Infamous America - SALEM Ep. 6 | Interview: Emerson Baker

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

Professor Emerson Baker is an authority on the Salem witch trials. His book, "A Storm of Witchcraft," was a vital resource for this show. In this episode, he shines a light on many aspects of the crisis, including his thoughts on the biggest question of all: How did this happen? For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the first of three interview episodes about the Salem Witch Trials for Infamous America Season 1, Salem. Today's guest is Professor Emerson Baker, who wrote a fantastic book called A Storm of Witchcraft. It's packed with a ton of information, and I can't recommend it more highly if you want to learn about this infamous event. I met Professor Baker in his office at Salem State University to discuss several big topics. We talked about the modern theory of conversion disorder that might explain. some of the afflicted girls' behavior, the role of the judges, and the big one, how did this happen? Here's Professor Emerson Baker. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night

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The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. at mood.com get 20% off your first order with our promo code infamous. Go to mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. Professor Baker, thank you very much for doing an interview about the Salem Witch Trials for season one of our new show, Infamous America. We appreciate it. We're sitting here in your interim office. I guess you are interim dean of Salem State University.

at the moment. Just the graduate school and just the graduate school. Not the whole university. Right. So we have almost 10,000 students. There's a lot of deans here. It's a beautiful campus here, by the way. We got to see a little of it as we were walking up here.

Walk away from the ocean. Great place to come to school. Yeah. And the leaves are turning. It's fall. It falls definitely here by the weather. So fantastic. All right, thank you for being here.

So we want to jump right into some of the questions. And before we turn on the microphones, you were saying some great stuff to us. I'd like to prompt you with a couple of questions to repeat some of that stuff. Our audience think it's fantastic. I'm sorry. I can only do it once. Yep. We'll turn off the recording right here. That was fun.

But I want to start with how one becomes a full member of the Puritan church. Because they're going to hear a little bit of that in the show, but certainly not to the extent that you just explained. Please tell everyone what it takes to become a full member. So in the 17th century, a church in New England is not a building. A church is the body of saints who are the Puritan elect to those people who are destined to go to heaven. and in order to become a member of the church, to become a Puritan saint, you traditionally would have to get up and make a public confession of your sin before the whole congregation and also described to them how God had reached out to you

and told you that you were amongst the saved. Because the Puritans believed in predestination. Right. They believed that God had predestined who was going to go to heaven and who was going to hell. And the real problem was, you never knew. Of course. Right? Yeah.

So that's the trick. But hopefully God might give you some hint. Mm-hmm. And once you knew that, then it was up to you to come forward before the body of saints gathered in your meeting house on the Sabbath to form what we call a church, a member of a group of saints, and join the elect. So it's a, normally it's a very, this is a very rigorous, tough process. If you can imagine being willing to get up in front of everybody in your town and tell them every sin you ever committed,

you know, this is not for the faint-hearted, right? And Salem Village in 1692, under Reverend Samuel Paris, was run this way. They just formed a congregation and signed a covenant in 1689, and they were gathering true believers to join the church. But what's interesting is at the time, Massachusetts was undergoing some real a real crisis in Puritanism here. Yeah, it was a little bit on the decline.

There had been a decline in church membership, and some people were not attending worship as regular as they were supposed to, because everybody, everybody was expected to attend worship service on the Sabbath, whether you were a saint or not. And there was only one church in town, one meeting house in town. It was the Puritan meeting house, and you had to go. And people weren't going as much as they should. people seem to have lost some of their religious fervor.

And part of this, frankly, is probably more perception than reality. Because by our standards, Massachusetts in 1692 was a pretty devout place. Very, yes. Right? It's hard for us to imagine. But what you also realize, too, is by this stage, we're talking about the second and third generation of Puritans. And, you know, I think we all want to, we tend to idolize our parents, particularly our grandparents, and we want to be like them.

