Infamous America - SALEM Ep. 7 | Interview: Rachel Christ

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

Rachel Christ is the Director of Education at the Salem Witch Museum. We met at the museum for a great discussion about the history of witchcraft, the Salem crisis in context with the witch hunts in Europe, and modern witch hunts, as well as many other things. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our second interview episode about the Salem Witch Trials as we work our way toward the end of infamous America, season one, Salem. For this episode, I spoke with the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum, Rachel Christ. If you're thinking about visiting Salem, this is where you need to start. You'll learn about the Salem Witch Trials, of course, but also the history of witchcraft and witch hunts in Europe. And then you can spin forward to today and learn about witch hunts that have happened in our lifetimes. I spoke to Rachel about the history of witches and why it was so easy to get a conviction in Salem and how the whole thing happened

and examples of modern witch hunts. Here's Rachel Christ. So as we sit here in the Salem Witch Museum, can you please give our listeners a quick little recap of the history of witch trials across Europe? They will have heard a little bit of this in the show, but you have a lot more detail. I'm sitting here staring at a wall that details all of it back a long ways.

So can you please tell everyone, Give us the kind of peak years and some of the history to the European witch trials. Yeah, so I think it's especially living in America. It's kind of a, you know, common misconception that, you know, the witch trials are happening around 1692 because we obviously automatically think Salem when we think Salem or when we think witch trials. But Europe actually had hundreds of years of witch trials that predate the Salem trials. Salem actually comes at the very end of witch trials in the period where people are actively, you know, hunting and executing witches. So in Europe, which hens really begin around the 1420s, mid-1400s.

And this is because there are certain changes in, you know, religious belief mainly. There are certain beliefs that change about, you know, the devil and, you know, what the devil is in society and the fact that you can now make a pact with the devil. and that's something that an individual is believed to have the ability to do. Sure. And a witch, the definition of a witch when we're talking about Europe, is an individual who makes a pact with the devil in return for magical powers. So that can't happen until you have a devil to make the pact with. Right, of course.

So that's happening around this time, and this is when people start to get really concerned about it. So this belief, you know, it's starting to emerge. It's mostly, you know, educated males, religious leaders. these are the ones who are talking about it and writing about it. So it takes a little time to trickle down into the kind of illiterate classes. So you've got this first period of witch trials. And then you get into the 1500s and the early 1600s, and this is when you get the peak witch hunting period.

So this is when you've had enough time for these ideas to seep into society. People start to really believe that people are practicing this malevolent sorcery and people start to get really afraid of witches and witchcraft. And at the same time, you've also got this really rough period to be living in Europe. So it's kind of just like this perfect storm of events. You've got unprecedented levels of inflation. So these economic problems, you've got massive famines because the little ice age is going on. Right, right, of course.

So there's these very unusual weather patterns that are hitting Europe. and people who are farmers who've been tracing the weather for generations suddenly can't predict it anymore and people are starving to death. So that's very frightening. You've got these massive religious changes, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. And then the Black Plague had just finished sweeping Europe. And when the Black Plague hit Europe, about a third of Europe's population had died. So that's also extremely traumatizing. So all of these things together are just these, you know, massive waves of people realizing that they can't predict their lives anymore. Things just seem very much out of their control.

And that combined with this idea that people could be, you know, harnessing the power of the devil or the devil could be, you know, coming to weaker members of society and asking them to make a pact. Exactly. That suddenly breaks into these waves of witchcraft. So the area where there are the most witch hunts is Germany. You do see it in Scotland as well. but Germany is definitely the biggest area of witch hunts and witch executions.

So throughout this time, in total, about 45,000 people, you know, charitably are executed for the crime of witchcraft. And about 20,000 of those people are executed in Germany. So what is now Germany? At the time, it was the Holy Roman Empire. And that's got a lot to do with the fact that Germany was this kind of loose confederation during this time, because the Holy Roman Empire is huge. So it's got a very weak judicial system, particularly in, you know, the more rural areas. Right. So what that means is if, you know, I go up to, you know, my neighbor and my cow that was perfectly

healthy yesterday suddenly passes away. I don't have an explanation for it, but my neighbor's looking a little shady these days. And she's this older woman who lives on her own. She seems like someone who would, you know, want some magic powers to get through the winter. So, you know, maybe I had a fight. with her the other day, I'm going to accuse her of witchcraft. And because it's, you know, as I said, there's this weaker judicial system, it's much easier for the group to kind of come together and, you know, pass this judgment as she's a witch and execute her. Whereas in contrast, in places like

