Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 348: The Salem Witch Trials Part 1

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

It DEFINITELY isn’t Boston Season, but Mathas DOES happen to be covering the Salem Witch Trials. Today, he gives Alex and Jesse real historical context, and blows their minds re: broomsticks and ye olde businessmen. And remember: legal nugs ONLY.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODMERCH: https://theyetee.com/chilluminatiLIVE SHOW TIX: https://lh-st.com/shows/08-22-2026-chilluminati-cox-n-crendor-live/Mike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSOURCES:"A Storm Of Witches" - Emerson Baker

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast of episode 348. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by my two favorite witches, Jesse and Alex. I am this kind of witch. I am this other kind of witch. What's up? Patreon.com slash Chulminati Paz where we should go to support us if you want to keep the show going. We don't ask much, right? All we ask really is that you listen and share and talk about how good the show is with your friends and listen and share.

and listen and share and talk about how good the show is with your friends and listen and share. Yeah, if you can do more though, like that's fine, but like if you could do a lot more though. If you can do more, there's a website for that and we appreciate it if you can and it's for people who want to listen and share. Invest in the future of the show and keep us free of nasty algorithms and weird brand deals. Like, you know, it's good. It's good stuff. We, like, let's be real. We pay artists. We pay a team to like do a bunch of stuff behind the scenes for us. Yes, we are just three boys doing a show, but because we all have other stuff we do, we have a team that we need to invest in.

And that's what goes on. That's that. I mean, like, that's, that's how it works. Yeah. It's a, it's a well-oiled machine at this point. And it, and it partially depends on viewers like you. So if you want to get minisodes or you want to get episodes of our show, rotten popcorn, when we watch and react to movies, including chasing Bigfoot or whatever the hell it's

called, as soon as you want to get, uh, when the moment that thing is available to us. It didn't do as well in award season as I was hoping. Anyway, weird. Didn't win the Oscar. Yeah, it's crazy. But also, May 25th, new merch coming for everybody. We're going to do the Mantis shirt and we're going to do new stickers from a top secret

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whatever comedic version of journalism we do here on this show. You know what I mean? All right. Let's not call it. Let's not use the word journalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's step away from the journalism word.

It's like comedy journalism. Yeah, it's satirical. It's like, it's like, when we say journalism, we mean like keeping a journal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And writing your thoughts down without any real editorial.

No, for today's, today's topic, I was boots on the ground when this was happening. Oh, really? You were for, You're a first person. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You were there back in the day for this? I was there back in the day for all of this. Are you sure you weren't just your best crash and you died at the beginning? I can't guarantee any of that. Sure. Because we're talking about something that I have been working on for months at this point. And I realize that no matter how we approach this topic, I will do somebody a disservice. There is too much involved in the entirety of our next three episodes, the Salem Witch trials.

then there is there's no way I could do that unless I'm doing like 12 episodes there's nothing I can't cover everything so if it was me if it was me I would just do 12 episodes no I refuse so I did my best to kind of cull all this down to a three episode you know kind of chunky episodes and we're going to dive right into that at the very top I just want to shout out the primary sources that I use for this episode the book a storm of witchcraft the Salem trials in the American an experience by Emerson and W. Baker, as well as a bunch of other documents available. A lot of primary, like right from the era documents for the Salem Witch Trials are available on an archive online.

You can go find them. There's records of the Salem Witch trials as well that I use in a bunch of other just like historical research stuff. And your own lived, in your own lived memories. Yeah. After they covered him in stones, they accidentally buried him and entombed him for many years, instead of crushing him. You know those like little boys that are in paintings that like look like little adult men

that have like that was Mathis. Yeah. That was me. I was in the little puretian. That little boy blue that famous. Yeah, that was like a little colonial boy witnessing the witch trials from just off to the side. Yeah. Yeah.

The Salem witch trials were the largest witch hunt in American history. And actually it was also the last major witch hunt in the entire English speaking world. Depends on who you ask in the White House. Well, that's another thing as we also will talk, though, it is crazy as I'm going through this and I'm reading and writing this. How much 1600s life and the reasons people did things are fucking same? Like, it is all the same. It's happening now in its own unique way. And I think you'll see a lot of that mirrored in this.

You're saying the Salem witch trials are happening in their own way right now. In a weird way. Wow. I don't believe it. But after the Salem witch trials, no person would ever again be executed for witchcraft in New England. It was the single most studied event in 17th century American history. Entire academic careers I learned through this are just devoted to this stuff.

There's a bunch of, there's a Pulitzer Prize winning book about this thing. There are professors who spent their entire lives just trying to figure out how a town of 600 people, in the middle of January had like this few years spree of just murdering innocent people. We spent like a month or two on this

in my own like middle school experience or high school experience. I've visited Salem. A huge chunk of one of the semesters was this. Growing up in New England particularly close to that area, every single year for a field trip, we were off into Salem

and we would learn about it every year. What is the status of the movie Hocus Pocus in actual New England? Do they hate it? I mean, I love it. So. Okay. All right.

I'm just, you know, for somebody boots on the ground. I just want to. I just want to get boots on the ground opinion. You know what I mean? I'm not trying to. Right, right, right. Well, I think New England things sees it as a documentary.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty close to how it all went down. Honestly, so the thing is, like, after something that drove me crazy putting this together to,

is like after over hundreds of years of people like scholarship and studies and all this stuff, we still don't fully understand. why this all happened. Like there are myriad of motivations independently for different people, but what kicked this all, like what the underlying motivation is we have, we don't know, we have theories and we have a lot of really good ones, which we're going to talk about them more at the end of the series. But there isn't, I found, a single answer that satisfies everybody in this field. I think it's Satan.

You know, I think that checks out. Yeah. I think it's the influence of Satan. Yeah. So we're going to jump into part one here at the Salem Witch Trials. This is going to be a three-part series, like I said. And part one is going to cover the setup through it and the first formal accusations in Tichiba's confession in early of March 1692. Did my girl Tichaba wrong?

They did. We're going to talk about that at the top because actually right at the very beginning of the script. I'm like, I want to clear out some bullshit because there's so much to cover. I can't get everything intention it deserves. But because most of what people think they know about. the Salem Witch Trials is either half wrong or just straight out of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which is a freaking. That's how I think most people understand the Salem Witch Trials.

It's a very good play. It's a good fictional play about a historical thing. It's good, but it's not true. But it made a lot of, it created a ton of misinformation. Yeah. So the first thing I want to put up there is nobody, just nobody was burned at the stake at Salem. No, no witches were burned alive.

19 people were hanged and one was crushed to death. But burning witches was a European thing primarily in Catholic countries. And even there, it wasn't really even the standard of how they killed witches. In the English legal tradition, the punishment for witchcraft was hanging. And because witchcraft was treated as a felony and the standard punishment for felony was hanging. So, yeah, the opening of hocus pocus with the witches burning, not real. Sorry, not a documentary. That part was embellished.

All the long is made up. I'm here to crush your hopes and dreams. I'm so sorry. Agatha Harkness isn't a real witch. No, I'm sorry. And honestly, they kill people in a lot worse ways than burning alive sometimes. Or like their witch tests were just pure fucking torture. One other thing is that the trials didn't take place in Salem Village.

The Salem Village is where the accusation started. but the trials took place in Salem Town, which is the seaport five miles away from Salem Village. The business district of the Salem community. It's like we see the city limit, but like the business limit. Yeah, no, I get it. You think it's just because Salem Town witch trials doesn't sound as good?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. That's right. Like how people say they're from Los Angeles, even though they're from Orange County. They're totally separate communities. Yeah.

Like Salem Village is a. separate community and in 1752 60 years after the trials it got its independence from salem town and the first thing it did was rename itself it was like we're danvers now that's it that's it that's that's who they are that's they're out of this day probably because people kept going there but like where's that much is that yeah that's exactly the problem was like they don't want to deal with any of this anymore marvel nerds in that town yeah yeah exactly uh the next thing tituba was not african This is one that people, like, even to this day, don't realize. It is one of the most persistent myths about the trials and honestly clearing it up is necessary.

She is described as, quote, unquote, Indian. That means indigenous. The two leading theories place her either in the Caribbean or in South America. So she was not African. That comes from the play, the crucible. That's why she's believed that way. He put like a voodoo spin on her in the play. And so that's kind of what stuck.

But she was most likely an indigenous person. The last thing I want to talk about is that people accused of witchcraft in Salem were not generally speaking accused as some part. This is my initial misunderstanding, not part of some grand conspiracy to seize their land. Like one of the things I thought kind of growing up was like people accuse somebody of witches because they were they wanted this or. that from them. Like there was some kind of political leverage to the whole situation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I thought like, and there is to a degree, as we'll see, but like it wasn't to the degree, at least I thought it was. And it's, I thought other people may have believed. We're going to get into kind of slam booky to me. Is that right? Like like, like, like an internet, like an early live

journal internet rumor vibe is what is what it feels like you'll see. It's more, it's more like, there's like elements of like game of throne style political maneuvering. And involved in some of this stuff. Interesting. Specifically with a particular individual, which we'll get to here as we're about to begin. We will get into the economic and political dynamics a bit later on because it's needed a bit. But the notion that Salem was basically a real estate like shouting match to like take their land from each other for over like and killing them to do it basically is not really fucking

true. Wow. That's so crazy. Like already I'm like operating on a completely different. mindset than I was. I mean, not 100%, but yeah, a lot of things I thought are different. This series more than any other series I've done felt like a school project. And not in a bad way, but it was pure history. There was very, there was no weirdness.

Yeah, exactly. It's pure history. So no like magic missiles or. No magic missiles. No, no witches chanting and stealing from others. Sorcerers powers that it is a wizards. Okay, dude. okay

sorry to get corrected on that and I don't care I still think it's funny honestly I'd say Salem which trials are closer to a true crime than they are anything mystical or magical

I mean they definitely happened like right no yeah but like the reasons and all that yeah the crimes were like just people being fucked up pretty much like for the most part

just like every fucked up thing we do on the show yeah yeah this show should be called Shulomani the fucked up chronicles that agreed people that are fucked up

got fucked up fucked up or that were fucked up. It's perfect. Perfect description for what we are. Things that are fucked up. Things that are fucked up. Well, do you remember what your original pitch for this show's name was? No.

You pitched it as weird shit podcast. Weird shit podcast is a genius name. Whoever thought of that. It was taken. That was the reason we didn't actually have it. That's hilarious, by the way. Shout out to weird shit podcast. Shout outs to them, dude.

Good luck, man. they're probably really successful because of that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm sure. All right. So the very first fact I want to lay on you as we jump into this to understand all this is in 1692, which is where we begin, the most fundamental fact you have to understand is to them, witches were real. Like educated, literate, college graduated, Bible reading, sermon attending, Puritan English people genuinely believe that there were people walking around in their communities who signed contracts in their own blood with Satan in them. self, suit and tie and all, and who use supernatural powers to torment, sicken, or kill other

godly folk. This is ingrained in their DNA. It's who they are as a person. They truly believe this stuff, which is one of the big reasons this even happened in the first place. And this was, again, like I just said, consensus view of the entire educated world. Witchcraft was a felony under English law. It had been a felony in Massachusetts since.

