In this episode, we'll explore the eerie events of the Salem Witch Trials, a chilling tale of suspicion, fear, and injustice in 17th-century Massachusetts.
Discover how a village turned against itself, leading to the execution of innocent people amidst accusations of witchcraft, and consider the theories behind what really happened.
The History of Witches
"Weird history" episodes
"'Horror" episodes
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:28] It’s a story of suspicion, the devil, witchcraft–alleged witchcraft, I should add–mass hysteria, hints of psychedelic drugs, and justice.
[00:00:40] OK then, let’s step into the icy, unsettling world of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:48] The winter of 1692 was particularly cold in Massachusetts.
[00:00:54] The temperature rarely got above freezing point, and many of the ponds and rivers had been frozen over since late the previous year.
[00:01:04] In the small village of Salem, the 500 or so Puritan settlers did everything they could to stay warm.
[00:01:13] Church was, of course, a regular occurrence.
[00:01:16] This was a highly religious community.
[00:01:20] And what these god-fearing men and women feared the most was, naturally, the devil.
[00:01:28] In Salem Village, the devil wasn’t just a story whispered to scare children; he was real.
[00:01:35] To the 500 or so Puritans huddled in their icy wooden homes, he was an ever-present enemy, lurking in the shadows, waiting to snatch their souls.
[00:01:48] But why were they so afraid?
[00:01:51] Why did this small, God-fearing community see the devil behind every misfortune?
[00:01:58] Well, these settlers weren’t just a random collection of English people, they were Puritans, a group so strict, so devoted, that they’d crossed an ocean to build a ‘pure’ life.
[00:02:12] Back in England, their parents or grandparents had watched the Protestant Reformation unfold, and they believed the Church of England, the Protestant church, hadn’t gone far enough to strip away Catholic influences.
[00:02:29] So they sailed across the Atlantic, dreaming of a holy community, a shining “city upon a hill”.
[00:02:38] But that dream came with a catch: if they were God’s chosen people, and of course, they fervently believed that they were, the devil would surely try to destroy them.
[00:02:52] And in early 1692, life gave them plenty of reasons to feel that the devil was edging closer.
[00:03:01] The winter was brutal, crops had failed, smallpox had swept through, and Indian raids from the north had left families grieving.
[00:03:13] Every creak of the floorboards, every howl of the wind through the frozen trees, felt like a sign.
[00:03:21] The Puritans believed the devil wasn’t some distant figure, someone you might meet in hell if you didn’t live a god-fearing life; he was here, or rather, his secret servants were.
[00:03:34] These servants were witches, people, almost exclusively women, who had made a pact with Satan, a deal with the devil.
[00:03:44] And they weren’t random strangers; they were neighbours, friends, even family, who were working with the devil.
[00:03:54] His tricks were clever: he could send ‘spectres,’ invisible spirits, to pinch or choke you in the night.
[00:04:02] He could turn your cow’s milk sour or make your children fall ill and die.
[00:04:08] Every Sunday, Reverend Samuel Parris, the village minister, would stand in front of his congregation and preach exactly this.
[00:04:18] Beware the devil; he has evil and cunning ways, and he is sending witches to test you.
[00:04:26] Perhaps it all sounded theoretical, but in January of 1692, he noticed something unusual happening in his own house.
[00:04:38] His daughter, Betty, and her cousin Abigail, started behaving strangely.
[00:04:44] They were only 9 and 11 years old, but suddenly, they weren’t acting like children anymore.
[00:04:51] They twitched and shook, cried out in pain, and complained of being pinched or bitten. But there was nothing there. It wasn’t mice, it wasn’t some pest, or bed bugs. They seemed to be being attacked by some invisible force.
[00:05:13] At first, it might have seemed like a sickness. After all, the winter had been harsh, and disease wasn’t uncommon.
[00:05:22] But when a local doctor examined them and found no clear cause, he gave an altogether different explanation: witchcraft.
[00:05:34] To the Puritans, this made perfect sense.
[00:05:38] If the devil was real, and his witches were among them, then these girls were under attack.
[00:05:47] Word spread quickly through the village.
[00:05:50] Salem was small, only about 500 people, so news travelled fast, from house to house, whispered over fences and church pews.
[00:06:01] Soon, other girls in the village started showing the same signs.
[00:06:07] Ann Putnam Jr., a 12-year-old from a powerful family, and Mercy Lewis, a 17-year-old servant, joined Betty and Abigail in their fits.
[00:06:18] They screamed about invisible tormentors, pointed fingers, and named names.
[00:06:25] The first to be accused were the kind of people you might expect in a suspicious little village: outcasts, people on the edges.
[00:06:34] There was Sarah Good, a beggar who smoked a pipe and muttered under her breath when anyone refused her charity.
[00:06:43] Then Sarah Osborne, an older woman who’d shocked the village by marrying her servant and committing the most scandalous crime of all: skipping church.
[00:06:55] And finally, Tituba, a black slave woman who worked in Reverend Parris’s own home.
[00:07:02] Now, not much is known about Tituba.
[00:07:06] It’s thought she might have come from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, and if so, she may well have told the girls stories about Voodoo, spirits and fortune-telling. These might have sounded weird and fascinating, but with the accusation of witchcraft, to her Puritan master, they sounded like the work of the devil.
[00:07:30] Under pressure, Tituba confessed.
[00:07:33] She was questioned for days, beaten, and likely told that confessing could save her life, while denying it would mean death.
