Witches: Truth Behind the Trials (2024) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[Narrator] For centuries, witch
hunts raged through Europe
and the Americas.
[Kevin Waite] Everybody believed
in the existence of witches.
[Marion Gibson] The trials
catch fire.
[Narrator] causing the
deaths of tens of thousands
of innocent people.
[Martha McGill] It was
extraordinary.
[axe chopping]
♪
[Narrator] To this day, the
most infamous hunt of all
ravaged a small
religious community
in colonial Massachusetts.
[Martha McGill] Salem was a
community that was already
riven with hostility
to one's neighbors.
♪
[Narrator] The horrors begin
when children in the minister's
house have violent fits, an
affliction that seems
to be caused by the devil.
Triggering a savage, unstoppable
panic that saw hundreds
accused of witchcraft by their
neighbors, friends, and family.
[Martha McGill] This great
network of witches all working
together across the area.
[Marion Gibson] They know at
the end of this that they could
be judged guilty of witchcraft,
and they'll be hanged.
[crowd shouting]
[Alison Rowlands] Once you've
crossed that line, you
have actually executed someone,
it's very difficult to stop.
[Kevin Waite] It could never go
back to the way it was.
This was a war zone.
[Narrator] This is the story of
the Salem Witch Trials.
[whispering]
♪
[Martha McGill] Salem is a
Puritan community.
-The Puritans were a dissenting
branch of the Anglican Church
who fled England in
the early 1600s.
-They were concerned
that living in England,
the hierarchy of the Church of
England, the Anglican Church,
was telling them what to do,
was making them believe things
that they didn't actually
want to believe.
So off they go to America
to found their own church
and to own their own doctrine.
[Kevin Waite] As the Puritan
population increased
over the coming decades, they
established multiple colonies
in what would become the
Northeast of the United States.
Really, the locus of
Puritan influence
and the locus of the
congregational church
was in Massachusetts, was in
places like Boston and Salem.
[Martha McGill] The community
at Salem is a congregation-less
community, which means that
the people there
have a belief that the
congregation itself should
be able to shape how
the church works.
[Narrator] Puritans in Salem
Village have the power
to elect a new minister to
lead their congregation.
They nominate the recently
ordained Samuel Parris.
[Kevin Waite] Samuel Parris
arrived in Salem Village
in 1689.
[Alison Rowlands] He's come to
Salem from Barbados.
He has had a bit of a career
as a merchant before then.
He's not actually
very successful.
He comes to New England to try
his luck at something new,
at something different in this
new colony that's just sort
of building itself up
in the 17th century.
[Marion Gibson] He sails first
to Boston, where he
lives for a couple of
years with his family,
and then to Salem Village.
[Alison Rowlands] Salem Village
is a kind of
an appendage to Salem Town.
Salem Town is the much
more prosperous community.
[Kevin Waite] Salem Village was
fractious.
This was not considered
a destination
for an ambitious
minister like Parris.
[Martha McGill] He enters into
the community, and he
starts sifting out the most
godly people around him
to join his sort of
special congregation
of particularly pious villagers.
[Alison Rowlands] I think he's
quite an embittered individual,
and I think he tends to
take that frustration out
through very, very sort
of impassioned preaching.
[Marion Gibson] Because he's a
new minister, he's
very keen to prove his place
in the village and his utility
to the local community.
[Narrator] Parris has overseen
the church in Salem
for two difficult years.
When this highly
religious community
is thrown into disarray, young
girls in nearby villages
have been experimenting
with magic.
[Martha McGill] They had been
doing something known
as the egg and glass.
The idea was that you
would take an egg,
and you would then drip
the white of the egg
into a bowl of water and
look at the shapes it makes.
You were asking God to give
you some insight into what
shape your future would take.
[Alison Rowlands] What starts
off as playing around with
fortune telling
becomes more sinister.
What they saw in the water
was the shape of a coffin.
They start feeling very worried.
[Marion Gibson] This kind of
divination was regarded
as demonic.
[Narrator] It's impossible to
know if Samuel Parris's
daughter, Betty, and
niece Abigail
took part in these rituals.
But something terrible
happens shortly afterwards.
[Martha McGill] Betty Parris
starts showing strange symptoms
of affliction.
This then spreads to Abigail.
[Marion Gibson] They start
saying that their muscles hurt,
and they start screaming.
