the salem witch trials thesis

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Salem Witch Trials

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: November 4, 2011

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months. 

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Belief in the supernatural—and specifically in the devil’s practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty—had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England . In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts ) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem). 

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents’ suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren.

In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women—the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn—whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trials: Who Were the Main Accusers?

Though adult women—and a few men—accused their neighbors of witchcraft in 1692, the core group of accusers were girls.

5 Notable Women Hanged in the Salem Witch Trials

An elderly widow, a beggar and a church‑going woman who made a stand against the trials were among those executed.

How the Salem Witch Trials Influenced the American Legal System

Those accused lacked basic legal protections, including the premise that one was innocent until proven guilty.

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse—both regarded as upstanding members of church and community—and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused “witches” confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha’s husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton’s father) later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that “It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned.” 

Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

Salem Witch Trials: What Caused the Hysteria?

Explore five factors that fueled unease and panic over accusations of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials.

Before America Had Witch Trials, Europe Had Werewolf Trials

A few of the accused may have been actual pedophiles or serial killers, but many were beggars, hermits or recent émigrés who were tortured into confessions.

7 Bizarre Witch Trial Tests

From barbaric tortures and occult dessert dishes to unwinnable trials by ordeal, find out more about seven unusual tests once used as evidence of supernatural misconduct.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711. 

Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play “The Crucible” (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist “witch hunts” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

HISTORY Vault: Salem Witch Trials

Experts dissect the facts—and the enduring mysteries—surrounding the courtroom trials of suspected witches in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692.

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Witch hunts

Setting the scene, fits and contortions, three witches.

• Aftermath and legacy

What caused the Salem witch trials?

How did the salem witch trials end, what is the legacy of the salem witch trials.

Salem witch trials

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• Bill of Rights Institute - The Salem Witch Trials
• Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project - Overview of the Salem Witch Trials
• American History Central - Salem Witch Trials — the Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692
• World History Encyclopedia - Salem Witch Trials
• Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University - Salem Witch Trials
• GlobalSecurity.org - 1692 - The Witches of Salem
• The National Endowment for the Humanities - The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records
• Ancient Origins - Salem Witch Trial hysteria and the courageous stance of Giles Corey
• Famous Trials - Salem Witchcraft Trials
• Salem Witch Trials - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Salem witch trials - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

In the late 1600s the Salem Village community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers, Massachusetts) was fairly small and undergoing a period of turmoil with little political guidance. There was a social divide between the leading families as well as a split between factions that were for and against the village’s new pastor, Samuel Parris. After some young girls of the village (two of them relatives of Parris) started demonstrating strange behaviours and fits, they were urged to identify the person who had bewitched them. Their initial accusations gave way to trials, hysteria, and a frenzy that resulted in further accusations, often between the differing factions.

How many people were killed during the Salem witch trials?

By the end of the Salem witch trials, 19 people had been hanged and 5 others had died in custody. Additionally, a man was pressed beneath heavy stones until he died.

After weeks of informal hearings, Sir William Phips, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , interceded to add some formality to the proceedings. Over the following year many trials were held and many people imprisoned. As the trials continued, accusations extended beyond Salem Village to surrounding communities. After Governor Phips’s wife was accused, he again interceded and ordered that a new court be established that would not allow so-called spectral evidence. By May 1693 everyone in custody under conviction or suspicion of witchcraft had been pardoned by Phips.

The haphazard fashion in which the Salem witch trials were conducted contributed to changes in U.S. court procedures, including rights to legal representation and cross-examination of accusers as well as the presumption that one is innocent until proven guilty. The Salem trials also went on to become a powerful metaphor for the anticommunist hearings led by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s, famously in the form of Arthur Miller ’s allegorical play The Crucible (1953).

Salem witch trials , (June 1692–May 1693), in American history, a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted “witches” to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers , Massachusetts).

The events in Salem in 1692 were but one chapter in a long story of witch hunts that began in Europe between 1300 and 1330 and ended in the late 18th century (with the last known execution for witchcraft taking place in Switzerland in 1782). The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European witch-hunt fervour, which peaked from the 1580s and ’90s to the 1630s and ’40s. Some three-fourths of those European witch hunts took place in western Germany , the Low Countries , France , northern Italy , and Switzerland. The number of trials and executions varied according to time and place, but it is generally believed that some 110,000 persons in total were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 to 60,000 were executed.

The “hunts” were efforts to identify witches rather than pursuits of individuals who were already thought to be witches. Witches were considered to be followers of Satan who had traded their souls for his assistance. It was believed that they employed demons to accomplish magical deeds, that they changed from human to animal form or from one human form to another, that animals acted as their “familiar spirits,” and that they rode through the air at night to secret meetings and orgies. There is little doubt that some individuals did worship the devil and attempt to practice sorcery with harmful intent. However, no one ever embodied the concept of a “witch” as previously described.

The process of identifying witches began with suspicions or rumours. Accusations followed, often escalating to convictions and executions. The Salem witch trials and executions came about as the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all of which unfolded in a vacuum of political authority.

There were two Salems in the late 17th century: a bustling commerce-oriented port community on Massachusetts Bay known as Salem Town, which would evolve into modern Salem , and, roughly 10 miles (16 km) inland from it, a smaller, poorer farming community of some 500 persons known as Salem Village. The village itself had a noticeable social divide that was exacerbated by a rivalry between its two leading families—the well-heeled Porters, who had strong connections with Salem Town’s wealthy merchants, and the Putnams , who sought greater autonomy for the village and were the standard-bearers for the less-prosperous farm families. Squabbles over property were commonplace, and litigiousness was rampant.

In 1689, through the influence of the Putnams, Samuel Parris , a merchant from Boston by way of Barbados , became the pastor of the village’s Congregational church. Parris, whose largely theological studies at Harvard College (now Harvard University ) had been interrupted before he could graduate, was in the process of changing careers from business to the ministry. He brought to Salem Village his wife, their three children, a niece, and two slaves who were originally from Barbados—John Indian, a man, and Tituba , a woman. (There is uncertainty regarding the relationship between the slaves and their ethnic origins. Some scholars believe that they were of African heritage, while others think that they may have been of Caribbean Native American heritage.)

Parris had shrewdly negotiated his contract with the congregation, but relatively early in his tenure he sought greater compensation, including ownership of the parsonage, which did not sit well with many members of the congregation. Parris’s orthodox Puritan theology and preaching also divided the congregation, a split that became demonstrably visible when he routinely insisted that nonmembers of the congregation leave before communion was celebrated. In the process Salem divided into pro- and anti-Parris factions.

Probably stimulated by voodoo tales told to them by Tituba , Parris’s daughter Betty (age 9), his niece Abigail Williams (age 11), and their friend Ann Putnam, Jr. (about age 12), began indulging in fortune-telling. In January 1692 Betty’s and Abigail’s increasingly strange behaviour (described by at least one historian as juvenile deliquency) came to include fits. They screamed, made odd sounds, threw things, contorted their bodies, and complained of biting and pinching sensations.

