Rye New York Apartment Applications: Fill & Download for Free

The Salem Witch Trials(Extracted without footnotes from the author’s book, Intolerance. Wildy, Simmonds & Hill. 2008.)‘In the latter end of the year 1691 (1692 in the new style calendar) Mr. Samuel Paris, Pastor of the Church in Salem-Village, had a Daughter of Nine, and a Niece of about Eleven years of Age, sadly Afflicted of they knew not what Distempers; and he made his application to Physitians, yet still they grew worse: And at length one Physitian gave his opinion, that they were under an Evil Hand. This the Neighbours quickly took up, and concluded they were bewitched… These Children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them.’(John Hale. A Modest Inquiry Into The Nature Of Witchcraft, 1702. )So began the most infamous series of witch trials in modern times in which twenty people were judicially put to death and others suffered horribly and died in a vain attempt to put an end to a phenomenon which had no real existence outside the heads of the good people of New England.The early church had been scornful of the idea of witches. The Canon Episcopi of 906 AD, for example, writing of women said to cavort through the air at night, asked, ‘Who is so stupid and foolish as to think that all these things that are done in the spirit are done in the body?’ For some reason the church changed its attitude in the fifteenth century and began hunting witches with a truly religious fury. And what began in Europe followed the European settlers to the New World.England, where most of the New England settlers had come from, had been relatively free of witch hysteria until the superstitious King James I extended the mandatory death penalty to a wide range of witchcraft offences. The new law was swiftly put to use in Lancashire, where ten ‘witches’ were discovered in the small town of Pendle and hanged. Paranoia and persecution found their most extreme form, however, in the activities of a clergyman’s son, Matthew Hopkins, who in 1645 arrogated to himself the title of Witch-finder General and for nearly two years caused havoc among the ‘witches’ of East Anglia. Some 200 people are thought to have been hanged as a result of his exertions in the name of God.It is not surprising that a similar outlook prevailed among the devoutly Puritan settlers of New England. Their Bible took a stern line on witches. Exodus 22:18 states, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And in Leviticus 20:27 it is written, “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.’ These texts had been given the force of law by the 1648 Book of the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts which provided that, ‘If any man or woman be a witch (that is, hath or consulted with a familiar spirit) they shall be put to death’. This belief in the supernatural seemed almost to be reinforced by the colony’s harsh climate and its hostile Indian population. ‘The forests which surrounded our ancestors were the abode of a mysterious race of men of strange demeanour and unascertained origin,’ wrote the nineteenth century historian Charles Upham in his book, Salem Witchcraft. ‘It was the common belief, sanctioned … not by the clergy alone, but by the most learned scholars of that and the preceding ages that the American Indians were the subjects and worshippers of the Devil, and their powwows, wizards.’ As a result, the Puritan settlers saw themselves, in the words of a New England divine, as ‘a people of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's territories’.It was against this background that the curious behaviour of the Salem children was to have such devastating effects.A village dividedSalem was a fishing settlement only a few miles to the north of what was already the great town of Boston. Known to the Indians as Naumkeag, it was given the Biblical name, Salem (from ‘shalom’ or peace) by the English settlers. Gradually, the town expanded to the north and west, creating what came to be known as Salem farms, later, Salem village. Some have traced the witch frenzy to tensions between the depressed village folk and the more prosperous folk on the edge of town, but later analysis has cast doubt on this. Nevertheless, Salem was not a happy place. Though it had a meeting house and minister of its own, Salem village had been refused a separate congregation with the power to baptize and give communion. The move had been led by the Putnam family, one of the largest farmers in the village. The agricultural Putnams had long been in dispute with the mercantile Porter family over the flooding of their farms which led, eventually, to a complete break-down of relations. At the centre of the storm was the church, whose ministers, James Bayley, George Burroughs and Deodat Lawson, had all left in unhappy circumstances. (The Putnams had even quarrelled among themselves over Burroughs.) In 1688 John Putnam invited a new man to become visiting preacher. He was the London born Samuel Parris and his role in the ensuing events was to be pivotal.The new ministerParris’ temporary appointment appears to have been a success because in 1689, after protracted negotiations over his salary and emoluments, he was appointed pastor and moved to the village. But the old pattern soon repeated itself and by the following year Parris acknowledged that ‘a great hatred ariseth even from nearest relations.’ When the elders of the church asked the village committee to impose the tithe which provided the minister’s salary their request was ignored. Instead, an inquiry set up into the legality of his title to the parsonage. Parris preached against those who opposed him and the church took the village to court. ‘By 1692’, writes the historian Bryan Le Beau, ‘Salem Village had reached the point of institutional, demographic and economic polarization.’ The first manifestation of the troubles to come occurred in the minister’s own home.When Parris came to the village he had brought with him his wife Elizabeth, his daughter, also called Elizabeth (or Betty) and his niece, Abigail Williams, as well as his slave, the twenty five year old Tituba and her ‘consort’, Indian John. It was Betty and Abigail (now nine and eleven years old) who first began behaving oddly. A doctor was called but could find nothing wrong with them; their symptoms, he concluded, could only be the results of witchcraft. Within weeks two more village girls began to act in the same manner. They were seventeen year old Betty Hubbard and twelve year old Ann Putnam. Betty was the indentured maidservant of the physician who had first suggested witchcraft. Ann was the daughter of Thomas Putnam, the Parish clerk and his wife, also called Ann, both strong supporters of Rev. Parris. A firm believer in witchcraft, Ann Sr. was, like other members of her family, an excitable, somewhat unbalanced person who seems to have greatly influenced her daughter’s behaviour. Along with the Parris girls, the Putnams, mother and daughter, were to play prominent roles in the events which followed.In an attempt to alleviate their symptoms, the Rev. Parris organized prayer meetings and days of fasting, but the girls covered their ears and would not listen. A neighbour resorted to a more unconventional method of getting at the truth; she asked Tituba and Indian John to make what was known as a ‘witch cake’. This was a mixture of rye and barley meal. Old English superstition held that, when cooked together with Betty's urine and fed to a dog (a known familiar of the Devil), this mixture would cause the animal to reveal the identity of the girl’s oppressor. When Parris learnt of this development he was horrified; the witch cake, he said, was ‘the devil's own means to reveal the devil's presence’.The first accusationsUnder pressure from her father and other grown-ups Betty and Ann Jr. eventually named Tituba and two other women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn, as the source of their troubles. Born in Barbados, Tituba has been variously described as of west African or South American origin: we shall probably never know. The important point is that her contemporaries thought of her as an Indian, and thus an agent of the Devil. Because of her exotic origins Tituba was thought by some to have influenced the children’s behaviour, but there is no real evidence for this. Nevertheless, the possibility that a woman of Tituba’s background could have spent the long New England winters filling the children’s ears with stories of the supernatural cannot be entirely dismissed. The thirty eight year old Sarah Good, already under suspicion for witchcraft, was a natural scapegoat. After falling on hard times she and her children wandered from door to door begging for charity; refusal was met by mutterings which the simple village folk took to be curses. Sixty year old Sarah Osborne (née Warren) was not a regular churchgoer and before her marriage had lived ‘irregularly’ with her Irish indentured servant. She had long been involved in litigation with her children over her first husband’s estate, and the Putnam family were on the children’s side.Warrants were issued for the arrest of the three women and they were duly brought before the examining magistrates, John Hathorne and John Corwin on 1 March. The magistrates’ first question of Sarah Good shows exactly how little doubt they had of her guilt. Asked, ‘What evil spirit have you familiarity with?’ She denied having any. Asked what she had muttered when leaving the Parris household, Sarah said she was saying the commandments, changing her story later to saying a psalm. What happened next was to set a pattern for future examinations. Hathorne asked the children ‘to look upon her, and see if this were the person that had hurt them.’ They did so, and ‘presently they were all tormented’, going into paroxysms as if in pain. No doubt in desperation, Sarah Good named her fellow accused as the one who had tormented the children, and Sarah Osborne was duly ushered before the magistrates.Sarah Osborne’s appearance had the same effect on the children as Sarah Good’s. Faced with a deposition from Betty Hubbard alleging that she had visited her in spectral form, Sarah answered ‘I doe not know [but] that the devil goes about in my likeness to doe any hurt.’ It was a good point; how should she know what the Devil got up to? But Sarah was as superstitious as anyone in Salem. She told the court that ‘shee was more like to be bewitched, than that shee was a witch.’ Asked what made her say so, ‘shee answered that shee was frighted one time in her sleep and either saw or dreamed that shee saw a thing like an indian all black which did prick her in her neck and pulled her by the back part of her head to the dore of the house.’ (Emphasis added.)Finally, the court turned to Tituba. At first, the slave denied having had any contact with the Devil, but under pressure from examiners determined to find evidence of witchcraft, dramatically ‘confessed she was a Witch, and that she with the two other accused did torment and bewitch the complainers, and that these with two others whose names she knew not, had their Witch-meeting together.’ She had seen ‘a thing like a man, that tould me Searve him & I tould him noe I would nott doe Such thing.’ Her imagination now took flight: the visitant was ‘Sometimes like a hogge. Sometimes like a great black dogge.’ She had also seen a yellow bird and ‘2 Catts, one Red, another black as bigge as a little dogge’. Asked what she rode upon to go to hurt the children, Tituba replied, ‘I Rid upon a stick or poale & Good & Osburne behind me we Ride taking hold of one another don't know how we goe for I Saw noe trees nor path, but was presently there when wee were up.’After three days questioning all three accused were remanded toBoston prison in chains to await their trial. Sarah Osborne cheated death by dying in prison on the day set down for the hearing. Sarah Good lasted only a few days longer before she was tried, condemned and hanged. Tituba was more fortunate. By confessing, she was saved from the gallows so that she could give evidence against other ‘witches’. It cost her thirteen months in gaol.But the Putnams had not finished with the Good family. Sarah’s four-year-old daughter Dorothy (known as Dorcas) was the first child to be accused of witchcraft. Arrested and taken to Salem gaol, she was examined by three magistrates. It must have been a fearful experience for one so young and impressionable, for she was soon persuaded to display the finger upon which her familiar was supposed to suck. Dorothy’s cooperation with the court was rewarded by committal to prison, where she remained for eight months with her legs in eight pound irons like the grown-ups. (This practice was thought to prevent witches from sending their spectres abroad to torment good Christian folk.). Dorothy was eventually released when the witch hunt ended, but only after her now deranged mother had been hanged and her baby sister had died. She herself had been ‘so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very changeable haveing little or no reason to govern herself’But even before the accusers had finished with little Dorothy they had trained their eyes on another target.‘In the hands of authority’Seventy two year old Martha Corey (Goodwife Corey) was a deeply religious person, though believed to have had an illegitimate child by a Red Indian, which smacked of witchcraft in the eyes of many. An independent minded woman, she was known to be scornful of stories of witches. When Ann Putnam Jr. put it around that she had been visited by Martha’s spirit two local busybodies, Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever, resolved to investigate. They decided to test her story by asking her how the spirit was dressed. According to Charles Upham, ‘The girl told them that Goody Corey, knowing that they contemplated making this visit, had just appeared in spirit to her, but had blinded her so that she could not tell what clothes she wore.’ Apparently accepting this ridiculous story at face value, the two then went to Martha’s house. ‘I know what you are come for.’ She said. ‘You are come to talk with me about being a witch, but I am none. I cannot help people’s talking of me.’ Martha, who denied that there were such things as witches, had earlier boasted that the magistrates’ ‘eyes were blinded and that she could open them.’ In this she was sadly mistaken.At Martha’s first examination on 21 March magistrate Hathorne began as he intended to go on, ‘You are now in the hands of Authority; tell me now why you hurt these persons’. When she denied having afflicted anyone Hathorne asked, 'Who did, then?' She replied, 'I do not know; how should I know?' A number of villagers then ‘vehemently accuse(d) her in the assembly of afflicting them, by biting, pinching, strangling, etc.; and that they did in their fit see her likeness coming to them, and bringing a book to them.’ Martha denied knowledge of any book. Charged with having a yellow bird that used to suck betwixt her fingers, she said she had no familiarity with any such thing, adding indignantly that ‘she was a gospel woman’. Of her accusers, Martha could only say, ‘We must not believe all that these distracted children say.’ But it was what they did that counted. The Rev. Deodat Lawson recorded that,It was observed several times that if (Martha) did but bite her underlip in time of examination, the persons afflicted were bitten on their arms and wrists and produced the marks before the magistrates, ministers, and others. And being watched for that, if she did but pinch her fingers, or grasp one hand hard in another, they were pinched, and produced the marks before the magistrates and spectators.Some of the ‘afflicted’ even claimed to be able to see a black man whispering in Martha’s ear. The last recorded exchange went,Hathorne: ‘What do you say to all these thing that are apparent?’Martha: ‘If you will all go hang me how can I help it.’Hathoren: ‘Were you to serve the Devil ten years tell how many?’‘She laught.’There was nothing for it but to remand the obviously guilty Martha to prison. With one member of the church in prison on suspicion of witchcraft the accusers decided to aim for yet another, this time, in Upham’s words, a person ‘of acknowledged worth’.The attack on the Towne familyFor over half a century the Putnam family of Salem had been locked in a boundary dispute with the Towne family of Topsfield, a village some four miles to the north. Seventy year old Rebecca Nurse, née Towne, was known to be of the anti-Parris faction and Ann Putnam Sr. seems to have judged that this was the time to strike. The villagers were stunned when this pious, almost saint-like character was arrested and brought before the magistrates on 24 March. Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam and others told their usual rigmarole of having been tormented by Rebecca’s apparition that very day. Even Rebecca’s daughter, Sarah was persuaded to testify against her. At one point in the proceedings Ann Putnam interrupted the questioning by shouting out, ‘Did you not bring the Black Man with you, did you not bid me tempt God and dye?’ Rebecca raised her hands to heaven and exclaimed, ‘Oh Lord help me’; at which the children immediately went into fits. Later, the ‘afflicted’ were seen to mimic the poor woman’s movements.Rebecca denied the accusation of witchcraft ‘before my eternal Father’, but all the magistrate was concerned about was that the evidence of the afflicted had not reduced her to tears: ‘It is very awful,’ he said, ‘to all to see these agonies … & yet to see you stand with dry eyes …’ (As a contemporary, Thomas Brattle was later to observe, ‘Some there are who never shed tears; others there are that ordinarily shed tears upon light occasions, and yet for their lives cannot shed a tear when the deepest sorrow is upon their hearts; and who is there that knows not these things?’) Rebecca was now, in Upham’s words, ‘infirm, half deaf, cross-questioned, circumvented, surrounded with folly, uproar, and outrage.’ She exclaimed bitterly, ‘You do not know my heart.’Rebecca had two sisters, Sarah Cloyce (or Cloyse), and the 57 year old Mary Easty. They were shortly to be the subject of similar accusations. At a church service on 20 March Ann Putnam Sr. had shouted, ‘Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers.’ A week later Rev. Parris took as the text of his sermon, ‘Have I not chosen you twelve and one of you is a Devil?’ Sarah had had enough; taking this to be a condemnation of her sister, Rebecca, she ‘rose up, and went out, the Wind shutting the door forcibly, gave occasion to some to suppose she went out in Anger, as might occasion a suspicion of her.’ It did, and a warrant was promptly issued for Sarah’s arrest. She was to languish in gaol until the following January when the charges against her were dismissed by a grand jury.But when it came to the turn of Rebecca’s other sister, the fifty year old Mary Easty, the evidence seems not to have been as convincing as usual. So much so, that the magistrate asked Ann Putnam, ‘Are you certain that this is the woman?’ For reasons unknown, most of the accusers seem to have had second thoughts and Mary was discharged. This was too much for one of the ‘afflicted’, the nineteen year old Mercy Lewis, who promptly went into paroxysm of unprecedented severity which lasted the whole day. It was enough for the magistrate to order the unfortunate Mary to be rearrested. From prison she appealed to the Governor and judges,‘I Petition your Honors not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set, but the Lord he knows it is; if it be possible, that no more Innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not, but your Honors do the utmost of your powers, in the discovery and detection of Witchcraft and Witches, and would not be guilty of Innocent blood for the world; but in my own Innocency I know you are in the wrong way.’This moving plea made not a bit of difference and Mary was duly convicted and taken to the gallows, along with others, on 22 September. Before being turned off the ladder she prayed for an end to the witch-hunt.The ProctorsAlso arrested at the same time as Sarah were John Proctor and his third wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth managed her husband’s tavern in Salem town, an occupation which was regarded by many as unsuitable for a woman. Her Quaker faith also gave cause for suspicion in the deeply Puritan town. So important was her examination thought to be that the regular magistrates were joined in the meeting house on 11 April by four colleagues from the Court of Assistants, and the court was presided over by the Deputy Governor of the Province.The first witness was John Indian, who told the magistrates how Goody Proctor and Goody Cloyce had come to him at night and choked him ‘a good many time’. Hearing this, Sarah could not contain herself and exclaimed, ‘Oh. You are a grievous liar.’ Two of the prosecution witnesses refused to speak, though for what reason it is impossible to say. When Abigail Williams gave evidence that Sarah had asked her to write in the Devil’s book, the accused gently reminded the witness, ‘Dear child. It is not so. There is another judgment, dear child’; it was enough to send Abigail and Ann into paroxysms in which they called out, ‘'Look you! there is Goody Proctor upon the beam’, indicating the rafters of the meeting house. (For some reason the villagers seem to have fastened on the idea that the Devil’s servants had nothing better to do than hang around on roof beams.)When things had quietened down the court decided to apply the acid test for witchcraft. Elizabeth was required to recite the Lord’s prayer, an accomplishment which everyone knew that witches could not perform inerrantly. Sure enough, the terrified woman pronounced the phrase, ‘Hallowed be thy name’ as ‘Hollowed be they name’. It did not bode well for her.Elizabeth’s husband, the tall, sixty year old John Proctor, stood beside her during the examination. When one of the girls called out that the spectre of John would raise up a woman’s feet; sure enough, the feet of Bathsheba Pope were seen to arise. Another woman, Goody Bibber suffered a similar indignity. John was a farmer accustomed to speaking his mind and his mind scorned the whole idea of witches. He had once said, ‘They should rather be had to the whipping post… If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches’. Before the magistrates two of the accusers ‘cried out of John himself, saying that he was a wizard. Immediately, ‘many if not all of the bewitched had grievous fits.’ Deputy Governor Danforth asked John why they were suffering so. ‘I know not,’ he replied, ‘I am innocent.’ It did him no good and the following day he and his wife were committed to prison along with other suspected witches.John Proctor ended on the gallows, a fate which his wife Elizabeth escaped only by reason of her pregnancy. In January of the following year, while still in prison, she gave birth to another child, but mother and daughter were not released until the general amnesty four months later. Three other children of the Proctors’ had been arrested along with their parents, but their fate is unknown. For the accusers, it had been an almost clean sweep.The accuser who turnedThere was now an extraordinary development. Two of the foremost accusers, Mercy Lewis and Ann Putnam turned on a third, Mary Warren and declared that it was she who had forced Elizabeth Proctor to sign the devil’s book. Cast into prison, Mary replied in kind, saying that her former accomplices were not to be believed any more than a simpleton. When she was examined on 19 April magistrate Corwin asked her, quite reasonably, ‘You were a little while ago an afflicted person, now you are an afflicter: how comes this to pass?’ Her enigmatic reply was that she took it to be ‘a great Mercy of God’. The ‘afflicted’ children immediately went into fits, which were capped only by Mary doing the same, but repeatedly and at greater length.When Mary had calmed down sufficiently to be examined further she was reminded of her accusation that ‘the afflicted persons did but dissemble’. This caused her to collapse again. On coming to, she said, ‘Oh! I am sorry for it, I am sorry for it, & wringed her hands, & fell a little while into a fit again & then came to speak, but immediately her Teeth were set, & then she fell into a violent fit, & cryed out, Oh Lord help me, Oh good Lord save me!’ Later in prison Mary seems to have had yet another change of heart for she now declared that the Proctors, husband and wife, were both witches and that at their bidding she had signed the Devil’s book and had tormented the children. Perhaps she had decided that it was best to give the inquisitor what he wanted, or perhaps she had been, as the historian, Chadwick Hansen has suggested, ‘literally driven insane’. Whether from confusion or design, however, Mary’s status as a confessed witch was to keep her off the gallows long enough to ensure her survival.The one who got awayOne who managed – narrowly - to avoid the fate of so many others was Elizabeth Cary (or Carey) of Charleston, across the river from Boston. Hearing that she had been accused of witchcraft, the doughty Elizabeth and her husband, Captain Nathaniel Carey determined to go to Salem to see what it was all about. When they arrived on 24 May they met John Indian in a tavern in order to hear his story. Abigail Williams had promised to be there, but ‘instead of one Accuser, they all came in, who began to tumble down like Swine, and then three Women were called in to attend them. We in the Room were all at a stand, to see who they would cry out of; but in a short time they cried out, “Cary”’. Elizabeth was immediately hauled before Hathorne and Corwin, where she was forced her to stand with her arms apart in order to prevent her from tormenting the children. Later, her husband pathetically reported that, ‘I did request that I might hold one of her hands, but it was denied me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint.’ With all his characteristic lack of impartiality and compassion Justice Hathorne remarked that if she had strength enough to torment those persons, she should have strength enough to stand.The hearing ended with Elizabeth being committed to prison in leg irons. Nathaniel tried unsuccessfully to have her trial removed out of Salem; in desperation he arranged her escape from prison. The couple fled to New York, where they remained until the witch fever died down. Thomas Brattle thought that various ‘high officials’ had been complicit in her escape, which suggests that by this date a degree of cynicism with the witch hunt had begun to set at a high level.The brave CaptainThe accusers also met their match in the case of the redoubtable Captain Alden.According to Calef, John Alden was an ‘Indian fighter, naval commander, now at seventy a man of wealth, (and) one of the leading figures of New England’. Alden himself later recorded how, when he was examined on 31 May, ‘Those Wenches being present, … plaid their jugling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in Peoples Faces.’ Alden turned to the magistrate and pertinently asked, ‘What's the reason you don't fall when I look at you?’ Hathorne had no answer. Alden was nevertheless committed to prison. He escaped three months later, along with another prisoner and was not seen again until his case was discharged by proclamation the following year.But nothing could stop the accusations. In the month of May alone 36 warrants were issued for the arrest of suspect witches and by the end of that month about one hundred people were in prison. The ancient court system was groaning under the strain and something had to be done about it.Massachusetts had been without a charter since 1684 following disagreements with the home country. A delegation had been sent to England under one of Massachusetts’ most prominent divines, the Rev. Increase Mather. Their efforts bore fruit and on 14 May 1692 Mather returned to the colony with a new charter and a new Governor, the successful soldier and merchant Sir William Phips. On 27 May Phips, acting on his own authority, set up a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to ‘hear and determine’ the witchcraft cases. As chief justice, he appointed his Lieutenant Governor, William Stoughton. It was a disastrous choice.The first trialThe person with the dubious privilege of being the first to be tried by the new court was sixty year old Bridget Bishop. Despite the fact that she was a member in full fellowship of the church in the nearby village of Beverly, Bridget was suspect for various reasons; she owned a tavern where drinking and games of shovel board took place even on the Sabbath; she seldom had a