Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 501: The Salem Witch Trials Part II - Titters Over Time

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

The boys are back to continue the tale of Salem's Witches, who at this point have become a major issue in several New England communities, and as various "witches" are round up, one after another, the examinations for the Salem Witch Trials themselves begin.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Alright boys, alright my sweet little tiny little boys. You know what, today a lot of times our episodes unfortunately are by the boys and about the boys. No they're not really. Yeah they are. They're never really about the boys.

Yeah they're always about the boys. I feel like masculine is like the fourth thing people would describe as us. Today though, today's episode, all about the girls. It's about the girls? Oh yeah. I see what he's saying here, I see what he's saying. The subject man. The ladies, yeah.

Come on. That's fantastic. Otherwise known as the afflicted. Welcome to the last podcast on the left everyone. I have been hanging out with the shirtless Henry Zabrowski and the sleeveless Marcus Parks. I just saw Marcus Parks's armpits, not that much hair. However, I'm staring at Henry Zabrowski's chest and he makes up for it. Wow.

Everyone knows that I'm the satyr of the group. From the waist up, hardly any hair, waist down, a lot of hair. It all fell to the bottom. And there's actually a lot of accounts of demons and demonic figures in this entire story that have me feeling a little triggered, maybe almost body shamed by history. Because a lot of them talking about the evil nature of the squat hairy man who dresses in fun clothes. Right.

Well folks, we're not going to Nilbog, we're not talking goblins. We're on the Salem Witch Trials part two. Part two. Part two. So when we last left Salem and the surrounding community circa 1692, the first of the main witchcraft accusers, collectively known as the afflicted, were just starting to show the first symptoms of bewitchment. Now, what truly set the Salem Witch Trials apart from all the rest, or at least the rest

in America, is that it was the only one to admit so-called spectral evidence during both the beginning accusations and in the trials themselves. Now, is that what happens when you take a toot and it lends up a little bit in your underwear? I would say legally it's a shard. In the legal, of the legal processes, it's the most shard-like of them, because anybody can say anything. Anybody can be a ghost.

And it's very difficult to pin that down. Absolutely. You might even say they might be difficult to find actual evidence of that. Could be. Yeah. A shard, I think, because it's a shard. That's got an evidence. There's very hard evidence for a shard.

Man, I don't know what it is. It's almost like it's an SPD. It showed up. Yeah, maybe an SPD, and then your friend starts yelling at you that you did it, you did it, you did it, and then they fucking hang you for it. Oh, good. Yeah, they all said, yeah, you're emoliated. Gosh, darn it.

Well, put simply, spectral evidence was evidence that only the afflicted party could see. For example, a girl would say that she was, at that very moment, being attacked by the astral projection of a witch that was clear as day to her, but invisible to everyone else. Kessel's sucking my dick right now. He's sucking my dick right now, and he can still talk. It's amazing. Oh, this is like a magic act. I wonder where my mouth tasted like a good Polish wand.

He's sucking my dick right now. Wow. Spectral evidence. But over the next couple of episodes, what you're going to see is the constant struggle, I think, of these guys in their own really stupid backwards way trying to figure out how to make all this legal, which it ain't. And it's all dumb, and it's a waste of time, and it's actually just a font of misery for everyone involved.

Just one second, guys. Terrible. That's spectral evidence. Spectral evidence. Well, usually, spectral evidence would not be considered admissible evidence in court. Because it's not real. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Instead, of course, because it's a hallucination. And hallucination is generous. It doesn't even allow lie detectors. Yes. Lie detectors don't even work. Exactly. Instead, according to the book Salem Witch Trials, A Day by Day Chronicle, conclusive proof for witchcraft followed the same standards as any other crime in colonial Massachusetts.

Back then, you needed a voluntary confession plus concrete evidence of the act or proper evidence by two credible witnesses. And a lot of this was set up from the Crusades and the Inquisition, where they had it again. And this is also just plain all legal. Oh, yeah. This isn't just witchcraft. This is because, remember, witchcraft is just another crime like stealing. Yes.

But the witchcraft and shit got baked into legal processes 500 years before all of this shit. It has been going on for a long time. Also, Henry, please say it correctly. Inquisition! Oh, you're doing Monty Python, and now I'm upset. Usually. But that's not even close.

No one expects the Inquisition. No one expects the Inquisition. Inquisition! You're just saying, you're mixing. You're saying it in a French accent, which is not with the characters of Spanish. I'm not saying it like Monty Python. I'm saying it like Sebastian the Crab from Little Mermaid. I don't even.

We're at the very beginning of a very long episode. This is the very, very beginning. Can this now? Yeah. Lumiere was the French when Sebastian, I believe, was Jamaican. Yeah. That'd be crazy. We have a long episode.

Well, concerning these standards of conviction, or at the very least standards of accusation, confession without supporting evidence that could just be the suspect's delusion, the so-called serial confessors. But evidence without confession, like, say, evidence of the sort of folk magic many people saw in 1692 New England, that could be seen as a coincidence. Coincidence. That's why you need both of them at the same time. Yes.

Okay. And as far as the two witnesses principle goes, those two witnesses needed to have both observed the same event, not two similar events at different times. Like, say, if you're charged with sucking the devil's dick, both of those two people have to see you sucking the devil's dick. You cannot have two people seeing you suck the devil's dick twice. You understand? Does the devil get to come out and say, he was sucking my dick?

Right. Does the devil like cookery? Yes. Do you think it'll make the devil uncomfortable? No, he loves it. Okay. But for the devil, but to be a cook, you have to be in a committed relationship in the first place, and the devil's never going to be in a committed relationship.

Hard to pin him down. Interesting. But when it came to the Salem Witch Trials, all of those rules were thrown out the window. In Salem, a girl could just say that she was being attacked by the invisible specter of Goody Proctor, and that would be admitted into evidence against Goody Proctor with just as much weight as if they found a pentagram drawn in goat's blood under her rug while she wore a t-shirt that says, I suck the devil's dick in Salem, Massachusetts. Yeah, thank you to Matt Syndicate for the inspiration there.

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt. That's right. You know, because they didn't have any evidence, because as I might begin to chart in this episode, the idea that there was a gigantic secret confederation of witches or devil worshipers in any single society, there's absolutely no real evidence. I hope that there is. There's probably, we'll get into it at some point, but the idea that there was, there are theistic Satanists.

You get the Temple of Set. There are people that do believe in Satan as a God, but again, they just believe it's more Luciferianism. They just think that there was a mix-up, and Lucifer is the real God. And God's the lion God, you see. Yeah, I see. It's a mix-up. Now, the most respected spiritual leaders in New England came out against spectral evidence

even before the trial started, and they continued to caution against its use during the trials themselves. However, this was not because admitting spectral evidence was obviously stupid. Instead, the leading ministers of the time, and therefore some of the leading figures in the colony, said that spectral evidence was unreliable because the devil was powerful enough to impersonate the innocent. It makes all the sense in the world. Especially if I appear to you in some form that you may be confused. There's no way, because I could never be the devil.

I do think you woke me up at like two o'clock in the morning when you were all hammered and into my room, and then you... It was not me. Okay. It must have been some other specter. Specter. Because I certainly never must have your room for the bathroom. All right.

As far as where we are in the story of Salem, we're right at the beginning of the first accusation. After the two girls living under the roof of Reverend Samuel Parris baked a witch cake to identify the witch causing their torment, the accused one of the two people Samuel Parris had enslaved, Tituba, of being that witch. Yes. And that was one of the better piss cakes in Massachusetts. But also, I find there actually is a really compelling evidence to say that the Parris'

daughters were suffering from tinnitus. Oh, really? And that's it. And that tinnitus, what's it? A tetanus. Doubt. Hey. Tinnitus.

Oh, yeah. It's just... Did the Charles Manson act out? No, a tetanus. Oh, interesting. However, partly because the bewitchments had started to spread beyond the Parris household to servant girls across Salem, as well as the daughter of Parris' friends, the Putnam's, people had a feeling that it wasn't just Tituba who was responsible for these attacks.

Therefore, Samuel Parris and his wife, Elizabeth, pushed their daughter and niece to name more witches in Salem, all while they bandied about the names of people they thought might be in the thrall to the devil, all within hearing of the girls who needed more names to name. As far as who those names belonged to, they were women that the Parris' and their buddies didn't respect, or people they believed wished them harm. In other words, they named people it was safe to name. With the usual suspects. And when the first afflicted girls overheard the names of people it was safe to name being

spoken, they put those names in the jackpot. Specifically, the second and third accused witches were two women of low social status named Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn. While Sarah Osburn was merely a free thinker that somewhat lived outside of society, Sarah Good was certainly one of those aforementioned pains in the ass. It's kind of interesting. I watched the witch again last night to kind of get more context and remind myself just how creepy New England is, and it is crazy.

The idea that she truly was outside of society, Sarah Osburn, they leave, they literally make them go. So they just go, because also I found out, reading a little bit about the structure of Salem Village, is that back in the day they used to have all the farms in one collected area and all of the living areas in one collecting area, right? Like it's a town. Like a town. But the idea is you had them all close, right, so that everybody could collectively work together,

that everybody that lived in the houses would collectively work the land and share amongst themselves. Eventually, everyone realized, I'm sick of doing this, I hate you, I want to go live over there where those nice trees are, and then they go send it over there, and eventually the longer you're over there, everyone's like, I think that bitch is a fucking witch. Like they just look her over there, she's staring at my rutabagas. Why would she want to hang out with us? I don't understand.

I don't understand. She must be weird, she don't want to hang out with us. You notice that the wheat is higher than it was yesterday? Very carefully. Also, Sarah Osborn, she would love, I was stuck in traffic today, which was infuriating. She would have loved the man I was behind because he had a funny bumper sticker, and it said, think, it's not illegal yet. Not yet.

Not yet. So Sarah Osborn, she would have felled outside the bun too, she probably would have laughed at that bumper sticker, which in my opinion makes her a witch. Is it wrong if I take the side of all the priests and pastors? It is. It is. It is wrong. It's a bad take.

It's a real bad take. Fantastic. Well, Sarah Good was a poor, alienated woman from a family who had fallen on such hard times that they were near vagrancy by the time the accusations began. While her family had once been successful, circumstances meant that she and her husband had resorted to begging, doing it in a way that is specific to those who once held higher status. Okay.

I used to be rich. Don't we all want to see me be rich again? I love that. Well, for example, if someone gave Sarah Good charity, she would make the giver feel uncomfortable as if the gift was an insult. But if the gift was too little, Good would feel equally disgusted. Oh, God. You can see this, fucking bitch.

This is like when you try to give somebody who is unhomed in New York some food and they're like, I'm vegan. I had that happen to me. I remember one time I gave a sandwich to a poor dude on the street and he's like, I don't need bacon. I know it's like, I think that your Lord would not care right now what you eat. Or his Lord would look at it as the ultimate test and we condemn him to hell forever for failing.

Dude, now you're in the Puritan mindset. Yeah. Now I'm thinking like a minister. Now I've been thinking like a minister since I was six years old, dude, and fucking I first got the fear of hell put inside of me deep where it still lives to this day. This book, I can't really talk about it enough how much I love it, Europe's Inner Demons by Norman Cohn. And a part of it is constantly that it's this whole idea that even the idea, you would

fall for one of these so-called human frailties, like the idea of like being horny or wanting something else and somebody hacks, right? Being envious or something about how all of that is just a fucking trick, bro. And then God purposely punishes you to make you want all the extra shit. He makes you want it, want it because then you just yearning for it shows why you should be at the bottom of the fucking pile, dude, because you fucking didn't get it. Whammy's. Nothing but whammy's.

Nothing but whammy. I mean, literally it would just be an LT, lettuce, tomato sandwich without the bacon. That's a salad. That's a salad. You cut up the bread. That's a croutons. Yeah. It's not bad.

Well, as it happened. Well, it is bad. You want the bacon. Henry's trying to bacon scam people. Yeah, you want the bacon. I can do a bacon flip if I want. Whatever. Well, as it happened, after Reverend Samuel Parris gave charity to Sarah Good one day

at the start of his daughter and niece's afflictions, he noticed that Sarah walked off muttering something under her breath. But instead of simply thinking, wow, what a bitch, Samuel Parris decided that yes, his girls had gotten worse after Sarah Good had come by his home and the muttering that he heard, it must have been a curse. It's a devil's house. Whoa. Meanwhile, she was just going like, cheap ass fucking minister.

It's like all she was doing. Yeah, that's it. And to top it all off, Sarah Good was considered untrustworthy in this community of British immigrants because her father had been a highly successful innkeeper nicknamed the French man. The French man. He invented two in the pink one in the stick. Isn't that something?

Which is really very incredible. And then we covered it a little bit. Do I get now rose? I wouldn't do it. And now do it. And then murder. Isn't that something? Inquisition.

I think that you think that that's tradition from Tevea. I always think of Tevea. It's one of my favorite fake sugars. Fuck it. I'm gonna fucking walk away, dude. It's got two hours and 15 minutes left. But that was Sarah Good. The other accused, Sarah, Sarah Osburn, had done nothing more than make some unconventional

life choices. Years before, she had scandalized the community by purchasing the contract of an indentured servant because she was in love. She married him after the purchase, but because these things just weren't done, the community looked down on her for this decision. How hot is it to be husband and present? Oh. And you're the purchased one.

And you show up and you're like, ooh, ooh. And you get the weird little, like, you're too nick with the extra holes and decide to go get all the firewood and be like, oh, no, I spilled all this firewood and you like drop down and that wife just sits there watching that husband get all dusty. I love the Sibarowski revisionist history of American history. This is great. You'll be, after they get rid of CRT, you're going to be taking over for most curriculum. Hey, I believe fair and just.

And I'll just say, humans should be damned and we're a virus on this rock. America, the sexy years. Well, as a result of thinking outside of societal norms, just the slightest bit, Sarah Osburn was in prime position to be accused of witchcraft. However, in an example of just how cruel and uncaring people can be when they're scared and looking for a scapegoat, Sarah Osburn was completely bedridden at the time of her accusation. Colonial Massachusetts sick.

