What Really Happened in Salem 300 Years Ago?

hola 42 aki today's video is kindly sponsored by babel the number one language learning gap in the world hey 42 here if you were to walk through salem massachusetts today you'd find a pleasant commuter town by the sea its leafy streets are lined with traditional weatherboard houses and ships bob on the waves in its peaceful harbour however you'd also find a string of wiccan and pagan shops with names such as the cauldron black and covens cottage where you can buy spell books crystals and even broomsticks visited halloween and you'll find the entire town has been taken over by tourists in terrifyingly silly costumes salem's name will always be inextricably linked with the 17th century witch trials that took place there in 1692 and 93 around 200 people in salem and the surrounding villages were accused of witchcraft and tried in court 30 people were found guilty 14 women and five men were hanged curiously two dogs were also executed i suppose when your dog begins levitating whilst chitting on your carpet it's time to put it down the accusations began when it was suspected that two local girls had been possessed by the devil betty paris aged 9 the daughter of a local puritan church minister and abigail williams 11 her orphaned cousin who lived with the family the girls seemed to be behaving in rather strange ways they had fits screamed in pain and through things they were found in strange contortions on the ground and regularly hid under the furniture they even barked like dogs with over 10 million subscribers worldwide and new content daily it's easy to see why babble is top of the list for anyone wishing to learn and develop a new language for me it was about taking a short break from my daily routine and flexing those cognitive muscles a little bit in a productive and fun way with the goal of improving my holiday vocabulary i'm using babble to learn to speak french before babel i couldn't even order a croissant in france and i wish i was joking but now i can have meaningful human conversations when abroad it has genuinely changed the way i travel babble is packed full of content designed by language experts it offers 10 to 15 minute short and fun classes that are proven to get you speaking in a new language in just three weeks there's also loads of new podcasts stories and games to fully immerse yourself in the language of your choice so if you're looking to become bilingual for professional reasons or you just feel like learning a new language would be a great personal achievement for you then i would highly recommend trying babble and you can take advantage of six months for free when you sign up for six months all you need to do is click the link in the description below as a religious man reverend paris's first reaction was to pray for his daughter and niece and their souls but all the praying in the world didn't stop them from doing gymnastics onto the coffee table so the minister quickly realized he needed backup a doctor and another minister named john hale were summoned to the house to examine the girls and the rather odd happenings shocked by what he found reverend hale reported these children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents their arms necks and backs turned this way and that way and returned back again so it was impossible for them to do of themselves strange stuff indeed and those present immediately pegged the blame on witchcraft what other explanation could a 17th century puritan minister find for his daughter writhing on the floor and barking sheer blister-inducing boredom perhaps the girls were known to have been experimenting with the bizarre practice of umancy shortly before all the fitting and driving malarkey umancy was attempting to predict the future using a separated uncooked egg and a mirror used by the ancient greeks and vikings umanci had become something of an illicit craze in 17th century massachusetts and the girls were thought to have been attempting to conjure a vision of their future husbands using it but instead of seeing a lovely vision of brad pitt one of the girls saw a coffin an omen of what was to come perhaps whether the mystic eggs had anything to do with it or not once the word witchcraft had been uttered it didn't take long for accusations to fly around salem the first to be accused of afflicting the girls was tituba the family's living slave then accusations were hurled at sarah good a poverty-stricken homeless woman who begged in the local streets and a similarly poor elderly woman sarah osborne all three were powerless to defend themselves without social standing or money for women like them an accusation of witchcraft would prove fatal so it was strange then that when tried tituba decided to give the court exactly what it wanted to hear perhaps she was delirious or maybe she was trying to save herself from the executioner's noose but over the course of three days she told a lord tale in which she recounted seeing a man in black who'd forced her to sign her name in the devil's book making her the devil's servant she then said sarah good sarah osborne and six unnamed others had done the same she also told of seeing sarah good send yellow birds to attack the two girls and the cat to attack