Looking back with the perspective provided by modern science, some scholars have speculated that the strange behaviour may have resulted from some combination of asthma , encephalitis , Lyme disease , epilepsy , child abuse , delusional psychosis, or convulsive ergotism—the last a disease caused by eating bread or cereal made of rye that has been infected with the fungus ergot , which can elicit vomiting, choking, fits, hallucinations, and the sense of something crawling on one’s skin. (The hallucinogen LSD is a derivative of ergot.) Given the subsequent spread of the strange behaviour to other girls and young women in the community and the timing of its display, however, those physiological and psychological explanations are not very convincing. The litany of odd behaviour also mirrored that of the children of a Boston family who in 1688 were believed to have been bewitched, a description of which had been provided by Congregational minister Cotton Mather in his book Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689) and which may have been known by the girls in Salem Village. In February, unable to account for their behaviour medically, the local doctor, William Griggs, put the blame on the supernatural. At the suggestion of a neighbour, a “witch cake” (made with the urine of the victims) was baked by Tituba to try to ferret out the supernatural perpetrator of the girls’ illness. Although it provided no answers, its baking outraged Parris, who saw it as a blasphemous act.

Pressured by Parris to identify their tormentor, Betty and Abigail claimed to have been bewitched by Tituba and two other marginalized members of the community, neither of whom attended church regularly: Sarah Good , an irascible beggar, and Sarah Osborn (also spelled Osborne), an elderly bed-ridden woman who was scorned for her romantic involvement with an indentured servant . On March 1 two magistrates from Salem Town, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, went to the village to conduct a public inquiry. Both Good and Osborn protested their own innocence, though Good accused Osborn. Initially, Tituba also claimed to be blameless, but after being repeatedly badgered (and undoubtedly fearful owing to her vulnerable status as a slave), she told the magistrates what they apparently wanted to hear—that she had been visited by the devil and made a deal with him. In three days of vivid testimony, she described encounters with Satan’s animal familiars and with a tall, dark man from Boston who had called upon her to sign the devil’s book, in which she saw the names of Good and Osborn along with those of seven others that she could not read.

The magistrates then had not only a confession but also what they accepted as evidence of the presence of more witches in the community, and hysteria mounted. Other girls and young women began experiencing fits, among them Ann Putnam, Jr. ; her mother; her cousin, Mary Walcott; and the Putnams’s servant, Mercy Lewis. Significantly, those that they began identifying as other witches were no longer just outsiders and outcasts but rather upstanding members of the community, beginning with Rebecca Nurse , a mature woman of some prominence. As the weeks passed, many of the accused proved to be enemies of the Putnams , and Putnam family members and in-laws would end up being the accusers in dozens of cases.

Salem Massachusetts: Salem Witch Trials, HIstory and Fright Tourism

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This thesis examines the history of Salem Massachusetts and how it has transformed itself from a Puritanical society primarily remembered for its execution of nineteen innocent men and women falsely accused of witchcraft in the 1690s to the modern “City of Witches” known for its annual month-long celebration Haunted Happenings, dozens of occult, metaphysical and wiccan shops and for being home to thousands of modern witches. With the growing phenomenon known as fright tourism, this research utilizes both historical primary documents as well as more modern writings to take a look at how Salem Massachusetts has been able to utilize a dark point in its past as a means to educate the public, honor the victims of this tragedy and generate revenue for the city. The final product of this research is a virtual walking tour, available online for anyone who is interested in learning more about the history of Salem from the Trials to today regardless of their location or accessibility needs. Prior walking tours have focused heavily on the Salem witch trials, this walking tour offers a fresh approach by providing a glimpse into the past while focusing on modern Salem. https://www.salemwitcheswalk.com

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What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

Looking into the underlying causes of the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.

In February 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem Village found itself at the center of a notorious case of mass hysteria: eight young women accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Trials ensued and, when the episode concluded in May 1693, fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for their supposed supernatural crimes.

The Salem witch trials occupy a unique place in our collective history. The mystery around the hysteria and miscarriage of justice continue to inspire new critiques, most recently with the recent release of The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff.

But what caused the mass hysteria, false accusations, and lapses in due process? Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories.

The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a “little ice age” that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself.

Emily Oster posits that the “little ice age” caused economic deterioration and food shortages that led to anti-witch fervor in communities in both the United States and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Temperatures began to drop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the coldest periods occurring from 1680 to 1730. The economic hardships and slowdown of population growth could have caused widespread scapegoating which, during this period, manifested itself as persecution of so-called witches, due to the widely accepted belief that “witches existed, were capable of causing physical harm to others and could control natural forces.”

Salem Village, where the witchcraft accusations began, was an agrarian, poorer counterpart to the neighboring Salem Town, which was populated by wealthy merchants. According to the oft-cited book  Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Village was being torn apart by two opposing groups–largely agrarian townsfolk to the west and more business-minded villagers to the east, closer to the Town. “What was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be.” In a retrospective look at their book for a 2008 William and Mary Quarterly Forum , Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that as tensions between the two groups unfolded, “they followed deeply etched factional fault lines that, in turn, were influenced by anxieties and by differing levels of engagement with and access to the political and commercial opportunities unfolding in Salem Town.” As a result of increasing hostility, western villagers accused eastern neighbors of witchcraft.

But some critics including Benjamin C. Ray have called Boyer and Nissenbaum’s socio-economic theory into question . For one thing –the map they were using has been called into question. He writes: “A review of the court records shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is, in fact, highly interpretive and considerably incomplete.” Ray goes on:

Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed, geo graphic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different economic status.

On the other hand, the physiological theories for the mass hysteria and witchcraft accusations include both fungus poisoning and undiagnosed encephalitis.

Linnda Caporael argues that the girls suffered from convulsive ergotism, a condition caused by ergot, a type of fungus, found in rye and other grains. It produces hallucinatory, LSD-like effects in the afflicted and can cause victims to suffer from vertigo, crawling sensations on the skin, extremity tingling, headaches, hallucinations, and seizure-like muscle contractions. Rye was the most prevalent grain grown in the Massachusetts area at the time, and the damp climate and long storage period could have led to an ergot infestation of the grains.

One of the more controversial theories states that the girls suffered from an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica , an inflammation of the brain spread by insects and birds. Symptoms include fever, headaches, lethargy, double vision, abnormal eye movements, neck rigidity, behavioral changes, and tremors.  In her 1999 book, A Fever in Salem , Laurie Winn Carlson argues that in the winter of 1691 and spring of 1692, some of the accusers exhibited these symptoms, and that a doctor had been called in to treat the girls. He couldn’t find an underlying physical cause, and therefore concluded that they suffered from possession by witchcraft, a common diagnoses of unseen conditions at the time.

The controversies surrounding the accusations, trials, and executions in Salem, 1692, continue to fascinate historians and we continue to ask why, in a society that should have known better, did this happen? Economic and physiological causes aside, the Salem witchcraft trials continue to act as a parable of caution against extremism in judicial processes.

Editor’s note: This post was edited to clarify that Salem Village was where the accusations began, not where the trials took place.

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Salem Witch Trials

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The Salem Witch Trials were a series of legal proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-1693 resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 others based, initially, on the reports of young girls who claimed to have been harmed by the spells of certain women they accused of witchcraft.