You can imagine how
distressing that would
have been for their family.
[screaming]
[Martha McGill] This upheaval
is coming from right inside the
house of the minister.
[Alison Rowlands] The Reverend
Samuel Parris
calls in the doctor.
He says, it is supernatural.
I can't cure it, so it
must be witchcraft.
[Marion Gibson] The people of
Salem, they're very religious.
They believe in God.
But that means they
believe in the devil, too.
They're kind of on the
lookout for witchcraft.
[Martha McGill] There had
certainly been plenty of cases
in Europe involving
what was known as bewitchment.
What was happening
to Betty and Abigail
seemed to follow this
recognized model.
There was an
established precedent
for blaming this on witches.
[Alison Rowlands] When the
community has
decided to accept
the idea
that these girls are being
attacked by witches,
the next stage in the
process is then saying,
who is it who is
doing this to you?
Who is afflicting you?
[Martha McGill] The names that
come up are two
women of
middling age
who were unpopular within
their community,
Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
The other name we
have is Tituba.
Tituba was a servant in
the house of Samuel Paris.
[Marion Gibson] I think her
name was probably originally
something like Tata Bay.
She comes from a grouping on
the South American mainland
called the Tetebetana.
-There was that ethnic
difference compared
to the people surrounding her.
And it's kind of
that classic idea
of assuming that people
who are different
are more likely to be
in league with things
that are deemed evil
and unfamiliar to you.
[Marion Gibson] Abigail and
Betty might have picked on
Tituba as well because Betty's
father Samuel may
have been critical
of a woman of color
who lived in his community.
I can imagine him
bullying Tituba.
I can imagine him speaking
critically about her,
maybe thinking she wasn't
a good enough Christian.
So it's really no
surprise to Samuel
when Abigail and Betty start
pointing the finger at Tituba
and saying that she's a witch.
♪
The affliction starts spreading
from Abigail and Betty
to their friends,
the Putnam family.
They start exhibiting
the same symptoms.
They start screaming
in the night.
They start convulsing.
They start pointing the finger
and saying that they, too,
are bewitched by the people
that
Abigail and Betty have
suspected.
♪
[Narrator] First of March,
1692, the accused
are dragged in front
of magistrates.
A confession is needed before
they're sent to trial.
For all the women, it's
a terrifying ordeal,
especially Tituba, the woman of
indigenous or African heritage.
[Martha McGill] Tituba
begins by
denying that she did
anything at all.
[Marion Gibson] She's in front
of these powerful white men.
She's probably been hurt,
and she's certainly been
enslaved by powerful white men.
This is a very bullying
power relationship
that she's in in this room.
[Martha McGill] These women
were looking for ways
to try and save themselves.
Therefore, they might
come to say the things
that people wanted to hear,
confess to imaginary crimes.
♪
[Marion Gibson] In the end,
during her questioning,
Tituba starts to say, I
did hurt the children.
She said, the devil came to me,
and the devil kept saying to me,
you must hurt the children.
You must hurt the children.
He threatened me, she said.
He said he would kill me.
He would tear me to pieces.
He would cut my head off.
[Narrator] With Tituba's
confession secured,
the magistrates also questioned
the other two women accused
of being witches, Sarah
Good and Sarah Osborne.
[Marion Gibson] As part of this
questioning, Sarah Good's young
daughter, Dorothy, was asked
about whether her mother
was, in fact, a witch.
She was only four.
What was she expected to say?
And of course, she says,
yes, my mother is a witch.
And she admits
witchcraft herself,
which is particularly shocking.
♪
The people of Salem
send the suspects off
to Boston, the capital of
the colony of Massachusetts,
to await trial.
They're kept in chains.
There are women.
There are some children,
like Dorothy Good.
There are people who are
absolutely desperate.
[Narrator] Although the accused
women have been jailed,
it will be many months
until a trial can proceed.
[Marion Gibson] The colony of
Massachusetts, it's
governed under a charter
from the British government.
And the charter has expired.
The governor and many of the
leading men of the colony
have gone off to England
to secure a new charter
to make sure that its
legal processes can
continue to function.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] Although the
Salem town magistrates
can question suspects,
they can't really
start any trials until the
governor arrives from England.
It gives more space and time
for the afflictions to spread
and the concern of the
community to grow.
[Martha McGill] During that
time,
questions keep on being
asked.