1641. The first execution for witchcraft in the English colonies happened in 1647. And then between then and 1688, which is the 45 years before Salem, at least 13 people, it's somewhere between 11 and 15 depending on the sources. So the average I'm putting is like 13 people were executed for witchcraft in Connecticut and Massachusetts. And more than 100 were formally accused of it. And And to put even Salem in perspective by European standards, what happened in Massachusetts in 1692 was not an especially large witch panic. Across Europe, between 1,400 and 1775, some historians call it the great age of witch hunts. Somewhere to the order of 100,000 people were tried for witchcraft.

And out of them, 50% of them got killed for it. 50,000 people were fucking slaughtered. Half of the people were killed. Half. 50% of these people were fucking killed off. Acuse anybody of being a wish that you want. And odds are, they might just die.

They might literally just be killed for it. There was a single 10 year stretch in Cologne, Germany, between 1626 and 1635, where roughly 2,000 people were burned. In Hungary, between 1710 and 17,000, 1750, about 800 people were executed for witchcraft. So when we're talking Salem, which was 20 dead, 156 formally accused, and around 170 accusations all told, counting informal ones that we have paperwork of, we're talking like,

it's not, it's small. Yeah. And maybe Arthur Miller does have a little bit more to do with the reason this is popular than we'd like to admit. Yeah. Yeah. I think he is how all this works, man. Like I look at, I always look at Bell Star.

We've used her as an example multiple times. The real life of Bell Star versus the tabloid of Life of Bell Star, which is what most people believe to be true is not really close to like the reality of it. It's like Luke, I am your father, basically, at this point. People just kind of take what they want to take and make it that. Yeah, I agree. But I think there's another part of it too, though, but because this was the largest witch hunt in American history and American history is short as it is and was even shorter back then.

like it sits in our collective conscious because it was around at the birth of our nation, right? And it was a big deal for a small colony back then. But just in the grand history of witch hunts like around the world, Salem isn't nothing. It's just nothing. What makes it more interesting is that it was happening at a time where witch hunts were basically done happening around the rest of the world. Isn't it wild that like Jesse's like mass hysteria episode like low key was kind of a prequel to this episode? I was literally thinking about that. Really? Yeah. That's funny. Hey, you're not right.

You're not wrong, though. Yeah, right. I'm not right. You're not right. Blaming you for being a witch. So if you were a Puritan in Massachusetts Bay at this time, winter of 1691, going into 1692, let me paint you a picture of what your miserable fucking life looks like back then.

You'd been at war at this point for four years already, and it was not a war. You were really on the winning side. In 1688, fighting had broken out on the northern frontier, words are hard, between English settlers and the Wabanaki, the indigenous peoples of what is now Maine and their French allies in Quebec. The conflict was called King Williams War and had been a disaster for the Massachusetts settlers right from the fucking get-go. Frontier towns were burned, people killed, people had been taken captive and then marched to Quebec. refugees had been streaming south into Essex County for years. And in 1690, an attempted military, English military expedition against Quebec,

financed by Massachusetts itself on the assumption that the spoils of victory would pay for it had fucking bombed catastrophically. Who signed off on that? What a raw deal. That dude from the Pocahontas movie. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I'm going to do it. So not only did they give shit, like, that they didn't have, it all went to hell. And now the colony is in huge amount of debt. So to pay for the war, Massachusetts had been forced to issue paper money for the first time in its history. And the paper money was rapidly losing value. Like inflation took off. There were new taxes. The judges, the judges who'd later preside over the Salem, which trials were,

almost to a man, the same men who'd been in charge of the failed war effort. Like it was the same, literal same dudes who were the judges and the people who led them into the failed war. It's like you're fucking, it sucks. It absolutely sucks to like be around at this time as just a common individual. Several of them owned land in Maine that thanks to the war was now worthless. And four of them owned sawmills in Maine that the war had destroyed. And New England winters suck. So the weather was awful.

And we're like, but at this particular time in history, climate scientists call it the little ice age. Like that's how shit. Like your life fucking suck. In the late 1680s and early 1690s were among the coldest, wettest years of that entire centuries long cooling period. Somebody was playing sieve and they like turned the difficulty. up a little bit. It's like just like fucking some like like like little like like yeah the sin they're messing with the sims and they're like oh they're going to all die we can't just keep doing this.

We need to keep. I don't want the age level weather. Yeah. It's crazy. So obviously other than it being like miserable to live in like in the cold crops were failing and the harvest of 1691 had been particularly bad food prices were rising even edge as wages. Wait for it.

Stagnated. sound familiar? Like, it's all the same shit because of the same people who make poor decisions at the top that fuck themselves over and they save themselves for it's all the fucking same. The political situation was a mess in 1684. And I know there's going to be a lot of years being thrown at you. I promise you don't necessarily need to remember them. But I'm just trying to build a timeline that led us here. I really quickly just realized how much I sound like I wrote a history like school high school lesson in some way.

Don't say the word time slice. Don't say time slice. I would never. I would never say time slice. What am I? Some sort of stupid amateur. Come on. So yeah,

1684, the English crowd had revoked the original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was the legal foundation that the Puritans had used to govern themselves for 50 years at this point. And so without that charter, to give you an idea of what that means, the colony's laws were technically invalid.

Just wild west? It's lit it's courts had no formal authority in any way. And there was what? It's the purge. It kind of was the Salem witch purge. And there was widespread throughout the colony widespread uncertainty about who actually had the right to fucking do anything anymore because their entire law system was upheaved. It was gone.

King James I had imposed a hated royal governor, Edmund Andros, who was overthrown in a 1680, colonial uprising, this is the same year as England's glorious revolution. So from 1689 until May of 1692, Massachusetts was effectively just governing itself with no legitimate legal foundation, no charter, no agreed upon laws, and no royal governor because they fucking ousted him. It's chaos. Okay. It's starting to make a little more sense.

they were waiting for England to figure out what to do with them. And while they waited, no formal trials could be held in the colony because there was no legitimate court system to hold them in. The religious situation was for the Puritan establishment, fucking terrifying, by any measure they could think of. From church attendance to Sabbath attendance, the conversion of the younger generation, Puritanism was starting to fail. The original founders of- That's because admittedly, Puritanism sucks ass. Just so we're all on the same record here. Oh, Puritanism is a nightmare of a version of Christianity.

But also, like, it also mimics younger, like, the stress churches are having today with loss of attendance and no new membership and, like, trying to figure out how to reach, like, a younger crowd, essentially. Well, it turns out if your religion is based on, like, absolutely insane orthodoxy, uh, people don't want to be a part of that. That seems just like really alienating and scary. Yeah. Yeah.

If you are a religious person, but you're also an asshole, people are going to associate you with that religion. And it's going to turn people away from that religion. So. Yep. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there's a moral there for modern times. I don't know.

So by the time we're here in 1692, we're about 60 years after they arrived, right? The original founders of the colony. had come over in the 1630s. Like just vision of building. And John Winthrop's famous phrase, A city upon a hill, a purified Christian community that would be a beacon to the entire world.

And by the 1690s, literally just two generations later, the vision was visibly collapsing in front of their eyes. The grandchildren of the founders weren't joining the church the way their grandparents had. They were drinking in taverns.

They were dressing in fancy clothes. They were doing business with the Quakers. What? I know fucking Quakers and their oats. Disgusting. The ministers were in a full panic at this point. Like literally everywhere these guys looks,

they saw signs that God was withdrawing his favor from New England, is how they saw this. The war on the frontier was assigned to them. The really bad weather was a sign. The economic troubles signed from God. Political instability. Signed. Everything was a sign that God was punished.

them and the only question they had then they couldn't figure out was why why god are you punishing us for being your chose member they came here to be puritans why would god punish this um this is all in the background this is what's in the air in massachusetts early 1692 like all this shit is happening and now they're left with the question what have we done to deserve this and why is God punishing us. In a Puritan worldview, that question had a super specific answer. Bad things don't happen to good people. So if terrible things are happening to you, then you're bad. Yeah. Well, because either you have sinned or someone in your community has sin. Question. Point of order. Question. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. You have no problem. Now, I'm no biblical scholar, but I seem to recall there are many

times in the Bible where bad things happen and the result is God is testing you. Yeah. Well, it couldn't be that, right? No. Well, if he is, they, they, how do they pass the test? Oh, by killing people. Right. Well, exactly correct. Right. Okay. Never mind. We're just like dying, bro. Like, it's like being like, no, this is right. Yeah. So if terrible thing, I said, if terrible things are happening to you because you sinned, someone in your community has sinned, or the most dangerous one of all, Satan has come for you. He's just here and he's fucking you up by choice, by his choice. Satan has been allowed by God for some specific testing or punishing reason to operate in your community as a whole.

He's got the zoning board to allow him in, eh? Again, to your like Siv-Siv-a-Nalogy, it's like playing a God game and dropping just Satan in the village. Just see what happens. Yeah. And then it's watching. A giant, A giant, horrendous, emaciated tiger comes out and starts whipping everybody up. He makes, yeah, so say, what they would say he would do is that he would go into town

and he would make contracts with people, try to recruit them and then send them out to do his dirty work. So if you're a devout Puritan at this time, looking around at the burning frontier, the way the failed harvest from the weather, empty pews at church, worthless paper money, the only explanation that fits with everything is, well, the devil is here. The devil is among us and we have to find him. We got to root out Satan to pass God's test as it were. So while this all happens, like I said, in Salem Village in 1692, it wasn't a town yet. And that's really important because it was actually kind of just a parish.

It was a chunk of farmland like on the inland side of the larger Salem, which was over by the bay. And the original settlement of Salem dates back into 1626 when about. 20-ish families landed at a place the Patucket Indians called Nam Kig, which means fishing place. I grew up in the town of Patucket, Rhode Island, named after people we slaughtered. Isn't that nice? Boots on the ground. Boots on the ground. Dude.

So wait, are you, is family guy based off your life? Yep. Which one am I? Oh, you're the dog. I'll take it. I'll be Brian. Brian Griffin. That's me.

Mathis as Brian Griffin. There we go. So the Pawtucket, unfortunately, had been wiped out by European disease and a great plague that started in 1616. So when the English arrived, they were moving into a landscape

that was already filled, kind of a haunting imagery of empty indigenous villages and abandoned cornfields because disease had quietly wiped them out over the past few decades. It feels like humanity needed therapy to stop just making themselves It was like just utterly miserable at any point.

It's crazy. It's like when I was putting this part together, I'm just like what life is like back then. I'm like, this is all nightmare. It's all a nightmare. No matter what side you're on. It's like a fucking nightmare.

Nothing is good. Everything is bad. Blame Satan. I mean, I guess maybe I would blame Satan at that point too if I was living in this time. And it was just like hell every day. So when they arrived, they renamed the place,

Salem from the Hebrew word Shalom meaning peace. That's what the word name Salem comes from, I learned. Which in retrospect is kind of ironic. Considering what would happen in this village, not fucking 90 years, 80 years later, or 60 years later. So by the 1690s, Salem had become two communities kind of glued together.