And she was unable to leave her house under her own power. I think that we can all tell that this woman has the ungodly powers of a witch. I mean, she can't get out of bed. No, we will all see as I show you now, as I grab her bed clothes and I spit her from the bed and she launches and triumphs into the devil's, oh, she is just on the ground. Oh, well, I can't fucking hang her any, honestly, what a waste of time, let's hang her anyway. She had more power, I think, if she was a witch. And that didn't stop the good people of Salem from actually dragging her from her bed to

publicly accuse her of witchcraft. You can get up, get up. Do witches get sick? Ah, I guess. You get sick of the hassle of society. I agree with that. She could also be faking it. You never know.

She never know what happens. You never know what happens to these people, yeah. Now Osburn and Good held at least one, if not many of the characteristics that made a person susceptible to witchcraft accusations in the 17th century. They were outside of society. They wanted to be outside of society. They refused to show deference to the superiors in the existing order of things. They'd moved around a lot for whatever reason and or their social rank had fallen.

And so, since Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn met at least a few of these criteria and they were openly suspected by those of higher social rank, Samuel Parris' niece and daughter named the two Saras as their tormentors. And once the daughter and niece did accuse two more women, the other girls mentioned at the end of the last episode followed suit, specifically 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr. She's a hard-ass bitch, that little girl. She's 12. She's intense.

I guess she's Colonial Williamsburg 12. Well, this whole episode is filled with very scary little girls. It is filled with, I'd be like, oh, sort of devil in the window, if you look to look like you. That is scary. Yeah, dude. It's all of them. It's a whole town of the orphans.

Oh, no. Of course you are, president. Or so a pretty rocked-out ticketed woman and thrashed her on a spit-claw. A four-hour long. And the fate was dripping in on the worst devils, baby. How do they all sound like Julia Childs? Well, Ann Putnam Jr. said that the specter of Sarah Good was visiting her and pinching her.

But more importantly, Putnam Jr. said that the specter was trying to get her to sign what the afflicted had started calling the devil's book. Yes. And that's why a lot of times you'll see the devil hanging outside of various movie sets or hotels where the movie stars stay, because he's constantly looking for others to sign the devil's book. He's not going to get Keanu, I'll tell you that much. Look at this signature I have for Hugh Grant.

Ooh. $7 on eBay. Fantastic. Yeah, it's just another nefarious page from the devil's book. I love that. And here is this signature I got at Disney World from a young Aladdin. Please. Yes.

He's actually not the genie. Isn't that something? Oftentimes people think Aladdin is the genie. They don't. Yeah, they do. No, no one's ever thought that. No, I would never do that. I would never do that.

I would never complain that. That is why I am the owner of the devil's book. All right. Well, as we mentioned last episode, the Puritans were a mercantile people and contracts were a big part of their lives. So it made sense that one of the touchstones of the Salem story was the so-called devil's book, where people could make their market signifying a formal yet temporary covenant with Satan, much like an indentured servant contract.

Yeah, man. You can do a lease to own with Satan for your soul. So it's, yeah, it's a rent to own. That's a good point. It is. But, you know, again, this is a formula that harkens back to all or all accused organizations with Satan or contractual obligations to Satan. That has been around for a fucking ever.

It's really strange because there's something about it again. The human need to create a kind of a legal base, a form and reality, because they are constantly not in good faith using the Satanist argument against people since the year 100. The whole point is to discredit you, but they need to find a legal basis, they need to find a hook that they can hang it on, so these are the type of things. You say, ah, but you see, she signed a contract and then they're like, where's the contract? Hmm, Jesus, but spiritual nature. But the contract does exist, but the contract exists in a place that is very real called

the invisible world. Yep. Oh. It's just as real as this world. Well, it's invisible. It's invisible. And it lays over our world, you know, like animation cells, you know, where they put Mickey Mouse's face on and off and on and off, yeah, it's like that, except invisible, you can't see

Mickey Mouse's face. No, you can't. You don't know if it's Mickey Mouse or not. No, you don't. In the invisible worlds where I'm a professional basketball player, where kissles the best lover that the world's ever met, absolutely. And where Marcus is finally a beautiful woman. Isn't that nice?

Finally, I get to be Martha Sparks. Oh yeah, Martha. I don't like the tenor of that either. I didn't like the tenor of that voice or the guttural growl I heard underneath. You looked at Marcus like he was a pile of Slim Jims. Snap into a Slim Jim. Now once Amputnam Jr. started accusing the two Saras of pestering her, she was joined by Elizabeth Hubbard, servant to the man who had originally diagnosed the two Paris girls

with bewitchment. That was Dr. Griggs. Yeah, it's me, man. Dr. Napoleon Griggs. You changed your name. Man, man. Benedicto. It doesn't matter, man, when your practice is rock and roll.

I have a lump on my neck. You want to check it out real quick? Oh hell yeah. You know who once had a lump on his neck? My old buddy who's dead. That's not good news, bro. Oh, that's bad news. You got cancer, son.

Gosh darn it. Well, Elizabeth Hubbard added to the narrative by saying that she was being stalked by a wolf sent by Sarah Good. And the specter of the bedridden Sarah Osburn was tormenting her while accompanied by, this is very interesting, a short, hairy, winged thing. I am pissed. I'm already pissed. You get mentioned so many times in these stories.

There's a dude. Should I jump into this now? This is fascinating. All right, all right. It's fascinating. Fascinating. So I was reading this book in Europe's Inner Demons and one there was a, there's an old timey writer, right, a guy named Caesarius, right, who wrote, he's named Caesarius much

like, is this guy Caesarius? And he was a monk in the 1200s. This is fun. This is fun. A fun way to tell history. Ed Tutan. I reacted the exact same way I did as when you did it earlier. Yeah, thank you.

Oh, that's the second time you've tried that. I did it on the show now, though. Wow. Before I did it, I ran it for Marcus and I was like, because I came up with it yesterday when I was fucked when I was doing my research. That's fantastic. But he was a monk, right, so a while he wrote these, the stories of demons and their behavior for all of these years and people thought that Caesarius was writing a funny book.

Okay. Like that he thought it was supposed to be funny, but this researcher, which I think is really interesting, Norman Cohn, he postulates that the dude was not funny, that he thinks he was dead serious. Right. But the stories that he told of how demons behaved were like, he basically wrote episodes of your pretty faces going to hell. Good plug.

Where, yes, it is. Where he wrote these stories about these little fat little demons. And what year is this by? This is like 10th century, right? This is 1200s. Yeah. And so he wrote this story and one was the story of this demon that wanted to get right with the God, right?

He wanted to confess his sins. So he goes to this priest and he says, hey, I want to get right with God. And the priest is like, well, it would take like a thousand years for you to confess all your sins. And he's like, good for you, I've been alive for five thousand years. Oh, that's good. He can do it five times. And he's like, all right, fine, whatever.

Well, okay. When you want to be absolved, you have to throw yourself on the ground and say, praise God three times a day. You got to do that for a thousand years and you're free and you're done. Still not that much. And the demon's like, you got it. So he goes out there. He throws himself down.

He's just like, praise God. And he does it again. Prostrates himself again. Praise God. And finally he's like, this is really hard. And he's like, fuck it. I'll go back to hell. And then he just disappears.

That's the end of the story. That's the end of the story. It's a 12 minute episode. There's really not much you can do with it and then I love the other story about the priest that all of a sudden got this beautiful singing voice and hits and stole it. And it's like, y'all hung around. You know, this guy was doing all my life, I pray for someone like you. And they're like, you never had this much soul, Derek.

Was that C.C. and JoJo? Yes. K.C. and JoJo. Fantastic. And so he told us all about having sex as little kids when he used to dance to that in sixth grade. You make it hard for me. You remember that?

Oh yeah, you make it hard for me. You make it hard for me. Do you remember that one lyric? A little poke comes through. Yeah, it's called making it hard for me. The song is about dancing too close on a woman and then you get a boner because the woman stands too close on you. Yeah.

No, I just always think, never gonna get it, never gonna get it, never gonna get it. Now that's singing right there. Oh yeah, and Bo. Woo, woo, woo! Yeah. Back when singers were singers. Just cut to me outside the pizza hut buffet without $5. I always remember.

But this priest, right? So he's singing and they're all like, you never sang this fucking good. You must be filled with the demon. So they go and they do a big exorcism on him. The demon comes out of him and the guy just dies and they just realize, oh, that demon's been living inside this dude singing great for the last six months, reanimating his body. Just because all that demon wanted to do was sing. Well they should have let him sing then.

So that's all it did, like the priest died and then the demon entered into his body and reanimated the body and all he did for six months was sing. Beautifully. Beautifully. And they were all pissed. What is the point of that story? What is the point of that? You never know.

And then the end of it, they said something like, Lyfe de Un Leche de Baxalate, which means in Latin, life is a box of chocolates. Damn. You're pissed. Wow. I'm learning so much. I think this is history. It's not.

I think this is history. That's actually not history. That is. No, no. Somebody wrote, it's two stories that an idiot wrote. Yeah, no. But I'm saying it's just, it's just badly written stories at that. No, it's just about how there has been stories of demons for a long time and what they do.

Yeah. I mean, you don't have to convince us. Yeah. Yeah. It's all good. I believe you. No, I believe you. Well, with at least four girls claiming witchcraft, legal proceedings began against Tichuba,

Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn on February 29th, 1692, meaning the Salem witch trials essentially began on a leap day. A day that should never exist. Interesting indeed. I just feel so bad for Sarah Osburn. She's just in bed and she's like, what are you all doing? I mean, that's how it is. I've been sick.

Yeah. However, the trials themselves would not be for months to come. On this episode, we're going to be focusing on the formal accusations that led to the trials, the so-called examinations. Now, since servant girls and children weren't legally considered to be people in colonial Massachusetts, the complaint against the witches had to be filed by men on their behalf. Good and fair. So crazy.

And so once the complaint was filed, local magistrates, Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorn, or Hathorn, it's hard to say, they began with what was referred to as examinations. Examinations basically were a terrifying combination of an interrogation and a deposition followed by a likely instant arraignment all done not only in front of the public, but your accusers themselves. And this is a step up from the inquisition, because it used to be you only have the inquisitors to be in front of. So this is them being like, you see, now we've made it fair.

We've made it good. Yeah. Now, there's the examination first, and then there's the trial after that. But almost 100% of the time, the examination is just like, you're guilty. Get out of here. Go to jail. And there's no bail either. Like, you're in jail until the trial.

And also, they said that the prisons there were fucking disgusting. We'll get to the prisons later. And I think there was actually bail sometimes, but it was prohibitively expensive most of the time. It was for the super, super rich. Yeah. It's nothing again. So glad, again, no contemporary tie-ins.

Absolutely nothing has changed. Well, Corwin and Haythorne, they were nothing more than merchants and politicians without any legal training whatsoever. And even if they had been, Massachusetts at this time didn't even have a legal system to speak of, because they were transitioning yet again to a new charter. And so, Corwin and Haythorne got swept up in the same fear, paranoia, and social pressure as everyone else to keep this witch train moving for no particular reason other than life sucked and everything was hard.

It was something to talk about. And when you are literally in a full standstill as a society, like your production is shut down, there's no farming, the soil is fallow, everybody's at each other's throats, you're in the middle of literally a religious civil war amongst your community. It was almost like, we can all agree on this, right? This town needs a witch trial. Yes. Very good.

Very good. Now, the day after the complaint was filed, the three accusers were arrested and brought to a local tavern for questioning. This included the still extremely sick Sarah Osburn, who was ripped from her sick bed and brought to a bar on the say so of children. Once they all arrived at the tavern. I mean, this is how I'm going to like leave the hospital one day. Bring me to the nearest tavern and then that's where you're going.

The local children are convinced that Sasquatch has cancer in the local hospital. But once everyone arrived at the tavern, they had to undergo the humiliation of being inspected head to toe by the tavern owner's wife for witch marks, which were blemishes, moles, warts, or pretty much anything out of the ordinary down to having a weird butthole, or at least weird according to the inspector. Yeah, and then that guy's got, when he's got starfish butt, and he's hanging there and he's wondering, he's looking at yours been like, there's no natural butthole that is a circle.

Well, I don't know about that. I'm sitting right here. That is obviously a hexagram. Oh my goodness. Excited. It's like that little Play-Doh push thing. I would say more discoloration, you know, because they definitely talked about grundles. You know, they talked like sometimes like a butthole's like, it's not quite the right

color. You know, are they just looking at birthmarks? If you had birthmark was in a weird place or something like that, like they would just decide basically. They were looking for the perfect butthole. The perfect butthole was a nice pink, you know, it's like pornography. You know it when you see it. Yeah.

You go like, that's a nice. What about, okay, so the wife of the bar owner, the wife of the tavern owner, why did she get to do that? Like what, did she have credentials? She's probably just happy she's not the one being searched. I see. I think you get that. And then, because they're looking for the witch's teat, which is a third nipple that

would be used to feed the familiars or when the devil would come and supple, supple and suckle. So they were stripped entirely nude in front of everybody. Yeah, their boy's hair was shaved. No, the inspection was private. That was classy. Yeah. Yeah.

Because if they strip someone down, then someone's going to get horny and you can't have that. Then that person has to be tortured. Yeah. Because you have to weigh it's like, is humiliation more important or is tamping down sexual need more important? And in this point, sexual need, tamping that down one out. Life sucked and everything was hard.

It sounds like it, yeah. Well, interestingly, Sarah Good's husband, William Good, who seemed pleased as punch about his wife getting arrested for being a witch. Bye, honey. Bye. Oh, you got, I got to pick you up where at the witch hunt? I just got, I'm inventing a thing called golf. Yeah, I got to go do that.

He made sure to stop by the tavern to tell the woman doing the inspection. Hey, my wife, she just developed this like weird wart, like underneath her right shoulder. Just want to make sure you didn't miss it. Just want to make sure you didn't miss it. Okay. See you later. I'll see you later. I don't see.

Tell me if I'm right. Tell me if I'm right. Tell me if I'm right. She's got a weird fucking feed, right? You tell me. I never, I don't think she's evil. It just sounds like you're not attracted to your wife. No, no, no.

