Deep Dive
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In 1692, the small Puritan village of Salem, Massachusetts was at the center of one of history's deadliest witch hunts.
It was just an utterly tragic case of mass hysteria. Nobody was safe. Once you were accused, it was a domino effect. You would accuse someone else, try to deflect the attention from you to some other poor soul. It was absolute pandemonium. As a result of the unjust execution of 20 innocent men and women during the Salem witch trials, some people believe that Salem remains cursed today.
Salem, without a doubt, is the most haunted location in the country. The land is stained with blood. Yet despite its past, Salem now prides itself on being the capital of modern American witchcraft. I call unto and invite to this sacred space the spirits of those who were accused in 1692.
I mean, there's no doubt a terrible wrong was done on all of the accused. They were all innocent of everything. It's haunted America for the best part of 300 years. During the notorious Salem witch trials, 20 men and women accused of witchcraft were wrongfully executed.
Salem historian and paranormal author Sam Baltrusis is heading to the exact spot where the deadly Salem Witch Hunt began in February 1692. But wherever Sam goes in Salem, he always finds it a haunting experience.
I love the history, but every time I come to Salem, I will have something weird happen. As soon as I stepped foot in Salem, things started happening that were inexplicable. I've had a man with a hat, like a shadow figure, stalk me at my job in Salem, and I really feel like that maybe I'm cursed.
Sam says he discovered a possible reason a few years ago when he found out he's distantly related to one of the key figures in the Salem witch trials, Ann Putnam Jr. Ann Putnam Jr. accused 62 people of witchcraft, and she was responsible for the deaths of 17 people. Those numbers are huge.
Ann Putnam Jr. was the major player, but her father, Thomas Putnam, was controlling what was going on. He was, in my opinion, the puppet master. Now that I know that I am related to the Putnam family, my goal is to make amends for what my family did back in 1692. I feel like that maybe this curse that's been kind of with me since I've been in Salem will somehow be lifted.
Today, very few original 17th century houses survive in historic Salem village. But the foundations of the original parsonage where the Salem witch hunt began have been preserved. This is ground zero to what happened in 1692. To me, it's hallowed grounds. Living here in Salem's parsonage in 1692 were Reverend Samuel Parris and his wife,
their nine-year-old daughter Betty, and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail, and the family slave Tituba.
Alright, 1681 the Salem village inhabitants built a home for their minister at the site. It was in this house in 1692 that stories of witchcraft nurtured the village witchcraft hysteria and resulted in the deaths of 23 persons. Now it's interesting that they say 23 persons is the fact that there were 20 people that were executed but there were also three people that died in prison as well.
But the impact of the witch trials reached hundreds of people. The families were destroyed. There were people that were accused of witchcraft never the same again. So 23 is a modest number compared to the hundreds of people that were affected by the witch trials. The tragic trail of events that soon snowballed uncontrollably into the deadly Salem witch hunt
began when the children of the reverend's house started to act strangely one day in February 1692.
When Reverend Parris's daughter Betty and her cousin Abigail began to kick off, essentially, you could say they were hysterical, but it was more than that. They were barking, they were contorting their bodies in ways that people thought were impossible, they were crawling like animals under the furniture, they were foaming at the mouth. Obviously something was very, very wrong, so they called in the doctor.
The doctor examines them physically and comes to the conclusion that there's nothing obviously physically amiss. And so he makes the dramatic proclamation that they're bewitched. When the girls were later questioned, they said that the family slave Tituba, who was believed to have been an indigenous South American woman, had taught them various strange and superstitious practices. In this Puritan world, Tituba is indigenous customs.
are viewed as being demonic, obviously of witchcraft in origin, but she was just different. So she was targeted first and accused of practices that were obviously witchcraft, but just normal and indigenous to her culture. As a highly religious community, Puritans were extremely afraid of witchcraft and believed that the devil was always trying to tempt the God-fearing from the path of righteousness.
You cannot underestimate how conservative and how strict the culture was in this village and all around New England. Dancing was not allowed. Fun was not allowed. Not a lot of sex was allowed. Christmas was banned. If you varied from the norm one little bit, then people would start to think that you're different, but not a good kind of different, a bad kind of different. The work of the devil. Why can't you be like the rest of them?
