Why Did the Salem Witch Trials Happen?

So, I’ve started an exercise, maybe an experiment of sorts, on my socials. I’m going to try to explain from my point of view what I’ve learned in my research about the Salem Witch Trials. Why did the witch panic start? What was really going on with the afflicted girls? Were there real witches in Salem? Why did the accusers target certain people?

The Ingersoll Ordinary in Danvers, MA. Photo taken by the author in August 2025.

These were all questions I had when I started thinking about the Beckett Coven books. The series takes place in modern Salem, MA, but the events of the Salem Witch Trials absolutely affect the Beckett Coven characters and will force them to make some very tough choices as we go further along in their story.

The question I get asked the most about the Salem Witch Trials is, what fed the witch panic of 1692?

Like most complex things there were many factors. It was not a land grab as some people have recently been posting on social media. Anyone who says there is one main reason like a land grab that explains why people were accused, hasn’t read all the source materials, such as the trial transcripts, or is only reading one particular historian's take on what happened. Land grabs were not a thing in the 1600s, except for the land that was taken by the colonists from the Native Americans. What gets people confused is the word “property”. Property means something very different nowadays than it did back then. Nowadays we think of property as land and/or the house on that land. Back then, property meant belongings, such as the things inside your home, your tools, and your livestock. Land property as we know it today was just known as “land” back then, not property. Property (belongings) could be seized but only under certain conditions. Later in the Trials, Sheriff George Corwin, who was twenty-six at the time, seizes property (belongings) of several people including the Procters in order to pay their jail bills, but he does this before they were even put on trial, which was a no-no. His family had to pay restitution for his assumptive impatience and greed. Back then prisoners who were arrested had to pay for their meals, chains, bedding, jailer, and court fees. It could get very expensive. People incarcerated for long periods of time often lost everything. At the end of the Salem Witch Trials in May of 1693, there were over 150 plus people whose sentences were acquitted, but they couldn’t leave jail until they paid their bills while being kept there. Utterly ridiculous and cruel.

There are three factors that made you very vulnerable to being accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. 80% of the people accused were women. Of the women who were hanged or died in jail, 75% of them were over the age of fifty. Of that group, many were widows or had been widowed in the past and had inherited property from their dead spouse (about 60% or more). The vast majority of the women who inherited property didn't own it outright if they remarried. Their new husband held it for them or they were expected to quickly pass it onto their sons once they came of age. If you were a woman and you were quarrelsome, bucked the system, different (in any way), or pissed off one of the Putnams in Salem Village, those were nails in your coffin.

So, what really played a hand in what started the Trials? Politics played a part with a healthy dose of paranoia and resentment. The Massachusetts Bay Colony (I’m going to call it the MBC for short) had been in political disarray. Their charter had not been renewed because of political unrest back in England (James II had just been deposed) and tensions with how the MBC wanted to run itself, be taxed, etc. Basically, all the early seeds that started the Revolutionary War eighty years later were incubating in 1692. Consequently, the MBC did not have a functioning government at this time. Without that they couldn’t form a judiciary to try cases. Some people had been stuck in prison for months on end waiting for the MBC to be able to form a court to try them.

There were also a lot of political tensions between Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Town was primarily the area we now know today as downtown Salem, MA and a little beyond, from the Neck over to Gallows Hill. Salem Village was a large area located to the north/northwest of Salem Town, which now encompasses Peabody and Danvers. Think of Salem Town as the urban area full of merchants, various goods commerce (exports and imports), and dwellings tucked in close together. Think of Salem Village as the rural part with clear cut fields, farming commerce, and dwellings spread further apart. The Village was wanting more autonomy from the Town, but they also had a symbiotic relationship. Most of the ground in Town was not suitable for growing crops and the original land grants of 1 or 2 acres had shrunk due to the third and fourth generations needing more and more space to build homes and the new wealthy merchant class buying up whatever got sold.

The Town depended on the Village for their food. The Village depended on Town for goods and services that couldn’t be manufactured in the Village. Tensions arose when the Village wanted to form its own Puritan congregation and build its own Meeting House. The Town still wanted the Villagers to pay for the original Meeting House by the harbor. They also expected Villagers to pay for the Town’s road upkeep and defense from potential Native American raids. The Village felt they were more at risk from skirmishes due to their proximity to the vast forest beyond and thought they should get more defenses from the Town. The people who got caught in the middle of these conflicts were the ones who lived along the Village border with the Town and it’s not a wonder that many of those people were the ones who were accused during the Salem Witch Trials.