A lot of other names
start getting mentioned.
And these women who are sitting
around in these jail cells
happen to keep remembering
other people who
might have been involved.
Things start to spiral.
♪
[Narrator] Months pass.
The people of Salem village
grow ever more convinced
that witches walk amongst them.
[Marion Gibson] Further
accusations are coming from the
supposedly afflicted girls.
[Martha McGill] Samuel Powers
is preaching about
witchcraft
to the congregation.
And the contagion seems
to be continuing.
There are stories of more
girls getting afflicted.
[Marion Gibson] The suspects
also carry on being questioned.
And they carry on telling
stories about the witchcraft
that they've
supposedly committed.
They name new suspects
back in Salem village,
people like Bridget Bishop.
And then these people are
brought in for questioning, too.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] Most news is
spread by word of mouth.
People communicated
at the marketplace
when they were trading.
♪
[Marion Gibson] About 75% of
those who are accused
are female.
And that's because women
are seen as particularly
prone to becoming witches.
They're seen as
gateways of the devil.
They're seen as people
who might fall prey
to these sort of demonic lies.
♪
Samuel Powers also asked the
previous minister of Salem,
Diodat Lawson, to come
and visit and see what
he thinks of the situation.
[Alison Rowlands] And then he
goes to the Powers household.
And he sees Betty Powers
in one of her fits.
[Marion Gibson] She's running
around the room screaming.
She's trying to climb out
of the window and fly.
[Alison Rowlands] And he writes
an account of what he saw
and what he experienced while
he was in Salem Village.
As a minister and trusted
member of society,
Lawson's vivid account adds
credibility to the witch hunt.
[Kevin Waite] The first accused
witches were the outsiders.
They were those
you might consider
the usual suspects
in witchcraft.
But as the accusations grow,
more and more prominent people
are actually drawn
into this net.
[Martha McGill] The sorts of
people who would not
expect to be giving
themselves up to the devil.
[Marion Gibson] They're not
people who might be seen as
outsiders or scapegoats
like the Native American
Tituba or the
homeless person Sarah Good.
These are prime, upstanding
members of Samuel Powers's
congregation, people
like Rebecca Nurse,
who's been a member of
the church all her life
and is seen by her neighbors as
being a pious and good person.
[Alison Rowlands] She's a
pillar of the godly community.
You would expect her to be
protected from accusation.
But nevertheless, she's
named as a witch.
As the accusations spread,
they dig deeper and deeper
into Salem's community.
We have to begin from
the important fact
that everybody believed in
the existence of witches.
And so as these rumors
begin spreading,
there's a sense of crisis.
There's a sense that Satan is
actually successfully waging
this war on their community.
[Martha McGill] Salem was a
community
that was already
riven with division.
[Alison Rowlands] You've got
the tension
between Salem
Village and Salem Town.
Salem Village is more
backward looking,
much poorer than Salem Town.
[Marion Gibson] Salem Town is
wealthier.
It's fancier.
It's becoming more interested
in the refinements of society,
the kind of things that Puritans
disapprove
of very strongly
indeed.
[Alison Rowlands] And then
you've got Paris.
Rather than smoothing things
over and calming things down,
he really intensifies the
factions and the resentments.
And I think the fact that the
afflictions of the children
start in his household
suggests that he very much is
at the center of a
lot of this concern.
[Marion Gibson] Within Salem
Village, there is a division
between two of the
prominent families.
And those are the
Putnams and the Porters.
[Alison Rowlands] The Porter
households and their allies
were much more politically
linked to Salem Town,
whereas the Putnams
are inward looking,
much more linked to Paris as
the Salem Village minister,
much more older fashioned
in their emphasis
on Puritan godliness.
The accused witches tended to
come from the Porter network,
whereas the afflicted tended
to be much more closely linked
to the Paris Putnam faction.
-The villagers are
turning on each other.
But beyond the village, there
are even worse threats.
There are Native
American peoples
who the villagers have taken
their land, essentially,
and they've dispossessed them.
There's also famine,
because they don't know
which kind of crops to grow.
The Native Americans aren't
helping them anymore,
naturally enough.
There's disease.
There are wars to
the north in Maine.
And some of the people who are
doing the accusing in Salem
Village are probably
refugees from the war.
We're dealing with people
who are really traumatized.
