Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Inside the Witch Trials: Salem | Fear In A New World

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

We often think of the witch trials as something in the deep and distant past.But, as we'll hear in today's episode, the attitudes and behaviour that led to witch trials is as present today as it was then.In this third and final episode of our limited series, Inside the Witch Trials, we go back to Salem, Massachusetts, to find out how colonialism, racism and a radical ideology created a witch trial that's as relevant today as it was in the 17th century.What was life like for Puritans in this new and unfamiliar land? Why did so many people willingly admit to being witches? And what became of Tituba, the enslaved woman whose testimony sparked panic in this remote village?Kate is joined by Professor Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials, to find out.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. How are you doing? Well, I'm doing just fine. Thank you very much for asking. I'm glad that we're all fine and here together.

But to make sure that you stay fine and I stay fine and everyone else stays fine, I have to give you the fair do's warning, so here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adults subjects and you should be an adult too. And actually in all seriousness, we are getting quite tasty today. We are discussing the witch trials. And if that is not your cup of tea, then this is your opportunity to get out now while you still can. For the rest of you, on with the show.

The early modern period was a time of huge upheaval. Radical ideas were spreading like wildfire. People were led to believe they were at spiritual war with the devil. The stakes couldn't have been higher. As fear and paranoia grew, a violent breaking point was inevitable. What became known as the witch trials soon followed. Over the course of this limited series, I'll be taking you directly into the isolated communities

where this fear was felt the most. Further still, we'll enter into the courtrooms at the heart of three significant witch trials to find out what it was like to be caught up in the middle of all this mayhem. From Pendle in Lancashire where a nine-year-old sent her whole family to their deaths after accusing them of being witches. It's Janet who really signs the death warrant for her own people. To the West Fords of Iceland, where it was mostly men, not women, who were burnt at the stake.

All of a sudden, the devil was all around, and this caused a hysterical fear. And to Salem, Massachusetts, where colonialism, racism, and fear in an unknown, created a perfect storm that is still felt today. The Salem Witch Trials, they have this really long legacy, and it's a legacy of persecution and mistrust. Join me, Kate Lister, as we go inside the witch trials. Part 3, Salem, Massachusetts. The winters in Salem are long and hostile.

Some days, it's so gloomy that it feels like the sun barely rises at all. Now, in 1691, just a few decades after the Puritan settlers first arrived in the area, the families that live here still wrestle with this environment. Uncertainty and anxiety underpin everything. From the crops that barely grow to the threat of the native people who live beyond the fringes of their village. Native people whose land they've taken and whose lives they're suspicious of. In this long winter, in the spring of,

spiritual heart of Salem at the house of Reverend Samuel Paris, his daughter Elizabeth and niece Abigail attempt their own form of folk magic. They crack an egg white into a bowl of water believing it will reveal their future husbands to them. However, on this day, the so-called Venus glass reveals the specter of a coffin. The girls recoil in horror. Reverend John Hale will later write that this one small event led to a diabolical molestation. Life in Salem carries on, but in the months that follow,

the girls begin acting strangely. They have fits where their bodies move in unnatural ways, making unnatural sounds barking like dogs. Reverend Hale wrote that their mouths stopped, their throats choked, and their limbs were racked and tormented. What began as an innocent game between bored children sparked a sequence of events resulting in the deaths of 20 people and ruining

the lives of countless more. At the heart of it are accusations made by children and the chilling testimony of their slave, Tichiba. What happened in Salem to allow this to happen? And why is this a history that keeps repeating itself? Joining me is author and historian Marion Gibson to take us back to Salem to find out. Firstly, what was this village, just a 30-minute drive by today's standards from the bustling port of Boston like at this time? So today it's called Danvers. Then it was called Salem Village. So Salem Town, which is the modern little town of Salem that people might know, and then there's a village called Danvers on the outskirts, and that is Salem Village, where all this kicks off. So, you know, the big ministers of the new colony, they're all based in Boston.