The initial accusers were Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) who were supported in their claims by Ann Putnam the Younger (age 12) and Elisabeth Hubbard (age 17), but once those accusations were made, many others not only supported the girls but brought charges against their fellow citizens, sparking a witch hunt in Salem and the surrounding communities.

At the heart of the trials and later executions were religion and superstition in Colonial America . The Bible , in the Book of Exodus 22:18, states "Thou shalt not suffer a witch live," and this was adhered to as closely as any other biblical injunction and encouraged by the Salem Village minister of the time, the Reverend Samuel Parris (l. 1653-1720). Parris was the fourth minister called by the Salem Village congregation. Earlier ministers had left after relatively brief stays, and Parris was faring little better in his ability to mediate disputes between neighbors until he managed to focus their energies on accusing each other of witchcraft. The underlying tensions of the community found expression in the persecution of marginalized members – and then those well-respected – in the community which resulted in the execution of 20, self-exile, loss of status, or death in jail while awaiting a court appearance.

As early as 1695, criticism was leveled against the magistrates of Salem for the deaths and persecution of the innocent and this opinion only gained ground afterwards. Between 1700-1703, petitions were filed to have the convictions reversed and the accused exonerated, and in 1711, compensation was authorized for the families of those unjustly executed. Since that time, the Salem Witch Trials have been referenced simply as "witch trials" or "witch hunts" in connection with any unfounded, unfair, and baseless claim against a person or the ideals that person stands for and the event has been given iconic status in the USA and elsewhere.

Colonial Belief in Witchcraft

Legal documents and testimonies of the time establish that there were a number of citizens who did not believe in witchcraft, but the majority – in the New England Colonies as well as the Middle and Southern English Colonies – certainly did. This belief was encouraged by the Bible through stories such as the Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-25) and the line from the Book of Exodus mentioned above. The Bible was understood as the inerrant word of God and made clear that witches were as much of a reality as anything else; questioning the existence of witches meant questioning the divine authority of the Bible.

A belief in witchcraft was further encouraged by the need to explain the seemingly unexplainable. If a pious person or a child or young bride should suddenly fall ill or die, it might be attributed to God’s mysterious will but could as easily be explained by witchcraft and the workings of the devil. Although it may seem strange and irrational to a modern-day audience, the belief was also supported by colonists’ interpretation of everyday experience. If Neighbor A asked to borrow some candles from Neighbor B and Neighbor B refused the request, and if Neighbor B later became ill or their house caught fire or their horse died for no apparent reason, Neighbor A might be accused of having cast a spell to cause the otherwise inexplicable misfortune.

A belief in witches did not originate in the colonies, however, as England – and Europe overall – had been persecuting those accused of witchcraft for centuries. One of the most famous witch trials in English history was that of the Pendle Witches in 1612 in Lancashire which resulted in the execution by hanging of ten people convicted of witchcraft. The records of the proceedings were published in 1613 and widely read, and the case was popularized again in 1634 when one of the accusers was herself accused of witchcraft. The 1634 case was further popularized by the melodrama The Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood (l. c. 1570-1641) and Richard Brome (l. c. 1590-1652), which ends with a supposition of the guilt of the accused.

This was almost always the foregone conclusion of an accusation of witchcraft since it was understood that no one would bring such a serious charge against another without good reason. Accusers seem to always have believed that their word and anecdotal evidence was all the proof a court needed to convict, and while this may have been true of popular opinion, courts did try to weigh objective evidence before handing down a conviction, even if the paradigm of guilty-until-proven-innocent was largely adhered to. This was certainly the case with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 during which over 200 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village, Salem Town, Andover, Ipswich, and Topsfield; 30 were found guilty and 20 executed, most by hanging.

Social & Religious Context

Tensions were already high in both Salem Town and Salem Village in 1692 and had been for some time. The citizens of Salem Village resented the greater affluence of Salem Town as well as its presumption in controlling the village’s affairs. Salem Village had no civil government of its own and was under the jurisdiction of Salem Town. All citizens of both were required to attend Sunday worship services, but Salem Town refused to allow Salem Village to have its own meeting house and so villagers had to travel to the town on Sundays, no matter the weather, which they came to resent.

Salem Village eventually hired their own minister but refused to pay him and so he left. The second minister, George Burroughs, experienced the same problems and resigned but remained in the village. A third minister also resigned, and this contributed to Salem Village’s reputation, as held by Salem Town, as contentious and petty. The fourth minister was Samuel Parris, a failed merchant who had attended Harvard University but never completed his course of study. He seems to have become a minister as a second career choice. In 1689, Salem Village was allowed to form its own church with Parris as their pastor. Scholar Brian P. Levack comments:

Parris proved to be an unfortunate choice: a failed and bitter merchant who resented those who succeeded in the world of commerce, he fueled local hostilities. Parris gave a series of inflammatory sermons that translated faction division into a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. In the minds of his supporters, Salem Town became the symbol of an alien, corrupt, and even diabolical world that threatened the welfare of Salem Village. Because supporters of Samuel Parris perceived their enemies as nothing less than evil, it was but a short step for them to become convinced that those aligned with the town and its interests were servants of Satan. (403)

Tensions increased further with the arrival of immigrants in the area who were members of minority Christian sects, such as the Quakers, who were considered threats to the Puritan vision of the Salem community. Perpetual fear of unseen and unexpected danger had been present in the communities since the outbreak of King Philip's War (1675-1678) when King Philip (also known as Metacomet , l. 1638-1676) of the Native American Wampanoag Confederacy launched an assault on the settlements of New England that killed hundreds and destroyed a number of settlements.

In the midst of these various tensions, in February 1692, Samuel Parris’ daughter Betty and his niece Abigail Williams, began exhibiting strange behavior – crawling around the floor, hiding under furniture, contorting themselves, screaming, and hurling objects – which, lacking any other explanation after they were examined by a physician, was blamed on witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, Ann Putnam the Younger and Elizabeth Hubbard, then Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Warren – all friends of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams – began exhibiting the same signs. When Samuel Parris asked his daughter and niece who had cast the spell that was tormenting them, they named three women – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the Parris’ house-slave Tituba – and Salem Village was plunged into a witch-hunting frenzy.

Sarah Good was a homeless woman who often begged for charity and had been taken in by Samuel Parris for a short time until he threw her out for "malicious behavior" and ingratitude. Sarah Osborne was a wealthy landowner who had not attended church in over three years, claiming a recurring illness, making her as much of an outcast as Good. Tituba was possibly an Arawak of Caribbean origin who was kidnapped, enslaved, and sold to Samuel Parris in Barbados, where his family had a plantation. She was the family’s house-slave and looked after the children, often entertaining them with ghost stories and tales of demons and magic.

Tituba confessed (later revealing Samuel Parris had beaten the confession out of her) and supported the girls’ accusation of Good and Osborne. Good, as noted, was already despised by the Parris family and Osborne, due to her land deals, had adversely affected the finances of Ann Putnam the Younger’s father. Tituba popularized the concept of witches riding on broomsticks and conversing with 'familiars' – spirits in animal form – as well as associating with demonic figures and casting malicious spells. Osborne was hanged as a witch in May and Good in July of 1692, maintaining their innocence to the end; Tituba, since she had confessed, was left in jail because Parris refused to pay the fees which would have released her. She was finally sold for the price of the jail fees and disappears from history.