We never want to disappoint them. but at the same time, a lot of these people were not those people who'd given up everything in England as adults and come over here. And so they lack some of that fervor. And even if they wanted to be good Puritans, some of them doubted themselves. You know, am I really worthy? And so there was kind of this crisis in those second and third generation of Puritans. And a lot of that results in people doubting the sort of the religious nature of the colony, the fact that Massachusetts Bay is supposed to have this special.

covenant, the special relationship with God as his elect people as the city upon the hill. And if we are falling from that standard, if we are not living up to that standard, if we're spending too much time in the tavern and, you know, more time in idle gossip with our neighbors and less time being devotional to God, then God is going to be angry with this. And he's going to show us by sending a signs of his anger and even letting Satan loose into our colony as a test as to whether we are true believers or not. Right, right. And I think it was really interesting that the idea that they had that because in some of my reading, the idea that they were such a devout community that if Satan was going

to target any community, it would be theirs. So they were the ultimate target for Satan. So it was somewhat natural that once you started seeing witches everywhere, that Satan would have targeted these people. It became a natural evolution of what they believed could happen anyway. Right, because they believe that they are sort of those favored people by God, and that of course, they're going to be number one on the hit list from Satan to see if he can take them down, right? Of course, yeah. Because here's this shining example. You know, John Winthrop talks in his famous sermon about a model Christian charity about the city upon the hill. And the people of Massachusetts Bay are going to be this perfect Christian utopian commune where people walk hand in hand

with each other and with God. And they aren't even going to need really a legal code or anything because it's going to be this perfect society. And I mean, it's a wonderful dream. It really is. It's a wonderful utopia. But unfortunately, even in a godly society, it's never going to be like that. Yeah, it turns out we're still human and we're not perfect.

Sadly, we are all human and sadly none of us is perfect, right? And in 1692, people in Massachusetts Bay realized that Satan had indeed been let loose in their colony. Remember, God creates Satan. Yeah. And Satan also, too, is allowed to create witches. And so, you know, in 1692, no one doubted whether Satan or witches were real. You couldn't. Everybody believed in God. Exactly. And we know that God creates Satan and Satan gives power to witches. So therefore, no one would doubt the power of witches, right? No one would doubt that they were real. And that's one thing that really bothers me that people say, how could people be so foolish, so superstitious to believe? It's like, well, if every,

everybody believed in God and therefore you believed in witches in Satan, right? Yeah. So if you know that Satan is real and that there are all kinds of signs that Satan has been let loose into your colony, your job then is to find the witches and to execute them and eliminate that threat to your society. Right. And so let's tie that into, as we talked about again, as we talked about before, the Paris household, the minister of Salem Village. So he's been experiencing this.

Salem has already been through some turbulent times with its ministers, but he's now experiencing this again. His congregation is slightly on the decline. So kind of paint the picture for me for what it would have been like for his daughter, Betty, and his niece Abigail, to have lived in his house while he's experiencing both this turmoil in Salem Village

and then in the context of the greater turmoil in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the lack of charter and everything. So Samuel Parris had become minister in Salem Village, which is present-day Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1689. And at the time, it's kind of a rural backer water and a small poor congregation and he's the first covenanted minister there. So he's the first person who can really form a body of saints to sign a covenant and become official church members

and get the sacraments like baptism in the Lord's Supper. And he is very successful in his initial year or so in Salem in growing that congregation in making people become church members of convincing them that they really need to fight back against the threat of Satan and to become members of the church, really before it is too late. And he has some success at that. And this is in sort of the whole background of all of Massachusetts being concerned over this declining spirituality and all kinds of external threats from the Native Americans on the frontier who they were at war with,

to the horribly bad weather, which is seen as a sign of God's anger. We now know it was the absolute worst weather in three or four. years of what's now called the Little Ice Age. Yeah. And so these are the way that God would express his anger to you and let you know that Satan had been let loose in your midst. And Samuel Paris had taken over Salem Village, which was just, again, it was not only was it as sort of a poor frontier community

at the time, but it was also a community in turmoil where there had been much dispute over the choice of minister, over his salary, and all kinds of things. when he became minister in 1689, he was the fourth minister in the community in less than 20 years. Yeah. So that has to tell you that it's a tumultuous place. And unfortunately, Paris was not, his strong point was not interpersonal skills in trying to, to, he seems to be better at frankly pouring gasoline on fires than on putting them out. Yeah.

