Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 349: The Salem Witch Trials Part 2

Episode Date: May 17, 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/Thank you to our sponsors:MINTMOBILE: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com/chill  HEROFORGE: Create and customize your own minis on https://www.heroforge.com! 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, episode 349. As always, on one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by my two favorite DMV workers, Jesse and Alex. We are the ones that decided to make half of the room face the other half of the room. It is a essential part of dealing with your- Oh, actually, I'm so sorry. You have the wrong form for that half of the room. So I need to go back to the front and get form 5F. You got 5E. I get a misunderstanding. standing and then bring it back to me you're going to have to wait again facing the other side of the room before you can sit on the other side then hand me the form then i give you that form back and then you go sit on the new side which then you can be called i don't have a real ID help i'm so sorry you can't fly or do anything i'm not joking i zoned out as he were talking you just like he went to the real DMV in his mind you were there for a minute you immersed me too we triggered his uh fight or flight

Disassociated and just Gone. That sounds correct. We all have to go to the DMV you soon. That's where this comes from everybody. None of us want to go. It's all, it's all just a ritual. It's the opposite of magic. It's not cool. It takes something from you. It's not chaos magic. It's like mundane. Bullshy. Yeah. The magic of the mundane.

Like I should just be able to click something. Like what are we doing? You thought life was going too fast? Watch time dilate in real time. Really truthfully, yes. Well, you know, I bet you if we were rich enough, we could skip the DMV. No, no, but you can, Kim Kardashian, close one down for you. Whoa. That's insane. That did happen, and they let her take multiple photos, so she got one that looked just one.

Has people seen like Brad Pitt at, like, the DMV before? No, I promise you, like that. They shut the whole thing down. The Hollywood ones, they will shut them down for a couple hours to get them. it's like oceans 11 in there for like three hours when like every a list celebrity shows up and it's like the fucking they have there's one day it's like the golden globes in there everybody they have like a banquet table set up in the middle like a bunch of different like drunk tables yeah it's like it's like the golden globes in there yeah yeah it's great yeah maybe i could shut down my local dmv you think

to lumini's big i mean you could i can think of a few ways but i wouldn't do them no no i don't want to do whatever it is you're thinking. I already can feel the negative vibes. I'm thinking a big banquet. That's what I'm thinking. Please support us at Chulaminati pod at patreon.com. We are out of ideas. This will need that money to get out of prison. Life is hard out here on the streets of Podcastville, USA. Come on by to the Patreon and get yourself a membership and you can get in return plenty of extra content. That's what I'm going to say. It's a great thing to do. It keeps us off the teat of the algorithm and lets us make weird shows about whatever we like off the teat of the algorithm off the teat of the algorithm take that perfectly calibrated t-tie out show mouth i don't know

if i like that that's all right i appreciate at patreon dot com slash julidati like he already said it it's recorded shall we get into the episode boys and dive into part two of the salem witch trials welcome back, Alex, by the way. We missed you last week. Oh, thank you so much. Very excited to get back into the Salem Witch Trials. Since it's been a week or so, let's do a little bit of a recap real quick. But before we do that, shout out to the sources. For all this episode and all the next episode, the primary source I use is Emerson W. Baker's, A Storm of Witchcraft, the Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience, which is honestly as far as I found like the fucking best book. Sick-ass title. I think I said that last time. Yeah. On anything. It's another book that I pull from in

this episode called In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth. Wow. Also a great name. Another sick title. What the fuck are we talking about? Which is bringing out the sick titles? Is that what it is? I think it is. There's actually a book from 1700 with not a shit name I'm using for this, but it's execution accounts that are drawn from this book. Robert Caff's More Wonders of the Invisible World. We like it. Not bad for 1700. It sounds like the name of a TV show from the 1980s that had like a yeah yeah, you know, mystery vibe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm Scott Bacula and this is more wonders of the invisible world. Yep. Oh boy. Perfect. It is another reality where that exists. So, it's been a week, let's go, it's been a couple of weeks. Let's go over part one very quickly.

Here's what you kind of need to know. Back in January of 1692, two girls in Salem Village Parsonage started twitching. Their names were Betty Paris and Abigail Williams, age nine respectively. I always an Abigail. What year did you start Twitching, Jesse? Oh, a lot closer to now than I thought because Twitch released that thing of like first partnered people. I was like, I was on there before Justin TV, dude.

Like I should be. And I realized I was still heavy into YouTube and never like charged people to watch me stream. So I'm not in that list at all. Which? Which? Jesse was pre-bleed purple. Jesse's also a fun fact channel was the longest to go for the permanent subscription for I was never blue purple. Let's be very clear.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. All right, Betty's dad, or in Abigail's case, remember her uncle, was the Reverend Samuel Paris, who was a failed Boston merchant turned minister who'd been engaged in a financial dispute with half of the village for about three years at this point. The girls twitching turned into seizures, then into screaming. about being bitten by things and poked by things that nobody else could see. And by late February, the village doctor had diagnosed them as, quote, under an evil hand. They got a bout of the evil, remember.

Yeah, of course. You just get up, you're like, oh, girls these days. Now I've got to be evil. The evil. Gotten them bouts of evil. Oh, I mean, I'm evil. I'm evil. I hate when that happens.

Oh, boy, as Scott Bacula would say. Scott Bacula would say. Then on February 25th, neighbor Mary Sibley instructed the pairs and families enslaved woman Tichiba to bake a folk magic counter spell called a witch cake to identify the witch that was tormenting these girls. As we learn, the witch cake is not as delicious as one. I was going to say, no need to get into those ingredients again. You make, no, I got you. Don't worry. I got it in my brain.

It is you make rye bread and then the afflicted girls pee. gets baked into it and then you feed that to the dog. I feel like I'm already in a clip of this show that's later going to be shown on Instagram. I feel like we already, I feel like we already made this factoid into a reel already once. And now you're going to get last week's episode is you unironically talking about the witch cake. And now this week it's good.

Yeah. Now it's going to be me just like once again by trying to avoid the witch pee once again invoking the witch pee. You invoked it. Well, hold on. hold on, to be clear, it's not witch pee. It's the girl who is afflicted by the witch pee.

Let's not put this on the witches. This is not their pee. It's witch afflicted pee. It's pee of the witch afflicted. And then by March 1st, three women had been accused. Tichiba, another woman by the name of Sarah Good

who was the beggar, who was also pregnant, and a bed ridden widow of the town Sarah Osborne. Tichie She said and gave the magistrates the most detailed witchcraft confession they had ever been given colonial America. She said there were nine witches operating in Salem Village. Three had been arrested. Six were still out there.

By the end of March, yeah, no, it fucking sucks. Can you imagine confessing so hard that people still know your name in 2026? Can you imagine, can you imagine telling such a fucking whopper that everybody still knows Tichuba? Yeah, you're a good storyteller. That's wild. stuff. This is all off, I imagine, probably pulled off of the top of the dome and mixed with, like, experience of folk magic in general, because people just had experience with it back then. So, you know, she was really just spinning, spinning the plates as needed. It seems weird, but people are still just practicing folk magic all the time now. And the people that I, people that I know all the time are practicing. All my friends. Out here, just practicing folk magic. It's an absolute wasteland out here. We have nothing left but to turn to the invisible forces of, stuff that may or may not even exist. Literally is just folk magic.

Yeah. That's really all we've got. If you've got no money, we have lots of will and we have lots of come. Come, come, come, come, come, come, come. By the end of March, the afflicted population had grown to about a dozen. The accused now had grown to seven. And a four-year-old girl, if you remember, named Dorothy Good, was in chains in the Boston jail for nine months.

My expert opinion, not that good. probably not that good ideally yeah ironic last name not actually that good not that good yeah a 71 year old church member named rebecca nurse had been examined and held over for trial and then by the end of april the accusations had escaped salem village uh its boundaries people in topsfield andover salem town town town town town town Salem Town and Boston started being named, including merchants, captains, and three sisters of the respected town family of Topsfield, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloy, and Mary Eastie. By the time Governor William Fipps arrived in Boston from London on May 14th, 40 people stood accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay Colony. And every one of them was sitting in jail because the colony had no legal court that could try them. because if you remember, the legal system was in a weird limbo because they were allowed to have a minister, but they weren't allowed to have a governor ruling them

until they were approved properly. But you know what they say? If the shoe fits. On May 27th, Fips Commission Special Court. Didn't you just say his name was Fitts? Phipps. Phipps.

P-H-I-P-S. Close. we were waiting for something my headset fell off you were you went for it you took that swing and then we all heard the ball

on the catchers mitt imagine that happened when Babe Ruth pointed at the stance and then everybody just started throwing candy bars at him actually I don't think the candy bar has anything to do with the baseball player race that part

forget about all of this let's just pretend like this Let's just, let's have a trial and decide that this part didn't happen. Right. No. Let's ask Titchabove this part. Let's get a, let's get a Phipps cake made real quick. On May 27, the Phipps commissioned a special court, the court of Oyer and Terminer, to clear the backlog.

Nine judges, none with formal legal training. The Chief Justice was a 61-year-old hardliner named William Stoughton, who believed in spectral evidence as an absolute. The court convened on June 2nd. The first case they heard was Bridget Bishop, and they convicted her in a single afternoon and hanged her on June 10th, which is where we ended. Gallows Hill, I think is what they called it. We talked about last episode. I know, very just.

Murder Mountain. Come on up to the top of Murder Mountain. Exactly. So that's where we're picking back up. That's where the end of Part 1 left off. And around mid-June of 1692, sometime in the few. weeks after her execution, one of the nine judges on the court of Oyer and Terminer resigned. His name was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and he was a militia major from the town of Haverill.