The accusations against the three marginalized women in February 1692 were only the beginning, however, as more people were accused in March. Two of them, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, were members in good standing in the church. Corey had questioned the validity of the girls’ accusations, insinuating they were lying for personal reasons, and so was charged as a witch for denying the existence of witches. Nurse was accused by the Putnams who claimed her 'specter' was harassing them. The use of 'spectral evidence' was admissible in court as the concept had been addressed by the well-respected Puritan theologian Cotton Mather (l. 1663-1728) whose works were especially popular among the citizens of Massachusetts.

Spectral evidence was simply accepting the word of an accuser over that of the accused as in the case of Martha Corey where the girls cried out in court that her specter was tormenting them and a yellow bird, invisible to everyone but them, was feeding at her hand. Nurse and Corey, both in their early 70s, were hanged. Their convictions heightened the hysteria further in that, if two elderly church-going women in good standing could be witches, anyone could. Corey’s husband, Giles, was accused when he defended her. He refused to stand trial and was executed by pressing – crushed to death by weights – in order to extract a confession of guilt. As he never confessed and was never convicted, his last will was honored and his lands went to his heirs, as he intended, instead of being taken by the Putnam family who had accused him.

Once spectral testimony came under attack and once confessors began to recant, the court found itself in an extremely awkward position…As the eagerness of the court to convict collided with a growing chorus of opposition to its proceedings, the governor felt that he had no choice but to suspend the trials and reassess the situation. (407)

The trials were stopped and pardons issued for those still in jail in May 1693. Although it is well-documented that 19 people were hanged and Giles Corey crushed to death, others died in jail awaiting trial, and over 200 had their reputations damaged if not irreparably ruined. The accusers were never called to account because no one involved doubted the reality of witches and their power to harm nor of Satan and his ability to deceive in order to destroy. After the hysteria died down, the accusers went on with their lives as before.

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Those who had been accused and pardoned, as noted, were not as lucky and lived on with the stigma of the event or moved elsewhere. Three years later, in 1696, the General Court mandated a day of fasting and repentance for the trials on 14 January 1697. Judges who had taken part in the trials publicly repented and asked forgiveness of the community. Beginning in 1700, petitions were filed by family members with the colonial government of Massachusetts to have the convictions overturned, and in 1711, 22 people were exonerated and financial compensation authorized. This pattern continued over the next ten years but not all who had been convicted were cleared even then. The names of all the people convicted were not cleared, in fact, until 2001.

The Salem Witch Trials, as the most infamous event of its kind, has generated a number of myths from the time people began writing about it c. 1700 to the present. Among the most persistent is that "witches" were burned at Salem even though there is no evidence to support this claim. No "witches" were burned at Salem; they were all hanged. Until recently, those convicted were thought to have been hanged on Gallows Hill, conjuring images of a somber death march up the hill to the place of execution, but the Gallows Hill Project of 2017 debunked this myth, establishing that the hangings took place at the bottom of the hill at the far less dramatic area known as Proctor’s Ledge.

It has also been claimed that the majority of those accused were poor, marginalized women, but this has also been challenged and debunked. People of all social classes were accused and convicted, women and men – and, actually, two dogs – for any reason at all. George Burroughs, the second minister to resign at Salem Village, was accused and convicted because he seemed to possess unnatural strength, another woman was convicted because she was able to walk the dusty streets of Salem Village without dirtying her clothing, and Martha Corey, as noted, was executed as a witch for denying witchcraft even existed.

Over the years, many theories have been suggested to explain the Salem witch hysteria and trials. One theory, popularized in the 1970s, is that the colonists were poisoned by ergot fungus on their rye crop in 1692 which caused them to hallucinate, but this does not explain the continuing hysteria throughout 1693 nor the fact that there were many who still believed in witches and the justice of the trials afterwards. Witch trials had been conducted prior to 1692 and would be afterwards throughout the colonies. Class frictions between Salem Village and Salem Town have also been cited as a possible cause, but, although these added to the tensions of the time, they did not actually cause the hysteria. Of the first people accused, only Osborne had connections to Salem Town, the other two were firmly of Salem Village.

The most likely cause of the witch hysteria of 1692-1693 at Salem was religious belief coupled with societal tensions. No one will ever know what caused the girls to make the accusations which started the panic, but once made, they confirmed what was already believed by the colonists. American playwright Arthur Miller’s The Crucible cast the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s which sought to root out communism in the United States. In this play, Miller was drawing attention to the dangers of ideologies which depend on confirmation bias in order to thrive. In both cases, the accusers were operating on a belief in threatening agents in their midst they needed to defend themselves against. The people of Massachusetts already believed in witches because religion in Colonial America encouraged it – they did not need ergot or anything else – all that was required was a physical manifestation of what they feared to confirm what they already knew to be true and act upon it.

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Bibliography

• Drake, J. D. King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676. University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Earle, A. M. Home Life in Colonial Days. The British Library, 2010.
• Hall, D. D. Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology. Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Hawke, D. F. Everyday Life in Early America. Harper & Row, 1989.
• Levack, B. P. The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America . Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Mann, C. C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books, 2012.
• Philbrick, N. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Viking Press, 2007.
• Taylor, A. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Penguin Books, 2002.

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The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear Thesis

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
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Introduction

Salem witch trials, explanation, works cited.

The most distinctive features of Modernism could be enumerated as Universality, development of Political thought, advent of technology and science, different inventions, approach towards Arts, literature, Specified Cultures, distinctive warfare and industry. There are several social and economic factors that make the Modern society different from the Pre Modern Society. Modernism a complex and intricate civilization but the Pre Modern society lacked all these elements and the major aspect of the society and religion was mostly superstition. The aspects of superstition, juxtaposed with entail of religion, was instrumental in every walks of life and this was an alter existence against clear thought process and science. (Knott, 188-9) This was the time in early American history when the fearsome cases of witch-hunt took place and one of the most terrifying incidents was the Salem Witch Trials.

In 1692 in the counties of the English ruled Massachusetts there were conducted a series of trials which meant to prosecute persons accused of practicing witchcraft in these areas. The outbreak began with the sudden and rather unusual illness of the daughter (Betty) and niece (Abigail) of the local Reverend Samuel Parris. Betty, aged 9 was the first to be affected and displayed what we would today call ‘hysterical’ behavior, often screaming and convulsing with pain, throwing things about and crawling around her room. She has also famously been quoted to have felt “pinched and pricked with pins”. To relive her of her strange affliction reverend Parris soon summoned the local doctor, (supposedly) William Griggs who sowed the first seed of trouble by suggesting that her illness was less physiological and more ‘supernatural’. (Kumar, 334)

Abigail Williams, 11, Parris’ orphaned niece complained of similar symptoms soon after Betty and promptly a handful of other girls all over the village displayed the same antics as Betty and Abigail. The people of the village of Salem were famous for their strict Puritanism. The neighboring revolutionary war (to which the Salem residents apparently contributed and war refugees from which probably took shelter in Salem) had left them even more attached to their faith. Death, war and a frantic return to religion provided a fertile ground for the re-emergence of some time tested superstitions. The timely intervention of the young girl’s ailment was exactly the sort of thing that would set a quiet village like Salem on fire.

