one else can see, yelping about pins and pinches, and hands that aren't there. The village doctor, William Griggs, has no remedy, and worse, no medical reason for these issues to be happening. And so, in the absence of an answer, he offers the one the village already fears, the witchman. Anne, once that were at lands, it spreads, and panic grips hold. Who's doing this to you, the adults asked, Anne, the names come, because one way or another they always do. They are the usual suspects, Sarah Good, who was a desperate beggar that made the town's folk uncomfortable. Then Sarah Osborne, a rebel who was out of church and out of favor, Antitoba, an enslaved indigenous woman in the Paris household, another convenient target. These are filed on February 29, and by the next morning interrogations begin. Accordes convene in the town of Salem, Tichibu is brought before a court, before a council, and they ask, "Are you a witch? Did you be witch the Paris girls?" One of the peculiarities of the Salem witch trials is that those who confess are granted clemency. Inside that room, the pressure mounts and Tichibu bends, and then breaks, not just a witchcraft, but to a story that matches the village's worst suspicions. She says the devil came, sometimes a man in black, sometimes marked by a yellow bird. When asked specifically about Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, she said they knew about it too. At others, seven more, in fact, all walked the same path, and were hiding among them. So the town exhales in a way that sounds like relief, but isn't, because relief would mean it's over, and this is the opposite. This is permission, which brings us to the heart of it, what exactly were these women being accused of? Witchcraft in 17th century, Puritan New England, wasn't tall, dark hats and broomsticks. It was actually a legal category with a fatal end point. Massachusetts bays 1641 code, put it in black and white. If a person hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they die. The language came straight from Scripture, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and in a world where church and law braided together, this was a metaphor, it was the statute, and the penalty was the gallows. Once the first accusations landed, and then they multiplied. By spring, jails across the region would jam with more than 150 people from Salem and the surrounding towns, and the timing couldn't have been worse. England had dissolved the old colonial charter and replaced it in 1691, which meant Massachusetts was wobbling between frameworks, old laws uncertain, and new ones not yet settled. When Governor William Fips arrived in May of 1692 to this messy situation, in order to clear up the backlog, he created a special tribunal, the court of Oyer and Termineer, literally to here and to determine. From Stouten, the hard-edged new lieutenant governor took the bench as chief magistrate, and the court made the choice that would define its legacy, it admitted spectral evidence. If a witness swore that the accused sent a specter to pinch, choke or stab them in dreams or waking visions, the judges let it in. The theology of the day said the devil could loan which is that power, so when the afflicted girls collapsed and shrieked in the courtroom, pointing to invisible assaults only they could see, the record absorbed it as proof rather than panic. A rumor had become hard evidence, which opened the door to simple arguments amongst neighbors, now becoming life or death situations. People could fully take advantage of what was going down, legally get rid of their perceived enemies just by saying they were dancing with the devil, and from there it all snowballed. With the rules bent that far, the first trial moved fast. Bridget Bishop gossiped about for wearing black clothes and for living in ways her neighbors called a moral, face the grand jury on June 2nd and was convicted the same day. Eight days later, she was led to the rocky rise we now call Gallo's hill. She was the first to hang, everyone in town understood, even before that rope went taught, she wouldn't be the last. Five more went to the gallows on July 19th, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin, Sarah Wilde and Rebecca Nurse, and it was Rebecca's case that rattled people most. Seventy-one years old, a church member, widely respected. The jury first said not guilty but then flipped it, and they couldn't make exceptions because after all, a single witness was all it took and game over. August brought five more, and then came September 19th of 1692. That was Giles Corey's day, man, he didn't die by rope, and Corey was 80 years old, a prosperous farmer accused alongside his wife Martha, and when he was brought in on September 9th and told the plead, he said nothing. Under English common law, the court couldn't try him without a plea and wouldn't release and without one, so they reach for the harsh answer built into the system. Penae Forte Adur, the strong and hard punishment. Judge