I'm not saying she's evil. Do you want a divorce? Uh, that's, that's going to punish them all by death. Is that right? You're not getting a divorce. You're not getting a divorce in this society. God dang it. So once the physical examinations were done, the magistrates moved on to the aforementioned

legal examinations where according to author Emerson Baker, the suspects were grilled with all the fervor and dirty tricks of a police detective trying to elicit a confession. In this first of many rounds of examinations, the accused were brought before the first four girls, which were the two Paris kids and Putnam Jr. and servant Elizabeth Hubbard. Once faced, magistrate Haythorne asked leading questions that straight up accused the suspects of witchcraft. Basically, instead of saying, let's figure out what's going on here objectively and calmly, the judges actually began the examinations by declaring that witches were real and that

the purpose of these proceedings were to find them. And we're going to find them no matter what, because we're here to find them. My God. And think about this. All this is at the fucking TGI Fridays. Yeah. Are people like drinking and stuff? Oh yeah.

Is this an active bar? Yeah. This is Ingersoll's Tavern. So everyone's just getting hammered and then you have a person be like, which is a real? I see why it's entertaining. It is entertaining. I mean, I will say, will I be mad if I'm there? Yeah.

And I'm just trying to have a normal bar at happy hour and now a fucking witch trial shows up with no sign. Like, I'll be pissed. It's better than a stand-up comedy show starting up. I don't know. Oh yeah, for sure. Well I don't know if at this point they may have, for the first round of examinations, they might have been at Ingersoll's Tavern, but for every examination after that they

did it in the meeting house, which is basically like you're having a trial in a church. Yeah. Okay. Now, for example, here are a few of the questions that the magistrates asked the accused witches. What evil spirit have you familiarity with? Have you made no contact with the devil? Why do you hurt these children? Why?

Why, Kiesel? Well, it seems like you're acutely... I didn't do nothing. Why did you hurt the children? I don't have any. I don't even like kids enough to hurt them. Write them down. He's, honestly, this is the most honest answer I've heard all day.

The Sarah Good of course denied everything when she was put to the question, what evil spirit have you familiarity with? None. Have you made no contact with the devil? Of course not. Why do you hurt these children? I have never hurt a child. But in a pattern that occurred again and again throughout the preliminary accusations and

the trials themselves, the afflicted girls wailed and convulsed and shrieked in agony whenever Sarah Good denied the accusations. Man. Yeah. The more she denied, the louder they shrieked. And it's shrieking and shrieking, just the worst fucking noise you can imagine. Four girls, all at once, 14-aged girls screaming at the top of their lungs that they're in pain, they're in pain, they're in agony, they're in agony.

Everything's awful. Yeah. And have you ever been outside at one of these One Direction concerts? Oh my goodness. Oh, you know how it is. But it's weird because it was total chaos. They were doing, they were like, again, trying this concept of like, well, there'll be order and injustice here or whatever, bullshit.

And then it was an immediate total circus. No, man. Sarah Good, she's getting gaslit. She must be pretty confused and upset at this point. Mm-hmm. And so, not knowing what to do, Sarah Good threw the other Sarah under the bus and claimed that it was the bedridden Sarah Osborn who was tormenting all of them all at once, including Sarah Good.

I can't even stand up to piss. I did not do this. I'm not a witch. That's how powerfully of a witch you are, madam. If she can't stand to piss, she is not a witch. Whoa. Wow. The first defense attorney.

Yeah. Well, following that proclamation, the magistrate brought Sarah Good's husband, William Good, to the stand. He said that he had no reason to believe his wife was a witch, aside from her quote-unquote ill temperament. Oh, come on. Basically saying like, sure, my wife's horrible to be around. I hate being married to her, but eh.

No witch. She's not a witch. She's not a license-carrying witch. She's more of a fucking, I'd say a JV Squad witch, you know what I mean? I guess contractually he fulfilled his husband duty. Oh yeah. Yes. William Good then got punny with it, in the middle of proceedings accusing his wife of

a capital crime. He said quote, I may say with tears that she is an enemy of all good. I mean, you're a witch. That's a Puritan enjoying a good joke right there. That's what I'm talking about. Oh my God. I hate it. It's horrible.

Oh, you're going to murder her then, huh? It sounds like it. I guess I'll be single. You're way too happy about that. But while the whaling did introduce some drama into the proceedings, nothing on that first day compared to the story told when Tituba was brought into the meeting house as that day is closer. Now, Tituba's testimony was what really kicked the lid off everything, but her lies certainly

were not those of a woman looking for attention or those of someone looking to shake up society. Instead, Tituba was another victim. She later told a writer named Robert Califf that after she was accused following the baking of the witch cake, Samuel Parris beat a so-called confession out of her, then coached her on what to say and how to say it for her eventual public examination. I mean, anybody with a shade darker than a deep pink was under a suspicion in this time period. You know what I mean?

So like Tituba was right in the center of it. She really became like a huge force by this because, but also her hands were tied. These people. Because she was fucked either way. If she was going to be hung up for doing nothing, there is no evidence that she did any sort of like, because there was titters over time saying that she did some like fortune telling with the kids or like show them country style little magic things. And there is no evidence that she did any of that shit.

Also, if you Google titters over time, you're going to find one of the most romantic pornographies of all. I'm so glad I'm not your father. I just feel like I just see banked, banked because I'm just like shaking his head climbing into the cab of his truck and I'm not even a beeping a goodbye, just hitting that road. You're hitting the road. Titters over time. You'll love the milking scene.

Yeah. Titters was my cousin's nickname when he was a kid because he was a, he was a chubby little boy. Oh, because first titts? It was even just first titts. Mr. Titters. Mr. Titters. Come here, Mr. Titters.

No, I'm fucking Titters. I wish I knew what Titters was. It was just straight up Titters. It was just straight up Titters. He's a wonderful man, though. You guys met him, remember in Grundy County, my cousin came by? I didn't know he was Titters. That was Titters.

He would have completely changed my entire perception of that now handsome man. Next time I see him, I'm calling him Titters. We're going to end up with four black guys between us. He's going to get quite upset, but awesome. Well, because, sorry, man, well, because of Samuel Parris' coaching of Tituba, her story was intricate, extremely convincing, and most importantly, highly satisfying to the people who believe that the devil was the source of all their ill fortune. Yeah, it's good, man.

That's a good story. She nailed it, huh? Now, Tituba said that she was first visited by the devil one night as she was falling asleep. A tall, darkly clad, white-haired man stood beside her and told her that he planned to kill Samuel Parris' daughter and niece. Now, if you're Tituba, you're not going like, nice. Yeah, that'd be awesome.

He was like, yeah, do it. He actually sounds like the tall man from Fantasm. Yes. Interesting. And what was more, Tituba was supposed to help him, or he would kill her as well. Okay. The heading usually was the threat. Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah. Okay, bro. Yeah, bro, let's go. What are we going to do? What are we doing? Well, this man, who was obviously the devil, said that he was a god and presented her with a document that would exchange six years of service for, quote, many fine things. I don't know if you've ever heard of a thing called a beer koozie.

Oh, that's fantastic. And there's more than that. I don't know if you've ever even heard of a thing called a key chain. Woo! So much swag. I'm thinking a molten chocolate cake also, and then you'll be super happy. This is not that bad of a deal. Six years, you get a bunch of stuff.

It's not that long. This is stuff, though. But it's devilry. Stuff. It's just stuff. We're surrounded by stuff. I love stuff. It's trickery because the devil doesn't just sign a contract for six years now.

You will see once your signature is upon the dotted line, oh, there's one. The trick really has been set. Titter's over time. Well, if she declined, like she pretty much had a deal. Like sign the six years, do the devil's bidding whenever he asked, and you get many fine things. If you don't sign, then you will receive the same torture as these two young girls. Just sign it. I will make you watch Ken Burns' jazz.

I don't mind that, but it is a lot. I really don't love jazz, but I respect it. Yeah. Well, over the next few days, this white-haired devil would come again and again to offer Tituba bizarre bribes, like small, brightly-colored birds, like, look, I shall give you this bird along with many other fine things. It's a bird. What about Gamecube?

Can I get a Gamecube? No, I brought you a bird. A bird? You're the devil. You brought me an effing bird. I also understand this bird needs to be fed two times a day. I don't want a bird. I can only regularly clean it, and you're going to have to buy the gauge.

An animal is the worst gift you can give. No, not yours. Congratulations. Man. But still, Tituba refused, and the devil promised to return again and again, all while he bewitched and tortured the two young girls in the Paris household. By late January, Tituba was being tormented by taunting and demanding apparitions, hogs and big black dogs that would leap from the shadows and yell, serve me.

Oh, yeah, very good. Other times, the man with white hair would appear with a pair of cats. One red cat, one black cat. Yeah. This is blacky. This is Ed Sheeran. Oh, isn't that nice? That's a little cat Ed Sheeran.

Yeah. Or, in an image that would show up time and again, the devil would be accompanied by a little yellow bird, yellow being the devil's color, which is why the original daredevil costume was that hideous yellow instead of the classic red that we now know it has. Fascinating. Wow. This is all the piece of information that just removed a piece of information I wanted. There goes your brother's birthday.

You know, daredevil, he used to be a yellow costume. I guess he didn't really have a good, I guess he didn't have a good fashion sense because he couldn't see why. He's blind. He's blind. That's the whole thing about it. You can't hear colors or something. No, you can't.

You can't hear colors. Also, it's like green. You know the rules. It's the thing you don't. It's the least. We know. I don't want to get stuck. You're just talking about the color of the sonar they use in the comic book to signify

that he can see stuff with sonar. No, I'm talking about how if you see a piece of broccoli, which is man made. I don't want to. You remotely talk about this completely uninteresting, fake scientific idea you have. No, it's not fake. It's real. Well, it's around this time that the devil urged Ditcheba to sign his book again. Sign it again.

Come on. Right here. You go have this wonderful, it's Judge Reinholtz. I love it. You're going to want to say that one. The breakfast club. And after over a month of torment, Judge Reinholtz was not in the breakfast club. You're thinking of Anthony Michael Haltz, Judge Reinholtz.

I can't. Jesus fucking Christ. We literally can't. We're kids to shit. I couldn't let it go. I couldn't let it go. Judge Reinholtz was in fast times at Ridgemont High. That's what you're thinking.

I don't give a fuck. I actually don't even care. Also, it's just... No, we're never going to get through this. No. Dr. Oz told me that you shouldn't even eat breakfast. Oh, god. Well, after over a month of torment, Ditcheba testified during her examination that she

did sign the devil's book in her own blood with a crescent mark next to the marks of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn. But what was most deserving for the people of Salem was that Ditcheba also testified that beside her mark and the mark of the two Sarahs, seven more marks were the devil's book. Whoa! That meant that there were no less than nine witches in Salem. This is really starting to heat up.

Yeah, there's a Salem witch expanded universe. I guess so. But once Ditcheba signed the devil's book, all bets were off regarding her reluctant participation in witchcraft. The specters of the Sarahs would visit Ditcheba on the regular, accompanied by a swarm of familiars, including yellow birds, yellow dogs, and more red and black cats, who would paw at Ditcheba saying... Serbas.

Serbas. Yeah, they're just needy-ass cats. No. I wish you'd do something for me, cat. You don't change my food, I get diarrhea. Just go kill a mouse. Go kill a bird. Actually, here's a freaking bird.

Do you want a bird? I'm sorry, I'm an indoor cat. Oh, I don't. Hey, you are going to need to feed me. I'm so sick of you. Ah, yes, you see, you've received my cats, multiple, and the best part is they all go to the bathroom inside. And they are yours now, congrats.

That's a thing, so much for these cats. Witches' familiars would play a large role in the proceedings to come, as their presence was the true mark that a person had given themselves over to Satan. Satan, Satan. See, familiars during this time period were considered not just the witch's buddy, but an actual imp sent by Satan himself to aid witches in their nefarious deeds. And it came from the very first mentions of Satanic, like, secret groups, and their initiatory rites, which is one of the first things you're supposed to do.

This is true, this comes from some ancient scripture, you're supposed to kiss a cat on the butthole. Absolutely not. That is how you're supposed to kiss a familiar, and it says, most odourously under the tail. What does that do? You lick a fucking cat's asshole if you say hello to the devil. That is ridiculous. Why would the devil be there?

Never fuck the cat. Yeah, never fuck the cat. Never fuck the cat. No, definitely don't do that. How many times it fucking sluts around? It's a cat. Well, some of the very first artistic depictions of the devil, way back, and I think like the eighth or ninth century, showed people shoving their noses into the devil's butthole because

that's how you pay fealty to the devil as you kiss the devil's butt. So I would imagine, in lieu of the devil, if the devil doesn't show up, then you gotta kiss the cat's butthole because the cat is a familiar that has been sent by Satan. So if you can't kiss Satan, you gotta kiss the familiar. It's like, if you remember the guy that used to hold the umbrella for P. Diddy, if you meet him, it's kind of like you're meeting Puff Daddy, right? You kiss his asshole? I'm just saying, I'm just trying to change the command.

Oh, I see. You see that guy, you're like, you're the umbrella guy, and he goes, yep. And then you go like, eh, how's P. Diddy doing? And he'd be like, I don't know. Don't talk to him. And he'd be like, well. Well, he's definitely not wet. That's good.

I mean, man, I went to Massachusetts, they're cats of the cleanest buttholes I've ever seen. But you should see the tongues on these guys, bunch of mass holes. Just move it on. The familiar did not serve the witch simply because Satan told it to. The familiar needed nourishment, and to keep the evil going, the creature would suckle blood from the witch. Either through a cut, usually on the hand, or the witch's teeth that Henry mentioned

earlier. Little nipple. She needs to go to the doctor if she's bleeding out of her fucking tit. I don't know. Well, I mean, usually they cut the hand. They cut the hand open, and then they, yeah, and the fur, like the fur, or some of it. When you say teat, are you just referring to any open wound? No.