[00:07:43] In a village gripped by fear, she had little choice but to give them what they wanted: a story.
[00:07:51] She described visions of black dogs, red cats, and witches flying through the air, details that matched Puritan fears perfectly.
[00:08:01] She said she’d met the devil, that he’d asked her to serve him, and that she’d seen other witches in Salem signing his book, a sort of evil guest list.
[00:08:15] Her confession wasn’t just a story; it was fuel.
[00:08:20] Suddenly, the village had proof, or so they thought.
[00:08:25] If Tituba was a witch, then the girls’ fits weren’t imagination; they were evidence.
[00:08:32] And if there were more witches out there, as Tituba claimed, no one was safe.
[00:08:39] Soon, fingers started to be pointed every which way.
[00:08:44] The accusations didn’t stop with the outcasts.
[00:08:47] They spread to people no one expected: a 71-year-old grandmother who went to church every Sunday and a well-respected farmer.
[00:08:57] When a woman named Martha Corey, who was in her 70s at the time, dared to question if the girls were telling the truth, she found herself accused of being a witch.
[00:09:08] Her husband, Giles Corey, an 80-year-old farmer, was another one of the few who refused to play along, and of course, he found himself accused of witchcraft too.
[00:09:20] He wouldn’t confess or deny the charges, so the court ordered him to be pressed under heavy stones, a terrible torture intended to get him to realise the error of his ways and corroborate.
[00:09:35] For two days, he lay there, saying only ‘More weight,’ until he died, a stubborn stand against the madness.
[00:09:44] His wife was executed three days later.
[00:09:48] In a village of 500, where everyone knew each other, this had become personal.
[00:09:55] Neighbour turned against neighbour, enemy against enemy, friend against friend.
[00:10:01] By spring, the panic had grown so big that the local magistrates couldn’t handle it anymore.
[00:10:09] A special court was set up in Salem Town, just a few miles away, to deal with the growing list of the accused.
[00:10:17] And here’s where things got even stranger: the court didn’t rely on normal evidence, like witnesses or proof you could touch.
[00:10:28] They used ‘spectral evidence’, the idea that the devil could send a witch’s spirit to harm someone, even if her body were somewhere else.
[00:10:38] If a girl screamed in court and said she saw Sarah Good’s spectre choking her, that was enough.
[00:10:46] It didn’t matter if Sarah was standing right there, clearly not doing anything other than trying to defend herself.
[00:10:53] To the Puritans, the invisible world was just as real as the frozen ponds outside.
[00:11:01] As you might imagine, the courtroom was a mess: girls fainting, judges pushing for guilty verdicts, and even a ‘touch test’ where if an accused touched a girl and her fits stopped, it was proof of guilt.
[00:11:20] By summer, the jails were full, and the gallows were busy.
[00:11:25] Nineteen people were hanged that year.
[00:11:29] Five more died in prison, including Sarah Osborne, who was worn out by illness and chains.
[00:11:37] And Giles Corey, of course, met his end under the stones.
[00:11:42] But it couldn’t go on forever.
[00:11:45] By late summer, the accusations had become a form of village retribution, a way to settle scores with quarrelling neighbours. If there was a dispute over land or some feeling of being wronged in the past, what better way to get your vengeance than accusing your enemy of being in bed with the devil?
[00:12:07] In fact, it took the accusations to reach the very top of Puritan society for the madness to end.
[00:12:15] People began pointing fingers at the wives of important men, like the wife of Governor William Phips, who was in charge of Massachusetts.
[00:12:25] This was a step too far.
[00:12:28] Phips had been away, dealing with Indian wars up north, but when he returned in October 1692, he saw the chaos and shut the special court down.
[00:12:42] Or, more cynically, he might have thought, “I don’t mind people accusing other people’s wives of being a witch, but you’re not going to accuse my wife of witchcraft!”
[00:12:53] He banned spectral evidence, saying it wasn’t reliable.
[00:12:57] Of course, it wasn’t reliable; it was invisible and was one person’s word against another's.
[00:13:04] Without that, most of the cases fell apart because there was no evidence.
[00:13:10] The trials slowed, then stopped.
[00:13:13] By early 1693, the jails started to empty.
[00:13:18] Tituba, who’d confessed, was sold to a new owner and disappeared from the records.
[00:13:24] The girls, Betty, Abigail, Ann and Mercy, went quiet, their fits fading away as the village tried to move on.
[00:13:34] Years later, in 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood in church and apologised.
[00:13:41] She said she’d been tricked–by the devil, she claimed–and hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.
[00:13:48] By then, 20 people were dead, and Salem was a village full of scars.
[00:13:55] In the immediate aftermath, there were movements to try to undo some of the damage, or at least acknowledge the sheer insanity of it.
[00:14:05] In 1702, the trials were declared unlawful.
[00:14:11] Then, in 1711, the government passed a law to restore the rights and good names of many who’d been condemned.
[00:14:19] They even paid some money to the families, a token compensation payment by way of apology. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
[00:14:30] Still, not everyone was included.
[00:14:33] Seven people’s names stayed on the list of the guilty, forgotten by that first effort.
[00:14:39] It wasn’t until 1957 that Massachusetts said sorry and tried to fix it again, clearing more names.
[00:14:47] But one person, a woman named Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was somehow missed out.
[00:14:55] She’d been accused and convicted but not hanged.