Given their interest in the subject village girls often coupled together to ‘tell’ fortunes and practice divinations just to keep themselves busy during long idle evenings. Tituba, a young slave girl Parris had acquired from Barbados proved popular at such congregations due to her stock of mystical stories. Occasionally, she was also reported to have ‘told’ fortunes. Following Griggs’ ‘diagnosis’ the village quickly decided that Betty, Abigail and the other girl’s suffering was surely a result of witchcraft being practiced in the village. Residents quickly justified this allegation by referring to the recent loss of cattle and other such similar misfortunes and before long almost all the villagers were sure about witches inhabiting the same space as them.

Tituba was, predictably enough, the first person to be accused of practicing witchcraft. It could be stated that her sex, social status, proximity to the ‘victims’ and most importantly her ethnicity, though unfortunate, left her particularly vulnerable to the allegations. After her two other women Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, both social outcasts and unpopular were similarly accused of being witches. Ironically, while the two Sarah’s never accepted the allegations as true, Tituba soon confessed to being a witch. Sarah Osbourne later died in prison, the other two were later hanged to death. (Tyerman, 233-37)

Human Beings are naturally expressionistic. Thus, if repressed they consciously or subconsciously search for methods of self-expression. In an atmosphere as that of Salem in 1692 women were allowed little or no room to articulate their personal desires, as a result they remained eager to find means to attract attention and establish their existence. The unexplained affliction of the women in Salem has occupied much academic space. In the absence of any real medical evidence for this sort of collective suffering, most academicians and medical practitioners have time and again suggested that the symptoms exhibited by the girls were, in all probability an ‘act’, which the girls used to attract attention.

Young girls such as Abigail and Betty, who remain confined to their home doing little besides household chores such as sewing, cooking etc. crave the merriment of youth and the spotlight attached to it. Puritans however maintain that kids ‘should be seen and not heard’, and hence their values are often completely contradictory to what children usually want. Given the constant lack of attention received children often resort to tactics to attract the sort of attention they want. This tactics may be the sort that we are used to such as tantrums, crying, throwing things, holding their breath etc. or under certain circumstances it may also be what we otherwise call ‘pretension’ or ‘play acting’. (Prawer, 227-229)

The young girls in Salem were engaged, in all probability in such a mass play acting practice. It possibly began as an accident with Betty, but once she and those around her discovered the potential of being afflicted they too jumped into the bandwagon one by one. Each emulated the other and while in public eye used their sudden position of power to cause harm to and accuse everyone and anyone they despised or disliked in the most juvenile manner. It was a power play of the most childish kind, only it ended with about 19 innocent people being killed unnecessarily. (Powell, 49)

The witch hunt in Salem enflamed further with a sudden outbreak of a small pox epidemic, which many believed was the witches doing. As a result of these minor events the accusations flew till even the most unlikely of people came to be accused of being a witch. And then suddenly in 1693 the witch hunt died down much in the same way as it had begun, without a band but with a whimper. All those accused of practicing witchcraft were pronounced innocent (although this proclamation continued till early 20th century, until when the descendants of the accused fought to clear their ancestors’ name). Many of them were even accepted back within the folds of everyday life in Salem. Many others left forever and never returned to the place which maligned their reputation forever. (Manning, 115)

Not much is known of the Parris household except that they moved and that Abigail Williams never recovered from her affliction and died soon after. It can also be stated that the fact that Parris’ young son too died young and of insanity perhaps indicated a seed of lunacy which remained sown in the family. Academicians, psychologists and descendants of the accused and the victims have never quite figured out what happened during that rather eventful year in 1692 in the somnolent village of Salem. Even today it continues to intrigue people from all over the world like an unsolved mystery in the pages of time. (Powell, 53-55)

Knott, Paul. Development of Science: 15th C-17th C . Dakha: Dasgupta & Chatterjee, 1979.

Kumar, Hiranarayan. Power of Opportunity: Win Some, Lose None . Sydney: HBT & Brooks Ltd, 1988.

Manning, Charles. Principals and Practices: Human History . Wellington: National Book Trust, 1989.

Powell, Mark. Anatomy of Witch Hunts . Dunedin: ABP Ltd, 1991.

Prawer, Ali. Superstition’s Kingdom . Auckland: Allied Publishers, 2004.

Tyerman, John. Invention of the Crusades . Auckland: Allied Publications, 2001.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 6). The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-salem-witch-trials-a-time-of-fear/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear." July 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-salem-witch-trials-a-time-of-fear/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear." July 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-salem-witch-trials-a-time-of-fear/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear." July 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-salem-witch-trials-a-time-of-fear/.

• Suggestions on Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

The Salem witch trials were prosecutions conducted of people indicted for witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people faced accusations of witchcraft. Thirty were found guilty, and nineteen of them were executed by hanging. Fourteen of the victims were women and five men, but an unknown number of innocents were injured as well.

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Therefore, Salem witch trials essay topics are so popular among students. This theme has many pitfalls to explore, and all researches concerning the Salem witch trials have unique historical value.

Read this list of topic suggestions on the Salem witch trials and find out why it is so important to study.

The Salem Witch Trials: A legal bibliography

The law of the Salem Witch Trials is a fascinating mix of biblical passages and colonial statutes.  According to Mark Podvia (see Timeline , PDF), the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted the following statute in 1641:  “If any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exod . 22. 18. Levit . 20. 27. Deut . 18. 10. 11.”  The statute encompasses passages from the Bible written circa 700 B.C. Exodus states:  “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.” Leviticus prescribes the punishment.  Witches and wizards “shall surely be put to death:  they shall stone them with stones:   their blood shall be upon them.”  And Deuteronomy states:  “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.  Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

In Salem, the accusers and alleged victims came from a small group of girls aged nine to 19, including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams.  In January 1692, Betty and Abigail had strange fits. Rumors spread through the village attributing the fits to the devil and the work of his evil hands.  The accusers claimed the witchcraft came mostly from women, with the notable exception of four-year old Dorcas Good.

The colony created the Court of Oyer and Terminer especially for the witchcraft trials.  The law did not then use the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – if you made it to trial, the law presumed guilt.  If the colony imprisoned you, you had to pay for your stay.  Courts relied on three kinds of evidence:  1) confession, 2) testimony of two eyewitnesses to acts of witchcraft, or  3) spectral evidence (when the afflicted girls were having their fits, they would interact with an unseen assailant – the apparition of the witch tormenting them).  According to Wendel Craker, no court ever convicted an accused of witchcraft on the basis of spectral evidence alone, but other forms of evidence were needed to corroborate the charge of witchcraft. Courts allowed “causal relationship” evidence, for example, to prove that the accused possessed or controlled an afflicted girl.  Prior conflicts, bad acts by the accused, possession of materials used in spells, greater than average strength, and witch’s marks also counted as evidence of witchcraft.  If the accused was female, a jury of women examined her body for “witch’s marks” which supposedly showed that a familiar had bitten or fed on the accused.  Other evidence included the “touching test” (afficted girls tortured by fits became calm after touching the accused).  Courts could not base convictions on confessions obtained through torture unless the accused reaffirmed the confession afterward, but if the accused recanted the confession, authorities usually tortured the accused further to obtain the confession again.  If you recited the Lord’s Prayer, you were not a witch.   The colony did not burn witches, it hanged them.