We have Salem Town, the harbor settlement, the seaport, all that stuff, all the rich people and all that stuff. and then there was the inland part Salem Farms, later called Salem Village, which is now Danvers. It's where the poor, the agricultural, kind of where those other people live. The two communities have been pulling apart for decades,

kind of immediately, and the village had been trying to formally separate from the town for years. The Massachusetts General Court, which was its colonial legislator, legislature at the time, had granted Salem Village permission to build their own meeting house and hire their own minister,

but had not granted them permission to form their own church. And again, this is all super fucking important, I promise you. In Puritan New England, a church was a specific covenanted body of full members, what they called the quote-unquote saints. A meeting house without a church was a strange in-between kind of place. It meant that the village had a minister, but the people who attended his sermons were technically still members of the Salem town. own church or other neighboring churches. And so fundamentally, who actually had the authority to

hire and fire a minister? Was it the saints who were the members of the other churches? Or was it the village as a whole who paid the minister's salary? Already you have political problems popping up for this little village when they're not granted full independence because now they already don't know where to look when it comes to authority when it comes to it. And of course, nobody could agree. And the disagreement would tear the village apart. In the six, 16 years between 1672 and 1689, which is three years before the 1692, which is when the trials happened, Salem Village ran through three ministers. The average tenure of a New England minister in that time was 22 years. And in 16, they went through three of them to give you an idea.

They averaged about five and a half years. The first was James Bailey, who took the job in 72 and was forced out in 1680 after a faction of villagers. led by a man named Nathaniel Putnam, which is a place I worked in Rhode Island, by the way. Putnam. Putnam is a town in Rhode Island as well. I worked there. Decided they didn't want him anymore. Bailey moved to Connecticut where he served for nine years, then quit the ministry entirely and became a doctor. Classic, you know, shift back at that time. A man of science and religion. Out of a man of faith. Yep. The second was George Burroughs. And because Burroughs, he, remember that name. He's going to come back into this story in a very specific and horrible way later. Burroughs took the job in 1680 and lasted less than three years. The village committee stopped paying him in the spring of 1683 and he left to take up his

old ministry in Falmouth, Maine. The third was Diodat Lawson hired in February Diodat, D-O-D-A-T. Love that. He was hired in February 1684 and he lasted about four years. and left in 1688 after his own attempt to be fully ordained got blocked by another wave of village factional opposition. It would take him six years to find another posting after that place. Three ministers, 16 years. And as the village itself later admitted in a 1695 petition, quote, we have had three ministers removed already. And by every removal, our differences have been

rather aggravated. It's just making shit worse. everything is getting worse. It was basically the polite way of saying this stuff is sucking. What was actually going on in Salem Village was a vicious multi-decade civil war between two extended family networks who hated each other. This is what I mean where it's like that true crime, almost like mob mentality, Game of Thrones, backstabbing. It's so much weirder than I even thought it was before.

It's just like ingrained hatred, basically. It is. Yeah, it's like hatred of. of thy neighbor sort of. Yeah, very Christian of them. On one side, you had the Putnam's. The Putnam's were the dominant family of the western and northern parts of Salem Village, the inland end, further from Salem Town. Now, again, we say village and it's small, but it covered a lot of land. They were farmers. They had been there since the 1640s. They were the largest landowners in the village, and they tended to be religiously conservative, suspicious of the commercial mercantile

world of Salem Town and politically dominant in village affairs through sheer numerical weight. There were a lot of Putnam's. Then just by having a lot of you around, the babies. That's literally it. Like they all had a, the family was huge. And by virtue of them having a lot of them in the village, they had a lot of sway as to what went down. Three brothers and their cousins and their wives and their children.

The patriarch of this generation was Thomas Putnam Jr. and the family included his brother Edward, his cousins, his uncles, and a network of allied smaller families who'd married into the Putnam line. It's mob shit. It's crazy. On the other side, you had the porters. The porters were oriented towards Salem Town. They lived on the eastern side of the village closer to the harbor, and they were involved in

commerce, in shipping, mercantile networks that reached out into the wider Atlantic world. They had connections to the Salem Town Church. They tended to be religiously a little more flexible, but saying somebody's more flexible in the Puritan world isn't really saying all that much, but they were opened things like the Halfway Covenant, which was a then controversial Puritan reform that loosened the requirements of church membership. To be even part of the Puritan church, you had to follow a strict set of rules. They're like, what if we like loosened it a little bit so that maybe the younger generation would be interested. And that was already. Yeah, exactly.

There was a huge. What? Get a TikTok? Get the church a TikTok? At the time, that was a, that was a mechanical clock. It was terrifying. They hated it. They were so scared of that shit, dude. Yeah, they were like, it moves on its own. It beats with the heartbeat of the earth. Satan is beneath the soil. I can hear him ticking beneath. Quick, bury it on top of a witch. And if it stops, ticking, she wasn't a witch. That all checks out, dude. So their patriarch had been John Porter, Sr., who by 1650 was the largest landowner

in all of Salem with more than 1,500 acres. His sons inherited the network and his influence, and the Putnam's and the porters had been fighting over land, water rights, middle privileges, church politics, and who got to be a selectman for at least a generation. Every time the village had to make a decision about fucking anything, who to hire as a where to build a meeting house, taxes, Sabbath service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The same two factions lined up against each other, Putnam's on one side, quarters on the other. This is the situation we're in when in late 1688, a man named Samuel Paris came into negotiations to be the village's fourth minister.

This shit feels like a Greek tragedy in a way, right? Like, that's how it feels to me. So Samuel Paris is the human being at the center. of this entire fucking disaster. He is the key person that we're going to be talking about a lot of this. He was born in London in 1653 into a Puritan merchant family. When Samuel was a young child in the late 1650s, his family moved to Barbados, where his dad Thomas became a sugar merchant and plantation owner.

Samuel grew up in the Caribbean. When he was around 17, his dad sent him to Massachusetts to attend Harvard College. The plan was that Samuel would graduate from Harvard with a master of divinity degree and became a minister. This was at the time a seven-year course of study. But Samuel got through it in three. In 1673, Samuel's dad died. He left the entire Barbados estate to Samuel, somewhere around 7,000 pounds, which was an immense fortune at the time, especially for just, by the he's 20 years old and a bachelor at this point.

I didn't do the conversion rate on what 7,000 pounds in 1673 money would be today. If you want to check, feel free. I don't even know if that would convert like that. 16, 17. It would be a British money, right? Pounds. I should have looked it up, but I was like in a fever right in the shit. 1673 to modern day conversion.

It's equivalent to $1.3 to $2.8 million in 2026 purchasing power. Less than I thought it would be still a huge jump. Yeah. Interesting way we're putting it. Okay. So this is what was left to him as a 20 year old bachelor when his dad died. Samuel left Harvard basically because he got that money. He was like, well, why do I need to go to school?

That's a lot of fucking money. Yeah. And the historians who've studied him have concluded that he left not because he could no longer afford it, but because he no longer wanted to be a minister. He went back to the Barbados, took over the family. Really quickly just to give you a really insane idea of how this actually works. Yeah. The annual income.

annual of a normal average peasant household was two to three pounds annually a year that's crazy and he had 7,000 he inherited 7,000 pounds a year was considered well to do man like he's like he's a bit like he would be an oligarch in a way right like the kind of money he walked into literally yeah yeah he had a whole estate all business all that shit I know I keep saying it, but I feel like I'm placing the pieces for a Game of Thrones style story. That's how all this shit plays out. Within a few years, though, like any good 20-year-old bachelor, it doesn't matter if in the 1600s or not, the inheritance was fucking gone.

Scholars, and like, particularly in the book I read, like the references are using, basically it boils down to nobody knows exactly how. Some say it was because of a major hurricane in 1675 that destroyed many Barbados plantations, but Paris's plantation appears to have survived it and to have been operating in 1679, three years later. Sugar prices declined in this period. Paris may have made bad business decisions, but we genuinely just don't know.

But we do know is that by 1680 or 1681, Samuel Paris had sold his Barbados properties and moved to Boston, and that within about a year, he'd married Elizabeth Eldridge and was running a much smaller mercantile business out of a small wharf and shop on the Boston front. So there's a chunk of history where just like he loses his money, he moves to Boston. We don't really know why. Within another year in 1682, Paris bought his shop and wharf from a merchant named Richard Harris for 270 pounds.

He had to borrow another 420 pounds from Harris just to buy the goods he needed to operate the store. and a year later, because we had the paperwork for this, Harris sued him to recover the loan. This is his trajectory, like through his life. In the spring and summer of 1685, Paris filled in as a temporary minister in the central Massachusetts frontier town of Stowe. And he liked it.

He decided maybe the ministry was the right path for him after all and that he made a mistake. So he went looking for a permanent appointment. But the problem was, by this point, He was now in his mid-30s. He'd never finished his Harvard degree, and he had a track record of business failure. So obviously, he's not going to find himself in a scene of power as a man who has failed businesses over the future of others and families, right? That wouldn't happen.

Never. That's not something we do here. No, no, no. The good ministerial positions, the ones in established towns with healthy congregations and decent salaries just weren't in opposite. to him because he did not finish his degree. He had no competition to them like he just didn't have a chance. What Paris did have a chance at was Salem Village because Salem Village in late 1688 was so notoriously dysfunctional that no respectable minister with a Harvard degree actually wanted

the job anymore. Like three ministers went through. Nobody fucking wanted it. The salary was low. The factional infighting was constant. The reputation was so bad. that the position had been open for months, and Paris was as far as we can tell, the only candidate that actually went for it.

So real good so far. So we started negotiating with the village committee in November of 1688. He gave a sample sermon on November 25th. The congregation voted to offer him the position, and on December 10th, they made a formal offer. And he didn't take it right away. He sat on it. He told the committee that he would consider the offer. and that they would hear from him, quote, in good time.

And then he didn't move, though. I like that. It makes it seem like he's more competitive to you when I feel like it. You know, there's so many looking for my service. Exactly. And then he didn't get back to them. He just waited. He let the village sit on it and stew.

He literally waited for them to come back to him with a better offer. So like he read that village like a book. He knew exactly like how to. how to play them. And he was right. Eventually, the village invited him back. And he laid out a long list of demands.

He wanted a salary of, and Jesse, this goes to what you just looked up. He wanted a salary of 60 pounds a year, which was well to do. Well to do. Yeah. Exactly.

He wanted a third of it paid in hard currency rather than in provisions because hard currency was scarce in the colony and worth more than its face value. He wanted protection against inflation. which meant if prices rose on goods he was being given, he wanted to be made whole. Like he wanted the price that he pay the price that he always paid.

He wanted free firewood. He wanted any donations from people outside the formal congregation to be considered. Free firewood. What a wild idea considering at the time, my assumption is people would just go chop it down. But I guess dudes are doing it and then selling it. All right. Yeah.

You probably don't have time, you know. Like you got to. Yeah, he's writing sermons. Not get sick or whatever. Yeah. Exactly. And like I said, he wanted any donations from people outside the formal congregation to be considered a bonus on top of his salary, not a part of it. That's fair. The village ironed out a contract that met most of his demands in Paris began preaching in July of 1689. Negotiations took eight months, almost a full year of negotiations with him. So wait, but he didn't live there at the time, right? Right. So it's probably back and forth via letter, so that takes time. Yeah, oh yeah, it was long back and forth.

