Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 350: The Salem Witch Trials Part 3

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

In the final episode of our Salem Witch Trials three-parter, Mathas shows Alex and Jesse how the damage done by this three hundred year old misguided tragedy carries all the forward to modern day.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 350. Hey. Hey, it's like some sort of landmark. Were you holding on to that? Did you know that? I didn't. I knew it a few days ago when I was like putting the script to starting putting the script together. But before that, I didn't actually.

It's funny because now nobody ever, I never know when it's coming up because everybody's worried that I'm going to do like a minutes based. That were like too high up. We're too high up because that was what? A hundred. That was like, yeah. Yeah. So that's like a long. years ago. Yeah, but actually it was mini-sode 100. So it was like a hundred minute minisode.

So that's like a game show with video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really, really genius and great. The 1000's episode marathon is going to be fantastic. One thousand minutes. What will we do? It would be like we'd have to do, we'd have to like do a live like, oh, we'd have to go to a hundred house finally. And a thousand. We got to go before a thousand. Holy shit. I've been waiting. Okay. I promise, I promise that by episode 1,000, we will go to a hundred house. All right, good. Good. We're almost halfway to a thousand, almost.

350 is like kind of a landmark. It's a round number, but like, it feels good. I don't think there was ever a Pokemon that landed on 350. You know what it means? Yeah, yeah. It's like how iconic is it as a number? Right. You know, what is, what is Pokemon 350, by the way?

That's something that I could have told you several years ago. Several, several many years ago. Reptile squirrel. Reptilla squirrel? That's a teenage mutant ninja turtle guy. I don't know what that is. Now it's just straight here. That was pretty close.

Milotic. Milotic. Milotic. Is that a bug that sings? No, it's a beautiful lamia fish. So you were pretty close. Okay.

Welcome to the show, Jesse and Alex, by the way. How are? Oh, thank you. Yeah, we're no problem,

no problem. Yeah, I'm used to this. I've done this 349 other times. Yeah, yeah, just goes right by you at this point. Hmm.

Before we jump into the final part of Salem, which I'm excited to get into, it's a big chunky one. Just go, hey, we have live show tickets still available right now. You can go get them at the link below. The show is August 22nd out in Chicago at the Lincoln Theater. We always sell out. So grab the tickets while you can before they're gone. I'm really excited. And speaking of 20 seconds, and I don't mean 20 seconds, I mean 22, as in May,

May 22, as in probably already has occurred, right? So we are doing a huge merch release and sale, and it's all happening for everyone on May 25th. Okay? That's when we're going to do our Manted shirt, which you can go, Manted and Chill, which you can go see now at patreon.com slash Chimaleepod, or probably now, depending on when you're listening to this,

it will also be live on the Yeti by then. it's going to be live. We're going to be blasting it everywhere. You can get the shirt. We're also doing a set of stickers, mystery stickers, where we're going to feature an artist who the jig will be up on the artist

next week. So we're going to, you know, the whole thing is, the jig will be up on those artists. See? The jig will be up on those artists. You'll never take them alive. Come on, yeah. Well, yeah, it's all good. The point is we're going to be doing this, you know, it's the second installment.

I'm looking at the stickers right now. They're all amazing, but you guys won't be able to see them until you buy them. But they're based on some of our favorite and the artist's favorite moments from our show. So starting next week, we're going to be promoting these super hard with the artists, with the stickers. But right now, you can go see them. If you're on Patreon, you can see the stickers. If not, you get a mystery question mark image on the Yeti site.

So those are 50-50 that we're going to split the profits there with that artist because that is going to be super awesome. And I'm going to give you one hint as to one of the stickers. And that is range for Harry. That's a little teaser. Doesn't ring a bell. Don't know what that is. A little teaser for those stickers. And then so in addition to the stickers and in addition to the shirt, which is the manted like sexy mantis logo, which Mel took our house artist,

StudioMelectro. She took it, her original art, and she expanded it into like a nice, cool T-shirt drawing. So now that is going to be also a classic shirt that's going to be on the shop for a while. But you can go get it and you can go get the stickers. And while we're still doing this promotion, all of the beautiful posters that we have on the site, which we have lots of stock of. They've been in the shop for a while. They are like the series of like comic book cover posters. Mathis, maybe you can remind me who the artist is on those. It depends on the poster, actually. Oh, okay.

So a collection of really great comic art from people that are drawing on par with anything that you would go buy at a comic shop, to be honest with you. Jeff the Mungoose, some Nyarlathetep-esque character that I can't remember. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. or hair hypnosis, this is one of them. Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of posters there. Go check them out. There's 70% off for the duration of this sale.

That's a huge discount and you can snap up as many as you want with or without the shirts or the stickers. But there's all kinds of new stuff. There's deals on old stuff. Uh, Gettie.com slash Chulamini. Hell yes. Yeah. I'm excited. Follow the link in the description.

Um, and, uh, like I say, 25th for everybody. But if you're a patron, even a free patron, head to patreon.com slash chumni pod and you can get early access starting on the 22nd. It all came full circle It all came Look at that For Harry That was almost like I didn't just pull that out of my ass

While I have some kind of crazy head cold But I do Yeah Well don't worry We're gonna make your We're gonna cure your head cold with witchcraft today Boys That's my segue into the episode

Because today is the third and final part Of the Salem witch trials Between Is there some kind of a P like cake That I could use for my sniffles? Yes, it would be your own some sort of loaf of bread with urine involved that could help me

you said a pee like cake a pee like a you know a cake but with pee qualities yeah it has to have the urine of a doctor yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I like the dog would appreciate that cake and would be able to tell you more if there are witches present I assume yeah two of the three of us are sick this week by the way and I'm not I'm not the sick one. So can I just get like an apple cider donut or like the old fashioned? That's not going to cure you. Sorry.

It's not going to help. No. Which peak is the only thing. I'm so sorry. It's only piss cakes. I want to have piss in my mouth. Just a reminder from our primary source for the series was, has been Emerson W.

Baker's A Storm of Witchcraft and the Salem trials and the American experience. Phenomenal, phenomenal source. It is just a wealth of knowledge. And between last episode and this episode, in this episode, the sources have actually just simply grown. There's just so many documents out there. I'm not going to read them all, but like, there's just so many, like, documents from that era that you can just literally go read

that tell you so much about what's going on. So as we dive into part three of this series, let's just do a very, very quick recap as to where we left off in the last episode. When last left off, 20 people were dead, 19 hanged on, on the gallows. And then one, 81 year old Giles Corey pressed to death. over two days in a Salem pasture in mid-September. At least five more had died in jail before they could be tried. Sarah Osborne, the bedridden widow we met in part one, was the first one to die back in May 10th.

Sarah Good's newborn infant, the grandmother Lydia Dustin, who would die just weeks after being acquitted because her family couldn't pay her jail fees and others. A bunch of people died, but 20 were executed kind of directly. and we left off part two with a very particular sentence. The most famous sentence from a document, Increased Mather had been writing all month. Cases of conscience concerning evil spirits, personating personating men.

I think he means impersonating, but personating. What happened to storm, a storm of witchcraft? What happened to that? Yeah, that's way cleaner. It's way,

no, not anymore. Could just be verbiage of the time, too, or just personating was a thing. Yeah. That sounds like when they translate anime episodes directly into English. Yeah, that's exactly right. The quote was,

it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned. And like what he's doing with this document, basically, you know, it's easy for us 300 some odd years later to look back at this. At the moment, like we could say a reasonable man finally said what we all think is the obvious thing. Like 10 people should be fucking killed over one suspected witch.

This is fucked up, guys. Hey, calm down. Okay. Yeah. Everybody needs to relax. Yo, what the fuck, though? What? You're on 11.

I need you at a four. Yeah. Hello? But it wasn't really that cut and dry. It was way more, especially because of the time period. It was way more of a careful and politically risky maneuver. than that. Increase Mather was at this point one of the most powerful religious figures in the entire English speaking world. He just returned from London the previous year in May of 1691, having spent

four years there as the colony's lead negotiator on the new royal charter. He'd come back with Governor Phipps with a P. They were political allies. He was president of Harvard. He was the senior minister of Boston's North Church. He was the father of Cotton Mather, the man who'd ridden up on horseback at Burroughs execution that we talked about last week to talk the crowd back into killing the person that they almost

were like, wait, maybe this guy isn't a witch. The Mathers were basically like the religious dynasty of Massachusetts at the time. Sounds, let me just say this, super chill. Yeah, absolutely not at all

stressful in any way. I walk into my sandwich shop, I'd say, oh, hey there. What's going on? Yeah, yeah. And you wouldn't be nervous at all. Hey. How's it going? Welcome.

And in October of 1692, Increase Mather sat down to write a document that pulled the rug out from under his own son at the time. And he didn't do it by name, but the central argument of the cases of conscience, the, which I'm going to keep as the short name of the book. The argument that spectral evidence, mind you, was theological. and evidentially worthless, that Satan could absolutely impersonate innocent people, and that the touch test was nonsense, and that the standards of proof being used by the court of Oyer and Terminer, which never sounds natural coming out of my mouth, would have been laughed out of any reputable English court. The argument was a direct refutation of the framework that his son had spent the summer publicly defending.

Kind of point. Has he considered that I'm the only real person and that you're all my dream? It's like what he's basically saying. It wasn't like a private quarrel either. 14 of the most senior ministers in Massachusetts signed off on the document, including Samuel Willard of Boston's Third Church, who'd been quietly preaching against the trial since June, including James Allen and John Bailey.

The senior ministry of the colony had finally collectively decided to say in print what some of them had been already kind of saying and quiet to their pulpits and parlors and all those people for months. Phipps read the manuscript on October 9th, a Sunday ministers across the colony read excerpts from it from their pulpits. The next week, Increase Mather himself traveled to the Salem jail. He went to talk to the confessed witches. The Andover residents who'd been confessing all summer to save their own lives. And when this, remember, because remember, the only way that you could save your life during this was literally. going against God, which is very like counterintuitive if you take a moment and step back and be like,

the only way not to die is to turn yourself. It's about admitting you have a problem. And that problem is Satan has control of your soul. But once you do that, then you open yourself up to Jesus and God to fight it back. And that's why it's fine to be like, oh, I was with the devil. But now I'm fine. From the minds that brought you, if she drowns, she isn't a witch. Thank you so much to Mint Mobile for sponsoring today's episode.