[00:15:00] She died of natural causes in 1747 at the ripe old age of 77 but with no living descendants to fight to clear her name, legally speaking, she was still a witch.
[00:15:14] However, more than 300 years after this conviction, she found some unlikely supporters in the form of a particularly creative teacher called Carrie LaPierre and her middle school class.
[00:15:30] Mrs LaPierre found out about Elizabeth Johnson Jr and set her eighth-grade class a project: clear her name.
[00:15:40] The class worked tirelessly, collating records and writing letters, and in 2022, a bill was passed that officially exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., thereby clearing the last convicted person in the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:15:59] Of course, she should never have been convicted in the first place, but it was better than nothing, and Mrs LaPierre definitely deserves some sort of prize for devising such an interesting class project.
[00:16:12] So, if we are to conclude that the residents of Salem were not being challenged by the devil, and there was not a mass transformation of the female population into witches, what was going on?
[00:16:26] Well, people have been trying to figure that out for centuries, and there are a few theories.
[00:16:33] One idea is that it all came down to a fungus. Ergot, to be exact.
[00:16:40] Ergot grows on rye, a grain the Puritans used to make bread.
[00:16:47] If the weather is wet and warm, like it might have been in the summer of 1691, ergot can spread fast.
[00:16:56] Now, here’s the strange part.
[00:16:58] Ergot contains natural chemicals that are similar to LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug that became famous in the 1960s.
[00:17:08] LSD causes people to see and feel things that aren’t real, and ergot can do something similar.
[00:17:17] If someone eats bread made with infected rye, they might become very sick, have convulsions, feel like they’re being pinched or burned, or even see things that aren’t really there.
[00:17:31] In other words, make people do exactly what the young girls did.
[00:17:37] Some historians think this could explain the strange behaviour, not witches, just bad bread.
[00:17:45] But not everyone agrees.
[00:17:47] The symptoms don’t match perfectly, nor does the timeline, and ergot poisoning would’ve hit more people, not just a handful of girls.
[00:17:58] Another theory is simpler: mass hysteria.
[00:18:02] Salem was a pressure cooker; harsh winters, failed crops, disease, and attacks from nearby tribes had nearly everyone on edge.
[00:18:13] Add in their deep fear of the devil, and it wouldn’t have taken much to spark panic.
[00:18:20] When the girls started twitching and shouting, the village was ready to believe the worst.
[00:18:26] Fear spread like wildfire, and soon, people saw witches everywhere because they expected to.
[00:18:34] The girls might have kept it going, maybe for attention, maybe out of fear themselves, while adults fuelled the flames with old grudges and power struggles.
[00:18:46] Then there’s the idea of plain old jealousy and spite.
[00:18:52] Salem was tiny, 500 people, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.
[00:18:58] Sarah Good was poor and bitter; Sarah Osborne broke the rules; Tituba was an outsider.
[00:19:06] Accusing them could settle scores or shift blame.
[00:19:11] Once it started, it snowballed; people piled on, afraid of being accused themselves if they didn’t join in.
[00:19:20] So, which is it?
[00:19:22] Maybe a bit of all three: some sickness, a lot of fear, and plenty of human messiness.
[00:19:29] Now, to wrap things up, this was a weird period indeed. 15 months, more than 200 people accused, the vast majority of whom were women.
[00:19:40] Nineteen people were hanged, one eighty-year-old man crushed to death under heavy stones, and at least five more died in jail.
[00:19:50] It was a miscarriage of justice indeed, and to think, it might all have come down to bad bread.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:20:04] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:08] If you enjoyed it, we have another episode on the history of witches, it’s episode number 322.
[00:20:15] I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to listen to that one. And we have a bunch of other “horror”-themed episodes, or ones about “weird history” too. Just click on the “horror” or “weird history” tab if you’re listening on our website, and I’ll put some links to all of those in the show notes as well.
[00:20:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:28] It’s a story of suspicion, the devil, witchcraft–alleged witchcraft, I should add–mass hysteria, hints of psychedelic drugs, and justice.
[00:00:40] OK then, let’s step into the icy, unsettling world of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:48] The winter of 1692 was particularly cold in Massachusetts.
[00:00:54] The temperature rarely got above freezing point, and many of the ponds and rivers had been frozen over since late the previous year.
[00:01:04] In the small village of Salem, the 500 or so Puritan settlers did everything they could to stay warm.
[00:01:13] Church was, of course, a regular occurrence.
[00:01:16] This was a highly religious community.
[00:01:20] And what these god-fearing men and women feared the most was, naturally, the devil.
[00:01:28] In Salem Village, the devil wasn’t just a story whispered to scare children; he was real.
[00:01:35] To the 500 or so Puritans huddled in their icy wooden homes, he was an ever-present enemy, lurking in the shadows, waiting to snatch their souls.
[00:01:48] But why were they so afraid?
[00:01:51] Why did this small, God-fearing community see the devil behind every misfortune?
[00:01:58] Well, these settlers weren’t just a random collection of English people, they were Puritans, a group so strict, so devoted, that they’d crossed an ocean to build a ‘pure’ life.
[00:02:12] Back in England, their parents or grandparents had watched the Protestant Reformation unfold, and they believed the Church of England, the Protestant church, hadn’t gone far enough to strip away Catholic influences.
[00:02:29] So they sailed across the Atlantic, dreaming of a holy community, a shining “city upon a hill”.