They'll say they're looking for a third nipple, but most of the time they'll take anything. Okay. Yeah. Well, this concept was seen as such absolute fact that when Tituba was being grilled about familiars during her examination, Magistrate Haythorne asked Point Blank this question exactly. Do not these cats suck you? What?

Do not these cats suck you, Magistrate? Suck me? I see. Oh, I can see the white hairs upon your jeans. No. You've been sucked upon a cat this day. I have not. I've been sucked on by a cat.

Yeah, well, the more you say it, the more I think you might be having cats suck upon you. It's just reverse psychology. Yeah. You're just trying to... Oh, man. Ah. Catsucker?

I'm not a cat-sucker. No, this is a boy cat-suckler, because if you suckle, if you get...if you suckle, then that means the cat sucks you, but if you're a sucker, you suck the cat, so it'd be a...the more proper term would be cat-suckler. Cat-sucky? I just don't think you should be doing any of this with a cat. No, leave him alone. Absolutely.

Life from your play. A roast as dark as the night, perfect for fueling the cryptid research and mad ravings required for your podcasting. Don't mind the red eyes. He's just trying to warn you of the bridge. The bridge. Finally, from the caffeine-addled brains of Spring Hill Jack Coffee and Last Podcast on the left, we bring you Mothman's Red Eye Blend.

Yes, delicious Panama beans. Go to lastpodcastmerch.com to order yours today. Well, while the animals present were usually familiar, sometimes the witches themselves took the forms of bizarre creatures out of nightmare. In one instance, Titibus said she saw a bird with a woman's head fluttering about, and the head belonged to none other than the sickly Sarah Osburn. Uh-oh. Look at her.

She's a little bird. Hey, who's a little Kalista Flockhart? Remember that reference? Kill me. Yeah, there you go. Well, speaking of the Sarahs, Titibus said that in addition to torturing girls in the Paris House, she was also present in spectral form during the torture of Anne Putnam, Jr. And this, of course, made sense because Samuel Parris was coaching Titibus on all of this

bullshit. But remember that Samuel Parris was also friends with the Putnam family. And if Titibus was being coached on the torture of the two girls in the Paris household, then in order to keep up appearances, she also had to be involved in the torture of Anne Putnam, Jr. Geez. And Anne Putnam, Jr. is one of the, they're part of the Putnam family that owned half of Salem.

Yeah. This is like, it's the, she's deeply connected to the landowners that have like, that's another factor in all of this, is that, which we didn't get into because it's, talk about sleepy history. Yeah. Like, I was always trying to read about the land issues happening between the families in the Salem, like, area. Not fun.

It's just, well, it also just shows how petty and how empty all of this shit was because a part of it was also land disputes. Part of it. Yeah. Yeah. And this also shows you like this, it shows you how quickly all of this spider webs out. You know, it really is like you, you, a rock hit your windshield and then before you know it, you have to replace the entire motherfucker because it's just spidered out from this one

tiny little rock. Yeah. Absolutely. And he said that she and the two Saras flew to Anne Putnam Jr.'s house on a pole, basically a broomstick, where neighbors were holding a prayer meeting for the already tormented 12 year old. And those were very orgasmic. You know, you actually joke about that, but that's actually, it is true, I was reading

about the history of broomstick writing and where it came from. And one of the things that they said, which was like, where ergot, ergot tradition actually comes into play is the fact that they believe that a part of it, they would rub a, none of this is, it might be real. Honestly none of it might be real. We're just going to ask, is this true? No, I believe this is real. This is true because we spoke to a witch about it.

Yeah. This is the legend, is that broomstick writing came from them covering themselves in a solve that would be, sometimes it would have shit, like hallucinatory shit, like ergot in it. And one of the things that they do is they rub it up into their pussy and then slather the broomstick with it and then that's what it was, is that your, your pussy stick would stick to the broom. Just like that. And it was like a little thing and then you fly it around and that's why they were always

laughing and shit because they're literally, they're literally coming. Yep. That's a scene from Tidders Over Time. But if you're pussy, I would imagine having your pussy stick to a piece of wood is very undesirable. No, they lube it up. They lube it up. Not if you're from 1690s, Massachusetts.

Absolutely. Because then you got to peel it off. They're witches, Marcus. They're stronger than us. They like that feeling. Yeah. I suppose so. Well, when Tituba showed up with the two Saras at Amputnam Junior's house, the Saras pulled

out a big ass knife and told Tituba to kill the girl. Kill the girl. This sounds good quickly. At this point, they're in the invisible world. They're invisible. Nobody can see them except for Amputnam Junior. Tituba refused and supposedly wrestled the knife away from the witches while they threatened to cut off her head instead.

Kill the girl. I'll kill you. Supposedly, this was all seen by Amputnam Junior and was described in real time. People did have memory of Amputnam Junior saying, Saragud and Sarah Osborne are fighting over a knife right now. They're both trying to kill me. However, the most likely explanation for that was that Ann had a hallucination in front of her father.

Her father told Samuel Parris and Parris told Tituba, were you present at this Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne knife fight? And she said, yeah, sure. And then repeated the story on the stand. Still using the term hallucination very kindly. Kindly and loosely, yes. In the end, though, Tituba did confess to the least of the tortures, pinching on the devil's behalf.

That was the lightest thing you could do for the devil. Yeah, and the Al Franken approach. I mean, it's just the devil is like, I'm the most powerful enemy of all time, just go pinch someone for me. Like it's kind of a funny thing to do. Well, that was all done on purpose and I'll talk about it when we get to the section where I talk about the beginning of the devil's supper. Okay.

But interestingly, in another pattern that would repeat itself, the four girls who had spent Tituba's entire time on the stand in torment, they quieted down after she confessed and apologized. But once they calmed down, Tituba started freaking out and acting torment at herself. That was my turn. Oh, man. I thought we were done. She said that the two Sarahs were now attacking her as she tried to out afflict the afflicted.

But despite her confession, Tituba was held for trial three for three on the first day. Oh, we're doing it. One day. One day, Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn and Tituba, all that's one day. Yeah, dude. Already got three witches today. Good work, everybody. Good work, fake court.

Yeah. Look at that, man. You're a bailiff tomorrow. No shit. Awesome. Yeah, man. Fake court's awesome. And this wasn't even the end of the meeting.

To tell you how almost mundane this was, or at least how matter of fact the proceedings were, the rest of the day's meeting, after they charged three women with capital crimes, was spent arguing about bills and taxes. Always. Yeah, because the road between Salem Town and Salem Village, it had been repaired. And Salem Town said, hey, Salem Village, you got to pay for this shit. But Salem Village said, Salem Town, you should pay for this shit. So once again, they were caught in the pain in the ass, in a fucking pain in the ass spat.

There's never been, I think, in history to the group of contankerous fucking Karens in this entire story. Like it all started like this. It all did. It's all this petty fucking garbage that they all would not give an inch on. It was all about whatever it was. It was all like, again, everything sucked and life was hard. You call them Karens.

I'm going to call them grumpy Rories. You know what? Good restructuring. Absolutely, because this is the, it seems like the man are being a little catty. They all are. Yeah. But it's two men from this meeting were walking from Salem Village to Salem Town to tell them, fuck you, Salem Town, Salem Village, they ain't paying for this fucking road.

They're not paying for this road. Salem Village ain't going to pay for this road. I'm not going to pay for this road. You're going to be the one paying for the road. Well, do you use the road? I dabble. Well, maybe you should pay for it then. Okay.

What if I instead? I'm the devil. No way. Damn it, man. You're a witch. Honestly, whoever came up with pay tolls is the devil, because those are all over the place in Boston. No, honestly, it is honestly really nice because it does help build the roads.

No, it just taxed me secretly. I don't need to stop in the middle of the fucking highway. Well, as the two men were walking down that road, they heard frightening noises on said repaired road, they then saw a quote, unidentified beast which flew apart and became three women who fled quickly as they vanished. Hi. It just sounds like three young people trying to get into an R rated movie. According to these two men, those three women were Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.

But even though all three, including Sarah Good, were being held in custody, it seemed to do nothing to alleviate the torment of serpent Elizabeth Hubbard. That night, she was afflicted by a series of pinches, and as she stared blankly ahead, she said, quote, Bear stands, Sarah Good, upon the table by you, with all her naked breast and barefooted, bare-legged, oh nasty slut. If I had something, I would kill her. Tell me more now. What does she look like again?

A big old hanging top on the bottom and then round on the bottom and feverish red legs. Maybe have her turn around. Oh, now you see the ponderous split in her back area with long hair like a horse. Well, now you're kind of mixing streams. She's got shoulders like a goose. No, I can't think about this. She's got the calves of a delicious roast beast. Oh man.

I'm going to go have sex with all these farm animals now. So after taking her at her word that Sarah Good's right there, there she is, a neighbor keeping watch picked up his walking stick and started just striking at the air. Everybody's jumping in. He plopped everywhere, man. Everybody's jumping in. Oh my God. And after a few swipes, Hubbard said that the neighbor, yes, you hit Sarah Good.

You hit the specter in the back. You did it. And you almost killed her. You almost did it. Yay. I was just drinking beer, eating peanuts, just be like, this is fucking getting great. I thought we were going to have to make up something to do today. No, I guess they're doing it for us.

They did actually, there was one instance of this happening in the bar. Oh yeah. It must have happened. Yeah. I mean, that is fun. Well, this scene of a girl directing someone to swat the air with an object where the specter was supposed to be, it would occur again and again. Sometimes with success, sometimes not.

But it certainly made people feel like they were a part of the scene. They were in it, man. They were getting the mix. They were in the mix. Yeah. All right. Meanwhile, even though Sarah Good's specter was supposed to be attacking Elizabeth Hubbard, the real Sarah Good was trying to escape jail barefoot in the Massachusetts winter with

her infant in her arms. When she was finally found almost freezing to death, her arm was bloody from wrist to elbow. The devil. I mean, for maybe the escape. I think it's the escape. The devil. Oh, the devil.

The war of the devil. One of the two. Now, after Tituba's testimony, the worst fears of the Salem community were confirmed, which is we're not only present in Salem, but at least nine of them were working together in a conspiracy with Satan to torture their children and destroy their way of life. Yeah, dude. That's two up from seven. That's a lot.

Yes. Let me say that again. Satan is there to torture your children, kill your children, and destroy your way of life. Yeah. That's like. Yeah. Now, after the first three accused witches were in jail, the afflicted girl started feeling

a bit better. The only one who showed no change was Anne Putnam, Jr., who seemed to be an actually very sick girl who needed treatment instead of blind indulgence. Maybe if you'll think I'm sick, maybe that's because you're an agent of the devil. No. Man, you can't just sort it. You know it, Sean. Oh.

Someone bring me pogs. Fine. You're your pogs. Thank you. Are you happy? Former witch. Thank you. It's very nice.

You just saved my life. You laugh, but it was a lot like that. Got it. Anne Putnam, Jr. claimed to still be tormented by two additional specters. The first in an accusation that was taken as seriously as death was Sarah Good's five-year-old daughter, the unfortunately named Dorcas. Yeah, old Dorcas. I mean, you just don't hear that name anymore.

And I don't know why. I don't think you even heard it then. No, I mean, Dorcas. Actually, there was more than one Dorcas in Salem. There's more than one Dorcas in the story. Yeah. Now, even though, and also Dorcas, that was another one of the nicknames that I had when I was a kid.

Besides Marcus Farts, Dorcas Parks was also... Dude, that makes... See, that I like. Yeah. That is fun and it makes sense. Dorcas Parks. Yeah. Oh my goodness gracious.

Actually, if I would have been like a chubby, nerdy kid, Dorcas Parks, that would have been a hell of a nickname. Dorcas Parks is an incredible gay porn name. Yeah, that's not so bad. I know, which it was. And apparently, it means a woman who's made clothing for the poor. Dorcas and Titter has come in for dinner. We're eating bones again.

Oh, that's right, because we were too busy fucking to do everything. Go for us and remember, we're brother and sister. Don't forget to lick the cat's asshole clean before you come in, Dorcas. Don't worry, I already did it. You can tell by how brow my tip of my tongue is. Fantastic. Now, even though Dorcas Good was only five, Amputnam Jr. claimed that this kindergartener thrust the devil's book towards her and demanded she sign it.

And when Anne wouldn't, the five-year-old bit pinched and choked her as viciously as any adult witch. The other accused person here, number five, by my count, I think, was a recent addition to Samuel Parris' church who seldom hesitated to voice her opinions, in other words, a pain in the ass. Her name was Martha Corey, and she was the third wife of a man named Giles Corey, who over the years had graduated from pain in the ass to real piece of shit. Hey, all right?

I prefer a real piece of fucking shit. It sounds like, what happened to your other two wives? Let's just say they're not wives anymore. Did he kill his wives? No, no, they just died. One died. Yeah, they just died. That happens a lot.

But the thing is about this time is that, you know, when a wife dies and all that, you know, everyone's very sad, but when you're accused of being a witch, that wife's death very easily turns into a murder, no matter what really happened. Because witchcraft, you can do anything with witchcraft. You can give someone, if they die of a fever, ooh, you gave them that fever through witchcraft. Oh. It's very easy to do. Fantastic.

So you jump off a bridge. Ooh, witchcraft. No. Maybe you jump off that bridge. Exactly, yeah. Because, well, we'll talk about it, because back in the day, there used to be many gods, right? There used to be many, many gods.

And as we shifted to monotheism, what they had to do was come up with all these different ways to talk about the inner drives of human beings, which is why they invented demons. Hmm, it's like that film, Inside Out. I'm mad that he said it, but yeah, I mean, technically, I'm like upset that it does work, but yes. It does work, yeah. Except for all the cuteness, it's demons. Yeah.

And sins. Sin. Oh. God. One of those inside, and one of the emotions in Inside Out should have been fucking disturbingly horny. Yeah. That should have been one of them.

It was for children, so. But Giles was considered a, quote, very quarrelsome and contentious bad neighbor. Fuck you, you're the bad neighbor. No, I didn't even say anything to you. I saved my spot every day. Can I get my lawnmower back? He had once been in trouble for theft of dry goods, and he had almost certainly beaten a handyman to death.