He was a respected colonial politician, and he was the only member of the court to look at what they had just done to Bridget, Bridget Bishop, realizing they convicted her in a single afternoon. It's like, Jesus. Correct. He was the only one who would look. He saw that they convicted her in a single afternoon on the strength of spectral evidence and two seven-year-old recovered dolls and a witch's mark that disappeared on his body

and decided that he could not in good conscious keep doing this. It was that was not enough. He didn't make a public speech or anything. He just kind of like resigned. The historian Charles Uppam in his 1867 book on the trials wrote of Stulton, of Stahl that he deserves. credit for, quote, being the only public man of his day who had the sense of or courage to condemn the proceedings at the start.

Doesn't sound that much like he condemned them as he just sort of gave him the old Irish goodbye, you know? Yeah, more or less. Yeah. He wasn't like, I cannot stand this any longer. You are all fools and you should stop. Goodbye. Yeah, pretty much.

He didn't do that. He should have. Reminds, reminds me a lot of, like, a lot of today's administration who can't stand, like, what's going on. So instead of doing anything about it, they just simmer as Iin instead of fighting. So, uh, but the reason being made fun of on the internet hurts, dude. Yeah. It sucks. It like hurts.

Like, we don't know what that's like. Yep. I certainly don't. We've just never been made fun. Wait until you find out that not everyone in the world thinks that Sonic Adventure is not very good games. If you think you've experienced hate speech as a marginalized person in this world, world. I'm just kidding. Go on.

But the reason for his resignation, like the, the, the reason that he left it all is now kind of the central main legal question hanging over the other judges, spectral are which is real. Oh, no, yeah. Spectral evidence. Obviously, no, but like, genuinely that's kind of the same thing, dude. It's like, wait a minute, spectral evidence is real, which is then are real. So like, yeah, that's, That's kind of correct. But this like spectral evidence. How we know there's these witches?

You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, okay. True. Sure. But was it this witch that did it? Are we accusing the wrong witch? Let me ask you. You have to believe the eyewitnesses saying they saw the spiritual form of that person hovering over them,

poking them and doing all these horrible things. Because remember, spectral evidence was the testimony of an afflicted person about what they had seen or experienced from the specter. That means just literally they saw actual magic. and that magic is real. Yeah. So like when Ann Putnam Jr. told the court that she had seen the specter of Rebecca nurse biting and pinching her,

that was spectral evidence. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on now. I know, I know. So she's all like, there I was in my bed all alone. And she came in through the window and started biting and pinching me. Oh my.

It was the worst. Where's this Salem, Georgia? Keep in mind. It's Ann Putnam, Jr. I do declare. Salem, North Carolina. Their accent is like an English accent at this point in time.

But this is a little girl. So I don't know if it was quite like that. So and all little girls sound like they're from the South. It's a fact. That's true. That's true. That's very true. Oh no, mama. It's by its nature.

It was evidence that nobody fucking could see. It rested entirely on the credibility of the of the person. No one said, hey, I want to see the bite marks. Well, they did, but sometimes they would have like red marks on them. The witch's mark faded. So she'd say that she was seeing things that when other people around her didn't see them. Is that right? Like at the same time night when they're like in bed and she's alone or sleep or everybody else is a sleep rather.

So she's just acting crazy around a group of people and pretending to see things that aren't there. And how big were these homes that like? Not big. Right. So shared space. It might have been the same space. but that's that's also them like twitching and writhing and all that stuff that's them being attacked by the spirit oh it's it's when they did their fake battles he's like they're sending vampire bats and they're sending specters

and people you know you couldn't see it but they were there same vibe yeah okay i don't think people thought to try this before i think that's really what this boils down to like at some point like well just keep in mind we also talked about the last episode this is girls under insane amounts of trauma and stress whose brains may simply be snapping and they have no words for it they have no way to diagnose it so they're like it's a touch of the evil from a witch Satan is among us we're in a war with that's exactly that's exactly what I mean is it's like we always say like you get desensitized from violence like when you watch like the Terminator like blow people away and stuff like that but it's so much more than just violence like psychedelic concepts like wild mind bending

shit that is like so commonplace for us because we read comic books and like do mushrooms and shit in like a context where we know it's like chemicals in the mushroom that are messing with our brain. It's such a different context than like you've never seen an electric light in your life. And somebody's like, it's in you. It's there. Like people used to move out of the way of the fucking train on the movie screen. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Like that's like. Yes. It's the same vibe as when people talk about like if you could bring one, if you were trapped back in time, you could bring one thing with you. It's like my cell phone. I'm like, dude, if you pulled out of magic pocket thing, they'd kill you instantly. Yeah, you'd be dead immediately.

Just carry a phone and a gun on you and you'll be all right. A gun? They'd still be like, even a gun. But that means they can't kill you because you'll be killing them instead is what I mean. So you run out of bullets and then they draw and quarter your ass for existing. Only, only us. If you could bring one thing with you, something I could kill with. It's a American way.

So again, so in this, Jesse, as you kind of brought up earlier, this kind of ties into the next piece, which is the spectral evidence kind of was a hotly debated thing in Puritan circles for decades itself because nobody knew whether Satan could appear to people in the form of innocent people. Like you said, like how do they know if it's that witch? Like his power set, like his fucking mutant powers? They didn't have the Marvel's hero's guide to Satan. could say you take the form of Sarah Good for instance and impersonate that person who would then like go and get them to try and sign his book and then at that point is the spectral evidence reliable if it's Satan lying it's not really Sarah Good it's Satan impersonating Sarah Good to get you to sign his witch's book that's what the lawyer

should have that's the Matlock defense is is reality real or is everyone that you're talking to just a fucking transmogrification of Satan in a different form if that's the How can we blame Sarah if Satan did it using Sarah's likeness? Classic Satan's dream prison defense. Classic Satan's dream prison defense. Classic. He could impersonating anybody. The spectral evidence is essentially worthless.

It's funny that how do I know I exist? How do I know I'm not seen? Is the reason the other spectral evidence would be worth. Yes. One other version of it is so wily. He's so tricky that like it's like AI. You know what I mean? Like now we don't know what's real.

What's fake, dude. That's goddamn true. And then on June 13th, just before Salton Stahl's resignation from the court, Governor Phipps and his counsel, with four of the witchcraft judges in attendance, asked the colony's most prominent ministers to weigh in on this exact question. Well, if the shoe Phipps. They, fucking, I hate you. Two days later, on June 15th, the ministers responded with a document called

the return of several ministers consulted. Oh, good. That's before they realized that titles needed to be snappy because just we were still into the novelty of titles. Yeah, titles were still very new. Yeah.

It was penned by Cotton Mather himself with input from a group that included his father, Increase Mather, James Allen. Yeah, increase. Increase Mather. Increase Mather. It's like Sliber Mather. James Allen, John Bailey, Samuel Willard, and others. The document was supportive of the trials, at least on like the surface level.

It thanked the magistrates for their work and encouraged them to continue. But buried in the middle of the document, they actually had a pretty clear warning sitting there. The ministers cautioned against placing too much weight on spectral evidence alone. warned the court not to treat the touch test or the evil eye as infallible proof, since those signs could be, quote, abused by the devil's ledger domains. But my most honorable judge, what if the cootie shot? Shall it not be admissible in court, the cootie shot? I don't understand.

Do I deserve a reference that I'm not getting? That's my issue with not having any form of pop culture references. I don't know if you're making a reference to something, or it's a joke I'm just not getting. I love that Mathis is slowly becoming Alex's foil. Like Alex is trying for the goof. And Mathis is like, I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're trying to do. I have knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, but it's still not hitting.

It's perfect. It's wonderful to watch. The cootie shot? You don't know what a cootie shot? Yeah, the cootie shot. You know what that is? Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you got a cootie shot.

Oh, oh my God. Okay. Dude, that's not what my brain went. Sorry. I don't even want to know where your brain went. Punching like a cooter. A cooter shot. What do you mean?

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Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash chill. That's mintmobile.com slash chill. Up front payment of $45 for three months, five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile for details. Oh my God. What do you think happened in the Salem witch trials?

What do you think this? What do you think witchcraft is? We, we have one week off. And it's like the two of you don't even know each other anymore. It's like you forgot. You broke all bonds of fellowship. I'm not on the face of you for you now. What the fuck?

I know. That's why I was so confused, but I don't control. Oh, I thought you had a cooter shot. I thought you'd been a nice punch of the chinas. You know. You know. You know. Why?

Why would Alex have said that? You know, like, why are this? Because he said it. And I was genuinely like, I don't know what he's talking about. And my brain was like, punching the cooter, obviously. And I'm like, that makes no sense. Which is why I didn't say it. Like people do from times and times.

That makes no sense in my own mind. I'm like, that can't be what he's talking about. Just I don't know what he's talking about. And for the record, it was not. and cootie shots are to protect you from the invisible cooties. It's like midi-lorians for girls in great school. Okay. Oh, my God.

Jesus Christ. All right. Yeah, okay. Abused by the devil's ledger mains. They had to decide whether or not the devil was real because if the devil was real, then what else could be real? But the thing is, like, what they were saying in the book was also like, it's, okay, the spectral evidence is real. But we don't know how real it actually can be.

So don't, like, put too much weight into it. But keep up the good work. You're doing a good job. Like, getting these witches. So you basically gave a response that was like not a response. Yeah, it's very political.