and scratch another girl her damning confession gave tituba the nickname the black witch of salem amongst the community with such bizarre tall tales flying around the town salem began to descend into a vicious whirlwind of collective madness which lasted for over a year more people came forward accusing anyone they didn't quite fancy the look of of being a witch husbands even accused their wives siblings turned on each other lifelong friends became enemies even children didn't escape the youngest person to be accused and arrested was the five-year-old daughter of sarah goode a little girl named dorothy dorothy was eventually released but her mother was hanged of course not everyone in salem relished the trials and the disintegration of their town into a madness of accusations and executions but those who did oppose weren't exactly able to say so only a very brave or very foolish person would have stuck her neck out into the salem witch trial fray as doing so would probably just see her accused of witchcraft too the whole thing was turning into one big witch pursuit thing even when there was clear room for doubt no one in salem dared voice it amply illustrated by the sad story of george burrows who was accused of being the witch's ring leader despite being a church minister in salem it wasn't enough to save him but it did mean that standing on the gallows in the last moments of his life he gave the watching crowd a word perfect recitation of the lord's prayer this it was thought would have been an impossible task for a witch because witches simply could not pray they still hanged him anyway well they had gone to a lot of effort to get everything set up when a citizen was accused of witchcraft she could plead guilty or innocent it may surprise you that the majority pleaded guilty yes they said i'm guilty of being an actual witch you may be somewhat less surprised however when i tell you that a guilty plea usually resulted in jail time whereas an innocent play would almost always result in execution why well puritans believed that lying was a sin and since the town had already unanimously decided the accused was probably a witch before the trial if she did plead innocent she just had to be lying and therefore had committed another sin on top of being a bleeding witch for which she obviously deserved to now die a guilty plea however demonstrated remorse and repentance good traits according to the puritan ideal and therefore the accused would usually be spared not all who pleaded innocent were however and many met the hangman's noose located at the now infamous gallows hill regardless contrary to some pop culture depictions not a single witch was burnt at the stake during the salem witch trials that was how the europeans back home like to do it though there was the odd exception of giles corey a farmer in salem who was accused of being a witch by the community and was executed by being slowly crushed to death under large stones so how does a sleepy new england colonial town take leave of its senses and start hanging their satanic neighbours left right and center to really understand the salem witch trials we need to take a look at what life was like in 17th century salem and the surrounding villages and farmsteads the colony had only been established six decades earlier in 1626 and even at the time of the witch trials many of those who lived in salem would have been recent arrivals mostly from england who traveled to the new colony in order to enjoy religious freedom specifically puritanism a movement that practiced protestantism in its purest form and sure they found purity in new england but they also found fear the colony was surrounded by the ocean on one side and wilderness on all of us the little lore and order there was struggled to contain the constant infighting and power grabs between the colonists and there was the ever looming threat of attack from native americans in fact only a decade before the witch trials in 1676 a brutal 15-year war between the settlers and the local population had just come to a bloody end it killed one out of every 10 of the colonies adult men and destroyed numerous homes and businesses so it's fair to say in 1692 the residents of salem weren't enjoying a peaceful life but one in which fear and suspicion was around every corner every sunday they would stand in church to hear a puritan sermon that spoke vividly of the devil and the dangers that lay beyond the walls of their homes and the fences of their farms for most salem residents the only respite from their arduous existence was to be found in the bible they would gather around a warm fire at the end of a long day to share stories of the devil witchcraft and holy reverence and so the entire population was ripe for suggestion and when the first accusations of sorcery began to fly it isn't difficult to understand why it spread through the colony like an epidemic of suspicion some have sought alternative explanations for salem's sudden descent into madness diseases such as epilepsy and lyme disease have been blamed but there's little evidence for either more plausible is the idea that a hallucinogenic fungus could be to blame the ergot fungus grows on grains such as rye and wheat which just so happen to have been staples