[MUSIC PLAYING] In the year 1692, the citizens
of Salem, Massachusetts went on a witch hunt. Before it was over, 200 people
were accused of being witches and 20 of those
accused were executed. This bizarre episode
in American history left such an impression
that the term which trial has been used
as a synonym for injustice to this very day. We've all heard the stories,
but how much of what we know is really true? Today, we're going to
debunk some misconceptions and falsehoods about
the Salem Witch Trials. Before we get started,
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if you would be so kind, please leave a
comment and let us know what topics you
would like to hear about. OK, let's see if
you're a witch or not. In the years just prior
to the Witch Trials, Salem had been
overrun with refugees fleeing a war between
England and France that was raging to the north. Resources were strained, putting
the locals in competition with both the newcomers
and each other. Pre-existing local
political conflicts over everything from
church privileges to grazing rights to property
lines began to intensify. As things got worse people,
began to suspect the discord was the work of the devil. Nine-year-old Elizabeth
Paris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, respectively
the daughter and niece of the local Reverend Samuel
Parris, started having fits. A doctor diagnosed the condition
as the result of witchcraft. Under pressure by the
adults, Elizabeth and Abigail placed the blame on three women,
a local beggar named Sarah Good, an impoverished old
lady named Sarah Osborne, and a slave named Tituba. This case, which remains
famous, maybe one of the reasons why many people assume that
the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were exclusively women. However, while the
accused were mostly women, records show that about a
quarter of them were men. In fact, a full 30% of
those convicted and executed during the Salem
Witch Trials were men. These men could be targeted
for any number of reasons, from being related to a
woman accused of practicing witchcraft to being friends
with the wrong tribe of American Indians. It was hard to tell what
might get one accused, but one thing was clear-- being a man did not
necessarily make you safe. In 1953, Arthur Miller,
one of the most famous American playwrights
of all time, turned the story of
the Parris family into the play The Crucible. The Crucible used the
events of Salem Colony as an allegory for the communist
hunts being led at the time by Senator Joe McCarthy of
the House of Representatives Committee on
un-American activities. The Crucible became
massively successful, and went on to be adapted
into television shows, movies, and even an opera. While Miller's play has
reinforced the popular image of young women being
accused of witchcraft, the truth is much
more complicated. Older women were, in fact, just
as likely to have the finger pointed at them as young women. This was especially true
when those older women were widows who
had no male heirs and owned vast swaths of land. Once their husbands
were lost, those women, who were valued mostly
in terms of their ability to have and raise
male children, were highly vulnerable to
charges of witchcraft. If there's one constant
throughout history, it's that impoverished
people have it rough. That's probably why most people
assume that the accused were all poor and downtrodden. But that's not the case-- believe it or not,
quite the opposite. To fully understand
what happened, you first need to understand
that there were actually two Salem's-- Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Town was a prosperous
port mostly populated by well-to-do merchants. Salem Village, on the other
hand, was a farming area, and its residents
tended to be on the poor and more puritanical side. When it came to the witch
trials, most of the accusers came from the
impoverished village, and most of the accused
came from the wealthy town. This has led
scholars to speculate that the unequal
distribution of wealth may have played a major role
in motivating and perpetrating the trials. This has led
scholars to speculate that the unequal
distribution of wealth may have played a major role
in motivating and perpetuating the trials. However, it's
interesting to note that the villagers
themselves didn't always agree on everything, and the
trials were no exception. Those who supported
the trials tended to live further from the poor. Those who lived closer to the
poor tended to oppose them. Exacerbating this division
was the controversial Reverend Parris himself. As a staunchly puritanical
anti-wealth minister, the reverend and his
flock purposefully fueled the hysteria that
kept the trials going. Villagers who oppose
the trials made efforts to have the reverend
fired and replaced, but they were
countered by his flock. While Reverend Parris wasn't
unusual for a religious leader of his time, neither was a
completely representative. Almost immediately after
the first hangings, the widely-known and respected
minister Cotton Mather wrote a letter to the
court begging them not to admit what was then called
spectral evidence-- that is, evidence known through
supernatural dreams and visions. Mather's son, then
president of Harvard, agreed, writing that
it would be better that 10 suspected witches should
escape than one innocent person to be condemned. This plea moved the governor
of the colony to halt arrests, while he established a
new court that wouldn't hear spectral evidence. This new court
condemned only three of the next 56 defendants. The governor pardoned all of
those accused of witchcraft-- well, all of those who
had already been executed, at least. As previously established,
70% of those executed during the witch trials