You can't end a thing with like, what are you doing is wrong? Because then someone can take it and be like, see, they're in league with the devil too. They said, what are doing this wrong. So you have to say,

all right, I wouldn't have done it that way, but good on you Christian warriors. Like, you have to do that. Jesus Christ. The politics of it. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. And later on, and later on, and later on, after the witch, trials, he actually would publish another book, the book, the one we actually referenced earlier, The Wonders of the Invisible World. We referenced that in part one. But he literally uses his own court document that they sent to the magistrate, to the ministers, to the ministers as defense for why

they allowed it to happen. They like the court did it. Great job. They convened. They made the decision, yeah, there's people died that shouldn't have died, but still it was like, oh good, like it was, he defended himself. It's insane. Uh, the court read this advice. though, like, don't take too much weight into the spectral evidence, and they promptly just ignored it. They don't care. Salt and Stahl then resigned, like I said. This is a nightmare court. This is like...

Oh, it sucks. This is like the opposite of 12 angry men. This is like nightmare of angry men. Like, this is... The other eight judges kept going. And from this point on, spectral evidence would be the engine that would produce the murders at the end of all this. Without it, without spectral evidence being weighed as heavily as it is, none of these cases, I think would have held up personally. I don't think any of them would have held any weight at all.

So after Salt and Stahl, the doubts about spectral evidence would not be publicly raised again in any consequential way until October. After most of the killings had already happened. The court had been told the brakes might be faulty way after they basically revved that engine to maximum efficiency. So before we get to the next round of executions, we're just going to go over something that we talked about last episode that I said would come back this time around. Part one, I told you to hold on to a few names. And one of them I told you to remember,

in part one, I told you remember Salem Village's earlier ministers, the men who would come before Samuel Pairs. The first one was James Bailey, who was forced out in 1680 by the village throwing him out. The second was George Burroughs, who took the job in 1680, and lasted less than three years before the village just stopped paying him. And then the third was Dio D.

Lawson, who lasted until 1688. What's the Dio, Dad? I like that. I don't know what the Dio Dad is. The Diodat? Yeah.

He sounds like a Star Wars character. Like he raced. He does. On that Boone to Eve, classic, or whatever. Dio Dad is stalled. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Dio Dad was killed by a young Anakin Skywalker. Skywalker. Dio Dad fell and hit a pillar. His whole family watched. Oh, no. The one we care about of those three is George Burroughs, because between 1683 when he left Salem and 1692,

when he was actually would be dragged back in chains, George Burroughs had been ministering on the main frontier, to a town called Falmouth, which is now Portland, and then to a town called Wells further north, right in the middle of King William's War, which was in the middle of the Wobbin, Naki raids that had been pushing refugees south into Essex, Essex County for years. And this all matters because this is the other book I was referencing in the devil's

snare by Mary Beth Norton. She's a Cornell professor, by the way, who in 2002 published this book, her argument in that book is basically that you cannot understand the Salem Witch trials without understanding this war specifically. that in every previous explanation of the trials, the factual, the factional politics, the conversion disorder, the Paris versus village dispute, the ergot fungus theory, all of it is missing this central piece. And I agree, it's kind of crazy to me at doing all this research. How many people tried to pin it on all these other things while completely ignoring one of the most culturally oppressive things happening to the north of them during their lifetime, which is this war. which is fucking up hundreds and hundreds of people's lives over like every single day.

And it's at Essex County in 1692. This was a community that was being actively traumatized by this ongoing war in the northern frontier. A war where this was what, remember, put Salem Village into debt because they put a ton of money into this war. And the English were losing very badly. It had, it produced waves of refugees who'd watched their families. is killed in front of them. It was a war in where in the Puritan theological framework, the Wabanaki and their French Catholic allies were literal agents of Satan operating on the borders of the godly community.

They literally saw this as Satan trying to like ruin them. And the most afflicted girls in the village, Salem Village, were themselves refugees from this war. Mercy Lewis, who we talked briefly about in part one, was 17 years old. in 1692. She was a servant in the household of Thomas Putnam, Reverend Paris's strongest political ally and the father of the afflicted Anne Putnam Jr. And by March 1692, Mercy was one of the most violently afflicted people in the entire

community. She was having seizures so severe that several men had to physically hold her down. That was the part we talked a bit about in part one. She testified in 16 witchcraft cases. She formally accused at least nine people. But it's the shit that happened to this poor girl. Before she even set foot in Salem Village, is that why I think she was this way.

She was born in Falmouth, Maine, around 1675, when she was about a year old in August of 1676, the Wabanaki attacked her village. Her grandparents, multiple cousins and other extended family members were killed. Mercy and her parents fled to a small island and Casco Bay, along with other survivors, including their minister, a young man named George Burroughs. The Lewis family eventually moved briefly to Salem, where one of Mercy's uncles, who'd been wounded in the attack, died of his injuries. And by 1683, when Mercy was about eight years old,

the family had moved back to Casco Bay. In the late summer or fall, we don't really know which of 1689, the Wabanaki attacked again. This time, they killed Mercy's parents. She was 14 at the time. The minister, George Burroughs, had once again somehow survived. He'd already left Falmouth by then, but he'd been operating the same general region, and he had twice now escaped the same attacks that had wiped out the families around him. Orphaned, Mercy was briefly placed as a servant in a Burroughs household.

She lived with him. She worked for him. And then by 1691, she had moved to Salem Village to be near her one surviving sister. And she'd taken up a servant position in the household of Thomas Putnam, where she befriended a 12-year-old girl named Ann Putnam Jr. You see how like all these people, like it's such a small world back then. Like we think small world now in so many ways because of planes. This was the world of the colonial era. was insular.

It was very, very tiny. They're all circling each other all the time, no matter where they are. And this poor girl survived multiple attacks, watched her whole family killed in front of her over many different years of her life. Like the trauma is unimmeasurable. It's got to be huge.

And then so when Ann Jr. started having fits in late February, 1692, Mercy Lewis followed suit within weeks. It also makes it much more reasonable to imagine these younger people sort of like accepting whatever the fuck as like the next fucking stupid-ass thing that's happening that's completely outside of their control that completely rips their entire reality apart you know what I mean this is the other part that when I read this again huge shout out to Mary Beth Norton on all this that I am surprised

I never hear talked about in any other when it comes to these trials By April of 1692, the afflicted girls in the Putnam household were starting to give detailed spectral accusations involving the main frontier. Like PTSD flashbacks is what I'm imagining. Like literally talking about like horrors of war basically? With, yes, mixed with spectral witches. They were talking about witches assemblies on the eastern shore. Exactly. That's what I'm saying, Smitty, dude.

the fucking the witches on the eastern shore, they were talking about specters of dead colonial militia officers. Like, they're being haunted by these dead colonial militia officers. They were talking about being shown the kingdoms of the earth from a high mountain, language ripped directly from the gospel temptation of Christ by a tall, dark man who wanted them to sign his book.

12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., had never been to Maine. she had no reason to know any of this, but Mercy Lewis had been to Maine. Clearly it's where she lived all her life. And Mercy Lewis had served in the household of a minister who'd survived two separate Wabanaki attacks on the towns where he was preaching. And Mercy Lewis had every reason in the world to suspect that her former employer, the minister who lived when everyone around him died, knew something that the others didn't. So we're about to get into like why he got dragged back in chains.

But you can see why Ann Jr. might be having weird flashbacks of a war she didn't experience because she had been probably hearing stories for Mercy Lewis about what life was like where she came from. And then Ann Jr. started having fits. Then Mercy started having fits. And she started seeing ghosts of dead colonial majors and shit. It's an extremely, extremely heartbreaking detail this.

It is. it's like it makes everything so human in a way that like salem witch trials often aren't presented i think because it is war PTSD it makes it reasonable behavior you know what i mean it makes it makes so much sense makes it connected to what i like when you think about it even if you watch the fucking movie it's like it feels pretty like oh crazy women uh yeah you know crazy uh 1700s women you know yeah but it's but it's definitely not that it's definitely kind of got this extra sort of layer to it that totally changes it. And you mix that as well with the other girls who, even if they didn't have war PTSD,

they were living in a colony that was at war with itself, really. Half the colony wouldn't pay the minister. They were trying to out him. And so the minister was living in barren cold conditions. And that's why he was like blaming Satan for all this, if you remember. But like, yeah, it is just the perfect crock pot. for mental distress. This is like,

this is like, like Christian Cthulhu type. Like, this is like religious depravity almost. Like we're almost, we're almost taking the doctrine past reasonable, like, you know,

100%. You're interpreting it in such a strange way. You're changing the entire, like, character of like what the spirits are meant to be doing and what they exist for. And like, even if you are,

reading the Bible according to any of these religions. It's not like this. This is not how these characters act, right? No, but that's, I left, what's like, yes, I agree with you. But I'm also, I put myself into their shoes and I'm like, what other explanations are reasonable for my 1692 brain where like bloodletting isn't working and your usual hubris things are not working?

What are you left with? Like, like even later in the 1800, like they would be away from Satan blaming, but they would just call things like the melancholy. Like, again, just like there's, it'd be hundreds of years before they actually had a word to put to what these people were going through at this time. I know all about the melancholy.

You know what I mean? Yeah, we, yeah, yeah, we all, we all have our own fair share. Martin, D, D, D. Satan has nothing to do with it. In fact, it would be hilarious if Satan had something to do with it at this point. Yeah, at this point, yeah. I've been targeting you specifically.

This was just my test. This was just my test. But I like too much, but just to really upset the whole balance. I don't want you out of vet. The vibes will be off. Don't get them. Don't get us, twirl. Don't do the work.

