Imaginary Worlds - Salem Bewitched

Episode Date: November 5, 2014

Salem is like something out of a Grimm fairy tale for many people -- it’s not a real place. But Salem always felt visceral to me growing up in Massachusetts. I love the ancient graveyards and the colonial houses flush up against the sidewalks. Historian Mary Beth Norton says to truly understand what happened, we have to delve into the imaginary world the Puritans believed in – where witches and Indians were both agents of the devil conspiring against them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Salem. One of the great things about growing up in Massachusetts was taking school trips to Salem. I know for a lot of people out there, Salem is like something out of a grim fairy tale. It's not a real place. But for us, Salem was visceral. The colonial houses flush up against the streets, the ancient graveyards. I went up with my wife, Serena. She's from the Bay Area. She'd never been there. And right when we parked our car, we came across these local girls wearing Puritan costumes. And one of them was holding a cloth baby which had no face.

I do. She's lovely. Baby Rebecca. Yeah, looks just like her mother. Yes. She does. My sister. Yeah, the witches have taken her face away.

What's your name? My name is Abigail Robinson. Goody Carlisle. They perform witch trials for the tourists. We do a Cry Innocent, which is a reenactment of Bridget Bishop's witch trial. She was the first of the 19 to be hanged in 1692. Then the audience plays a Puritan jury, so they get to ask questions of the accused,

of Colonel John Hawthorne, who's conducting the trial, and then at the end, everybody votes. In majority rules, we either vote to hold Bridget for formal trial on charge of witchcraft or release her. Our destination that day was the Salem Wax Museum. The one that I used to go to as a kid was, like, unnecessarily awesome. I know these are memories from elementary school

and junior high, but I swear, they would lead us into an amphitheater, which was pitch black, and the only thing lit up was a pentagram on the floor. And then this really old, warbly narrator would tell the story of Salem, and these corroded, old wax figures would light up in dioramas that were stacked up to the ceiling. And on the bus ride back, we'd all try to do the voice of the narrator, you know. But whose side was the devil really on?

Whose side is he on now? When I was in college, I brought some British friends to see the wax museum. And it was totally revised. The lighting was bright. The wax figures were slick. And there was this new narrator that was really upbeat, and he ended by saying,

The Salem witch trials may have been unfortunate, but they helped pave way for the great legal system we have today. One of the British women looked at the other and said, That was very American. I decided it was time to give the wax museum another shot. I decided it was time to give the wax museum another shot. So I haven't been to the wax museum in like 20 years. Has it changed?

Yeah, you probably weren't even born. I was one, she said. Now at first things seemed promising. The lighting was dark again. The pentagram was back. But then my hopes were crushed, like Giles Corey under boulders of disappointment. I mean, they were playing sea chanty music.

The wax figures were just kind of arranged around the room. There was no narrator, just plaques. I mean, there's nothing wrong with plaques, but it just lost its sense of drama. You know, the gift shop was more impressive than the museum. Wow, that was a big, fat disappointment. I have to say, the other thing about Salem is I think I found it creepier before it was gentrified. Well, yeah.

Because that's not witch creepy, it's just creepy creepy. Yeah. Agatha Prendergast of His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts. But the dark, creepy Salem? That's still all over pop culture. Of witchcraft. There is something worse than a witch hunt.

A witch. Back in 1693, the people of Salem, Massachusetts. Witches? Yes. Thought they got rid of the Sanderson sisters for good. We shall be back. It's amazing this piece of real history has become a horror genre, like right next to Frankenstein and Dracula. But the Hollywood version of Salem and all the academic research on Salem actually have one thing in common. You know, whether you're listening to a filmmaker or historian, they're all trying to say, forget what you've heard. Forget what those other people told you. I solved the mystery. I can tell you what really happened and why that town went bonkers.