England or even Spain where the Inquisition is happening, it's a common misconception that the Inquisition was burning witches left and right. That's actually not true. The Inquisition actually burned comparatively very few witches. They're killing heretics like it's no tomorrow. But you had to have a lot of proof to bring someone through the Inquisitions court and say, I think this person is a witch. They would say, okay, well, do you have eyewitnesses? Do you have any sort of proof to say, we're not just going to kill this person willy-nilly?

So comparatively, the Inquisition is actually pretty sane in the witch trials, which is kind of funny. I don't know, funny is the right word, but ironic for sure. So, as I said, this kind of, you know, this peak of hysteria kind of comes to an end in the early 1600s. But, I mean, witch hunts still happen, obviously. There is a dramatic increase in the 1630s into the 1770s, and that's when witch hunts really come to an end in Europe. So the last legal witchcraft execution is in 1782.

It takes place in the Swiss canton of Gloris. So 1782 is a little bit later, but you see these like isolated incidents of one person being executed, one person being accused. But so as I said, Salem is actually quite late to the game. It's really late in the process. And I do want to step back to a couple things you touch on

because there were things that I had been thinking as I did the research and I become fascinated with these. I find myself getting fascinated with these really little things. You mentioned a couple of them there. So we'll step back. to some of the almost German mob justice. What you were saying was that they didn't have a great legal system. So if you were in a more of a rural community and you accused someone of witchcraft,

basically the town just dealt with it. They just decided, you know, if this person could be a witch, then they would take justice into their own hands. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not like the mob overwhelming the person and throwing them on the pyre. Like there was, you did have to go through a couple more steps, but it is a lot more mob mentality, mob justice. So, I mean, they do have courts, they do have courtrooms.

You do have to go through X, Y, and Z, but it's a lot easier to throw someone in and say, I think she's a witch. Here's my reason why. And especially as a hysteria grows, you know, the first couple of people may be kind of hard to, you know, get through the process. But once you've got 10, 15, 20 people that you're suspecting of witchcraft, it becomes much easier to say, all right, throw her in jail, throw him in jail, throw this, child in jail.

Kids were executed for witchcraft. That sounds crazy to us today. But, you know, when you've got this insane hysteria growing, people do wild things. You know, there is, I believe, the name is escaping me, but there is a town in Germany where it was like 90% of the female population was executed during a witchcraft happening. Something absurd along those lines. So, you know, those are, you know, isolated incidents. It's not like this was happening throughout the whole period, but things got really intense, really fast, and it was particularly in Germany where you see those flashes of just absolute insanity.

Right. Right. And one of the other things, you use the classic example of the cow falling sick. And I think that was another thing that I found really interesting about this, that it was the little things that seemingly trivial things, as we would consider them now, big things to them. but small things were huge reasons why you could consider someone a witch. If something happened to your butter, you might have been witched by your neighbor who maybe had a grudge against you. And you could align several different reasons of your own devising for why this random thing would have happened. Your cow fell sick. Your hog fell sick.

Something like that happened. And it had to be a witch next door. Of course. It couldn't be some kind of natural thing that you didn't understand as grasping for a reason and trying to figure out how to understand it, this was one of the more logical reasons of the time. Yeah, I mean, as crazy as it sounds to us today. I mean, we have to remember we're living in the age

where the scientific revolution has happened, the age of enlightenment has happened. So to us, we naturally think, oh, well, the weather changed, what happened? Something, you know, currents and, you know, whatever. There are reasons why the weather changed. To people back then, they don't have the scientific method. They don't have, you know, their world,

really based in this kind of superstition of, you know, if I put a horseshoe over my door, that will protect me. Like, you know, it's kind of this very, very different, you know, logic isn't quite the right word, but logic system, you know, reasoning system that makes perfect sense to them today or back then. So I think that, you know, listeners and when we learn about the trials, just all of the witch trials today, we have to remember that we have to take off our 20th century hats. and step back into a time where science doesn't exist yet.