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Just admit that, the the the the guys trying you are correct you are an evil woman that's all you have to do is just say I'm an evil woman and these men are correct that's it yeah what's so hard about that yeah what's so hard about that you know that's smart you know these men are correct yeah and well when increased mather went to the colony jail showed up and was like in essence looked at them and was like hey we know we know you're not witches like we kind of know a lot of them almost immediately retracted the fact that they were witches. Like it was near instant when after he showed up.

Because they saw literally one other person that wasn't part of their like nightmare? Yeah. Well, yeah. Increased Mather, one of the most influential religious people in the world showed up and was like, hey, we kind of know you're not witches and whatnot. So like most of them, a big chunk of them were like,

then we retract our statement and, you know, we're not witches. They had only said it to save themselves. They retracted their confessions, accusations they had made against, their neighbors. They also retracted those. Basically the whole pyramid of testimony for the court that had had been built started to come apart in the cells right then and there. And Mather had been

accompanied to the jail by a Boston merchant named Thomas Brattle. And Thomas Brattle is the second character I'm going to introduce you to here because what he was doing in October of 1692 in some ways is even more devastating than what increased Mather was doing for these people. Thomas Brattle was a Boston merchant in his mid-30s, super rich. He was the treasurer of Harvard College, and he'd inherited a substantial mercantile fortune. But he was also something more rare around that time in 1692, Massachusetts. He was the best you could be a scientist at this time.

And I say the best you could be because it's, you know, there's still a lot of, a lot of learning that has to be done before we're like, you know, a scientist of our understanding. kind of comes into existence. Is this just mean like a wizard? Like what are we talking? No, no. He went to, he was educated at Harvard.

He traveled to England in the 1680s and worked with Robert Boyle. You know about like humors and shit? Like what are we talking about? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if their humors are still mixed in there or not. I'll be honest with you. But what I did learn is that he worked with a guy called Robert Boyle and Robert Boyle,

which I didn't know, was the father of modern chemistry. His first guy who boiled shit ever. Yep. That's why they named it that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the man whose name is on Boyle's Law that you probably learned, like, people apparently learned about this in high school, but I didn't take chemistry in high school.

Like, I never even had chemistry class. So you tell me if that's common. Boyles law Celsius, water boils. B-O-Y-L-E, all right? Not B-O-I-L, unfortunately. No, that's the English version here in the States. That's B-R-A-R-A, yeah, you're right. No, that's Raymond's dad.

Okay. Point being this guy that we're about to like we're meeting here has had like actual scientific education for this time. He returned to Massachusetts with like a scientific mind and an understanding of like some sort of scientific method and some sort of chemistry, right? Like he has an understanding here. The best you could hope for in fucking. That's what I'm trying to get at.

That's what I keep spinning my tires on here. And in the summer. and fall of 1692, what Thomas Brattle was observing in the court was something that he was like this shit. This is all bullshit. On October 8th, 1692, a single day before the minister started reading cases of conscience from their pulpits, Brattle finished writing a long letter. It was addressed to an unnamed reverend sir, quote unquote. We don't know for certain who the recipient was. It was possibly increased Mather, possibly somewhat else in the similar senior position. But every everyone involved understood that the letter was meant to circulate. It was in modern, like,

letters, and it was an open letter, as we understand them. A piece of, like, something that he wanted the public to see. Braddell's letter is 338 years later still, the single most devastating piece of writing produced during or about the Salem trials, in my opinion. He goes to the court's procedures one by one, and he destroys them, one by one. In iambic, pentameter. Yeah, exactly. Kind of close. The use of spectral evidence, Brattle pointed out that the same evidence had been rejected

by every reputable English court for over a century by this time. The touch test, I know, it's crazy to like learn that. And by 1692, spectral evidence was a hundred years out of date in the English court. Like, I get, I get being like superstitious, right? I understand even today, like, some people who are Christians are like, especially, and you don't have to be a Christian to feel this way, but like, your religion gives you a sort of extra fear of something like, oh, there's a demon in this relic from eBay. It gets you, you know, there's a little bit, but we're not in a world where the judge will go,

oh, it was a demon. Right. Anything that you say, right, even right now is, is a demon. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, it's so, yeah, it's insane that they were even doing it at this point. The touch test, Brattle also noted that the afflicted girls had no business diagnosing witchcraft because their own conditions were so obviously suspect.

The confessions Brattle have continued to point out that the confessors regularly contradicted themselves, that many of them were described by their own neighbors as, quote, crazed, distempered women, that they were obviously confessing because the alternative was fucking death. Like, if they don't confess, they die. And then Brattle did something in his letter that people kind of pointed out as even more dangerous than anything else written at that point. He started naming the names of people who agreed with him. He's like that internet poster to me who's like, yanks in his private conversations

with people to like prove their point. he started naming he named increased Mather Samuel Willard Major Stalton assault install the guy who had resigned That we talked about last episode is this before like witness testimonies were a thing You just said them no you just said the name and then they'd go oh yes wow okay I mean like witness testimonies are a thing but this guy's just doing an open letter and pointing people out and he had like sway Simon Bradstreet was also named who was a former governor Thomas Danforth the former deputy governor and several sitting Boston magistrates who Brattle said were prepared to resign their commissions

rather than continue participating in the trials. And he listed them by name. He was telling the colony in the writing. Yeah. He was like just playing like the entire senior political and religious establishment of Massachusetts thinks this court is illegitimate. You are alone, gentlemen, increasingly alone. Like that was his message to these people.

Brattle's letter and Mather's cases of conscious together broke the. the political support for the court of Oyer-Terminer kind of definitively. Phipps read both. Phipps heard what was happening in the Salem jail when increased Mather walked in. He also got some news that hit him personally sometime in mid-October. An afflicted girl in Boston cried out the name of Phipps's own wife, Lady Mary Phipps, who had, while her husband was often main fighting the war, used her authority as the governor's wife to order the release of an accused woman from the Boston jail.

essentially doing something good and it got her accused as a witch. That brings up a valid question. All right. Mathis, Alex and I pull you in front of the judges. We are your prosecutors. We are saying to you, you witch.

You damn other witches. You fucking witch. Wouldn't you think as a defense, you would say Alex's wife, taught me the witchcraft. You know what I mean? Like, why wouldn't you immediately be like, why governor, twas your wife

who taught me the way? Like, I'd take them down with me. I feel like that's like, that's like, like right now, that would work in like two seconds. I'd be like back then they would just like, be like, and then just like kill him. Sure.

But if that's the case, then at least I want to plant, if they're going to kill me anyway, I'm planting the scene that lady's a witch. You know what I mean? And that did. Remember, part of the. was like that did eventually start happening, which is when it started becoming a problem. It's like, oh, right, they started getting accused.

But also keep in mind, this all started in a higher up's house and started accusing downward. So I think it took time for to swing back the other way. Oh, yeah, I would be like, did this not, did this not begin in the whole? Like, I would take them all that. I'd be like, why, yes, but I'm just a poor slave. I learned it from you, mistress. Like, I would take them down. not what you told me burn the ground that they all walked on i'd be like screw it oh well i think it might

have been i think it might have been like too scary like i think it might have been like i think that's like a big swing it's like saying fuck you to the king or something almost like right because these people are like children right and like i mean there is like a there is sort of like in a puritanical society there's definitely like a uh father knows best vibes and if you don't fall like you do not go against dad right right so any men had a lot of control and i would imagine that would be scary with that said again i would have gone like you know i would have tituba but a little more targeted tituba i would start name of name targeting titgum about all the higher up targeted titian he go straight up targeted titian i go i go full t t tis on those sons of

bitches i would destroy that town i'd be like them tities out be like mayor in on it. I'd be like the governor, yep. I'd be like those little girls, they're the ones who taught me. They're just selling me out. Oh, I would go. I danced naked with the governor's wife through the trees on candle tips. Yep. And as always though, like, right? Like, it's all, and that always worked. And eventually that's what always ends up tipping the shit. It always works is when the higher up start getting accused of it. Now they're like, oh, way, we need to fix this. Because for William Phipps, that was, I think, one of the biggest moments for him that really did. push him in this direction.

What is that his own wife became a target. The senior ministry of the colony had publicly turned at this point as well. The political class was bailing at this point. The war on the frontier was eating his attention because that's still going on and being lost horribly. And every eventual execution was making the situation so much worse every single time and never got better after an execution. Shit just not got better.

on October 12, 1692, William Phipps sat down and wrote a letter to William Blathwaite. And this is where I point out, there's a lot of the shit that gets done in this time is by letter. There's so many letters written everywhere. So are you going to hear by letter a few more times in this episode? Just be ready. Written by letter to William Blathwaite, the secretary of the Privy Council in London, that it was the first time he had ever. It was the, I know, dude, there's so many governmental like shit. Privy Council in London, 1692. It was the first time he had ever formally told the English

government what had been happening in his colony. He told them he was forbidding any further charges of witchcraft except in extreme cases. And he told them, and this is verbatim, that he had concluded, quote, the devil had taken upon him the name and shape of several persons who were doubtlessly innocent and to my certain knowledge of good reputation. There's still, saying the devil showed up. They're still like saying the devil showed up, but the people, these people saw assaulting them was actually the devil in disguise. It wasn't actually them and they're all innocent. And this is like, I guessed best case scenario at this time for the religious governance. Diplomatic. Yeah, it actually feels kind of, yeah. Diplomatic is a great way to put it.

Exactly. It feels like a way towards a win-win sort of based on what's already gone. down. Yeah, trying to minimize probably further damage on both sides. He also banned any further publications about the trials. He didn't want what he called, quote, inextinguishable flames. He just didn't want the negative press to catch fire. I think that sounds a little fascist, but like, okay, I get it. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're at this scale like, yeah. Remember, they're coming from a fucking monarchy. Like it is fascist in a lot of ways. You're right. Um, Cotton Mather's book, The Wonders of the Invisible World, which was the defense of the trials. by Cotton had been, which he'd been writing all summer that we talked about last episode a bit,

was rushed into print under Phipps Authority right before the ban took effect. Phipps wrote a personal foreword for it, and it was in Phipp's mind the official government version of the story. He sent a copy to London on the same ship that carried his letter, and by the time anyone in Massachusetts could legally publish a response to Cotton's defense of the trials, the trials would be over in the colony's official narrative would already be set. Basically, because things took so fucking long to travel back and forth

and for things to be signed and for word to get back into the colony, you're looking nine months to a year, probably in between hearing back from when you send your letter off to getting a response, that didn't matter that the version that took hold was Conn Mather's defense of it all

and that like time, like the like people, culture moved on. They just moved on with their lives. Honestly, probably for the best to have like non- instant communication in some cases. I mean, yeah, look at what it's got us now, you know?