[00:02:38] But that dream came with a catch: if they were God’s chosen people, and of course, they fervently believed that they were, the devil would surely try to destroy them.
[00:02:52] And in early 1692, life gave them plenty of reasons to feel that the devil was edging closer.
[00:03:01] The winter was brutal, crops had failed, smallpox had swept through, and Indian raids from the north had left families grieving.
[00:03:13] Every creak of the floorboards, every howl of the wind through the frozen trees, felt like a sign.
[00:03:21] The Puritans believed the devil wasn’t some distant figure, someone you might meet in hell if you didn’t live a god-fearing life; he was here, or rather, his secret servants were.
[00:03:34] These servants were witches, people, almost exclusively women, who had made a pact with Satan, a deal with the devil.
[00:03:44] And they weren’t random strangers; they were neighbours, friends, even family, who were working with the devil.
[00:03:54] His tricks were clever: he could send ‘spectres,’ invisible spirits, to pinch or choke you in the night.
[00:04:02] He could turn your cow’s milk sour or make your children fall ill and die.
[00:04:08] Every Sunday, Reverend Samuel Parris, the village minister, would stand in front of his congregation and preach exactly this.
[00:04:18] Beware the devil; he has evil and cunning ways, and he is sending witches to test you.
[00:04:26] Perhaps it all sounded theoretical, but in January of 1692, he noticed something unusual happening in his own house.
[00:04:38] His daughter, Betty, and her cousin Abigail, started behaving strangely.
[00:04:44] They were only 9 and 11 years old, but suddenly, they weren’t acting like children anymore.
[00:04:51] They twitched and shook, cried out in pain, and complained of being pinched or bitten. But there was nothing there. It wasn’t mice, it wasn’t some pest, or bed bugs. They seemed to be being attacked by some invisible force.
[00:05:13] At first, it might have seemed like a sickness. After all, the winter had been harsh, and disease wasn’t uncommon.
[00:05:22] But when a local doctor examined them and found no clear cause, he gave an altogether different explanation: witchcraft.
[00:05:34] To the Puritans, this made perfect sense.
[00:05:38] If the devil was real, and his witches were among them, then these girls were under attack.
[00:05:47] Word spread quickly through the village.
[00:05:50] Salem was small, only about 500 people, so news travelled fast, from house to house, whispered over fences and church pews.
[00:06:01] Soon, other girls in the village started showing the same signs.
[00:06:07] Ann Putnam Jr., a 12-year-old from a powerful family, and Mercy Lewis, a 17-year-old servant, joined Betty and Abigail in their fits.
[00:06:18] They screamed about invisible tormentors, pointed fingers, and named names.
[00:06:25] The first to be accused were the kind of people you might expect in a suspicious little village: outcasts, people on the edges.
[00:06:34] There was Sarah Good, a beggar who smoked a pipe and muttered under her breath when anyone refused her charity.
[00:06:43] Then Sarah Osborne, an older woman who’d shocked the village by marrying her servant and committing the most scandalous crime of all: skipping church.
[00:06:55] And finally, Tituba, a black slave woman who worked in Reverend Parris’s own home.
[00:07:02] Now, not much is known about Tituba.
[00:07:06] It’s thought she might have come from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, and if so, she may well have told the girls stories about Voodoo, spirits and fortune-telling. These might have sounded weird and fascinating, but with the accusation of witchcraft, to her Puritan master, they sounded like the work of the devil.
[00:07:30] Under pressure, Tituba confessed.
[00:07:33] She was questioned for days, beaten, and likely told that confessing could save her life, while denying it would mean death.
[00:07:43] In a village gripped by fear, she had little choice but to give them what they wanted: a story.
[00:07:51] She described visions of black dogs, red cats, and witches flying through the air, details that matched Puritan fears perfectly.
[00:08:01] She said she’d met the devil, that he’d asked her to serve him, and that she’d seen other witches in Salem signing his book, a sort of evil guest list.
[00:08:15] Her confession wasn’t just a story; it was fuel.
[00:08:20] Suddenly, the village had proof, or so they thought.
[00:08:25] If Tituba was a witch, then the girls’ fits weren’t imagination; they were evidence.
[00:08:32] And if there were more witches out there, as Tituba claimed, no one was safe.
[00:08:39] Soon, fingers started to be pointed every which way.
[00:08:44] The accusations didn’t stop with the outcasts.
[00:08:47] They spread to people no one expected: a 71-year-old grandmother who went to church every Sunday and a well-respected farmer.
[00:08:57] When a woman named Martha Corey, who was in her 70s at the time, dared to question if the girls were telling the truth, she found herself accused of being a witch.
[00:09:08] Her husband, Giles Corey, an 80-year-old farmer, was another one of the few who refused to play along, and of course, he found himself accused of witchcraft too.
[00:09:20] He wouldn’t confess or deny the charges, so the court ordered him to be pressed under heavy stones, a terrible torture intended to get him to realise the error of his ways and corroborate.
[00:09:35] For two days, he lay there, saying only ‘More weight,’ until he died, a stubborn stand against the madness.
[00:09:44] His wife was executed three days later.
[00:09:48] In a village of 500, where everyone knew each other, this had become personal.
[00:09:55] Neighbour turned against neighbour, enemy against enemy, friend against friend.
[00:10:01] By spring, the panic had grown so big that the local magistrates couldn’t handle it anymore.
[00:10:09] A special court was set up in Salem Town, just a few miles away, to deal with the growing list of the accused.