So you can't think of it with a scientific brain because it wouldn't make sense to them. Exactly. I've said that to myself over and over again. How a sane, rational person in today's world would look at many of these things as almost not possible. How could it even happen? Because you try to apply whatever logic

and cumulative knowledge we've built up over the last almost 400 years since it happened and apply that. And it's hard to separate those. two things. It's really difficult. Yeah, and I mean, they're living in a time when you, the devil supposedly could materialize in front of you and grant a wish. Like, that sounds insane to us today, but that's something that their educated elite was telling them is real, you know? At this time, the people who are the most educated in your society tend to be religious

leaders. Yeah. So your religious leaders are the ones who are writing and thinking and going to college and doing all of this, you know, heavy intellectual stuff. And they're the ones that. that are telling you that this is real. You know, the, you know, illiterate rural classes, they didn't come up with the idea of the devil. Like that came from the top and trickled down. Right. So, you know, it kind of, it makes sense

that this is kind of what happens as a result. And there's several, we can go in so many different directions here, but there's, as you keep hitting little keywords that remind me of something I read, there was one really interesting passage I read, and I'm never gonna be able to come up with the offer at this point after all the different passages of read from the different books.

books and everything else. But there was one instance that I thought that was really interesting in that someone I believe during the, who was actually present at the time of the Salem witch trials, brought up the idea that one of the things that was going wrong was that people were connecting the witch of the Bible of which they read all about. Everyone read, if they read something, they read the Bible cover to cover. And they were using that as the same definition as a witch under English law. And those two things had to be separate. that people started kind of getting this confused, that they thought, well, in the Bible, it talks about a witch, and right now we're saying the word witch too. So they have to be the same thing. So therefore we have to do what is described in some way that we found in the Bible. This is how we have to deal with it, because they're one and the same. But they're actually two different things. Yeah, it's interesting because the witch of the Bible is actually, it's a new piece of the Bible. So that translation, Thou shall not suffer a sorceress to live. The word sorceress is not originally. to the Bible. It comes from several translations of the text. So originally it was,

Thou shall not suffer, and essentially it was a poisoner. So somebody who is using herbs to hurt someone else. That's what it was originally. And as time goes on, that word gets interpreted again and again. Eventually we get to a point where it's sorceress. So I believe King James is the one responsible for that. I could be wrong because when you get into the biblical history. Sure. It gets even more complicated. Oh, I know.

We don't want to dive too deep into that. That's all, it's a whole other world. But yeah, it comes with the different translations when you're translating it from Latin to, you know, Greek to English and, you know, all of that jazz. And you're adding your own, at the time, modern approach to it. So the word changes or the description changes as we develop new terminology and new practices and new ideas. So we transpose those again kind of onto the old text and maybe update what we think is going on.

But to stick kind of in those same lines, there was another passage I read that touched on something you were just mentioning. When we talk about specifically the kind of German more mob justice, it wasn't just simply grabbing someone and throwing them onto a pyre, but it was easier to find someone guilty in some of those more rural areas as opposed to in England where there was actually a court and a process and there were essentially several steps he had to go through. You had to prove a witch.

And one of the things I found fascinating here that I read was that one of the possibly unique things about the Salem witch trials was that the judges, the magistrates who were presiding over these trials would have potentially been on the side of the accused in England previously. But they were automatically against the accused witches in Salem. There was kind of this trans, like you were, I guess the presumption of innocence. that there was more of a presumption of innocence in the older English trials than there were in Salem. Somehow that flipped so that you were automatically assumed to be guilty in Salem, whereas you were automatically assumed to be innocent in England, and you had to prove someone was guilty up to this point. So do we have any kind of understanding as to why it flipped so dramatically in Salem?

Salem is interesting because it kind of breaks all of the rules. And that's, you know, we talked a little bit about earlier before we were recording about how Salem is just this anomaly in American witchcraft, even in English witchcraft. It just does everything, the reverse of how it was done before. And that's why it's so interesting. And especially because it's so late, it's 1692. It's coming right at the end of witch trials. And suddenly, you know, all of the old rules are kind of tossed out the window

and you just start again, which is super interesting. But it's got a lot to do at least. And, you know, scholars will debate this and debate this and debate this. But my kind of personal take on it is I think the reason why Salem is so strange and so different has a lot to do with the fact that Massachusetts didn't have a charter when the Salem Witch Trial starts. So Massachusetts had lost its charter in the 1680s, and that meant that the laws of Massachusetts are kind of up in the air. No one really knows what's going to happen from that point on. So a charter, you know, to kind of back it up even further, is, you know, when you are a colony, you are, you know, still under English law, but you have your own special take on that for your colony.