I mean, there's a lot of things that we can say about this that are reflective of what's going on now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's another, that's probably for the end of the episode. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that was, but that was politics. Get the story out, ban the debate and the killings in hope that London never asked too many fucking hard questions that would make him look worse than this already had become.

In October 29th, 1692, when the Massachusetts general court asked Phipps whether the court of Oyer and Terminer would stand or fall, Phipps said two words, or sorry, three words. It must fall. More blathwaite. More blathwaite. I love that name. It's so of its time. There's got to be blathwaits around still, you think.

If you're a blathwaite, you are awesome by just by association. That is an incredible last name. I yeah I would love if there's a Blathwaite that listens to the show I feel like we win the lottery that's last way is like I don't know how to like I don't want to explain this further but that is such a fucking last name ass name yeah yeah yeah you can't mistake that for a first name or a middle name literally oh come on now there's some guy named Blathwaite Shaw who rocks he's like a wizardly Shaw I was gonna say he's got a character for sure yeah Blackwood Shaw is a good name. Blathway Shaw is a fictional character. Hobbs and Blathway Shaw. Yep. If that is what his first name is, I will lose my shit.

That was, that was Owen and the other guy, Shaw's dad, Blathwaite Shaw. Blathwaite Shaw. Because the mom's name is Queenie, by the way. So Queenie and Blathwaite Shaw is a good couple. Now we're back in like 1910 England again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn, proved us wrong. All right.

Well, now that the court was dead, you'd think, The accused would be freed right away, but they were not. Why? They just, they were still more than 150 people in jail across the colony in November of 1692. Some had been there for nine months. Their conditions were not getting better. And as winter was starting to set in, if you remember in episode one, we're talking like some of the worst winters, the mini ice age of the time. People were innocent and known to be innocent and just dying in the,

Winter in prison? Still in prison as winter is coming because obviously there were heated cells back then. And the prisoners had been wearing the same clothes since the previous spring. Yikes. It's like medieval like jail like systems. People were literally still dying in jail. Lydia Dustin, the Redding grandmother that we mentioned earlier, they would die in the Cambridge cell. That March, from November to March.

and they were known to be innocent. Why weren't they let go? Weeks after being formally acquitted because the families couldn't pay the jailkeeper's fees. Okay. But they were innocent, but now you've got to pay.

Like, yeah, you're innocent. You were all acquitted. Sorry, are bad. Once you pay your fees, you can go. That'll be one million. The old debtor's prison vibe.

Yeah, exactly. He didn't even do a crime. No, I know. But after people started to die, FIP started to let people out of jail on bail instead. He had the option to do that from the beginning? Well, yeah, because he didn't have the legal authority to actually just release them. But he had the political authority not to enforce the existing warrants, and he stretched that literally as far as he could.

God bless him. He tried, I guess, on his own way. He still let people die first and they sat in prison for weeks after they were acquitted. but then he started to try. And then on November 25th, 1692, the Massachusetts legislator created a new court system. Finally, the top court in the colony

would now be called the Superior Court of Judicature, and it would handle all capital cases, including any remaining witchcraft cases. New court system, eh? Yeah, yeah. On December 7th, the governor's council appointed the judges. Stoughton would continue as Chief Justice,

Samuel Sewell, Waite Winthrop, and John Richards, all veterans of the disbanded previous court would also serve. So would Thomas Danforth, the former deputy governor who had been one of the most vocal critics of the trials. On December 12th, the legislature passed a new witchcraft statute that basically just adopted the current English law on the subject of witchcraft. And they scheduled a special session of the Superior Court to begin on January 3, 1693. in Salem to deal with the remaining witch cases because you got it.

These people are still in jail and some of them are still waiting fucking trials on the witchcraft cases that they were accused of. Like, people were, a lot of people were acquitted, but a lot of people still had to go through the whole court system still before they could get acquitted of this shit, which makes no sense,

but it's how they were doing things. Phipps did one more thing before the new court convened. He talked privately to the judges off the record. So we actually don't have a transcript, but what we have, is a letter Phipps wrote to London a few months later in February of 1693, where he described the conversation that he had. He said verbatim, quote, some of them were convinced and acknowledged that their former proceedings

were too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation, but that if they might sit again, they would proceed after another method. Basically saying, if you seat us again, we will do the witchcraft thing differently this time. We definitely didn't do it right the first time. we were too violent. Make us judges and we'll do it differently. Just so you know, there is a real wit. There are still real witches out there that we haven't caught.

But yeah, yeah. But like we'll get them this time. The witches are still out there. Yeah, it's basically, yeah, he told the judges off the record that spectral evidence was no longer admissible and most of them agreed, essentially is what people believe is what it boils down to. When the Superior Court convened in Salem on James, January 3rd, with 50 or so remaining which case is on the docket, the jurors asked the judges

what weight they should give to spectral evidence. An unnamed judge replied, and this is another kind of somewhat famous line among historians, I guess, is increased Mathers, quote, 10 suspected witches line that spectral evidence should be given, quote, as much weight as of chips in wart. Does that mean like in water? in W-O-R-T, as much weight as chips in wart. Chips in wart. Wart is the liquid, I got you, don't worry.

Ward is a liquid you make when you boil malted grain for beer. Chips of grain that get into wart during the boiling are nothing. Gross, so you toss them away, they're trash. They don't count. Yeah, the judge was saying, spectral evidence is floating shit. Disregard it. I just didn't know if you boys would have known what that meant. I thought you meant a gloria warder.

Glorcia Warder. So the court tried 22 defendants over the next two weeks. They acquitted 19 of them. The three who were convicted had all confessed. Their names were, because we're going to get back to them,

Sarah Wardwell, the wife of Samuel Wardwell, who'd been hanged on September 22nd. Rough name for a suspected witch, just got to say. Mary Post, and a young woman named Elizabeth Johnson, Jr. We're going to come back to her as well.

Stoughton's, signed warrants for the execution of all three convicted women. He also signed warrants for five others who'd received stays of execution under the old court of Oyer and Terminer, including Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Faulkner, both of whom had been spared because they were pregnant. The attorney general reviewed the warrants and pointed out something obvious to Phipps. Basically, there were other women who had confessed and been acquitted by the new court. If you execute Sarah Wardwell and Mary Post and Elizabeth Johnson Jr. for the same crime that you just acquitted other people of.

You kind of had a problem on your hand. And so Phipps instead reprieved all eight. And this is where we get into William Stoughton's one of the judges' fury about this. The Superior Court was set to meet again on February 1st, 1693 in Charleston, to take up more witchcraft cases. When Stoughton arrived and was informed that Phipps had reprieved, the eight condemned women, the women that he had personally signed the death warrants for. Stoughton walked out of the courthouse.

He left mid-session. He turned the proceedings over to Judge Danforth, Danforth, the man who'd opposed the trials from the start, mind you. And as he walked out, he was overheard fuming in a line that Robert Caliph of one of the books would later preserve. Quote, we were in a way to have cleared the land of these. The kingdom of Satan is advanced, and the Lord have mercy on the. this country. So he just full on thought he was like fighting evil. What year was this? 2025? Uh,

2026 actually. Things don't change. Let me tell you. Yeah, he just couldn't. I know, I know, I know. We'll just take a minute, take a breath. Thank you so much to Hero Forge for sponsoring today's episode. And I've you heard me say before. I'm going to say it forever. I'm such a nerd. I play tabletop RPGs multiple times a week. I have a figurine collection that I am both proud and embarrassed of and a lot of that is thanks to heroforge if you head over to heroforge.com right now you can go check it out if you're like a minies collector if you like to make your own minis that's what hero forge is all about you can customize hundreds and thousands of different minis with the different unique combinations they have and then have the mail directly to your home from plastics

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who all game like me to go to HeroForge well before we started working with them, and I'm just happy we get to keep working with them for another year. Head over there, and if you do buy something, use code ChillPod on checkout to save yourself a little bit of money on the way out and supports the show.

That's ChillPod code on the checkout of HeroForge. Thank you again to HeroForge. for sponsoring this part of today's episode. Yeah, he was like, we almost got them all, baby. We almost got all the witches. But nope, we're going to let the witches live. Stoughton, again, was the chief justice of Massachusetts at this time. And he was the one who also personally overruled Rebecca Nurse's not guilty verdict.

He overruled that and said, you're guilty anyway. And he was also, like 20 people died on this guy's watch, essentially. He would return to the bench in late April and May of 1693 to preside over the last session of witch trials and the result was the same. Every single accused person was acquitted, though several of them, including a woman by the name of Lydia Dustin, would die in jail before their families could raise the money to pay for the prison fees, as we said a little earlier. The last person tried by the Superior Court was Chichiba, which is kind of like a poetic circle. One of the first people is also the last person. And on May 9th, 1693, a grand jury in Ipswich refused to indict her. 14 months after she'd been arrested.

So she'd been arrested. She'd been in jail for fucking over a year. 14 months in jail sat. Tichibu was acquitted, but she was not free. She still owed her jail fees, which is about seven pounds, which is around rough, which is at the time, uh, he was equal to probably half of her. value as an enslaved person in 1693. What would that be in dollars?

