Week 9: The Evil Hand and the First Accusations

February 23 – March 1, 1692

By the time three women were arrested at the end of this week, on March 1st, 1692, nearly everything that would define the Salem witch trials was already in motion. The legal framework existed. The theology was settled. The community had been primed by weeks of unexplained suffering and a physician who ran out of answers. What the examinations of Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba did was confirm what Salem Village had already decided to believe.

This is the week that turned a household crisis into a hunt.

February 23, 1692: Before Salem — Boston’s Forgotten Victims

Massachusetts Bill H.5154, which would exonerate people accused of witchcraft in Boston and elsewhere around the Commonwealth, is now in the House Ways and Means Committee. The momentum is real, and the February 23rd episode makes the historical case for why it matters.

Salem 1692 has long been treated as a beginning. It was not. Massachusetts had been executing people for witchcraft since 1648, a full forty-four years before the first Salem arrest. The fears, the evidence, the methods were already established in Boston before they exploded in Salem. You cannot understand Salem without understanding what came before it.

The week opens not in Salem Village but in London, where Increase and Samuel Mather were entertained by a woman who told them her dead son’s ghost had visited her two weeks after his burial. Increase Mather recorded it carefully. He knew that ghosts could be devils manipulating grieving people. He had the case of Alice Lake in mind, a woman convicted of witchcraft in Boston around 1650, reportedly visited by the devil in the guise of her dead son who tempted her to witchcraft. Nathaniel Mather had written to Increase about that very incident in 1684.

The first person executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts was Margaret Jones, a healer from Charlestown, hanged June 15th, 1648. She was accused after a quarrel with neighbors led to mischief befalling their livestock. Guards watched her using methods popularized by English Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and claimed to see a small child run from her. A neighbor, Alice Stratton, tried to defend her and was subsequently accused herself. Governor John Winthrop recorded in his journal that a great tempest struck Connecticut the very hour Jones was hanged.

Just a few years later, in 1651, