Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 503: The Salem Witch Trials Part IV - Crossing the Rubicon

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

The boys conclude the story of The Salem Witch Trials, this time focusing on the trials themselves, the convictions, and the various gruesome executions that would follow.

Do you think that Annie Lennox would have been made into a witch? Oh I love Annie Lennox. I was listening to Here Comes the Rain Again today looking at her and she's just so fun and out there with it. I mean you're listening to Here Comes the Rain not Walking on Broken Glass. I do like that song too but Here Comes the Rain Again was just on the radio currently and I listened to that and I was just like, ooh Annie Lennox, that's a cool witch. And she would have been right there in the middle of it and they all started twitching

and then she'd go up there and be like, Here Comes the Rain Again. And then they'd all be like, Leah, Leah, fucking shirts coming off and everybody's being like, let's fuck instead, let's fuck. And I just realized how upset I am that Walking on Broken Glass wasn't in the movie Home Alone. Huh? Is Here Comes the Rain? Is that Here Comes the Rain? Is it that one?

No. Here Comes the Rain Again. Watching over me like a memory. She was in the rain. Yeah, she's wet. But when you're in the rain, Marcus, you don't think of songs. You're just like, I'm wet. I'm wet.

She was like, let me bring up my notepad. Ooh. Is that nice? Welcome to the last broadcast of the Left Everyone. Here Comes the Rain Again. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. I'm Ben Hagnum with Henry Ann Marcus. Yep.

And we are on to the Salem Witch Trials Part Four. We're at the end. Can you feel yourself in the cart as you go towards your early grave knowing that no matter what your innocence has been tainted forever. Forever! You are a specimen of the Daveville and that's how you'll ever be known. But today, today, we exonerate these women. Oh good, and some men?

No. OK. Not the men, even though they were all so innocent. They're fucked. Men are fucked. Great, as always. So when we last left Salem, the establishment had sent the second round of accused witches to their deaths,

hanging five women in a single day on the say so of a group of young girls collectively known as the afflicted. Oh yeah, and that's not with a K in the black metal writing. I know what you're talking about. Now, while one might think that seeing five people horrifically hung in the manner which we described last episode might tamp down the furor surrounding the witch hunt,

things only got worse once the people of Salem dunked their head in the bucket of blood. It was like an aperitif for them. As soon as they saw that first round, because I do think on some level, they were kind of hoping. They're like, all right, because what we've talked about before, like that lull inactivity and the paranormal activity after the first round of hangings.

It wasn't even the first round, just one person. It was one person and then five after that. Okay, but there was kind of a lull, right? They're kind of feeling, well, maybe we've done it. Maybe we've here, we've done it, but guess what? The fake law keeps rolling on. Rolling, rolling, rolling. Do not do limp biscuit, not today.

Hard biscuit. As a consequence, people in Salem were quickly realizing that getting captured and examined was an almost guaranteed fast track to conviction and public execution. No. However, while most of the people who knew this still played the game, there were others

who tackled accusations from a different angle. In Cambridge, a woman named Elizabeth Carey was accused and imprisoned. So her husband, a military man named Nathaniel, decided to actually do something about it. Yeah, this is a movie. I feel like there, this little segment right here because it comes down to, I've got a certain set of skills.

I could turn wheat into the shape of a woman. And they don't know, they don't know. It's not you in there. It's actually just wheat. So we have a Liam Neeson taken situation. Is this about to be a superhero tale? It's token. Okay.

Knowing that she would hang if she went to trial, Carey worked with an accomplice to break his wife out of prison. They were successful. They did it. That's called which prison break? What were prisons back then? Just a whole series of different kinds of sticks.

How did they hold people? I mean, they're not like today. You can't break people out anymore. There actually was several versions of it. It was kind of shitty, kind of impromptu, put up jails. They had to do stuff like that. There was also just the kind of the courthouse where like where the constables were,

they'd have like a holding cell or two. There were essentially just shacks attached to the building. But also I do believe there were, and I might be wrong, sidestorieslpodlgmail.com if you know, because I'd love to know, I believe that they also dug ditches and had put people inside of ditches

and then had sort of gratings put on top of them. Either way, not the most difficult prisons to break out of perhaps. Well, it's not super max, but it's going to be somewhat difficult. It's not going to be the easiest day, although sometimes you could just break someone out with an ax.

It was! Swat! Sweet. That's fucking sweet. We broke them out with a sick guitar riff. Yeah, yes. After Nathaniel stayed behind to take the heat for a couple of days while his wife got clear,

the daring couple fled to New York City, where nobody gave a shit about witches because witches were bad for every business except rope. Meanwhile, though, those who didn't have a bold military husband to arrange a jailbreak were left to face the music in Salem. On August 2nd,

the court of Oye and Termine reconvened to hear the third round of witch trials, beginning with the so-called Queen of Hell, Martha Carrier. Now that's a big title. It is. Because you got all these fucking witches. How does she get to being the Queen of Hell?

Why is she in charge? Because she's last? I think she has the most amount of soot on her feet. Dirty-ass feet, but some people like that. I know. Unclear. Okay. Unclear.

Do you think that it was because she was like quine? Like that style, and everyone's been like, wow, girl, you go girl. Like it was like that, where they were all like, she was like a fashion icon or something? I think it was a lot like everything else

for someone just said it, and it stuck. Yep. Maybe she wore Prada. Or maybe it's Maybelline. Well, Carrier had been the woman whose sons had flipped after being tortured, discussed at the end of the last episode.

But so many people testified against Carrier that the testimonies of her sons weren't even heard in court. Damn. Most notably, influential minister Cotton Mather used an oddly John Waters-esque insult when he referred to Martha Carrier as a quote,

rampant hag. Whatever, dog. That just means she's on that grind. She's in that grind culture out there being the queen of hell, being herself, supporting herself, being her own quaint, right?

Because when it comes down to it, quaint, without any, she had a keg, she don't need a keg. Yeah, sir. Can one person be rampant? I think so, that's the idea.

And that's how I feel like we'll put it to our listeners, be the rampant hag you know you can be. Because that means- I agree with that. Because you're undeniable. Because you're just a hag who's everywhere, anywhere, at all times. If you're a man, be a herg.

Is that the male version of a hag? I think it's an asshole. Oh yeah, that's true too. Partly, people turned against Martha because she showed a seeming lack of empathy for the afflicted, while the rest of the community was bending over backward

to take care of these poor, put-upon girls. Oh, it's kind of like how my mom did the thing when the Michael Jackson news like fully hit and she's like, oh, when I got molested, no one took me to an amusement park. Is it just that? Or are you just like, you just mean like,

yeah, fuck the age, fucking other bitches ain't doing shit, right? I'm a rampant hag. I'm everywhere. I don't take a day off from being a bitch. I love that your mom has the same like idea as the Sam Kinnison. Yes, it reminds me very much of Bird Cage

with Nathan Lane's character. It was like, why don't they just let the babies die and they'll take the mothers down with the ship over about abortions. And then Gene Hackman's like, that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh said. However, again, like it was with the fucking farm animals

in the last episode, many of the people that testified against Martha Carrier did so because of petty disputes over property lines. And those subsequent arguments had ended in specific and somewhat witchy threats. The year previous, a neighbor named Abbott had gotten into a dispute over property boundaries with Martha Carrier.

And she got so angry that she said she would quote, stick as close to Abbott as bark to a tree. There's Abbott, there's me. There's Abbott, there's me. I'm a rampant fucking hag. Why would someone wanna be around someone like bark on a tree that they hate it? Cause they can fucking eyeball you, dawg.

Yeah, they're eyeballing you. They're making sure, and then you ain't gonna fuck up nowhere. Know how? Not without this rampant hag fucking seeing it and calling you on your shit. I'm the queen of fucking hell. I hate revenge.

Okay. I mean, it just seems like she would be making her own life miserable also. Hey, McQuine's gonna quine. Oh, all right. Well, I think that's sort of the story of Salem right there is everyone making everyone else miserable at the expense of their own happiness.

Nothing to put in it. Now that threat wasn't too bad, but when she very cryptically said that Abbott would be sorry for causing trouble before seven years were through, she added that not even the most talented doctor in all the land would be able to save him. I'm liking her, man.

I'm liking her, man. Don't you fucking dare to say anything about her grass. I'm not messing with her. Soon after, of course, many of Abbott's cows fell ill and died. He was struck with severe pain on his side. His foot became infected and allegedly gushed several gallons of pus when it was lanced,

and a series of sores on his groin also became filled with enough pus to need regular lancing. Just sounds like his body was trying to make another farmer. Yeah. It sounds like he got monkeypox, which, by the way, I've done a deep dive on that. You want to avoid it.

Really good advice. Whoa, Mamacita. Well, supposedly, though, once Carrier was arrested, her neighbor's groin sores began to heal, and no further lancing of the boils was required. And so for the crime of coincidence, Martha Carrier was convicted and sentenced to hang. It's going to take four ropes to hang me.