And so by 1692, Paris is really in the midst of a controversy in Salem Village to the point where his opponents have taken over control of the committee, which hires and fires the minister and also pays him. They've cut off his salary. They've cut off the firewood that they're supposed to provide into the house. And Samuel Paris is now convinced more than ever that Satan is in Salem Village, and he is actively encouraging his opponents

to try to get rid of him because he is the one who is really trying to bring God's word to the community. and so in this sense I think paris sees anybody who is against him to whether they mean to be or not they have become agents or in league with Satan and it is his job to try to stop that and he does this with what we would now call fire and brimstone sermons for sure yeah god is coming and he is terribly angered and he is going to destroy his enemies there's one of the we know some of his sermons and one out of the bible he talks about that i will i will i will you know make my enemies into my footstool. Yes. Very martial, bloody kind of images of the war that is coming between God and God's

enemies and choose now which side you are going to be on. So imagine in this parsonage, in the middle of this, we have poor Betty Williams and her cousin Abigail, Betty Paris, and her cousin Abigail Williams, excuse me. And here are these little girls, like ages nine and 12, and their father, is storming around the parsonage in this rage, practicing these fire and brimstone sermons, warning anybody who was in listening distance that God was coming. God was terribly angry and prepare for the war. Sinners take note.

God is coming. And I think he literally, whether he meant, he certainly didn't mean to, but I think he literally was scaring his daughter and his niece to death. Right. And so that's, that's, your personal opinion is that's kind, that's where their affliction started, essentially. That stress, the stress of seeing that and being around that every day, plus maybe the natural stresses of a Puritan girl's life at this time in this area. Exactly.

Built into how their symptoms became evident, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I call my book a Storm of Witchcraft because I equated to that other great Essex County tragedy, the perfect storm, the destruction of the Essex fishing fleet. And that is, it takes a lot of bad things to take place at once to create, which was by far, the greatest witchcraft outbreak in American history. Oh, yeah. The next, most cases of witchcraft were one or two people accused. Hartford in the early 1660s, what, like 13 people accused, four put to death. Salem, over 150 people accused.

19 executed, one press to death. Five died in prison awaiting trial. It's off the scales. You have to have a lot of things go bad. A lot of people to be convinced that Satan is in your midst to have something like this happening. So there is no single explanation, right? But I do think certainly in the case of the first to be afflicted of Abigail and Betty, what today we would call conversion disorder, mass conversion disorder,

where the mental anguish, the fear that you're suffering is literally your mind it takes over and is converting it into physical symptoms. And you're barking like a dog. You're trying to throw yourself in the fireplace. You feel pins and needles being stuck into you, but you can't see them. You go hysterically deaf or blind. And even worse is, you don't know why this is happening. because your mind is taken over it and it's not telling you what's going on.

And unfortunately, we know that mass conversion disorder can actually spread. And soon other girls in Salem Village begin to have the same symptoms. Right. And so certainly I think this first group, at least at the beginning, there was no sort of a, there's no deliberateness to this. There's no forfeiting. There's no faking of symptoms. This is very, very, very real.

And the fact is, since you don't know what's wrong with you, it just makes it worse because this is all built on anxiety and fear and it just gets worse as you go. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't know what was happening to them. Therefore, a doctor couldn't figure out what was wrong with them. So it all just built upon itself. Right. The doctor comes and examines the girls and spends time with them. Remember, you know, Reverend Paris doesn't want them to be bewitched. No. Because if to be bewitched suggests that there's a flaw in your soul. Yeah. And to be susceptible to witchcraft. And that's, so to have the minister's own children to be the first victims of this outbreak. So he does take some time before he brings the doctor in. Before that, he brings in other ministers, what he thinks wrong.