And some of the scientific theories are pretty nutty themselves. Like there's this one theory in the 1970s that the girls in Salem had been eating rye bread that was really moldy, and the mold made them hallucinate. And this has been totallyunked, but, you know, I'll be talking to somebody about Salem, and they'll lean in and be like, I heard they were eating moldy bread that was like LSD. Another popular theory is that Salem was just a big soap opera, and a lot of serious historians have been tracing all the grudges that people in Salem had against each other. So behind every accusation of witchcraft, there's really a jilted lover or a

jealous neighbor. Mary Beth Norton teaches history at Cornell, and she says there's something to this theory. And she should know, one of her ancestors, Mary Bradbury, was accused of being a witch by a neighbor who didn't like her. One of her male enemies said he was riding by her house on his horse. And she appeared in the form of a blue boar. And she frightened the horse. And he was thrown off from the horse. And then he knew it was she because when she was in the house, she turned back into herself and he could see her peering out the windows at him. So I'm descended from a woman who turned herself into a blue boar. I was really excited to talk to Mary Beth Norton because she wrote this book called In the Devil's Snare, which was groundbreaking. And the thesis of this book just totally blew me

away. And she said, you know, forget all these small town shenanigans. Salem is a much bigger story about war and politics. And the great thing is she didn't start out with this thesis. Originally, she was planning on writing a very different book. She wanted to do a feminist take on Salem because for a long time, the girls were blamed for turning that town on its head and making up lies about witches so they could supposedly get attention. And Norton just never bought that theory. So she thought a good place to start her research would be reading letters that people in Salem wrote to their relatives back in England. I was actually expecting to find many comments on the witch trials.

I mean, my goodness, why wouldn't people write about the witch trials? I did find a few comments. They were very prosaic. Something like, a witch hanged yesterday. And then that was it. Nothing about what that person thought about that or anything. I was very upset. But then I realized that even though the people were not telling me what they thought about the witch trials, they were writing reams and reams about the Indian War. And that's clearly what was on their mind. So let's put this in modern terms.

The Puritans are occupying a land so they can exploit its natural resources and spread their culture. In the meantime, they're fighting a war against these indigenous people who are using terror tactics and guerrilla warfare to scare away the occupying force. But instead of Iraq or Vietnam, the battlefield was

Maine. Because Maine used to be part of Massachusetts. And Maine is where the good stuff was. The wood, the animals, all the natural resources the Puritans needed to fuel their economy. But Maine was really dangerous. The Wabanaki tribe slaughtered towns of settlers, which made the Puritans wonder, if God was on their side, why were they losing a war against these savages, these agents of the devil? Everyone knew that the devil could not act without God's permission. The devil did not have an independent existence. The devil is a fallen angel.

The devil can't act without God allowing them to. And so for his own reasons, God had loosed the chain that he usually kept around the devil. He'd given the devil permission to chastise people in New England for their failings. So God was punishing them for not being puritanical enough. But then in the midst of this tension, a girl named Ann Putnam Jr. made an accusation that was so explosive, it triggered what we now call the Salem Witch Trials. Ann Putnam Jr. had a vision

in which she accused the former minister of Salem Village, who also happened to be the former minister of Falmouth, Maine, as the leader of the witches. His name was George Burroughs. He was a minister with a bad reputation, eccentric, difficult to work with, and a 12-year-old child had just accused him of being a double agent, working for Satan. Now, this is a little girl growing up in Salem Village. There's no way in which she had any personal knowledge of the life of George Burroughs

on the main frontier. But in this spectral vision that she had of George Burroughs, she talked about things that had to do with his life on the main frontier, and she accused him of having bewitched the soldiers who were fighting the Indians. So I asked myself, where did Ann Putnam Jr. get this information? Well, the only place she could have gotten it was from the servant in her household, Mercy Lewis. Mercy Lewis had actually grown up in Falmouth and had been a servant to George Burroughs at one point, probably after her parents had died. Now we all know Tituba from The Crucible. She was the West Indian slave that got blamed for introducing the girls to witchcraft. Mary Beth Norton says even

if that was true, the real spark came from this group of war orphans whose families had been wiped out on the main frontier. And without any prospects, they were sent down to Salem to live as servants. And they suffered from what we would call PTSD. And they spread fear through Salem like a contagion. And if you look at the testimony from the first batch of girls, they talk about Indians and witches all in the same breath. And you also see, by the way, in their accusations, images from the main frontier. For example, some of them said that the witches threatened to tear them to pieces or that the devil threatened to tear them to pieces.