I guess so. So this guy got genital warts, and they blamed it on this poor woman? It sounds a lot more like herpes than genital warts, but not every soren your groin has to be an STD. No, absolutely. He could really just be. It could be a wasting disease.

It could be a form of rampant psoriasis. He could just straight up. It could just be bad pants. Bad pants? At the time, bad pants is like a cause of, like, 5% of deaths, because they just grind you down. Oh, yes, the old asbestos leave eyes. I got the wear.

That's why I switched up all my underwear to softer stuff, because I really got sick of putting all this, like, cheap ass, like, coarse, like, hangs dollar store fabric up against my most precious jewels. It's a good idea. But while seemingly everyone was convinced of Martha Carrier's guilt, the next on the docket, John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth,

were two of the accused whose possible guilt split the community. See, Proctor had garnered 51 signatures on two separate petitions from people attesting to his good character. This was just like Rebecca Nurse. She had also gotten a lot of signatures, and I think Elizabeth Howe had also gotten signatures.

But Proctor was different from Rebecca for one reason. He not only had the respect of the community like she had, but he was also a land-owning businessman, man being the operative word here. As someone who has had to petition before and get signatures, I'd rather be hung. It is very scary. I hate it so much.

Yeah, being hanged is much better than doing cold calls. What's your address? Can you fill it out? Make sure it's clean, and so I can see it. God, he's just you just over them just being like, use the pencil! Use the pencil, ma'am! Well, therefore, since they were killing or at least

trying to kill a highly respected man, a fair amount of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance had to be done to accept the guilt of such a person. And this was the first of many that would eventually come to be too much for the people of Salem to accept long term. Nevertheless, John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Not Daniel Day! Yeah, Daniel Day, sentenced to death. 66, although his wife's execution was delayed until she gave birth to the child she was carrying. Man, that must have been a fun day. I mean, that must have been a night. You could be like, oh, congrats. What was it?

Which day was fun? The day she got pregnant, the day she was sentenced to death, or the day she eventually gave birth to the baby, or the day that she hung? Hopefully, the only day she ever smiled was the day she consinked. I don't know if their off-pleasure was involved, but hopefully that's the one time she ever,

when John Proctor gave the, ha! Ha, yeah, all right, there you do that. That should be a sun. I think that might have been nice. But it was giving birth in the cell, like in the Salem town, Danvers, or Boston cell, wherever they were. And watching that flop out into the dirt-covered hay.

And then I'm like, oh, it's good. Now you get to be hanged. She's just like, she had like two seconds of like, ha, ha, ha, unless she had post-partum depression, which actually might have helped. That baby could have been Jesus Christ himself. No, he wasn't, because he survived, and he was just a guy.

He's just a fucking guy. You could also just see her, well, never mind. I don't want to think of the image. You get it. Well, never mind. Well, you just talking about her opened birthing vagina? No, her hanging and then the baby. Oh, flopping out of her?

Flopping out. But also hanging. This is a great detour. Fin. I'm glad we're here. Well, partly, the proctors have been condemned by the testimony of their servant, Mary Warren, who had flipped from afflicted to accused and back to afflicted,

a switch that certainly didn't help the proctors. No, looking Kevin Durant trying to get out of the nets. Wow, that's an interesting observation coming from you. He read a headline. This is how we talk to straight men. The John Proctor's conviction would have been a big deal anywhere in the Western world owing to his status and gender. But his trial and conviction would pale in comparison

to that of the man who faced the judges in Salem next, the Reverend George Burroughs. This is the only guy I'm proud they hung. Yeah, he's something. Because they got him, man. He sounds like an asshole. He was a reverend. Yeah, dude.

They just go around killing people for being assholes. You're correct. But you know what? It really is. This is the kind of the crux of all of these trials is the fact that when he is convicted, that's when shit blows up. Yeah. Because you finally, you crossed the line.

You finally did the thing. What was it, whether you're using the line now? Someone crossed the Rubicon. That's when he did. They've been using that line since Napoleon crossed the Rubicon hundreds of years ago. That's not even real. It's not even Napoleon, that wasn't Napoleon, that was fucking Julius Caesar.

Why not just use the Rubicon? Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. People have been saying that for thousands of years. Everybody who was crossing through the Rubicon, why doesn't nobody just enjoy it? We need a vacation. We just need a vacation. Look at the flowers. Just enjoy yourself.

After Julius Caesar returned from his campaign and go, sir. The Rubicon actually sounds kind of nice. I don't know. All I know is I think someone crossed the Rubicon. That's for sure. You crossed the Rubicon on just making shit up. Hey, man. Hey, I'm just, I'm almost a funny guy.

What the fuck is a Rubicon? It's a river. It's a river. Who cares? So they crossed the river? That's what a Rubicon is? I don't know. If you want me to explain it to you, I will.

We'll do it after. Yeah. We'll do it in Vegas. Now the audience for Burroughs' trial was the hot ticket for the entire proceedings. See Burroughs was a man of God, which was far worse than your run of the mill witch because he had the power to eat the church from the inside out. Supposedly Burroughs was the ringleader of the entire operation, the so-called aspirant king of hell.

Cool. What? Yeah, Martha Kerry was the queen of hell and Reverend Burroughs was the king of hell, which made, Burroughs made sense because he was the pastor who was, well, he was the witch who was masquerading as the pastor, which was the biggest sin of all. Yeah, dude. That's the most metal you could be. That's like the most fucking awesome shit.

So on this entire water marble that we live on, In Salem was both the king and queen of hell. It just so happened. Yeah, it's like if you go to any sort of mental hospital and you find like five Napoleons. Oh, yeah. But I also remember the world was much smaller back then. I mean, it wasn't. Well, the world was the same size, but the population was smaller.

Yeah, and our perception of the world was far, far smaller. We had no idea that all the rest of America was out there. Well, the Spanish had gone over a while back, but still we didn't know it was that big. Yeah. We didn't have that internet. We have enough content for the episode, right? Yes. Okay.

Now, this trial was one of the most dramatic of all. To start, the afflicted claim that four ghosts, his two wives, and the deceased family of another reverend had shown up on the day of his trial specifically to accuse him of murder. That's how it is. Which was believed by damn near everybody in the room. Everybody's like, fuck, yeah, the ghosts are here. Oh shit. Oh, dip.

Yep. It's the haunted mansion, the ride. Yep. Oh, there it is, right there. Damn. Now, Burroughs' power was supposedly so strong that the afflicted weren't able to even testify against him, because they claimed that he and the devil working together choked the words from their throats before they could get specific.

Yeah, dude. Oh my. They thought he was that powerful. They literally couldn't speak. They had to go, at some point, do you think that Joe Burroughs wished that he was that powerful? George Burroughs. Joe Burroughs is his great, great, great, great grandson who currently has a sports

level. I don't know. Joe Burroughs Cincinnati. Oh, is that that child? Yeah, kind of. They're all children. Really, as you get older, you realize all athletes are just children. Yep.

Luckily for the prosecution in the George Burroughs case, though, 30 other people gave depositions attesting to Burroughs' guilt. See, while being a reverend would have insulated him from the accusations in any other witch trial, it targeted him in Salem because he was the infernal body that most of the other false accusers orbited around. Everything kept coming back to him. And he was a, technically, he was competition to somebody like Paris, right? Like he was technically competition.

He was a person. Kind of sort of. Not really. He'd already left reverending behind. Yeah, but he was, he, because of that, actually probably is a thing that helped put a target on his back because the, this point in time period, it's like, so if you wanted to be a Puritan, Puritan was a 24-07 deal, right? Like, you don't get to just take off from being Puritan.

You got to fucking go back into it every day. You got to put your Puritan time in. It's 23-45-7 because they're 15 minutes when you're taking a violent dump. You can't be a Puritan. I hope that God ain't there too, but this guy, like, he was, he had separated himself from the church. And in a way, it kind of took that protection away from him as well, where he had separated himself.

He had accepted the half covenant. He was trying to be like a normal, like he was trying to be kind of whatever, just like a normal ass reverend and they didn't want that. Well, I think part of it was that he was also not very good at being a reverend and people had always looked at him sort of sideways, but that was also how Salem looked at every person who tried to tell them to not be a bunch of assholes. They looked at all of them sideways. During his trial, eight confessed witches described how burros lured them into joining

Satan's army, vividly painting pictures of well-attended witch meetings, and forced poppet making in the pursuit of torturing the afflicted for no good reason. Poppet sweatshops. I was there, and I was already knitting, there was incredible colorways on some of these poppets that we were doing, there was the new black cement, which is really awesome. You had banana ding-dong cream pie, it was an amazing colorway of poppet, it was really really good. But most of the time, the way burros got these witches was through Call of Duty.

Isn't that nice? It's really, it's insidious. Fantastic. The cherry on top in those testimonies was that most self-confessed witches ended their testimony with the telltale seizures. Susan, how are you, man? Getting almost everyone there, that bewitchment was indeed real. God, this trial must have been such a show.

Yeah, honestly. Like, there is an element to it. Seriously. You can see how they all kind of got into it too, in a way, like, especially this point and his point of the trial, like, that's the top of the fucking heap. Well, we have six, seven, hung, nine hung at the, eight hung at this point. At this point, six. You have six hung at this point.

All the world is a stage. Six hung, seven, six hung, eight dead. This is the greatest performance without a doubt, maybe in American theatrical history. Yes. At this point. That's possible. Well, borrows, meanwhile, could do nothing to prove his innocence beyond weak excuses, and things were only made worse when he became flustered and his answers contradicted each

other. This, however, was easy to do during the Salem Witch Trials because, as Henry said last episode, the rules were made up and the points didn't matter. Yeah. How do you weekly just be like, I'm not the king of hell? Like, that's like every day, like, I'm not, how do I even, how do I explain this? Oh, God. I'm not the king of hell.

I mean, if he was the king of hell, would I be here? No, everyone would be burning around me. I'd be like, you're all on fire now. I read in a really interesting point of like, okay, so Satan is more powerful than he has ever been, but he must be like his armies are slowly but surely, like allowing themselves to insinuate themselves in the religious communities of the entire world, and he'll slowly turn everybody and flip everybody to this cabal of worshipers of his great power and blood drinkers and all this kind of shit, a shirt.

But wouldn't he be like, hey guys, why don't we chill on telling everybody what we're doing right now? Like, why would he be like, why are we yelling this from the rooftop? The plan isn't completed yet. It's not supposed to be I and the former Barack Obama arrive and flip this whole country into a gigantic military unit, right, a prison planet. That was the idea, but now you guys are all like, why are you doing this? Why are you just shut up, shut the fuck up?

Well, what I'd always thought about is that why did these people continue to torment the afflicted while they were sitting right in front of them? It didn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense at all. There's no, like there's very, there is some logic to some of it, but there's no logic to most of it. There's, yes. You're right.

Yeah, the only person who kind of sort of came out on Reverend Burroughs' side was his granddaughter, Margaret Jacobs, who had inadvertently given testimony during the examinations that led to the execution of five people. Oh, did I do that? She recanted about her grandfather at the last second, but all that did was make the judges more suspicious of Margaret Jacobs, who only avoided conviction because her trial was postponed due to a nasty head boil. Yeah.

No one wanted to see it. They're all like, okay, can we put a sack on her head? No, because then we don't know if the devil's eyes show. We're like, all right, we'll wait till it goes down because I'm sick of her second nose. Yeah, you gotta go right to the 13th part one on that one, or part two when he has the sack on his head. But why wouldn't they just flip it and make the boil a sign that the devil has inflicted

her? Not unclear. They just literally just didn't want to look at it. Geez. By the end of the third round, though, the judges had produced five convictions and four immediate orders of execution, with the fifth to come after Elizabeth Proctor gave birth. Besides Proctor and Burroughs, though, the court had sentenced two more men of lower profile but still high status to their deaths, meaning that the August 19th public execution

was set to be an all-male review. Whoa, yeah, girls. Thunder down under. I've seen that before. Come on. Legs up, boys. Come on, now. Now, like the trial, the execution that was co-headlined by the Reverend George Burroughs

and John Proctor drew the biggest crowd yet, and neither the Reverend nor Proctor disappointed the crowd with their showmanship. This was like a monsters of rock of fucking witch executions. They're all in there, dude, one room and one night only. Oh, my God. That man's pants fell down. He's double-hung. Oh, my God.

Just before his execution, the Reverend George Burroughs stepped forth and recited a perfect rendition of the Lord's Prayer. All right, guys. All right, let me see if I can do this. Drop that beat. I'm so disappointed. Our father, who art in heaven, although he's not named, everyone's just like, whoa, oh, shit.

God does rock. I'm disappointed in everything, but I think it was pretty good, though. That was bad. It's her spinner on the side of the chair. That'd be fucking sweet. Only the devil can be that foam kid. That's very true. But as we discussed last episode, reciting the Lord's Prayer perfectly was supposed to

be impossible for a witch. Yes. But similarly, John Proctor, in an act of passive defiance, specifically asked the Reverend Nicholas Noyes to pray with him, Noyes, however, refused, citing exasperation that all of the people being hung kept insisting that they were innocent even when faced with imminent death. Yeah, it's like a thing. It's like they all keep saying, like, don't hang me, no matter which, it's like, that's

exactly what a witch would say. I don't know if that's true. But to calm the uneasiness in the crowd that came from these seemingly sincere shows of Christian faith, Cotton Mather, remember we talked about him, he was the Puritan leader that we brought up last episode. He was there to witness his first witch execution. He's finally coming. He's showing up.

Yeah, he's like, it's time to get that wig dirty. Yeah, I mean, he is the closest thing to a celebrity that New England has. So it's a big fucking deal that Cotton Mather's showing up for this. But he stepped forward to once again, play both sides, somewhat drawing on his insistence that the devil could impersonate the innocent, but not really going all the way in front of a crowd, baying for blood, Mather's explained the perfect Lord's prayer by saying that the devil has often been transformed into a, quote, angel of light. They changed the rules.

No, they did not change the rules. Not really. He cited Corinthians chapter 11 verse 14. Actually, yeah, I agree with you. The rules are made up and the points don't matter. Yeah, it's almost like the Bible's made up. And it's always like, it's just, ah, God, he's got the words right. I'm just getting so many flashbacks to when I did the dude series and like how many times

people be like, it's incorrect if you actually look at, you know, they opened up some old arcane chapter of one of the books I didn't like, one of the Brian Herber books that I didn't read. Actually corrected the record in this thing and it's just been like, it's fucking, I love it. It's made up. Like, dude, I'm not real. I'm not real.

That's a hell of your own making. My friend. I love it though. Do you know what they didn't do in Dune? Cross the Rubicon. No water. No water. Mostly desert.

Maybe they were on Paladin. You rapped. You mentioned Paladin. Paladin. Paladin. Paladin is what you are to me, my friend. And so after the crowd was sated and the executions were over and done with, the bodies were haphazardly tossed in a shallow, common grave nearby, so hastily buried that the chin and hand of

the Reverend George Burroughs stuck out from under the dirt, along with the foot of another victim. What was he? Bruce Campbell? How big was his chin? He's just being, he just was at the top of the pile. Oh man. And that maybe, maybe he was the last one killed or maybe he was the, no, he would have been

the first one killed. It's like the baggage in the plane, the first bag to go in is the last one to come out. Actually. He was probably the first killed because he was the first on the pile. I actually do believe, I actually weirdly, I think it was the opposite. I do believe that he was last because that was the point is that he was the most important. So his job was to watch, he was the headliner and his job was to watch them all get punished because the idea is to get, you wait for the most important ones to be at the end of the

line because then you kind of give them a constant opportunity to confess. Right. Okay. Well, while one might think that this hasty burial might have something to do with the grave diggers being afraid that the devil might come for his acolytes, it had more to do with the rank smell of the corpses because the executions had taken place in the middle of a heat wave. It's a heat wave.

And don't forget, everyone upon hanging voids their bowels. Oh, God. So it is five, four, excuse me, four fully grown men covered in their own shit and blood and piss. And it's about 95 outside in a humid ass Massachusetts day. Amen. Went in Massachusetts. That's the subway car that has no one in it.

Yep. And then you're like, it's my lucky day and then you're like, oh, I get it now. Wow. You know, I will say here in the city, it's going to be where that's just sort of the permanent smell. No matter what car you're getting into, it's just, that's just the way it is. It's going to be where that's just the way it is all the time. I think it's just because it's August.

And that's when urine really bakes into a car. That's the stinkiest month in New York. Yeah. By far. Yeah. But regardless of the stench, the sons of the Reverend George Burroughs dug up his corpse in the middle of the night, transported it to family land by boat and discreetly reburied it in an unmarked grave.

I know what's that. They think now there's a parking lot there or maybe a school. Yeah. That'd be cool. That makes sense. Just like Hitler's bunker. Yeah. Which is underneath the affordable housing units.

Is that right? Yes. But you know. It's underneath the parking lot in front of the affordable housing units. Yes. Oh my God. That's actually candy, man. Yeah.

But they finally put up a sign and said that it was there, but yeah, I feel weird like going to school every day, you just live in there as a kid and she'd be like, yeah, hey, there's Bronco. What's the idea? What's the idea? And then everyone's been like, great, cool, good. They put up like a reserved for Hitler sign? They do have a little parking spot for him for forever.

And a VW bunk is a lot of parking there for free any day of the week. Oh, him and Ted Bundy. 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.