[00:10:17] And here’s where things got even stranger: the court didn’t rely on normal evidence, like witnesses or proof you could touch.
[00:10:28] They used ‘spectral evidence’, the idea that the devil could send a witch’s spirit to harm someone, even if her body were somewhere else.
[00:10:38] If a girl screamed in court and said she saw Sarah Good’s spectre choking her, that was enough.
[00:10:46] It didn’t matter if Sarah was standing right there, clearly not doing anything other than trying to defend herself.
[00:10:53] To the Puritans, the invisible world was just as real as the frozen ponds outside.
[00:11:01] As you might imagine, the courtroom was a mess: girls fainting, judges pushing for guilty verdicts, and even a ‘touch test’ where if an accused touched a girl and her fits stopped, it was proof of guilt.
[00:11:20] By summer, the jails were full, and the gallows were busy.
[00:11:25] Nineteen people were hanged that year.
[00:11:29] Five more died in prison, including Sarah Osborne, who was worn out by illness and chains.
[00:11:37] And Giles Corey, of course, met his end under the stones.
[00:11:42] But it couldn’t go on forever.
[00:11:45] By late summer, the accusations had become a form of village retribution, a way to settle scores with quarrelling neighbours. If there was a dispute over land or some feeling of being wronged in the past, what better way to get your vengeance than accusing your enemy of being in bed with the devil?
[00:12:07] In fact, it took the accusations to reach the very top of Puritan society for the madness to end.
[00:12:15] People began pointing fingers at the wives of important men, like the wife of Governor William Phips, who was in charge of Massachusetts.
[00:12:25] This was a step too far.
[00:12:28] Phips had been away, dealing with Indian wars up north, but when he returned in October 1692, he saw the chaos and shut the special court down.
[00:12:42] Or, more cynically, he might have thought, “I don’t mind people accusing other people’s wives of being a witch, but you’re not going to accuse my wife of witchcraft!”
[00:12:53] He banned spectral evidence, saying it wasn’t reliable.
[00:12:57] Of course, it wasn’t reliable; it was invisible and was one person’s word against another's.
[00:13:04] Without that, most of the cases fell apart because there was no evidence.
[00:13:10] The trials slowed, then stopped.
[00:13:13] By early 1693, the jails started to empty.
[00:13:18] Tituba, who’d confessed, was sold to a new owner and disappeared from the records.
[00:13:24] The girls, Betty, Abigail, Ann and Mercy, went quiet, their fits fading away as the village tried to move on.
[00:13:34] Years later, in 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood in church and apologised.
[00:13:41] She said she’d been tricked–by the devil, she claimed–and hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.
[00:13:48] By then, 20 people were dead, and Salem was a village full of scars.
[00:13:55] In the immediate aftermath, there were movements to try to undo some of the damage, or at least acknowledge the sheer insanity of it.
[00:14:05] In 1702, the trials were declared unlawful.
[00:14:11] Then, in 1711, the government passed a law to restore the rights and good names of many who’d been condemned.
[00:14:19] They even paid some money to the families, a token compensation payment by way of apology. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
[00:14:30] Still, not everyone was included.
[00:14:33] Seven people’s names stayed on the list of the guilty, forgotten by that first effort.
[00:14:39] It wasn’t until 1957 that Massachusetts said sorry and tried to fix it again, clearing more names.
[00:14:47] But one person, a woman named Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was somehow missed out.
[00:14:55] She’d been accused and convicted but not hanged.
[00:15:00] She died of natural causes in 1747 at the ripe old age of 77 but with no living descendants to fight to clear her name, legally speaking, she was still a witch.
[00:15:14] However, more than 300 years after this conviction, she found some unlikely supporters in the form of a particularly creative teacher called Carrie LaPierre and her middle school class.
[00:15:30] Mrs LaPierre found out about Elizabeth Johnson Jr and set her eighth-grade class a project: clear her name.
[00:15:40] The class worked tirelessly, collating records and writing letters, and in 2022, a bill was passed that officially exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., thereby clearing the last convicted person in the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:15:59] Of course, she should never have been convicted in the first place, but it was better than nothing, and Mrs LaPierre definitely deserves some sort of prize for devising such an interesting class project.
[00:16:12] So, if we are to conclude that the residents of Salem were not being challenged by the devil, and there was not a mass transformation of the female population into witches, what was going on?
[00:16:26] Well, people have been trying to figure that out for centuries, and there are a few theories.
[00:16:33] One idea is that it all came down to a fungus. Ergot, to be exact.
[00:16:40] Ergot grows on rye, a grain the Puritans used to make bread.
[00:16:47] If the weather is wet and warm, like it might have been in the summer of 1691, ergot can spread fast.
[00:16:56] Now, here’s the strange part.
[00:16:58] Ergot contains natural chemicals that are similar to LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug that became famous in the 1960s.
[00:17:08] LSD causes people to see and feel things that aren’t real, and ergot can do something similar.
[00:17:17] If someone eats bread made with infected rye, they might become very sick, have convulsions, feel like they’re being pinched or burned, or even see things that aren’t really there.
[00:17:31] In other words, make people do exactly what the young girls did.
[00:17:37] Some historians think this could explain the strange behaviour, not witches, just bad bread.
[00:17:45] But not everyone agrees.
[00:17:47] The symptoms don’t match perfectly, nor does the timeline, and ergot poisoning would’ve hit more people, not just a handful of girls.