This is where the local government is. This is the centre of what will become the new colony and finally the state of Massachusetts. So they're sort of close to that centre of power. But at the same time they're also sat on the edge of this huge continent with as far as they can see nothing in it but hostile peoples who, you know, in their ignorance, the Puritan stigmatises devil-worshippers.

So they're kind of central, but they're also very peripheral. And I think that gives them a real sense of fear about their surroundings. When we say they're Puritans, there'll be people listening that they know, they've heard that word before, but can you tell me what a Puritan is and why that makes this group of people, no offence, 20 Puritans out there, but why it makes them particularly highly strung and perfectly susceptible for somebody going, she's a witch? They're a really interesting group of people, actually. They're basically a rebellious group within the Church of England.

So it starts off within the Anglican Church in England, the Church of England that people are know about now. And these are people who want to reform it. And they want to reform it in quite a violent way. So quite often they are saying, let's go back to fundamentals. So they are fundamentalists in that sense. And they're saying, let's get rid of all the church decoration. This is distracting us from God.

You know, we should be having this personal relationship with God. And thinking about our faith and our sins and having a personal relationship with immorrients. rather than going through a minister. So they're pretty rebellious. They're pretty fanatical and quite radical people. And that makes them really interesting. And in some ways, really quite modern. But in other ways, they're really frightening

because as religious fundamentalists, they're continually looking for enemies of God. And of course, witches fall under that heading. Is it true that Puritans were very, very anti-fun, anti-pleasure? Like, what did you do for fun if you were a Puritans? I mean, it can't have all been miserable. I honestly think it was. Yes, what you did for fun was reflect on yourself and read the Bible and pray.

That is almost, it is a little bit of a caricature, but it is actually one of the ones that's closest to the truth. You know, it's a real kernel of truth here. So no dancing, no drinking. Very little celebration. You can't have celebrations in the church. You can't even get married in the church. because that's seen as too festive and not godly enough. You know, that's just two people celebrating their love and joy.

And we can't have that because it's not a sacrament. It's not, you know, part of gold's plan. So they do tend to strip away everything that makes life, you know, in my terms and your terms, too, fun. They are quite problematic. Is it the idea that pleasure, any kind of pleasure is a weakness, is that and that everything has to be kind of difficult and you have to fight for everything.

Is that the sort of the basis of this? I think that's part of it. Yes, these are people who like a good fight. Absolutely. Self-denial. But they're also very, very focused on God. So, you know, they're two criteria. Really, yeah, you have to work.

You have to work at it. They're very keen on the work ethic. But it has to be about God. And if they don't think it's about God, then, oh, well, you know, that could be about the devil. That's a bad thing there for. These Puritans sound like a fabulous bunch. how overjoyed the Native Americans must have been to meet their new neighbours.

As you can imagine, the two communities clashed. Despite early attempts to live peacefully alongside one another, the relationship between Native Americans and the newly arrived Puritans was one marked by cultural misunderstanding, mistrust and conflict, particularly given the Puritans were taking Native American land. Add on to that that the Puritans saw the Native American religious practices as pagan and satanic, and already you have an environment that's twitching with suspicion

and the threat of malevolent forces. It's fair to say that the Puritans were out of their depth in a number of ways, and they were already beginning to set themselves apart from the other colonists in Boston. Is there any sense that in Boston they were a bit more forward-thinking and sort of, you know, like a bit more urban,

but out in Salem, there was a little bit like they're out in the sticks, that kind of feeling. That's interesting. Some of them, I mean, some of the people in Boston were just as prejudiced about which is the people at Salem. But Boston also had a big merchant community and it also had people who were rather more outward looking. And some of those as the trials went on got very critical of the local religious government. You know, they were disappointed too that they'd gone all the way to the new world to do all this new and interesting stuff. It's colonialism. So it's not good from that point of view. But it's trade. It's, you know, opening up the big world.