good word to say about her neighbours and she was slow at paying her bills. Worse, only six years before, Bridget had been accused of murder by witchcraft, but had been acquitted.Prof. Richard Frances has painted the scene in court on 2 June:On the one hand: the row of grave justices … in long scarlet gowns with matching hoods, along with attending ministers like Samuel Parris from Salem village and Nicholas Noye from Salem town, in their black robes, white cravats around their necks conveying the dignity of spiritual office. On the other the accused, mainly girls, some of them small ones, shrieking, falling over going into paroxysms, staring at Bridget Bishop like children do in playgrounds, seeing who will be the first to blink, though here a life depended on it. Then there were the onlookers, fascinated by the spectacle but fearful a finger might suddenly, arbitrarily be pointed at them. Many were weather-beaten country people from Salem village and outlying parts, men in smocks or doublets and knee breeches with worsted stockings, the women with shawls – long handkerchiefs as they called them – their homemade dresses dirty at the bottom where they swirled over miry paths and fields … Some better off townspeople were sprinkled among them, a glint of brass buckles and buttons on their shoes and surcoats, the women in gowns with virago sleeves, made of patterned quality material, sarcenet or velvet…On the morning of the trial Bridget was examined for witchmarks. It was believed at the time that the Devil confirmed his pact with a witch by giving him or her some bodily confirmation, such as supernumerary nipples in the armpits or other concealed place. The result was a series of humiliating bodily examinations of suspects. If a witch mark was found it was proof of guilt; if absent, it was not proof of innocence. The jury of nine matrons which examined Bridget found a ‘preternathurall Excresence of flesh between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women’. It was a clear sign of witchcraft, but, frustratingly, ‘upon a second search, within Three or four hours, there was no such thing to be seen…’ The task of the witchfinder was truly difficult.The prosecution began their case by calling witnesses who told how they had been visited at night by Bridget’s spectre. A man spoke of having being kissed by her on the lips. Could it be that he harboured sexual fantasies about this attractive woman who was notorious for wearing a scarlet bodice? As had now become customary, ‘the Bewitched were extreamly Tortured. If (the accused) did but cast her Eyes on them, they were presently struck down; and this in such a manner as there could be no Collusion in the Business. But upon the Touch of her Hand upon them, when they lay in their Swoons, they would immediately Revive; and not upon the Touch of any ones else …’ Fifty year old Deliverance Hobbs, who had confessed to being a witch and was now probably out of her mind, claimed that Bridget had administered the sacrament to her at a witches’ Sabbath. To crown it all, labourers employed to tear down a wall of Bridget’s house gave incriminating evidence of ‘poppets’, or ritual dolls, concealed within it for which she could give no good explanation.‘There was,’ wrote Cotton Mather, ‘one very strange thing more with which the court was newly entertained. As this woman was under a guard passing by the great and spacious meeting house of Salem she gave a look towards the house and immediately a demon, invisibly entering the meeting house, tore down a part of it; so that there was no person to be seen there, yet the people, at the noise, running in, found a board, which was strongly fastened with nails, transported into another quarter of the house.’ (Is it only in our more cynical days that we question how, if the devil was invisible, he could be seen entering the building?) Eight days after the inevitable verdict of guilty Bridget was taken to Gallows Hill and hanged, the first fatality of the Salem witch-hunt.Gallows Hill was a promontory overlooking the North river. (The exact site is disputed.) It had been chosen, so the superstitious villagers believed, in order that Satan and his imps could survey the destruction of their kingdom in the New World. Drawn through the village on a cart and placed on a ladder before being launched into eternity, the condemned had to listen to the minister’s sermon and confess their sins. Their end would not have been an easy one. Death by hanging was not the speedy dispatch perfected two centuries later. Instead of the immediate loss of consciousness which results from a broken neck, the condemned slowly strangled to death over a number of minutes. Afterwards, their bodies were thrown into a shallow grave, to be rescued secretly at night by any relatives brave enough to do so.