Samuel Saul noted what followed in his diary, and Corey was stripped and laid on his back, a bored one over his chest. Sheriff George Corwin began adding stones one after another, the weight rising over two full days. Witnesses said his tongue drooped from his mouth and Corwin shoved it back with his cane. Each time they asked for a plea, Corey answered the same way, more weight. A why endure that? Well, it was a calculated move by Corey. A trial meant a certain conviction and the loss of his property to the colony, but death without a verdict, and as a state could pass to his heirs. He had already deeded his farm to his sons-in-law, and by refusing to plea, he kept what he'd built in the family. The only end for him was going to be death anyway, so he made his choice. Three days later, Martha Corey was hanged. On September 22nd, 8 more were executed, bringing the toll to 19 by hanging, one pressed to death, and at least five who perished and fouled jails awaiting trial. Even two dogs were killed as supposed instruments of the devil. But the ground was shifting. Accusations were now brushing people with money and standing, voices that carried, and public patience began to fray. In early October, increased matter, published cases of conscience, arguing that it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned. And he went straight at the court's use of spectral evidence. In ten days later on October 29th, Governor Fipps dissolved the court of Oyer and Termineer. For all practical purposes, the Salem witch trials were finished. In 1693, the colony reset the rules of justice, creating the superior court of judicature, and shutting the door on spectral evidence once and for all. The change was immediate, and other remaining 52 cases, 49 ended in acquittal, and the three convictions were pardoned on the spot by Governor Fipps. By May of 1693, Fipps said cleared the jails, the damage, though, clearly had already been done. More than 200 accused, and 30 found guilty, and 25 dead. The families split along accusation lines. Neighbors testified against neighbors, children appointed at parents, churches cast out their own. The reckoning for all this came in slow waves. In 1697, the general court called a day of fasting and reflection, some participants own their failures in public. Judge Samuel Saul had a confession of guilt read as he bowed his head in church. By 1702, the witch trials were officially labeled unlawful. In 1711, the colony paid restitution. $600 spread among the families. And still, it took until 1957 for a formal state apology, and until July of 2022, for the last convicted woman left off the role, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., to be exonerated, thanks to a group of eighth grade civic students who wouldn't let the record stand. Assalam wasn't myth, there was policy, fear, and ordinary people grinding each other up inside a broken system. From the pertinent perspective, and from the parisist perspective, this is a great thing, because not only do they get to eliminate their enemies by accusing them of witches and potentially killing them, but they also create a kind of hysteria that brings people closer to their fundamentalist viewpoint. And it wasn't unique, or even the worst of its kind. The forces that fet it didn't vanish with 1692, and in fact, still continue on in the modern age. 17 years before the first hanging in Salem, a spring day in 1675 turned the sky over the Swedish parish of Torsiker, the color of coal-small. This wasn't a field burn, it was a purge. 71 people were beheaded and then burned. 65 of them women, roughly one-fifth of the parish's women erased in a single day. The Torsiker witch trials stand among the largest mass killings of alleged witches ever recorded, and it hadn't always been like this, and for more than a century, Sweden had been comparatively quiet, barely ten executions for witchcraft before 1668, until a case against a woman named Marat John's daughter let the fuse. The Swedes called what followed the great noise, an eight-year fever that swept the country from 1668 to 1676, and carried off about 400 lives. By 1674, the panic reached Angermanland. A minister there named John's Watringus, asked his colleague Laurentius Horneus to investigate Torsiker, so they could figure out what all the fuss was about. Horneus was determined to cleanse the area of any evil and devised a system, a very basic but devastating one. East Asian two teenage boys, 16 and 18, at the church door. They were soon called the Viscous Sarna, which meant the wise boys, and they claimed they could see what no one else could, a devil's brand on people's foreheads. The stigma, Diaboli, proof of a trip to Black Gala, the mythical place where Satan was said to receive his followers. Peritioners filed toward worship unaware of the boy's powers, and as they filed in, one after another, the teenagers simply pointed and the people were taken away. The parishes even paid the boys for their services, a