The Salem Witch Trials divided the community.  Neighbor testified against neighbor.  Children against parents.  Husband against wife.  Children died in prisons.  Familes were destroyed.  Churches removed from their congregations some of the persons accused of witchcraft.  After the Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved, the Superior Court of Judicature took over the witchcraft cases.  They disallowed spectral evidence.  Most accusations of witchcraft then resulted in acquittals.  An essay by Increase Mather, a prominent minister, may have helped stop the witch trials craze in Salem.

Researching the Salem Witch Trials is easier than it used to be.  Most of the primary source materials (statutes, transcripts of court records, contemporary accounts) are available electronically.  Useful databases include HeinOnline Legal Classics Library (see  Trials for Witchcraft before the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 ;   The Salem Witchcraft  (Clair, Henry St., 1840); and “ Witch Trials ,”  1 Curious Cases and Amusing Actions at Law including Some Trials of Witches in the Seventeenth Century (1916) ), HeinOnline World Trials Library, HeinOnline Law Journal Library (also JSTOR, America:  History & Life, Google Scholar, and the LexisNexis and Westlaw journal databases),  Gale Encyclopedia of American Law (“ Salem Witch Trials “), Google Books, Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive.  For books and articles on the Salem Witch Trials and witchcraft and the law generally, Library of Congress subject headings include:

• Trials (Witchcraft) — History
• Trials (Witchcraft) — Massachusetts — Salem
• Witch hunting — Massachusetts — Salem
• Witchcraft — Massachusetts — Salem — History — 17th century
• Witchcraft — New England
• Witches — Crimes against

• Salem Witch Trials:  Documentary Archive & Transcription Project (University of Virginia)(includes online searchable text of the transcription of court records as published in Boyer/Nissenbaum’s The Salem Witchcraft Papers , revised 2011, and e-versions of contemporary books)
• Famous American Trials:  Salem Witch Trials, 1692 (Prof. Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School)

Bibliography

Adams, Gretchen A. The Specter of Salem:  Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, BF1576.A33 2008).

Boyer, Paul & Stephen Nissenbaum, eds. The Salem Witchcraft Papers:  Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692  (Da Capo Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5S240 1977 )( digital edition , revised and augmented, 2011).  3v.

___________________________. Salem Possessed:  The Social Origins of Witchcraf t (Harvard University Press, BF1576.B79 1974 ).  See especially pages 1-59.

___________________________, eds. Salem Village Witchcraft:  A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England  (Wadsworth Pub. Co., KA653.B75 1972 LawAnxS ).

Brown, David C.  “The Case of Giles Corey.” EIHC ( Essex Institute Historical Collections , F72.E7E81 ) 121 (1985): 282-299.

___________.  “ The Forfeitures of Salem, 1692 .” The William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 85-111.

Burns, William E. Witch Hunts in Europe and America:  An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, BF1584.E9B87 2003 ).  Includes a Chronology (1307-1793), “Salem Witch Trials” at pages 257-261, and a bibliography at pages 333-347.

Burr, George Lincoln. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (Barnes & Noble, BF1573.B6901 1963 ).

Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).

Craker, Wendel D.  “Spectral Evidence, Non-Spectral Acts of Witchcraft, and Confession at Salem in 1692. ” Historical Journal 40 (1997):  331-358.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan:  Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, BF1576.D38 1982 ).

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall’s Apology:  The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of the American Conscience (Fourth Estate, F67.S525 2005 ).

Godbeer, Richard. The Salem Witch Hunt:  A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, XXKFM2478.8.W5G63 2011 ).

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem (G. Braziller, BF1576.H25 1969 ).

Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader (Da Capo Press, BF1576.H55 2000 ).

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Salem Witchcraft Trials:  A Legal History (University Press of Kansas, XXKFM2478.8.W5H645 1997 )(Landmark Law Cases & American Society).

______________. The Devil’s Disciples:  Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Johns Hopkins University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5H646 1996 ).

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:  Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Norton, BF1576.K370 1987 ).

Le Beau, Bryan F. The Story of the Salem Witch Trials:  “We Walked in Clouds and We Could Not See Our Way” (Prentice Hall, 2d ed., XXKFM2478.8.W5L43 2010 )(DLL has 1998).

Levin, David. What Happened in Salem? (2d ed.  Harcourt, Brace & Co. BF1575.L40 1960 ) (Documents Pertaining to the Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials).  Compiles trial evidence documents, contemporary comments, and legal redress.

Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World:  Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England, and Of Several Remarkable Curiosities Therein Occurring (1693) .

Mather, Increase. Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in Such As Are Accused with That Crime  (1693).

Nevins, Winfield S. Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692 (North Shore Pub. Co., BF1576.N5 1892 ).

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare:  The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692  ( BF1575.N67 2002 )(legal analysis, with appendixes).

Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692  A Documentary History (Beacon Press, KB4537.P39C8 1966 LawAnxN ).

Rosenthal, Bernard ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5R43 2009 )(includes Richard B. Trask, “Legal Procedures Used During the Salem Witch Trials and a Brief History of the Published Versions of the Records” at pages 44-63).

Ross, Lawrence J., Mark W. Podvia, & Karen Wahl. The Law of the Salem Witch Trials .  American Association of Law Library, Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, July 23, 2012 (AALL2go – password needed to access .mp3 and program handout).

Starkey, Marion. The Devil in Massachusetts:  A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (A.A. Knopf, XXKFM2478.8.W5S73 1949 ).

Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft:  with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Witchcraft and Opinions on Kindred Subjects   (Wiggin & Lunt, 1867).  2v.

Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (The University of Massachusetts Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5W4440 1984 ).  Includes a chapter on “The Crime of Witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay  Historical Background and Pattern of Prosecution.”  Appendixes includes lists of legal actions against witchcraft prior to the Salem prosecutions, Massachusetts Bay witchcraft defamation suits, persons accused of witchcraft in Salem, confessors, allegations of ordinary witchcrafts by case, afflicted persons.

Young, Martha M.  “ The Salem Witch Trials 300 Years Later:  How Far Has the American Legal System Come?  How Much Further Does It Need to Go? ”   Tulane Law Review 64 (1989): 235-258.

General Resources

Mackay, Christopher S., trans. & ed.   The Hammer of Witches:  A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (authored by Heinrich Institoris & Jacobus Sprenger in 1487 – Dominican friars, who were both Inquistors and professors of theology at the University of Cologne)(Cambridge University Press, BF1569.M33 2009 ).  This medieval text ( Der Hexenhammer in German) prescribes judicial procedures in cases of alleged witchcraft.  In question-and-answer format.  The judge should appoint as an advocate for the accused “an upright person who is not suspected of being fussy about legal niceties” as opposed to appointing “a litigious, evil-spirited person who could easily be corrupted by money” (p. 530).

“Judgment of a Witch.” The Fugger News-Letters 259-262 (The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1924).  Also reprinted in The Portable Renaissance Reader .

Pagel, Scott B. The Literature of Witchcraft Trials:  Books & Manuscripts from the Jacob Burns Law Library (University of Texas at Austin, BF1566.P243 2008 ) (Tarlton Law Library, Legal History Series, No. 9).