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Hail Satan. Meanwhile, more people were fleeing to New York City, although it was only the people who had the means to do so. In Boston, Philip English, the Frenchman and his wife, Mary, had posted bond to get out of prison at the cost of 4,000 pounds. The rough equivalent of $1.2 million in today's money. They just paid out. They're like, all right, fuck this, we got the money.

We're going to New York where it's not illegal to be French. My name is Tommy German from Italy. As you can tell, my name is Stephanie Canada and you won't believe it. I'm from Mexico. That is an incredible bit. Yeah. You get it. Yes, I do.

I can do this with every... It's different countries. The man is a different country name than where he's from. He's got Portugal. I'm from... From where? Uruguay. I'm just really glad you know those countries.

Isn't that nice? Well, Mary and Philip fled to New York City and nothing was done to capture them. But in a telling example of the sort of tip for tat happening during the trial, the English's goods were confiscated by the state at a modern profit of $350,000 for the colony of Massachusetts. There is a... There's really interesting thing of... There's layers of that within all of these accused where... So it was kind of a rule up to a point that if you were murdered by the state, maybe I... Again, I believe that this was correct, is that you... Your shit would go to the state, that if you were executed, the state would come and grab all

your shit, right? Right. Depending on... That went back and forth in Massachusetts, depending on the charter. And so there was a certain period of time where they had fixed that. They're like, no, it should go to the immediate family, the people who own it. But the original... They kill you and take your shit?

Oh, yeah. The original sheriff that was going through the accused, basically what he was doing at the very top, was ganking everybody's shit. As soon as you were hung, as soon as you were hanged, they would have went and you'd go and grab your stuff and be like, it's my now, and they would just do... It was also kind of interesting. I'm like, don't you think that a witch's items would be actually incredibly dangerous to own?

Cursed objects. They're cursed objects. They're so strange, because they just jump right on it and like... They just like, sleep in a witch's band and shit. They just wanted to watch people die. They didn't believe any of this shit. Whoa. No, wait.

Some I think, I truly do believe that some of them did and some of them didn't. I don't think the sheriff was all that concerned with it. The people who were profiting from it certainly weren't concerned with it. But I think the vast majority of people did believe their own bullshit. At the same time, the association game was resulting in even more charges. Even after 10 people had been hung, or excuse me, 10 people had been hanged. Thank you. You're welcome.

I don't want to... Yeah, I don't want to get the fucking DMs. I don't... Unfortunately, if we don't say it, they won't listen to a single other word we say in the context. So they were hanged. They were hanged. They were hanged, yes.

The examinations continued between trials and a man named John Jackson was put in the jackpot after six afflicted girls accused him of witchcraft. The association was John Jackson's aunt, Elizabeth Howe, who had already been hanged. But what really turned up the volume on the whole affair when it came to association was the fact that many of the accused were now confessing instead of protesting their innocence. And every time that was done, the number of witches had to be increased to make room. Yeah. So if you confessed, you did have a better outcome.

Were you hung if you were confessed? We'll get to that here in a bit. Okay. Accused witch and foster claimed on July 15th that there were 25 witches. Had to be. Had to be. At least 25. At least 25, okay.

But a week later, another accused said that there were 77. Yeah, yeah. We had a big runoff. You would be surprised. Yeah. Honestly, I don't even know how we got so many witches at once. There's a lot of subs. No, 77.

There's a lot of subs in one day. A lot of subs, okay. By the end of August, there were three confessors saying there were 200 witches. Oh my God. And the afflicted were also fueling rumors that there were over 300 witches in a colony-wide population of about 50,000 people. My name is Cordial Indiana. I'm from Michigan.

I am telling you one thing. We need to do something about this witch inflation. That we... It's an inflation joke. Very good. I combined two jokes. I'm learning. Thank you.

Tellingly though, accusations had not yet hit the main population center of Boston. And at this point, things had not gone past the small rural communities where life was harder, things sucked more, and no one could stand anyone else. But speaking of Boston, some people already imprisoned in Boston Jail were confessing to even more crimes after being harassed by other people who had also made false confessions. What is going on? It's just... It's full lunacy.

Everything... The wheels have fallen off of the entire society. Sounds like it. This is insane. Listen to this. The troll Abigail Hobbs convinced a woman named Rebecca Eames that Eames had been a witch for 26 years and that her son had been a wizard for 13 and that they'd both tormented people together.

That woman fully believed this. Hi there, Rebecca. It's me, Abigail Hobbs. Just got dumpied with my best friend, Mr. J. That's so terrible. Okay. I hate your Polish Harley Quinn. Don't even mix these dreams for me. Can you see my happy trails?

I don't want to lift up my shirt. Look at that. There's no reason for you to lift up your shirt. It's just amazing. The swirls of hair around my perfect breath. But listen to that. Rebecca, did you know? All right.

You know what? Everybody fucking hates you. She's one of the sexiest women in Superhero lore. Yeah. But not me. I'm Halloween. I'm like, hey, Rebecca. You know, I like everybody hates you and they've hated your fucking life since you took these

like last 26 years. Yeah. What if I told you? Yeah. Yeah, a witch. Is that good? Yeah. Yeah, it is.

It's fun. Yes. Yeah. There you go, girl. Yes. Yeah. Come on. Be a bitch with it.

Come on. Act like it. Act like a witch. Be one. Be found with that. That's bad. We live in fucking hell. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. The incredible thing about this is that like modern false confessions, like for example, like Jesse Miss Kelly of the West Memphis tree or of the West Memphis three or five of the Beatrice six, these confessors convinced themselves that what they had falsely confessed to was in fact what really happened at some point you're in jail, right? You're already there. Like it's already happened to you.

You've been brought into the fold. At some point, I think that it might help your reality to be like, well, I have to be here for a reason. Yeah. If I'm not here for a reason, right, everything is fucked and life is really hard. But it turns out like, you know, like I'm just think I'm going to be rolled over by the justice no matter what. So now you kind of your brain can start to, I believe it puts you in the place where you're

at already so that you don't like the cognitive dissonance is too much. Well, what a fucking nightmare when you know you're innocent and you're incarcerated. I mean, my God. It's very scary. Yeah. Maybe flipping your brain and be like, I deserve to be. I don't know. I don't know.

That's crazy though. I mean, Rebecca Eames, she was so distraught with her false belief that she was a witch that she unsuccessfully tried to hang herself in her jail cell right after she cut her own throat with a razor. Geez. How'd she fail at both of those? She's not a very good witch. I guess not.

I mean, for this flurry of accusations, along with the fact that community leaders were starting to swing, this was slowly turning the tide on public support for the trials, especially when it became obvious that convictions were mostly coming as a result of spectral evidence. But even though support was waning, or possibly because support was waning, the court of OAA and Termine geared up for the largest round of trials yet, this time trying eight of the accused who were still protesting their innocence. This time, you had Dorcas Hoare and a woman with another unfortunate surname called Ann

Pudd-Eater. Oh, Ann Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Any way you pronounce it, it's a bad name. Pudd-Eater.

Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. Pudd-Eater. That's my wife. That's my wife. Pudd-Eater.

What I found out is that Dorcas Hoare is actually the long, long time, the relative of the actress Jean Smart. We did learn that. We learned that on Wikipedia when a fan sent it to us. Wow. I saw the same tweet. We were at it on. But isn't that interesting?

I'm happy that you took that information and pretended like you needed research. People like that show hacks. And maybe it's because I am one. Dorcas Hoare. Now five were convicted right out the bat. But Dorcas Hoare confessed after her conviction and started naming names. For that, the law seized her estate, but granted her a reprieve from execution to see how many more names they could get.

Absolutely. We got Morcas Slut. We got... We got... Forkish Bitch. I don't... I love Forkish. Forkish Bitch is actually very sweet.

Lovely woman. Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Well, amongst the convicted in this round was Mary Bradbury, a well-respected woman of high class in her 70s who was the wife of a military man. She actually had more signers than anyone on her petition at 118, but seeing how much good signatures had done in the past, Mary Bradbury was broken out of jail by supporters and hidden away.

That's the one thing about back in the day is that if you did have a hundred people that believed in you, they could all just come and just pull you out of the jail. They're more than all the cops. That's very nice. And they'd be like, all right, we want that guy. Like, you remember what happened with Joseph Smith? It was like the same shit. Yeah.

It reminds me a little bit of... But it was bad news for him. Yeah, it was the other way. It reminds me a little bit of the early Bonnie and Clyde as well, right? Did they do a series of jail breaks and things like that? Yeah, he remembers. Yeah, he does remember. It's nice.

It was like three years, four years ago. Is that right? Yeah, dude. Yeah. Maybe five. What was when we were on Australia? I wanted to cut myself in half and just count the rings. One ring is going to be all tincture.

You know. Oh, I know. Well, meanwhile, nine more cases of witchcraft were tried and nine more were sentenced to hang. Four of those, however, including the troll Abigail Hobbes, had pled guilty during their examinations. But at this point, possibly because the judges felt that the fun was almost over, people were being sentenced to death, seemingly just for the crime of being accused.