bureaucracy of panic with a payroll. The trial opened on October 15, 1674 with around 100 names on the list, and the proof was the kind that thrives in panic. Children's stories of night flights to Black Gala of the accused pouring bread and wine at Satan's table, of visions only they could see. Children's follow because confessions were the only way through. The official record is thin, maybe by design, so the clearest account arrived 60 years later, from the grandson of the prosecutor who wrote down what his grandmother, Britta, said she'd seen. Britta had married Laurentias Hornias himself, and even she wasn't safe. One of the wise boys pointed at her in church, and crowd drew breath, and she met it with a slap. The boys backpedaled, blaming the sun for tricking their eyes. Execution day came, and prisoners had been scattered and makeshift holds, but almost no food, dependent on relatives for scraps. When the sermon ended and Torsica church in the march began, many could barely stand. 71 and all, and they were beheaded first, and their bodies burned after. And the fever pushed on to Stockholm in 1676, where eight more women were executed until authorities finally turned and questioned the child witnesses. Now some of them admitted they lied, and some of those children were executed for perjury. So suddenly, people weren't so quick to accuse. But by 1677, priests were ordered to proclaim from their pulpits, that all witches had been driven from Sweden forever, an official spell of closure. As for the wise boys of Torsica, a letter reports, say they were found with their throats cut, a last grim footnote to a tragedy that had already gone too far. Now let's cross the Atlantic, because there's something here that happened many people don't even know about, which occurred 23 years before Salem. Before Massachusetts had even fixed witches in its legal imagination, and this all went down in Connecticut. On May 26, 1647, a woman named All's Young was hanged in Hartford, likely the first person executed for witchcraft and all the American colonies. A record simply states, "One All's Young of Windsor arranged and executed at Hartford for a witch." So, what did you do? Well, apparently, just lived in the wrong house. Because that year in Influenza waved, ripped through Windsor, a young happened to live beside a family that unfortunately lost four children while their own child survived, and a seasoned hungry for a culprit, survival looked like evidence. A Connecticut already branded witchcraft a capital crime in 1642. Over the next 16 years, the colony logged 37 cases and 11 executions. The accused followed a pattern, women on the economic margins, and people with prior petty offenses. Mary Johnson, a house servant, for example, confessed in 1648 after whippings in the spiritual squeeze of a minister's interrogation, and she admitted, "familiarity with the devil and the murder of a child" because she was pregnant, the hanging waited, but only until June 6, 1650, when it went down. Her newborn baby left behind. As some cases seem far fetched even then, in 1651 during militia drill, Thomas Allen's gun fired by accident, and killed Henry Styles. Allen paid a fine for a homicide by misadventure, and that should have been the end, until Wispers turned the misfire into malice. Three years later, but he a Gilbert of Windsor was indicted for bewitching the weapon, tried and found guilty in 1654, she was hanged in Hartford. The fever crested in 1662 with the Hartford Witch Panic. Nate, your old Elizabeth Kelly, died under unclear circumstances, her parents blamed witchcraft and the town just followed. In a blast of accusations from 1662 to 63, 12 people were charged and four were executed within a month. Nathaniel and Rebecca Greensmith, Mary Sanford and Mary Barnes. Pressed by interrogators, Rebecca Greensmith confessed to dancing with the devil in the woods and named the others. The confession even folded in an illegal Christmas gathering, because the Puritans had outlawed the holiday as frivolous and unbiblical. It would take Governor John Whitrup Jr. returning from England to put a stop to it all, and the people it seemed had just started going off the rails. But now with real scrutiny at the helm, the execution stopped. So, by the time Salem's trials began in 1692, they were primed, Connecticut had already set the legal and moral precedent. They'd shown how quickly fear could set neighbor against neighbor. How specters could stand in for proof, and how fast a courtroom could become a conveyor belt to the grave. The pattern didn't die with the 17th century either, and it just learned a new language. In jump to 1983, Manhattan Beach, California, Judy Johnson calls police and says her two-year-old son was abused at the McMartin pre-school by an employee, Ray Bucky. Detectives question Bucky, and find nothing they can hold. Yet a letter still goes out to roughly 200 families, urging parents to ask their children about possible abuse, and with that nudge, the