[00:17:58] Another theory is simpler: mass hysteria.
[00:18:02] Salem was a pressure cooker; harsh winters, failed crops, disease, and attacks from nearby tribes had nearly everyone on edge.
[00:18:13] Add in their deep fear of the devil, and it wouldn’t have taken much to spark panic.
[00:18:20] When the girls started twitching and shouting, the village was ready to believe the worst.
[00:18:26] Fear spread like wildfire, and soon, people saw witches everywhere because they expected to.
[00:18:34] The girls might have kept it going, maybe for attention, maybe out of fear themselves, while adults fuelled the flames with old grudges and power struggles.
[00:18:46] Then there’s the idea of plain old jealousy and spite.
[00:18:52] Salem was tiny, 500 people, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.
[00:18:58] Sarah Good was poor and bitter; Sarah Osborne broke the rules; Tituba was an outsider.
[00:19:06] Accusing them could settle scores or shift blame.
[00:19:11] Once it started, it snowballed; people piled on, afraid of being accused themselves if they didn’t join in.
[00:19:20] So, which is it?
[00:19:22] Maybe a bit of all three: some sickness, a lot of fear, and plenty of human messiness.
[00:19:29] Now, to wrap things up, this was a weird period indeed. 15 months, more than 200 people accused, the vast majority of whom were women.
[00:19:40] Nineteen people were hanged, one eighty-year-old man crushed to death under heavy stones, and at least five more died in jail.
[00:19:50] It was a miscarriage of justice indeed, and to think, it might all have come down to bad bread.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:20:04] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:08] If you enjoyed it, we have another episode on the history of witches, it’s episode number 322.
[00:20:15] I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to listen to that one. And we have a bunch of other “horror”-themed episodes, or ones about “weird history” too. Just click on the “horror” or “weird history” tab if you’re listening on our website, and I’ll put some links to all of those in the show notes as well.
[00:20:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:28] It’s a story of suspicion, the devil, witchcraft–alleged witchcraft, I should add–mass hysteria, hints of psychedelic drugs, and justice.
[00:00:40] OK then, let’s step into the icy, unsettling world of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:48] The winter of 1692 was particularly cold in Massachusetts.
[00:00:54] The temperature rarely got above freezing point, and many of the ponds and rivers had been frozen over since late the previous year.
[00:01:04] In the small village of Salem, the 500 or so Puritan settlers did everything they could to stay warm.
[00:01:13] Church was, of course, a regular occurrence.
[00:01:16] This was a highly religious community.
[00:01:20] And what these god-fearing men and women feared the most was, naturally, the devil.
[00:01:28] In Salem Village, the devil wasn’t just a story whispered to scare children; he was real.
[00:01:35] To the 500 or so Puritans huddled in their icy wooden homes, he was an ever-present enemy, lurking in the shadows, waiting to snatch their souls.
[00:01:48] But why were they so afraid?
[00:01:51] Why did this small, God-fearing community see the devil behind every misfortune?
[00:01:58] Well, these settlers weren’t just a random collection of English people, they were Puritans, a group so strict, so devoted, that they’d crossed an ocean to build a ‘pure’ life.
[00:02:12] Back in England, their parents or grandparents had watched the Protestant Reformation unfold, and they believed the Church of England, the Protestant church, hadn’t gone far enough to strip away Catholic influences.
[00:02:29] So they sailed across the Atlantic, dreaming of a holy community, a shining “city upon a hill”.
[00:02:38] But that dream came with a catch: if they were God’s chosen people, and of course, they fervently believed that they were, the devil would surely try to destroy them.
[00:02:52] And in early 1692, life gave them plenty of reasons to feel that the devil was edging closer.
[00:03:01] The winter was brutal, crops had failed, smallpox had swept through, and Indian raids from the north had left families grieving.
[00:03:13] Every creak of the floorboards, every howl of the wind through the frozen trees, felt like a sign.
[00:03:21] The Puritans believed the devil wasn’t some distant figure, someone you might meet in hell if you didn’t live a god-fearing life; he was here, or rather, his secret servants were.
[00:03:34] These servants were witches, people, almost exclusively women, who had made a pact with Satan, a deal with the devil.
[00:03:44] And they weren’t random strangers; they were neighbours, friends, even family, who were working with the devil.
[00:03:54] His tricks were clever: he could send ‘spectres,’ invisible spirits, to pinch or choke you in the night.
[00:04:02] He could turn your cow’s milk sour or make your children fall ill and die.
[00:04:08] Every Sunday, Reverend Samuel Parris, the village minister, would stand in front of his congregation and preach exactly this.
[00:04:18] Beware the devil; he has evil and cunning ways, and he is sending witches to test you.
[00:04:26] Perhaps it all sounded theoretical, but in January of 1692, he noticed something unusual happening in his own house.
[00:04:38] His daughter, Betty, and her cousin Abigail, started behaving strangely.
[00:04:44] They were only 9 and 11 years old, but suddenly, they weren’t acting like children anymore.
[00:04:51] They twitched and shook, cried out in pain, and complained of being pinched or bitten. But there was nothing there. It wasn’t mice, it wasn’t some pest, or bed bugs. They seemed to be being attacked by some invisible force.
[00:05:13] At first, it might have seemed like a sickness. After all, the winter had been harsh, and disease wasn’t uncommon.