And then, like, what should have been the end of it wasn't the end of it. Because in October of 1689, four months after Paris started preaching, a small group of villagers held a meeting and voted at Paris's encouragement to deed the parsonage and the surrounding two acres of land to Paris personally. Here, it's all yours. He just walked in and owned this town. The parsonage was the village's main asset at this town, too. It was the house that the minister lived in while he held the position.

It belonged in any normal arrangement to the community. Paris was now going to own it outright. Even if he was no longer the minister, he would own the land. Again, a leader coming in and making something his that was once not his and was the communities. This was almost unheard of. Ministers were never given parsonages. They were housed in them and that's it. That's kind of how it works for priests in the Catholic Church as well.

like they're stationed and they live in the house that's usually attached to the church. It's not theirs that they own. The parsonage stayed with the position so that the next minister could move in. By giving Paris it, obviously the village was effectively converting a community asset and a private property. And it still got worse. In 1689, in the 1689 vote that gave Paris the parsonage actually overturned in fucking crazy. I'm so sorry.

This is just like not at all the setting that I understood. to be at this time. I am glad to shatter every thought you had about it. Um, so in that vote that gave him the parsonage, actually it overturned an earlier vote from 1682 that had specifically made it illegal to give or sell the parsonage to anyone. So not only was it a vote to give it to him, it was a vote to overturn a law that they've had voted on less than 10 years prior to that. The list of villagers who attended the October 1689 meeting did not survive history. We don't know who attended. But the men who were appointed to actually carry out the property transfer were all members of the Putnam family or members of Putnam family political allies at the time.

So we know it was likely the Putnam's that were there in overriding most of these votes. So this was almost certainly a meeting that the Putnam family faction decided to pack like they did on votes they cared to influence and that the Porter faction either A didn't know about, didn't attend or was deliberately not told about them and excluded from the meeting entirely. We don't, unfortunately, we fucking don't know and we never will. The decision to hand the parsonage to Paris, though, is clearly a Putnam one. Half the village probably wouldn't have accepted it. They considered it theft afterward. They considered illegal. And from that moment, the decision was made, a portion of Salem Village stopped paying their share of the minister's salary.

Further creating destabilizing circumstances. And by the fall of 1691, two years later, 29% of the previous year's ministerial taxes were unpaid. I have a little quote here for Jesse to read. just to give you an idea of like what this is, what's happening here. I didn't have the chat open. Whoops. The first substantive act of Reverend Samuel Paris's tenure

as Minister of Salem Village was to win through procedural maneuver. Ownership of property, the community had explicitly resolved seven years earlier could never be alienated. First substantive, substantive, whatever, act.

of the Salem Village Committee in response was to refuse to pay him. That comes from Storm of Witchcraft. Thank you for Baker for that. Yeah, that happened. It was like, fine. Fuck you. We're not paying you. Just a tornado of pettiness.

Yeah. Immediate and prolonged. By the fall of 1691, Paris was in a very specific kind of hell of his own making. His parsonage was his, but he had no firewood because the villagers were refusing to deliver any. He had a salary contract, but the village. committee was refusing to collect it. The committee that had been elected in October of 1691,

Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Daniel Andrew, and Joseph Putnam, three Josephs is fucking amazing, by the way. And Francis Nurse were all opposed to him. They voted not to collect a salary at all. They were trying, without quite saying it, to starve him out of the parsonageageage. They were trying to, like, just make him leave. And it's from this point, his sermon started to get a little weird. Reverend Samuel Paris had a habit of writing his sermons down in his personal record book,

which is why we have them. We have most of them. And the sermons he gave in the fall and winter of 1691 are in retrospect. Fucking weird. Throughout the fall of 1691, Paris was preaching about war. And not like the war on the frontier that they had all lost that I was talking about earlier, although that was a recurring theme too. But a spiritual war is what he was talking about.

about a war between Christ and Satan, a war between the saved and the damned. Hold on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you saying that this individual who was under personal attack decided to use religion in some sort of way to deflect that personal attack? That seems like that, that's crazy. Can I go back to asking a question about your Bible? Was that the one you took into call? You're the very one. What were the relevant passages for you? All right. Thank you for asking me. actually find the verse that i had that day wouldn't that be crazy if somehow pierce morgan was able to take a moral high ground over there all that all it took was like a elementary level question for you to hold that my ground uh yeah no it wouldn't happen like that but uh all right

but according to him this war between christ and satan was breaking out right here in salem village It's happening right here. And on July 19th, all I can think about now is like Paris on the pulpit like Oregon. Oh my God. Oh my God.

God. God. That's all I can think about. I'm totally ruined to this. No, you've just made it better. So on July 19th, 1691, he preached that quote, Christ Jesus hath purchased victory and conquest for believers. Christ puts believers into a- Wow, that doesn't sound that much like Jesus.

Christ puts believers, no, kind of weird. Christ puts believers into a conquering capacity. Christ furnisheth ye believer with a skill, strength, courage, weapons, and all military accomplishments for victory. They are well appointed for war. cool. That makes you, yeah, God and pull it. It is the complete antithesis of Jesus' teachings, but like, yeah, man, hopefully that

kind of Christian will never catch on. You know, yeah, exactly. You think these people know Christ's teachings? I wonder about that in 2026, dude. Yeah, no shit. Me too. On October 11th, he preached that Christ, quote, ascended in triumph like a comment. Conquering Roman with his enemies sound like Jesus that much.

Are you sure? I don't know. Jesus was all about conquering. Like he loved conquering Romans. In the Bible, you're like Jesus and the Romans. They were tight, dude. I'm pretty sure the story in the Bible about Jesus having a giant Roman fuck circle with all the soldiers. I forgot about that.

Remember, that's what they do, right? Roman soldiers. Yeah, yeah. That's in the Bible. Yeah. It's right after he turned 18. Let me shut up. I forgot about that.

There's my mistake. I didn't read that part. That's sad. I skipped ahead to Revelations. I was like, this is boring. I'm going to the end. Revelations comes after that.

I got to see how it ends. Yeah, I got to see what the ending is. He has to get that post-Christ clarity. Yeah. So talking about a congo, he sent it in triumph like a conquering Roman and his enemies,

with his enemy's death, hell, the law and the devil following him on foot as captives. Well, of course. Like he was like chained captives of all the evil people he's taking with him. By late November, with his salary cut off, his firewood gone at a hostile village committee actively trying to now remove him, Paris's sermons reached a new fever pitch. And on November 22, 1691, he simply opened with a passage from Psalm 110.

And this is a simple one line. I'll have you, Alex, go ahead and read this, Psalm 110. The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. Drink thy energy drinks and polish thy automatic weapons. For Christ is about to go bonanza crazy on these motherfuckers. Armor of God. Yeah.

Armor of God. Armor of God. Motherfucker. So basically, he's basically, he's trying to, he's building these people into a fever pitch. He's telling him the war is breaking out between Christ's Satan right here, and he's slowly upping his sermons to be more and more kind of intense. How dare? How dare? I know. How dare him? And he was saying that God was going to crush all the enemies in this village, the enemies of God, and that the war was coming. Nine days later, on December 1st, 1691,

the village committee called a meeting to officially question the legality of Paris's contract and the irregular deeding of the parsonage. They were planning essentially to try and maneuver him out of his position with his house. We don't know if the meeting actually took place, though. We have records of them wanting to do the meeting. We don't know if we, we don't have records of the meeting happening. Paris recorded nothing in the village record book that day, and he didn't write down any of his sermons for all of December.

But a deposition made by three of his opponents five years later describes a contentious confrontation with Paris was forced to, and he was forced to defend his original 1689 contract and exploded in fury at them, calling the men who were challenging him knaves and cheaters. Seems like a stable individual. That's what I love. We have so much paperwork, and some of it isn't from years later, too, and it fills in puzzle pieces that we didn't have. And again, I didn't do, I am not one of the academics who put the research together.

I just read the research and telling you about it. six weeks after that, sometime in mid-January of 1692, Paris's nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, started behaving strangely. And this is where I think most people know the same Illinois trials as like starting for real, like the young girls who are like twitching and stuff.

It's the mid of January 1692 at this point. And inside the house, Reverend Samuel Paris, who is age 30 at this point, his wife Elizabeth, who is in poor health and will be dead within four years. There are three children, Thomas age 10,

Betty, age 9, and Susanna, age 4. And then Abigail Williams, age 11, who is Reverend Paris's niece and lives with the family. But the historical record is unclear

about exactly why she lives with them. There's theories that she may have been an orphan working as a kind of unpaid domestic helper around the house. And then, Then there are two enslaved to people.

Tichiba, an indigenous woman of unknown, but as I said earlier, probably Caribbean or South American origin, and her husband, John, whose origin is also unclear. Tichita and John live somewhere in the house. It was probably a lean-to of some kind of the back of the property. And they've been with the family since at least 1680, so 11, no, 12 years at this point. when Paris brought them from the Barbados is where he pulled them from. He took them from the sugar plantation that he had on Barbados and took them back here. The house at this time, there's no interior heating, mind you. The firewood that was supposed to be supplied by the village hasn't been delivered and God knows how long.

So middle of January, no fire. Paris's enemies in the village have been refusing to provide it for months as part of their effort to starve him out of the position. And some of the firewood the family has is would that other parishioners, Paris loyalists specifically, have been donating directly, but it's nowhere near enough that they need to keep warm. The man at the head of this household has been preaching for months

about this coming war, devil rising up and all that stuff, about sinners, and then all this stuff is happening with the villagers. It was unbearable at this time. Just to give you the temperament in the household is what I'm getting at

was very, very, very, very fucking tense. And I can't imagine what it would be like for a nine-year-old girl and an 11-year-old girl to be living in this house in 1691. Again, their dad, her and Abigail's uncle, was a man basically under siege by the community that they were a part of. They were probably not getting very many good looks or even like people talking to even the kids, probably cut them off entirely, surrounded by enemies.

The adults are becoming increasingly frantic, increasingly furious, preaching every Sunday about the imminence of Satan. and that's when some time in mid-January, Betty Paris started to twitch. The Reverend John Hale of Beverly was one of the ministers who came to the parsonage in late January or early February to observe the girls who started twitching in mid-January. He kept notes. Years later, he actually would write a book, probably the most important contemporary source that we have on the trials as a whole, called a modest inquiry into the nature of witchcraft. It was published in 1702, 10 years after the trials, after Hale himself had become deeply skeptical of what he had been a part of.

Here's what Hale wrote about what he saw at the parsonage. Alex, you can read this one as well since you only had a one liner last time. These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves. and beyond the power of any epileptic fits or natural disease to affect. Sometimes they were taken dumb. Their mouths stopped.

Their throats choked. Their limbs racked and tormented, so as might move a heart of stone to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them. Bowels and bowels of compassion. Overflowing bowels of liquid compassion just for them. It was all of English. You probably meant something else. They also suffered by pins. invisibly stuck into their flesh and pricking with irons.

Now, Reverend Paris was at first hesitant to call it witchcraft. He later wrote that it was, quote, several weeks before such hellish operations as witchcraft was suspected. And this is important because the official Puritan position was that you didn't accuse someone of witchcraft lightly. You ruled out everything else first. Witchcraft was not something you jumped to. You consulted physicians.