Seven pounds to USDA. Oh, man, I didn't look it up. Seven pounds to seven pounds, 1693 to present day USD. It's equivalent to roughly a thousand or to 1500 bucks somewhere in between there. So she would have been valid. So yeah. So like if you look at $1,500, then she was.

year in jail for a year in jail thousand dollars in debts you know her value as an enslaved person was three around three thousand at the time then that would mean god damn yeah it's fucking in today's US dollars three grand three day three grand in today US dollar

person for a person yeah that fucking is pure evil pure evil it's like hard it's hard it's like impossible for a bro I live in Texas so maybe not for everybody but like to wrap your hand your brain around like it's insane exactly it's a it's a PC it's nuts so her not she's not free you know she's

got seven pounds of of jail fees samuel paris who was her owner refused to pay them which is insane because again it all started in his fucking house uh baker thinks paris baker the author of the book that i used it thinks paris didn't want her in his house anymore where she would have served as a constant reminder of what happened. So Tichibu was sold to another master to recover the fees. And then she disappears from the historical record, like completely. We do not know what happened to her. We don't know who bought her, where she went.

If her name ended up changing after that, whether she lived another year or another 40 years, we just, we don't know. The woman's whose confession kind of started everything just vanishes in history, which is really fucking frustrating. because I would have loved to know what happened to that poor woman. William Stoughton, by the way, never forgave Samuel Sewell for what Sewell did four years later, which we're about to get to. Stoughton would as acting governor of the colony after Phipp's death snub Swill by inviting

every other member of the governor's council to a dinner party at his house. Stoughton would eventually die in 1701, having continued to believe to his dying day that the witchcraft court had been right, that it had been on the verge of saving the colony from Satan, that its only failure was that it had been stopped too soon, and he never apologized for any of it. Dickhead. It took Samuel Sewell four and a half years to publicly say what he had done,

but he was honestly in the end one of the only judges who would admit to it. Sewell in 1694, or 1697 was 44 at this point, and he was one of the wealthiest men in the colony by virtue of his marriage to Hannah Hull, the only child of John Hull, who had built one of the greatest mercantile fortunes in colonial New England. Sewell had inherited an empire, sawmills, like a sawmill empire, a farm out in Rhode Island, and properties throughout the Boston area just like fell into this dude's lap. And he was a judge, a member of the governor's council, and he was a respected Puritan saint

of the South Church in Boston. and he had spent the four years since the trials watching his own household get destroyed. The Sewells had buried two infant children in the years after 1692. Sewell's two-year-old son, Joseph, had been struck by an illness so severe in the spring of 1696 that the family believed he was going to die. He survived, but the experience devastated the man. He had also been watching throughout this period. The Quaker writer Thomas Moll's pamphlet against the Salem Witch trial,

being prosecuted in Salem itself in a trial that ended in November 1696 with Mao's acquittal, the jury finding that he had every right to publish what he had published because remember, there was a censorship law that was put in a place about writing this stuff. Sewell in his private diary in this period started writing about his certainty that God was punishing him, that the deaths of his children were a judgment, that something had to be done. And so on December 17th, 1696, the Massachusetts General Court issued a proclamation for a colony-wide day of fasting and humiliation to be observed on January 14, 1697. The proclamation was carefully worded. It asked the colony to humble itself before God and repent for its various sins. And almost as a side clause, easy to miss, to pray that God would not bring judgment upon.

them for, quote, the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments. And that particular line, the late tragedy raised among us by Satan's instruments, the official government approved framing of what the trials had been, not the colony's fault, but Satan's, and that they all had just gotten tricked into hanging 20 of their neighbors. And that was what the colony was asking its people to repent for on January 14th, 1697. He's still in a weird way trying to be political in his prayer to God. His inability to say it was their own fault, their own fault that God is not punishing them, no, but God is punishing them for allowing themselves to be tricked by Satan.

So like still not quite able to take ownership and just praying to God, I guess, that way. As much as we live in a like secretly Christian dominated government, like you see it as a secret eh well look it's just not reported on that people don't talk about it as such that much these days but you know like I don't feel like even in this climate now is the literal existence of the Christian God like so needed from almost anyone you know what I mean like I don't don't believe that, that, but it's, it's hard to imagine that, like, there was like a specter of like a real, like, I don't, I, I know that like, you know, if you're Christian, you kind

of do believe this, I, but I, I would venture to guess that the feeling of the belief in the 1600s was very visceral and literal. Like, it complicates whole elements of it for me, like, that guy who's just pissed because he didn't get to save the world from evil. Like, that guy, I am, like, pre-coded to understand that guy as like a fucking guy from like some part of the country that disagrees with me who is insincere and probably touches children you know what i mean like that's what i think of a guy who talks like that right but like maybe in this time this guy's because he thinks evil is winning like for real in an ins like a in a sincere way and that he with his like mighty sword can like put it back you know what i mean like yeah it's really weird

to think about a world where Christianity exists and God's presence feels like that. Literally, like among you. Like Satan is walking like physically around. It's yeah, it's scary. And like it's interesting to see the people at the higher and echelon of things still kind of very clearly, whether they consciously are or not using their religion to implement their desires and how that spirals out of control when that falls to the people who maybe believe a little bit more literally the things that you're, it's just, it's, it's so much

has changed and so much has not changed at the same time is like what I keep walking away from this all with. So that morning when the colony was to repent, Samuel Sewell walked into the South church in Boston, sat in his pew and he had a letter folded in his pocket. He handed the letter to the Reverend Samuel Willard, who you'll remember had been one of the most consistent critics of the trials from last episode, and it had written the preface to Increase Mather's book. Willard had been Sewell's pastor for years, and he was the one minister in Boston, Sewell trusted to read his letter in public. The service began. Willard read the prayers. The congregation participated in the fasting, and then at the appropriate moment, Willard stood and read Seward's

letter aloud. Sewell, and Sewell stood up while Willard read it. He stood in his pew, facing the congregation, the entire Sabbath gathering of the South Church staring back at him while the words were read by the Reverend. He just kind of stood there in silence. The letter is pretty short, and it's one of the more interesting documents that I'm going to have you guys read. Alex, you can read this. Like I said, it's a pretty short letter letter. And this is what the pastor is reading aloud.

Samuel Sewell, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and his family, and being sensible that as to the guilt contracted upon the opening of the late commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem, to which the order for this delay for this day relates, he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins. Yeah, he is, in essence taking the blame. trying to take the shame. The quote, he upon many accounts is more concerned than any that he knows of.

Like he's basically saying like he's the one. He's the judge of the court of Oryan Terminer who is standing up in front of his church in front of the colony in front of God and saying, this was me. I did this. I was wrong. I'm asking for forgiveness. Kind of playing the Jesus role in a weird little way of his own way of taking the sin upon himself from men and from God.

If that's what it takes to get somebody to be honest, great. And yeah, but this is also the only public apology from any of the judges ever. And remember, there were nine judges. Eight of them never publicly apologized. Stoughton went, again, the guy who was, you were just saying fighting evil, went to his grave defending the fact that he was fighting evil. Probably because he thought that shit was out there. He probably thought Satan was licking at his heels. I 100%.

I agree. And I believe that he truly did believe that Satan was real. Hawthorne and Corwin, who were the original. examining magistrates from part one, never just publicly said anything. They just went fucking quiet. We're like, nope, we're never going to talk about it again. Wait, Winthrop, John Richards,

Bartholomew Gedney, Peter Sargent, Nathaniel Saltonstall, who'd resigned in June. None of them ever stood up. Sewell was the only one. Stoughton never spoke to him about it directly, but Stoughton, who was acting governor, had to maintain at least formal civility

with Sewell on the governor's counsel, and he found a way to communicate his contempt for this. That was the dinner party snub that we talked about previously. Sue will also did something else that morning or shortly after, we're not sure, that almost nobody knew about during his lifetime, but that his family eventually disclosed. He started wearing a hair shirt, a hair shirt, which a hair short, a hair shirt is a coarse, uncomfortable undergarment worn directly against the skin as a form of constant penance.

I never heard about this before I did, like, I wrote this. Like, yeah. Did you knew about this? Oh, yeah. Really? Penance is an interesting thing. Like, I don't know. Like, again, going back to real God, like, tangible, present God and Satan, right?

Like, in this plain, like, a guy who you got to, like, think about and it's consistent between all men. Oh. You know, everybody today has, like, a lot more of a personal relationship with God. Maybe, maybe Samuel Seal, Sue, being like, I, God, I, God, I, God. will take the blame of this. I will put it on myself. I will be the blame. And then he's he's he's repenting, right? Maybe the other judges were like, he handled it. Great. Yeah, he took all the blame. It is, I guess by tradition, it is meant to be itchy and irritating. And he was apparently war to the day he died for the rest of his life. I think what's his name? War one from Da Vinci Code too.

That's a, that's a different version. But yeah, I'm looking it up right now. That's the chain mail one where you wear it around your leg and just having it on it digs into your body. Yeah, there's other versions that are made of sacks. Oh, God. Ivan the Terrible had a hair shirt that feels exquisitely Catholic to me. Yeah, really? St. Louis does. The actual man, St. Louis wore a hair shirt, but it was it was not actually, like many of them aren't made of hair. They're just made of like the coarsest cloth you can find. Just a shitty thing. Yeah. So it just hurts. A fun fact, he wore he died, which was he lived until 1730, so he wore the shirt for 33 years. That's fucking crazy.

Oh, God. You think after a while you get used to it? Your brain has to. Like, your brain has to adapt to it. But that's still fucking nuts. Like, he probably did feel bad. And then just literally probably woke up and thought about it every day. Yeah.

At least somebody did. God, at least somebody felt guilty about it out of the nine judges. I mean, I don't know what they, those other guys were thinking. I hope they at least couldn't sleep. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I hope they had a bad morning every morning after a bad night's sleep. But a few days after Sewell's apology, 12 men came together who had all been jurors on the court.

And they published their own statement of regret, which appears in Robert Caleb's book, which I have the quote here for Jesse to read. Who is this again? This is a published statement by the jurors of the court of the court who also felt regret. We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and Prince of the Air. We do hereby declare that we justly fear that we were sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted and distressed in our minds and do therefore humbly beg forgiveness. This is the hardest video thine has ever had to make. Yeah, it fades in really slow. And this is like a, they're already crying.

Yeah, it's, it's the political, we got tricked. It still wasn't our fault. Satan tricked us, but we admit we were tricked and we were. If thou dost remember, twas the powers of Satan and not our own minds, which led us to this. Happens to the best of us. And we should be forgiven. However, we will. think about this for a while longer, at least a day

of the war. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing too. Like, we have a total of 13 people who like openly apologize the best you could in 1690s like with the belief in God, right? Out of how many people who sat on the bench, out of how many magistrates and judges and however many people sign documents to make this all happen, 13 people in total ever are the only ones to ever apologize for it. And 12 of them much more just sort of like

took a big lateral step away from the problem compared to the guy who wore a fucking torture device the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like that second quote is like, we are not in trouble for this anymore. Goodbye.