A woman named Margaret Scott was convicted because she asked her neighbors for corn and the neighbor refused. Oh, you know how it is? No, I don't. I don't know how it is. Afterward, the neighbors oxen refused to move all night, and this was seen as evidence of witchcraft. These fucking ox have no idea how important it is for them to move.

They don't know. All these animals are just like, I'm just hanging out. I'm just having a bad day myself. Oh, my God. Another argument over 10 shillings worth of wood was added to the evidence, and Scott was thereby sentenced to hang. However, while most of the accused were either falsely confessing or steadfastly protesting their innocence, there was one man in particular who refused to participate either way.

My boy. That man was Giles Corey. It's Giles. It's Giles, really? It is Giles. No, let's go Giles. It is Giles. It is Giles.

No, Giles sounds like a lubricant filled jelly. I'm just trying to save us five emails. Sure. Five emails. Let's go with Giles. It's all names are made up, so we're just going to make it up as Giles. Actually, wouldn't it be Giles if we're doing that? That's two Ls.

That's two Ls. You fucking asshole. Okay. So you're the asshole today. Giles. You're the asshole? What? I'm the academic.

Wow. I'm the English way of doing things. I'm just going to call him Corey. Fuck right. Giles Corey sounds so much cooler than Giles Corey because Giles sounds like he doesn't have any teeth. Well, Giles is kind of an old time butler name. Yeah.

Now, in the old English way of doing things in court, the accused answered to the charges first with his plea, then he was asked if he was, quote, willing to be tried by God in country, that is, by a jury. No. Well, the stock answer to that was by God and by country, which was that era's version of answering, do you square to tell the truth with I do? I never do. But while Corey pled not guilty to all the witchcraft charges read against him, he refused

to answer the follow-up question because if he didn't answer, then this sounds like something you would do, then the trial couldn't proceed. He's not wrong. Technically in a way. You know? You could sit here all fucking day in silence. Well, in English law, this tactic of refusing the answer was called standing mute, but standing mute was not an advisable way of avoiding a trial.

Standing mute was met with something called pain forte et du ore, which translates to strong and hard punishment. Okay. So make me watch the fucking Jojo from Magnolia Farms' cooking show for a certain period of time. Mm-hmm. And so, when Gals Corey was brought before the court three times and refused to answer how he would be tried every time, the court of O.A. and Termine sentenced him to be pressed

to death for his stubbornness. Yeah, I don't think I can handle the weight. I'm a straight bastard. Come on. All right. You want to make me talk? I'll show you. You want me to talk?

I mean, at some point, you can't handle the weight. It's keeps on coming down. Essentially, being pressed to death involves placing the stubborn person on a large board while another board was laid on top of their body. Then rocks of increasing size would be stacked on top of said board. Simple yet effective. So how do you actually, I would assume it's suffocation. No, you get crushed to death.

Your internal organs get crushed. You get squished to death. Wow. It's not pleasant. Yeah. The idea, yeah, because they say that there's actually, there's a certain point where you're still alive as you're getting crushed. You're still alive.

But even if you do say, okay, okay, okay, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, you're already dead because your internal organs have all been crushed. You're going to die eventually at a certain point. You were just made jelly and it's the 1690s, which means it's like, it's not like you get a flown in a helicopter, like a fancy hospital where they can like hook you up and shit. You die of like a long-term infection or bleeding, internal bleeding and you just become a giant bruise sack and yeah, you just expire in pain and feverish, probably feverishly die hallucinating and screaming.

Fantastic. Well, the idea was that the weight would cause the defendant to acquiesce to answering the question before he was crushed. But that is not at all what happened with Corey. See after Corey was sentenced, but before he was pressed, and Putnam Jr. chief accuser said that his specter visited her and told her that he would quote, press her to death before the law pressed him. And then you're like, all right, let's see what happens.

Yeah, full court press, here we go. After that Putnam Jr. was visited by another spirit. But this one said that Corey had pressed him to death with his feet. God, does it make any sense? Big feet. See, while the stories about other accused witches committing murder most foul were almost certainly false, Corey had indeed killed a man by beating him to death almost 20 years before the trials.

I'll fucking beat anybody to death. But that wasn't the problem. No, no, no, no, no, no. Back in the day, it was a misunderstanding. I guess so. In 1675, Corey had hired a guy described as quote unquote, almost a natural fool. What does that mean? That means he's a Rudy Rudiger type, almost a natural fool.

I know, Rudy came to talk to her at our school, as I've said before, and he is just, he is a fool. Yeah, but you know, he's not a clinical fool, like he's not medically a fool. He is, he is. Yeah, I know he's, none of that story is true. No, no, they let him play one play. Yeah, and the game's already over, and they carried him off the field being sarcastic. No, it's nice, technically.

The movie was nice. Yeah, the movie was nice. Apparently, Corey was not satisfied with the job that this man had done. So Corey beat him to death with a stick, so this he received heavy fines. I'll pay what I owe. Wait, okay, so you can beat a dude to death with a stick, but the idea of spectral evidence gets you killed. Yeah.

Yeah, this is also a time period when- This is the founding of our country. But this is someone who was below somebody who was a moneyed landowner, so when it comes down to it, they are of a different law. He beat a lesser to death. I see. And so, sort of like Dorcas Hor, nobody was really surprised nor all that concerned when Corey was accused of being a witch. And absolutely nobody, as far as I know, came forward to defend him when he was brought

out for his pressing. This is what I mean when you say you can't murder someone just because they're an asshole. True, because, again, eventually, maybe some way you do get punished for it, which is kind of- this is kind of his punishment for that. On that day, Corey was taken before the public and placed between the boards. Look, I'm a sandwich, you fucking assholes. Then rock after rock was stacked on top, and according to legend, Corey only said two words before he was crushed to death.

More. Wait. Jesus Christ, man. Bro, you're liking this way too much to make it fun for me? Yeah, dude. Reportedly, his tongue then lulled out of his mouth, and Sheriff George Corwin took his walking stick and pushed the tongue back inside, as either a final show of just how little Corey was regarded or in an attempt to lessen the morbidity of the situation.

Now that's just rude. I guess so, my God. This, thankfully, was the first and last pressing in Massachusetts history. Wow. And according to records, Corey was buried near the crossroads by a place called Butts Brook as a final indignity, because Butts Brook was where they normally buried people who died by suicide. And of course, usually you bury someone six feet under, but in this case, two feet will

do. He's pressed. He's pressed. All you say is, oh, it's because he's a panini now. He's dead. So with Gall's Corey pressed to death, all that was left was to hang the next round of witches. Jesus.

But where the first round was one hanging, the second was five, and the third was four. The hanging day held on September 22, 1692 featured eight executions. Oh, they're about to adopt a duck. This is like season five. Yeah, this is the crossover episode, but the other shows on TGIF all showing up at once. The eight executed that day held steadfast to their innocence until the final drop just like all the rest. But what's most interesting about this round was who hadn't been executed, namely the confessed

witches. The total number of convictions on the last round had been 15, but seven of those had confessed and pled guilty. Therefore, those seven were spared the hangman's noose. See, in a move contrary to damn near every witch trial that I've ever researched, not a single person who actually confessed to being a witch in the Salem Witch Trials was executed, including the troll Abigail Hobbs. Yeah, dude.

That's like, and she just got to go cause mayhem and a bunch of other people's lives after this shit. They just flipped it and reversed it. Well, they just under, the confession was more important than anything else because that's it legally. They just confessed. But that's what they had, right? They had that.

Legally, that's where they got you. And they sort of had this, there was a religious hook to this, and you can go and we'll go into a little deeper. Yeah. Now, it's said that the choice to not execute any confessed witches is a puzzling one, but I think it's actually pretty cut and dry. See for the first three rounds, a plea of not guilty was met with a trial, a conviction and an execution in short order, usually within a couple of weeks.

What became quite clear to the people of Salem by the third round was that those who had confessed were not being executed. Instead, they were being held in jail where they were naming more witches and testifying against those who pled innocent. And the more you distance yourself away from the day that you're supposed to get hanged, the more you think like, ah, I got some wiggle room here. And so you just keep naming witches because what that does is like, it allows you to sit, I mean, like it's not a great jail, like you're not having a great time, but you're not dancing

on the end of a row. They just turned state evidence. Yes. Therefore, while 19 out of 19 people who pled not guilty to witchcraft in Salem were executed, absolutely none of the 52 people who confessed were hanged, although two of them did die in jail. Now, it is believed that had the witch trials continued for much longer, the magistrates would have eventually gotten around to setting dates for the executions of the confessed witches.