In this kind of community, the indigenous slave Tituba stuck out like a sore thumb, and she very soon admitted that she was indeed in league with the devil to bewitch the girls. Tituba confesses almost immediately to witchcraft. Why? Was she a witch? Almost certainly not. But she confessed and began to tell a very elaborate story about consorting with the devil in very intimate terms. Now,
counter-intuitively, probably saved her life. None of the people who confessed to practicing witchcraft in the Salem witch trials were killed. Those accused who claimed innocence all hung. As a result of the paradoxical incentive for the accused to admit guilt, within weeks the events unleashed by the unusual behavior of the two girls in the parsonage rapidly spiraled into an uncontrollable and terrifying witch hunt.
For us today, one of the most shocking things about the witch trial at Salem was the widespread use of untested children's evidence. And this happened because of two things. The first was that in 1597, King James I of England had written a book called "Demonology." And in it, he tried to convince the world that witches were real and their offenses were so diabolical that all evidence possible should be taken and should be used to find them, including children's evidence.
And then not long afterwards, in Pendle in Lancashire in 1612, there was a very famous trial in which a nine-year-old girl, Janet Device, sent her entire family to the gallows. The court clerk wrote that story up and it became an international bestseller. It was even read in America in places like Salem. So by the time of the trials in Salem, the idea of children giving evidence in witch trials was completely normalized.
You had children accusing their parents of being witches, husbands accusing their wives, wives of their husbands. Nobody was safe. Once you were accused, it was a domino effect. You would accuse someone else, try to deflect the attention from you to some other poor soul. It was absolute pandemonium. The outcome of Salem's infamous witch hunt in 1692 was the judicial execution of 20 innocent men and women.
Today, each of the victims is remembered at Salem's Witch Trials Memorial. Caught up in a terrifying legal whirlwind, the 20 people memorialized here were all executed within just over 100 days during the summer of 1692. Given the kind of evidence that was allowed in court, the accused didn't stand a chance.
A lot of the accusations were ridiculous. If you read some of them, there was a ghost pig. This ghost pig had the face of Alice Parker on it and chased this man, John Westgate, down the streets of Salem in 1692. And that was used to accuse and execute an innocent woman of witchcraft.
The Salem witch trials were a classic expression of what happens when a group succumbs to mass hysteria and things get out of their control. It's important to remember that colonial Salem was essentially medieval England. These immigrants brought with them superstitious folk beliefs that would make it very easy for witches to feel really, genuinely frightening.
The admission of so-called "spectral evidence" followed English legal precedent, set at an earlier witch trial at Bury St. Edmunds in England in the 1660s. People could testify to being attacked by a witch in spirit form, even though their specter was obviously invisible to anyone else. Not only that, these unsupported accusations could be made by children, too.
The Salem Witch Trial Court, with hysterical people, the court sitting day after day, new accusations coming out regularly against more people, the net widening and everybody being convicted, no real ability to present a defense, and no real sense that anybody wanted to listen to your defense, must have been utterly terrifying.
Bridget Bishop was the first woman to be executed. She was portrayed as this loose woman who would wear lacy garb and red clothing, but the red was a signal or sign of wealth. And that's why the town did not like her. Bridget would get these beautiful dresses made by local townspeople and kind of mysteriously lose her purse while they were asking for the money. So if anything, she was guilty of penny pension, but that doesn't make you a witch.
In Salem's court, however, five young girls, including Sam Baltrusis' distant relative, 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., testified that Bridget Bishop had bewitched them. After various adults also said they had been tormented by her specter, Bridget was found guilty and hanged on June 10, 1692.
After Brigid Bishop's execution, 13 other Salem women were also convicted and hanged, including Sarah Good, who insisted until her last breath on the gallows that she was innocent. According to legend, she cursed one of the reverends who were responsible for the witch trials. She said, "If I'm a witch, then you're a wizard, and may God give you blood to drink." Well, guess what? The guy had a brain aneurysm and ended up choking on his own blood.
As well as the fourteen women hanged in Salem for being witches, six men were also put to death. Remarkably, one was a previous reverend of Salem village, George Burroughs.
Now, at this point, they were looking for sort of like the devil himself. And according to Ann Putnam Jr. and multiple people that testified against Reverend George Burroughs, he was the devil. He was sort of the ringleader. But he was having a lot of financial issues and borrowed money from the Putnam family. On the surface, the Salem trials were just about allegations of witchcraft. But it seems many accusers used the opportunity to eliminate their enemies.
Reverend Burroughs had failed to repay his debts to Ann Putnam Jr.'s father, Thomas Putnam, for over ten years. And many believe this was the main reason why he became caught up in the witch hunt.