All of the, it was never definitively proven, but everyone knew they beat the guy to death. When I beat the guy to death, he's the one with the hammers. Yeah. I got my lawnmower back again. Oh, yeah, you want me to reintroduce you to your fucking wife? No. Jesus is a fucking cow out there eating all the grass all day. Jesus fucking piece of shit.

I didn't do anything to him. I'm a bad neighbor. Oh, I see. But Giles was also known to threaten suicide to get his way, and he often, yeah, he often threatened his sons with a specifically spiteful suicide in which he would kill himself and make sure that they took the blame if they didn't do what he said. It's highly specific. This is how I know that I was born on the East Coast because my grandmother used to

say fucking shit like this all the time. Yeah, I believe it. It's a great, it's a good little tool of manipulation, I suppose. In other words, he was a bad dude, and his accusation would come on the heels of his wife's. See, once Martha Corey was accused by Amphutnam Jr., a new addition to the afflicted, a servant named Mary Warren, also said that Martha Corey Spector was haunting around for pinches and pokes.

What's interesting about the afflicted Mary Warren, though, is that she worked for a couple named John and Elizabeth Proctor, and Proctor was none too convinced that any of these witchcraft accusations were true, but not because he thought that witchcraft wasn't real. Mm-mm. John Proctor believed that if anyone should be accused of witchcraft in the village, it should be the bewitched servant girls themselves and not the respectable women of the village like Martha Corey.

But I also feel like that's just going to get him into extra trouble. Yeah, maybe. And John Proctor, by the way, he was 60 years old, and he did not look like Daniel Day-Lewis. No, he doesn't. No, no, no, it's really weird how they do that in Hollywood. Some people call it lies. Right, it is. It's more like it's dramatic effect, where you make it seem like everyone would be attractive

in the time period. What actor should they have cast? Danny DeVito. Ah. It could have been anybody, you know, a guy with a fucking hatchet face who is a disgusting man. The guy from The Witch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the weird British man.

Yeah. No, I mean, the Crucible was, of course, I mean, Arthur Miller took many artistic licenses with the Crucible. Like, for example, the supposed romance between John Proctor and Abigail Williams. The real Abigail Williams was 11 years old, and the real John Proctor was 60 years old. Yeah, so she could be married for another two years. Yeah. So, well, yeah, then it was a whole like donkey cow.

Absolutely disgusting. Okay. Well, since John Proctor was also a real piece of shit, when his servant Mary Warren started throwing fits and hurling accusations at Witchcraft, he beat her until the fits and the accusations very abruptly stopped, implying that Mary might have just been joining in on the fun. But once Mary had her change of heart, saying, hey, I was just making shit up, sorry, the afflicted girls also had a change of heart and said that Mary Spector had joined the ranks of the witches.

Well, I'm getting confused. Welcome to the show. You wanted to buy tickets. It's just important to remember, anytime you get confused, it's just any single person that says any single thing about any one of the accusers or the afflicted, they get wrapped into the story. Oh. So every single person that has remotely touched the story is now in the story.

Maybe they should just keep it down a little bit. Maybe. Well, Mary Warren then spent three weeks in prison until she decided it was better to be amongst the afflicted rather than the accused. Change teams. Yeah. Okay. And she once again lapsed into fits.

Oh my goodness. Why was I on drunk history? Yeah, wow, shirtless Henry shaking around. Mary Warren then rejoined the ranks of her tormented sisterhood while her masters, John and Elizabeth Proctor, they joined the ranks of first, the arrested and then the condemned. God fucking dare I said. It sounds like they're choosing dodgeball teams, but it's all about witchcraft and they can be killed.

Oh yeah. The stakes were high. Geez. Well, seemingly low on outsiders and disliked community members she could name, Anne Putnam Jr. made the first truly startling accusation. She named an elderly woman named Rebecca Nurse, who was a good Christian woman by all accounts who was almost universally loved and respected. They all loved her.

The Anne Hathaway. Oh. But as it happened time and again, as soon as one afflicted accused someone, the rest would follow no matter who was accused. It's the most dangerous game of yes and there's ever been. Okay. However, it is important to note that the six main girls were not the only ones hurling accusations, nor were all the accusers Puritan.

A middle-aged Quaker woman named Bathsheba Pope counted herself amongst the afflicted, and Titibus' husband, an enslaved man named John Indian, also came in and out of the proceedings to say he was being tortured by the specters of teenage girls. In a move that I don't quite understand, Martha Corey was actually brought to the Putnam House to meet her accuser, Anne Putnam Jr. face-to-face, and predictably the mere presence of an accused witch absolutely ruined the day of the afflicted. On this day, yeah, ruin her day, this is putting it lightly. On this day, Anne Putnam Jr. fell into what were presumably full hallucinations the moment

Martha Corey walked through her door, and crumbled and her feet head in hands horribly contorted as she choked and writhed. So how could- You just know everybody's just sitting there with their head in their hands, spin like, oh, fuck, who's next? Who's fucking next? I mean, were they like that, or were they thrilled? I don't know.

I think that if- you remember we've ever seen the Twilight Zone movie when they're all afraid of the kid? Yes. In that one story? I think it's like that. I think they're all like, whatever you need, Anne! Oh, you want some? It's a good thing that you did that.

It's a good thing that you just accused the old woman that we all love and of witchcraft. It's a good thing. Thank you, mother. Oh, tell me, I guess it's time for my fourth Pop Tart of the morning. Yeah, I guess so. Apparently they're healthy snacks. Oh, my belly hurts. You're a witch!

God! Man! I shouldn't have given you all those Pop Tarts. But when Anne Putnam Jr. wailed that Martha Corey was torturing her just by being there, Anne's tongue stuck out seemingly involuntarily and she bit down hard as if Martha was punishing Anne with witchcraft most foul. At this point, you just got to be like, all right, you know what? I can see that I'm affecting you.

I'm going to go. Well, I- I'm going to get out of here. What I would say is that if I was accused, witch, at this time period, I think the goal is to start being like, then I curse you, and I curse you, and you can't get everybody to do it, right? And then we can all be like, is it working? Because then you can do it with people like, I curse you!

And then they have to go like, oh, then they have to act like they're going crazy, and then you have everybody doing it, and then you run. Because then everybody's running and screaming, and then you go like, yes! I think if you do that, you very much risk getting an axe buried in your skull, right there in front of everybody, right in front of the whole town. People taking this real serious. Yeah, point counterpoint. Interesting.

So when Anne regained the power of speech, she said that she could see a yellow bird suckling blood between Martha's forefinger and middlefinger, and from there the hallucinations only got gorier, or at least the claims of hallucinations only got gorier. Anne cried that she was looking directly into the invisible world, which, as I said earlier, that's the catch-all term for the realm where specters did their dirty deeds, where familiars lived, and where the devil reigned absolutely! Yes, yes, he does, doesn't he? And then this is where Al Sir Crowley broke the mind of his intern, is in the invisible

world where they were fighting in the desert together while he fought the Agamemnon, I forget what it was. Yeah, something like the Abraxas maybe, yeah. I gotta say the invisible world's a great place to be a cat. Look my asshole right meow. You're a guy. You're just a guy and a cat, too. Yeah, I was trying to play a cat, though.

You really ruined it for me. Good lord, I mean you're six foot seven. Will you lick my asshole? I guess you'll make me if I don't. Well during this peak under the veil, twelve-year-old Anne Putnam Jr. said that she saw a man skewered on a spit, roasting in her parents' hearth. Then she turned to Martha, pointed and said, Good, goodie Cory, you'll be a turning of it.

No! Listen, you're the man now, don't you? Stop. No, this seems to be a pretty far-fetched hallucination for a twelve-year-old Puritan girl. You might think, oh my god, how does this girl possibly just come up with this stuff off the top of her head? She's never seen a horror movie before, but the Putnam's had taken in an orphan from the

main frontier wars named Mercy Lewis who may have contributed to this fantasy with her own reality. By seventeen years of age, Mercy's parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and most of her cousins had all been killed in the recent wars against the native tribes in Maine. And she had no doubt repeated the stories of natives burning people alive, whether those stories were true or not. But it was true that her entire fucking family was dead and smoldering in a burnt-out village. She experienced trauma.

Sounds like it. It actually sounds like there were pretty brutal wars. They were extremely brutal on both sides. And so, when Anne Putnam Jr. said that there was a person skewered on a spit in the fireplace, Mercy Lewis, the main refugee, grabbed a stick and repeatedly struck at the spot where the apparition was supposed to be, which supposedly caused it to flicker in and out of Anne's sight with each strike. It's like playing with the antenna.

It's just they were one willful ball away from just starting a game of baseball. You know, just come on, put a couple of bases out there, outfielder, infielder. You got a game that you don't have to kill anybody in. You know what this would have been good time for? Twister. Twister? They would have not been allowed to play twister. They would have ejaculated all over themselves.

But in the context of twister, if you could say this is God's twister, we're doing this for God. Maybe if they just had everyone lay straight. Yeah, sure. That would be their twister. And that's called logs on a mat. That's a fun game. With that point, Mercy Lewis certainly showing some PTSD here.

She joined in on the hallucination and claimed that the specter of Martha Corey had struck her with an iron rod. And she fell to the floor in just as much torment as Anne. And at that moment, Martha finally left the house. But Mercy's fits have become so strong that it took three men to restrain her. And supposedly later that night, as Mercy sat in the chair facing the burning hearth, the seat began inching towards the fire. And it took three men to stop Mercy from being thrown into the flames.

That's fucking scary. Yeah, it is. That is scary. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say it took three men to stop Mercy from throwing herself into the fire. That's a horrifying scene, to be honest. I actually got absolutely horrifying. I got a little bit of a breakdown scientifically about mass hysteria from Joel, a researcher

that I actually thought was really interesting. And one thing it kind of talks about is how this what's what's kind of called mass sociogenic illness is one of the terms for it, because we've talked about the concept that we're dealing with, which is conversion condition disorder. We're dealing with the conversion disorder, which actually I found out is not been debunked. There's a thing called functional neurological disorder that there is now a thing around that kind of talk about, which is this sort of like weird spell of symptoms that a bunch of people get.

And there's one thing is like, it's really interesting the way they trace it, that it seems to come from stress related stimulus on eight symptoms that are typical with this type of hysteria, symptoms with no plausible organic basics, symptoms that are transient and benign, right symptoms with rapid onset and recovery, occurrence in a segregated group, the presence of extraordinary anxiety, symptoms that are spread via sight, sound or oral communication, doing this, being like, there's an apparition over there. And then everyone goes like, ah, and they jump in and they act and they're doing it. They're fulfilling the fantasy, a spread that moves down the age scale beginning with older

and high status, right, which is not true, it doesn't always happen, and a preponderance of female participants. I mean, if you look at it that it did absolutely happen that way. Samuel Parris coming out and saying, the devil Israelis coming for us, so yes, it absolutely did happen that way. Very interesting. Yeah. Now by late March of 1692, 10 people have become afflicted by witchcraft and Salem in a population

of only about 550. To put that into perspective, if you applied that same ratio to New York City's population, you'd have 149,400 people being attacked by invisible specters and 8 million people taking it all deadly seriously. I don't know, have you been on the Q train? Whoa, there it is, folks. He took down the Q train a notch. That Q train really had it coming for me to train, to transport people to work, to and

fro. So I think these days, I think it's like the one, two, three is pretty bad and the ACE, I think, is also taking a beating. That's a lot of the trains to be honest. That's six of the trains. Yeah. Four or five, six is also the green line, it's not doing great. It's not doing well either and all.

Yeah. Yeah, I actually think the numbers might hold. Yeah. I think like over 100,000 witches in New York City. Now, as far as why the witch panic gained so much traction so fast, the answer is simple. The people in charge took it seriously. See, not only did the local magistrates take it seriously, but Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, arguably the only person even close to being in charge of something here, he traveled to

Salem with four assistants to take part in the examinations. Honestly, that's a fun freaking trip. It is. It is. We're like, all right, well, we got to go handle these witches. But the thing is, we're going to find out is that the crown itself is going to be real upset. Real upset.

They do all of this. She's always upset. I think it was a man, baby. Yeah. Well, episode 501 is so talented. Now Deputy Governor Danforth could have easily walked into that meeting house in Salem and shut the whole thing down before even a trial occurred, because he had every right and power to do so.

But instead, he participated and provided tacit approval in the process. Can I maybe say it was just easier to do than any of his other jobs? And it was just like the easiest thing on the checklist, and it's one of those things where you just keep doing the easy thing over and over again instead of doing the hard stuff? Yeah, because the road is real. You know, they have to fix the road. Yeah, but that's very complicated. It's like the invisible realm.

Yeah. Anything can happen. I knew that. Yeah, and that's easy. Yeah, you just show up and you just hang a bunch of people in your leaf. And that's the end of the series, folks, and I want to thank everyone for listening. I want to thank you for the support over the years. Well, furthermore, when Danforth returned home, he told Dan near everyone, hey, witchcraft

is infesting Salem, and he told everybody everywhere, and he therefore spread the panic throughout the entire colony. Now all of Massachusetts knows that there is witchcraft in Salem, and not only that, but the guy, the only man in charge is telling him that witchcraft is real. Now I don't mean to be cynical here. Whoa. Please don't be that, Marcus. But with the new government coming in, because remember, they're transitioning from one

charter to the other. They're transitioning into the English law, Puritan rule charter. I'm sure Danforth wanted to hold on to his position. However, a crisis like this would be the perfect excuse for him to stay in power, to be transitioned over from one to the other, because the old chestnut of not switching horses midstream, that's been in use by politicians for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Because first of all, you have to get the second horse there, into the middle of this stream, right?

And yes, oh yes, my first horse, it is already wet, uncovered in my... Yeah, it titters the horse. Oh, it titters. You know how he longed to be a mother, if you can tell by his udders, but simply this because of the weight distribution that all little titters suffer from. Poor titters, yeah. But I would say, you don't switch a horse midstream, because then you have two wet horses and nine wet people looking at the horses.