[00:05:22] But when a local doctor examined them and found no clear cause, he gave an altogether different explanation: witchcraft.
[00:05:34] To the Puritans, this made perfect sense.
[00:05:38] If the devil was real, and his witches were among them, then these girls were under attack.
[00:05:47] Word spread quickly through the village.
[00:05:50] Salem was small, only about 500 people, so news travelled fast, from house to house, whispered over fences and church pews.
[00:06:01] Soon, other girls in the village started showing the same signs.
[00:06:07] Ann Putnam Jr., a 12-year-old from a powerful family, and Mercy Lewis, a 17-year-old servant, joined Betty and Abigail in their fits.
[00:06:18] They screamed about invisible tormentors, pointed fingers, and named names.
[00:06:25] The first to be accused were the kind of people you might expect in a suspicious little village: outcasts, people on the edges.
[00:06:34] There was Sarah Good, a beggar who smoked a pipe and muttered under her breath when anyone refused her charity.
[00:06:43] Then Sarah Osborne, an older woman who’d shocked the village by marrying her servant and committing the most scandalous crime of all: skipping church.
[00:06:55] And finally, Tituba, a black slave woman who worked in Reverend Parris’s own home.
[00:07:02] Now, not much is known about Tituba.
[00:07:06] It’s thought she might have come from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, and if so, she may well have told the girls stories about Voodoo, spirits and fortune-telling. These might have sounded weird and fascinating, but with the accusation of witchcraft, to her Puritan master, they sounded like the work of the devil.
[00:07:30] Under pressure, Tituba confessed.
[00:07:33] She was questioned for days, beaten, and likely told that confessing could save her life, while denying it would mean death.
[00:07:43] In a village gripped by fear, she had little choice but to give them what they wanted: a story.
[00:07:51] She described visions of black dogs, red cats, and witches flying through the air, details that matched Puritan fears perfectly.
[00:08:01] She said she’d met the devil, that he’d asked her to serve him, and that she’d seen other witches in Salem signing his book, a sort of evil guest list.
[00:08:15] Her confession wasn’t just a story; it was fuel.
[00:08:20] Suddenly, the village had proof, or so they thought.
[00:08:25] If Tituba was a witch, then the girls’ fits weren’t imagination; they were evidence.
[00:08:32] And if there were more witches out there, as Tituba claimed, no one was safe.
[00:08:39] Soon, fingers started to be pointed every which way.
[00:08:44] The accusations didn’t stop with the outcasts.
[00:08:47] They spread to people no one expected: a 71-year-old grandmother who went to church every Sunday and a well-respected farmer.
[00:08:57] When a woman named Martha Corey, who was in her 70s at the time, dared to question if the girls were telling the truth, she found herself accused of being a witch.
[00:09:08] Her husband, Giles Corey, an 80-year-old farmer, was another one of the few who refused to play along, and of course, he found himself accused of witchcraft too.
[00:09:20] He wouldn’t confess or deny the charges, so the court ordered him to be pressed under heavy stones, a terrible torture intended to get him to realise the error of his ways and corroborate.
[00:09:35] For two days, he lay there, saying only ‘More weight,’ until he died, a stubborn stand against the madness.
[00:09:44] His wife was executed three days later.
[00:09:48] In a village of 500, where everyone knew each other, this had become personal.
[00:09:55] Neighbour turned against neighbour, enemy against enemy, friend against friend.
[00:10:01] By spring, the panic had grown so big that the local magistrates couldn’t handle it anymore.
[00:10:09] A special court was set up in Salem Town, just a few miles away, to deal with the growing list of the accused.
[00:10:17] And here’s where things got even stranger: the court didn’t rely on normal evidence, like witnesses or proof you could touch.
[00:10:28] They used ‘spectral evidence’, the idea that the devil could send a witch’s spirit to harm someone, even if her body were somewhere else.
[00:10:38] If a girl screamed in court and said she saw Sarah Good’s spectre choking her, that was enough.
[00:10:46] It didn’t matter if Sarah was standing right there, clearly not doing anything other than trying to defend herself.
[00:10:53] To the Puritans, the invisible world was just as real as the frozen ponds outside.
[00:11:01] As you might imagine, the courtroom was a mess: girls fainting, judges pushing for guilty verdicts, and even a ‘touch test’ where if an accused touched a girl and her fits stopped, it was proof of guilt.
[00:11:20] By summer, the jails were full, and the gallows were busy.
[00:11:25] Nineteen people were hanged that year.
[00:11:29] Five more died in prison, including Sarah Osborne, who was worn out by illness and chains.
[00:11:37] And Giles Corey, of course, met his end under the stones.
[00:11:42] But it couldn’t go on forever.
[00:11:45] By late summer, the accusations had become a form of village retribution, a way to settle scores with quarrelling neighbours. If there was a dispute over land or some feeling of being wronged in the past, what better way to get your vengeance than accusing your enemy of being in bed with the devil?
[00:12:07] In fact, it took the accusations to reach the very top of Puritan society for the madness to end.
[00:12:15] People began pointing fingers at the wives of important men, like the wife of Governor William Phips, who was in charge of Massachusetts.
[00:12:25] This was a step too far.
[00:12:28] Phips had been away, dealing with Indian wars up north, but when he returned in October 1692, he saw the chaos and shut the special court down.
[00:12:42] Or, more cynically, he might have thought, “I don’t mind people accusing other people’s wives of being a witch, but you’re not going to accuse my wife of witchcraft!”