Like leave us alone. Goodbye. God's got us. Now though, we're going to go back to Salem Village because while Sewell was in Boston standing up and doing all this stuff, who kind of made himself the center of it all. If you tell me that he sees a real witch and then this becomes a real mystery at the end, I'm going to lose my mind.

I wish that that's how this was going. It was another scene from again. I believe from his throat and then a live sparrow flew out. Back at home, back in Salem while he's away, Reverend Samuel Paris, his whole house, his whole like image in the colony is starting to slowly collapse in on itself. And it started almost immediately after the trials were officially done. If you remember in part one, that Salem Village, remember, was divided into two factions before any of the started. The Putnam's on one side, who were Paris's allies, the family of the lead afflicted accuser and Putnam Jr.

And then the porters and the porters and the nurses on the other side. And the families of many of the accused families that had stood with Rebecca Nurse, the families that had been opposing Paris's installation as minister in 1689. the half that wasn't paying Paris's money. That fight didn't just end when the trials ended. It just got worse. In April of 1693, within months of the last trial, a group of Salem Village dissenters, led by some of the nurse family and the Porter faction,

formally stopped attending Reverend Paris's services. They started walking every Sabbath to neighboring villages to hear other ministers, preach instead. This was their public act of religious defiance. It was their, I don't know, you guess, like, withdrawal, like passive withdrawal of their consent

for them to preach in their village. Paris is, because they were still, they were not paying him. It feels so passive aggressive. It is super passive. I mean, it's not, I realized that, like, I realized that, like,

there's, like, not that many people and everybody knows everybody and, like, going to church is, like, the only time you fucking see anybody. So for them to be missing, it's definitely like much more buzzworthy than it seems like it would be if you just want to another church but it's still very like they didn't like hit them they just no then we will get our godliness elsewhere exactly and keep in mind his congregation all which

had never even been large like the village was not all that large and now it was visibly shrinking week after week and then the dissenters started writing petitions they documented paris's role in the trials they listed specific actions that he had taken, specifically remember, the sermons that had whipped up the panic in February of 1692, the shit where he was like declaring war on Satan himself and his presence of the examinations of accused witches in his own meeting house, his refusal to defend members of his own congregation when they were accused, his refusal to pay Tichib's jail fees, which, you know, shout outs to them for like bringing that up as part of the complaints.

That's like actually way more than I ever would have expected from anyone. That's what I'm saying. Like it's not, you know, now it, yeah, it's, I appreciate all. In today's lens, of course. Today's lens, of course, but I just, it was bleak back then, guys. It was bleak. They also argued that he was unfit to continue as their minister, and they argued he should be removed.

Paris by 1694 was a man under siege in his own village. And at this point, his wife Elizabeth was sick. She would die in July of 1694. His niece Abigail Williams, who was one of the original afflicted accusers, the 11-year-old girl from Part 1, remember, who was adopted because of orphanage stuff. We don't know what happens to her because she, too, vanishes from the historical record around this time. Baker thinks she may have died, but we don't know. She didn't have a MicePace or anything? No, she didn't have a Micepace.

It's a few years out from that still unfortunate. Even Tom wouldn't friend her. Tom just in like a fucking like one of those like puritanical buckle hats. Yeah. The Putnam faction was still defending Paris though. But the Putnam faction was shrinking too because by the end of 1692, several of the Putnam's family's own extended relatives in Andover and elsewhere had been accused of witchcraft. The very machinery that put that the Putnam's had helped set in a motion was eating at their own alliance. So their numbers, remember one of the big.

Big reasons they were so powerful as their numbers were bigger than the porters. But their own numbers were starting to get put into jail because of the witchcraft accusations. And by 1694, even some of the Putnams were quietly beginning to wonder if maybe their support for Paris had been a mistake. Maybe we should have not sided with with Paris and we should have been on the porter's side. Feels like privilege. A little bit. It's always until it starts getting you that they start giving a shit, you know? in 1695, a special church council was convened to try to mediate this dispute.

And the council included increased Mather himself. They tried to broker peace and they couldn't. The dissenters wouldn't accept Paris staying. They did not. There was no condition in which they were okay with Paris staying. The Putnam's had no condition where they would accept him going. On the other hand, they did the hat he gets, no matter what he stays. They loved him so much.

They needed him around. They loved his cooking. Well, after that, because nobody moved. The council eventually issued a report suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Paris might diplomatically potentially consider leaving on his own. And Paris fucking ignored it. It took another year. April of 1696, Paris finally announced that he would step down when his contract would expire on July 1st. He was worn out.

His wife was dying. his niece, we don't know what the fuck happened. The village, he had spent eight years presiding over, had basically turned on him in every direction, and with his wife finally dying on July 14th, two weeks after Paris's last day as minister, it only got worse for him. Because Paris had no other job to go to.

He had no other church that would take him, and he was still living in the parsonage, the house that he had, you'll again remember, he'd manipulated the village into deeding to his. him personally in 1689. The Salem Village Committee sued him to evict him. He countersued back a salary and claimed that he was owed. The dispute went to arbitration in 1697.

Wait Winthrop and Samuel Sewell and Alicia Cook served as arbitrators. And yeah, again, remember how tiny this world is. It's all the same fucking people constantly coming back together. The arbitrators, the arbitrators settled. it and Paris would surrender the deed to the parsonage in exchange for 79 pounds in back pay. He left Salem Village, never to come back. The next decade of Reverend Samuel Parris's life is a slow, kind of picturesque disaster. He took a post in the small frontier, no, like he gets a post and the small frontier village

of Stowe, the same village where he'd done a temporary preaching stint back in 1685, and the one that had first convinced him to pursue the ministry again. That's where it all started. Oh, nice. He immediately got into a salary dispute with that congregation. He remarried. I know, very surprising. He remarried to a woman named Dorothy Noyce from Sudbury.

Noyes. Noyes. Oh, noice. Oh, you married Nois, noice. He left Stowe in late 1698 and moved his family to Newton, then to Watertown, then to Concord. He worked briefly as a school teacher. He then worked briefly as a shopkeeper. And then he worked briefly as a farmer.

And then none of it worked out. His new wife, Dorothy, had brought a substantial inheritance into the marriage. And Samuel Perez, remember, this dude blew through 7,000 pounds inheritance in the Barbados property and business that he owed. And so what do you think happened when his wife inherited money? Did he learn? No. Uh, no. Hold on.

Wait a minute. Hold on. I was, you know, yesterday. Do you think he learned his lesson? Yes. You know that,

you know that picture of, you know that picture of Bugs Bunny? That one where he's like, Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. Uh,

correct. No. He fucking blew through that money too. He served a short stint in prison for debt. Uh, and he may have considered moving back to the Barbados. We don't know. but in 1708, Paris took a job as Minister of Dunstable,

a remote frontier village that was so dangerous, so poor and so vulnerable to Wabanaki raids, that no other minister in the colony would take it. The previous minister had quit after going six months without pay. Paris lasted three years. In 1711, he moved to Sudbury, his second wife's hometown, where he lived out the rest of his life as a small-time farmer,

briefly teaching school, building up a modest estate to leave to his children. He died in February of 1720 at the age of 67, and his will, written a week before his death, opened with the phrase, quote, perceiving the approach of the King of Terror's drawing near. The King of Terrors was a Puritan euphemism for death. He was basically like, oh, I'm about to die. I'm going to die soon. It comes from the book of Job, apparently. 28 years after Samuel Paris had stood in his pulpit and warned his congregation that the devil had been raised among them,

that his rage was vehement and terrible and that no one could know when it would end. He was at long last facing his own king of terrors as he had finally outlived the devils that he supposedly found and fucking died as a mediocre nobody. It's a shame he didn't fall into nothingness and lose all of his everything. he had a modest estate that he could leave to his children, but at least he didn't die continuing to be a preacher and preaching, like, hatred to whoever would listen to him. I guess. I'm trying to salvage a little bit of, like,

sounds like what I want to do. Like, that sounds like if this ended tomorrow and that was what happened in the rest of my life, I would be like, ah. It all worked out. Fuck. I mean, I guess you're right.

Sometimes just... He left an estate, a modest estate for his children? Yeah, he had a small farm. You know, I just want to point out how funny it is that at that time, and only really up until recently, one with no real training could just go to a new town and start over and claim you were a thing. I'm, what are you talking about? I'm James.

Yeah. Alex, what is that? I'm James Landing, dude. Yeah, you go out far enough. you will never see anyone you knew ever again. Yeah. I'm James Blastweight. So in 1699, Thomas Putner, Thomas Putnam Sr. died.

He was 47. Two weeks later, his wife, Ann Car Putnam and Putnam Sr., the troubled mother we had already talked about, also died, both within a fortnight of each other at the time. They left behind eight children, the eldest of whom was Ann Putnam, who was now 19. So at 19, the girl who basically was at the center of a lot of this stuff

was the head of the household. She had seven younger siblings that ranged aged from 16 down to seven months old. She had to raise them. And by every account we could find she raised them alone. She never married. In 1706 when she was 26, Ann Putnam Jr. applied for full membership in the Salem Village Church. The Salem Village congregation under its new minister Joseph Green, who was a 22-year-old Harvard graduate, who had taken over after Paris and who had spent his short tenure quietly trying to repair the village's wounds, spiritual wounds, still required a full public confession from anyone seeking membership.