And then finally the doctor comes up with the diagnosis that these girls are bewitched because it is a medical diagnosis in the 17th century because, again, yes, witches and witchcraft was real. Of course. Yeah. And it's at that point where the accusations do start to fly. Now, do you think there was an evolution from that point in the afflicted girls? It certainly feels like it probably started that way with the conversion disorder. Did it evolve into something more?

If so, what do we think that was? What were some of the factors later when it really gets out of control? Well, I can start off by saying, let me say what it wasn't, right? So first off, the one question I'm always asked is, well, what about, you know, like these LSD-like trips, these girls were getting off a grain? Ergot poison. Ergot, yes, yes. So Urgot is the theory that the, the right.

the supplies of rye that they were harvesting to make into bread. When rye gets damp, it can get a mold on it called ergot. And if you ingest it, it is poisonous. And the idea is that this was, it's also has hallucinogenic like side effects. Now shall I say this idea first came forward in the early 70s and the Timothy Leary drug-induced LSD days, right? So the idea was like, the girls who were afflicted in 1692 were just having a bad trip. Well, multiple problems with this, right?

I mean, it sounds good in theory, and I wouldn't rule out that maybe one or two had those kinds of symptoms. But frankly, the only type of ergot poisoning that has side effects like that is lethal. It's actually sometimes called gangrenous ergot, where your limbs turn gangrenous, shrivel, blacken, fall off, and you die. This did not happen to the afflicted girls. No, clearly not. Also, too, the disease process when you're being poisoned with ergot

is you get worse and worse. worse and worse. Right. If you've read the transcriptions of the trials in 1692, if the girls would be absolutely fine, then they'd see an afflicted witch, and then all of a sudden, bang, they would be afflicted. And then when the afflicted witch would leave the courthouse,

they'd be fine again. They'd sleep like babies at night. Exactly. So it doesn't follow the proper disease process, and it somehow suggests that everybody in Salem Village in 1692 who's being afflicted is eating the same bad rye. Right. Well, so first off, how does that explain that Reverend Paris and his wife and the other children and their servants and other people in Salem Village aren't being afflicted with these bad trips?

And how can you explain why then they were afflicted people, afflicted girls in Andover, in Boston, and why people up and down Massachusetts are accusing people of witchcrafts. So it sounds good, but does that mean there were medical excuses or reasons for why one or two people were afflicted? Yeah, perhaps. But it can't explain why a whole colony literally went absolutely crazy. To me, the real answer is that there was a medical diagnosis in 1692. It was called witchcraft and people were bewitched, right? Yeah. But so, and also, other thing too is no, well, okay, Professor Baker, it wasn't that,

but we know it was because they were trying to take people's land, right? You'd accuse your neighbor of witchcraft to get their property. Right. Some glorious conspiracy is seems good. Yeah. And in 1692, yes, it was legal if you were a felon for, to have your assets seized, but only your movable assets, your furniture, your clothing, cash, livestock. But even if you were convicted of witchcraft, your house, your land, all passed to your

ears. And even in this case, too, even if there were forfeitures, then as now, unfortunately, as we learn on April 15th, it's only the government that wins. Right. Because anything that was seized went to the crown, went to the king, and there was no finders. Right. Now this isn't to rule out neighborliness as a problem. Of course it would have. We know, for example, Rebecca Nurse had a property dispute over a boundary fence with one of one family of her neighbors, the Holton's, and after sort of a very bitter argument

between the two and a couple days later when Mr. Holton had today what we probably think would have been a stroke. All of a sudden the family is saying, aha, Rebecca Nurse, you are a witch and you cause this to happen to poor Benjamin Holton. Yeah. So that's, it isn't saying that disputes between neighbors isn't a factor, but certainly it wasn't for property seizures. So if it wasn't that, okay then, what was it?

Well, again, I think there are a lot of factors. I think those early, the younger girls who were afflicted first, again, maybe a post-traumatic stress, I mean, maybe a mass conversion disorder. But we also know that many of the afflicted were people who had lived very traumatic lives. many of them were war refugees from the fighting that was going on at Maine at the time. They'd been burnt out of their homes. They'd been taken prisoners of war. They'd lost family members in the fighting.