Witchcraft and the Law:  A Selected Bibliography of Recent Publications (Christine Corcos, LSU Law)(includes mostly pre-2000 works).

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One alum’s dream: A Netflix series about Creighton, starring Russell Crowe

The hypothetical Netflix series is only a dream at this point, but the screenplay’s author, one-time Creighton student, Jesuit scholastic and demonological researcher Andy Kelly, 90, hasn’t given up hope on bringing his story to the screen.

Featured Testimonial About Creighton University

By Micah Mertes

Writing a feature about a Creighton alumnus as interesting as Henry Ansgar Kelly, PhD, poses a unique challenge: Namely … where to begin? What do you focus on first?

We’ve decided to solve this problem by not making a decision. Instead, here’s a list of many reasons Kelly makes for such a compelling feature:

1. He’s one of America’s preeminent scholars on Satan. In fact, Kelly wrote THE book on the devil. His academic bestseller Satan: A Biography has been translated into six other languages.

2. Kelly met the real-life exorcist who inspired the bestselling novel and hit movie.

3. Kelly is an ordained exorcist himself.

4. He was almost a Jesuit priest, just one year shy of completing the 14-year seminary curriculum for Jesuit scholastics.

5. He wrote a screenplay about Edward Creighton and the transcontinental telegraph.

6. Kelly’s daughter is a protégé of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.

7. Kelly’s son has composed music for the TV series NCIS .

8. At 90, Kelly continues to be highly prolific. Technically retired since 2004, he’s a distinguished research professor emeritus at the University of California – Los Angeles, and in the past 20 years alone, he’s published more than half a dozen books and more than 40 articles.

9. Henry Kelly’s name isn’t really Henry. It’s Andy.

10. Henry/Andy Kelly has pre-written his own obituary, which notes the day he will die.

Creighton and the Jesuits

First, the name.

Kelly was born in the small farm town of Fonda, Iowa, in 1934, with the intended name of Harry Francis Kelly, Jr. But the town’s parish priest said that nicknames couldn’t be used in the baptismal ceremony and register. Instead, the priest put down “Henry” and also mistakenly gave Harry/Henry the middle name of “Ansgar” instead of “Francis.”

Kelly’s mother, Inez, was known as “Andy,” short for her maiden name, "Anderson,” and Kelly’s parents chose to name him “Andy Jr.” after his mother instead of his father.

Nine decades later, the man originally named Harry now goes by Andy or Henry, depending on the context. He’s lived a life befitting a man with three different first names.

Growing up in Fonda, Kelly became intrigued by the Society of Jesus. “I had read a lot about the Jesuits, and I could see they were the most intellectual of the orders,” Kelly says. “That’s what drew me to them.”

Kelly was advised to first go to nearby Creighton University to strengthen his handle on Latin before joining the seminary. He attended from 1952 to 1953 (but, he says, has remained a Bluejay ever since).

The same year Kelly left Creighton, his older brother, John Patrick (“Pat”) Kelly, BS'57, JD'60 — future Sarpy County attorney — finished his sophomore year there. Pat was the only member of the family to graduate from the University, which he did twice. (After his junior year, Pat was drafted and spent two years in the Signal Corps, later returning to Creighton to finish his bachelor’s degree on the GI Bill, then completing his law degree.)

Andy Kelly’s sole year at Creighton was, in many ways, foundational. It’s where he discovered his love of scholarship. It’s where he met the two Jesuits who inspired him to stay on his path to the priesthood (residence hall namesake Rev. Francis Deglman, SJ, and Rev. Norbert Lemke, SJ). It’s where his resolve as a future seminarian was almost immediately put to the test.

“There was a complication during my Creighton year,” Kelly says now. “I fell in love with a girl who worked at the library. There was nothing practical about it. She was a senior, and I was a freshman. It couldn’t have worked.”

In 1953, with a newfound Creighton education in Latin, Kelly began his work in the seminary, joining the newly founded Wisconsin Province of Jesuits. Over the next 13 years, he spent time in the Missouri Province, earned degrees in the classics, English and philosophy at St. Louis University, earned his PhD at Harvard University and studied at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry as a Jesuit scholastic, where he spent much of his time on demonological research, in addition to theology, scripture and canon law.

In 1966, Kelly realized that the life of a Jesuit wasn’t for him and formally requested a dispensation from the Pope to release him from his perpetual vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience.

No longer an aspiring priest, he spent much of the next year abroad, renting a room at the American Academy in Rome, which, he says, served as “a suitable halfway house between the religious and secular life.”

In Rome, Kelly met his future wife, Marea Tancred. She had moved to Italy from Australia a few years earlier, taking a job as a switchboard operator for American bishops during the last year of the Second Vatican Council. The following year, Kelly joined UCLA as an English professor. He’s remained there, except for sabbaticals, ever since.

“I’m grateful that my life has turned out the way it has,” Kelly says. “But I’m also grateful to the Jesuits for the education they gave me and for my year at Creighton. Everything I’ve learned has been so valuable and gratifying in my life.”

Kelly says he “never made it out of the minor leagues” as a Jesuit. But before he left the seminary life, he was ordained to four minor clerical orders: usher, lector, acolyte and exorcist.

Giving the devil his due

In 1960, the same year he was ordained as an exorcist, Kelly met the exorcist: Rev. William Bowdern, SJ, whose reported 1949 exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in St. Louis inspired William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist and the subsequent 1973 hit film of the same name. ( Learn about Creighton’s connections to that real-life case here. )

At the time, Kelly was studying scholastic philosophy and American literature at St. Louis University. While exploring the history of the Salem witch trials, Kelly became fascinated with the devil (in a purely academic sense).

Bowdern — incidentally, the brother of Rev. Thomas S. Bowdern, SJ, Creighton’s 17 th president — happened to be living in the same campus building as Kelly, who asked the elder Jesuit if he could interview him. (Kelly says now that he was the only person ever to interview Bowdern.)

“It was a great opportunity because he was willing to tell me everything,” Kelly says.

Kelly recounted to Bowdern the most colorful details he’d heard about the real-life incident. Bowdern quickly shot most of the stories down as sensationalized, if not fantastical. (Kelly later included details of the interview in the second edition of his book, The Devil, Demonology, and Witchcraft , 1974.)

After that experience, Satan and demonology became some of Kelly’s primary areas of scholarship. He’s since written over 20 books or publications tracking the evolution of Christian beliefs surrounding the devil and his minions. Titles range from the scholarly (“The Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent During the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology and Drama ) to the slyly humorous (“Satan the Old Enemy: A Cosmic J. Edgar Hoover,” Satan: A Biography ).

In his 2017 book, Satan in the Bible, God’s Minister of Justice , Kelly lays out his thesis:

Satan has long been seen as God’s eternally evil enemy, determined to keep as many beings as he can from entering the heavenly kingdom. But this understanding dates only from the distortions of post-Biblical times, when Satan was reconceived as Lucifer, a rebel angel, and as the serpent in the garden of Eden.

Kelly says that a later misreading of Satan as radically depraved transformed Christianity into a highly dualistic religion, with an ongoing contest between good and evil.