world. They're thinking about exploration and making money and all the kind of things that they want to do. And they see these Puritan fundamentals as holding them back in a lot of ways. Like it's the new world. They wanted new stuff and to do things in a new way and we're still messing around with this witchy nonsense. Yes. It's horrible, isn't it? It's one of the things that we exported there. You know, they're all well-fum. Yeah, exactly. They meant to find a new world, a better world. They really did want this kind of wonderful, godly utopia, where everything would be fine, everybody would be good, and it would all be fantastic and God would be pleased with them. And, you know, what do they do? One of the first things they do is they start holding witch trials. It is deeply disappointing, isn't it? And it was during the long hard winter of 1691 to 1692 that this utopia took a violent turn towards, well, dystopia. This cauldron, if you'll forgive the, pun, of Puritanism, fear about a world they couldn't control and a suspicion of people they didn't

understand, manifested itself in dark and dangerous ways. Not for the first time, it's children who play a pivotal role in the course of the witch trial. Back to Marion. Two girls who live in the house of the Minister of Salem Village, Samuel Paris, his daughter Betty, who is nine, and his niece Abigail Williams, who is 11, and they start having fits and they start screaming. and saying their bodies hurt and they're contorting. And everybody around them is really frightened. You know, often when you get that kind of thing in history, you know, this is a period of huge child mortality.

So the people around them must have been really frightened. What is this disease? What is happening to these girls? But as time went on, once they called in the local physician, and he and the people around Abigail and Betty, particularly their father and uncle, Samuel Paris, start to think that they are in fact bewitched. So it's not a natural disease.

It's the devil. It's the devil afflicting them. Maybe they start to think they're possessed. Maybe they start to think they're bewitched. They explore all these kind of ideas. And Abigail and Betty start pointing out women in the community and saying, yes, we are bewitched and that person is the witch. All right.

Now, this is the million dollar question. This is the one that's been raked over by so many historians. What do you think was going on? in that house. I struggle to come to a decision about it. It's not a unique case. I mean, there are lots of other cases where really quite young people do this sort of thing. I think it's very hard not to suspect that they were faking it to a fairly large extent. And I do suspect that, I think, given what we've said about the community already, I think people can probably imagine it's not a nice place to be a child. And if you're growing up in this kind of joyless,

religious fundamentalist atmosphere and everything that you want to do is stigmatised as being wrong and you're also really terrified that out there in the woods around you you know there are these big wild animals they're there are people who don't like you and may very well want to come and kill you in the night

because you've stolen their land you know there's new diseases there may be famine coming next winter if there's too much snow or too much rain I think they were probably very frightened and miserable young girls. And maybe they thought that one of the ways that they could make themselves feel better was to be a sort of religious martyr figure, you know, to have something happened to them that made other people go, oh, you know, we must take care of them.

Let's give them some attention. They must be very godly girls. You know, we must praise them and look after them. So I wonder if it is to do with attention seeking and trying to fit in with what they believed a very religious community wanted them to do. And they may also have believed that. themselves to be ill. It would be very, very easy if you were that frightened and that miserable to convince yourself of it. Yeah, so it might be a psychosomatic condition. Or it might have

started with a real disease. Maybe they did have a really bad fever or they'd eaten something, disagreed with them, and they were pained and they were upset. So it could be any of those things. As we've seen in the previous two episodes of this limited series, at the heart of all these destructive witch trials has been a man driven by ambition and a perceived religious calling. And Salem was no exception. Samuel Paris, as Marion mentioned, was the father and uncle of the two girls

who supposed possession first raised the alarm of witches in Salem. It doesn't seem like it's a coincidence that this is happening in, was it the minister's household? Like it's not happening with Bert the Baker or down the road with the shoemaker. It's in the minister's house that they're suddenly being possessed by demonic forces. Yes, I, you know, I think their uncle and father, although he expressed his horror, was probably in many ways quite pleased because it showed, didn't it? Yeah. His was the godly house, you know, the children in his house were so godly that the devil himself had come round to attack them. And his position in the community was quite a difficult. He's quite a contentious man. He had fallings out with other people in the community.