And certainly we know that they're examples of what we would classically, post-traumatic stress disorder. So Mercy Short describes Satan as a tawny man like an Indian. And she had been a victim of the Salmon Falls raid in 1690, where a combined Native American and French-Canadian force surprises her town and wipes out most of it. Her parents are killed. She has siblings killed.

She has siblings and neighbors, and she are marched off to Canada in captivity. She's forced to convert to the Catholic Church. And then she's eventually ransomed. But her life, as she knew it, was gone, right? That kind of what we might think of as a middle class existence where she, you know, when she grew up, she'd marry the cute farm boy next door.

Gone. She's a lowly household servant in Boston. And when she's delivering food to the prison from, her mistress to one of the prisoners, one of the witches curses her, and mercy loses it, she freaks out. And it's fairly clear that when Cotton Mather is asking her to describe Satan and how he tempted her, that she's really reliving that day where she describes Satan like an Indian, and that day when she lost everything, when her family was destroyed. And she, like many people, I think, in the time, we're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

So that's certainly a factor. There's other things going on, too. certainly it's clear to me though that some of these girls that sooner or later are faking what's going on right and you know i think we tend to think the best of our children and our and our kids yeah and it's hard to believe to us that a bunch of teenage you know adolescent teenage girls could could could be faking what they're up to um but i think eventually they come to this and again think about this you can if you were a flicking and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever it is, that's all well and good. But after Bridget Bishop has executed on June 10, 1692, there's no turning back.

You can't, a month later, you can't say, wow, I was, you know, I don't know what came over me, but boy, what did I say? What happened? No, it's too late. Bridget Bishop is dead and you're responsible. And I think at that point there has to be some sort of covering up of your footprints and and certainly some fakerie going on. I really don't think the fakery was deliberate to the point from the get-go where, again,

like, you know, enemies of your family were being singled out and the parents are whispering in the ears of the kids, accuse them of witchcraft. I really don't see it as being that sort of deliberative. But again, if you think about this whole community where they're concerned about the declining spiritual fervor of the community, they're worried about the war on the frontier. They know that there's a new governor coming with. the new charter that may change everything for the way the colony is run. Salem Village is torn by all this factional strife.

Horrible weather, really bad, worst horrible winters, really late frosts in the spring, cold, dry summers that destroy all the crops. Yeah, crop failures. Early frosts in the fall. Just these violent swings in the weather. So people are, there's famine, there's inflation, there's a bad war, problems with religion, problems with politics. Everything goes wrong.

We know from Wolfgang Berringer, a historian of European witchcraft, has pointed out, there are two key factors to when witchcraft happens in most societies. One is when you have historically bad weather. When you have, you know, because if you're losing crops, people are starving, right? Yeah. And then you go to your government for help or for explanation. And if you have a weak government, then you're in real trouble. Right.

Because you want to be, so people, if people aren't having their problems, if they have problems and they're not being solved by the government, then they start looking for someone to blame. And that's where the scapegoating begins. That's when the witchcraft accusations fly. Sure. Then or now for that matter. Yeah, it can certainly continue. But let's stick with the government theme for a quick second because another one of the, another one of the things that was particularly interesting was that you mentioned Governor Phipps publication ban

as one of the early histories of kind of censorship and cover-up in American history. Yep. So there were certainly a, probably at least a dozen factors that played into this whole thing. One of them was this cover-up ban. How did the censorship of publication of materials about the witch trials factor into the whole propagation? It would allow it to continue. Well, it does. I mean, Phipps finally, though, he brings the, he brings the trials to an end in October 1692.

This, again, is after there's 150 people. in the prisons and they've executed. The executioners are already done. And he finally brings the court to an end. But he also, by this stage, people have realized that something has gone seriously wrong. That not all of these people can be witches. I think Phipps' personal moment,

was frankly, was earlier that month when his wife and the wife of increased Mather, the leading minister of the colony, had both been accused of witchcraft. They were never formally charged, but they would say they were cried out upon, where someone had accused him of being a witch.