You prayed. You looked for natural causes the best you could have. at that time anyway. And you looked for evidence that the symptoms were maybe of the mind or physical or some unknown disease. Paris brought in a local doctor, a man named William Griggs. He brought in neighboring ministers, hail from Beverly and others. He prayed, he fasted.

He held days of fasting and prayer at his house with other ministers. It must have been like a mortifying scene, I imagine, with like all this shit going on. A minister who's like his whole, like, what he's basically kind of quietly admitting to here, to the community is that his own household might be being invaded by Satan himself. If these things don't like everything he's been preaching

if they can't find a reason, then that means Satan himself is like invading his house. And that's not something he wants. By the middle of February after weeks of this, Reverend Paris was strongly suspecting that his daughter and niece were

bewitched. The doctor, William Griggs, agreed. He delivered the diagnosis that would eventually be quoted by fucking every history book, every history of the trials, the children were quote, under an evil hand. And modern medicine has a name, but modern medicine rather, has a name for what those was probably happening to those girls, which we're going to talk about here. But under an evil hand is the doctor's prognosis sucks. It's just like such an old, timey-ass diagnosis.

Evil in a medical diagnosis is like so funny. Like yeah. Yeah. Like I'm like, well, you're not real. You're not a doctor. Yeah. Well, it must be a touch of the evil. Nothing can do.

It's probably because the pancreas is broken bad. So, but what was happening to the both of them in January and February has a name. Modern psychiatry calls it conversion disorder, sometimes. called functional neurological disorder. And when it spreads through a community, Jesse, sound familiar, it's called mass psychogenic illness. It doesn't check out. When you were talking about how like, oh, this reminds me of the dancing plagues,

I'm like, yeah. It's maybe the very same thing. It is. Like conversion disorder was first identified by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that a person's psychological anxieties could be his term, quote, converted into physical. symptoms, hence the name. In modern medicine, conversion disorder is when a person experiences real, physically observable neurological symptoms like ticks, fits, seizures, paralysis, blindness, and even going mute,

the inability to speak, that have no identifiable physical cause. But the symptoms are not faked. That person is experiencing them isn't consciously controlling them. Like they are real symptoms. They're also, in some sense, generated by the mind in some way. either by stress, by trauma, by anxiety that was so intense that the body has to express itself in some way. And that's, you know, we've talked about mental health on the show countless times.

But how many times have we said just because you bottle it and put it away doesn't make it go away. And the body will react, especially if you're going through high intensity, high, high traumatizing events. Shit is going to come out one way or another. And these young girls, 9 and 11, are living in a house that is hands. hated by the only community they know are being isolated, are living in freezing temperatures. Pretty much the setup of the witch, the movie. Yes. I love that movie.

I've seen that movie and I love that movie so much. The movie opens with the family being banished to the outskirts of their town in winter because they're so, they're like religiously being prosecute. Yeah. And I'm sure if this is a praise for that movie that people have said countless times, one of the only movies that made old-timing English sound natural when they were speaking it. Like, if you've got innocent in there, he can make any British accent sound natural. He was, it was great. He's the best British talker of all time. He really, he really is.

Also, everybody says Danny Dwyer. I'm telling you, it's that dude. Yeah. Innocent. Well, mass psychogenic illness is what happens when conversion disorder starts spreading. The classic modern case study is what happened in Leroy, New York in October 2011. LaRoy is a small working class town, 8,000 people upstate New York, and its economy had collapsed when the local factories closed in the 60s. In late 2011, a group of cheerleaders at the local junior, junior, senior high school.

We talked about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They started experiencing the strange neurological symptoms. One girl woke up from a nap with her chin jutting forward uncontrollably and her face contracting into spasms. A few weeks later, her friend woke up stuttering and then began twitching. her arms flailing and her head jerking around, then more girls than 12, 16, 18, in a school of 600 students. They were tested for environmental toxins.

They were tested for infectious diseases. They eventually diagnosed them with mass psychogenic illness. And a few features of the Leroy outbreak track exactly with what happened in Salem. First, the population's most susceptible to conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness is, statistically speaking, adolescent girls, especially girls under stress, especially girls in environments where their mental and emotional distress

is not being acknowledged or addressed in the slightest. In Salem, in 1692, the first afflicted girls being 9 and 11 in the household of a man who was preaching apocalyptic war every summer. We've very fucking talked about it. Second, mass psychogenic illness tends to start with high status individuals

and then spread outward. And LaRoy, it started with cheerleaders, a high status group in the school's social hierarchy. In Salem, it started with the daughter of the minister and her cousin, the highest status children in the village. And the reason why it spreads is because those high status people can affect you. If you aren't on team high status, you're against them or a loser or a weird or whatever. Like by having such power, you can control others and get them. to do it without even asking them to because people want to be associated with you. So like if I'm a big old loser kid and some cheerleader is having a problem and I start

having the same problem now I have a connection to the cheerleader and they may hang out with me, like that kind of thing. Yeah. And I wonder how much of it too is if you see the higher ups affected with something when they're supposed to be the ones on the pedestal and they're better, oh shit, if they're vulnerable, that means I must be vulnerable. And third, the symptoms are interpreted by the community in terms of whatever the dominant external threat is at the time. So in Leroy, the first hypothesis was environmental toxins because there were natural gas wells on school property and toxic waste cleanup sites a few miles away.

After the Vancouver bus driver case in 2004, where similar symptoms appeared after an encounter with a passenger of perceived Middle Eastern heritage, the first hypothesis was bioterrorism. The threat fits the moment. And in 1692, the dominant external threat was Satan and his witches. You know, it doesn't, like much like the 04 one, it doesn't have to be logical or realistic in any way. It's what the perceived threat is. And that was the explanation that fit. Conversion disorder doesn't explain everything that happened in Salem. And Emerson Baker is direct on this point in the book I use as my main source.

There was almost certainly some fraud, especially as the trials went on. and accusations spread. Some of the afflicted girls almost certainly understood what they were doing by the summer. But conversion disorder very probably does explain what was happening to Betty and Abigail at least in January and February of 1692. While we're on this talking about Abigail, shout out to every probably blonde actor who has ever played a sassy, bitchy Abigail. Just want to put that out there to all of you.

Good work. It's true. You don't think about it until you think about it. You realize how much you just despise these girls in the play. You're like, ugh. Yeah. And it explains why the symptoms got worse rather than better, too, because in Leroy, when the diagnosis was made and treatment was given, the symptoms gradually subsided.

In Salem, no one ever got the diagnosis. The community's interpretation of what was happening to the girls whether the devil had attacked them, which just makes it worse for the girls. It didn't make it any better. That is so nuts, actually, though. Yeah, it is. It's such a little bit of extra knowledge. Like, like for the average person, like, but it matters.

Yeah, you don't learn that much about like psychology when you're the average person, but just knowing it's not like a demon and that it's coming from inside your brain and stuff. It's, it's so crazy. And I, if you're listening to like too much, I apologize. Part of my odd, like, my fucking autistic ass brain is like, I want to over explain everything. So I want to give you, but this, like, all these little layers build such a picture. that make you go, oh, of course this shit happened. It's interesting.

But oh, my God, it shouldn't have happened because it's worse than you thought. What were you saying? Alex, sorry, I cut you off. I'm just, it is interesting. It is not, like, over explained. Like, there's a lot to say, and it's really complicated. And it's a totally different angle to look at this fucking thing. So, you know, how many, how many times have you seen this?

Like, I'm sure everybody in America, at least, has talked about this in school. So it's interesting to talk about it like this. My understanding of it was, like, obviously they weren't witch. is, but they were doing it for land or like human reasons. I'll accuse them of a witch and I'll get his wife or I'll get whatever. I mean, I think most people understand the play version is these girls just don't want to get in trouble. So they make up a lie in order to not get in trouble.

When in reality, they were likely actually suffering. And those and being told the devil's attacking them made their anxiety fucking worse. So scary if you believe in the devil. Right. And so it's spread. And if you're nine years old and you're sick and you're convulsing and the most powerful adults in your community look at you and tell you in absolute terms that the devil himself is doing this to you what does that do to a child's mind like how traumatizes this is it is making them without

them realizing it it doesn't help can't possibly fucking help it can only make shit worse and by the third week of february the paris household was now under siege betty and abigail were just getting worse reverend paris had brought in ministers from other towns now to observe and pray over the girls days of fasting had been held, but the girl's symptoms hadn't improved. On Thursday, February 25th, 1692, Reverend Paris and his wife Elizabeth left the parsonage to attend a Thursday lecture in a neighboring village. A Thursday lecture was a midweek religious service that rotated from one town to the next, which was a kind of additional preaching event that ministers attended to support each other, kind of like a minister support group through God. While the parisers were away from

the house, a neighbor named Mary Sibley came to the parsonage. And she had a suggestion. Mary Sibley was a member of the Salem Village congregation. She wasn't a witch or sorceress or whatever, not anyone with a reputation for a cult dabbling. She was a regular Puritan villager who, like a lot of her neighbors, had a working knowledge of folk magic, which we talked about on the show during the folk magic thing. And I said it before, but you have to understand at this time, folk magic wasn't seen as evil. It was just part of your everyday thing. And even as they were growing away from it, the generation still knew some folk magic. They knew of folk magic. It was just part of their culture. And they would mix folk magic and

Christianity kind of all the time in the early days. So she, this is not bizarre for them to have it, to have a working knowledge of it. And what she was coming with was a kind of counter magical home remedy that English communities had been using for centuries. to detect and ward off witches. The remedies were technically forbidden by the Puritan ministers, but they were widely practiced anyway, and things like nailing horseshoes over your doorway, or boiling a witch bottle full of pins in urine to torment the witch

and force her to reveal herself. Or in the case of Mary Sibley's suggestion, baking a witch cake. Now, I was passingly familiar with the witch cake. I couldn't remember the details. Do you boys know the witch? No, I have no clue. Is it like a New England thing?

I think we talked about it briefly in the American Folk Magic episode. Very simply instructed the two enslaved people, Tichiba and John Indian, to make a witch cake. The recipe was a loaf of rye bread mixed with the urine of the afflicted girls, baked together, and then fed to the family dog. And the dog like threw up and died. It was like a witch or something, right? Well, the theory of the witch cake was that the dog having, having, eaten a substance that had been in contact with the afflicted girls' bodies would be supernaturally compelled to reveal the identity of the witch tormenting them. Some accounts also suggested that

the cake itself would somehow torment the witch forcing her to come forward. It just depends on the version of the witch cake and folk magic. But like, so gross. It's kind of like, okay, now it's like, I've got the witch pee in me. I know where she is. I've got the witch pee in me, baby. I've got the witch pee in me. Tituba and John baked the cake. They fed it to the dog. This would end up being a catastrophic decision and it set in motion

everything that came afterward. The afflicted girls, Betty and Abigail, soon cried out that the witch was Tichiba. And for a minute, just think about this from Tichiba's perspective for a minute. She was this poor

enslaved woman who lived with this family for 12 years. She'd helped raise these children. By all accounts, she was close with Betty in particular, the nine-year-old. A neighbor came over, asked her to bake a folk magic cake to help diagnose what was wrong with the kids. She did it because she was an enslaved woman in 1692, and a free white neighbor was telling her what to do. And she had every reason to believe that the Reverend would agree with this approach. Why wouldn't she know?