Socially, there was a lot of bickering over land and like who owned what. So there was a lot of tension going on. And usually when we find accusations of heresy and witchcraft and demons and whatnot, there's usually something much more common and banal underpinning it. If someone wanted your land, if somebody wanted your property, if they didn't like you, then the easiest way of getting rid of you is to point the fickle finger of fate and call you a witch.
Reverend George Burroughs, on all accounts, was not a perfect person, but he was a reverend. He was definitely not the devil himself. And when the people saw him executed, there was a quietness that happened with the group because they felt like what they were doing was wrong. The thing that most affected people at Reverend Burroughs' public execution was the fact that he loudly recited the Lord's Prayer just as he was about to be hanged. Surely no devil worshiper would do this.
Yet despite the growing public doubts about the Salem trials, the witch hunt still continued. Among the last to be executed was an elderly landowner, Giles Corey. However, he wasn't hanged like the other victims of the witch hunt. Because he refused to plead either guilty or not guilty, the Salem court, uniquely in American judicial history, ordered him to be tortured.
The story of Giles Corey is really interesting and very tragic. His wife becomes accused of witchcraft, and he's horrified because he believes it. He believes that she's a witch. And all this time, he never knew. But quickly the tables turn, and he's accused of witchcraft. Local historian Thomas Valor is an expert on the story of what happened to Giles Corey and why.
In the beginning, Giles, he was a big fan of the witch trials. He loved going, he loved checking them out, like it was fun for people back then. But his wife, Martha Corey, could see through the hysteria a little bit better than him, and she would try to discourage him from going to see the trials. But Giles Corey's views about the witch trials quickly changed once he and his wife got caught up in the witch hunt themselves.
Giles was accused, like so many others, by Ann Putnam Jr., as well as several other young girls. You can see during his trial, the accusers, the way that they spoke, it was a way of like tugging on people's heartstrings. It was really dramatic.
When Giles Corey was questioned in court about the accusations of witchcraft, he used an unusual legal tactic: refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty.
Giles understood what was going on. He had been a lawyer when he was younger, and he could see that the way that court proceedings were working out, a lot of the times they were confiscating the land and property of the victims. He knew that they were coming for him too, because he had a lot of land.
In those days, if you remained mute, even if you were found guilty, your property would not go to the Crown. So he remained mute so that his family could get his property, his land, his money. But the accused had no legal right to silence in 1692, so the Salem Court sentenced Giles Corey to be tortured in order to force him to plead.
No one knows exactly where Giles Corey was pressed to death, but generally speaking, it was outside of the witch dungeon. So a lot of the local historians like to go on the theory that it was in this back corner here of Howard Street Cemetery. So the sentence was that you be taken from this courtroom and weights of stone as heavy as you can bear and heavier to be placed upon your body until you either plead or you die.
While he's being tortured, the sheriff asks him, "Have you changed your mind? Will you enter a plea?" To which he replies, "More weight, more weight, complete defiance." And more weight he got. Remember, they weren't trying to kill him. They wanted him to give up. They wanted him to give in. So they made it slow. They made it last as long as they could.
The man who is in charge of the pressing of Giles Corey was Sheriff George Corwin, who I like to call the sick, sadistic Sheriff of Salem, because it's alliteration, but also it's true. It's very clear that he was a sadistic person. He enjoyed torturing people.
Can you really imagine how awful it would have been to have died in this fashion, slowly crushed to death, slowly suffocating hour after hour? So after two days of this torture, Giles Corey dies, but not before issuing a curse on the sheriff and the village. He said, "I curse you all and Salem too."
Giles Corey's refusal to plead before his death successfully led to his family inheriting his land and property. But according to local Salem legend, Giles Corey's most enduring legacy was the curse that he uttered with his last dying breath. It's said that his curse and his ghost still haunt Salem to this day.
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During the notorious Salem witch trials of 1692, 20 innocent people were executed. One of the last victims of the witch hunt was landowner Giles Corey. Uniquely in American judicial history, he was tortured in order to force him to plead either guilty or not guilty. But to ensure his family inherited his property, Giles Corey refused to plead up until his last gasp. Finally, in his final breath,
He issues a curse, not only to the sheriff, but to the entire village. Ever since then, strangely enough, starting with Sheriff Corwin, every single high sheriff of Essex County seated in Salem died while in office or had to retire early due to heart disease or random blood diseases. And this lasted all the way up until 1991.