There were conflicts going on inside the Village, as well, such as property boundary disputes and family in-fighting over how estates had been dispersed in the first generations' wills. Much of Salem Village, particularly the central part closest to the new Meeting House, was intermarried between two families, the Putnams and the Ingersolls. The Putnams, who mostly lived further north near Topsfield, are easier to identify because of how many sons were born into the family. The Ingersolls, who lived at the center of the Village, may be a bit harder for folks to identify. I’m an Ingersoll descendant, so I have access to lots of family genealogy records, which makes it much easier for me to ascertain the three families descended from Richard Ingersoll and their extended marital relations. They all lived immediately around the Meeting House. Some of those extended relations even included the Putnams.

Nathaniel Ingersoll was considered by many to be the “Father of the Village”. He was who you went to went you had a dispute and needed a moderate, calm hand to figure it out. The great room in his house was where all important Village meetings took place, and it was created that way by design. In 1692 at the age of 60 Nathaniel was not only the first Deacon of the Salem Village Meeting House, he was also a Lieutenant in the Salem militia. His father, Richard Ingersoll, had been in the Village almost from the beginning and formerly leased the land the Nurse family was now farming on, the Townsend Bishop lot. Richard was highly respected as well. He was good friends with MBC Governor John Endicott and other early Village settlers like the Putnams.

Richard Ingersoll arrived in Salem in 1629 with his wife, Ann (or Agnes) and several children in tow, Alice, George, John, Joanna, and Sarah. They eventually would have eight children, three sons and four daughters. (Another son may have died in England.) Bathsheba and Nathaniel were the two youngest born in the New World and benefitted from the 1640s mandate that all Puritan children should learn to read and write so they could partake in scripture. After being granted two acres in Town, Richard continued to prove himself an important member of the Salem community by helping to build key pieces of infrastructure including a ferry. For that he was granted a larger portion of land in the Great Meadow. By the 1630s he was leasing land from Townsend Bishop within what would later become Salem Village. Part of the family remained in Salem Town on the original two acres of land Richard had been granted. Today, that area now encompasses Daniels Street over to the maritime park from east to west and Essex St down to the water from north to south. My ancestors, John Sr. and John Jr., along with John Jr.’s brothers, Samuel and Richard (patriarch Richard’s grandson), lived there. Two of the daughters, Alice and Sarah, ended up in the Village and got married. Patriarch Richard Ingersoll lived in the Village until his death in 1644. Upon his father’s death, Nathaniel Ingersoll, the youngest son and only twelve, was not yet old enough to inherit the property his father left him in the Village, so he apprenticed under Governor Endicott on his nearby farm, learning everything he would need to know to run his own.

When Nathaniel was nineteen years old he took on that challenge and built a large house on his inherited property and installed the infamous great room. This is where many Village meetings would end up taking place and where his extended family would gather and visit with him. At this same time, Nathaniel married Hannah, a member of the highly respected Collins family. (Collins Cove in Salem is named after them.) Nathaniel and Hannah were never successful at having children of their own. A daughter died in infancy. They eventually adopted the son of a neighbor. That boy’s name was Benjamin Hutchinson and his property in 1692 laid northwest of Nathaniel’s place (about half a mile away where the I-95 and Centre Street come together today), just past Nathaniel Putnam’s southern field.

Nathaniel’s oldest sister, Alice, had married William Walcott. She unfortunately died in 1643 while her children were still small. In 1692 her son, Captain Jonathan Walcott (Nathaniel Ingersoll’s nephew), lived just north of Nathaniel past the parsonage property (about where Ingersoll Parkway and Ingersoll Street meet today). Jonathan married Mary (nee Sibley) (1644-1683), not to be confused with the wife of her brother, Samuel, who was also named Mary. In 1692 the Sibleys lived just northeast of the Village Meeting House off what is now the dirt road of Gansons Lane on private property. We’ll get back to that Mary (Woodrow) Sibley in a bit. Jonathan and Mary Walcott had several children including Mary Walcott Jr. of afflicted girl fame. Yes, an afflicted girl was the great-niece of Nathaniel Ingersoll, which explains why he was so personally invested. In 1685 Jonathan remarried with Deliverance Putnam, the sister of Thomas Putnam, Jr. Therefore, Mary Walcott is the step cousin of the more infamous afflicted girl, Ann Putnam, Jr.