Most other Puritan congregations had loosened to this requirement, but Salem Village had not. Reverend Green worked with Ann Putnam on her confession, and he showed a draft to Samuel Nurse, one of Rebecca nurse's sons, a man who had 14 years earlier to this, watched his own mother die being hanged because of her testimony as being a witch. Samuel Nurse approved the draft, and then Ann Putnam Jr. stood in front of her congregation while Reverend Green read her statement aloud, and I have the statement here for you. This is what I mean to so many sources for this shit, man. It's crazy how many documents we actually have. Jess, you can read this one. I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father's family in the year about 92, that I, then being

in my childhood, should by such a providence of God be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons, and that it was a great delusion of Satan that seaved me in the sad time, or that sad time, whereby I justly fear, I have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood. Though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did not out of any anger, malice, or ill will to any person, for I had no

such thing against one of them, but what I did was ignorantly being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing good wife nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause with others of so sad a calamity to them and their families, for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those onto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offense, whose relations were taken away or accused. I give him 65%.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Actually, Baker in the book, I have a quote from him, specifically says, quote, the statement is worded so opaquely and inclusively that it is impossible to say. So people will see it in what they want. to see. Like, basically like, it's, it was a YouTube apology. Yes, exactly. It was a fucking YouTube. It was a non-apology apology. It's whatever you want it to be. I want to lie in the Yeah, this was the supreme version of I'm sorry if it offended you. I hear that you

were offended. Some people might say it was Satan and not me who's responsible. And then I shouldn't be blamed. But whether it was me or not who actually did. these things, I feel really bad that anyone was hurt by anything to happen. My favorite part of this entire thing is the part where it's like, you know, whatever it is that I did say, I didn't do it because I was mad or I hated someone or I just didn't like that person. I had none of that against them. I was just being stupid, but because Satan made me do it.

Yeah, Satan made me stupid. I'm sorry. Which is a crazy thing to say because then that's literally being like, yes, those witches? why I was the witch all along. Agatha, bitch. Like that's crazy. It's a not apology. Cotton Mather never apologized as we learned.

He died in 1728. His diaries in the years after, by his account, he said he grew more spiritually anxious after the witch trials. He wrote about the trials privately throughout his life, but he never publicly recanted what he had done at Burroughs execution or what he had written in his book about defending this shit. Like he kind of went to the grave also. I don't, unlike Stoughton, I don't think he died believing he was fighting evil.

I think he was more worried dying, defending his reputation in his actions, where I think the other guy truly did believe he was like a judge fighting evil. This guy was way more self, self-preservation focus. This guy was a clever little devil. That's all I'm going to say. Yep. And while the apologies were going on, the colony was also slowly mechanically, legally. trying to undo what it had done. In 1697, the same year, Sewell's apology,

a few of the surviving accused had started petitioning for compensation. Their argument had been that they were in prison, falsely imprisoned, that their property had been seized, their family had been impoverished. Yeah, their reputations were destroyed. Many of them were still under the formal legal status of a tinder, which was an English legal concept

that meant that as a convicted felon, you forfeited your civil rights. Your children could not inherit. Your land was in limbo, like that kind of thing. And they still were? Yeah. Why? Welcome to the shit, dude.

It makes no sense. It's no sense. Petitions like these trickled in for years. Because remember, there's like, how many people confessed just to be let go? There's hundreds of people that were confessed and now needed to be undone in the court. Because, like, they didn't do like a giant. wide wiping of witchcraft like things in the court, people had to

be acquitted for this shit. But usually when you get acquitted, it means that they like undo the shit that they did to you, right? You would think. These petitions trickled in for years. Most of them were ignored. In 1703, the general court

took a first pass at it, and they passed an act that reversed the attainder of three people. Abigail Faulkner, Sarah Wardwell, and Elizabeth Proctor. three out of the 20 executed and several more condemned. Honestly, kind of fucking embarrassing. Like just all, just do all of them.

But no, three of them. The families of most of the dead got nothing. The thing that finally moved the colony was a petition campaign organized in 1709 and 1710, led largely by just the families of Salem villages. It's always, always the fucking people. Dude, wait until we get this is a wait, just wait, there's a little part that's just like crazy to me. A substantial sum, like they, they, they, uh, I lost my spot. Uh, they yeah, yeah, there we go. So all the families in Salem village got together. The nurses, the towns,

the Corries, the Easties, they all went to the general court collectively. They demanded a complete reversal of a tanger for all of the executed. They demanded financial reparations for the families of those who had died and those who had been imprisoned. The general court appointed a committee to investigate and the committee took more than a year. of investigating the stuff. They received claims totaling 796 pounds, which was an enormous amount of money. Think about how seven pounds was $3,000.

You're looking at what? A thousand to $1,500. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, 1,500. So we'll say 10 pounds is 2,000, maybe, something like that. And so 10, 10 times 7, you know, like you're looking at 70,000, 10 times 100. You're looking at $700,000 or 10 times 10?

Yeah, whatever. A ridiculous amount of money. I can't do math right now. On October 17th, 1711, the Massachusetts General Court passed an act to reverse the attainders of George Burroughs and others for witchcraft. The act formally reversed the convictions of 12 of the executed witches plus Giles Corey, plus seven others who had been condemned but not yet executed. 20 now had been restored, but not even all of the executed. it had been restored yet. Only a chunk of them.

On December 17th, 1711, and just also keep in mind, of the first three people that were acquitted or, like, released, Giles Corey, the guy who got pressed to death was not of the first round. He was second round, like, acquittals,

which is not because the- second-round acquittal pick. He was a second-round acquittal pick, man. That's rough. On December 17th, 1711, the general court approved a payment of 578 pounds to be distributed to the families.

The reparations were divided according to the committee's recommendations. And the nurse, so the nurse family received 25 pounds for Rebecca. The borough's heirs received 50 pounds. The estate of Giles Corey received 21 pounds. Sarah Good's heirs received 30 pounds. And Mary Eastie's family received 20 pounds.

You know, they got a chunk of money. They didn't come close to compensating for like the loss of fucking family, but at least they got some money out of it. Philip English, the wealthy Salem merchant who had fled to New York with his wife to avoid execution had claimed losses of more than 1,500 pounds. He received nothing in this round and would have to keep petitioning for another decade and a half before he received a token settlement that he refused on that when he did get it offered, he refused on principle.

The dude had to leave his whole life behind because he was going to die otherwise. And then the 1711 and the 1711 reversal of a tanger didn't cover everything. everybody. The committee only reversed the convictions of the people whose families had specifically petition for them. Why? I don't. This is what I mean. We got to keep doing this because it's like, it keeps going. Six of the executed had no surviving family member willing or able to petition. So their convictions stood. Their attainders stood. Their names in the eyes of the law remained names of convicted witches. The six were Bridget Bishop, who was first hanged, Susanna Martin, who who had hanged with Rebecca Nurse in July 19th. Alice Parker.

and Poodiator or Pood eater, Pud eater, whatever the name was, Wilmot Red and Margaret Scott. And then there was a seventh whose case was even weirder because she'd been convicted by the Superior Court of Judicature in January of 1693. She'd been reprieved by Governor Phipps. Her brother had tried to petition for a reversal of her attainder on her behalf, but his petition got lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, I guess. And apparently the court confused her with her. mother who had the same name and had been acquitted. So in 1712, the woman herself petitioned

the court directly and she reminded the court that she had in fact been convicted and that her name had been left off the 1711 reversal. And so the court took her petition petition and didn't act on it. That was Elizabeth Johnson Jr. Uh, we're not the, what the fuck? In 1712, we're almost, we're getting to the close to the end here. I know. We're like the last back quarter of this now. Everybody was like, we were wrong. And then everybody just paid for it for the rest of their lives. Dude, just wait.

In 1712, on March 6th, the Salem Town Church formally voted to rescind the excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey. Because while they were acquitted, they were still, they still remained excommunicated from Catholic Church, even after they were killed. The same excommunications that the minister who had called the eight hanged in September 22nd. On what grounds were they excommunicated? Well, when they get convicted as witches, they are, they get also immediately excommunicated. Now reversing the excommunication is a separate process than the court process of getting them acquitted and seen as innocent. So you do one and then you have

the ability to go and do the other. Because you can't get unexcommunicated until you are then first approved to be innocent by the court because of the court says you're a witch. And why would the church let you in. This was like when I needed registration to get insurance and insurance to get registration. I was like, help. It's exactly correct. That's exactly correct.

So the repair work just kind of continued and like fits and starts over, not just a decade, but multiple decades. Like we're talking, we're in 1712 as we're talking right now. in 1750 Salem Village finally petitioned to separate from Salem Town become its own community and it took two more years

and an argument with the royal governor but in 1752 the village got its incorporation and it chose a new name this is when the village became known as what it's known as now Danvers. We don't know what it was named after some people think it was named after the English aristocrat but more

importantly it was the only name they care about is that was named anything other than Salem. Anything other than Salem. Because by 1750s, Salem was already so famous for the witch trials that any village trying to put

16992 behind it wanted nothing to do with the name at all. So if you go to Danvers today, you can stand on the foundation of Reverend Paris's parsonage. The house itself burned down in the 1780s. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is a museum now.

And the Salem Village meeting house where the first examinations were held is gone. The site of Gallows Hill where most people for centuries thought the hangings had happened is a neighborhood of single family homes now. The actual execution site, Proctor's Ledge, identified by a team of historians that we talked about last episode in 2016, is now a small memorial just below the hill on just like a quiet residential street. The trials happened in a real place, like it's just now known as Danvers.

And you would think, looking at like 1711, that the colony had done what it was going to do, that like the legal reckoning was over, that the rest of the story was going to be about how memory kind of works. But no, because like Alex said, how did it take so fucking long? Because there's still people that up to, like, I'm jumping ahead of my own. I don't want to jump ahead, but I'm like, it's mind blowing. So the first thing that happened is what happened to most like early American history around this time was that it that it became a story people wanted to tell we saw it with bell star

and a bunch of other stuff i always go to bell star because it's like i don't know i just go there also we're a new country right we're looking for like super new yeah we're looking for like a story of our country a little bit you know yep so the first major retelling of salem was charles upham's two volume salem witchcraft which was published in 1867 good title good title solid respectable nothing that's crazy? No, no, it's just Salem witchcraft. You get what you're getting when you go into it. You don't have to think about it. That's good. Upham was a Salem native and a former Unitarian minister and former U.S. congressman who set out to write a comprehensive account. And it's from Upham that a lot of the cultural mythology about Salem actually solidifies for the first time.

The thinly veiled land grab reading of the trials that people, including myself, thought a lot of this was for initially. And the framing of the afflicted girls as, conscious, like, aware fraudsters of what they're doing. And the elevation of like Nathaniel, uh, salt install as the lone honorable judge, some of up in up and upham's framing has held up. But a lot of it hasn't. The second thing that happened, like a lot of it comes from that, basically is what I'm saying from that book.