♪
-All of these factors are then
feeding into the division
at Salem and perpetuating
this mood of suspicion,
potentially of hostility
to one's neighbors.
Between January
and May, we end up
with 81 people accused of
witchcraft, 49 of whom
are imprisoned.
♪
-This is developing into a
massive social, cultural,
political crisis.
[Narrator] Several months after
the first accusations,
Governor Phipps arrives
with the new Massachusetts
charter in hand.
He now has the power
to open the courts.
And the accused will either
find justice and freedom
or a brutal death.
♪
[Marion Gibson] When the
governor arrives back from
England with the new charter, he
has a range of pressing matters
to deal with.
There are Native American
wars going on to the north.
There are wars between the
English and the French.
And he has to go in
person to intervene.
So, he's not present in the
colony of Massachusetts
for quite some time
after his arrival.
However, he's briefed about
the people awaiting trial
for witchcraft in Boston jail.
And on May the 27th, he
sets up a special court
to deal with them, a court
of our own termina, which
means to hear and determine.
[Alison Rowlands] Which is
basically an old English method
for dealing with
a legal emergency.
It's a bit of a challenge
in the Middle Ages
for things like
popular rebellion,
when you've suddenly got a
really unusual number of trials
that you need to get through.
♪
[Marion Gibson] The trials are
held in the meeting house,
so essentially the
community's own church.
It's a packed room.
It's a hot room.
It's a noisy room.
It's crowded.
It must have felt
incredibly intimidating.
[Kevin Waite] This is a
spectacle that
a lot of villagers, some of whom
are accused, are
coming to watch.
[Marion Gibson] Governor Phipps
won't lead the court himself.
He won't be the judge.
He asks his friends,
the intellectuals,
the important men in the
community, to help him.
[Alison Rowlands] There's also
a lot of potential for the
judge to steer things in the
way that he wants.
♪
[Narrator] As the court
assembles in Salem town,
the accused witches
are led from jail,
desperately hoping
they will find mercy.
[Marion Gibson] The accused
people have to
defend themselves. They
don't have lawyers.
[Alison Rowlands] They would
have been reliant on their
own words, their own denials.
♪
You get this very, very
dramatic, peculiar situation
where the afflicted girls,
including Betty Parris
and Abigail Williams, are
brought into the courtroom
♪
[Martha McGill] They might
writhe or whimper or babble.
[Marion Gibson] They actually
throw fits
in front of the court.
They make new accusations.
They say things like,
she's attacking me.
She's screaming at me.
She's hitting me.
[Alison Rowlands] If the
accused witch in the dock
raises an arm, the afflicted
individuals would react to that.
It's quite hard for us to
imagine how sensational that
would have been and how
much their performance kind
of convinces people that they're
being attacked by witches.
[Marion Gibson] The suspects
must have been frightened.
They must have been
terribly upset
by this public humiliation.
It must have been an awful,
traumatic experience for them.
They know at the end of this
that they could be judged
guilty of witchcraft, and
that they'll be hanged.
[Martha McGill] Your options
when it came to defending
yourself against a witchcraft
charge were pretty limited.
But there was an idea that those
who confessed to the crime
had at least shown some
kind of repentance,
some kind of remorse.
[Marion Gibson] If you
confessed, you lost your
reputation.
Not only had you told
a lie before God,
but all your
neighbors would then
judge you to be a witch.
You'd be permanently tainted.
But also, the people who
confess will be spared.
They will be judged guilty,
but they won't be executed.
And of course, it's a massive
inducement to confess.
The judges don't seem to
have spotted that one.
But it's something that really
makes the trials catch fire.
[Narrator] Tituba, the first
person accused of witchcraft
by the Paris family,
finally takes the stand.
♪
[Marion Gibson] Tituba did
admit that she was a witch,
whether she believed
herself to be one or not.
[Martha McGill] When she
introduced this idea that there
might be this great network of
witches all working together
across the area.
♪
[Marion Gibson] And she was
spared.
Therefore, she was
not to be executed.
She was returned to jail.
Of course, that was a
punishment in itself.
But it did save her life.
♪
[Martha McGill] Those who
confessed to the
crime might
well have helped
out the authorities by
giving details about what
happened, naming other names.
[Marion Gibson] As one person
after another confesses and is
spared, the number of witchcraft
suspects and convicted witches
starts to grow again.