It was a bit of a jerk, wasn't he? Both by all the same. He's a bit of a jerk is a quite nice summary of it. Yeah. Yeah. Not everybody. He liked him and for good reason, I think. And so he'd found that they weren't willing to pay him exactly the salary that they'd agreed. They weren't giving him some of the perks and benefits that had been agreed, he said. You know, I think he needs to prove himself a godly man. And one of the ways that you can do that is, of course, by saying, oh, well, you know, I'm so godly. The devil has come after my family.

And I'm so godly that I know who the witches are in this community. Let me point them out. As with all the witch trials we've looked at in this limited series, In Salem, the finger of blame is pointed at those at the bottom of society. The people who are least powerful and don't have the agency to do anything about it. In the case of little Betty and Abigail, they don't have to look too far. They pick on somebody else in the house and that's somebody else, is a woman called something like Tituba. That's her name. She's a Native American person and she probably comes from South America.

She's certainly a servant, but it's likely she's also a slave as well. Her position in the society is really unclear. But there's some evidence of somebody with a very similar name being a child slave in Barbados, where Samuel Paris was once based. So it seems very likely that he bought this young woman, this child. Tichiba, she was called something like Tateba or Tateba, then. And then he shipped her north to Massachusetts with him. All the dates work out.

This child slave is being held on an estate near the Paris estate on Barbados. It seems really, really likely that's our woman. So she's been on a really long journey already. Now she's in her 30s. And she's being held in this religious fundamentalist household where she does a lot of the domestic work. She talks about washing the furniture in the room. She talks about doing cleaning and other tasks for the family.

And she seems to have been some kind of nurse to the children too. So they turn on somebody who's very close to them. I hadn't quite put two and two together when I was looking into this, is that they must have actually been quite close. Those children must have grown up with Tichiba in the house. This is somebody that they've known all of their life and this is the person that they go, yeah, it was her. Yeah, I'm afraid so, which again is a horrible thing, isn't it? And I think they pick on her partly because she's a person of another race. You know, she looks different to them. And they probably suspect that.

and Samuel Paris probably suspect being the sort of man that he was, that she has some kind of non-Christian religion, whether she's been born into that religion, or she's kept any part of it with her during the course of her life, or whether she's converted to Christianity more or less by force, and she's as good a Christian as they are, there's still room for that suspicion. If you're the sort of person who is inclined to think other people,

might be pagans or devil-worshippers or something you don't approve. So I think they pick on her, of racial and religious reasons. But it's a pretty disgusting thing, isn't it? And I would imagine, if you are a child that has got so carried away with this thing that now you're being demanded to name somebody, you're probably going to name the weakest person that you can think of because Tichibir is the most, she doesn't have any power, does she, at all, to say no.

No, she doesn't. No, she doesn't. If she's an enslaved person, she has almost no legal status. And she's got nowhere else to go. if she's come from somewhere else anyway. You know, she doesn't belong to the Native American people, even of that region. So she's just got nowhere. She is the most powerless person, absolutely. And what does Tichabod?

I have no idea what I would do in this situation. If somebody turned around and said you were a witch, and it must have been terrifying. But what did Tichiba do? She tries to resist to start with. And this is true of the other women who were accused as well later on. They often try to resist. resist initially by saying what you know what you think you kind of hope you would say i'm not a witch

you've got this wrong but of course as time goes on they very likely subject her to extensive questioning all sorts of bullying we know from some of the later cases that the suspects are questioned in rooms full of people almost all of whom are hostile to them which you know it's a horrible dynamic for people to have to deal with and we know from earlier cases in england that they were very keen on keeping people awake for long periods of time, keeping them moving up and down. It's horrible, isn't it? That's what we now call torture. They didn't think of it as torture.

Torture was illegal, but they put people under tremendous physical and psychological pressure and sleep deprivation does break down your resistance. It makes you more likely to agree with people who are suggesting things to you. So if they're saying, now you are a witch, aren't you? You're going to tell me that you're a witch, aren't you? You've been a witch for years. Now, when did you first become a witch? If people are bullying you in that sort of way, quite likely to agree.