Nathaniel’s other sister, Sarah, married her second husband Joseph Holton/Houlton Jr. in 1651. With him she had six children on top of the four she already had with her first husband, William Haynes/Haines. Sarah’s son, Benjamin Houlton, will later play a key role in Rebecca Nurse’s questioning during her trial. Benjamin married a Putnam girl named Sarah, although it is unclear to me which Putnam she is descended from. In 1692 Benjamin lives four houses south of his uncle Nathaniel Ingersoll (about a third of a mile away and now where Holten and Collins Streets meet.) The house is still there. It is currently owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution because the great-grandson of Sarah and Joseph Houlton was Judge Samuel Holten, one time President of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Articles of Confederacy, and one of the original U.S. Congressmen. Benjamin’s acreage abutted that of Francis and Rebecca Nurse and encompassed the original Townsend-Bishop property that his grandfather, Richard Ingersoll, worked on with help from his sons, including pre-teen Nathaniel.

It’s not surprising that the Putnams and the extended Ingersoll clans were highly in line with each another in terms of Village business, particularly anything that involved the parsonage. In regard to the Village church there was an additional connection between the Putnams and the Ingersolls. Serving alongside Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll for many years was the second deacon, Edward Putnam, who was Thomas Putnam Jr.’s brother.

Forming the Village church in 1672 had been a dream of Nathaniel Ingersoll for a couple of decades before it happened. It was not an easy feat to travel the ten miles from the Village to the Town meeting house every Sunday in a cart or by horse, especially when the weather left the road a muddy or icy mess. But to stay in good standing with the church and eventually become a full member who could receive communion and be saved, frequent and devoted attendance was expected. There were even men assigned to wander about the countryside on Sabbath days to make sure everyone was adhering to Sabbath rules and getting their butts into the hard wood benches at the church. (Nathaniel served in this position for a time.) The Villagers really wanted their own place to worship, which gave them a better shot at full membership and therefore the opportunity to be among the chosen people who were saved ensuring heavenly salvation upon their death.

But like many dreams, Nathaniel’s was not easy to obtain. From the beginning the Villagers could not agree on how to pay for their new church and fund a minister. They did manage to build a meeting house on land donated by Joseph Hutchinson (the father of Benjamin Hutchinson, who Nathaniel Ingersoll adopted.) During the building of it, Nathaniel Ingersoll was given a license to run an ordinary, a tavern that also had food and lodging, in order to help support the men building the meeting house. According to 19^th century Salem historian Charles Upham, the Ingersoll Ordinary was located close to the corner of what is now Centre and Hobart Streets and faced south.

The building that still stands there today is considered to be that same ordinary, although it has had modifications done to it over the years. But Upham states this was not Nathaniel Ingersoll’s house. According to him the building on the corner was built just to serve as the ordinary. The Ingersoll house itself was further back from the street closer to the parsonage. Through a modern lens this might be debatable. It’s not hard to imagine that the ordinary’s tap room would also have also been large enough to be Nathaniel Ingersoll’s prized great room. There are a lot of Ingersoll details that Upham gets wrong, so the idea of two large buildings may be one of those facts, but it's not completely out of the realm of possibility since the Ingersolls were known for their carpentry and wood working skills. Richard helped build wood roads and a ferry when he first arrived. He made a penny per person for anyone who wanted to cross the river by Ingersoll’s Point. My own Ingersoll branch of the family built houses on their land in Town. Later they were coopers (barrel makers) and my 7^th great grandfather, William Burroughs/Burrows, made fancy portrait frames in Boston before he left for Delaware.

With the meeting house finally built, the Village hired its first minister, Reverend James Bayley. He lasted the longest of the first group of ministers but by 1680 they needed a new one and that’s when the in-fighting really gets going. Half the Village liked Reverend George Burroughs when he took over, the other half hated him. The Villagers stopped paying his wage even when he needed funds to bury his wife who died in childbirth. Issues had developed amongst some of the Villagers about paying for the Village church, and Burroughs got caught up in the middle. Not everyone left the church in Salem Town to join the new church in Salem Village. The Nurses had lived in Town for many years and only recently moved onto part of the enormous, old Townsend-Bishop tract.