“But Satan wasn’t originally God’s enemy,” Kelly says. “He was His henchman . Seeing Satan in his true nature, as a cynical and sinister celestial bureaucrat, will help to remedy this distorted view.”

From the start of his career at St. Louis University through his time at Harvard and UCLA, Kelly has found the devil to be an endlessly fruitful research track.  

“As researchers,” he says, “we always have our eyes on the main prize of doing something original and fascinating. That’s what we scholars are on the lookout for.”

As far as scholarly research goes, penning the devil’s biography is pretty darn original and fascinating. Examining the origins of the Bible has likewise allowed Kelly to continually challenge our modern conceptions of good and evil.

It’s important to note that Kelly’s Satan studies make up just a fraction of his bibliography. He’s also written four books on Chaucer, three on the genre of tragedy and one on Shakespeare. He’s likewise published works on Biblical studies, Church history, canon law, theology, the Inquisition, the heresy trials of Sir Thomas More, and medieval and Renaissance literature and history. (Kelly believes himself to be one of the most published authors ever to attend Creighton.)

And yet, however eclectic Kelly’s interests, he keeps circling back to his career-long campaign: to write the definitive revisionist history of the devil himself.

Creighton: The Movie

Kelly has also long been interested in another individual, this one much kinder and less prone to controversy: Edward Creighton.

During his time at Creighton, Kelly not only became imbued with the spirit of the place but its history. He read up on the University’s origins and founding family.

Years later, in 1960, when Kelly was a Jesuit scholastic at St. Louis University, he realized the 100th anniversary of the construction of the transcontinental telegraph system was coming up the following year. University founder Edward Creighton had led the telegraph’s construction in the 1860s, connecting the eastern network in California via his home of Omaha. ( Read more about how Creighton united a nation here. )

Kelly thought Creighton’s story was so compelling it deserved its own movie, ideally in time for the telegraph’s centennial. One of his fellow scholastics, Joe O’Shea, SJ, was a bit older than Kelly and had some experience in filmmaking. Together, they came up with an idea for a movie scenario chronicling Edward Creighton’s adventure of constructing the telegraph.

They called it The Admirable Creighton and the Transcontinental Telegraph.

What they wrote wasn’t a full script with dialogue but a scenario that outlined the “cinematic incidents” that would fill out the movie.

Here’s an excerpt from the scenario — its conclusion, in fact — that illustrates Andy Kelly’s affinity for Ed Creighton, the University he founded and the city where they made their home:

“(Edward Creighton), alone, had the foresight to found a great University of the West — to assure for this country a steady supply of teachers (shots of modern schoolroom) and of professionals (shots of doctors, dentists, lawyers) … Creighton’s was not an idle dream but one which has come true. It is fitting that the center of the Free World’s greatest communication network should be located at Omaha — a network ever on the alert to defend the blessings of freedom to all men, everywhere! (Shots of the Strategic Air Command Communications Center). Cut to the martial music of the air corps. B-52s in the air over Creighton University. And on and up into the very sun itself.”

Kelly and O’Shea sneaked into the SLU president’s office to make copies of the script using his Xerox machine. They were eventually caught and chastised.

But it was worth it, Kelly says. They now had four copies of the final product. And, more importantly, they had a connection to Hollywood.

Linda Hope, the daughter of comedian Bob Hope, was attending SLU at the same time as Kelly and O’Shea, and she agreed to recommend their script to her father.

A few weeks later, Rev. Carl Reinert, SJ, president of Creighton University, was in St. Louis visiting his brother, SLU president Rev. Paul Reinert, SJ (whose copy machine Kelly and O’Shea got in trouble for using). “We managed to see Fr. Carl Reinert and make our pitch to him,” Kelly says. “He seemed interested, so we gave him the final copy of our opus. We later learned that he, too, sent the script to Bob Hope.”

Bob Hope never got back to them. Kelly was disappointed that he wouldn’t get his movie made in time for the telegraph’s 1961 centennial. (There was, to be sure, already a 1941 movie about the telegraph line’s construction called Western Union, but Kelly and O’Shea’s film would have focused much more on Edward Creighton himself.)

Though Kelly never broke into Hollywood, his children did. His daughter, Sarah Kelly , is a protégé of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. She worked as a set production assistant on Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and directed Full Tilt Boogie , a documentary about the making of From Dusk Till Dawn , which Tarantino co-wrote and stars in alongside George Clooney and Salma Hayek.

Andy Kelly’s son, musician Dominic Kelly, has also worked in the industry. Dominic has licensed hundreds of his tracks to CBS for the shows NCIS, NCIS New Orleans and NCIS Hawai’i . For fans of the show, any time a scene takes place in Abby’s forensics lab, the music you’re hearing has likely been composed by the son of a one-time Creighton student who was almost a Jesuit but decided instead to become Satan’s biographer and Ed Creighton’s Hollywood agent.

More than 60 years since he wrote the Creighton script, Kelly hasn’t given up hope on it getting made. (Though he has, of course, given up on Bob Hope making it.) There’s still time, Kelly says, for the story to be adapted by Creighton University’s 150th anniversary in 2028.

Kelly anticipates the project’s eventual success in his own obituary. Here’s what will soon happen, he writes:

“(The Admirable Creighton) was revived in 2024, when the scenario was exhumed and seen as deserving of Creighton University’s support as part of celebrating its 150th anniversary. The result was not a feature film but a six-part limited series called Ed Creighton of Western Union , starring Russell Crowe as Edward Creighton and produced by David E. Kelley. The series screened on Netflix in 2027 to great acclaim.

“It was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, acknowledged as ‘based on The Admirable Creighton and the Transcontinental Telegraph by Joseph O’Shea, SJ, and Henry Ansgar Kelly.’”

The last day of Andy Kelly’s life

The Russell Crowe Netflix series about Ed Creighton isn’t the only future development Andy Kelly claims to foresee. His obituary also notes the date of his death.

Kelly will, he writes, pass away on June 6, 2035, his 101st birthday. His obituary reads:

“During the last decade of Andy’s life, he was still hard at work on various projects, and a good number of posthumous works are forthcoming. During his waning years, he was lovingly tended to by Marea, in spite of her own waning, and their children.

“His funeral will be celebrated at Corpus Christi Church on June 18, 2035 (his and Marea’s 67th wedding anniversary), with a Requiem Mass, complete with black vestments, at his request, rather than the now usual Mass of the Resurrection with white vestments. The Los Angeles Chamber Group will play Fauré’s ‘Requiem’ as part of the service. Interment will be at Holy Cross, in a plot he and Marea long ago selected for its expansive view.”

(The obituary’s text, Kelly says with a laugh, is “subject to revision, of course.”)

Kelly — a man clearly fascinated by death — has always liked to quote Hamlet’s graveyard musings.

In particular, he’s fond of the first scene of Act 5 in Shakespeare's play, the “gravedigger scene,” when Hamlet ponders over the skull of a man who might have been a lawyer.

What remains of this man now, this skull ? Where can his essence be found? “Where,” Hamlet asks, “be his quiddities , his quillets , his cases, his tenures and his tricks?”

Andy has the answer, at least for himself: “They be in his writings.”

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