There were IOUs for it. And that's as good as a trial. But another reason why the confessed witches survived might be that people were following the same logic used to condemn the use of spectral evidence while also maintaining that the devil was still out there trying to jam everyone up. After 19 people have been executed, Cotton Mather wrote to one of the judges saying that it was actually better to keep a confessed witch alive so that they might repent and bring glory to God.

This was, he claimed to believe, the best way to ultimately defeat Satan. Because now you have these definite witches, right? You have these straight up witches that are saying that they're witches. I mean, they're not witches. But what we're going to do is that through this process of the trial and them confessing and holding and showing all these other non-recaltrant witches, right, that they aren't going to come, they're not going to admit it. Recalcitrant.

Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant. Rubicon. You know, Rubicon is an incredible, if you've ever played Rubicon, it's incredible.

Love that fucking game. Fucking hate. I hate this. I hate the word. Very wet. And I'm upset. I'm upset. I did this.

Very wet. Yeah. But because you're flipping the devil harder if you got a confessed witch, because you have a PR standpoint, it works for everybody, because then after the trials, all the confess witches can be like, see, I was saved by God, and then it's a great commercial for puritanism. Crossing over the Rubicon. Yeah. Now, the last round of witch trials had only lasted two weeks, meaning that those 15 people

going on trial for capital crimes, they averaged less than a day each, because that, of course, you had two days break for the two sabbaths. And that was nuts even by 17th century standards. Jesus. Besides what many felt was a rush to judgment, the public also began to notice that the evidence in the last 15 cases wasn't quite as strong as the ones that came before, even with the confessions. Furthermore, the fact that the confessed witches were all still alive while everyone who protested

their innocence was dead, it introduced just a shade of doubt in everyone's mind as to whether or not they were really doing the right thing here. I believe it. I believe everyone's like, ooh, I think we might have, ooh, I think we might have, ooh. And so Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather, finally weighed in. Yeah, old Pappy got in there. Okay. See, Increase Mather was just as influential to the colony as Cotton Mather.

But while Cotton had been wishy-washy on the issue of spectral evidence, Increase came out against it, albeit far too late. Yeah, it's almost like he came out against it once he wasn't worried that they'll all rise up and accuse me of being a witch. It's like now that maybe some of the heat's lessening. They got the bloodlust out maybe. Yeah, maybe. Who knows?

Kind of sort of. I mean, his ideas were, he was one of those guys that I think believed, not believed. And the name Increase, by the way, because I know you're all thinking about it, it's a literal translation of the Hebrew name Yoseph, or Joseph. Yoseph translates to increase, because he was supposed to increase the amount of Christ in this sinful world. I just thought he was a big fat asshole. Yeah.

That's funny. That's so funny. I didn't know. Yeah, Joseph was lied to. Now part of the reason why Increase waited so long to involve himself in the trials was that he was a friend of Massachusetts Governor William Phipps, and Increase couldn't be seen coming out against the judges, and by extension, the colonial government. Do you know that Phipps was also close to being accused of witchcraft before all of

this? Him and his wife, the same thing, they also, that's a part of the ickiness, a part of why they didn't want to involve themselves was because they already went through, his wife went through a series of accusations in the past, and he pulled her out of it. Well, he'd also, he used a little bit of magic himself. He did treasure divining. That was his whole thing. Did Joseph Smith shit?

They all did the same stuff. But when public pressure against spectral evidence began to grow, Increase published a short book called Cases of Conscience in Concerning Evil Spirits, in which he publicly questioned the credibility of possessed people, confessed witches, and especially spectral evidence. Okay. However, this probably had less to do with his conscience, and more to do with the fact that there were rumors going around that Increase's wife was the next to be accused

of witchcraft. She's a witch? That's not too big. Okay. And that's why I don't think he waited until it was socially popular to come out against it. I think he waited until it touched him, to come out against it, and waited until it kind of came out of rural Massachusetts, because as long as it stayed in the backwaters, who

gives a shit, just let him fucking battle it out. Well, that was the idea a while. They kept thinking, I think in a while, they're like, well, this will burn itself out. It'll all burn itself out, but then it just kept raging. Now while Increase's book could have been a bold stroke against the establishment, he didn't go all the way because of his aforementioned connections. Instead, he included a postscript in his book tacitly endorsing the executions by saying that he himself would have voted to execute Reverend Burroughs had he been on the jury.

And this is despite the fact that Burroughs' conviction was based on the testimonies of possessed people and confessed witches, along with spectral evidence and nothing else. The mind of a politician has never changed. No. Because that double-speak is so fucking infuriating. And since, here I say, it makes him a witch. Literally since the invention of government. Yes.

To be totally fair, though, Increase did try in other ways to tamp down the hysteria. He went to Salem Jail and talked with some of the accused who were still alive, and they not only retracted their confessions, but also retracted their allegations against other alleged witches. So you can kill this group now. Got to get that. All right, cool. They all just retracted.

You can go wipe those guys out. That's all you got to do, I guess. Increase also wrote that while he did believe that there were dangerous witches that needed to be, in his words, exterminated, it would be better that 10 suspected witches should escape rather than one innocent person be condemned. But like the accusations against Increase's wife, the thing that truly started winding down the Salem witch trials was when cries of witch began reaching people of actual power outside of the backwaters of New England.

Once it got out of shithead town, and it started going into big shithead town. One girl from Andover accused a, quote, worthy gentleman of Boston of being a witch. But instead of weakly protesting, this worthy gentleman obtained a writ to arrest the accuser for defamation, then sent some goons to deliver the message. And that does help the message get delivered. Very frank Sinatra of him. Very. Immediately the afflictions of that afflicted cleared up to sweet.

In addition, other people were starting to realize that those imprisoned in Boston jail might not last the winner, especially considering how two people had already died of jail fever even when it was warm. And so after much public pressure, Governor Phipps finally acknowledged the witch trials to his superiors in England, while also saying, don't worry, I'm putting a stop to everything, except under extreme circumstances. Just understand that, listen, okay, I know it was icky for me to, and we're all kind of upset about when it happened, how this all went down, we're all kind of upset about

it. It is upsetting. But honestly, it's already done. So don't worry about it, I've already been handling, so I didn't want to make you get all concerned about it because I was already handling it so. It sounds like you're horrified. No. Yeah?

Is everything falling apart? No. Is everything okay? No. All right. See, Phipps was able to pass the buck on the witch trials because he said he had missed most of it trying to win a frontier war in Maine. How could I even know?

How could I even know what was happening? And these fucking molasses trees out there in Maine, you have any idea of the difficulty? The resistance they're putting up. They're sticky. I lost 14 men. And then there's all these people living behind them. That's great. And it was like, how do you get, ew, how do you get here?

And when he returned, he said, from these frontier wars, the people he'd left in charge had gone just the tiniest bit bananas, which was partly his fault, but not really. I was just like, ugh, it's more just like, I couldn't over, my main problem was that I couldn't foretell the flaws of other people. Oh, that's your issue. That is my main thing is that I couldn't see. Do you also care too much? I work so hard.

Right. Again, knowingly though, Phipps made his big push to end the witch trials just after an afflicted girl accused his wife of witchcraft. Interesting. Yes. Meaning he was fairly content to let the whole affair play itself out until it affected him personally. God, you can just see fucking every time Mrs. Phipps walks down the street and we're just

like, ugh. Actually, it kind of makes me think that she must have been like super hot or something because a lot of the times that you're just constantly deflecting witchcraft or you're amazed or it's one or the other. No. You might be Dorcas Horror. Yeah. Who's a legit, who actually was the only witch in this whole thing.

I like her. Life from your grave. 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. But even though the witch trials were, for all intents and purposes, over, there was still one more death to go and a few more trials. On December 10th, confessed elderly witch Anne Foster died in jail, but her body was not released to her family until they paid the six pounds owed for fees incurred during her imprisonment.

You got slop. You got hay. Right. All right. We had it. We brought in all the crows to scream at him so they couldn't snipe. What about all the tax dollars that we're paying for it? Like, no.

No, no, no. That's pay for our hats. Sorry. That's for your fucking hats. And also, we're fighting trees in Maine. Now, in order to just sort of forget that this whole thing ever happened as fast as humanly possible, Governor Phipps ended the court of Oye and Termini and banned any further publication on the subject of witchcraft in New England unless he approved it.

He just thought, hey, all right, well, I'll just shut up about this. That's what we're going to do. And he put a three-year ban saying, like, no one can even mention that this happened. Boom. And it certainly is not super interesting. And it's certainly not as one of the most compelling stories about a microcosm of government and religion and all that kind of shit. So you'd be surprised how many people wanted to talk about it totally forgotten about though,

huh? See, no. The people of rural Massachusetts, they were, in a way, sobering up from almost a year of extreme witchcraft hysteria. But instead of blaming themselves, they were on the verge of blaming the government for not stopping them from acting like savage morons. Wasn't this kind of on you to make us not crazy anymore? Jesus.