Rebecca Nurse was a full member of the Town’s church and already saved. Full church members were typically a small group apart from the entire congregation. They would remain after the Sabbath lecture, which often had two parts to it with a lunch break in between. At the end of lecture, the congregants would leave the meeting house and the members who were saved would participate in holy communion with the sharing of bread and wine like the apostles did with Jesus the night before he was crucified. Rebecca Nurse didn’t need to join a new church, especially the Village one with all its drama. But now the Nurses were being told they had to pay to help maintain the Village church and its minister. They also were expected to help pay for the Town church of which they were members.

Reverend George Burroughs leaves and gets as far away from Salem as possible by heading back to the Maine territories up north. When the Witch Trials really get under way, that distance wouldn’t deter his accusers from dragging him back down south for what they thought was well-deserved punishment. The next minister, Deodat Lawson also only lasted a few years before things in the Village get contentious again, and then he and they have had enough of each other. In between ministers Nathaniel Ingersoll and Edward Putnam have been serving as unordained deacons just to keep things afloat. In 1689 they find a new minister. Samuel Parris has caught their eye in Boston. His lectures are dynamic and dramatic. The current Salem Village church committee think he might be a good fit and keep them entertained and engaged on the Sabbath. Parris’s employment, though, doesn’t come without a price. He counters their salary and parsonage offer. By the time negotiations are done and the Village church committee is worn down, Parris comes away with not only a hefty £60 salary, he also is granted the parsonage land in perpetuity. That’s an extraordinary offer for a position in the Village with such a high turnover rate! Of course, that contract doesn’t go down well with a bunch of the Village congregation, but Reverend Samuel Parris is ordained anyway on November 19, 1689.

It's not surprising that Parris bargained for his benefits and salary. After being a failed merchant and landowner in Barbados (to be fair a hurricane helped take out is property), Parris moved north to Boston and turned to preaching in order to establish a more solid income for his new family and to keep his enslaved servants. From the start Parris’s manipulative, paranoid, and petty personality started coming through. He refused to ordain deacons Nathaniel Ingersoll and Edward Putnam and kept them as probationary appointments although they had been instrumental in bringing him on and had served in the roles before Parris’s arrival. Nathaniel even gave up part of his land for the parsonage deal! Parris also had a tendency to call out grievances with parishioners from the pulpit. He was even keeping an enemies list in his church book where he recorded his sermons and other ecclesiastical events. How Christian of him.

Finally, by late 1691 Parris ordained Nathaniel and Edward as deacons. This may have been forced upon him as a means to close ranks with his patrons and supporters, predominantly the Putnam and Ingersoll clans. The most recently elected church committee, however, was now made up of men who were not part of these groups. They despised Parris and wanted him gone. The men included Daniel Andrews and Francis Nurse. One would end up being accused witchcraft but escaped; the other one would lose his beloved wife, Rebecca, to the noose. Earlier in the year, Francis Nurse had been tasked with going around to his fellow villagers and collect Parris’ salary, but he didn’t. By January 1692, Parris’s salary had not been paid for about a year. He was surviving on donations from some of his faithful full church members and congregational supporters. It was the brutally cold time of year, and he was running low on supplies. His concerns about running out of firewood landed on deaf ears.

By January 1692 Reverend Samuel Parris was wound up like a top, fuming, and cold. His paranoia about getting fired, supported by the history of the Village church ministers not outlasting their tenure, was growing increasingly sharp. The sweetheart deal he had concocted, which would have given his son Thomas (named after his deceased father) land of his own, was at risk of falling apart. His house was cold, and the eggs from their few chickens seemed to be going missing. Elizabeth Parris, his wife, was having a hard time keeping their five-year-old, Susannah, happy in such conditions. His middle child, Betty Parris (9), and her cousin, orphan Abigail Williams (11), were missing for long stretches of time. Most likely they were escaping the cold and cranky parsonage by going to neighboring houses such as the always welcoming Ingersolls, or the Walcotts, whose niece Ann Putnam, Jr. was the same age as Abigail.