♪
As well as sparing
confessing suspects,
the court also makes
another fatal decision,
which is to admit what's
called spectral evidence.
♪
And this is essentially
evidence based
on the visions of the accusers.
[Martha McGill] Spectral
evidence draws on this idea
that the devil has the power
to cause hallucinations
in people's minds.
[Kevin Waite] Spectral evidence
was basically evidence
that wasn't visible to
most of the townspeople
but was, in fact,
visible to the accusers.
♪
Sometimes these spirits
admitted their culpability
to earlier crimes.
Sometimes other spirits
accused the supposed witch
of a particular crime.
[Martha McGill] This now is an
absolute nightmare when it
comes to evidential standards,
because what you have here
is a form of evidence
that is basically
impossible to disprove.
♪
So spectral evidence allows
the trials to escalate,
allows them to move further
into the realm of fantasy
and away from anything we
would consider valid proof.
♪
Other members of the
community are essentially
allowing this to happen by not
protesting loudly against it.
There are cases of
brave individuals
who'd fight to defend
their loved ones,
but it was potentially a
pretty dangerous business.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] Trials are
doing very, very quick
by comparison with today.
[Marion Gibson] It can be as
little as 15 minutes
to determine whether
somebody lives or dies.
[Kevin Waite] On the 2nd of
June, the court of Oyer and
Terminer renders
their first verdict.
♪
[Marion Gibson] It's Bridget
Bishop,
and she's sentenced to be
hanged.
♪
[Kevin Waite] On the 2nd of
June, the court makes its first
conviction of Bridget Bishop.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] She says not
guilty in court.
She's condemned to die, but
she maintains her innocence
to the gallows, and that's
quite disturbing for people.
♪
Having an execution of
someone for witchcraft
is dramatic enough,
but she's not
going to the gallows as a
kind of a penitent sinner
admitting her guilt.
She's actually saying,
you guys got it wrong.
♪
[Marion Gibson] The same day,
one of the judges actually
resigns from the court.
So there are
already some signs
that things aren't going well.
[Martha McGill] Now an actual
execution has happened.
Things have got serious.
People are getting murdered
because of these accusations.
♪
[Marion Gibson] On the 29th of
June, one of
the original
suspects, Sarah Good,
is arraigned and
formally charged,
and she's charged alongside
four other women--
Rebecca Nurse, Susanna Martin,
Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wild.
♪
At that trial, all
five of the women
are found guilty and
they're sentenced to death.
♪
The five women are executed
on the 19th of July.
Sarah Good turns on the
crowd and the ministers
and the judges, and
she says to them,
I'm no more a witch
than you are a wizard,
because she is an innocent
woman about to be hanged.
God will give you
blood to drink.
And that sounds very
much like a curse.
But at the same time, it also
feels like a bit of a prophecy
that this is all going to come
to a very bad end indeed.
♪
[ticking]
[Martha McGill] There's also
growing doubts over what's
going on now that it's proving
just so serious.
♪
[Marion Gibson] A number of
ministers are asked for their
opinion of the trials, and in
particular, the way
that spectral evidence
is being used.
Some people are concerned
that the accused people might
actually be making up evidence
of seeing the specters
of the accused witches.
♪
And they want people
like Cotton Mather, who
is a university
intellectual and somebody
with wide experience in the
field of judging the demonic.
[Kevin Waite] Cotton Mather was
regarded as one of the foremost
authorities on witches.
He wrote widely on the
subject, and he wrote widely
from a position
of real authority
as being one of the senior
ministers in Massachusetts
at the time.
♪
[Marion Gibson] So Cotton
Mather and a number of other
ministers write a letter
to the court
in which
they sum up their opinion
on this type of evidence.
It is, however, a very
equivocal letter.
They say on the one
hand that there
are some doubts about
this kind of evidence
and that exquisite
caution, as they put it,
should be used in judging
the accused people.
But at the same time, they give
the court a pat on the head
and they say, well, you
should just continue
doing what you're doing.
Because of course,
the ministers do
believe that there are witches
in the Salem community.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] Very
important that
a group of men
of Puritan ministers
with such influence in the
colony say, be careful.
But then they're also
saying, but it's a
jolly good thing
to hunt witches.
So it's a very, very difficult
situation for the authorities.
♪
[Marion Gibson] Meanwhile, some
people are asking questions
about why the
accusers are making
the accusations that they are.