Play a video game. Get a pizza. You want it. But you had pizza yesterday. Then have it again. Have another pizza today, you fool. Yes, pizza. But every day, you fool.

Why is he just turning into Mark Hamel? I don't know. No, Mark. Oh, my camel, no. On April 20th, 1692, and Putnam Jr., with what historians like Norton are, I'd say, looking at it with like Mercy Lewis's coaching, formerly accused George Burroughs of being the leader of the Salem witches. Like, it makes the most sense because this, again, he lived through multiple town executions and he somehow was always away or not there. They call him the chief conspirator, the wizard who'd recruited all the others. Pretty rough, like, evidence against, but whatever.

Yeah, poor guy. I never saw him in the same room as the witches. Or as they called them sometimes, quote, the minister of the devil's anti-church. Oh. Who was doing all this naming back in the day? What's going on? Is it just a dour time? Is it a dower time?

Do you think, like, the logo? It says anti-church, but then in a little, like, cursive, it says, the devil. it says the devil's up on top of it. I'm just trying to market it. Yeah, the devil's little anti-church. The devil's. The devil's sweet little, the sweet, devil's sweet little anti-church barbecue sauce. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Sweet and spicy, you know, anti-church barbecue. But it makes her ass burn no matter what. You can't get away for me. Like a pitchfork in the ass. Yeah. Every time's barbecue sauce. Every time.

The anti-church. At the time of his accusation by Ann Putnam, by Ann Jr. Burroughs was 130 miles north in Wells, Maine. So he wasn't even anywhere near Salem at the time. On April 30th, John Partridge, the Field Marshal of New Hampshire and Maine, arrested Barrows at his home in front of his third wife and their children, put him in chains, and began marching him south. Then he invited his first wife and second wife and all their kids to watch. Exactly, yeah. He arrived in Salem jail on May 4th.

He'd remain there until his trial in early August. This guy now, who actually had been, remember, this is his return to Salem. He was here for three years before he was like, he got ran out. And now he got brought back home thanks to Mercy Lewis. Mercy Lewis was the most prominent of the Red Refugee accusers, but there were others. Susanna Sheldon had been displaced from Maine as an infant. Abigail Hobbs, whose confession in mid-April had named Burroughs as well. well had lived in Falmouth as a child.

Sarah Churchwell, who was another afflicted girl, was also a frontier refugee. Mercy Short, who would become afflicted later in 1692 in Boston, was a captive who'd been taken during the combined French and native raid on Salmon Falls in the spring of 1690. Her parents killed in front of her, her home destroyed, herself marched to Quebec and forced to convert to Catholicism before being ransomed that fall. Dude, in my mind at this point, all these people accusing him are so desperate for an answer as to why their life went the way it went. They were like, this has to be the reason. Whatever, yeah.

So, but basically the point being, this wasn't some random teenage girl having mass teenage girl hysteria. Right. She was, she was like sort of just already destroyed. She was already just destroyed and saying yes to whatever at this point. Yeah, but, but, but there are people dying because of their reactions. Oh, 100%. Yeah. You know, I don't want to be like these poor girls when there are also dragging people down with them.

Like, it sucks all around, but people are dying. It does. It absolutely sucks. And I don't want to say that what their actions didn't have consequences and it does cast, you know, not them in a completely innocent light, obviously. It's hard to blame them, though, when, you know, they're not being put in. They're just somebody's putting them. situation. I'm just saying that, that, you know, historically, you know, I will give Tichaba all the grace in the world, but I also recognize that to save her own ass, she threw other people under the

bus. You know what I mean? Like, that's a lot of what's going on here is people throwing other people under the bus to save their own ass. Yeah, when it comes to the George Burroughs accusation itself, I think most of them are basically processing PTSD through a Puritan framework. But also having no, I mean, a lot of these are women. They have zero power. And there's a bunch of dudes. in charge and they're like if you don't tell us the truth will kill you. It's exactly what they're being asked to do. It's like there's a lot of layers to this. But yeah, yeah, agree.

No one, I don't think there's an innocence. There might be two or three innocent souls, but they're definitely dead at this point. But like, most people involved with this for being as religious as this community was, they're doing some of the most unreligious shit imaginable. Or depending on how you view religion, maybe the most. Yeah, Puritans are really strong. Are you the villain from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If yes, everything's going exactly as you expected. Are you so turned on by this girl you saw one time you're willing to kill her and everyone involved with her and go to hell? But then Mia Copa yourself out of it? Yes. And you see no problem with that? You get it. Thank you so much to Hero Forge for sponsoring today's episode.

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On June 29th, 1692 is where I ended the June here. The court of Oyer and Terminer convened for its second session, the first one after Sultan Stahl's resignation and the first one after the execution of Bishop. Over the course of that single court session, juries returned guilty verdicts against five women. Their names were Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wilds. Any relation? No relation to Susanna Martin here.

Oh, okay. Sarah Good, you already know, this is the homeless beggar pregnant part one. Pregnant when arrested, she actually had given birth in her cell.

And her infant daughter... Jesus Christ. I know. Fucking Boston jail. My God. Her infant daughter named Mercy after the infant the family had lost the year before

had died in the Boston jail. So she also lost that infant. A baby that died in jail that was named Mercy after another day. baby named mercy. Mercy. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. Sarah's four-year-old daughter, Dorothy, was still in chains at this point. We're still in that nine months of that four-year-old being in chains. And by the time Sarah went to trial in June, her family had been functionally destroyed, is the only way I can really put it. The other four women I want to spend a little time on because they kind of tell you something about what the court was doing are Susanna Martin, who is now 71 years old, a widow from Amesbury.

She'd been accused of witchcraft twice before in her. life. Once in 1669, when the case was dismissed for lack of evidence, and again in 1671. She was poor, noted as sharp-tonged, and generally disliked in her community. Is that not like super fucking old? Yeah, for this time, I think 70-old. Is she like the oldest person anyone's ever seen? Is she like? I don't know, but it's definitely one of the few rare ones that make it to their 70s.

Like, she's seen a lot of shit at this time of her life. Word. The historians who've worked on her case describe her as having had a 30 year reputation as a suspected witch in her community. That's how much people did not like this woman. 30 years is a suspected witch. Yeah, they just hated her. So they just suspected her as a witch. Probably not a witch.

If it's been 30 years. Yeah, you would think 30 years. But no. When she finally got dragged to Salem in 1692, the testimony against her included dozens of stories going back decades. Things from animals dying, children getting sick, men having nightmares, your classic kind of accumulated grudge witchcraft nonsense. Elizabeth Howe was about 57. She lived in Topsfield, and like the nurse and Easty Sisters,

she was caught up in the network of Topsfield families that the Putnam Allied accusers were systematically going after. Because remember, all in the background of this, it's Putnam v. Porter's, and the Putnams are winning right now. Like, they have the sway, they have the numbers, and they have families that married into the Putnam's that they have power over that they use as, like, secondary families to, like, go after other families. Even, like, outside the state, like, their power eked out into other communities beyond Salem. There is some comfort in the fact that even in the times of the Salem witch trials, people had, like, giant, like, basically, like, gods compared to them that they could, fully perceive everything that was going on and it would just affect their lives like overwhelmingly.

And yet they had nothing that they could do to change or shift it. And it was all just some machinations at the at the behest of two giant families. That's so fucked up. The more things stay the same, brother. That's like on such a small scale still how it feels to be alive today. It's nuts. Yeah. Multiple witnesses testified that her specter had quote, ridden them like a horse.

describing Elizabeth Howes, which ghost was riding them like a horse. The afflicted girls confirmed her as a tormentor. I know, right? Doesn't sound that bad. Sarah Wilde, also from Topsfield, was around 65, also tangled up in the Topsfield Putnam Property Feud Network.

Her past included scandals. She had been fine for, she had been fine for fornication before her first marriage. She'd been involved in a long-running dispute with the gould, family of Toppsfield, the same family that had been spreading rumors about the town sisters for decades. So that's four of the five women hanging on July 19th.

At this point, the pattern becomes kind of clear, usually older, poor, or marginal on the community, longstanding enemies of a particularly influential family. The kind of women previous English witchcraft cases had been targeting for generations. None of these convictions taken on their own, like, would. have stood out, I think, in the broader European context. It's just that in American history, this weird blip of witchcraft stands the test of time because it's the only thing that our country had ever seen like it moving forward. But the fifth woman we want to talk about is something a little bit different.

Rebecca Nurse, this is the 71-year-old. She was hard of hearing, sickly. And she was this unlike the other old woman. This is the other, by the way, there are two old women in this, two old 70-year-old. This one, unlike the other one, one of the most respectable women in Salem Village. The other people hated the other one. This one, they like. She had 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 about 300 acres on the western side of the village. And they had eight children, all grown, all members of established Massachusetts families. This is like back then the kind of woman if you told like a Salem villager and felt like that she was about to be accused of witchcraft they would have told you for they would have laughed at you for and said you were dumb. Like there's no way

this person would have been accused of witchcraft unlike 71 year old Susanna Martin who was being accused of of witchcraft. In this case I think the reason it's so separate from the other four is because it really is that I think the most damning thing about the court of Oyer and Terminer

in the entire. run of these trials. Because the jury heard the case. The afflicted girls did their usual performance of convulsing, claiming nurse's specter was attacking them in real time. Multiple witnesses from Salem Village came forward to testify on their behalf. Remember two, during these times, the place was so packed. Not everybody could even get in the building to like watch these cases.