At which point Phipps says, that's it. All right, hold on. And he writes to the king and the queen and says, yep, we've had some problems with witches, but don't worry. No innocent lives were lost. And if you don't believe me, I have had Cotton Mather,

the eminent Cotton Mather, write this book, and I'm sending you a copy. And since we now have the truth from Cotton Mather, we don't need any more information from anybody, and I'm afraid it might create an inextinguishable flame. So therefore, I'm ordering a publication ban.

Well, I have no more information published on the Salem Witch Trials because we have the truth. Yes. Right? It's done it over. We had a little thing. Don't worry about it. We took care of it.

It's not a problem. It's gone away. Because the basic problem is here again is that if the new government of Sir William Phipps, the last kind of hope for Puritan, Massachusetts for the survival of the city of Pine Hill, if it's found out that innocent lives had been lost, the king and queen are going to, are going to remove the charter and remove Phipps from office and restore a kind of military dictatorship that Massachusetts had faced in the 1880s under Colonel Edmund Andros, who was really like a military. dictator. Yeah, exactly. And where he allowed open worship of Anglicans and Quakers and Baptists.

And to our mind would say, well, what's wrong with that? This is America. But in Puritan, Massachusetts, there's only one religion, and that is Puritanism. And the fact that they would, the Puritans actually were horrified that Andros would, they would have put as defiled one of their, one of the Puritan meeting houses by allowing a Church of England service to take place in it. To them, that was beyond the pale. Yeah. Let alone letting the Quaker. and Baptists be mainstreamed. Sure. Again, we sort of laugh, like, what could be more American than Quakers who believe that

we're all equal, who believe in being pacifists and egalitarian, right? You know? Yeah. Believe that all women are equal. Wow, pretty radical, far too radical for the Puritans in 1692. No, no, you can do that. So we can't have returned to that. Yeah.

But on the other hand, too, is I think, you know, Puritans kind of get a bad rap in the story, because Puritans, as good Christians, when they find out that they have aired where they have sinned, They immediately beg forgiveness from God and apologize and beg forgiveness from those they have harmed. And by late 1692, Puritans know that innocent people have died. But again, Phipps issues the publication ban specifically because he doesn't want anybody admitting that. Cotton Mather knew this, but he was willing to write this book that was really an apology for the government because it was a sin to not admit fault in that innocents had died. But the bigger sin would have been to let the puritan.

written experiment end in Massachusetts. So instead, the sin of unrepentance, of not acknowledging that sin, of allowing innocence to die, really sort of festers there and has to for a few years because the greater cause is the survival of Puritan Massachusetts. Of course. Yeah. So in fact, actually, the publication ban will last, what, almost four years. I think I want to do a slightly transition to a couple different topics here.

Sure. I want to see, since you've done, it might be fair to say endless amount of research in this too much. My wife would say too much research. Too much research. Can you, is there something that has fascinated you above all else? Or are there a couple things that you discovered along this where you thought, oh wow, I didn't see that coming?

So I, I, I, I, stands out. To me, a couple things. One to me is the role of the judges that no one really looked at before where I couldn't figure out why you would have, you could have. juries that would go off the rails and convict an innocent person, right? But you have to have, you have this nine panel, the panel of nine judges of learned men who have to agree with, accept that verdict, and then sign the death warrant. So to me, it was really interested in trying to look at who the judges were.

And what I really found there, in short, was that there was way too much power in Massachusetts in the 17th century in the hands of the few. So the nine judges were all what we today call the 1%. They were the wealthiest merchants in the colony. Yeah. They were all members of the governor's council, what today we would call our state senate. They were appointed to that office in the original charter of 1692 by the king and the queen. So they're the richest men, they're the leading politicians.