That's pretty, what years that? That's pretty early. 1867. So a little over 150 years after the trial. I was, I'm surprised that people were thinking about it from anybody's point of without a dick before 1910. Yeah. Well, I think it's 1860.

The 1860s makes sense for me, but we'll get, I'm kind of going to talk about a little bit as we wrap up. But the other thing that happened much later was Arthur Miller's, The Crucible, which premiered on Broadway in January of 1953. This guy was a 37-year-old playwright. And this was like the height of his career. And Jesse,

you brought this up last week and we'll address it right now because you're like, I wonder if people like wrote about. this with McCarthyism. He was quite literally writing about McCarthyism with the with the stuff with this play. Crucible is like a parable of McCarthy is right. It is. Well, there you go. Exactly. Through the McCarthy hearings, he had personally been, because in the McCarthy hearings, he had personally been called to testify before the House on American Activities Committee. And he had personally watched friends and colleagues be destroyed by accusations they couldn't defend themselves against in any rational forum. And I didn't know that

about him. He went to Salem in the early 1950s, did a few days of archival research, so nothing deep, and produced a play that basically just took the names and the characters and fictionalized basically everything for it for dramatic effect. But it captured something about the underlying psychology of this thing that no historian at this point in time had really gotten hold of. Sure. Because in the play, like we talked about, we'll go a little detail, is that John Proctor isn't 60 like he is in real life. He's 35 and he has an affair with a teenage Abigail Williams. Tichiba is this voodoo priestess from Barbados.

Giles Corey's last words are more weight, which may actually be true. And like arguably, maybe the most accurate part of the entire play. It's just the more way. That ass. Yeah. Yeah. None of the historical detail matters, though. What matters is that the play is that a,

that a community has decided to destroy people by accusing them of an unfalsifiable crime, that the only way to live is to confess and then accuse others. Right. And that the only way to keep your soul for these people at time is to die. And that was also McCarthyism's allegory because he fucking lived it. And it's also accidentally kind of a pretty good description of what actually happened in 1692. The Crucible also did something else, which is that at 4. Salem to confront itself again.

By the 1950s, Salem was a working industrial city that did not particularly want to be famous for the trials. Miller's play brought the trials back into national consciousness in a way that hadn't happened in a century, and Salem started

getting pressure from descendants of the accused, from historians and from random Americans who'd seen the play to actually exonerate the people who had been executed. That's so fucking like magic based. That's like some like occultism type shit right there.

Yeah, yeah, it is. In 1957, after 12 years of effort, the Massachusetts general court finally passed a resolution, but it was fucking carefully worded. 1972? Oh, okay. Did I say 72? Like dumbly?

No, I have a head cold, dude. Don't take this on yourself. Yeah, yeah. In 1957, after 12 years of effort, the Massachusetts general court finally passed a resolution. It was fucking, like I said, worded very carefully. It pardoned, quote, one and puttider and certain other persons, end quote.

That was the language. One and putter, puttider, putt eater, and certain other person. We've established this. It doesn't matter what her name really was. I know, yeah. For this show, it's pood eater. She likes, she likes dessert. Putt eater.

P-U-D-A-T-O-R. Like a pudding eater. Yeah, that's how I see it. That's how I see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like Fatso last name. I don't know. Like, oh, this puttater.

Yeah, exactly. The legislature had parted in the six who'd been left off the 1711 reversal, Bridget Bishop, Susanna Martin, Alice Parker, and Putteeter, Wilmot Red, and Margaret Scott. But they had only named one of them by name. The other five were certain other persons. Massachusetts in 1957, formally exonerated five people without quite saying who they were. This is going to actually fucking matter later. In 1992, Salem observed the 300th anniversary of the trials. The city built a memorial designed by James Cutler and Maggie Smith on a small plot next to the old Burying Point Cemetery in downtown Salem.

The memorial consists of 21 stone benches, one for each of the 20 people. executed in 1692. Each bench is canty levered out of a slow stone wall with the victim's name, the method of execution, and the date carved into the side. Visitors leave flowers on the benches. You can walk between them. You can sit on them. But like, you know, it's a tourist attraction at this point.

Sure. The memorial site, the memorial is on the site of the colonial era cemetery where some of the trial era ministers and magistrates are buried. And the acute, but the accused. are not buried there. They were never given an honor of burial and the proper burial ground. The benches are the only memorials they actually have.

In 2001, a historian in Salem resident named Paula Keen noticed something. She'd been looking at the 1957 resolution, and she realized that the, quote, one and Poudita and certain other person's language meant that legally speaking, the five unnamed exonerated witches had not actually been exonerated.

The resolution didn't have legal effect for unnamed people. The five were still, in the formal eyes of Massachusetts law, convicted witches, 309 years after they've been hanged. Why did they do it like that? I don't know. I don't know. At all?

Like, what the fuck? Like, what? It didn't count. No, they were still by law. The whole point was to like go back and honor. those people and do something that like really didn't need to be done by now. And they got lazy with it instead of writing all their names in 1957. They just didn't have my hand or what?

They just remembered poot eater because it's a weird one. I know. It's so insane. So she worked with the descendants with Salem State Senator Michael Ruin with local historians. A new bill was drafted. It named each of the five by name. The Massachusetts legislature passed it on October 31st, 2001 because of course, Halloween, Uh, which they thought would be,

25 years ago. Dude, just, just wait. Like, they thought it was thematic. So they passed it then. Governor Jane Swift signed the bill into law in Salem. Massachusetts had now 309 years later officially cleared every name convicted, uh, every named convicted witch from the trials.

Except for one. There's still one. In 2017, a memorial was dedicated at Proctor's lead. The historical team led by Baker had identified the actual execution site the year before, which is where we learned. It's not Gallows Hill, but in the other spot. Salem and the descendants of the executed dedicated a quiet memorial, another low stone wall listing the names of the 19 hanged at that site.

There's no parking there. It's like you walk or it's like in a neighborhood. You have to go like actively, actively walk. It's like more about it being there than about visiting it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But something happened in 2022. because in 2022, a group of eighth graders finished what the colony had actually started in 1711.

Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was 22 years old when she was sentenced to death in January 1693. She was from Andover. Her family had been one of the hardest hit families in the entire Andover panic. She had at least 28 relatives who were accused at this time. Her father was Reverend Francis Dane, an elderly Andover minister who became one of the trial's most vocal critics from within Andover itself. Her mother also named Elizabeth Johnson was accused, tried, and acquitted. Elizabeth Jr. was convicted because she had confessed in language that reads 330 years later, like the words of someone with severe, like a severe what the historians think, intellectual disability. She described the devil appearing to her as two black cats. She showed the magistrate's marks on her knuckles where she said the other witches had sucked her.

S-U-C-K-T. She gave a tangled contradictory account that even her own grandfather later said and reflected that she was, quote, weak and incapitious and fearful. Her grandfather, Reverend Dane, said publicly in 1692 that he did not believe his grandfather was a witch. He believed she was confused and frightened. He believed her confessions was the panicked confabulation of a young woman who didn't have the cognitive resources to defend herself essentially. Governor Phipps reprieved her alongside the other seven in 1693. She was eventually released. She returned to And over and she lived the rest of her life there. She never married,

never even had kids or anything like that. She never had anyone to advocate for her. either though. In 1709 and again in 1716, the legal record actually shows her selling small parcels of land she'd inherited from her father of the father, which suggests the colony had quietly stopped treating her as legally dead at least, even though her attained her never resolved. She lived until 1747 dying at the age of 77 years old, in obscurity in a small and overhouse. Crazy. Her name had been left off of the 17th. 11 reversal because the court had confused her with her mother. We talked about that a little earlier.

This is why it's important because it had also been left off in 1957 resolution because nobody remembered her. It had been left off the 2001 exoneration because the historians and descendants who had organized that effort had been working from the 1957 list, which hadn't had her name on it. I was going to say, did they just use the like the names from the play? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, yeah, that's good enough.

By 2010, Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was the last name convicted which from the Salem trials whose conviction had never been formally reversed. In 2022, she had no descendants to push for her. Her grandfather had been, post COVID. Only post COVID, dude, literally post COVID. Her grandfather had been the only person in the entire record who had publicly defended her. And he died in 1697. God, damn.

So the way this happened is that in 2020, a civics teacher at North Andover Middle School named Carrie LaPierre was looking for a project for her eighth grade class. So she'd been reading a book about local Andover history. And she came across Elizabeth Johnson Jr's case. She brought it to her students. The students were eighth graders. Like, you're like, you know, their eighth grade is like for our non, like American listeners, eighth grade is 13 to 14 years old. they decided that they were going to doing this project. They were going to clear Elizabeth Johnson Jr.'s name.

They spent the next two years on it. They read the trial transcripts. They read the 1692 testimony in which a young woman with what looks an awful like a developmental disability described the two black cats. They learned in the process of all this. Not only how just to write a bill, they wrote the bill. That's awesome. they drafted petitions.

They presented their work to lawmakers. They worked with State Senator Diana Diaglio to figure out how to actually get the bill onto the floor. It's of the Massachusetts legislator. The bill. And when they finally had their way in, the bill stalled. But the students kept going. Their teacher kept advocating.

This is like hero teacher. I just want to say right now, like when I was reading, I've been putting this together, fucking Carrie, you're a hero. you're the teacher that I would have loved to have in high school. It's like you instill the passion into these kids that like so few teachers are able to do. It's so fucking badass. I'm so glad that like you exist and the teachers like you exist. That's fucking crazy.

So it stalled. But their teacher, Carrie, was like, just keep going, keep pushing. They were, you know, so they wrote up follow up letters. They made follow up presentations. They kept the case in front of the legislature when like seemingly, the case was not going to go anywhere. Senator DeZoglio eventually found a workaround. She was able to attach the exoneration as an amendment to the

23 Massachusetts state budget. That's how she got it in. And on May 26th, 2022, finally, 329 years after Elizabeth Johnson Jr. had been sentenced to death, the Massachusetts legislature passed the budget. And on July 28th, 2022, Governor Charlie Baker signed it into law, tucked into a $52.7 billion fiscal 2020-spending package,

was an amendment exonerating Elizabeth Johnson Jr. Of the crime of witchcraft. Doing literally nothing. The eighth graders won. You know, two years of them putting this together. It's crazy that that should not be like that. That also speaks to our government. It's a lack of priority.