Right. So Mass Bay had initially, obviously, you hear that story of the pilgrims come over for religious freedom. Sure. So they had a charter initially that very much catered to Puritans, to the Puritan religion and Puritan way of life. But then when they lose that charter, it's essentially. England giving him a slap on the wrist and saying you're getting too independent. You're, you know, doing your own thing way too much. It's time to step back, come back, revaluate.

Remember, you're still part of us. Exactly. You're your own little body out there. You've got to govern for what's happening where you are, but you're still part of England. Exactly. We still rule over your charter. Exactly. So they're reestablishing a charter and obviously everybody's very angry about this.

But that means that England can just change things that have been going on in America for centuries up until that point. So on a practical level, that meant that suddenly if, you know, you had been, you owned a certain amount of land for X amount of years and generations, England could take it back and say, nope, this is the Kings now. You no longer own this land that your family has been farming for three generations at this point. So people are hysterical. People are panicked. And then also, you know, no one's quite sure how are our court system going to be set up. You know, what exactly is going to be, it's not going to be dramatically different, but it's going to be different. So that also means that if you were arrested during this time, you couldn't go through a trial

because they didn't know what a trial would look like. So people are just waiting in jail for somebody to come back with the new charter to tell them. And obviously, this is not a time when you have phones and email. Someone had to physically sail across the ocean with the piece of paper that said, this is your charter now. Yeah. So they don't have to be. actually get the new charter until May of 1692. And the accusation started in January of 1692. So they have quite a few people waiting in jail. So Governor Phipps, who's the governor of Massachusetts at the time, kind of sets up this panic court of Oyer and Terminator, which means to hear and to determine, to deal with the witch trials and to kind of deal with the fact that there

are, you know, this large group of people who are accusing and being accused and everybody's, you know, kind of frantic and afraid, and Governor Phipps is still quite new in his position, and he is not the most educated man to begin with. So this is kind of just a mess. So that's kind of what I blame the witch trials on, because the Court of Orier and Terminator just hurriedly pieced together, and then you go from there. So if they had had this formal, rigid set of laws, and they knew you can't use spectral evidence. You can't, you know, make ever pass this guilty sentence on everyone. You know, if they had had slightly different, more rigid laws, it might have not played out the way it played out.

So there are obviously many other factors that go into it. But I think that that's probably the biggest one. Yeah. Because things are just so up in the air and everyone is just hysterical anyway. Yeah, I think probably the reference that's going to come up most often as I talk to people about this. and it just floats through my mind is a perfect storm. It really is. There's so many factors that lined up in exactly the right order

in exactly the right time to allow for this kind of thing to happen. That's a big one. When the real damage was done, when everyone was accused, when everyone was examined, when the trials were about to start, all of that process happened while there were technically no laws. So Governor Phipps, like you talked about, threw together a court because something had to be done.

But we didn't really know what to do. So we kind of use the old version and said, let's just try to get through this and we'll figure out. And because there was no way to really curtail it because nobody knew what was legal and what wasn't technically. So it just, you know, there was no real great guidance. And then everything just kind of snowballed. The economic conditions that you talked about and the little ice age, the weather was crazy. And the girls start then orchestrating fits and start predicting the behavior that's going to hurt them and things like that. So it clearly gets into a whole other realm from where it began.

Yeah. So there's obviously an evolution to it. Yeah, and the court system's letting them do it, which is another big part of. Yeah, which is another thing that you just touched on and made me think of, that somewhere in the passages too, that's one of the things that made Salem unique. Yeah. The accusers should not have been in the courtroom or the courtroom should not have been set up the way it was so that the accusers could react to everything that someone's saying on a stand, which is basically ultimately what convicted everyone. Yes. It was some of the accusations, but it was the fact that the afflictions happened right.

there for everyone to see it was impossible for a judge to say no I don't believe it yeah or anyone else even if they wanted to it was virtually impossible for yeah and you see examples that when you read the court transcripts which obviously are biased you know we don't know exactly what's happening because this is someone's account of yeah but you see examples of somebody who's on the stand moving their hand or biting their lip or something and then the girls react and they you move your hand they get a slap across the face you know they bite their lip suddenly the afflicted girl has a bite mark on her arm