Why would she know? The immediate result was that the children she had helped raise, turned around, and then accused. her of being the witch. When Reverend Paris returned home and found out what had happened, he was furious, but not at the girls. He believed the girls. He was furious at Mary Sibley, because Mary Sibley had committed witchcraft. So in Puritan theology, all magic was witchcraft. There was no such thing as good magic, white magic, folk magic, hail, helpful magic, the Puritan idea stripped all that away. If you were doing it, something that invoked supernatural power outside of God, there only is one other source for that.

And that's Satan. That's the only place you could get it from. So when Mary Sibley instructed Tituba to bake the witch cake, even though Mary Sibley's intent was to help the children, even though her intent was to defeat witchcraft and not commit it, Mary Sibley had, in Reverend Paris's view, used Satan's tools to fight Satan. she had committed an act of witchcraft. What's the matter? Is that not? No, I'm still upset for my girl, Tichiba. Yeah, she got fucked over, man.

This poor, poor woman. She didn't do anything wrong. No. Paris would publicly chastise Mary Sibley in front of the entire congregation, and he would warn his parishioners in a famous and chilling sermon line, quote,

by this means it seems the devil hath been raised among us, and his rage is vehement and terrible. And when he's shot, be silenced, the Lord only knows. So basically the devil's here. We don't know when he's going to go away. We don't know what's up.

Yeah, exactly. Be scared. He was raised in our community. Somebody brought him here through. Oh, he's basically saying the witch cake brought Satan here through the actions of one of our own. We don't know how to put him back. He's basically like,

we don't know how to put Satan back in the bottle, everybody. We're fucking, we'll vibe it out. We'll figure it out. And in the meantime, you need me. Yeah. So don't get rid of it. me it's very important i stay for outside forces are threatening us and that would be crazy if politicians started doing that not just religious figures anyway paris in this moment though like literally

at one level he was kind of like looking for a way to take his embarrassment and put it outside of himself like externalize it from himself right because it's his own daughter niece that had been afflicted here his own household wasn't strong enough to resist satan from invading and by blaming Mary Sibley for quote unquote raising the devil through the witch cake, Paris was kind of finding a way to say, hey, not my fault. I was gone. Not my fucking fall. The afflictions in his house were caused by an attack of witchcraft magic. That gave him cover, but it also did something else. Because by publicly declaring from his pulpit that the devil had been raised in Salem Village and that his rage was vehement and terrible and that no one could know when it would end, Paris was officially endorsing the witchcraft diagnosis. From that moment forward, the question was no longer whether there were witches in Salem Village. The question just shifted to who were the witches in Salem Village now. On the same day the witchcake was baked, the two new girls living in different parts of the village suddenly developed the same symptoms. The first was Ann Putnam Jr. She was 12 years old.

She was the daughter of Thomas Putnam and Ann Carr Putnam Senior. And we'll come back in this because she's going to be extremely important in all this. The Putnam family lived along the road to Andover, more than like a mile west from where his parsages, Paris's parsonage was. It was in the heart of the Putnam stronghold in the Putnam family. Anne Putnam was the oldest of the Putnam's couples, 10 children. They had 10 fucking kids. Ann Jr. had a complicated life, a home life. Both her parents had grown up wealthy and powerful, but both had received what they considered unjust portions of their inheritances. Her father Thomas had spent years in court trying to recover what he considered his rightful share of his father's estate and had largely failed. Her mother, Anne Sr. was a deeply troubled woman. Multiple of Anne Sr.'s children had died in infancy. She would later become an afflicted accuser herself alongside her daughter. one of the very few adults to claim the same kind of supernatural torment that the children were claiming.

And reading the Putnam family records, you get a household basically full of grief, resentment, slow burning rage that just was boiling over in generational trauma fashion passed along to each of their children. The second new accuser was Elizabeth Hubbard. She was 17 years old. She was an orphan working as a maid for her aunt, Rachel Griggs, and her aunt's husband, William Griggs. who was the same village doctor who had diagnosed Betty and Abigail as being under the evil hand. He was the doctor's like, they got evil on him. The Griggs household was located about two miles further from the parsonage out east. So they were sandwiching on both sides of the parsonage.

And the Griggs household was Elizabeth, rather, was at the bottom of the social hierarchy of Salem Village, being an orphan orphan servant with no real family of her own and no marital prospects that were worth speaking of anyway. So now there are four afflicted girls, Betty Paris, Abigail Williams, and Putnam Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard. Two of them are children in the parsonage. One is the daughter of Reverend Paris's most powerful political ally, and one is a servant in the household of the village doctor in the days following the witch cake all four girls afflictions intensified the day's following the witch cake that's that's a historical marker dude the witch cake day is a historical mark blood dude it's nasty it's like death stranding dude yeah it's way so much closer to

the death stranding that i wanted to be actually now that you mention it betty and abigail accused tituba directly they claimed her specter uh her spirit form separated from her body was chasing them around the house, biting them, pinching them, choking them. Anne Putnam Jr. began naming someone new, Sarah Good, a poor and disliked village woman who Anne said was pinching her and trying to coerce her to sign the devil's book. Elizabeth Hubbard accused Sarah Good as well, but added a second name, Sarah Osborne, a bedridden widow on the northern edge of Salem Village who had scandalized the community by buying the contract of her indentured servant Alexander Osborne, Osborne and then marrying him.

She like freed her own servant and fell in love with him and like married him. And so that was like they hated her for that. They looked down on her for that. Within a few days, three accused names now emerged, Tichiba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. These are what historians who were riffing on the famous line from Casablanca apparently called the usual suspects, a textbook list for them to like, literally, this is like the model of who would be accused. Tichiba was indigenous and enslaved, lowest possible status in the colony.

Sarah Good was poor, homeless, and known throughout the village for having a quote unquote sharp tongue. Her own husband, William Good, would later testify that he had no proof his wife was a witch, but that she had such an evil temper that, and these are her, his own words, he, he had to say with tears in his eyes that she is an enemy to all good. A pun on her man. I know, dude. It sucks.

That guy was like, I'm getting remarried. More like bad. The judge didn't laugh. Did not laugh at the joke. Sarah was in her late 30s, married to William and had a four-year-old daughter named Dorothy. She was also pregnant. Sarah Osborne was a widow in her late 40s. she was bedridden and ill years before she'd married like I said her family's much younger

Irish indentured servant after the death of her first husband which had been scandalized by the community younger indentured servant yeah he was like in his uh I think in his 20s Irish uh exactly Irish part of it um all so basically what I'm saying is like all these people were like bottom of the social hierarchy they were what in a serial killer situation you would call the lesser dead, as we've said before, the people of the society does not give a shit about. Reverend John Higginson, a senior minister in Salem Town, looked at the initial outbreak that was happening and said it seemed to be, his actual words were, quote, very small and looked on at first as an ordinary case, which had fallen out for at several times in other places

and would quickly be over. So he was like, oh, I've seen this before it's happened. It works itself out. It's fine. Unfortunately, for this very specific instance, He was wrong. It would not quickly be over. On Monday, February 29th, keep in mind how fast this is all happening, which is why I keep putting these dates to. Like, this is all within weeks.

It's just like fucking, it's taking off. On Monday, February 29th, which was a leap day, by the way, four men from Salem Village rode the five miles east into Salem town to begin formal legal proceedings. The four men were Thomas Putnam, Edward Putnam,

Joseph Hutchinson and Thomas Preston. Thomas was the father of the afflicted Ann Putnam Jr. Edward was his brother. Hutchinson and Preston were both Putnam allies. They went before two local magistrates, Jonathan Corwin and John Hawthorne. These two men deserve their own momentary brief talk about

because they're about to become two of the most consequential figures in the entire history of the Salem Witch Trials. John Hawthorne, 51 years old, wealthy merchant, respected Salem town politician, second generation American. His father William Hawthorne had been one of the original settlers of Salem in 1630. He was descended from the very founding of this colony. He had no formal legal training.

He was a justice of the peace by virtue of his social standing on his political connections. His descendants would later add a W to the family name to distance themselves from him after the trials. That's why Hawthorne. Hawthorne. Because his name was spelled without it. It was just H-A-T-H-O-R-N-E. And one of the descendants,

the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne would become haunted by his ancestors' role in Salem and would write about it for the rest of his fucking life. This guy, Nepo Baby. Jonathan Corwin was 52. Also a Nepo Baby, a wealthy Salem merchant, also a member of one of the founding families of the colony. And by 1692, also was,

a justice of the peace. His house in Salem town still stands to this day. It's the building the tourist know as the witch house, which I have visited multiple times. I didn't know it was this guy's house, even though no witches were ever held in this house. It was the personal residence of Jonathan Corwin. The reason it gets the called the witch house is because Corwin conducted some of the pre-trial examinations in that house and so it just fucking stuck. Hawthorne and Corwin were used to dealing with petty crimes and civil disputes pretty much exclusively, they weren't used to capital cases, which witchcraft is. They certainly were not even, never mind that, they weren't even witchcraft cases in general, like way above their pay grade. The four men from Salem Village

swore out formal complaints before them, accusing Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. And I'm going to read, I'm going to have you read verbatim just a line from this. We're not going to read the whole thing. But just the reason it was done, she's like, you know, just kind of pin at home, Jesse. Go ahead and take that. For suspicion of witchcraft by them committed and thereby much injury done to Elizabeth Paris, Abigail Williams, Anna Putnam and Elizabeth Hubert. Hubbard, all of Salem Village aforesaid sundry times within this two months and lately also done. Those words are very hard to make sense of when you read them. But the complaint named four afflicted persons, two children of the parsonage, the complaint named three

accused all basically made it legal on paperwork. Hawthorne-Corwin issued warrants for the arrest of the three women. The warrants ordered the constables to bring the accused the next morning to Ingersoll's ordinary. That's the village tavern owned by Lieutenant Nathaniel Ingersoll, a minutes walk from the parsonage. And examinations would begin at 10 in the morning on Tuesday, March 1st, 6th. 1692.

When the constables brought the three accused women to Ingersolls Tavern on the morning of March 1st, the crowd was so large that the building couldn't hold them. They had to move the proceedings down the street to the much larger village meeting house, the same building where Reverend Paris preached every Sunday. All four afflicted girls were there to face their accused tormentors. Ezekiel Sheaver, a 36-year-old village man, was assigned to take down. the official record of the proceedings, so that's how we have them. And several other observers, including Reverend Paris himself and Thomas Putnam, would also produce written records. So we have

varying viewpoints into how all this went down. So we have a real good understanding of how this went. Sarah Good was questioned first. John Hawthorne led the questioning. Hothorn was not a judge in the modern sense that we understand them. Keep this in mind. There was no presumption of innocence to this guy's approach at all. There was no impartial weighing of evidence as we would hope from a court. From the moment the questioning began, his tone was of a prosecutor who basically already concluded that Sarah Good was guilty and was simply pressing her to make her admit it. And we have a little transcript back and forth. One of you can be Hawthorne. One of you can be good. This comes right out of the records. Sarah Good. What evil spirit have you familiarity with?

None. Have you made no contact with the devil? No. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. I scorn it. Who do you employ then to do it? No creature, but I am falsely accused. Why did you go away muttering from Mr. Parris's house?