All right. But for a specific modern parallel, outside of how George W. Bush won in 2004, this tacit approval of the satanic panic by an authority figure is exactly what happened with QAnon. What? Instead of stamping it out as an obviously stupid and not even that clever prank perpetrated by the worst of the image boards, certain people in power and certain authority figures gave it credence. And now we've got multiple people in Congress who have all the sense and mentality of a

true believing 17th century witch finder. Which I always thought was going to happen for Scientology, but honestly, I always thought this was going to happen for Scientology, but they couldn't get their fucking shit together. Nope. And that's because as soon as LRH was gone, as soon as he volunteered his body... Last name Hubbard? I believe there's a Hubbard in this story. There is.

But as soon as he gave it up, they couldn't fucking figure out what to do with themselves. They couldn't find their dick with a lasso. Wow. When it comes down to it, the Scientologist should be there, not the QAnon people. Oh my goodness. He's spitting fire today, folks. But that's how it jumped, you know, and that's how things jumped in Salem as well. In Salem, you know, it jumped from just this thing that's going on in Salem that might

have fizzled out. That's how it jumped to a colony-wide thing where people actually get executed because the governor went in and said, hey, this is real. Everybody, this is absolutely real. Same way as like QAnon would have stayed on the internet. It would have been a fun, stupid internet conspiracy theory. A nice little lark. Yeah.

Yeah. But because people, you know, empower, belidedated it, it made a jump. When I was in Texas this weekend, I saw a Q flag out amongst many other flags. This shit is in the real world now because the people in power said, yeah, that's cool. Marcus, that was actually a taping of Sesame Street and the letter of the day was Q. His paranoia has gotten very intense. It's a little bit strange. Absolutely.

This is a thought virus. Yeah. That's what's happening here. So on the second round of public examinations, the magistrates started with Martha Corey repeating their previous pattern of accusations, insinuations, and leading questions. By now, though, the afflicted were starting to solidify their act. They reacted to every movement Martha Corey made, crying out if she bit her lip, showing bruises if Martha clenched her hand, or feeling general pain from pretty much any movement.

God, I can just see, it seems like theater training and a one and a two, let's take it again. It's very similar. Yeah, kid. Are you biting your lip? She's biting her lip. I'm doing it now. Yeah.

I mean, these girls performed together enough where they got the instinct, and they all performed in concert with each other. They're like the Harlem Globetrotters of witches. Yeah. Well, at this point, the Quaker Bathsheba Pope joined in, saying that she felt as if her bowels were being torn out by Martha's diabolical and invisible machinations. Yes, I'm in your butt. No.

I don't know. I may be sleeping over here, but when I am asleep, I'm in your butt. Is it possible? Is it possible it's just menopause? More like manopause. I'm going to kill you. It's misogyny. I'm going to make her stop Bathsheba through her muff at Martha.

Wait, what? This is the back of her hand glove. People still use them. No, it's not. It's the muff. It's the thing. No, they don't use them. People still use those.

When was the last time you saw someone use them? I mean, it was on Melania. Melania. Which tells you all you need to know about Muff's. Christmas, fuck Christmas. Yeah. But since muffs aren't exactly aerodynamic, she threw the muff, it didn't make it, so Pope took off one of her shoes and threw it at Martha's head.

That works. That's a projectile. After Martha Corey managed to stay almost perfectly still and the girls finally calmed down, the afflicted claimed that they were made privy to the fact that Martha Corey had signed a contract with the devil for 10 years of service, of which four remained. For this, Martha Corey was sent to jail. So she's still in her rookie contract. Yes.

These are over, well, all of these accusations are happening over several days, correct? Like the idea is that they're bringing them back to, so it goes back and forth from the tavern to the meeting hall. Well, there's the accusation first and then there's the examination because they got to make it feel at least a little bit official. They've got to put a sheen of law onto all of these proceedings. Good Lord. Hey, what's up, everyone?

How you doing? Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, it's me, man. Yeah, bro. Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast on the left, babe. Go out there and purchase yourself some. I hope you enjoy it. We have Sativa, we have Indica, and we have a hybrid.

And I have to tell you, from my personal experience, they are wonderful. They're tasty. Live resin. You really get the delicious, weedy taste, which is what I like and three different experiences. You go to your local vape store and get it. Absolutely. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. We absolutely love you.

Can't wait to see you on the road and get that vape, put it in your brain and have a good time. And if you want to set your favorite weed store, give them a call and ask for them by name. Last podcast on the left, it's weed. Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail Satan. Well, up next was, no shit, the five-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, Dorcas.

Little Dorcas. Little Dorcas. Get Dorcas on the back. Get Dorcas on the back. Free Dorcas. Free Dorcas. Well, as soon as the child entered the court, the afflicted acted the same way they'd acted with elderly Martha Corey.

And still, they flinched and winced even after an officer of the court held the little girl down to keep her from moving, because she's after all five years old. And you'll know where little Dorcas was, because every place she sat, there's a little cheese doodle. Little Iowa got a little goldfish. She's goldfish. She's so funny. She goes down Dorcas's throat, like her throat's the river.

Dorcas, get the fuck out of my office. That's all I can see. Be like, Dorcas, get off my exercise bike. I feel like it's like, Dorcas, get in my office. Dorcas, get the fuck out of my office. Get out of my office. Dorcas. Stop it.

Dorcas, stop it. Stop putting your own ear. How are you even doing that? Don't even name her dog. Next dog. Oh, next dog is Dorcas. Oh, yeah, Dorcas. Well, after the afflicted cried out that the specter of Dorcas Good had bitten them, after

they showed bite marks on their skin that they'd no doubt done themselves, the magistrates ordered the kindergartner to jail. What? Where she was shackled in iron like all the others to prevent her from doing further witchcraft. She's like a real life My Little Monster. Yeah. They put her in cough. She's a regular Greta Thornburg.

She's really, I don't know if those are comparisons that really work. I don't know what she does. I don't know more. She's being used by a lot of people, much like Dorcas was. The iron shackles were both convenient and a bit of a problem for the afflicted. And here's where playing by the illogical rules of witchcraft accusation got more people into trouble. Where I say illogical rules, it's more like they're playing by the rules and the rules

have their own logic to them. It's all shifting. Yeah, you have to follow the logic of the witchcraft rules the whole time. And the logic of witchcraft rules just brings more and more people in. It's a vortex that just keeps getting bigger and faster. May I steal a term from Marcus Quibono? Yeah. It's much like Donald Trump because he's got his live golf courses and they're refinanced

by the Saudis. Yeah. So now he doesn't know who did 9-11. Yeah. It's like, what did 9-11? What happened? Strong wind? What was 9-11?

What's the deal with 9-11? When was 9-11? Soon they're just going to bake your whole head in the cheese. Well concerning iron, it was believed that if a witch was shackled in iron, she, like a fucking fairy, would lose his or her powers as long as they were kept in iron. It couldn't be touched. It doesn't. It hurts magic.

Okay. But the girls, the afflicted, they needed to have constant tormentors to keep everything going. So when one person was shackled, they had to name more names. Oh, I see. This of course cuts both ways. If a girl was suffering from the aforementioned conversion disorder, then her symptoms would not have stopped because the imagined witch was in jail, because their lives did not change

from sucky and hard to awesome and easy in any meaningful way. Their symptoms are not going to go away. It's almost as if they were hoping that there would be a change. And then when all of the drama happened and then nothing got changed and actually got worse, it's almost like they realized like, oh, we are actually all now in an incredible amount of shit. Yeah. Well, I don't know if they realized at one point that like, oh no, like they snapped out

of it. It wasn't witches. I think that they thought that they were still afflicted, we're still being afflicted by something. Something is happening here. So logically, there's got to be other witches around. There has to be. Because these other witches, the ones that I thought that were doing it, they're in

iron, so there's got to be more witches around. They're in special witch jail. Like they can't do. They're in like, magneto glass prison. Absolutely. Yeah. And they logically had to name more names because I think they were also trying to please these authority figures who had told them, you are bewitched.

You are bewitched. There's something, a witch is fucking with you. And I think most likely that this is the case with only a couple of the girls. I think a lot of them were talking out of their ass. I think Amputnam Jr. certainly and probably Mercy Lewis were suffering from conversion disorder and this was sort of how they manifested it. Although I could be wrong. I might be wrong completely.

I wasn't there at 1692. Who fucking knows? Nice. No one's accusing you of being there, Marcus. You're a witch. You're a witch. You're a witch. You're a witch.

Wait, what? I called him a witch. I'm calling him a witch. God damn it. And I'm the only person who's safe because I am a witch. Oh, okay. Sucking in hard talent sounds like two thieves that only steal liquorish. It's you're being cute today.

Well, when it came to girls making shit up though, because there certainly were a few of those, it's possible that they either weren't ready for the game to end or they thought that they'd already gone too far to stop now. Because admitting to making false witchcraft accusations, that was also a crime. Not capital, but it was a crime. It was a crime. Okay, so you wouldn't die though. No, not necessarily, but there's also, you know, I think there's subtler forces at work

here too. I think there's a little bit of a, you know, there's two ends. There's the view that they are, these are people trying to find agency in a full on misogynist theocracy, right? It's the idea that they're trying to find a way to gain some kind of power by flipping it on their heads and making sure now everyone has to listen to the little girls, even though before they were non-existent, but then there's the other side of the same exact coin was does giving into the narrative that the witches are real actually help the patriarchy?

Does it help fuel it by completing a circuit by saying like, we are now the other elements that make what you say about witches being real real. So now we're actually completing a incomplete picture. These girls gain no power whatsoever. Not at all. All they did was they got 26 people, 25 people killed. That's it. They did not gain any power at all.

Well, let's not say that's it. I mean, it's pretty, it's a lot, you know, it's like, I don't want to say impressive, but they definitely accomplished what they wanted to do. When we get to the end of our series, we will show that they did go too far. Yeah. I know. Really? What?

Now, to the point of keeping things going, the afflicted couldn't very well keep saying the same things over and over again. In order to up the stakes once more, an afflicted girl claimed that the godly Rebekah nurse and about 40 other witches, they had invaded the lands of Samuel Parris to hold a devil's supper. Don't be late. I don't want to be late. Cocktail hours at 5.30.

I'll be there. And we're cutting it off at 6.30 so you don't interrupt the seating check. What is this? Hold his wedding? Well, in a perversion of the Lord's Supper, that was the Holy Communion. The devil's supper involves taking a communion of the blood of an innocent. He will. I mean, it's not that different.

No, it's the blood of an innocent. Jesus was giving you blood. Yeah. So Jesus was guilty? No, he's making you drink his fucking blood. But that's just wine. That's just wine that's transubstantiation. This is the literal blood of an innocent.

Yeah. You knew blood. It's real blood. It's real blood, okay. In this case, the blood belonged to Paris's niece, Abigail Williams. Well, Abigail Williams said that she was ordered to eat of the devil's supper, her own blood. And when she refused, she was choked. Yes.

Now we'll see what you can eat. I know I was trying to make you eat, but now I'm choking you so you can't eat. I know. Now I want to eat. The devil's trickery. Dang it. According to her and two other girls, the devil's supper was presided by who else but the devil.

It is my supper after all. Again, man, you're like this all-powerful evil entity. I'm also a caterer. This is it, huh? Yep. The devil who showed up to give communion was, they said, a fine grave man, and all the witches were made to tremble when he came. I hope you ladies are ready to, oh, guess what?

I guess so. Wow. Well, I'll talk a little bit on the idea of where Satan even came from, the idea of the Satanic mess, where it seemed to come from was a little bit I was alluding to before. Right? So at some point, there were many gods. Naturally. Of course.

There was many gods and many agents of God. There was many spirits and nymphs, and they all took care of the bad things. Sure. But at some point, we wanted to have one God. Not created by humans at all. No way. They were literally not arbitrarily created over hundreds of years of various councils to all decide what this mysterious book of poetry that somehow delivered to them, not

written by people, that was delivered to them, that they had to figure out what God was and how he reacted. Right. And so what they did was that they made up Satan because they needed somebody else, because if there's just one God, then that means that that God is also the same God that makes all the bad things. Absolutely. But he also makes the hair lips with Jacqueline Phoenix that he made his lunch off of that

one. Well, absolutely. And there's nothing wrong. Absolutely. Nothing wrong with it at all. Nothing wrong at all. But I'm just saying, there's also babies, babies having babies. You know, babies having babies.

Sure. I'm loving watching you struggle. That's true. Babies having babies. That's all. Yeah. That's the devil. It's not what you expect that God would do that.

Babies having babies. There you go. Fantastic. That's a bad one. So basically, you knew it. Earthquakes. Yes. It's a natural disaster.

Babies having babies. Babies having babies. It's bad. It's bad. Like when you bite into a hot pocket and you think it's good and it's not and it burns your mouth. Yes. It's always you never get the right temperature.

Yes. That's the devil. That's the devil. Right. Season four of Westworld was made by the devil himself. And so the idea is you had to create an evil God. So they created this. But then ever since, so like, soon as Christianity came out of the spiritual vagina, it splintered

into many different factions. And so what the main church would first have started with the Roman church and the Greek church or all that kind of shit, the main motto, the pantheistic religions, they wanted to smash little Christianity outbreaks by calling them cannibals and saying they do all this evil shit. But really what it came from was a thing called agape, which actually was the supper that someone in a Christian society, a person that was well-earned, would host a dinner where people would come and hang out and they would all, you know, they do a prayer thing.

Agape. Agape. That means open. Agape. Agape. Agape. And it also then quickly got turned into the idea of the bacchanalia that actually they all get together.

They have big gay incest, orgies, fathers fucking mothers and fathers fucking daddies and fathers fucking their sons. Really getting into detail. Yeah, you know, all the cannibal shit, but it really came, what it turned into was like that those were all split-offs because the people that were truly accused of that were these things that they called the dualists, the people that believe that they were a unknowable creator god, the Gnostics, and then a tangible god that normal Christians would worship that created this evil material world.

Right? Well, it's interesting. It was split apart, but the Cathars, which was like one famous group of them, they were constantly labeled as this, as cannibals, they'd do these big, crazy gay orgies and all this kind of shit, but really what they did. It seemed like they were really focused on the gay orgies. They were. They were the ones doing it.