39 prominent neighbors had signed a position, a petition rather, not a position, had signed a petition attesting to her good. character and her innocence. Some of those petitioners were taking real personal risk, too, because petitioning on behalf of an accused witch could get you accused yourself. And the nurse family had gone to the wall for her. Rebecca herself in the courtroom, struggling to hear the questions because she's deaf in 71, said something that, like, who read these records, quoted as unbearable to read

for someone like her age, the afflicted girls were screaming and writhing around her. and the court was treating her as guilty. And the old woman partially death, surrounded by her tormentors, realizing the court was not listening to her, just said out loud kind of to herself, I have got nobody to look to but God. Like she's basically given up. She's like, oh, they're not listening.

This is fucking crazy. All I can do is look to God and hope to God that I am not judged as guilty. Like people are just gone, I've gone insane. Yeah, it must look like a fucking insane circus act. Like, it's nuts. The jury deliberated. They then came back. The foreman, Thomas Fisk, stood up and denounced the verdict, not announced the verdict, not denounced.

I mean, if the shoe Fisk. Shut the fuck up. Announced the verdict, not guilty. And depending on which contemporary account you trust, this is either like the most ashamed. The shameful act of it or the most obvious one. The moment the not guilty verdict was read, the afflicted girls in the courtroom erupted. They started convulsing, screaming at the top of their lungs. The spectators in the meeting house by some of the accounts in the book started shouting along with them,

became a room filled with fucking screaming people. While at the center of it, the girls screaming initially are writhing around. and Chief Justice William Stoughton also self-referferferred to himself as the witch hunter looked at the jury and asked them to reconsider their verdict. Specifically, Stoughton asked the jury whether they had understood the implications of something Rebecca nurse had said earlier in the trial. Earlier, when one of the confessed witches, a woman named Deliverance Hobbs, had been brought in to testify against her, Rebecca had.

had said, more or less audibly, what do these persons give in evidence against me now? They used to come among us. That, and basically she's like, these guys used to be friends. What are you talking about? Why are these guys here? They used to, and also, some people also think it means that she used to be in jail with them. Why is she coming against us?

She used to be in jail with us. She knows that we're not witches. We were all saying that in the prison. Stowen asked Rebecca to explain what she meant and Rebecca 71 death exhausted from the day in court having just been told she was acquitted moments before did not hear the question and we are like we don't know if she heard it

the jury just took because she didn't respond to it we don't know if she heard it or not and the jury took the silence as an admission of guilt and the jury so the jury form in Thomas Fisk later wrote a statement dated on July 4th of 1692 explaining what had happened in that jury room, and we have his own words.

I wouldn't have the you read this, Alex. When the verdict not guilty was, the honored court was pleased to object against it, saying to them that they think they let slip the words, which the prisoner at the bar spake against herself, which was spoken in reply to good wife Hobbs and her daughter, who had been faulty in setting their hands to the devil's book, as they have confessed formally. The words were, what, do these persons give in evidence against me now? They used to come among us. After the honored court had manifested their dissatisfaction of the verdict, several of the jury declared themselves desirous to go out again, and thereupon the honored court

gave leave. But when we came to consider of the case, I could not tell how to take her words as an evidence against her till she had a further opportunity to put her sense upon them, if she would take it. And then going into court, I mentioned the words The force said, which by one of the court were affirmed to have been spoken by her, she being then at the bar, but made no reply. What he's saying there is, while we understand it now, it probably mean they used to be among us, like, as a community or in jail with her. What they are trying to interpret as as, do they mean you used to come among us as a witch during our rituals? They're saying, like, why are you in here? You're a witch like I am.

You shouldn't be speaking against me. when in reality, she's a deaf 71 year old, and she's like, why is this person here? And when they asked her, she just fucking probably didn't hear them. Regardless, it's fucking nuts. Him in his own words explaining why they challenged it. The jury wavered. They went back in, re-deliberated, and then came back out with a guilty verdict. And Rebecca Nurse, at her old age, was sentenced to death.

Did she just fucking die right there? That's what I would have done. not. The nurse family didn't give up. They actually went to Governor Phipps directly and begged for a reprieve and he granted one. He actually pardoned her. The pardon was issued.

And then almost immediately, the afflicted girls in Salem Village had renewed the Fitz. They cried out that the pardon was tormenting them, that the witches were emboldened now because of the pardon. And Phipps, looking at the political pressure, withdrew the pardon.

And Stoughton signed the death warrant. So this poor woman almost got out of it twice. And she just, and because of the girls freaking out, she ends up not getting away. On July 3rd, while she was still in jail, Reverend Nicholas Noyes, the senior minister of the Salem Town Church, the same man who'd been an aggressive participant in the examinations from the start presided over Rebecca Nurse's excommunication because of course they're going to excommunicate her from the church because she's a witch first. They brought her from her cell to the Salem town church. They sat her down in front of the congregation. Noise denounced her as a witch and cast her out from the church. 16 days after that, she would be hanged.

It's crazy. The poor woman is like, I just like, God, man, she's 71. I'm like, I just keep coming back to like she's old. She can't hear you. What are you doing? She doesn't know what's happening. Routality, dude. On the morning of Tuesday, July 9th,000.

19th, Sheriff George Corwin and his men took five women out of the Salem jail and put them in a cart. Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wilds. They drove them through the streets of Salem to Proctor's Ledge, the actual execution site, which for centuries was misidentified as Gallus Hill itself, but which we now know, thanks to a 2016 archaeological project led by historians, including Emerson Baker himself, the author of the book we used was a lower spot on the hillside above a residential street. There's a memorial there now, though, that was installed in 2017. At the gallows, Reverend Nicholas Noyes was waiting.

Noyes had appointed himself the official minister of the executions. His job, as he understood it, was to call on the condemned to confess in their final moments to save their souls. According to the rules, anyone who confessed the foot of the gallows would be spared. Susanna Martin did not confess. Elizabeth Howe did not confess. Sarah Wilds did not confess. Rebecca Nurse did not confess. No woman confessed.

Sarah Good, homeless, pregnant when arrested, watching her infant die in prison, having watched her four-year-old daughter be put in chains, stood on the platform and absolutely refused. Noise pressed her. He called her a witch. He demanded she confessed for the sake of her soul. And Sarah Good, according to an account. preserved by the New England magazine in the 19th century, looked at the minister and said,

quote, you are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. And if you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink. Damn. My girl. Okay. Honestly, it's, it's, I don't know what they expect. I mean, I understand that many of the women who did confess the reason they did these things was because mostly they were forced to. I mean, but, but, you know, but, you know, But the women of some standing in society who got like swept up in this, their only standing is that they're good Christians. So the minute they say, oh, sorry, I was a witch. They're like, all right, well, let you live.

But for the rest of your life, you're the witch lady. And in your community, you're a pariah now. So what's the like, like, screw it. Yeah, I'd go. I'd be like, F y'all. No, this is all. This is all I got. Now, it's important for me to just kind of caveat that the quote came a little bit later,

about 25 years after. So there's no first-hand account as to whether that was said or not. I'll leave it at that, and you can decide if it was real. I prefer to think that that is something she actually said. All five women, though, hanged. We don't know exactly how long it took.

Damn, but hanging in the 17th century, as we talked about in part one with Bridget Bishop, was a short drop strangulation. It wasn't like the long drop neck break that we kind of think about today, I think. The neck break is the, this is crazy to say, that's the good thing. Yeah, that was the humane thing of like, oh, well, we used to just strangle you until you died,

but now we try to drop and snap your neck so you die instantly. Yeah. Like that was the nice thing to do. They added that later. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that was a later thing. No, for these poor women, their bodies were left swinging for some time and then cut down and buried in shallow, unmarked graves nearby.

The nurse family, according to family tradition, came back at night, recovered her, Rebecca nurse's body in secret. buried her in a grave on the family homestead. The grave is actually still there. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is a museum now. So as far as where we're at, we're at in the Salem Witch Trial, six are dead. 14 more are still to go. Between the July hangings and the August session of the court, the witch hunt did

something it had not yet done. It went what we would call now viral. Crazy bonanas. Shazy, yeah, crazy bonanza, bonkers. No, it went viral. In mid-July, a man named Joseph Ballard, the village constable in the town of Andover, about 15 miles northwest of Salem, had a problem. His wife was sick, and he was convinced she was being attacked by witches. So he did something that nobody had quite done before.

He invited the Salem Witch Village Afflicted Girls and Putnam Jr. Mary Walcott and Mercy Lewis among them to come to Andover and identify the witches who were tormenting his wife. You know what? He just like made a spin-off. Like a free, free freelance work. It feels like this one of the things where the cynical side of me is like, oh, no, he invited him there. He invited him there to like say these girls are at my house. So he could be like that guy in town.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I fundamentally believe that. I wouldn't doubt it. The girls came. They went into a kind of touch test. The accused would be brought into a room, a blindfolded or not, depended. And the afflicted girl in the throes of a fit would be touched by the.

the accused. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the witch cake thing where you feed the dog, the cake, and the cake is supposed to like sniff out where the witch is. This is, they bring the afflicted in, the girls get attacked and they're supposed to like channel who's attacking them. If the afflicted stopped at the touch

that proved the accused was the source of the affliction, it was obviously to put it fucking mildly. Not great evidence, but the Andover magistrates accepted it. And the dam broke in Andover. By the By the end of the summer, around 45 Andover residents had been formally accused of witchcraft.