I did not mutter, but I thanked him for what he gave my child. A likely story. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter what she answered. He's like, okay, well, we know you did it. Who'd you hire? What'd you do? His first question, what evil spirit you have familiarity with assumes guilt right out the gate.

When Sarah Good denied the charges, Hawthorne ordered the four afflicted girls to look at her and confirm whether she was the woman who'd hurt them. They looked, they confirmed. And then on cue, all four girls began to convulse and court, claiming that Sarah Goodspector was lunging out of her body to attack them in the meeting house right then and there in front of everyone. The crowd watched and I imagine it was a lot of, oh my God, you know,

they like got surprised. They were watched, they watched Sarah Good deny the charges, but the crowd believed the girls. When pressed Sarah Good still clearly trying to deflect attention, finally said that maybe Sarah Osborne was the one responsible for the girls' torment, not her. Unfortunately,

this was a fatal mistake on Sarah Good's part by offering up Sarah Osborne's name, Good had effectively confirmed that there were witches in Salem Village, actually, and she was just denying being one of them, that's all. So Hawthorne then questioned Sarah Good's husband, William, and William said that he had no specific reason to think his wife was a witch, but this is where I said earlier, there was a but. He told the magistrates with the record describes as in tears that his wife was, and again, actual historical recorded statement,

quote, she was an enemy to all good, because it was a pun on her name. Sarah Good was held over for trial. Sarah Osborne was questioned next. Osborne, remember, was bedridden, sick and had been carried to the meeting house to even get here. That's how sick she was. She denied everything. She said she had never seen the devil in her life.

She said she did not hurt the children. She said she employed nobody to hurt them. The afflicted girls confirmed her as a tormentor as well with the same convulsions and writhing they did for Sarah Good. Osborne was held over for trial. She would die in the Boston jail nine weeks later. And on May 10th, 1692, having never been formally tried for ever any crime, she is by Emerson Baker's account. The first death of the Salem witch trials. God, the sick woman they put in prison. It was the first one to die from all of this. So brutal. And then last of the three, Tichiba was brought forward.

This is the moment kind of where everything pivoted on. Without what Tichiba said in the meeting house on March 1st and continued saying over the next four days, the Salem witch trials might have been just one more small, weird witchcraft outbreak. Three women accused maybe one of the, maybe one or two of them eventually executed. Because remember, not everybody who was getting accused got killed. That was another presumption that we talked about earlier. Only some of them got killed. the rest of the story doesn't happen with how with this didn't go the way it was this was in reverend john higginson's words supposed to be the kind of thing that would be over quickly it was titibe who made it impossible to be quickly over at all she stated she started the same way sarah good and sarah osborne had started by denying the charges hawthor opened with the same questioning asking her what evil spirit you have familiarity with why did you hurt these children um but i'll just have you

this back and forth. It's very easy. Tichiba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with? None. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. Who is it then? The devil for all I know. Did you never see the devil? The devil came to me and bid me serve him. Damn, dude. That last line is what made this whole, like, what spun this out of control. Tichiba was up to that point she was denying. But after the devil came to me and bid me serve him, that's a confession. Once Tichibus started, she didn't stop.

Over the next four days, all the way to March 5th, she gave the magistrates the most detailed, most narratively coherent witchcraft confession that had ever been given in colonial America. She described the devil appearing to her as a man, sometimes in black clothes, sometimes as a tall man with white

hair. She described witch's familiars, a yellow bird that fed at Sarah Good's hand between the fingers sucking blood, A red rat and a black rat. Two cats, one red and one black. Quote, as big as a little dog. A wolf that Sarah Good had set upon Elizabeth Hubbard. A creature with a head like a woman, two legs and wings.

Another creature, Harry, that walked upright on two legs and was about two or three feet tall. Sounds like the pants, the walking pants to me. That must be it. Yeah. Yeah, the night crawlers. Yeah, the Fresno night crawlers. It absolutely sucks that two women of. even though still very low social status are higher than a slave went through shit and then

Tichipa saw this and was like the only way I can save my ass is to give them what they want, which is so messed up. Obviously this didn't happen. Obviously she was innocent. So messed up that her whole thing is like, well, if they're going to railroad these other two ladies, it seems the only way to save myself is to admit to stuff that did not happen. It's like when the cops take you, you know, if the cops ever like arrest you. you, you just say lawyer, because they're just going to try to get you. And if you think you can work

with them, just say lawyer. Yeah, it's made it so much worse. And she tried to play their game. And all it did was give them what they want. Literally, exactly. Uh, she described a devil's book in which witches signed their names in their own blood. She said she'd signed it. She said she'd seen the marks of nine other witches inside it, including those of Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Two were unknown to her. Three were strangers from Boston. She described flying. The witches said, she said would ride on poles or sticks in the air, which is where the broom thing comes from, because it wasn't a broom, but it was a pole or a stick. That's really where it comes from is Tituba? Yeah. Wow. I probably comes, maybe that comes, but this is, well, she said in court,

and I'm assuming this is where it latched on to like cultural relevance. She herself had been forced to ride to attack Ann Putnam Jr. with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne riding behind her. She said they didn't pass through the trees, but they didn't fly over them either. They would simply be at the destination. She's just like talking about like hop on the broom and they like teleport, astro project. It wasn't like flying so much as it was like a weird teleportation thing. She described witches assemblies in the parsonage itself. The devil and his witches had met inside the Paris house, she said, while the reverend remained completely unaware of their presence. And here was the detail. One of the details that I would say,

was maybe the most damaging. She said there were nine witches in total, like I said, which meant if these three were witches, that means there are at least six fucking other witches in this town, literally throwing the kindling into the fucking fire. And it's like, oh, fuck. There's a recurring detail on Titibus testimony that historians, according to the author anyway,

has spent generations trying to understand, basically multiple times during her confession. She expressed remorse. She said more than once that she was sorry. She said she loved Betty Paris and didn't want to hurt her, but had been threatened by the devil and forced to do it. When she described the devil, she described being terrified of him. When she described the witches, she described being threatened by them. She was constantly positioning herself as a reluctant witch, coerced into Satan's service against her will, repenting now in front of the magistrates.

Again, there's no way to know for sure. I think, you know, Jesse's take on it is that play the game. Maybe they'll let you repent. Especially if you give up others. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense.

And plus again, she isn't like the other two were low social status, but like she has zero social status. Yeah, she's got none. Yeah. No, she's got none. So she's trying to like do the best she can the scenario to save herself. And they like, they don't just railroad her too. They literally use her to be like. like, well, now we can go after other people.

Like, it only reinforced it. That's why you, yeah, no. Like Mathis said, be like, I want my lawyer. Don't give anyone anything. Never, never speak to a cop. Yeah, yeah, don't do that. And Jess, and like, this is what a biographer of Tichiba actually argues, Elaine Bresla. She says that this is a strategic move.

Yeah. She thinks this is all strategic. She's, her reading of it, uh, is that, give them what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear confirmation that there was a witch conspiracy, textbook details. They wanted to hear contrition. They wanted to hear that Satan was at work in their community and had recruited his minions through trickery.

And she gave him all that, hopefully saving her own life somehow. And more importantly, you know, as a slave, your job is literally to give people what they want at all times or else like it's over for you. Again, she made the witch cake because a free white woman came over and asked her to. What is she supposed to do? Yeah, she did what she was told because that's the whole slavery thing, man. That's her job. Yeah.

Like, Jesus. Yeah, she gave them all the details. And of the 55 people who eventually confessed to witchcraft during the trials and maintained their confession, every, this is what, okay, this is fucking, it blew my mind. Again, in all this, we're going to get more into this part two. Let me repeat. Fifty-five people confessed to witchcraft during these trials. Never mind the people who denied it. Out of the 55 who confessed, every single one of them lived. Every single one of them lived.

As long as you confessed, you lived in this trial? There was one exception. Except. Well, yeah, obviously, Tipchiba. But out of the other 55 that would show up after Tichiba, a man named Samuel Wardwell. And he is kind of the exception that proves the rule because he confessed, then recanted his confession. And the moment he recanted, they hanged him. Hilarious.

Yeah. The others never recanted. They were like, no, I am. And that let, we'll get into it. Second episode's about that. Well, the other thing worth considering, right, which we learned from the, you know, folk magic episode is that like, everybody was doing witchcraft. Right? Yeah, but they confessed according to Tichiba's template of what making deals with the devil were.

And that's why her confession is important. Yes, there was folk magic, but her description of a devil, a man in suit, blood contract, brooms, books, that is what the 55 other people later on would go on to use. Everyone who maintained their innocence died. Tichita's confession was the template. She figured out what to say first, and others would follow her example. and by confessing she got herself sent to jail and out of the meeting house. She would spend more than a year in the Boston jail. Her case would not be heard until May of 1693, by which point the trials were over,

and the new court refused to indict her. Reverend Paris would refuse to pay her jail fees, which reached about seven pounds, perhaps half her value as a slave. And she would be sold to a new master to recover those fees. and then she disappears from historical record forever. She didn't die. Right. She got sent to jail and disappeared.

We don't know what happened to her after her released. We genuinely, she just is gone. But on March 1st, 1692, when she gave that confession, Chichima did something else that no one in that meeting house may have understood at the time. She fucking broke open the case. She did play by their rules, but playing into their insanity worked. It gave them what they wanted. It gave them like there are witches here and it spread the craziness.

And by saying there were others and by making it salacious, oh, yeah. Like it historically and end playwise, they're they'd sell titch about so bad. Yeah. They're like she did they make it so much worse. Yeah. What happens after her confession is like another part that the author was saying historians have a spent a lot of time trying to understand because this is where it gets weird in that what happens afterward is genuinely unprecedented in colonial American witchcraft history. In every previous

witchcraft case in New England, going back to 1647, the pattern had been that one or two people would be accused, examined, neither convicted or acquitted. The matter would be over within weeks. The community would then just move on. There had been larger flares, the Hartford Witch Panic in Connecticut of 1662 and 1663 produced 13 accusations and four executions. But even Hartford had stayed contained. And even Hartford had blown out, had blown out within the original geographic area. Salem didn't stay contained. In the days immediately following, Tichibah was examined three more times.

Each time, she just got more and more elaborate. March 2nd, she gave the magistrates the most detailed evidence of all. She had signed the devil's book in her own blood. She had seen the marks of nine witches, the stuff I said. The afflicted girls watched and listened to all of this. Then they started to name names. The first new name came from 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., Sarah Good's four-year-old daughter, Dorothy. Yep.

It's like four-year-old. Four-year-old girl. Was she doing witchcraft? Yeah, yes, dude. Anne claimed that the little girl's specter was biting her, pinching her, choking her, trying to force her to sign the devil's book, Dorothy Good, four years old would on March 23rd

become the youngest person ever formally examined for witchcraft in colonial America. I wish I was there. I just want to know what it was like to like watch a fucking four year old. They're not people yet. Like they can barely do much.

You know what I mean? Like she was, and this is the other thing. That's why it's easy to accuse them. Yeah. And at four years old, she was eventually placed in chains in the Boston jail where she would remain for nearly nine months, of which she would never fully recover from. Of course not. Yeah, you fucked her up forever. She was four.