There is the truth. Because we talked about it in the last episode, the judges on the old, as they were coming up, the quote-unquote liberal view that they were trying to espouse was just like, the judges were supposed to need a barrier of entry for evidence and accusations and all this kind of shit that was supposed to keep all of this wildfire hangings. It wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to stop it. The judges were supposed to be there to make a sense of normalcy.

But then it's like, what happens when mommy and daddy go insane? Exactly. And so to squelch any sort of opposition that might bring down the fledgling colonial government, Phipps engaged in what author Emerson Baker calls the first large-scale government cover-up in American history. Good work. Wow. Yeah, the first one in American soil.

I mean, I'm going to tell him this. It didn't work. Nope. You see, as it is with most cover-ups, this only angered people more because damn near everybody knew someone who had been touched in one way or another by the proceedings, and books criticizing the trials had already been published by the time this gag order went into effect. Among the most notable was A Brief and True Narrative of Witchcraft at Salem Village by

Reverend Deodat Lawson. His book held particular weight because it was alleged multiple times during the trials that Reverend George Burroughs had murdered Reverend Lawson's family using witchcraft, and Deodat had published a full book saying, that's a bunch of bullshit. My wife and child died because life sucked and everything was hard. I killed my family. I killed my family. I don't get fucking credit for killing my family.

I'm going to be pretty upset. About the only person in Massachusetts who didn't or couldn't read the room was Cotton Mather, but Cotton had fucked himself because he'd already explicitly supported the proceedings by attending an execution in person. No one asked him to be there. No. You know what I mean? No one asked you to come.

No one asked you to insert yourself into this whole fucking story. So I'm glad you also got covered in shit. Yeah. See, Massachusetts was now doing worse than ever, and a public acknowledgment that the government had wrongly executed 19 people, pressed to death another, and imprisoned well over a hundred more, it could have brought the whole fucking system down. And so Cotton Mather fell on his sword and publicly defended the trials in a highly selective book called The Wonders of the Invisible World, which, which, what?

Yeah, it's The Wonders of the Invisible World. It minimized the use of spectral evidence in the trials and didn't mention any of the public support which some of the executed received at all. Yeah. He tried to retcon the whole thing. Right. The spectral evidence was only used, and he cherry-picked five cases where he was like, no, actually, there was evidence here and blah, blah, blah.

He was all full of shit because, yeah, he'd already, he'd already ruined himself. Sure. And while his sacrifice might have saved the colony in a governmental sense, his obvious dishonesty destroyed faith in Puritanism because Mather was a Puritan leader. Sort of like how, like failures in evangelistic and Catholic leadership have been a rotting membership in those religions here in the Western world for decades. As far as the rest of the accused or confessed witches still in prison went, fifty were rotting away by the time the court of Oye and Termine ended.

Most of the cases were thrown out for ignoramus or lack of evidence, but twenty-one were still tried, and out of those twenty-one, three resulted in guilty verdicts. Now while the court of Oye and Termine was done, Chief Justice Stotten, arguably the driving force behind all this mass death, he was still in charge, and he signed a warrant for the execution of the last three witches and all of those who confessed during the trial. Yeah, he wasn't done. Like he wasn't, he wanted every, he wanted them all dead.

He literally wanted another twenty-five people hanged. He was a true believer, I guess, or refused to acknowledge that he was wrong. I think he was a true believer. Maybe a little bit of both. The real sheriff, Joe Arpaio. From what I read of him, he was not, honestly, I don't think he was a true believer. I think that he was, he felt that it was politically convenient, and he had already gone this far.

He had already killed twenty people, and at this point, he's like, well, if I now say that I'm not going to execute these, all of the rest of them. It's almost rude to the twenty that are dead. It's rude. We want a respect of twenty that I already killed, we're going to need to kill twenty-one more. Yeah. Wow.

But in the last minute decision, Governor Phipps, eager to just get all this bullshit over and done with, he reprieved the eight that chiefed us to Stotton was trying to murder, and had them all released without telling Stotton. Run! Run, witch! Okay. And then she flies away in a room. Oh, god damn it, we let her get away.

And so, when Stotton learned of the stays of execution upon the next court session, he walked out of the court in a huff, like it was the last scene of an eighties teen comedy where the cool kids saved the summer camp from the stuffy curmudgeon all at the last second. I have to agree that damn talent show was entertaining. After that, every remaining accused witch was acquitted, but were freed from jail only after they paid their prison fees. One last little, make sure the government always make sure, one last little bill.

Nice. Elizabeth Proctor, wife of executed witch John Proctor, she returned to her forum with her newborn baby to find that authorities had stolen everything. Oh, great. Similarly, Dorcas Hoare also returned home to an empty lot. But then she did the things she crossed her arms and blinked and like, whitch your nose and like, all her shit just showed back up and bleached. But perhaps the saddest post-script is that of Tituba, the woman who was forced to kick

off the whole affair by the one who enslaved her, the Reverend Samuel Parris. See, even though she'd been the first accused in January of 1692, she wasn't tried until May of 1693, having spent a year and a half behind bars. Her confession was rejected because it was all based on spectral evidence, but she, like everyone else, had her jail fees. Reverend Parris legally still owned her, but he refused to pay and instead sold her to someone else to cover the seven pounds she owed. Tituba then disappeared from the historical record completely.

But as far as what happened to everyone else, Governor Phipps ended his governorship in 1694, but incredibly, he was replaced by Chief Justice William Stoughton, who ruled until 1701. It's almost like they gave him that to be like, you know what, in the end, thanks for killing a bunch of people in the United States. You did what it takes to be a great governor. You really did, you fucking, you really made it so we, our tax dollars, were spent well on those ropes. After Stoughton, though, came Joseph Dudley, and with Joe Dudley, the Puritans were no

longer in charge. I mean, Dudley's a cool guy. Yeah, I mean Joe Dudley is pretty nice. Massachusetts then became a full royal colony and remained so until 1776, motherfucker! It's happening again, it's all over again, it's going to rise again on 1776, anyway. Now, perhaps not surprisingly, the Reverend Samuel Parris did not win any popularity contest for basically setting the whole of Massachusetts on fire for an entire year. What did I do?

I mean, you just ruined everything. Me? Yeah, you did it. Yeah. What if I wrap the Lord's prayer? Well, I love white wrap. Well, furthermore, all the petty grievances that Samuel Parris had with Salem over pay and firewood, the shit that arguably started all of this still hadn't been settled.

And it would continue for years after the trials. In other words, Parris played his best hand, got 23 people killed, excuse me, yeah, need 23, yep, 23 people killed and lost. You then just think he also didn't get his fucking firewood. That's like a bitch. He played his best hand, he didn't get anything. He got nothing. I got to kill 23 people.

I mean, that's pretty sweet, isn't it? Yeah, how many people have you fucking killed? Not 23, I mean. Now, he did apologize for his part in the trials and he apologized for the acceptance of spectral evidence. It's like it didn't happen. It did happen. He apologized.

It really did happen, though. It was like two years later, he was given a sermon and he only kind of half apologized to it, like he didn't really give it all the way. Yeah, it was very much a sorry, sorry if- Sorry that happened for you, but- Yes, sorry if me getting all these witches killed, I'm sorry if that offended you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if you felt like that about yourself.

That was kind of mean that you did that. Yeah, well, I'm sorry for it, so get over it. Okay. This, however, was not enough for his enemies in Salem. He spent six fucking years arguing and fighting, and then finally stepped down as minister after his contract ended. Six years. The people of Salem did not get rid of him, and then he stayed in Salem so he could sue

for back pay. Oh my God, what a fucking shackass. Yeah, I mean, he's, they got, this is the city on a hill, man. This is his idea that they're all, it's this, the Puritan ideal, just be a fucking asshole in the woods. Yeah, man, I need five codes, codes, please. Finally, they just gave him 79 pounds just to fucking go away. Get out of here.

Parris then spent the next 23 years moving from town to town, arguing about pay in every location. He switched from minister to school teacher to shopkeeper to farmer, and finally, Parris died in 1720 at the age of 66 as an absolute fucking failure in everything he ever tried to be. How dare you, Marcus? He inspired four episodes of our show. That is very true.

And again. That's big, though. And I feel like that's equals, everything that went on. 23 deaths. Yep. 23. That's something. That's nothing to shake a stick at.

You can shake a stick at a bunch of corpses. He doesn't do anything. Interestingly, though, it only took the people of Massachusetts five years to realize how badly they'd fucked up. Usually, it's a couple hundred. In 1697, they observed a fast to acknowledge their wrongs, and 12 jurors from the witch trials signed an apology asking a pardon from God himself. Okay, hear me out.