In a few months, this clique would become known as “The Afflicted Girls”, but in January they were just a small group of tweens who often sat together during the Sabbath and Thursday lectures. They were friends and were trying to escape the boredom of winter, trapped inside to stay warm. Later Reverend John Hale of Beverly recounts one of the ways the girls decided to pass the time. It involved folk magic.

Folk magic in times of calm could be seen as something benign. It included divination, herbal remedies, protection work, and manifestation of prosperity. The people who knew the most about these practices were often called cunning folk. Sometimes they were called white witches. They had learned old ways from their mothers or grandmothers. Most of them were women, but a few were men. Some were midwives. Midwives helped with birthing children, but they were also called upon for herbal remedies when people or animals were sick. Furthermore, they prepared the dead for burial by cleansing the bodies with herb infused water and anointing them with oils.

Cunning folk typically called upon angels and ancestors to help them in their work. There were actually a few cunning folk who got caught up in the Witch Trials. Sam Wardwell (executed September 22, 1692) was obsessively into divination and palm reading. Roger Toothacre from Boston was imprisoned (later got out) because of his herbal practices. Dorcas Hoar had the awful unnerving habit of walking up to parents, pointing at their child, and declaring, “You’re gonna die!”, which of course got her arrested for cursing the children to death. Mary Sibley, of witch cake fame, was probably into what we would now call kitchen witchery. Somehow she only got hit with dismembership from the Salem Village church and avoided arrest, probably because of her tear-filled confession that she was just trying to help and her extended family connection to the Ingersolls.

To many Puritans, folk magic was also seen as a potential gateway drug to more baneful practices, such as black magic and witchcraft. To the Puritans, witchcraft was on a whole other level than cunning practices and were acts performed by witches and wizards to harm others. Witches were intermediaries for the Devil. The New World Puritans believed very strongly that Christianity had defeated the Devil in the Old World, but he was going to make a last stand in the new one. The MBC folks even referred to the indigenous Native American tribes as Tawny Devils, which further emboldened the colonists to fight against them. So, when witchcraft is suspected in Salem Village it’s hardly surprising that it starts in a home with two Indian servants at the heart of their spiritual community, the parsonage. The Devil knew exactly how to hurt them the most.

So, what was the folk magic the girls were playing with? Reverend Hale describes a divination spell called Venus Glass. It was an amusing game for a young girls to play in order to learn the occupation of her future husband. The diviner would crack an egg into a glass of water and then gaze at the egg white to see what shape it would form into. If it looked like a ship, then he might be a dashing sailor or better yet a ship’s captain. If it was a hammer, he might be a carpenter. A plow may portend a farmer was in her future. But on this occasion when the Village girls get caught, one of them, someone who Hale says never married and died soon after the Trials, has her egg white turn into the shape of a coffin. It’s often speculated that this particular girl was Abigail Williams. Some people think it may have been one of the servants who were in their late teens, but I feel strongly that it was probably Abigail. Hale never gives a name, so we are left to speculate. Abigail did indeed never marry, and she disappears from records not long after the Trials. She was also one of the most infamous members of the gang of Afflicted Girls.

Parris finds out about the divination exercise. It likely took place at the parsonage. Parris’s study was upstairs, and I can just imagine the girls shrieking upon seeing the coffin shape in the egg concoction. Parris comes running down to see what’s the matter and finds them not only wasting precious eggs with funds running low, but they are also playing around with magic. Tituba Indian is also present during this event, which further suggests it happened at the parsonage.

Tituba Indian and John Indian were Parris’s enslaved persons. The surname Indian suggests they were of indigenous decent. African decent slaves in New England were given the surname “Black”. Indigenous slaves were given the surname “Indian”. During her testimony Tituba is often referred to as “that Indian woman” or “the Indian woman”. Whereas in the testimony of Candy Black and Mary Black they are both referred to as “Negro woman”. Tituba also mentions the land of her country, referencing that she is not originally from New England. Parris likely acquired her when he was in Barbados where indigenous and Africans were disgustingly traded like cattle. Many people forget that the first enslaved people in the Americas were indigenous people. For the length of the 1500s they were the only enslaved people in America. It wasn’t until the early 1600s that some asshole decided it would be a great idea to go kidnap Africans and put them into slavery. His reasoning was that they would stand out like a sore thumb and would be easier to catch if they escaped. Eventually, as the colonies took shape into what would become the United States, Black folks were to be enslaved, particularly in the South, Indigenous folks were to be hunted down and removed. They would become two of the new country’s greatest sins.