Perhaps things have gone out
of hand and gone too far.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] That's part of
this beginning of perhaps doubt
about the validity
of the testimony
and the validity of
the spectral evidence.
♪
[Marion Gibson] Yet even though
there are doubts about the
process of the convictions,
on August the 19th,
a further five
people are hanged.
And one of them is even a former
minister, George Burrows.
He's Samuel Paris' predecessor.
♪
Burrows is being accused
partly because he's
drifted from the position
that Samuel Paris feels
the church should be occupying.
[Martha McGill] George gives
supposedly
this quite
impassioned speech
where he talks about
what's happened,
closes it with a
perfect recitation
of the Lord's Prayer.
♪
This was an old
stereotype about witches
that they couldn't get
through the Lord's Prayer
without at some
point tripping up.
♪
George recites it perfectly.
And this also may have
generated some doubts
in the minds of the onlookers.
♪
[Marion Gibson] The crowd start
to murmur.
And they move towards
almost a riot.
And they say the execution
should be stopped.
[crowd shouting]
But who should come
along but Cotton Mayer,
who has come to the executions
to watch justice being done.
♪
He gives almost a sermon to
the crowd in which he says
that these people
are indeed witches
and that there's
nothing wrong here.
The execution should continue.
And of course, because
he's a minister,
he's a powerful, important
figure in the community,
the crowd accept his authority.
The executions proceed, and
the five people are killed.
♪
The bodies aren't
even buried properly.
They're thrown into a
nearby crevice in the rock
and partially covered by earth.
♪
[Narrator] As doubts about the
witch trials grow,
some villagers courageously
decide to take a stand.
But the repercussions of their
actions will prove deadly.
♪
[Marion Gibson] On the 18th of
September, 1692,
one of the
witchcraft suspects,
Giles Corey, refuses
to plead at his trial.
[Martha McGill] And the courts
at this time had a slightly
strange idea that if people
refused to enter a plea,
you could subject them to
torment to compel them to do so.
And this is what
happens to Giles Corey.
♪
[Nimisha Patel] It's an act of
defiance to not submit a plea
and allow yourself to be
subjected to torture.
♪
And it may be that he would
have imagined that he was going
to be found guilty either way,
that the outcome was inevitable
and that he had no
control over it.
-The 18th to the 19th
of September, 1692,
he has heavy weights
piled on top of him.
♪
[Nimisha Patel] That would have
been like a suffocation.
It's like a slow death.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] When they ask
him, what do you want to say to
the court, he says, more weight.
He had nothing to lose.
He's going to die anyway.
But he can die with
his own dignity,
and he can die with his
own sense of innocence.
♪
[Martha McGill] But one effect
of him dying without entering a
plea is that his estate
remained his own property
and passed to his descendants,
to his son-in-laws.
If he had died having been
convicted of witchcraft,
his estate would become the
property of the authorities.
♪
[Narrator] Without a plea,
trial, or conviction,
the execution of Giles
Corey is unlawful.
His death sends shockwaves
through the community.
Days later, his
wife, Martha Corey,
is also executed, sent to the
gallows, guilty of witchcraft.
♪
[Marion Gibson] It's an
absolute disaster
for the
community of Massachusetts,
and it will leave
a terrible legacy.
♪
[Martha McGill] It's been seven
months now.
We've had 185 people accused.
59 have gone to trial.
19 were hanged.
Others died in prison.
This then takes on a life of its
own, spreads geographically.
[Marion Gibson] Across
communities
like Beverly,
Molden, Gloucester, Andover,
Ipswich, Marblehead,
Charlestown, and Boston itself,
people are being
accused of witchcraft.
♪
[Narrator] The witch hunts
spread across New England.
They continue to attract the
attention of religious experts.
Including a clergyman
and scholar from Boston,
Increase Mather, whose
son, Cotton Mather,
is already deeply involved with
the trials in Salem Village.
♪
[Kevin Waite] Increase Mather
writes a letter to express some
of his doubts, to say that
maybe some of the evidence,
maybe some of the accusations,
don't carry the water
that we once thought they did.
After all, spectral evidence
is a pretty slim reed
to hang people on.
[Alison Rowlands] Increase
really begins to call on the
governor, Phipps, to come
and sort stuff out.
♪
[Marion Gibson] Phipps and
Increase Mather go back a long
way.