[00:12:53] He banned spectral evidence, saying it wasn’t reliable.
[00:12:57] Of course, it wasn’t reliable; it was invisible and was one person’s word against another's.
[00:13:04] Without that, most of the cases fell apart because there was no evidence.
[00:13:10] The trials slowed, then stopped.
[00:13:13] By early 1693, the jails started to empty.
[00:13:18] Tituba, who’d confessed, was sold to a new owner and disappeared from the records.
[00:13:24] The girls, Betty, Abigail, Ann and Mercy, went quiet, their fits fading away as the village tried to move on.
[00:13:34] Years later, in 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood in church and apologised.
[00:13:41] She said she’d been tricked–by the devil, she claimed–and hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.
[00:13:48] By then, 20 people were dead, and Salem was a village full of scars.
[00:13:55] In the immediate aftermath, there were movements to try to undo some of the damage, or at least acknowledge the sheer insanity of it.
[00:14:05] In 1702, the trials were declared unlawful.
[00:14:11] Then, in 1711, the government passed a law to restore the rights and good names of many who’d been condemned.
[00:14:19] They even paid some money to the families, a token compensation payment by way of apology. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
[00:14:30] Still, not everyone was included.
[00:14:33] Seven people’s names stayed on the list of the guilty, forgotten by that first effort.
[00:14:39] It wasn’t until 1957 that Massachusetts said sorry and tried to fix it again, clearing more names.
[00:14:47] But one person, a woman named Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was somehow missed out.
[00:14:55] She’d been accused and convicted but not hanged.
[00:15:00] She died of natural causes in 1747 at the ripe old age of 77 but with no living descendants to fight to clear her name, legally speaking, she was still a witch.
[00:15:14] However, more than 300 years after this conviction, she found some unlikely supporters in the form of a particularly creative teacher called Carrie LaPierre and her middle school class.
[00:15:30] Mrs LaPierre found out about Elizabeth Johnson Jr and set her eighth-grade class a project: clear her name.
[00:15:40] The class worked tirelessly, collating records and writing letters, and in 2022, a bill was passed that officially exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., thereby clearing the last convicted person in the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:15:59] Of course, she should never have been convicted in the first place, but it was better than nothing, and Mrs LaPierre definitely deserves some sort of prize for devising such an interesting class project.
[00:16:12] So, if we are to conclude that the residents of Salem were not being challenged by the devil, and there was not a mass transformation of the female population into witches, what was going on?
[00:16:26] Well, people have been trying to figure that out for centuries, and there are a few theories.
[00:16:33] One idea is that it all came down to a fungus. Ergot, to be exact.
[00:16:40] Ergot grows on rye, a grain the Puritans used to make bread.
[00:16:47] If the weather is wet and warm, like it might have been in the summer of 1691, ergot can spread fast.
[00:16:56] Now, here’s the strange part.
[00:16:58] Ergot contains natural chemicals that are similar to LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug that became famous in the 1960s.
[00:17:08] LSD causes people to see and feel things that aren’t real, and ergot can do something similar.
[00:17:17] If someone eats bread made with infected rye, they might become very sick, have convulsions, feel like they’re being pinched or burned, or even see things that aren’t really there.
[00:17:31] In other words, make people do exactly what the young girls did.
[00:17:37] Some historians think this could explain the strange behaviour, not witches, just bad bread.
[00:17:45] But not everyone agrees.
[00:17:47] The symptoms don’t match perfectly, nor does the timeline, and ergot poisoning would’ve hit more people, not just a handful of girls.
[00:17:58] Another theory is simpler: mass hysteria.
[00:18:02] Salem was a pressure cooker; harsh winters, failed crops, disease, and attacks from nearby tribes had nearly everyone on edge.
[00:18:13] Add in their deep fear of the devil, and it wouldn’t have taken much to spark panic.
[00:18:20] When the girls started twitching and shouting, the village was ready to believe the worst.
[00:18:26] Fear spread like wildfire, and soon, people saw witches everywhere because they expected to.
[00:18:34] The girls might have kept it going, maybe for attention, maybe out of fear themselves, while adults fuelled the flames with old grudges and power struggles.
[00:18:46] Then there’s the idea of plain old jealousy and spite.
[00:18:52] Salem was tiny, 500 people, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.
[00:18:58] Sarah Good was poor and bitter; Sarah Osborne broke the rules; Tituba was an outsider.
[00:19:06] Accusing them could settle scores or shift blame.
[00:19:11] Once it started, it snowballed; people piled on, afraid of being accused themselves if they didn’t join in.
[00:19:20] So, which is it?
[00:19:22] Maybe a bit of all three: some sickness, a lot of fear, and plenty of human messiness.
[00:19:29] Now, to wrap things up, this was a weird period indeed. 15 months, more than 200 people accused, the vast majority of whom were women.
[00:19:40] Nineteen people were hanged, one eighty-year-old man crushed to death under heavy stones, and at least five more died in jail.
[00:19:50] It was a miscarriage of justice indeed, and to think, it might all have come down to bad bread.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:20:04] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:08] If you enjoyed it, we have another episode on the history of witches, it’s episode number 322.
[00:20:15] I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to listen to that one. And we have a bunch of other “horror”-themed episodes, or ones about “weird history” too. Just click on the “horror” or “weird history” tab if you’re listening on our website, and I’ll put some links to all of those in the show notes as well.
[00:20:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