By that appointment, they're also court judges, right? And they're also the military leaders of the colony who are fighting this failed war against the Native Americans in the French on the frontier. One of the nine judges, Colonel Waite Winthrop, is the commander-in-chief of the master. Army that's losing this war. And most of the other judges are officers as well. And I think what you see here is a group of men who in many ways are largely then responsible for the difficulty of the colony faces, right? By the way, I did genealogy on these fellows and found out that like six of them are all like related by marriage. They're essentially brothers-in-laws. Yeah. And their nephew is the sheriff of Essex County. So this is really

insider stuff. Yeah. And they're not only, not only are they sort of a group of minded individuals, they are actually family. And I think they're very deferential, and once the decision is made, they're all going to go with it. And I think the problem this group faces is that it's so easy to look, I think it's human nature to look at others to try to blame for what went wrong. So imagine these folks, looking at the state that the colony is in. Look at the problems we have, it's the government's fault. Wait a second. That's us. It's the military's fault for losing the war. Wait again. That's us. Yeah. These guys are all rich property owners who have had sawmills burnt down in Maine and Samuel Sue may have lost the equivalent of over a million

dollars when his sawmill burned down. So these men have literally suffered from the war and they're not going to blame themselves for not fighting a good war or not having the government run well. It's so much easier to see this as being an act of Satan, you know, in the words of the immortal Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live. Could it be Satan? Right. No, you know, It really, and this to me is the whole thing with witchcraft is, it's about scapegoating. It's about finding people to blame for society's problems and to take unfortunately the shortcuts in the easy way out. So that's one thing I see. And the other thing to me that's really disturbing fact is that in 1692, the only people who died were those people who had refused to confess to witchcraft.

They all pled not guilty. 19 of them were executed. Meanwhile, over 40 people confessed to being witches, confessed to a capital crime, that normally they would be quickly sentenced and executed. In 1692, not one of these people died. And that to me is this huge problem I have with the way Salem is sort of remember today, particularly in Salem where it's become, we have haunted happenings, which has been sort of conflated with Salem,

and you have people having parades and eating fried dough and hot mulled cider seemingly to celebrate the Salem witch trials when we're talking about only those 19 people who were such devout Christians that they refused to lie, even if that would probably have saved their lives. They refused to darken their souls or the souls of their families and stain their names for eternity

by lying and saying their witches when they weren't. And those are the people who died. And those people who confessed and implicated their friends and neighbors and said, oh yeah, I'm a witch and so is my, daughter, and so is my mother. Guess what? They lived. And so to me that is kind of the ultimate tragedy, the Salem witch trials, is that the people who died weren't those usual suspects, weren't some of those people who, you know, in Bridget Bishop's case, it's even possible that she might have been carrying out some sort of folk magic, right? because they find poppets, what we would call voodoo dolls,

are supposedly found in her house like nine or ten years earlier. Yeah. Are the puppets produced in 1692? No. But that's pretty strong evidence against somebody that probably might have gotten them convicted and executed in London in 1692, okay? But still, you know, there's really no solid proof against these people, and all of these people that died really were probably the ones

who were the purest of soul. Yeah, that is one of the terrible ironies that I discovered in this whole thing, too, when I started really doing the research that if you confessed, you almost had to be kept alive because then you could help root out the other witches that were around. If you said, no, I'm not a witch, it was an almost instant guilty verdict. Again, if you look at judicial process, even today, what do you do? You get people to turn, right? And you go up the ladder because you're looking for Mr. and Mrs. Big, right? So who are these small minions of Satan? And if we can get them to confess,

okay so you confessed but who else is in your coven come on come on come on give us names we want names we want dates right what did they do what satanic act did they commit sign here I mean it's all very much like any episode of your of your favorite crime drama or frankly the Mueller investigation right it's it's this this process of trying and so you want you want those people who might be able to to rat out other people to still be alive because who knows what names they might give you and eventually they give you name like like George Burroughs, a Puritan minister. Aha. Now we found the leader of Satan's covenant community.