That's insane. Yeah. It's insane. Like, insane. In the press coverage afterwards, I actually remember this, the press after the stuff. The students who had worked on the case spent two years calling Elizabeth Johnson Jr. by a nickname. They called her E.J.J.J. They had developed, like, these kids kind of like developed their own little personal

relationship with this woman that they've been trying to exonerate for two years. Advocating for her. Yeah, exactly. And Carrie LaPierre, the teacher, told reporters that the class, talked about EJJ for so long and so consistently that she'd become one of our world. Like they just like they felt like they knew this woman. They were haunted by a tulpa of EJJ for the rest of their lives. Yeah, like that's why they fought so much for her as they personalized it.

Yes, 100%. And that in 2022 to 2023, that is technically where the Salem witch trials end, which is nuts. EJJ was the last name on the list, the last conviction reversed, and it was the kids who did it. Now, the last bit that we're going to talk about here as we wrap this episode up is, before we close out, a question I talked about in part two. Because we said this at the beginning of part one as well, that the Salem witch trials are the largest witch panic in American history. And they are also the last major witch panic in the entire English-speaking world. after Salem, no person is ever again executed for witchcraft in colonial America or in post-colonial America or in England, Scotland. Scotland would I learn execute one more witch in 1727, but then never another one after that.

Wasn't there some? Oh, no, I think it was just a public execution in the 70s or something in England. I can't remember. Oh, I don't. Yeah, I have no idea. Well, the European continent has scattered cases throughout the early 18th century. But the great age of European witch trials, quote unquote, was, which by the way killed between 40 and 60,000 people

over the previous two centuries after Salem it's effectively over. And historians spent years on this question. And there are a lot of answers and basically all of them are true in part, right? Some of it is a law. Salem's evidentiary failures became for English-speaking jurisprudence

like a sort of permanent cautionary tale, spectral evidence stuff. The use of spectral evidence, the testimony of afflicted persons about what they had seen, the specter of accused person doing, like all that stuff got formally disqualified by all of this. That was a huge shift.

Confession also became less acceptable as the sole basis for conviction because Salem had demonstrated that confession could be coerced. If only the cops of today would learn that. The asymmetry that the colony had unwittingly produced, which was the 55 who confessed and lived, the 19 who maintained their innocence and died,

became a permanent stain on the idea that confession was reliable evidence. Some of it is also religion. The Puritan worldview, which had held the supernatural, like, malevolence, walked among the godly community story could be detected and prosecuted, was already in retreat in the 1690s. If you remember in part one, we talked about how, like, they were already trying to figure out how to get the younger generation to come to the church.

The numbers were bleeding out of Puritans. Increased Mather's book and the publication, of Thomas Brattle's letter and the public apologies of DeSuel and the jurors. All together, these documents pushed the colony's religious establishment toward a position that had been quietly available kind of for decades. Again, the devil was real, but that his work, his works were largely inscrutable, and that the courts of men were not equipped to identify and punish his accomplices with the certainty of witchcraft prosecutions required.

You know what's like what's so funny about. it is that all the times throughout history in America mostly this is like what I know and have studied I don't know much about sorry Europe I got nothing for you but in America at least every time there's been a moral panic or some sort of like demonic this or that and the church is really hammer home the idea of Satan walks among us come to the church we need you it usually A is because there are enough people going to church. B, because during the time there's confusion and people are looking for answers. And C, the outcome is always the same.

There's an uptick, a commotion. And then people are like, well, that was the stupidest thing I've ever been a part of. Never do that again. Yeah. And what ends up happening after that is you see that most churches that are more positive and that give something to the community that give people hope and a reason to attend. and community in a positive way end up thriving and continue to thrive compared to those that are negative.

Yeah. But much like all things in life, the negative stuff is a is huge. Like when it happens, it gets big. Like in this case, it got big. But when it ends up, the aftermath is always people look for sanity where they're like, I need to find someone who isn't a mess. So it just, it's a cycle. It keeps happening over and over and over again.

Let's hope. Yeah, yeah, knock on what. Another, like another one of the reasons that the witch trial stopped is like, you got to keep in mind also the year we're in. Like, science is about to kind of pop off. I hear that's a new thing. Yeah, it's a new thing by then. You know, Thomas Brattle, again, is the kind of figurehead we looked at in the story.

He kind of came from the Royal Society and institution where Robert Boyle was working. But like the next century would be. like a century of adopting scientific habits. Like we see the boom of scientific thought processes from this point on. Yeah, reason and stuff. Then obviously, another big part of it is like, they can't be doing this witchcraft stuff while there's the war still going on. King Williams war on the New England frontier.

The war like that has talked about constantly throughout all this and where some of the PTSD may even started is still fucking going. And it wouldn't end until 1697 with the Treaty of Ricewick. The end of the war coincides. very closely with the end of the trials, too, in the beginning of, like, the public's reckoning for both of those things. All of these explanations are, I think, partly real. And none of them by themselves can fully really explain it alone.

I think it's all of it, like, the perfect storm of it all. But there's still another one more piece as well, because Salem ended, like, 21 dead people in a small community is a lot. Like, a reminder that another reason I think this ended, is because it immediately started eating away at people's friends, family, community, a way where which trials in bigger countries with more people wasn't really doing. Here, as we kept pointing out, like part after part, we see the same names, crisscrossing with each other, talking to each other, it's family feuds, it's always the same names.

I think 20 to 20 people dead in like a year on a community that that is that small is a shock to the community itself and how quickly it reached the higher class individuals of the colony. It's weird how not global people were at this time. You know what I mean? Like, it's like if something happens to your immediate vicinity, like right now, like in L.A., people are like getting murdered in town probably. Like I don't know how often, but like around me, violence, like stuff happening. I don't even hear about it. I don't even know about these people. Very different way of living. So as we wrap up and this is that, you know, come to the end of this, where does it kind of like leave us, right? Basically, like, all that shit.

You know, the trials happen for a myriad of reasons. You've got the Frontier War, New Royal Charter taking out a colony with no functioning government that it can fully understand with like half privileges and half no privileges, you know, PTSD leaking its way in. The important thing is like, at least they fucking stopped. It's a bit late in, you know, they killed 20 people. There was some awareness at least. There was some awakening.

One guy wore an uncomfortable piece of leather and one guy's said that he wanted to lay down in the dust. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And though they, in their apologies, they say, you know, it still was Satan's fault, but they apologize for being tricked by Satan. It's still, by the end, it would still take until 2022 for the witch trials to truly actually, actually technically by law. And that's funny.

Thanks a bunch of eighth graders. And that is where we're going to leave it. There's still so much, like out there about the witch trials that, you know, got left on the cutting room floor. If this sparked an interest, you'll read the book I recommend at the top. There's also so many other books. Like there is a wealth of just fascinating political

and governmental things happening around this time and why this was all going on. And there are so many other just details about each one of these people who were killed, had a family and a story. And we know things about them that just didn't have time to get to that. It's just, it's fascinating. But goddamn, when I was putting this together,

I did not expect to mirror so much of present day. like as it did. And that feels like it's a lesson I consistently learn on the show. Whenever I do a topic that feels old, how much of it is still so true to this day. This one is such a crazy like allegory.

Like it makes perfect sense. How are you feeling about the Salem Witch trials from where you were going in and now where we are after? Surprised by the context, but like walking away from it, I feel the same lesson should be learned from it.

Right? Like we're all still very clear that we, this was like, slow key, the mass hysteria squeak wall. You know what I mean? Like, yeah,

it's really all this boils down to is a bunch of people went absolutely insane from their senses for a while. Yeah. And did something that was so not right and then couldn't even cop to it for the most part. Something in their

1690's brain and gut told them what they were doing. There was a harsh portion that was like, fuck, I fucked up. We fucked up. We have to find a way to apologize by this,

but do it in a way where we don't blame ourselves fully and acknowledge Satan is real. It's fascinating. I will say this. I will say this about feeling guilt about past decisions, be they political, whatever they are. As long as you change, nobody's waiting for that apology, you know, as long as you change. And in this case, they didn't even change.

It had to go to all the way to 2022. But as long as you change, it's all good. How do you feel, Jesse, about it? And you feel similar? I mean, I think it, as you mentioned, it, reimbled. forces the fact that there are many times people use

people's beliefs and things against them or to manipulate them. And it always ends terribly. Always. Always. And most of the time the people that do do the using don't necessarily feel bad about it or will justify why they did it for some

purpose. So yeah, man. I mean, I've never been a fan. I don't like when people take something. Really? You know? No, this is why like, I think Alex and I were talking about the amazing Randy.

I love that dude and that he just went after con men and people that used, you know, like my desire to talk to a dead relative used it against me to bilk me for all my money. That's disgusting. I hate that kind of stuff. So, you know, I have no problem with faith and believing in anything, right? It could be Bigfoot. you know what I mean like I don't give a shit but then taking that and then using it to like manipulate someone or to yeah like if we just suddenly made an episode where we said bigfoot was real

we have evidence by our bigfoot pamphlet yeah by I would take issue I'd be like this is some shady shit fake big foot pamphlet from the 80s instead yeah my solemn swear to all these if we ever get evidence of anything it's going out it's free everywhere I'm gonna plaster that shit across the internet until the CIA comes for me for an episode bro. We'll probably be on my Twitter the day. I've confirmed that that it's real. That's it for us. Before we head off to,

we're going to head off to patreon.com slash chlamanati pod for a minisode. Let me for North London forever. That's for my boy, Dean, apparently his footy ball team won. Hey, congrats. Don't forget about tickets.

Tickets for our live show. Don't forget about the new shirt with the mantis on it. Yep. Don't forget about five mystery stickers, possibly featuring range for Harry and more. boo and 70% off all those beautiful posters at Yeti slash Chiluminati. Hell yeah. Thank you all so much for being here. We're off to go to the minis. We appreciate we love you. Links in the description.

Anyway, anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside and indulging on. I enjoyed myself. I needed to go to the back. So I stepped back inside and after I know. I hear my wife go. Holy shit. Get out. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up in the sky. but doesn't like to track across the stop.