And you're also likely to start hallucinating. So eventually you're in a sort of more or less purely imaginary state, very weakened. And unfortunately, Tichuba does break down in the end and starts to admit, yes, I am a witch. She's asked over and over again, did you hurt the children? Did you hurt the children? What all she has to do in the end is say, yes, yes, I did hurt the children. And then it all flows from there. The long winter in Salem is starting to thaw,

with the first flowers of spring pushing up through the muddy ground. The date is March the 1st, 1692, and Tichiba is standing before a crammed meeting house in Salem, full of local authorities and anxious villagers. The same meeting house where for the last three years, she is knelt in prayer with the Paris family. Now she must answer to the very serious charge, of witchcraft.

John Hawthorne, the Salem Town Justice, interrogates Tichiba. At first, she denies hurting Elizabeth Paris and Abigail Williams. As with the first suspects, Hawthorne asks Tichiba who she's employed to hurt the girls. This time, her answer shocks the hushed room. The devil came to me and bid me serve him. It's a sobering moment, as the village's worst fears are confirmed. And it's only the beginning. I'll be back after this short break.

John Hawthorne is relentless in his questioning of Tichiba. No fewer than 39 questions in total are put to her, and she doesn't shy away from a single one of them. She lists terrifying creatures that she's seen, from a great black dog to a yellow bird and an animal that had wings and two legs and the head like a woman. She's the first person at Salem to mention flight, that she flew in the air,

on a pole. The people gathered in the meeting house are stunned and chilled into silence and hanging on her every word. Tichiba doesn't stop there. She accuses both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne of being witches too and the three of them are sent to a jailhouse in Boston where they will await their trial. And in what is perhaps her most telling statement, Tichiba says that her master, Samuel Paris, the holiest man in Salem, beat her into these confessions. With her clear and chilling confession, Tichiba turbocharges the fear and panic around witchcraft in this isolated community, and many will pay for it with their lives. So she starts confessing that she's had this traffic with the devil. You know, the devil has come to her and tempted her and she's become a witch, and she's given him her soul and her body and so on and so on and so on.

And once she started, she's also asked to name other people as well. It's horrible. And she does, doesn't she? She named again two quite vulnerable people in the community. She does. And these are Sarah Osbourne and Sarah Good. And Sarah Good is a particularly vulnerable person, as you say. She's essentially homeless. So she's drifting round in the community. She's sleeping in people's barns and they've been throwing her out for some time. You know, this being not a particularly sympathetic community to anybody in need, actually, despite their supposed Christian. principles. So she's seen as a beggar, as a homeless person, as somebody who's problematic. Sarah Osborne again is a bit of a community outsider too. She's married to somebody who the community tends to disapprove of. And she's either elderly or real. There's probably something going on with her. These are kind of weak people and they're people on the margins of society like Tichiba herself. So she names them and the pool of suspects widens.

Now the levels of hysteria really start to escalate with other girls in Salem joining in and making similar accusations. In the end there's quite a broad group of particularly girls and young women, although some other people as well. It's so weird. And Putnam, Mercy Lewis, Mary Warren, a whole bunch of girls get involved. It really is weird. I mean, it must have been terrifying to experience

when you saw these young women screaming and writhing and pointing at people and saying she's a witch and, you know, she sent her animal familiar, you know, her demonic spirit creature to attack me and I can see her ghost or spirit attacking me in the night. It's just terrifying, just terrifying. And it spreads, of course, as those people start to make more accusations too, others are drawn in. As evidence starts to be gathered, terrifyingly, the burden of proof. becomes flimsier and flimsier. In the first episode of this mini-series, we heard how under the Witchcraft Act of 1604, children were allowed to provide evidence in witch trials, such as the one

we covered in Pendle. Now in Salem, things get even wilder, with something called spectral evidence being deemed valid. So spectral evidence is another thing that they import from England, but it's kind of frowned on under English law. And that's because what spectral evidence is a evidence is, is not saying I saw the real body of Tituba or Sarah Osborne or whoever it is come and attack me, but I saw a specter of them. I saw something like a ghost or a spirit projection of theirs, come and attack me. And that proves that they're a witch. And of course, when somebody's saying that about themselves, they don't need other people to see that. They can just point to empty air and say, I can see how, I can see how. I can see.