Okay. You mentioned that a few times. But they were just weird. Right? When did they kiss each other? The top and the bottom. Do you have to do that? They aren't saying.

It's it. Stopping the bottom. Okay. It's incest and cannibalism. Okay. And malifacorum were really big. The idea of little, tiny, witchery, like bad magics. And part of what the Cathars were, though, really, were just like the guy that doesn't

talk at IT, who's like super into Vore, who's always like on the tambourine subreddit. Oh, interesting. You know what they say about tambourinas? What? Gay incest orgies. I don't know. It feels like you're really hung up on that. But this has been around for a long time.

Are you cute? No, I'm Pete. Oh, you're Pete? Okay. Interesting, though. Well, with the revelation that 40 witches have participated in the Devil's Supper, all bets were off as far as who could be accused. Because the ranks had to be filled up somehow with someone.

You can just see the devil be like, how am I going to feed these 40 people? Seriously. I am stressed out. Absolutely. Can you stop accusing people here? I actually cooked for three. And now you're telling me there's 40 people coming to my dinner. You've got to hang in.

It sucks. Okay, so make seven pounds of macaroni. Yeah. Well, macaroni's great. It fills you up. It's cheap. I like this outlaw country basis devil voice you got going on to this. That's actually a little trick.

You're still telling stories about whaling any second now. It's actually a little trick with the kids, man. Spaghetti. Yeah, they don't know. It's very cheap. Well, furthermore, the Salem Witch Trials are a prime case of in for a penny, in for a pound. Because if you believe one claim, you have to believe every claim.

Basically, it's how you go from Hillary Clinton had a weird party with a performance artist to Tom Hanks as a blood drinking pedophile on Adrena Chrome locked in a battle with JFK Jr. for the soul of the world. Who is not? Who is fucking not? All right? Not our Tom Hanks. Where was he?

He was a 13-year-old who made a wish to become large, and then he had sex with a volleyball for a while. He died a sad death in Philadelphia. Love, Tom Hanks. Yeah, I love her. Now, in the next round of examinations, the magistrates decided to test the accused by asking them to recite the Lord's Prayer, because it was believed that anyone aligned with the devil would be physically unable to do so.

But this test is not as simple as you might think. When I say that they would be unable to recite the Lord's Prayer, it would be more accurate to say that they could not recite the Lord's Prayer perfectly. It wouldn't be like you tried and you couldn't even get through our Father who art in heaven. No, the deviation of just a single word or a single mispronunciation of any word throughout the entire Lord's Prayer, that was evidence of witchcraft, because it's not that you fucked up. It's that you couldn't do it.

I know exactly. I'm not going to. Yes. The Lord's Prayer is simple. Go for it. Our Father. Ah. No.

No. Okay. Our Father. Oh, man, no. Who is in Bethlehem? Our Father. Our Father. Who is in Philadelphia?

The Lord be thy gunk, thy pigeon come, thy ring man done, on earth as it is in St. Petersburg. You're a witch. You're a witch. Honestly, I'll take it. Yes. I hate public speaking. I can tell. You're very nervous.

Well, for example, during the second round of examinations, one of the accused said, as he was reciting the Lord's Prayer, he said, deliver us from evil, which that's how I've always known it. Yeah, that's what I thought. Deliver us from evil. The real line is deliver us from all evil. Got you, bitch. Yeah.

You never had a right, dude. Yeah. Our Father art in heaven. Hollow be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us a say, our delirly bread, and forgive us of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil. For thine is the power of the kingdom and glory forever. Amen.

You're going to kill me because I fucking forgot the word all. You're going to kill me? Yeah, they will. Literally, they will. Geez. Yeah, since the accused had said the popular version, which is the one we all know, that person failed the test, and the failure was used as evidence of witchcraft. But isn't evil all evil by nature?

Do you know that there's two other stanzas to Inagana De Vita? You're not psyched out. God damn it. And another person, when they tried doing it, they said, hollowed be thy name, instead of hallowed be thy name. So again, there for a witch. Killer. Splitting hairs.

Yep. Well, I mean, that's what it's all about. That's a whole fucking game. Now, during this round, the accusers roped in Martha Corey's husband, Giles Corey, making him the first, but certainly not the last man accused during the Salem Witch Trials. Yeah, I'm a fucking witch. All right. Yeah.

And a bad neighbor. Don't forget that. Yeah. It's less sexy when it's a guy. Yeah. Yes. But during Corey's examination, instead of staying perfectly still to avoid the noises of agony made by the afflicted, Giles Corey, like, waved his hands in the air and like

shook him around. Oh. Is he like Marcus Bachman? No, he wasn't mincing across the stage. He was waving his hands. No, he was waving. Well, jazz hands. Think jazz hands.

I can kind of see this because, you know, like, you ever do one of those, like, public areas where, like, you can wave your hands through, like, arches and it make noises. It's like fun soundscape. Or like a pheromone. Pheromone. Yeah. He's just doing it with all the afflicted girls. He's just going like, you go, you go.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Gales tipped his head to the side during his testimony and the afflicted girls all tilted their head the same way. That's scary, man.

That's funny. It is scary, man. I'd be like, if I was sitting there drinking, I'd be like, well, I'll have another beer there. That's scary, man. Yes. Then when Gals Corey exasperatedly sucked in his cheeks, the girls did that as well. You're copying me.

Stop copying me. And so after hurling a fair amount of vile, puritanical insults at the afflicted, Gals was sent to jail to join his wife, Martha. Oh, poor guy. Yeah, exactly. Oh, fuck. Now I'm in what? In jail with my wife?

Oh, come on. Up next though was a creature of pure chaos, a troll who would have certainly been right at home on 8chan. Her name was Abigail Hobbs, and her only purpose in the Salem Witch Trials was to royally fuck with everyone involved. In other words, she did it for the lulls. What else did he meet to do for you, Mr. J? That's horrifying.

She is Harley Quinn. You're not Harley Quinn. No, you're not Harley Quinn. No, you're not Harley Quinn. Imagine me as Harley Quinn. I don't want to do that. Hey, Mr. J, do you want to see which is my short shorts? I already saw a lot of alternate universe Harley Quinn's at Comic-Con, and everyone's beautiful

in their own way. I just don't need you to do that impression. Yeah, okay, Mr. J. No, I don't like it. Mr. J. Look at my crop top. You're shirtless. I wish that people could see this horrific image.

I have the same cup size as Margot Robbie. But you're not Australian. You're right. You're right. The only difference. The only difference. Well, Abigail Hobbs could have easily joined the ranks of the afflicted she chose instead, even at great personal cost, to play the part of the witch to throw as many wrenches as

she could into the situation to make things even worse in Salem. Talk to her. This is a girl who liked to gunk up the works. And while it's tempting to say like, fuck yeah, what a groovy check, man, she fucking up into the entire system, it's important to note that her trolling greatly contributed to the execution of 19 people and the deaths of six more. Again, the modern parallels are astounding. I was never really like, well, that's cool.

No, it's bad. I feel like that's bad. No, it's bad. Kill a lot of innocent people. Well, Hobbs's claims of involvement in witchcraft raised the entire affair to another level. Because where before you had only an enslaved person confessing to being a witch and a reluctant one at that, you now had a community member saying that she not only practiced witchcraft but she did so of her own free will and she loved it.

Whoa. Yeah, I suck the devil's dick. I also played with these fucking bulls and then I took them out to dinner and then I bought a dessert. Yeah. That's a nice night at the cheesecake factory. Wow. Well, Hobbs openly bragged that she feared nothing and had quote, sold herself body and

soul to the old boy. Every ho, every ho, spoken foul. Yeah, man, it seems like it's just you're going into great detail on that. Yeah. Now I'm all, yeah. What's fun about one ho is that eventually it turns into the other ho. I suppose so. That's about the closest anyone came to mentioning sex in all of these proceedings, sold herself

body and soul. Almost casually, Hobbs would tell women she didn't like that she could and would call upon Satan at any moment to raise nearby spirits for torment if they didn't do what she said to do. And all this was most likely, I mean, it's most likely done out of a certain teenage rebellion. I mean, it's a lot like Damien Eccles. You know, him playing shit, people calling him devil worshiper and him playing it up

because he thought it was funny. Yeah, because he was just a high school kid and he didn't commit a murder. He didn't think it was possible that they would believe it. Yeah, exactly. They did. But this is interesting. I actually talked about this on Toppat this past week as a little side story, but there was a woman that went to an execution.

She was going to witness the guy he killed his girlfriend in 94. He's going to be executed, but they kicked her out because her skirt was one and a half inches above her knee. That's insane. So the problem was, we're just executing this person for sport, basically. It was that she showed her kneecap so she had to wear it. Discuss. Isn't that crazy?

So we're still there. Yep. Well, interestingly, though, Abigail Hobbs was another one of those main refugees from the frontier wars, but she flipped it to the metal side by saying that she'd met the devil four years earlier at Casco Bay prior to her arrival in Salem, and she had been in the devil's surface ever since. Yeah, you wouldn't believe what his boat's like. Yeah, what was it like?

Low. Yeah, was it a sailboat or a motorboat? No, it's just that, fuck you. How dare you doubt what I have to say. Yeah, I was in the devil's boat back there, and you're trying to get me to describe it. I didn't even say anything. Yeah, I wish too. God damn it.

Yeah. Good work, Anne. You crazy little toddler. I mean, all you guys are crazy. You hate this episode of Rugrats. No, Abigail Hobbs is that she is truly the person who destroys lives. Oh, you guys are. Ah, let me guess.

Are you guys are into the devil now? I was into the devil four years ago. Okay. I can't. I'm sorry that it's cool now. What's really fascinating, though, is the fact that since Abigail Hobbs fully and completely admitted to being a witch, the first to do so without hesitation, the afflicted girls showed no signs whatsoever of any discomfort during her examination in court, even though

they were being faced with a witch who was waving her arms going, I'm a witch, I'm a witch, I'm a witch. I'm a witch, I'm a witch, I'm a witch. So they were like, you ain't a witch. What could happen was, man, they're stealing, they're stealing, they're shying. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, man. You come in like, because now it's like, oh, fuck, now we got a pro in here.

We were all having fun. We were the first ones in. Now she's in here. She's taken up all the oxygen and also, or were they just washing and learning? Maybe. So while Hobbs was certainly giving herself up as a witch, she also in the process put her entire family into the jackpot with her. Oh, this is just, this is, I'm not having children.

We're not having children. I'm telling you, man, a person, she's just a person who fucking destroys like a human tornado. Honestly, it's like when Casey Anthony brought her family into the story. Oh, very much so. Well, since witchcraft was seen as a corruption that could be taught, a witch's family members always risked suspicion by association. And so when questioned, although Hobbs, she showed contrition for her time as Satan's

naughty little girl. I must have been too naughty for me to be here in jail, Mr. Jack. God, stop it. You're not. Oh my God. I love Smokers' cough, Harley Quinn. You want to go get some donkeys? Oh God, you're so aggravating.

Well, when questioned, Hobbs freely offered up her parents as witches and said like, yeah, I fucking turned them. I turned them. I was the one who did it. Daddy always wanted a piece of my snapper. Oh my God, Harley. And their parents joined her in jail along with all the others. Oh God, what do you say to your daughter at that point?

I'd just be like, who else is a witch, honey? That's what I would do. Next up were the bishops, Edward and Sarah. And this one is, for me, I hate this one the most because Edward and Sarah Bishop sound truly like just a couple of regular fucking people trying to make lives in this weird ass place. They were accused because they ran an unlicensed tavern with gambling out of their home. They were cool.

Yeah, and because Edward had allegedly encouraged his children to quote, abuse the neighbor swine, which put it in modern terms, he said, hey, go fuck around with the neighbor's pig. Just go fuck with the pig. Just go fuck with the pig. I don't know. Don't kick it. No, don't kick it. Just pull its fucking tail or something.

I sure wish that those neighbor kids would leave me alone. But when it comes down to them, I guess it's their freedom. Everything else sucks around here. Absolutely, little piggy. Sarah was further accused of causing the suicide of a woman named Goody Trask. Goody Trask, after an argument with Sarah Bishop, had gone home immediately and cut her jugular vein open with a pair of scissors. Mama.

And she died. She bled to death. Yeah. What didn't help matters was that Edward Bishop, perhaps only ingest, and this is why they were just fun people, he said in public many times that his wife was so familiar with the devil that she sat up nights, quote, chatting with the fiend. You're all having fun. Yeah, she knows the devil.

Yeah. Absolutely. He's a funny guy. We have a good time with him. Maybe he named his penis the fiend. No. So a great character in the WWE was, anyway. Now, by this point, it was becoming obvious to people that you were either on the side

of the court or on the side of the devil, because if people didn't participate in these accusations in some way, or if they participated, then change their mind, they would be accused. For example, a deputy named John Willard, who had himself arrested many witchcraft suspects and had even helped Anne Putnam Jr. during her afflictions, he resigned because he thought that innocent people were being accused willy nilly. Oh, I thought you were going to say because he arrested himself, which is kind of adorable if he has two of you drinking and you put a tank of them himself. Okay.

I've done it again. Another citizen's arrest. I'm going to go sleep in the jail. Good joke is, I always wanted to sleep in the jail. Within days, Anne Putnam Jr. said that Deputy Willard was now amongst her witchy tormentors. Yep. Yep. That checks out.

Okay. Just by saying, hey, I don't think we should be arresting the sweet old lady. Right. Now, from Salem Village, the witch panic began to spread far beyond even Massachusetts. 250 miles away in Stanford, Connecticut, a servant girl said that she felt a prickling and pinching in her breast while gathering herbs. She then spent the next two days weeping and falling to the floor, followed by another 13 days of being haunted by a spectral cat who alternately cajoled and threatened her.

Growl. You growl. I said, I'm crying. I said, are you a pussy? Growl. Yeah. Are you a gelical cat? Get stronger.

It is me, the cat. Yeah. So stop crying because you look ugly when you're crying. You're gross when you cry. So very nice of you. Okay. What do you want me to do to you? I want you to suck my little cat fucking dick till I cover your mouth.