There were a lot of stories that circulated around Salem and Essex County at this time of the Indians torturing people and literally cutting them to pieces. So the judges had a choice whether to believe these girls and allow testimony based on dreams and visions, which is not something they usually did. Girls had testified in court before. It's just usually they hadn't been believed. This time they were believed. And why were they believed? Because what they were saying accorded with what the magistrates wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that they weren't responsible.

I mean, after all, if you're fighting the devil, how can you be responsible for what's happening? If the devil's behind the Indians, if the devil and the witches are behind the devil, how can you be responsible for what's happening? If the devil's behind the Indians, if the devil and the witches are behind the Indians, how can any mortal man fight them? The judges are also military leaders who suffered major losses in the battlefields of Maine, and they want to hear that it's not their fault. They are definitely losing the war on the Maine frontier, and they are in part responsible or in large part responsible for that loss. For example, it was the second attack on Falmouth in May of 1690 that completely wiped out the town. I mean, more than 200 people were slaughtered in the aftermath of that attack.

But why was that town undefended? It was undefended because the examining magistrates themselves, John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, had just been in Maine to investigate what was going on on the frontier. And they had reported back to Massachusetts that the militia troop of 40 men that was stationed there in Falmouth was not needed. 40 men that was stationed there in Falmouth was not needed. And so those men pulled out of Falmouth and literally the next day the Indians attacked and besieged the town and eventually wiped it out after five days. George Burroughs was found guilty of being the leader of the witches and conspiring with the devil. And that is what opened the floodgates to everyone else.

All those people who had grudges against their neighbors, the jilted lovers, who stormed in the courtroom and said, ah, will you believe me now when I tell you this person is a witch? And the accusations kept snowballing until the governor's wife was accused of witchcraft. And he had the power to put the kibosh on the whole thing. The governor, by the way, engaged in a massive cover-up of his role in what was going on. He claimed that he knew nothing. But in fact, he knew everything. In letters that he wrote to England, he said, I was up fighting the Indians on the main frontier. I wasn't around. Well, I show in my book that he was around all the time. He knew exactly what was happening. It's funny. It sounds like you're angry at the judges. I mean,

you're angry that they've been let off the hook. Oh, I'm angry at them. Yes. I mean, I think it was their responsibility and they did not fulfill their responsibility. I am angry at them. You're absolutely right. They deserve it. And they have been let off the hook by historians and everybody else because everybody focuses on the, quote, hysterical girls. And that started happening right after the trials, right after. I love history. When I was a kid, it was my favorite subject. And I always want people to care about our ancestors, to see them as real human beings, not that different from us.

But I have to admit, there have been a lot of different theories about Salem. And they do always feel right to people in their time. And then they're later discredited, and then replaced with new theories. I mean, it's possible that every theory about the Salem Witch Trials, no matter how right it feels, is like another wax museum. Because a wax museum is trying to mold life out of death, dead cultures, dead people, dead belief systems. I mean, maybe we can never really understand people in the past because we can never see the world through their eyes. We can never pretend that we don't know what we know now.

But that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Well, that's it for today's show. Thanks for listening. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment on iTunes. I tweet at emalinski. Special thanks to Mary Beth Norton and Cornell University. I later on saw a production of The Crucible in London, and I found that I argued with the entire first act the entire time, that I couldn't appreciate the play as a play. And so I remember at the intermission, I went out and I told myself, stop arguing with the play, just enjoy it as a play. I might add here that there's a current production of The Crucible at the Old Vic in London, and they asked me to do program notes

for it, so I did. A different version of the story aired on the show Unfictional from KCRW. And I interviewed a psychology professor who talked about how a lot of the testimony in Salem is compatible with sleep paralysis. And I talked with a friend who had sleep paralysis and actually thought that it was the devil tormenting her until she was 23 years old. I'll put a link to that on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.