see her or I can see her spectral animal coming to attack me. That really just opens everything up because anybody can say anything and the legal profession doesn't really know what to do. Yes, you're right. There are standards of evidence. But when you've started to say spectral evidence is part of that chain of accepted evidence, you really are stuffed. Children saying this stuff. Yes. Kids come out with all kinds of mad crap. But they're not only that. Like they could say Titus was in jail by this point, isn't she? Like locked up under lock and key. But they could say, yeah, but her spirit still came out and attacked me.

As the panic in Salem kept spreading, the accusations kept on mounting. And shockingly, the number of people who confessed to witchcraft increased too. The reason, though, is down to yet another peculiarity of Salem's legal system. So this is a relatively unique thing. the legal systems that they're basing everything on, if you confess, you're guilty. You know, that seems fair, doesn't it? Really, within the context of the times, if you confess to being a witch, it is accepted that you know what you were doing and you are guilty.

So, yes, okay. But at Salem, they get cold feet about executing people who confess because they say, well, you know, this is our neighbour and we're Christians, aren't we? and if somebody's confessed and they say how sorry they are and they really repent, well, we could save them, couldn't we? We don't really want to execute people. So if they'll just admit that they've done this awful thing, that they are sinners, we could consider reclaiming them.

We could give them a way back and that means they don't get executed. And it's just this mad legal misstep because obviously, you know, you and I looking at it here are saying immediately, yeah, but everybody will confess. and then they'll name other people and then they'll confess and soon, soon 200 to 300 people will be in jail, which is of course what happens. But at the time, they were just not thinking straight about it and they were thinking, well, we can reclaim all of these witches and reintegrate them into the community. The other thing that I didn't realise until quite recently is how small this community is. So how many people were accused in total in the end?

It's really unclear. I mean, there's a huge pile of documents. from this case and it ranges across at least eight or nine different communities. So it spreads to be on Salem across Massachusetts. There's a whole range of document collections and we think they're still not complete. And there was only about 500 people in Salem Village. Is that right? It's a tiny community. Yeah.

It's like a school. It's smaller than a school, the amount of people that are in here. And when you think that they had 200 people in jail. Yes. These are scattered communities too. So, you know, you're dealing with little hamlets, really. And yet they managed to find all of these people within their community that they suspect. It's just this awful picture of a tiny group of people feeling like they're under siege from the world,

but yet completely untrusting of each other. This frenzied behaviour caused a trauma and a shock that hasn't been forgotten. And as much as we'd like to distance ourselves from the horrors of those events, ultimately they are behaviours that we've repeated since. Fast forward to the 1950s and the Arthur Miller played The Crucible, which tells the story of Salem as a metaphor for a different kind of moral panic. Instead of witchcraft infecting American communities, it was communism. Arthur Miller and a lot of the people in his community,

which is a community of playwrights and filmmakers and artists, are facing accusation that they are communists or have at some time being members of the Communist Party. And he fears, and he's right in the end, he's going to be called in front of the committee that's investigating this, the House Un-American Activities Committee. That's mad when I read that. I was like, wow. I was like, wow. Yes. Un-American activity. They do. And he thinks that, well, I'm going to get accused of this. And he starts thinking, hang on a minute, isn't this a bit like some of the American history that I know about, the Salem Witch trials. So if he goes to Salem, he does a bit of research. It doesn't get everything