They're clearly reacting back and forth. So again, in this kind of frenzied hysteria, that seems like a really great indication that that person is a witch. Of course, yeah. Yeah, and it's a little bit of slide of hand, kind of a magic trait, too. You're staring at the person on the stand,

and by the time you shift your attention to the girls, something has happened to them that you didn't see. You can factor in a little bit of that kind of stuff. Yeah. It'd be a great Vegas show at, basically, if they could do that. So let's wrap up. I know we're going pretty long here, so let's wrap up with two.

We'll make a kind of a hard turn here a little bit, but I do want to get to apply this a little bit to modern day and to our history past Salem Witch, because you have this huge wall here that breaks down some of the more modern witch hunts. We've got a huge wall here that has lists some of the more recent things that we've called witch hunts. So let me just, I'll just ask it flat out. Do witch hunts still happen today as I'm looking at this wall? Oh, yes.

So, I mean, we clearly, you know, at the Salem Witch Museum think they do. And it's more so I think it's really complicated when you start using the word witch hunt because people start to think, first of all, you need a witch, someone who is using magic and so on for a witch hunt. Or you need this mob going after someone. And the thing about a witch hunt is it's the essence of what we've been talking about this whole time. So the way that we break it down is this formula. So in order to have a witch hunt, you need these specific things. So you need a fear. You need something to be afraid of.

Right. And then typically you need a triggering event. You need something to happen that makes everyone afraid that their worst fear is confirmed. And what that leads to is this growing and growing and growing hysteria until things become completely out of control. And it is that mob mentality. When people are in a group together and they're afraid, you just tend to lash out. So you find something. Whether or not that thing is logical, you just find it.

You lash out against it because in your mind, when you're very afraid, That makes sense and that's going to fix the problem. So a great example, which obviously Arthur Miller touched on is McCarthyism. It's kind of the heart of the crucible, really. Exactly. Yeah. And you hear, I think that's where you hear witch hunt very commonly today. So, you know, in the 1950s, you know, following the Second World War, you've got the Cold War.

So we're here in America, we're terrified of communism and communist expansion. And we're seeing communism playing out in other parts of the world. And that's this, you know, it's the Cold War. It's this standoff. where everyone is kind of staring each other down and there's this battle between communism and capitalism and everybody's nervous about it. In America, you do see a couple of people who were in the government

who were communist spies. You do see that, so that's real. But what Joseph McCarthy does is he's this, you know, relatively obscure senator from Wisconsin, and he is making a speech in Wheeling West Virginia in the early 1950s, and he stands up with his peace paper. paper in his hand and he says, I have a list of dozens of communist spies that I know for a fact

are working in the United States government and are trying to bring down the government as we speak. Joseph McCarthy had no, he didn't have a list. By all accounts, this was completely fictionalized. He said it to kind of get that, you know, spark. And it works. Suddenly, he's famous. Everybody, you know, wants to talk to him, wants to hear what he has to say, and the government had to take that seriously. They couldn't let a senator say, I know that there are witches, that they're communists. At the time it was, yeah, it's interchangeable. Exactly. You know, I know that there are communists working in the State Department. So what happens is, I mean, Hughack, which is the House Un-American Activities Committee, had already existed prior to this because there had actually

been a similar red scare in the early 20th century. So Hughack, which, which is the House of American Activities Committee, which is the government body that's responsible for, you know, sorting out the communists exists, but Joseph McCarthy kicks it up a notch. So he starts these hearings where you're starting to bring in dozens and dozens of people who, you know, maybe went to a communist rally in college, maybe read a communist pamphlet, maybe they were just gay. And at the time, if you're gay, that means you're a communist. Maybe they just wronged someone in the wrong government branch, and that means you're a communist.

Right. So, and what happens is hundreds and hundreds of people end up losing their jobs, in jail, you know, publicly branded as a communist, blacklisted. And once you were blacklisted, that meant that you couldn't work. You couldn't really show your face in the public eye at all because no one wanted to talk to you for fear of also being associated with communism. Now, if you just take out the word communism and you put in the word which, it's almost the exact same pattern of events. They're so parallel.

Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, people are afraid you don't want to be branded a witch. You don't want to be branded a communist. So you're not going to stand up for them. And it's that exact same kind of, you know, snowball effect. And you see this again and again and again. And so the other two examples that we talk about are Japanese internment after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which is another great example. A hundred thousand Japanese Americans were interned. So essentially put into, you know, these gross, you know, bare bones. camps in the interior of the country until the war was over. And no Japanese American was ever proven to be working with Imperial Japan. That was just a snap moment of fear where you blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few that are not related to them in any way. So, and I mean similarly, we've got the AIDS epidemic in America. Initially, AIDS was called Grid, which the G in Grid was gay.

So the idea was, this is a gay disease. you hear it in the paper all the time from that period, you know, gay cancer, gay disease. And because of that, the government didn't say the word AIDS in public until about 10 years after it first appeared. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word AIDS in public until, I think it's the 1980s, something like that. So, I mean, again, that's got to do with the fact that it's being lopped onto this group of people that are kind of outcast. any way, it's easy to blame them, they got what they deserved, and so on and so forth. And it's not until other people start to really, you know, in large numbers, be impacted by the

disease that, you know, it starts to also, you know, trigger attention and people start to care essentially. So, and again, you see this pattern of behavior again and again and again, all throughout global history, you know, this is something that people just do when they're afraid. Another excellent example you could put on the wall is 9-11. the exact same pattern of behavior happened right after 9-11, where suddenly, you know, anybody who is Islamic who's following, you know, that faith is a terrorist and we have to get rid of them.

It's, you know, you, again, you just see people react in a time of fear because that's the only thing you feel like you can do. Right. So, I mean, that's the big essence of a witch hunt. And the only way to prevent things like that from happening is to learn about it. Because I know that this is going to be the need-your-gris. reaction always. This is what you do when you're afraid. But if you can recognize it, you can analyze the fact that you're afraid that something illogical is happening in your brain, that's how

you stop it. You have to know enough to stop it. And that's the same thing with the European witch hunts. That's, you know, what we talked about earlier, right? Like if you have science, you're not going to accuse someone of witchcraft. So you have to understand the external factors instead of just kind of jumping into a, you know, gut reaction. So. Right. Well, so, you know, you You just touched on a lot of the keywords there. So as we wrap up, I'll ask one final one that you may have just answered in that great answer. What are the lessons we learned from the witch hunt that we can transpose onto today? Yeah, I think it's mainly just, you know, learning to listen and learning to, you know, apply education to times of great fear.

Like, you just, you have to educate yourself and you have to understand why things are happening on a larger scale. You know, the people in Salem in 1692 weren't looking around in saying. saying, well, we lost our charter and we're really afraid of Native Americans and we're having a little ice age. And that's why we're afraid of witches. No, they were just saying, I'm afraid. Clearly it's because of witches have infiltrated my community. You know, it's the same thing with Japanese internment. People, you know, weren't looking around and saying, you know, this is our knee-jerk reaction is to blame a group of people for, you know, you don't do that during times of great fear.

But you have to if you want to stop it. So that's the, I think, the main takeaway from the Salem Witch Trials, and that's why it's so important to learn about history. Because if you don't continue to recognize things that have happened in the past, these are just patterns of human behavior, because history is patterns of human behavior. You know, we don't stop those patterns unless we learn to recognize them, and that's why we have to study history.

So, you know, obviously I'm a little biased as someone who studies history professionally. But I think that it's so important to remind ourselves that my continuing to learn about the past, that's how we can help to change the future. And that's really the only way. And it's such an important thing to remember to prioritize. Right. Well, thank you for saying it. As a history lover myself, I'm glad you were able to put that out there. So thank you for wrapping it up on a very perfect note.

Thank you again for being our guest. Rachel, we will hopefully see you again down the road at some point. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Infamous America, Season 1, Salem. Next week, on the final episode of season one, we'll have an interview with Elizabeth Peterson, director of the witch house and pioneer village in Salem. If you enjoyed the show,

please give it a rating and a review on iTunes, or wherever you're listening. You can find us on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on social media. Our Facebook page is BlackBarrel Media. Our Twitter handle is at B-Barrel Media, and our Instagram handle is at BlackBarrel Media. Thanks again.

Thank you.