When Parris finds out about the Venus Glass incident, he punishes Tituba. Punishment, or “correction”, typically meant a beating. Domestic violence was extremely common in 1600s New England. There are several mentions of it in trial transcripts of women and children being beaten by their male family members as a means to keep them in line. There was a bit of a threshold though that was not meant to be crossed. The punishment couldn’t be excessive, but of course “excessive” could sometimes be left up to interpretation of whichever magistrate you got. In cases where both parties were to blame, such as Bridget Bishop’s second marriage to Thomas Oliver, the husband generally got off easy. (We’ll dive more into Bridget’s history of being an abused wife in another post.) In the Village parsonage, Parris beat Tituba and very likely did the same to Betty and Abigail, surely accompanied by a long session of prayer and scripture and possibly some fasting to make up for the lost eggs.

Not long after this, Betty Parris starts behaving oddly. She is staring off into space, making strange noises, flinching at nothing, and crawling under the table. To a modern psychology eye, this may very well have been the actions of an abused child. It is important to note that this strange behavior subsided after Parris removes Betty from his house during the Trials, taking her to a family friend in Town. But when Betty first comes down with the symptoms, all eyes and attention fall onto the sweet nine year old and what could be wrong with her. Then, cousin Abigail starts to exhibit the same behaviors. Is it power of suggestion or sympathy? Is Abigail also having trauma symptoms? It’s been suggested that Abigail was one of the orphans left over from recent battles with the Native American tribes in Maine. She very well could have watched her family massacred during one of the raids and may have had PTSD from it. Or is it something else? Psychology and trauma response was not something the Puritans would have understood at that time at all. They barely understood what dreams were and often mistook them for waking visitations of demons. It would have been very natural for them to turn this behavior into superstition or talk of the Devil instead of a defense response to trauma.

As the central Village families head into February, more girls start to show signs of “affliction”. They are girls that have been hanging out with Betty and Abigail. Ann Putnam, Jr. starts first, but her afflictions seem to be different and more shocking. She does stare off into space like the others, but she also contorts her body and looks like she’s having odd seizures, similar to the ones her infant sister experienced before she died. So, what are we really dealing with here? Are the girls working themselves up into thinking they are ill, especially after having played around with magic and skirting so close to devil’s work? Or is it something else? Are they learning that if they are ill they get positive behaviors from their parents? Instead of beatings or chastisement, they get hugs and comfort. Instead of doing their chores or listening to scripture and lectures for hours on end, they can get out of those monotonous things by being ill. It’s very telling that when they are in the Village meeting house during this time period, they often interrupted Sabbath proceedings, much to the dislike of many in the congregation. But when the families had special prayer services at home focused directly on the girls themselves, they were very quiet and still and only became “afflicted” again when the direct attention stopped.

Now we are into February and with the affliction symptoms growing worse, affecting more girls, and becoming quite public at the meeting house, the Putnams decide to call in the doctor. Parris reluctantly submits, even though he is worried this will put a greater spotlight on his inadequacies as the Village’s pastor. The only doctor in the Village is William Griggs. After examining the girls, he can’t figure out anything physically wrong with them, so gives up and his personal diagnosis is that “an Evil hand is upon them.” Witchcraft. Witches. There was whispering of odd shadows running through the fields at night in nearby Ipswich. Was it connected? Of course, the presence of witches explains everything! Parris brings in reverends from the neighboring parishes to get a second opinion. They have heard vague rumors about what’s been going on in the Village and are astonished to see the girls’ afflictions in person. Most of them agree it must be witches. Parris and the other parents need to figure out who is afflicting the girls. On top of that, after Dr. Griggs visited the girls, his niece Elizabeth Hubbard (17), also an orphan and servant in his household, becomes afflicted. Panic sets in further.