Many of them confessed because by midsummer, the colonies accused had figured out that confessing was the only way to live. It just is the only way. If you admitted you were a witch, you were out. Andover would, by the time the trials were over, have more formally accused witches than Salem Village ever did. Out of about 172 people accused across the entire crisis, more than a quarter of them came from Andover. No other town in the colony, including Salem Village itself,

produced more accused witches than Andover did. And this is where Salem outbreak stops, like, and this is where like breaks out of local Essex County panic and genuinely becomes, I think, rooted in our history as we, like why it's so heavily rooted in our history. Because this is where, like I said, the affected girls,

they're not just defending their own village anymore. They are now traveling mercenary witch identifiers. Like, they get, they go out and they are professionalizing their illness. The August session of the court of Oyer and Terminer ran from August 2nd through August 6th, and they heard six cases. The court returned six convictions. The six condemned were George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, George Jacobs, Sr., Martha Carrier, and Elizabeth Proctor, John's pregnant wife. Elizabeth would be granted a temporary stay because of the pregnancy.

The other five would hang together on August 19th. That's so fucked up that they were all able to be hanged on the same day, how close their convictions were to each other. And George Burroughs, remember when he was accused, he was 100-some-odd miles away when he got accused. He got dragged back and hanged for it. Martha Carrier, John Proctor, and George Burroughs are slightly different than some of the other cases. Martha was from Andover.

She was about 38 years old, and she had been blamed in Andover for bringing a smallpox outbreak to the town in 1690 that killed, I know, it sucks, that it killed several members of her own extended family. By 1692, her own children aged 7218 had been arrested and were being pressured to confess to witchcraft and to name their mother as a witch. I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you. I must ask to the audience, but I'm going to do my own research on this. Ever so often, I think to myself, I wonder if someone, some researcher somewhere, did a study about something related. So like, for example, I used to always wonder about like, you know, I wonder if there's some college student out there that wrote a thesis about how

the trouble in the Middle East is very much like the Alliance and Horde in World of Warcraft. You know what I mean? Like they fight and no one knows like, no one even cares why anymore. This fight. And I, I do wonder if someone out there has written a thesis or a book or something that is like Salem Witch Trials and then we overlaid that onto like the, the, the, Red Scare. Oh, yeah. And how similar

and how those things are connecting some kind of weird situation, you know, using it for your own ends. Yeah. Like watching something spin out of control

to the point where it becomes ridiculous, to the point that that ridiculousness is finally realized, but what it takes for people to get there. And I'm so curious if that does, it must.

Someone must have. I, there has to be, dude. Even if it's like a college level, like a dude wrote it to graduate or something. It's got to be something.

The parallels are self-evident. Yeah, yeah. Agreed. Unsurprisingly, her own children having been arrested and asked to claim their mother as a witch, they did that. And Conn Mather, in his book, the book we've referenced already in this episode, again, the wonders of the Invisible World, if you're curious, which again was published immediately after the trials to defend the trials of which he was a part of called Martha Carrier, this, quote, rampant hag and wrote that the devil had promised her she, quote, would be queen of hell. And he actually wrote, that's like literally in his book. Now, whether the underlying testimony actually supported that is a whole other question, but the line is real and it's like he singularly points her out as one of the worst

which is among them for some reason. John Proctor is the one most people know or think they know because of the play, The Crucible, yeah, which is the version of him is a 35 year old man having an affair with a teenage Abigail Williams who eventually heroically refused to sign a false confession. None of that is true. Abbeville! That's not true whatsoever. The real John Proctor was not 35.

He was 60 years old in 1692. He ran a tavern and a substantial farm on the southern boundary of Salem Village on the Downing Farm. There was no romantic relationship between him and Abigail Williams. There was, however, from the very beginning of the panic, John Proctor was one of the only adults in the area openly skeptical of the afflicted girls. His own servant, Mary Warren, was one of the afflicted, and Proctor reportedly threatened to beat her if she kept up the act. He said publicly multiple times that he thought the girls were lying. And in a community at this point where, like, being skeptical of this stuff could get you accused yourself, Proctor knew that price and kept doing it anyway. He was like too curmudgeonly in my mind to like get away from how he felt about all this.

That's so crazy. That's so crazy how much license. was taken. I know. And when he was arrested from his cell awaiting trial, he co-authored a petition to Boston ministers protesting the trials and the torture being used on the accused. I'm just 35. I'm having an affair with a young woman who really, really thinks I'm sexy.

Get me out of here. Those sexy, sexy children. The, like, they did, that play did this poor 60-year-old man dirty. He was not a creepy guy having, like, an affair with a teenager. But he goes on to protest the trial and the torture being used on the cues, specifically describing how Martha Carrier's two teenage sons had been tied, quote, neck and heels to the blood was ready to come out of their nose to force confessions out of them. Jesus. And then, and that his own son, William, had been tortured the same way. The petition, though, did not save this poor man.

But it still survives to this day. And it's one of the only direct contemporaneous protests from a key. accused person about how those confessions were actually being produced. George Burroughs was the one the court was really trying here. He was the one Cotton Mather himself thought was the key prosecution. Because he, again, he's the one all of these other girls who I would say have PTSD were blaming for all of this. His trial was on August 5th.

The evidence against him included spectral testimony from Mercy Lewis and Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams and Abigail Hobbs. Burroughs Spector, they said, had tormented them, threatened them, tried to force them to sign the devil's book. It included accounts of Burroughs extraordinary physical strength. He had reportedly on the main frontier lifted a heavy musket by sticking his finger into the muzzle and holding it out at arm's length. A feat the court took as evidence of diabolical assistance. What? He just did like a weird like broomstick trick with his gun?

Yeah, he like stuck his finger down the muzzle of the musket and looked. lifted it up and the girls were like, that's evidence that the devil made him super strong. That's impossible. It included testimony that his first two wives had died under suspicious circumstances and that borough's specter had been seen with ghosts of his murdered wives. What? Listen, this is all a spectral evidence, my friend. Seen with ghosts of his murdered wife?

I saw him in the close. Okay. Yeah. All right. They were there with him. All right. It also included his failure to take communion. Okay, well.

It included his unconventional religious views. Barrows may have been a Baptist sympathizer. Oh, no. Which in 1692, Puritan, Massachusetts, that's basically heresy. In Cotton Mather in his book, wrote about the case so uncomfortably that he refused to use Burroughs full name. Here's an actual sentence, Jesse, you can read this is right out of his book. Glad should I have been if I had never known the name of this man, or never had this occasion to mention so much as the first letters of his name.

For the government requiring some account of his trial to be inserted in this book, it becomes me with all obedience to submit unto the order. Kind of badass? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of badass sounding. But yeah, he was like super didn't, like, Burroughs was like the name. number one, like, hated man in this guy's book when he's talking about his defense of the witch trials. He's like, fuck that guy.

I don't even want to talk about that guy. Fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. But Burroughs was convicted. He was scheduled to hang with four others on August 19th. On the morning of August 19th, Sheriff Corwin's cart took five prisoners up the road to Proctor's Lodge, George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, George Jacob, Sr. And this was the old man from part one who was walking with two canes.

This is the guy who's like another old man. They had to kill him. He was a witch. Yeah, he's a witch. And Martha Carrier. A large crowd had gathered. Cotton Mather had ridden up from Boston specifically to attend this one. He was the only major minister there.

Burroughs went up the ladder. And what happened next was preserved in detail by an eyewitness named Robert Caliph, a Boston cloth merchant who would in 1700 publish a book called More Onewerext. wonders of the invisible world. That was a specific, that was, that was, that was, that was,

that was, that was, that was specifically intended, as a critique of Cotton Mather. He was writing, yeah, he's after him. Like,

he wrote that book specifically, an anti-church, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one of the historians famously, actually described him as a man

who had, quote, had it in for Cotton Mather, and who tied a can to him after the frenzy was over, and it rattled and bang through the pages of superficial and popular,

histories ever since end quote like the dude fucking hated cotton mather i love that the dude had an agenda um but the caliph account is the most detailed eyewitness record of any of the salem executions and here it is his actual words from 1700 for alex to read mr burroughs was carried in a cart with others through the streets of salem to execution when he was upon the latter he made a speech for the clearing of his innocency with such solemn and serious expressions as were to the admiration of all present. His prayer, which he concluded by repeating the Lord's prayer, was so well-worded and uttered with such composedness as such fervency of spirit, as was very affecting, and drew tears from many, so that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution.

The accuser said the black man stood and dictated to him. As soon as he was turned off, Mr. Cotton Mather being mounted upon a horse addressed himself to the people, partly to declare that he was no ordained minister, partly to possess the people of his guilt, saying that the devil often had been transformed into the angel of light. And this did somewhat appease the people,

and the executions went on. Fucking insane. Yeah. So the people, like, they were like, this is fucked. No, this is fucked. And they were like, trust me, this guy is a sicko. He's twisted, baby.

Trust me. And the audience was like, well, maybe he's right. Maybe he was sick and twisted. All right. On to the next one. Kill again. Yeah, he was, again, George Burroughs, former minister of this place, climbed the ladder, gave his speech to clarity innocence,

and then, doesn't matter, he was hung. The crowd, according to Caliph, began to weep. And according to multiple sources, began to murmur that Barrows was innocent. But again, none of that mattered. Execution went forward. Burroughs was hanged. And then after that, so were, Jean. John Proctor, George Jacobs, John Willard, and Martha Carrier.