Giles Corey's deadly curse is said to have been broken only by Essex County moving the sheriff's office out of Salem in 1991. The other side of the curse that more locals know about is they say that they'll see Giles, his specter, his ghost, kind of wandering around before terrible things happen to the city.
Decade after decade, people would see this apparition on the spot where he died. But the most famous manifestation of this apparition of Giles Corey was in 1914, right before the Great Fire of Salem.
Some women said that they saw the old man standing. They saw from his waist up, and when they called to him, he disappeared. That night, about one-third of the city of Salem began to burn.
Curiously for those who believe in curses, Salem's Great Fire in 1914 began in a building very close to the place where the alleged witches in 1692 were all hanged. Giles Corey's curse remains famous, but historically his most important legacy was that his uniquely gruesome torture became a major turning point of the Salem witch hunt.
Public opinion really began to change. Even though Giles Corey wasn't seen as a good person, what happened to him was just so unfathomably disgusting that it changed the way that people looked at this. People really started to understand that something terrible was happening. The last victims of the witch hunt were hanged on September 22nd, 1692, just three days after Giles Corey's death.
Within just a few terrifying months, 20 innocent men and women had been wrongfully executed by the colonial American justice system.
Even though we classify it as a witch trial, actually it's a miscarriage of justice. This is mass hysteria resulting in an extraordinary number of deaths, and we have to see it in that more modern context. Immediately there was an incredible outpouring of contrition and remorse, and the families of the victims were recompensed for lost money. Obviously they couldn't get back their loved ones. Official pardons were also granted to the witch hunt victims.
But in the years that followed the tragic events, the Salem region suffered many misfortunes, such as droughts, crop failures, smallpox outbreaks, and tribal attacks, making many Puritans feel that God was continuing to punish them for their mistake. Nonetheless, the witch trials were a turning point for religion in America.
Really, I think if you look at this time period, it was the beginning of the end of a theocracy, right? This was a time when religion was the end-all and be-all here. And this showed that it couldn't be maybe trusted with such complete control. And it started breaking down at that point.
America was set up as a country where people could express their own religious views. They were escaping religious persecution in the old world to live out their vision of a better world. And the fact that so quickly it descended into this kind of religious tyranny, I think is something that still haunts the American imagination. A century after the Salem Witch Trials, the newly independent United States guaranteed the separation of church and state,
and in the Constitution's First Amendment, proclaimed freedom of religious expression as one of the country's founding ideals. Today, protected by the full force of the law, witchcraft in all its forms is one of the United States' fastest growing religions.
Witchcraft for so long was the taboo thing, the absolutely forbidden thing that had to be rooted out at all costs. And yet now, society has come to understand and embrace and accept witchcraft. This would have been unimaginable to the people in Salem in the 1690s. And the thing that would probably have horrified them the most is that their history has become such a vibrant part of that growth story.
Now, Salem is a haven for modern day witchcraft. Everything that you can find to do with modern witchcraft and modern pagan practices is now in Salem. This is almost international world headquarters for it. In particular, Salem today is renowned as America's top Halloween destination, attracting large numbers of revelers every October. Happy Halloween. Welcome to Salem.
Massive seasons. Happy Halloween. Throughout the year, Salem proudly promotes itself as the Witch City and is home to a huge number of shops that sell witchcraft supplies and mysterious occult paraphernalia for casting magic spells.
When the first witchcraft shop opened in Salem, where witches, alleged witches, were put to death, it was almost like an "I dare you." "I dare you to try to take this right away from me." Which I think is a very American type of freedom, isn't it? Ironically, even those executed as witches in 1692 would certainly have been outraged by all the witchcraft going on in Salem today.
I think the spirits of the accused from the Salem witch trials are still here. I also think it's important to note none of the actual accused in the Salem witchcraft trials were actually witches. So they probably don't look at us too fondly for practicing so out in the open here. Today, many witches and residents of Salem believe the spirits of those accused in 1692 remain, vengefully haunting the town as a result of their wrongful executions.
Salem historian Sam Baltrusis feels particularly cursed because of his relation to Ann Putnam Jr., whose testimony sent so many victims to the gallows. Sam is looking to modern-day Salem witchcraft to lift the curse. I conjure this circle as a barrier to protect this space from all malice and harm. I conjure this circle...