The parents all start berating the children about who afflicted them. If the symptoms are all part of a game to get the adults to get off their backs, be nice to them, and give them attention, that has now backfired. To the girls’ credit they don’t initially give names of who the witches are, most likely because they freaking know witches are not responsible for their behavior. Later in February, while the Parris’s are out of the house, always-trying-to-be-helpful neighbor, Mary Sibley, comes by the parsonage and offers assistance. She instructs John and Tituba to bake something called a witch cake. I’ve heard multiple versions of what this is and what happens next. This cake is either supposed to point you to who the witch is, protect you from the witch, or draw the affliction out of the afflicted into something else. Either way, this is straight up cunning folk protection magic at its best. John and Tituba bake the cake, which includes rye and urine from the afflicted. Then they feed it to a dog, who either belongs to the Parris’s or Mary Sibley or maybe it’s some poor random neighbor dog. It’s not clear what exactly happens to the dog. I would suspect it got fairly ill from the nasty ingredients in the witch cake. Regardless, Reverend Parris finds out. Mary Sibley gets chastised and removed from church membership, so I guess she is no longer saved but can still come to the meeting house for Sabbath as a congregant. Her extended family member, Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll, is probably unamused by her helpfulness.

After the witch cake incident, Parris beats Tituba (later recounted by her in prison to Robert Calef, who published More Wonders of the Invisible World as a dig against Cotton Mather’s propagandish view of the Witch Trials). Parris probably also harasses the girls incessantly about naming the witches. The afflictions get worse. The parents’ demands increase. The girls finally give in at the end of the month. Betty and Abigail of course throw Tituba hard under the bus. This must have been particularly painful to the enslaved woman since she helped raise them and talks very lovingly about Betty during her testimony. It’s quite telling that Tituba doesn’t talk the same way about Abigail. Abigail and Betty also name two others. It’s important to note that both of these women are people Parris has a beef with. Were the names given freely, even if coerced, or were they suggested by an exasperated and biased Reverend Samuel Parris?

Sarah Good was a beggar woman living in Salem Village. She was estranged from her husband and had a four-year-old daughter Dorcas/Dorothy Good, a younger infant daughter, and one on the way. Her father committed suicide and left her with no dowry and she'd had bad luck with men ever since. She's estranged from her current husband who's been out of work due to illness. In February Sarah showed up a Parris’s door asking for help. She’s smoking a pipe and probably smells. He only gives Dorcas some food and tells Sarah to come to church more. She mumbles something as she leaves. In her testimony she recalls telling him thank you, but Parris at the time took it as a threat. Sarah Osborne is an ill woman who hasn’t gone to church services in over three years, the entire time Parris has been the Village minister. She might have been staying out of public view because it’s highly possible she was an abused wife. Her first husband died leaving her with two small sons and his estate. In order to keep things running on the farm she hired an indentured servant, Alex Osborne. After he paid off his debt, Alex and Sarah get married. Years later post-Trials, Sarah’s sons sue Alex. They claim he was violently abusive to Sarah and them and kept her from turning over her estate to them once they reached maturity, which was the custom.

So now we have our first victims. Tituba Indian. Sarah Good. Sarah Osborne. The Putnams have had enough and when they get the names they go into town and file a formal complaint with John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, who are merchants that have a side-gig as magistrates. They agree that an inquiry should definitely take place. On Leap Day, February 29^th, 1692, an arrest warrant is issued for the three women. As February turns into March, the questioning of suspected witches begins and nothing in Salem Village or Salem Town will ever be the same for anyone.

On a personal note, Nathaniel Ingersoll is my 11^th great-uncle. His brother, John Ingersoll Sr., is my direct ancestor. Captain Jonathan Walcott and Benjamin Houlton are my 1^st cousins 10x removed. Mary Walcott is my 2^nd cousin 9x removed. Hannah Collins Ingersoll is the sister of my 10^th great grandmother, Margery Collins Williams, so Hannah is my 10^th great-aunt. Unfortunately, all of my people involved in the Trails are accusers, but I do have a very, very distant connection to an accused person through marriage, which we will get to in a future post. That family connection between accused and accuser helped form the backstory of the Beckett Coven series and the ancestry of my main character, Kylie Beckett.

Check back next month as I continue this story. You can also view my vlog posts on my social media accounts. I will continue to talk about the Salem Witch Trials as we lead up to the release of the first book in the Beckett Coven series, Whispers of the Pale Witch.