Prudel. Robert Caliph witnessed all of this, would spend the next eight years writing a book specifically to indict Cotton Mathers for what he had just done. Agenda or not, Caliph's report of August 19th has for over 300 years, and the moment everyone, like, points to when they want to understand what Cotton Mathers was actually, actually was that morning. Like, what was his whole head space? because, again, he writes in his own book

about how all these people deserved it. Now, 11 are dead, 9 to go. Three weeks passed between August 19th, hangings in the next major event. The court was preparing for its September session. The afflicted girls were continuing to name names. The Andover panic was still expanding. And multiple confessed witches were now in custody

who had named dozens of others. It's like the world's worst pyramid scheme where you can't escape it if you're named. Because everybody who gets a, accused also starts naming other people and it just keeps spreading. On Monday, September 19th, something happened in a field on Howard Street in Salem Town that has in century since become one of the more famous moments in colonial American history. The man at the center of it was an 81-year-old farmer named Giles Corey. Giles was the husband of Martha Corey, who we again met briefly in part one.

The church member who accused alongside Rebecca Nurses was one of the the first signs that the categories basically kind of collapsed. Martha had examined, Martha had been examined on March 21st and had been in jail since. Giles, who was a hard, stubborn, brawling old man with a long history of legal trouble.

He'd been tried for death of, death of his hired hand, Jacob Goodell in 1675, beaten to death with a stick and a fit of anger. Jesus. What the fuck are you? And this guy was in his late 60s when he was doing that. Well, I think he's 81 at this point.

He initially testified against his own wife in the early weeks of the panic, too. He'd briefly believed the accusations. Then he'd changed his mind and tried to recant his testimony and started publicly defending Martha. In April, the afflicted girls had cried out on him. He'd been arrested on April 18th and examined the next day. And by September, both of the Corrie's were sitting in jail awaiting trial. While Giles was finally brought before the court of Warrior. Terminer in September.

He did something nobody in the court actually expected him to do. He pleaded not guilty and then refused to be tried. You can do that. That was the thing you could do? Yeah, you can just do that. Under English, no, I'm good. I think not. No, I'm good.

I'm chill. Under English common law. I didn't do this, so no. So no. Under English common laws, it existed in 1692, after a defendant entered a plea, The next required step was to consent to be tried by God and the country, meaning by jury, obviously. If the defendant refused to consent to the jury, the trial simply could not proceed.

There was no consent, so there was no trial. You legit could just do that. The legal remedy for this, the procedure that would evolve over centuries of English, like English law to handle defendants who tried to avoid trial this way, was a punishment called Pienfurt et d'er which meant strong and hard punishment

what we call now pressing oh they stone them to death like what you put stones on a person and then you crush them push on them yeah the procedure was the prisoner would be stripped naked and laid on his back

on the ground a heavy board would be laid across his chest stones large stones would be piled onto the board one by one. Between stones, the prisoner would be asked again whether they would submit to trial. If they

said yes, the pressing would stop and they would go to trial. If they refused, more stones would be added. The prisoner would be given bread on the first day and water on the second. The procedure would continue until the prisoner either consented to

trial or died. that is just such bullshit this is just the logic is just not there they're like fine then we'll kill you then we'll kill you okay consent or you'll die you'll give us your permission or we'll take it with your life

it's like worse than what could a normal happened just give them the punishment just find them guilty if they don't go to trust it's so weird too because the logic is like well you if you yeah if if if you don't do this, then you'll die. But, hey, at least if you really are, like, if you really are innocent or you were,

weren't a witch, hey, you're in heaven. So it's fine. Which is like such a crazy way to do it. Because that's literally them being like, it's, we can hand wave it. Like there's, all right, either we killed a bad person or God will take care of them. So it's whatever. It's, it sucks. It fucking sucks.

Like living at this time would be such a nightmare, dude. Oh my God. This is something you can fucking do about it. You can never do it before. And at this time, with him, this had never been done in colonial Massachusetts yet. Pressing was a procedure from English law that the colony had on its books, but had never been invoked. And Giles Corey was the first, or Giles Giles, Giles, I don't know. I think it might be Giles.

I don't know. Giles. Giles Corey was the first. He was, he is also the last. He is the only person ever pressed to death on American soil under legal authority. Why did he refuse? Well, there are a couple of theories. We don't know for sure.

He's more weight. What? Is he more weight? More weight? Yes. Yes. That's exactly who this guy is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. There are a couple theories why he went through with this. One, the one that gets the most popular play, I guess I'd say, is that under Massachusetts law, as Giles understood it, if he was tried and convicted of witchcraft, his estate could be seized by the crown. And he wanted to make sure his land passed to his sons in law instead. This is the version Arthur Miller went with in the crucible. The actual law on this is a little more complicated.

Personal possessions could be seized after a felony conviction, but real estate passed to the heirs regardless of whether you were convicted or not. So the financial theory might have some truth to it, but it's not as airtight as the play made it out to be. There's also another wrinkle where historians have found evidence that Sheriff Corwin later extorted Giles's daughter for 11 pounds, six shillings by claiming he was going to seize the property anyway, which suggests Corwin himself wasn't sure how the law worked. The second theory is

simpler and probably closer to the truth, I think. Giles Corey was just 81 years old. His wife was about to be hanged. Every confession he might have made would have been a lie. And he just decided he was going to not participate in his own conviction. He was. He was going to be was going to deny the court its legitimacy by refusing to acknowledge it. So they pressed him. Kind of bad. More honestly to the truth as an 81 year old at this time. Kind of badass.

Kind of fucked up. Yeah, definitely agree. And then so starting on September 17th in a field that's now the Howard Street Cemetery in Salem, Sheriff George Corwin laid Giles Corey on his back, placed a board across his chest, and began piling stones onto him. According to Robert Caliph's account, Sheriff Corwin himself sometimes stood on the stones to add weight. So the sheriff would just stand on it sometimes. What a dick.

They pressed him on the 17th. They pressed him on the 18th. And he died on the 19th after two full days of pressing death on the third morning. When they asked him between rounds of stones, what he had to say, what he wanted to plea, what he had to confess to everything. Giles Corey by every contemporary account said only one thing. More weight. Hell yeah, brother. Fucking crazy.

Some sources have him saying once. Some sources record him saying it multiple times. Some sources record different last words. Like one that I could find said, quote, damn you, I curse you and Salem, which would be in keeping with what we now know about his temperament. as far as we know.

But Moray is the version that is stuck. It is the version closest to all of the other contemporary accounts that we seem to have on him. So that seems to be what he would be saying most realistically. Robert Califf, who again, thank God this guy was there to witness this stuff. So we actually have a first hand account on this. Who witnessed the pressing recorded one more detail as well. As Giles was dying, his tongue forced its way out of his mouth from the pressure on his chest. Sheriff Corwin took his cane and pushed.

the old man's tongue back into his mouth of his own cane. Nah. Ew. That guy sucks. That guy's trash. What the fuck? Literal villain shit. That's like literal villain.

It's very villain. It's very heinous. Samuel Seawall, one of the judges on the court of Oyer and Terminer wrote about it in his diary the next day. He wrote a very small section on it. And these are his actual words dated Monday, September 19th, 1692. Jesse, you can read this one. Samuel Seawall.

I think it's how you say it. S-E-W-A-L-S-W-L-S-W-L-S-W-W-L-S-W-W-M-E-W-L-M-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-W-E-E-W-E-E-W-E-E-W-E-E-W-E-E-E-W-E-E-E-E. That's it. One of the judges, Of this guy's death, this two day, two and a half day longs pressing to an 81 year old man dedicated a single sentence to him and that is it. To me, that's my friend, slept, went to bed, dinner. I mean, you have to imagine it's tough again. If you say anything, then you're in league with the devil and you're dead. Yeah.

Even after the fact, like, you know, still time period wise, people could be like, oh, yeah, no, whoops, that's a mistake. But religious wise, especially in Puritan New England. They'd still have eyes out for you. It's, uh, yeah, people will be like, little heretical, little messed up. Yep. Well,

we'll talk a little bit more in the final part next week in part three. Um, but five years later, he would become, he, uh, the only one of the nine judges to publicly kind of confess to everything he'd done.

Um, so we'll look at that a little bit more. Uh, in the centuries after, the position of sheriff of Essex County has been, been said to be cursed. The story goes that Giles Corey cursed the officious office as he was dying. George Corwin, who pressed him, died of a heart attack four years later in 1696 at age 30. Every Essex County Sheriff after him is supposed to have died or resigned because of some kind of

blood or heart ailment until 1991 when the sheriff's office finally moved out of Salem to Middleton, Massachusetts. The obviously can make it out of what you will. It seems there are a lot of heart issues for people who had the position that this guy did when he pressed stuff on this dude's chest. Giles Corey's pressing in many, in the men, in the words of many of the people who saw it, the moment Salem is, this was the moment Salem's witch panic kind of broke in a way. This story spread really quickly amongst the community at that time. People who had been already quietly going along with the trials all summer were suddenly

publicly sickened. And in a lot of ways, it reminds me of when you push cult mentality to its breaking point, where suddenly everybody who supported this kind of thing suddenly never supported this kind of thing. You know what I mean? You're like, oh, suddenly people who were behind it, they were never behind it. I foresee a moment like that in the near future. Right? Yeah.

I foresee a moment quite like that real soon. Similar vibrations run through my body. The pressing was meant to demonstrate the courts. power and what it actually seemed demonstrated was the court. How heavy they were. What it actually demonstrated was that the court would now

literally do anything. But the trials weren't quite over yet. There was one more execution day, three days from this point. On the morning of Thursday, September 22nd, 1692, three days after the pressing of Giles Corey ended,

Sheriff George Corwin and his loaded eight condemned prisoners into a car and drove them back up to the road to Proctor's ledge. They were Martha Corey, Mary Eastley, Alice Parker, and a Poudiator, a Poodieter, Pudditer, Pudditer, Puditer. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. Puditer out of here. No. No. Pood eater.

No, dude. How do you say that? God damn it. You tell me. Puttitor. Puttitor. Puttitor. Puttitor.