dam gives way. Suddenly, there are stories everywhere, not just about Bucky either, but about multiple teachers, and the claims drift from awful to impossible, which is flying secret tunnels under the school, animal sacrifices. A photo lineup where a child points to actor Chuck Norris, tales of being flushed through toilets into hidden rooms, and then returned and scrubbed clean before pickup. This school is ground zero, and becomes the vocabulary of a new moral panic, a satanic panic. If you listen regularly, you've heard about it before, and if you live through it, you know just how much it ingrained itself into the culture. It rolled on through the 1980s and early 90s and generated thousands of allegations of ritual abuse without a single substantiated case, and in the marquee prosecutions, no convictions. The echoes are hard to miss. Torsiker had children spotting invisible marks. Connecticut turned unexplained illness into proof of malice. Children let specters speak louder than evidence. The 1980s handed the script to hypnotic interviews and leading questions. And children, eager to please and terrified to disappoint, supplied the horrors adults were primed here. And there's a good reason why each of these moments have occurred in our past and will continue to do so. It all comes down to imperfections and us as human beings and the societies we're constantly evolving. For better or for worse, these incidents are progress. They allow us to clearly see the error in our ways, so we can eventually correct ourselves. Unfortunately, though, they can take several times to really sink in and only happen in hindsight. Back in Salem, the village was already splitting along lines, years in the making. There were really two salums, prosperous Salem town with its merchants and harbored trade, and Salem village that had farmers scraping by on thin soil. The feud between the farming potnums and the town aligned borders turned every fence post into a battlefield. And property suits lined up, loyalties calcified in the minister, Samuel Paris, reached a hard gospel that sharpened divides rather than easing them. And you were either in or you were out. Then the stormfront rolled in, the memory of King Philip's war clung to the region, the raids on the northern frontier kept fear close. England had yanked Massachusetts as charter, leaving the colony in a legal wobble with no clear footing, smallpox flared, money fell tight, and a pureed in frame where misfortune carried moral meaning, the devil was never far away. Into that powder keg, a circle of girls began to convulse, whether it was placating panic or sincere belief, matter less in the response, frightened adults, and of them authority. Once the naming began, old grievances found a new courtroom, and Putnam, Jr. pointed to Rebecca Nurse, while the Putnam's and nurses were locked in a land fight. George Barrow's a former minister was dragged back into the story by the same family that had once had him jailed over debts. Salem wasn't the work of poison bread, it was the chemistry of fear and faction, a broken legal frame, and children's words steered and sometimes shaped by adults with scores to settle. By the end of the trials, more than 150 Salem residents had been imprisoned, 19 had been executed. One man was pressed to death under the weight of heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea. The adolescent girls who made the original accusations toward the alleged witches eventually admitted they had made up the story. Though the Salem witchcraft trials lasted only a short time, the came to represent the persecution of innocents at the hands of fanatics. And so, what have we learned since then? The three centuries on, Salem still haunts us. Those trials rewired American law by negative example. There was no presumption of innocents, no counsel at the table, and no chance to confront accusers, and dreams were allowed to masquerade as proof. The founders took that wreckage and built guardrails, the presumption of innocence, the right to an attorney, the right to cross examine, and a firm wall against hearsay and anything like spectral evidence. We have those rights, because Salem showed us what happens without them. It also reminds us that mass hysteria doesn't need the Middle Ages. It just needs fear, a community under strain, and authorities ready to ratify the improvable. I give those conditions a sp-- Spark and neighbors start turning on one another and children become instruments and justice tilts towards payback. The patterns haven't disappeared, and they've just learned to wear different masks. Because history repeats itself, or the foreseeable future, in one way shape or form, a wolf keeps falling for them. So that's it for today's episode of Every Town. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to come on back next week. Same place, same time for another episode of Every Town, full with strange and mysterious stories. As you never know, maybe your town will be next.