Oh, thank you. I love this series. But if not, I'll take some tuna fish. All right. Here you go. Growl. Gelical cat. He's a gelical cat.

Now, with each round of accusations, the types of people accused got more and more unlikely. See, in the first round, it was just a couple of weird off-putting old ladies that nobody liked. No big deal. On the second though, you had people of a little higher standing. You had Rebecca Nurse. She was actually well-respected in the community. She was a good woman of God.

She was the one who proved that any woman could be accused. Oh, yeah. On the fourth round, though, the afflicted finally got around to accusing a bona fide reverend named George Burroughs, which opened the door for absolutely anyone in Salem to be accused. However, Burroughs was still somewhat of an outsider, even though he was a minister. It wasn't like he was well-liked. See, he'd been one of the three aforementioned ministers who had popped in and out of Salem

in the years leading up to the hire of Samuel Parris. I wonder why nobody's guys wanted to be the pastors of the town. God, this is scary, man. Yeah. Burroughs had come under suspicion for a number of reasons. First, while most ministers were expected to be open and engaged with the community, Burroughs was withdrawn and private. He was a weird guy.

Second, he was exceedingly strong, which was considered odd for a man who should have spent his days reading the Bible instead of participating in physical activity. Where did you get that strength, but from the devil? I got a gripper. I got one of those hand-gripper. Yeah, it's a little hand-gripper. Yeah, that's the devil story. Oh, what?

Yeah, I'm sorry. He's making my grip grip. No, I'm sorry. Do you have a Nordic track? Is that a Nordic track that I see? That's the devil's toy. Oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's go to $2,000. Do you have that Suzanne Summers pushy, pushy, pushy? The one that strengthened the thymaster? That's the devil's toy, too. Lastly, Burroughs was fond of toads, which was considered a bit odd. Not to mention the fact that toads are a classic which is familiar. So he's strong and he likes toads. Yes, because kissing a cat in the butt hole was one way to start a satanic mass and the

other one's to kiss a frog on the mouth. I like my, but it's just Burroughs, I like my frog. I like my frog. That's just my frog. They're my friends. I like my frogs. What's nice about a frog is that they all share their lily pad. None of them fight.

It's nice. We could all learn something from frogs. We love a good frog. I mean, they were a little creepy, but I like them. The Burroughs left his minister post in Salem in 1683, nine years prior to the trials. This was not because he was kind of witchy, he didn't leave because he was kind of witchy. He left because the people of Salem stopped paying him because they didn't like him. It was the same shit they were trying to do with Paris before witchcraft so coincidentally

struck his home. All right. My car is literally in the pothole in the road, guys. So can we just figure out who's going to pay for this? George Burroughs then spent the next eight years or so in Maine at a house that was reported to be haunted, curiouser and curiouser. And finally he returned to Salem for God knows what reason. I guess because the frontier warriors had come, he was familiar with Salem.

He just thought, okay, let's give this place another fucking shot. Unfortunately for Burroughs, or maybe he was forced to go there. I'm not really sure. He might have been forced to come back. It doesn't sound like a lot of people liked him. No. Well, a lot of people didn't like Salem villagiler. Right.

Unfortunately for Burroughs though, through sheer coincidence, he got caught in the Troll Storm because his haunted house in Maine was in Casco Bay, which was the same town where Troll Abigail Hobbs had said she first paid fealty to the devil. Oh, get out of here, Abigail. To that point, two days after the examination of Abigail Hobbs, Am Putnam Jr. said that the specter of Reverend Burroughs had tried to get her to sign the devil's book. I think it's like which number, five or six, that came around and said Abigail, sign the devil's book, sign the devil's book.

She was big. They needed to get her. Yeah, she's a real star here. She was clutch. But what was different about Burroughs is that while he tried to get her to sign the book, he boasted of killing not only his own wife and child, but the wife and child of a Salem minister who came after him, Deodat Lawson. He didn't though.

Yeah, but in the special world he did, he's ghosted. But like he is just like sleeping. But his ghost confessed, so that's as good as him doing it. Okay. It really is. So with the man of God officially accused, the stakes were raised again. The afflicted claim that George Burroughs had hosted a gathering of witches in Reverend Paris's pastor.

He called all of these witches to order with a trumpet blast and gave us a sermon reminding them of their task of replacing God's church with the devil's, which I think is the first time that any real goal was mentioned outside of just go and do that voodoo, you do so well. I actually think that this was, it's interesting because that was what I talked about. That is the, of any real Luciferianism, that is the crux of it, is that the wrong God's in charge and that the other God needs to be put back in charge. I mean, maybe spices it up a little bit, might get some more income in there. Hey, hey, also sometimes we all need a break.

Absolutely. After the sermon though, witches passed bread and cider around a table in Paris's pastor, where it was announced that Satan had arrived. Oh. And that not nine, not 40, but 300 witches were living in Massachusetts. That's just a lot. That number really went up there. Think about how many people are there.

We're going to talk about, you know. I mean, in all of Massachusetts, a few thousand, but it's like, I mean, you're talking maybe 10% of the population. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. Burrows, it was said, would be king of hell.

Yes. And a woman named Martha Carrier would be queen. And I know we haven't mentioned Martha Carrier yet, but holy fucking shit, there's so many people involved in this story that I cannot name every single person, because it just becomes a name salad and you're not going to know who the fuck is who. My thing is, is that, yeah, sure, I guess you can name me king of hell, but I sort of wish that I'd rather be a counten of Frogtown, if they're frogs in hell. I guess they'll be there, but I don't even want to be charged with them.

I want them to be free. Yeah. They can't be around that much fire. I kind of want to be the president. So they vote me and then they chose me. The president of frogs? Yeah. Yeah, that's not possible.

Could we just kill me already? They don't vote me. They could just kill me. Yeah, I can. No, the authorities actually traveled all the way to Maine to arrest Reverend Burroughs. What? And five more were, oh, dude, that's the thing, man, once you were, it wasn't just one of those things where you're accused and it's like, well, if he's around, I guess we'll

arrest him. Like they hunted your ass down. Yeah, dude. And this is not like the internet. He was just at home and then all of a sudden, dude showed up and said, guess what? You're a witch in Massachusetts. I'm a witch. And five more were arrested in this round as well.

And people would escape. Like when they knew that the witch accusation was coming, their friends would go and say, okay, they're about to fuck you up. You need to get out of here now. Yeah. And they'd leave in the middle of the night and like hide in New York City or Boston. I mean, a lot of people would hide in New York City mainly because New York City is just like a fucking merchant town.

Yeah. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a fuck. No God at all. It's like the only answer, the only question is, does it make money? And if the answer is yes, then New York City is home. Absolutely. That's where they got the best food.

Yeah. Yeah. The water. Chicago. Oh, the water's great. But this being colonial times, the question was where all these witches would go while awaiting trial. Mm-hmm.

The answer was Boston. Hey, no way. Boston. I was going to say, I did, we did make, I was, I listened, right, I listened to the audience. I heard a couple of the audience told me that they felt that some of our Ted Kennedy jokes that we made last week are hack that they made. Why? He's, he's, apparently I've heard the terms.

People said that they were J-L-N-O-S. Well, J-L-N-O is one of the most successful comedians, but I don't. Yes. Yes. But that's why I- He's just a regular guy. He just, you know, when he's around, he's just a hot rod. He's just a regular guy.

He's just a hot rod magazine. And that's it. Super nice guy. Regular guy. They were mad at us for making fun of Ted Kennedy. So I decided I wanted to tell, so here's a more specific, a better Massachusetts jokes than that. Oh, you're actually taking a note from the audience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is a better, so just so you know, so if you want better Massachusetts jokes, here we go. Okay. Um, yo mama's so stupid, she thought Matapan was where chefs lived. Yep. Hey. Actually, I'm going to need some scotch for this.

No, no, no, no, you're listening to me like, um, uh, well, uh, why are rectal thermometers banned at Boston college? I would really love to know that. They cause too much brain damage because they're assholes. Did you just like look up Aggie jokes or something and just replaced specific Massachusetts jokes? What else do you got? We could do this all night.

Yeah, really good. I do like that one because the thermometer to go to the butthole, but that's where their brains are. That's where their brains are. Yeah. Uh, yo mama's so stupid, she thought Blue Hill Avenue had Blue Hills. That can't be real. Those are more yo mama jokes.

Yeah. That's not so much about Massachusetts. They're regional yo mama jokes. Yeah. Blue Hill. Yeah. Yeah. You might think it would be blue.

Yeah. I mean, you could just also say like, you could make that a Bronx joke by saying like, Oh, I thought your mom is so stupid. It's a Massachusetts joke. Your mom is so stupid. Your mom is so stupid. She thought Cobble Hill was actually made out of peach cobbler. Yeah.

Or the Forest Hill. Yeah. That's a Manhattan joke. These are both, again, these are all New York jokes. Why do all the trees in New York lean east? Because Massachusetts sucks. That's a good one. Oh my God.

That one's actually quite funny. That's a good one. Oh, I like that. That's very good. I like that quite a bit and I do. Where was I? The tree was made in East. Okay.

While Boston did have ample jail space at first, the cells had filled with witch suspects in just a few months. There was so many witches that the jailer had to make extensive repairs on the jail to fit everyone inside. And by the way, at this time in Massachusetts, the jailed, the people who were in jailed, they were billed for any new locks, any new roofs, anything like that. If it was in yourself, you had to pay for it. Yeah.

Fantastic. And now when they're like, go get a witch, and he's like, which, which one? Witch. Witch. Witch, witch, witch. Wow. This is a really great way to close this out. Absolutely.

Fantastic. Yeah. Now, I probably don't have to tell you that a jail in 1692 Boston was fucking awful. But some of the details are worth mentioning. In 1686, a writer named John Dunton described the Boston jail as thus. A prison is a grave of the living. Absolutely. It's a house of meagre looks and ill smells for lice, drink and tobacco, or the compound.

Or if you will, just the suburbs of hell and the person's much the same as there. Awesome. So I guess we're just going to improve the conditions then seem kind of inhumane. No. No. The goal is to make the mess. Oh, they're supposed to get worse. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Well, similarly, a writer named Job Tookie described the job Tookie's great name. I love Job Tookie. It's great names. Yeah. He described the jail in much simpler terms. He wrote that he was almost poisoned by the stink of his own shit.

Hey, man. Oh, okay. That's a self-indictment. It is. Yeah. And it said that the stench in Boston jail of unwashed bodies, rotting food, vomit in dead rats, they made it even more unbearable. And unsanitary conditions led to a disease called Jail Fever, which was probably just

dysentery. I'm sure it is. I thought that's why they were all dancing in that Elvis video. Oh, jailhouse rock. Yeah. Yeah. And as it was, the sickly Sarah Osburn, who had been ripped from her bed, carted to Boston and thrown in a cell, she died from prison fever.

That's the first one. That's the first one. Yep, after being held behind bars for nine weeks, and she left a bill of one pound three pence for her family to pay. Yep. And today's money, it's about 300 bucks. Unbelievable. Yeah.

She died and everyone was out 300 bucks. Wow. And it's with the first of 25 deaths that will leave Salem until next week, where we'll pick back up with the witch trials themselves and the eventual executions. This week's all about how do you try a witch? How do you find out if it's a witch and how do you make it stick? And then most importantly of all, how do you kill a witch? Oh my goodness.

And you do it in many different ways. In many, many different ways. Geez. Your mama is so racist, she went and married a Boston police officer. Wow. Yeah. That's an indictment of the police department. Interesting.

I don't know. With a yo mama structure. Which kind of makes it in a way truly interesting, doesn't it? Yes, indeed. Your mama so pink skinned that she's Larry Bird, who was in the Boston Celtics. Yes. Very good. So thank you all so much for listening.

Yo mama has such a bad taste in food. She her favorite meal is Boston baked beans. Yes indeed. Your mama had so much fun in high school, her name was Boston Cream Pie. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. You're so respectful. Well, that's fine.

All right. You're really good at that. You really are. I learned a lot from Popsicle Sticks. Thank you all so much for listening. We have this is going to be a four part series. Yes. Which I can't wait to get more into.

This has been awesome. Great job guys. Thank you. Let's see. We are going to be in Philadelphia. Yep. We are going to be in. I love Las Vegas.

La La. Las Vegas. Yeah, we're going to be there. August 13th. We're going to be in Philadelphia. Yes. And I believe that we, I think we're sold out. I'm not certain.

But if not, get a ticket. If there's not, there's very few left. Yes. And then we're going to be at Psycho Vegas. Can't wait. You know, it's always important because I know that Mayhem needs us to open. They always ask us to open for them all the time. Yeah.

I mean, they don't know who we are or anything. Yeah, no, no, no. But they're always being like, because one thing that metal audiences love is to stop all the metal and hear people talk. Yeah. No, that's what they truly love. Man. And we can't wait to be that voice.

Yes. We actually usually tell people not to pregame because our show is actually, you know, you do that kind of have to listen. You can be hammered for the show in Vegas because it's just going to be a bunch of gross. This is going to be gross. I'm really very excited. Yeah. So don't super gross.

Yeah. This is going to be really stupid. And don't forget, we have three more American shows. We have four more American shows this year. Actually, we're going to be in Buffalo. We're going to be in Northfield, Ohio. We're going to be in Pittsburgh and we're coming home to New York City. New York City.

We're going to be in theater on September 22nd. All right. All right, everyone. Thanks for supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network. We absolutely appreciate you. Hail yourselves. Hail Titan. Hail game.

Magustalitions. High five a witch, if you're a real witch, honestly, one that counts, you know, last this week on Side Stories, I'm saying, give it, if you meet a teacher, give them $5. Sure. If you meet a witch that you love, buy him a milkshake or something. There you go. Just fucking meet your local witch, just being like, you're cool with me. Yeah.

Pat him on the shoulder. Say, add a girl or add a boy, if it's your local warlock, whichever, absolutely. And hail me as well. Absolutely. Or you'll be punishable by death. I'm so happy you were to lie back then. Yeah, I mean, honestly, me too. Yeah.

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