Puttitor. No. Putt eater. Loves pud, loves a pud. Loves a bonafi pie. Food eater, dude. That's not how you say that. That can't be, no.

That's not. Puttitor? Yeah, maybe like a pootator or, uh, Puttitor. It's poot eater, dude. Huh? Uh, but it's not puttitor.

It's not puttitor. It can't be. It can't be. Man. And a pooditor. And a poo-poo delicious eater. Also, there was Margaret Scott, Wilmot Red, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary Parker.

Seven women. Jeremiah Piss drinker. He loves those loaves of bread. Big fan. Which loaves? Huge fan. According to Caliph, the cart got stuck at one point on the way up to the hill.

The afflicted girls who had come to watch said that the devil was hindering it from arriving. And now we'll look at some of the. these people real quick, very briefly. Samuel Wardwell of Andover is the exception that proves the rule of the Salem confession strategy, by the way. He was a carpenter who previously practiced fortune telling. In my mind, when I was, I know he's probably nothing like it, but this is Michael's, this is Santel. You got career whiplash, dude, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the court considered, basically they considered fortune telling low level dabbling in the occult arts. He had confessed earlier in the

summer, named several other Andover residents, and been told that confessing was the only way to live. So that's why he did it. Confessed witches were spared, innocent witches, who confessed, who refused to confess, died. He had confessed. And then, sometime in early September, he had recanted his confession. He had taken it back. He had said publicly that he was not a witch and had only confessed under duress. The moment he recanted, he was on the cart to the gallery.

of the 55 people who confessed during the Salem witch trials and who maintained their confession, every single one of them lived. The one exception was this guy who confessed and recanted when he was already being carted up and died for it. Martha Corey, you already know, three days after her 81-year-old husband had been crushed to death, she went up the latter. The previous Sunday, Reverend Nicholas Noyes had presided over Martha's excommunication from Salem Village Church. He did the same job that morning he stood at the foot of the third. the gallows and asked her to confess.

She did not. And poot eater of Salem was about 70, twice widowed, a practitioner of folk medicine, which the court took as evidence of witchcraft. The afflicted girls cried out on her. She was convicted. And then hanged, Wilmot Red of Marblehead, Margaret Scott of Rowley,

and Alice Parker of Salem, Mary Parker of Andover, no relation to Alice. All of them maintained their innocence to the end. none of them confessed. And then there is Mary Easty. The youngest of the three town sisters, the sister of the already executed Rebecca Nurse,

Mary Easty had been arrested twice. The first time in April, she'd been examined and then released, released because her case was so weak that even the magistrates couldn't justify holding her, if you can imagine how weak that is compared to how the strength of the other cases that we've seen. The second time,

two days after her release in May, Mercy Lewis had a sudden severe seizure, and cried out that Mary Easty Spector was killing her. Oh, Jesus. Why? Why? I don't know, man. I don't know.

Mary had been re-arrested that night, and the seizures stopped. She had been in jail ever since. She was tried on September 9th. She was condemned. She had 13 days left to live. Mary Easty spent those 13 days writing a document, and we have the document. It's one of the most, it's one of the coolest pieces of writing from that time that we have, not because it's like a cool thing that she wrote about,

but it's cool that we have it, like, still a lot. It's like a first, it's like a primary source, yeah. It is a petition addressed to Governor William Phipps to the judges of the court and to the ministers of Massachusetts. And in it, Mary Easty does not ask them to spare her life. Here is the central passage of the petition in her own writing, in her own spelling, preserved exactly, your poor and humble petitioner being condemned to die. I doth humbly beg of you to take it into your judicious and pious considerations,

that your poor and humble petitioner, knowing my own innocency, blessed be the Lord for it, and seeing plain the wiles and subtlety of my accusers by myself, cannot but judge charitably of others that are going the same way of myself, if the Lord steps not mightily in. I was confined a whole month upon the same account that I am condemned now for, and then cleared by the afflicted persons, as some of your honors know, and in two days' time I was cried out upon by them, and have been confined, and now I'm condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocency then, and likewise does now, as at the great day will be known

to men and angels. My petition to your honors, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set, but the Lord he knows it, that if it be possible, no more innocent blood may be shed,

which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. Yeah, her petition isn't for her life, it's for other people. She's like, stop. She's like, this is fucked. Yeah. Yeah, you're all being fucking stupid.

Stop. Mary Easty made two concrete suggestions to the court in her petition. First, she suggested that the afflicted accusers should be kept apart from each other before being questioned so that the court could see if their stories actually matched. Because if they were obviously really seeing the same specters, they should be able to describe them identically without coordinating. Second, she suggested that confess witches should be put on trial alongside the accused because under the current system, confessing was the only way to survive. which meant the confessions were obviously not reliable. Both of these suggestions, by the way, were obviously exactly correct. Both were exactly the procedural reforms that would after the trials were over

become the legal consensus in a colonial America for handling witchcraft cases. Mary Easty, 58 years old, again, no legal training, sitting in prison just as like common sense. She's just writing out common sense to these people and they're like, by golly, she's fucking right, regardless of the case. common sense. She went up the ladder. She prayed for an end of the witch hunt and she was hanged. After the eight bodies had been cut down and the reverend was standing at the foot of the gallows looking up at the empty ropes, he is recorded as saying, quote, what a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging here. What a fucking idiot. Calling them firebrands is such

a fucking dweeb fucking thing to say. Shut up. It's fire. Hell fire. By the end of the day, on September 22nd, 1692, the death toll of the Salem Witch trial stood at 2019 hanged, one pressed to death. At least five more had died in jail. Mary Eastie's family lay in the dirt on Proctor's ledge alongside the family of her sister Rebecca, who had been buried in the same shallow ground two months earlier. The eight executions of September 22nd had been intended by Chief Justice William Stoughton as a demonstration. A clearing of the docket, so to speak.

This was his statement that the court was working through the backlog and would continue working through it until Satan was driven from Massachusetts entirely. The September session had returned 15 convictions in two weeks. The court was at this moment the most efficient legal killing machine in the colony's history. They were just cruising through them. What Stoughton did not understand, what Cotton Mather did not understand, What Cotton Mather did not understand, what none of them seemed to understand, standing at the foot of the fucking gallows, calling eight innocent people firebrands of hell, none of these people get was that the demonstration had broken something in the village. The execution of Rebecca Nurse, the 71-year-old churchgoer, the hanging of George Burroughs, the minister who have recited the Lord's Prayer with earnest, the pressing of Giles Corey for no conceivable reason.

and the eight quote unquote firebrands of hell swinging in a row above Salem town, a Mary Easton's petition still circulating through the colony had broken something. And that was consensus. Across Massachusetts in October of 1692, ministers who had supported the trials began quietly to talk to each other. Increased Mather, Cotton's father, the most senior minister in the colony and arguably the most powerful religious figure in New England, was preparing a document.

Robert Caliph, who had watched George Burroughs hang, was beginning to write his angry counter book. Thomas Brattle, a Boston scientist, was preparing a long, careful, devastating letter that he would circulate privately within weeks. Multiple petitions were being drafted, multiple accused, including by mid-October, the wife of Governor William Fipps himself

would be cried upon. Exactly, it's touching everybody now. Nobody is safe. It's like a disease, dude, that spreads. He probably felt like such a dummy after that happened. Oh, dude, I can't imagine. The trials weren't over yet. There were still hundreds of accused sitting in jails across the colony. The court was still legally constituted to go through all this stuff. Stoughton was still playing another execution day in early November. There were still names being added to indictments, but it wouldn't matter because the killings would not start again. And next time, next week, we're going to talk about how the trials ended. We're going to talk about the document increased Mather wrote that broke the back of quote unquote spectral evidence. We're going to talk about Thomas Brattle's weather.

And we're going to talk about Fips finally telling London what he had, what had been happening in his colony. And we're going to talk about Stalin's incandescent fury at having his court taken from him, which it would be taken from him. Also about Samuel Sewell, Sewell, Sewell, the judge who wrote the one sentence diary entry, standing in front of his Boston congregation five years later in 1697 in publicly confessing what he had done. Jeez.

We'll wrap with the most famous sentence in the entire document is one line. By the end of 1692 would be passed hand-to-hand across the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A single sentence that one of the most powerful religious figures in New England put on paper to say, we have to stop. It was, quote, it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape. and that one innocent person should be condemned. And that is one sentence would be the... Pretty level-headed.

Yeah, pretty level-headed thought, bro. It is. And that is what would be the fever break of this town. And that's where we'll pick up next week. Amazing. The third and final part of the Salem... Infuriating. Crazy.

Infuriating, crazy, funny. It's a bizarre... Unavoidably American. Yes, it is goddamn unavoidably American. and all like this is why I said too like no matter what I do I can't cover everything because in the background of all this the Putnam and Porter thing is happening still like at full fury like there's all kinds of machinations moving in the background like read go I would urge everybody who's like if this has triggered an interest in you go by the book go do the research read the the like

the letters from the direct source of this time it is fascinating and if you look at it through like a weird mob lens. It's also really fun. It's just a crazy read. Thank you all so much for your support. We're off to go do a minisote over at patreon.com slash Chaluminati Pod. If there are still live show tickets available

for our end of August live show, you better hurry. Go grab them. They always sell out. Grab them while you can. We'll be there August 22nd out in the Lincoln Theater, out in Chicago. We'll see you guys then and we'll see you next week.

We appreciate it. We love you. Bye. Anyway. Me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside, and after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside, and she's looking up the sky in the fall.

I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. Thank you.