Years later, her father would petition the colonial government for compensation, noting that his daughter had been so traumatized by her imprisonment that she, quote, being chained in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrified that she has ever since. been very chargeable having little or no reason to govern herself. She was acting out. She was like rage and temper and like, you know, she got locked in a dungeon for a year. For nine months. Yeah, for basically a year.

Dorothy Good lived the rest of her life with severe mental disability that her family attributed directly to her time in the Boston jail. Then Ann Putnam Jr. And God knows how she was treated in the jail. Like, I don't want to think about it, but like, I just think about the fucking prison cells and the concentration cancer. We've got shit in the horror stories we come out. Never mind, 1690 fucking one Boston jail.

It's unthinkable probably. It is. Then Ann Putnam Jr. named another Martha Corey. And this one was a little different. Martha Corey was not a quote unquote usual suspect. She was a respectable middle-aged village woman. She'd become a full church member in Reverend Paris's congregation in 1690. She was in the Puritan terminology, a saint.

she was married to Giles Corey, a quarrelsome 81-year-old farmer and member of the Salem Town Church. Basically, by every measure, exactly the kind of person a witchcraft accusation should not have stuck to. And yet, within days, her specter was reportedly afflicting not just Ann Jr, but also Mary Warren, a 20-year-old servant in the household of John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth, who ran a tavern just south of the Salem village boundary of the Downing Farm. Mary Warren is going to come back into the story repeatedly. So another name to try and remember. Now, what's interesting is like, it's easy to look at the little girls and be like,

what the fuck are they're ruining these people's lives. But also, from the other perspective of things, these little girls, because Tituba said there were nine names, are the only ones who were being affected by ghosts and witches. They have the pressure of an entire community now to rule. out Satan's six other fucking witches and warriors in this town. Can you imagine being 11 and 9 years old and being like the weight of saving this town is based on you picking out the witch?

Do they even understand? I can't imagine they do. Then Ann Jr. named a third Rebecca Nurse. And this is the moment when if you were paying attention into the Salem Village in the second week of March 6092, you should have known that something was gone had gone catastrophically wrong because Rebecca Nurse was fucking 71 years. old. She was hard of hearing. She was sickly all the time. She was 71 also at that time is like a different vibe. At that point they should have been like, all right, girls. Really? Like, are you actually

naming people? Like, let's be honest with ourselves here. I don't know. Did you guys even meet up? Where'd you guys go? Well, basically, just to finish with her, she was sickly. And by universal claim of the village, she was the most respectable woman in Salem village. at this time. She'd been a full member of the Salem Town Church for decades. Her husband, Francis, was a respected farmer. Their family rented the substantial Townsend Bishop Farm, which was 300 acres on the western side of the village. They had eight children, all grown, all members of established Massachusetts families. Rebecca Nurse was the kind of woman who, if you told a Salem villager in that time, she was accused of witch, accused of witchcraft. I imagine they might have actually

laughed out loud to you. Like, you gotta be fucking kidding. By the second week of March, Ann Putnam Jr. was claiming that Rebecca Nurse's specter was attacking her. And by the middle of March, the nine witches, Tichiba had named in her confession. Seven had been identified by the afflicted girls. Tichiba, Sarah

Good, Sarah Osborne, Dorothy Good, Martha Corey, and Rebecca Nurse. And one more, and we're not going to name that seven name today, though, because that's going to be a part two thing. Oh. I know. Dude, it gets It gets crazy.

While the new names were being added, the original four afflicted girls started getting joined by more people who were being afflicted. Mercy Lewis was a teenager who worked as a maid in the Putnam household. She started having fits so severe that several men were required to physically hold her down. The witnesses who watched her described her as being in, and these are their words, quote, very dreadful and solemn condition. And Fad, she could not continue long in this world unless the torments subsided. We're going to spend more time with her in part two because she has a backstory that's really essential to understand what's happening here, but it's not really necessary for part one.

For now, just hold on to two facts for me. She was a teenage maid in the Putnam household, and she was a refugee from the frontier war in Maine. She had watched her family die. she had seen her village burn. She had been displaced south all the way to Salem Village, where she now lived as a servant in the household of the most politically aggressive faction in the village. Mercy Lewis was one of the most violently afflicted people

in the entire community, because she probably had the most fucking trauma of all of them and the way she grew up and how she even ended up here. So her convulsing makes sense if it's this psychological illness that's spreading. Soon. So crazy. I know.

Soon and Putnam Senior, the mother was afflicted as well. Adult, married, grieving, troubled, the wife of Reverend Paris's strongest political ally was also now suffering visions. She would join her daughter in the courtroom in the months to come. A middle-aged Quaker woman named Bathsheba Pope was struck temporarily blind by Martha Corey's specter. Two more women, Sarah Bitt. and probably, and we say probably because we don't have good record of it, Margaret Goodale

were also tormented. And perhaps most strangely of all, Tichiba's husband, John Indian, the man who'd helped bake the witch cake, was also now seeing specters. He was being attacked. He said by the same witches the girls were seeing. The afflicted population had grown from four to somewhere around a dozen, and the accused had gone from three to seven. And then on March 21st, Hawthorne and Corwin, the two judges, mind you, that were overseeing all this, formally examined Martha Corey. The proceedings filled the meeting house beyond capacity. This is already the bigger place. Two days later, on March 23rd, they examined, that's when they examined the four-year-old Dorothy Good and the 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse. Dorothy admitted that she'd been visited by a familiar by which, like the author say she made.

may have meant a spirit or may have meant nothing more than she'd been asked a leading question by a magistrate and she's four years old and said yes. We don't fucking know. They just in because in the paperwork it just says she admitted to it. So we don't know exactly how it went. Rebecca nurse. It's insane. To me that also could have meant maybe she saw a bird.

Right. Because they were saying birds and other animals were being. It could be literally anything. She's four. She's fucking four. Rebecca Nurse, who's hard of hearing, struggling to follow the questions, just denied everything. She was held over for trial regardless. And by the end of March 1692, the witch hunt that Reverend John Higginson had assumed would be quickly over was nowhere near it.

It was no longer just the marginalized and the disliked or even just obvious targets. It was four-year-olds. It was 71-year-old church members. It was respectable people of Salem Town. It was reaching upward and outward into respectable society, and it was no longer following any of the rules that previous New England witch panics had followed, and the afflicted were finding new victims to name every week. So where are we at this point? Colonies losing its war, terrible winter, no one's paying their parishes. They have no one real, any real legal authority from England at this point.

The two families are still warring. Putnam is still very much in control. And while all this is going on, the witch trials have kind of picked up. So by the last week of March, 1692, here's where we stand. Three women are in the Boston jail awaiting trial. Tichiba, who's confessed, Sarah Good, who's pregnant at this time, which I completely left out earlier, and whose four-year-old daughter had just been arrested, Sarah Osborne, who's bedridden and ill, and who has six weeks left to live before she becomes the first death, waiting in the prison cells,

dying on May 10th. Two more, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse have been examined and held over for trial. Dorothy Good has been examined. The four-year-old has been chained in Boston Dungeoned for nine months, and her mother has been told that her own daughter has confirmed her witchcraft at four years old. The afflicted population has grown to perhaps a dozen people.

Now a mix of children, teenagers, servants, war refugees, two adult women and a single enslaved man. They're seeing specters everywhere now. Names are being whispered weekly. and Reverend Samuel Paris has been entirely vindicated the man who not two months ago was being starved out of his parsonage

by a hostile village committee is now the spiritual center of the largest witch panic in the history of the English-speaking colonies. Man, that's so gross. It sucks because it fucking worked for him. The faction that had been trying to remove him now went utterly silent

because to oppose Reverend Paris now is to risk being, seen as opposing the campaign against Satan. He fucking politically maneuver himself like Littlefinger into position to be like, if you accuse me, then you're accusing God, really, because I'm just trying to fight Satan, bro. I just want to fight Satan for Holy Armor, right? Like, oh, fucking like.

Oh, God. Jesus Christ. That's what it was. Oh, my God. Like, that's what it is. Several members of the village committee that had voted against Paris in October will by summer find themselves part of the accused. In Boston, a new royal governor named William.

FIPS is preparing to set sail for the colony. He'll arrive on May 4th, 1692 with a new charter for Massachusetts Bay. He'll arrive to find a colony in the grip of a witchcraft crisis that the existing legal system isn't quite equipped to handle. To me, it's that meme from the community of walking in with the pizza. Hey, guys, what's going on fire? He's just fucking on fire. He's already fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. His first act as governor will be to create a special court, the court, of Oyer and Terminer to deal with the accused witches that were now overflowing the colony's prisons. By June 10th, 1692, the first execution will take place, a woman named Bridget Bishop, who's not a member of either of either of the Salem Village family factions. She lives several miles away, who isn't part of the original group of the accused, and she will hang from the rope at a barren rise of land outside Salem town that will come to

called Gallows Hill, which I'm familiar with as well. By September 22nd, 18 more will have hang. One man, 81 years old, will have been crushed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea. We'll talk all about that stuff. We're leaving part one in the last week of March 1692. The original four-girl outbreak and the parsons has become a regional crisis. Everything started. The dam has broken. And that is where we're going to pick up. up next week when he eventually went back to Boston. This guy went back to Boston, wrote about what he had seen, published a small book the next year and the title was a brief and true narrative, a brief and true narrative of

some remarkable passages relating to sundry persons afflicted by witchcraft at Salem Village. What a fucking name of her book. He should probably retitle that for like a second reprint because it'll probably be able to yeah, yeah, that was in 1701, I think. I have to check again. I can't quite remember. The circumstances of these events have gotten like more mundane and yet they have gotten like even more brutal. Yeah.

He published the first account of the Salem witch trials and it's where we get a lot of our sources as well. He was watching the beginning of something that like by the time he saw it in March was already fucking too far gone for him to stop. He just couldn't do it. He had to like just trying to like manage a collapse at that point. And that's what we're going to end the episode, boys. That is part one of the Salem Witch Trials. Next week, we dive into all of the executions and why they went down and the stuff surrounding it.

And then for part three, we're going to wrap it up with the theories, the familyal like what happened afterward, the ramifications of such things. But that is for another time. Crazy. Thank you all so much for listening. We're off to go do a minisode. Over at patreon.com slash shulmin.

I hope your boys are feeling good after this episode. I mean, my soul hurts, but like, I have the time I feel like I do a series you end and I hear Alex almost verbatim say my soul hurts It does But I feel good like it's cool But my soul hurts

It's cool but it hurts Fair enough That's it for us Thank you guys so much supporting us We'll be over to like us Patreon.com Sustraud for a minisote We'll see you next week

We appreciate we love you Hello everybody Welcome back to the weird shit podcast As always I'm one of your host Mike Martin and joined by the... I don't know who they are.

There's two... What? Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer. No. Neo and Trinity. No. I don't understand, and I probably never will.

Let me just tell you right now that... I've got the witch pee in me. Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield. I'm telling you, I think he literally just looked up. Famous Dich and Chich and Chaw. And they should have been going to... through the list ever since. I'm trying to dig deep.

Which one of you is Dick Powell? Me? Your name's Jesse Cox. Bebhra- Aluminati I want my podcast. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by Alex and Jesse.

Like, he's just here and he's fucking you up by choice, by his choice. Like a shooting star across the sky that's... He may be here with my God.