To serve as a place beyond time and space where the gods and spirits may meet in perfect love and perfect trust. This space is declared sacred. Today witchcraft is extremely popular and I believe that is because you don't need an institution to tell you what to do and when to do it. You're not following the dogma of a big organized religion.
I invite you to affirm with me this title, to claim this power as your own. Speak it forth and make it so. I am witch. The fascination now with witchcraft and the general societal openness towards it, in many places it is lawfully recognized as a religion, is something that those back in Salem at the time of the trial simply could not even have comprehended.
Ironically, although witchcraft is practiced very openly in Salem today, back in 1692 when so many people were executed as witches, there was almost certainly no witchcraft happening. As a result of the terrible miscarriage of justice in 1692, Salem historian Sam Baltrusis believes that Salem today remains cursed by the spirits of those wrongfully executed.
As someone who has written about the spirits of Salem and the impact of the Salem witch trials, I have to say that Salem, without a doubt, is the most haunted location in the country. What happened in 1692 left a psychic imprint on the land. The land is stained with blood. Sam hopes the curse that he believes has afflicted him will now be lifted by the spirits of those wrongfully executed.
But most of all, just as Ann Putnam Jr. learned from her mistakes, he hopes that the lessons of the Salem witch hunt will be learned all across the world. Because sadly, murderous witch hunts are still taking place today. During the notorious Salem witch trials in 1692, 20 innocent men and women were executed in one of history's deadliest witch hunts.
The irony, and undoubtedly the tragedy, is that none of the people executed in Salem for witchcraft were witches. They were behaving just a little bit different from the norm, but that was enough to accuse them of witchcraft. Twelve-year-old Ann Putnam Jr. was one of the most prolific accusers, whose testimony helped convict 17 of the 20 accused witches who were executed.
Among those she testified against were George Burroughs, the former Reverend of Salem Village, and Giles Corey, the only person in American judicial history to be tortured to death for refusing to plead. There is no doubt that a terrible, historic wrong was done to all the accused at Salem. It was just utterly tragic
case of mass hysteria, which just got completely out of hand. It's almost impossible to imagine the terror of being one of the accused at Salem. To know that you're not bewitching anybody, you're not possessed by the devil, you're just an ordinary person. And suddenly, all of your neighbors that you might have gotten well with in previous times are there pointing the finger at you and saying, "You're a witch. Kill, kill, kill."
For the modern United States, Salem's frenzied witch hunt back in 1692 has served as a stark warning of the dangers of religious tyranny. It's because freedom of religious expression is today constitutionally guaranteed in the United States that Salem has been able to become a hotbed of modern witchcraft.
This town needed a sort of reclamation after what happened here. Horrors happened and people were executed. Now it's a place where witchcraft in a community is thriving and flourishing. So it's taking it back for the practitioners now, saying we won't allow something like this to happen again. But sadly, although the lessons of history have been learned in Salem, elsewhere, murderous witch hunts are still taking place today.
When we look and smile at the bright lights and exuberance of Salem today, we should remember that allegations of witchcraft have not gone away. There are parts of the world in which allegations of witchcraft are still brought against people, predominantly women, and they are regularly convicted and executed for witchcraft. Unfortunately, all over the world,
People are being condemned as witches and horribly killed, tortured, you name it, especially in African countries or in parts of Asia. Just like in Salem in 1692, in modern-day witch hunts, the main accusers often hope to take land and property from the accused. And as in Salem, the accusers often enlist support against the marginalized victims by whipping up mass hysteria.
All it takes is, you know, one person says that woman over there is a witch and the mob descends. It's just this sheer, vicious, primitive horror that seems to lurk in people's minds. And when you get a mob together, they share in that mentality. 21st century witch hunts around the world are a reminder that the lessons of history must continually be learned or else history will be repeated.
The Salem Witch Trials, the world's most notorious witch hunt, remains a tragic cautionary tale.
I mean, there's no doubt a terrible wrong was done on all of the accused. They were all innocent of everything, other than they deviated slightly from what the Puritans thought at the time. It's haunted America for the best part of 300 years. Throughout the course of history, there have been many American miscarriages of justice, but perhaps none greater
than the Salem witch trials. Given what happened back in 1692, it's surely one of history's greatest ironies that today, Salem has become the proud capital of modern American witchcraft. Even though there almost certainly weren't any witches at all in Salem in 1692, there are plenty now. So despite the infamous witch hunt, you could say that in the end, freedom of religious expression won.