right in the crucible. His portrayal of the Salem Witch trials. But he does use it, this really powerful metaphor for what's going on in his own time, the witch hunts against communists. What was going on? Because it was led by a guy called McCarthy and people in the UK might have heard, or wherever, but they might have heard about McCarthyism. But just give us a sense of the paranoia and why communists? So this is Senator Joseph McCarthy. So he's a senator, he's a member of the US Senate. He's an elected representative for the American community. So he's a really powerful figure. And he gets this idea which a lot of Americans of his time also have, that their state, you know, their democratic capitalist, industrialist states as they see it,

is being undermined by subversives who are, communists and they blame the Soviet Union as it then was for this and they think oh this is foreign interference in our politics in our military you know they also blame immigrants they blame jewish people as well although that's one of the things they don't talk about quite as much so the idea of the jewish communist i know you know when you start to peel it back you see all sorts of other persecution discrimination going on here and you know arthur miller is a jewish man so he's particularly likely to be drawn into this. They blame them for this.

So anybody who has socialist ideas, always kind of vaguely left-leaning, really, starts to get suspected by Joseph McCarthy and he sets up this House on American Activities Committee, the House being the Senate, which he represents, and starts investigating people. And very quickly, it does become very much like the Salem Witch Triles because hundreds of people are called in front of the committee

and they come from the arts, they come from the army, They come from all walks of American life. They're other politicians. They're just people who are being drawn in because somebody has named them to the committee and said, oh, you know, I think he's a bit of a lefty. We should definitely have a look at him. Or there's somebody the committee wanted to have a go at in the first place

and has now found some reason to question them. And you really do get a sense. In his crucible, he gets those girls in Salem, the one that was screaming and shrieking and pointing fingers. That is very much within this. McCarthy raising it. Not that they had teenage girls doing this, but this kind of just like hysterical point and the evidence that was being used against people. It wasn't spectral, but it's not far off. It's not far off, no. I mean, it's really about reputation. So it's very difficult actually to prove that

somebody is a member of a really quite a secretive political party, you know, unless they've had a tattoo, or they've got a card on them saying that they're a member of the party. It's really, hard to find evidence against them. And then you also face the question of, well, okay, so if they are, you know, this has been decided by the American state, this is a bad thing. But what have they done? Well, you know, you can't prove they're a spy because they're probably not. What harm have they actually done in the community? So it does become very much this process driven by reputation and finger pointing and somebody saying, oh, I saw him at a meeting, you know, I saw her reading this book. It's that kind of level of evidence we're dealing with and it's not a million

mass and spectral evidence at all. And what happened to the people that were being accused of this? The people that were being dragged in and it was, you know, stuff like when you're at university you once picked up a book by Marx, that kind of cramp, wasn't it? Like, what happens to them? Do they get let off if they confess? No, not really. I mean, it's not anything like the severe sanctions that we saw in the 17th century, obviously, but they essentially lose. They lose their reputation. They lose their career. They're no longer employed. So say they're a screenwriter. They can't get work anymore. Everything is taken from them. They're forced to write under a pseudonym if they're allowed to write at all. Say they're a journalist. Nobody's commissioning pieces from them anymore. Say they're an actor. Nobody will cast them. Say they're in the army. They will very likely be drummed out of the army and lose their career. So people lose their income, their livelihood, their personal reputation. and their friends, sometimes, you know, their families will fall apart. It is a really horrible thing to happen to them.

And sadly, the McCarthy trials are just one example of a history that keeps repeating itself. I really thought, I mean, historian, right? I thought, oh, this is all in the past. You know, we really struggle to understand the witch trials of the early modern period, blah, blah. Except that suddenly now we don't, because people are once again using the term witch-hunting contemporary politics and they're throwing around the idea of the witch. And you realise around the world too, people are literally being accused of witchcraft. You know, it's happening in southern Africa.

It's happening in parts of India and the Indian subcontents. It's happening in Indonesia. You realise this isn't a dead issue at all. I think Salem and the Salem witch trials, they have this really long legacy. And it's a legacy of persecution and mistrust. And it's about people hating each other for no particular reason, scapegoating each other and subjecting each other to what are essentially kind of witch trial over and over again. It's really a horrifying legacy.