were women and 30% were men, but those were just
the human victims. That's right. If you thought trying and
condemning human beings was going to be enough crazy
for the people of Salem Village, then brace yourself. The paranoia was
so out of control that at least two dogs that
we know of were executed. Yes, you heard that right-- dogs. Not sure how they defended
themselves in court, but yeah-- one of the dogs was
accused by a young girl of attempting to bewitch her-- which, if you look
at my dog's eyes, she is always trying to
guilt you into giving you some of your sandwich. The other dog was
charged with being under the control of a witch. The name Salem has been
virtually synonymous with witch hunt, so
one could be forgiven for thinking those trials
were the first and only ones of their kind. But in all fairness to the
people of Salem Village, the idea of accusing
innocent people of witchcraft goes way, way back
before their time. Europe had been dabbling in
witch trials for over three centuries. England passed laws that made
the practice of witchcraft and anything related
to it illegal. A book called
Malleus Maleficarum, which contains instructions
on how to identify, which became all the rage. Professional witch hunters
sprang up everywhere. It got bad. How bad? Well, whereas the events
in Salem lasted a year and claimed 20 lives, some
of the European witch trials lasted 10 times as long and
took the lives of thousands. 50,000 such witches
are thought to have been sentenced in Europe between
the 16th and 17th century alone. Not only weren't the
Salem Witch Trials the first witch hunts--
they're actually more noteworthy for
being among the last. While several witch hunts
occurred in North America prior to Salem, no
one had actually been put to death for being
a witch in nearly 30 years. In Europe, the
philosophical age that would come to be known as
the Enlightenment-- which placed reason and knowledge
above superstition-- was dawning. Its influence
helped bring an end to the practice of witch trials. By the time of Salem,
people had assumed such things were in the past,
which just made the event more shocking and more memorable. The trope of a crowd of angry
villagers calling for a witch to be burned is a
common one in fiction. Indeed, the aforementioned
European witch trials did use burning as a
method of execution. However, things were done
a bit differently in Salem. The victims of the
trials of '92 and '93 almost exclusively met
their fate through hanging. The one known exception to
this was an 80-year-old man named Giles Corey. Because he wouldn't
plead guilty, he was pressed to death
between two heavy stones-- not a pretty thought,
but nonetheless, not a single victim of the
Salem trials were burned. Today, most people don't
believe in witchcraft, so when it comes to
what happened in Salem, most people assume
that the villagers who claim to be experiencing
supernatural fits had to be faking it. This may well be the case. However, there is
another possibility-- ergot-infected green. Ergot is a fungus that affects
rye, a crop that was heavily used by the Salem population. Ingesting ergot can cause
hallucinations similar to those caused by taking LSD. Thus, it is entirely plausible
that the initial fits and hallucinations that kicked
off all the paranoia were real. Of course, the deadly
hysteria that followed can't be blamed on the
grain, but it's worth considering that the whole
affair may have been kicked off by a medical misunderstanding. In the centuries since
the trial, a piece of land called Gallows Hill
was thought to be the site of the executions. However, in 2016, a
team of researchers set out to find the exact
spot of the hangings, and discovered that everyone
had been wrong all along. Buried in 1,000
pages of testimony, the group found the
words of an accused witch named Rebecca Eames. Eames made an offhanded remark
about witnessing the executions at the house below the hill. Checking this reference against
old maps, court records, and historical sources, the team
determined that the executions were actually held on a
nearby site now called Proctor's Ledge. Today, this area sits beside
a Walgreens parking lot. In 2017, the city
created a memorial to the victims of the
witch trials on the site. By January of 1697, the trials
were considered a tragedy, and a court-ordered day of
fasting and contemplation was observed in the colony. Five years later, the
trials were officially declared unlawful. Nine years after
that, the convicted were all officially
exonerated and restitution was paid to their heirs. 250 years after that, the
state of Massachusetts would officially apologize. Hey, better late
than never, right? But why did it happen
in the first place? When something as disturbing as
the Salem witch trial occurs, people go in search of answers. Surely, there must be a
tangible, identifiable reason these people acted this way. Fortunately, nothing could
be further from the truth. Hundreds of explanations
have been proposed, but none are
universally agreed on. The hysteria that gripped
Salem was centuries old, and was born at
the nexus of dozens of individual social problems. Religious beliefs played
a role, but so did economics, class differences,
history, migration, local politics, sexism,
misogyny, and greed. We may not have actual
literal witch trials anymore, but all of those problems still
exist in modern society, which is just one of the reasons
it's important we understand what really did and didn't
happen during the Salem witch trials. Do you think something
like the Salem witch trials could happen again? Let us know in the
comments below. And while you're at it, if
you like creepy true stories about witches, ghosts,
and the paranormal, check out some of these
videos from our sister site, Graveyard Shift.