of the salem diet it causes sickness fits and hallucinations which sounds remarkably similar to the behavior exhibited by betty paris abigail williams and others but even this theory as neat as it sounds is unlikely unless most of europe and north america spent about 300 years high on ergot because salem wasn't unique wits trials many of them much bigger and deadlier than salem's had been commonplace across europe for hundreds of years it's hardly surprising then given the traditions back home that colonists began killing so-called witches almost as soon as they arrived in the new world if we go back to 1626 one of the very first north american witch trials took place in the jamestown colony in virginia the courts there heard that a midwife named joan wright had carried out multiple acts of witchcraft against the people of the town these included bewitching chickens and butter churns killing a baby forcing a girl to dance naked and causing heavy rain that destroyed a tobacco farmer's crops which sounds like a regular friday night from where i come from there's no record of jones fate but the virginia courts were slightly more lenient on spooky behavior than those in massachusetts so it's likely she was spared those accused of witchcraft in connecticut however were not so lucky around 40 people are thought to have been tried in the states in the second half of the 17th century 11 of whom were executed such as mary johnson who confessed after torture to familiarity with the devil but to be fair i think i'd curse the devil a few times as someone had a castle brand pressed to my nipples the others fortunate enough to escape fled for their lives into the american wilderness over in europe the worst of the witchcraft trials were over by the time salem's took place in 1692 however it's fought an astonishing 50 000 people most of them women were executed for witchcraft in europe between 1400 and 1782 when the final european witch trial and execution took place in switzerland the peak of the european wits trial craze was in the early 17th century however and it got pretty out of hand germany in particular loved a good witch bothering with mass executions taking place on several occasions most horrific were the wurzburg witch trials between 1626 and 1631. around 200 people some of them children were beheaded and burnt at the stake in the town center in england the 1612 pendlewitch trial is kind of like the british salem as in salem the trial started as a result of an accusation which spiraled out of control a woman refused to buy some pins from a street hawker who shortly afterwards no doubt coincidentally collapsed and was taken to a local pub there he accused a woman of witchcraft the investigation saw many pendle families being interviewed and accusations ripped through the town the result was 12 alleged witches were tried in lancaster castle 10 of whom were hanged what's kind of funny about witch trials is that for hundreds of years witches were considered a helpful component of conventional society throughout the middle ages people visited their local witch to buy a potion or a spell a love struck young man would procure a love potion an elderly woman would ask for a potion to save her ailing husband from his sick bed a farmer might ask the witch to help find his missing sheep the catholic church wasn't particularly bothered about witches they were too preoccupied with heaven armies and endless crusades but with the spread of protestantism came a new found fear and hatred of witchcraft and generally suspicious female behavior martin luther kind of set the tone for the movement when he personally authorized the execution of at least four witches as protestantism grew so the catholic church decided they had better upped their witch-pursuiting game too so when puritan settlers left a religiously divided europe behind to seek new religious freedom in new england it's no wonder that witchcraft was top of their minds when it came to establishing a legal code the first crime punishable by death in new england was worshiping idols viewed by puritans as a dangerous catholic practice the second was witchcraft with the text if any man or woman be a witch that is has or consult with a familiar spirit they shall be put to death added to the massachusetts law books murder only features fourth on the list after blasphemy jesus christ i better be careful not to murder anyone but the people of salem were not completely without reason just as doubt had crept in when george burrows recited the lord's prayer from the gallows so it continued to spread through the town in the years after the trials petitions were filed in 1700 for free women who'd been convicted but not yet executed and all three were pardoned by the court and relatives of previously executed victims were also granted compensation finally in 2001 after 300 years massachusetts legally exonerated every person who'd been convicted at salem because in 2000 they were obviously still trying to figure out if magic is actually real thanks for watching

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 514,426

Rating: 4.9414678 out of 5

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Id: FLOQ3YTrrPM

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021