But again, to me, the other thing, too, is that I keep on coming back to, I guess, though, is that how difficult a situation this was from Massachusetts, because we are not talking about ignorant, superstitious people. Everyone believed in witchcraft in 1692. Governors, judges, ministers, popes, it was, you know, witches were real, because they got that power from Satan who got it from God. And so the problem, though, is that we don't know who witches are. Witches can be anybody, right?

They could be a family member, a neighbor, a friend. Well, then how do we find out who they are? Because they want to destroy everything we believe in. They want to destroy our faith. They want to destroy our society. They want to kill us all. But we don't know who they are. What do we do?

Well, maybe it's that someone who looks a little different than you. maybe they speak with an accent, maybe they worship God a bit differently than you do. Maybe there's some signs there, right? But the problem is, we don't really know, but it's up to the government to try to root them out and try to solve this. But that's impossible if you don't know who there. Well, as I'm suggesting, really, if you swap the word witch in 1692 with terrorists today, this is kind of the problem we face, right? We know there's an evil in our midst that wants to destroy everything we hold dear.

But how do we stop it when we don't know who they are? And frankly, what liberties are you willing to surrender to try to root them out and end it? And again, I don't mean to, you know, thank God we have people fighting terrorism. And I'm happy to take off my loafers when I go through the security at Logan Airport. But, you know, it's a real quandary because it's a real quandary because it's, In 1692, witchcraft was seemingly every bit as real a threat. Of course, we now know it wasn't, right? Of course.

But it seemed to be the end of society then. And that gives you a sense, you know, of how powerless we sometimes feel, I think, against these large threats. And how do we as society try to address them? Yeah, I think I thought one of the, maybe one of the, maybe the ultimate tragedy, and correct me if I'm wrong here, was that by the end of the whole process, it felt like it turned out people, people looked back and said, maybe there weren't actual witches there. Maybe the devil deceived everyone. Exactly. And that would be the ultimate

sign of tragedy that the devil, we thought the devil had actually created witches and infected all of our population, but it turned out the devil tricked all of us into believing that's what happened. This is exactly what Massachusetts, when they finally offer a day of public fast and humiliation to repent for the sins of the colony in 1697, chief of which was the sin of witchcraft. A petition, by the way, written by Judge Samuel Sewell largely. They do say that. they don't, they, they, they come clean, but only to the degree that they're allowed. And that is, we repent, we beg forgiveness from God for being deluded by Satan. Yes.

And because of that, innocent lives were lost, right? Yeah. Not that anything was done deliberately, but that clearly we have sinned in being allowing Satan, the great deceiver, the great trickster, to get the better of us. And because of that, you know, I think as Reverend Hale said, something like, you know, we were lost in the clouds. Yes. We could not see our way. And again, that is the ultimate tragedy of Salem, isn't it?

Yes, exactly. So I'll end with one last one. You teach a Salem Witch Trials class here at Salem State University. What is the number one question that your students ask or number one surprising thing that they mentioned to you when you teach this class to you? Well, I think there's so many misconceptions about Salem. I'm not even sure where to start that one, frankly.

But some of the ones are things like Ergot Poisoning is clear. Another one too is know the fact that we didn't burn witches here. Ah, yes, that's a big one, yeah. Burning was really for heretics. In Europe, witchcraft was treated as a religious crime, and the punishment for the heretic was burning at the stake. That was one. I think actually the simple one is, honestly,

is that most people don't realize that the city of Salem, which today is sort of seen to be as witch central. Sure. In 1692, the real action was in Salem Village, which is now the town of Danvers. Yeah. And that's the one that throws even people who come here to Salem looking for all the sites associated with the witch trials, and I tend to direct them out

to Danvers where the real action took place. Sure, sure. Well, I think that we'll wrap it up right there. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who listened and maybe suffered through a little bit of leaf blower outside of our window here. As we sit at Salem State University, we can't help the work that has to go on around us. So thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Professor Baker. Great to talk to you and welcome to Salem. Thank you. Season 1, Salem. Next week, we'll have an interview with Rachel Christ, the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum.

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Thanks again.