They came together on
the ship from England
with the new charter.
William Phipps really
respects Increase Mather.
And what he sees in Increase's
letter really concerns him.
♪
There's also a rumor
going around the colony
that somebody has named Mary
Phipps, governor's wife,
as a witch.
♪
[Kevin Waite] And it would make
sense, from Satan's perspective,
not to limit himself to the
older, less affluent women
that were so often
associated with witchcraft.
If Satan really meant
business, he would go
after the elites among them.
[Marion Gibson] So there are a
couple of powerful motives
for William Phipps to want to
put an end to the witch trials.
It's a huge crisis, and he needs
to do something immediately.
♪
♪
[Kevin Waite] Governor Phipps
decides that public opinion
has shifted enough to call a
stop to these proceedings.
[Narrator] Governor Phipps
dismantles the courts
responsible for the
brutal witch trials.
The remaining accused
are safe from execution.
[Alison Rowlands] The people
still in jail are released.
[Marion Gibson] Tituba was kept
in prison for at least a year.
There's a statement
from the jailer
where he says that
he hasn't been paid.
And we know that somebody
paid that bill, which
leads us to think that maybe,
in the end, Tituba was freed.
♪
[Kevin Waite] Samuel Parris's
role in the witch trials
had created such bad
blood within the village.
[Alison Rowlands] Parris, by
that point, is very embittered.
He feels that he's
failed as a minister.
[Kevin Waite] The family
members of some of the executed
actually successfully pushed
him out of the village
and out of his ministry.
[Marion Gibson] So what's left
at Salem?
Not very much.
A dislocated community
where neighbors are not
speaking to each other.
The whole church structure
has fallen apart.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] The economic
impact of that would
have been very significant.
The pendulum of support
swings towards the families
of the accused.
It becomes an episode
the whole community
really wants to forget about.
[Martha McGill] There is a
legacy of guilt
and unease over
the whole affair.
♪
[Kevin Waite] It could never go
back to the way it was.
♪
[Marion Gibson] In January
1697, the general court
orders a day of
prayer and fasting
to reflect back on the
history of the witch trials.
♪
Then another of the judges
publishes a public apology
for his role in the trials.
♪
[Alison Rowlands] In 1752,
Salem Village rebrands itself.
It calls itself Danvers.
It's caused a lot of
division, a lot of friction.
[Martha McGill] And then in the
20th century, it's revisited.
♪
[ticking]
[Marion Gibson] In 1957, the
state of Massachusetts
apologized for the witch trials.
That happened partly because
of a play, "The Crucible."
And that play is really the
reason why the Salem witch
trials are so famous today.
♪
Historians have been trying
ever since to explain
these terrible events.
This started with two
young girls being
sick at the house of a minister.
♪
People have wondered whether
the girls were psychotic.
Were they lying?
Did they make the
whole thing up?
[Kevin Waite] A lot of the
blame is placed on the girls
who made the
original accusations.
But that exonerates the
men who led the trials,
who rendered the judgment.
These men were the literal
adults in the room,
and they have blood
on their hands
far more so than the young,
powerless, original accusers.
♪
[Martha McGill] It's retained
this status as a sort of almost
archetypal witch hunt, in part
because it was extraordinary
and it was extreme and
it happened so rapidly.
It provided this
really vivid example
of how witch hunts
can snowball and how
on the basis of some
slightly strange behavior
from two adolescent
girls, hundreds of people
can be accused and a proportion
of them can be executed.
[Marion Gibson] You can see
that the community's misogyny
and racism is reflected in
their choice of suspects.
Tituba, a Native American
woman previously enslaved.
Sarah Good, a very poor woman,
somebody who was homeless.
Sarah Osborne, a woman
who was regarded
as being insufficiently
submissive to those around her.
Dorothy Good, she's
gone through seriously
traumatic things
within this jail
and allegedly is insane
by the time she's allowed
to leave when she's five.
♪
[Kevin Waite] The lessons that
colonists learn from Salem
aren't entirely clear.
Even the regret over the trials
didn't shake anyone's belief
in the existence of witches,
didn't make them apologetic
or regret the wars
against Native people
on the northern frontier.
What Salem did was make them
regret the amount of authority
that they invested in the
young female accusers.
That to them was the
lesson from Salem,
not to trust the
word of young women
quite like they had before.
♪
♪