We're not going to eat bread today. That is what they did. Okay, hey, listen, hey. You're going to be kind of hungry for 12 hours. Can I just do it for eight? Sure. Let's fucking bring anybody back. Nine years after the fast, Ann Putnam Jr., the most vociferous of the accusers, she went

before her congregation to read a statement of contrition. It said, I'm sorry. Now, she's still blamed the devil for deceiving her. Good. But she did say that for her part in the trials, she desired to lie in the dust and earnestly beg forgiveness from those that she caused sorrow and offense. I'm sorry for everything. And I'd also like to point out that I have not eaten chili in the past nine years out

of respect for the corpses, and I've avoided most of the beans that I like. And there are many beans. I love beans, so I've done that. I've done so. Yeah. I'm almost the victim, aren't I? That's going to be hard to do in Massachusetts in 1692. It's a bean-based diet.

It's a 2D people. Now some believe that this apology by Ann Putnam Jr. was an admission that she was knowingly lying the whole time. Personally, though, I think Ann Putnam Jr. started as a case of true conversion disorder, but she eventually got caught up in the scene with all the cool older kids, and she kept up in the ante until someone simply told her to stop. And it's just very difficult to pull yourself all the way back, think about all of the families that have lost people to fucking QAnon.

I really do mean it. And once you have sunk so much of yourself and your time and your energy into believing something that is absolutely total horseshit, that also leads to societal chaos and actual death, it is very, very difficult to then come be like, sorry, this isn't the closest that you get. You go like, you know, the devil is still real. You have to package it and all of these things and still be like, but hey, let's buy guns, big eye guns.

Denver Airport. What's going on at the Denver Airport? Oh, no. Now it's honestly a lot of delays. I know that. Well, Ann Putnam Jr., remember, she was only 12 when all this shit happened, which is because she was traumatized and she went through it and she had to deal with a lot of shit. In a way, I feel like that she, I agree with you.

She was having a trauma response at the time and then it just got pulled into the lore. The older girls. That was a big part of it. That was a big part of it. At that point though, right? What? Back in the day, 12 years old wasn't 12 years old. It wasn't like it is now.

They didn't have my little pony. She was an adult. Well, they had ponies, but they had actual ponies. But her brain still formed at the same rate as humans today, and she's still under the sway of older girls that she wants to impress. Humans no matter what time period always have a need for societal acceptance, and I think she very much fell into that. Oh, yeah.

At the time being a witch was super fetch. Fetch. Not me. I'm a lone wolf. Me and my 12 biker buddies are lone wolves. We don't hang out with anybody but ourselves and a couple of other people. Well, even though the people of Massachusetts apologized in 1697, it took until October of 2001 for the government to officially declare that the 19 people executed were innocent,

which I suppose is done to make people feel good about something after 9-11. 9-11 had to happen, dude. For us to admit that, oh my God, okay. But in a moment of insane synchronicity, which makes me very nervous about doing the fucking Manhattan Project in the future, the last person to finally be declared not a witch was Elizabeth Johnson Sr., whose name was cleared the day before we released our first episode of this series. Just got pardoned.

Not a witch. Not a witch. Proficially. But when we're talking the long-term consequences of the Salem witch trials, it didn't just come down to the fact that they effectively killed Puritanism as a religion, although that was quite consequential. Oh, yes. Apart from that, Salem required the Christian leaders of the New World to heavily examine

how they talked about Satan to their congregation. This is one of the very few, we saw it after the Black Death too, but this is one of the very few moments in history where you see a moment of people understanding that we are, we need a change, like something has to change. Well, they're going to call them the much cuter Beelzebub. Yeah, we have to modernize. We have to move forward. It's a moment of historical post-nut clarity.

Yeah. Oh. See, they realized that if you spent all your time telling people that an all-knowing, all-powerful evil force was roaming the earth with the purposes of committing evil for evil's sake and destroying their way of life, if you kept saying that shit all the time, people are eventually going to want to do something about it. And as they blatantly saw on display in Salem, this sort of rhetoric not only causes intractable community divisions, but also inevitably leads to violence and death.

Because you're fighting a war, right? You're literally fighting a war against the devil so people are going to die in that war because you're fighting against a concept that doesn't exist. I always like post-nut, I like pornography with storylines, so my post-nut clarity is usually like, you know, this episode of Seinfeld was really that good because I jerk off to Seinfeld. He's been saving that. Because I jerk off to Seinfeld.

Actually, the Seinfeld porno parody was pretty good. I do like it. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I like that one. It was pretty good. It was pretty good, yeah. It's all men. No, no, no.

Elaine, dude. Yeah, it is. No, I know. Because it's the whole plot. No, the whole plot, but those men have sex with women. With other women. That show up. Because remember, they're always dating.

They're always dating. George killed a lot. He killed his fucking fiance. That was her fault. No, it wasn't. It was his fault. He got her the poisoned envelopes. The funny thing about the porno parody is that the actor who plays George, they got

an actual George-like man to play him, and they never let him have sex. Yeah, he doesn't fucking all day. Yeah. Yeah, the whole thing is that the plot, very quickly, right here at the end of the fucking series, the plot is that Elaine goes to the porno Nazi instead of the soup Nazi. She finds the best porno shop in all of existence, and that's the plot. Well, it seems like that show is about something, man. Interesting.

All right, there you go. And so ministers in the late 17th century stopped talking about Satan so much because they recognized that going too negative turns any belief system into a death cult. It then eats itself from the inside out while also taking a lot of innocent people with them. I was really interested in passage in the Europe's inner demons to kind of talk about how what this did was that it kind of put witches and all that kind of shit on the back burner for about a hundred years, like up until the early 1800s when that fervor buck back up,

it was considered, during the 1700s, it was basically considered the idea that there was a gigantic cabal of devil worshiping witches, that was so debunked that no one even really talked about it anymore. They're like, well, that's dumb stuff. But then it wasn't until the 1800s when a bunch of literal comedians, guys who made up and tricksters, made up this bunch of fake evidence about witch trials that didn't happen, and it brought the whole thing back up again, which is where we're at again, two hundred years later.

Fantastic. Well, ministers therefore sent the devil back to hell as an entity that waited for sinners to arrive instead of tempting them here on earth. With the devil's tempter gone, Christians then took more personal responsibility for their sins, and Satan largely disappeared as an earthly force in America until the Great Awakening 30 years later. So Satan just basically, he had it easier. Yeah, he got to work from home.

So while it does seem like our current divisions in America will never fucking end, have faith that we're currently in the middle of just another satanic cycle. And if history does indeed rhyme, we may yet have a few decades of peace to look forward to here in the near future. Now that is an actual positive ramification. Was it? I mean, no, I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know. Maybe I don't know what he's saying happens. I hope so too. I mean, history also rhymes, but then like, you know, I don't know, I mean, rhymes with nuclear bomb. I mean, we've dealt with this before, since 1945. Yeah, I mean, it is hopeful that, you know, the bomb doesn't go off anywhere.

But you know, if the Salem witch trials, and as it has happened dozens of times throughout history, if it's any indication, Satan always gets really big and then gets deflated. A lot of people usually have to die in the process. A very large portion of the population, an outsized portion of the population usually has to die first. A lot of people's lives need to get ruined and all that, but then eventually everyone goes, uh-oh. And then they kind of pull back.

Did I just go back from a diner with an egg on my face? Oh my goodness. Yeah. No, it's just, it's all the same. All right. Salem witch trials, everybody. There it is. You mentioned eggs, by the way.

I watched Triple G, Guy's Grocery Games. He doesn't like eggs. And I'll tell you one thing, speaking of tricksters, his son, tricked Guy, he said, Guy thought it was going to be a bacon challenge. It was an extravaganza challenge and Guy doesn't like eggs. So there you go. That's just cruel. It was really cruel.

Again, a lot of people have to die. I'm just glad it's one last thing we could learn. We made it through a month of witches and a fucking 500 episode celebration is now over. That's right. In the next episodes, we're very excited when we come back from our little break. Obviously, there'll be some episodes where you're going to be, we're going to, don't worry, you'll be entertained, but I'm very excited for this fall than what we have ahead of us.

Absolutely. We've got some good old fashioned weirdo topics. We've got blood. I'm very excited for some fucking some weirdo shit. Absolutely. The next episode is going to be all about Virginia Slims. You're going to love it. It's a more feminine cigarette.

I actually like the man who got suck on to get that smoke. I know you do. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for listening. We hope you're doing well out there. It was awesome to see you in Vegas. Check out last comic book on the left issue do on Z2Comics.com. Get that pre-order.

It's fucking straight up. Yeah. Strict some of that fucking caffeine. That's right. We got to fucking honestly. That's what I was fuel with it, man. Yeah. I know you've had an interesting tummy week.

All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for listening. Inhale yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail game. Look at the latest everybody. Hey, man. This is good.

You know what? You wouldn't be queen of hell. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody knows this week. Absolutely. Also, bring back the name Dorcas. Yeah.

Honestly. I'd like to see some Dorcas's out there. Absolutely. Why not? Yeah. I'd like to see more people out there calling themselves rampant hags. Yeah, man. Be one this week.

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