Still, we keep being drawn back to the mass hysteria of Salem to revisit this dark and disturbing period in America's history. And it's worth emphasising what a brief moment in their history this was. A mere ten months had passed between the first winter's afternoon when Abigail and Betty played their innocent game of Venus glass. The chaos Tichiba's examination caused and all the accusations, arrests and trials that followed. Yet the human cost was significant. Ultimately, 19 people are hanged, and one person is particularly horribly pressed to death under a big weight of stones. And that's because he not only refuses to admit that he is a witch, but he also says, I'm not even going to enter a plea

in this court. I'm not going to say either I am guilty or I'm not guilty. And the legal punishment for that is astonishing that you're oppressed a death under a heap of stones. So some people were incredibly courageous or stubborn or both and they did stand out against this. So the people who were executed were absolutely, as you say, people who just wouldn't admit that they were witches because they weren't witches and they thought the truth was more importance than surviving this experience. You know, they weren't good Christians. Their faith meant that they did not want to lie And so they did not lie and they did not accuse their neighbours. They did the right thing.

But that ultimately led to them being executed by hanging. By the autumn of 1692, Salem and the surrounding area was gripped by a paranoia and fear, with approximately 150 witches having been arrested. The authorities struggled to cope with the caseload. All the while, Tituba sat in a Boston prison cell awaiting her trial. A place where doors were covered with iron spikes and passageways were described as being like the dark valley of the shadow of death. Another hard winter was starting to grip the northeast of America, with Puritan families once again doing their best to survive the brutal conditions. It wasn't until May of 1693 after 15 months in prison that Tichiba faced a grand jury in Salem again.

How strange it must have been for her to be back in that case. community. Weighing up her case once more, the jury came to the decision not to indict her for witchcraft. On the back of her charges, the word ignoramus was written, meaning that the court found no truth in the charges. Her case was dismissed. By this time, the hysteria had largely passed, and a sense of reason seemed to have returned to Salem. And while Tichiba was the first to confess her witchcraft in Salem, she was the last suspect to be released. for it. I'll be back after this short break. She's actually quite lucky under the circumstances. And I do say under the circumstances, because obviously this woman's life is already an extremely

difficult one. She does survive the trials because going back to what we talked about earlier, she confessed, didn't she? Yeah. So she'd done what the community wanted. And they wanted to save her, actually. And so because she confessed and she continued to confess and to hold to her confession and she'd named other people, she ends up spending about a year, over a year in jail. And at the end of that, it appears that she's freed. The evidence we have for that, there's a bill for the people who are in jail, you know, the charges for keeping them in jail for that period of time. There's this list. And there she is on the list and her debt is crossed out. So it appears very likely that she was freed. Nobody says that she died in jail. Unfortunately, Sarah Osborne,

who we were talking about earlier, perhaps being quite a frail person, did die in jail. Some people did. But Tituba did not, and we think she was freed. I don't know what happened to her afterwards. That's another thing I would very much like to know. But she did survive the witch trial. With the witch trial hysteria dying down in Salem and since seeming to have been regained, some reflection was allowed. In 1694, Samuel Paris, the central figure of the Salem witch trials, apologised to the people of Salem for the role he played in them. It was an apology he delivered in a sermon titled Meditations for Peace.

However, he still placed the blame with the devil, saying that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the powers of, darkness and the Prince of the Air. His apology wasn't accepted by his congregation, many of whom were directly affected by the witch trials. In the face of continued opposition from local people, Paris was forced to leave Salem altogether in 1697. Over a decade passed and in 1711, the Massachusetts General Court sought to revise convictions and offered compensation to the victims of the Salem Witch trials.

Tichiba was not one of them. Thank you for listening, and thank you to Professor Marion Gibson for joining me. If you want to find out more about Marion's work, she's the author of Witchcraft, A History in Thirteen Trials. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on President's Sex Lives and Women Gladiators all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.

Join me again, Betwixt the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.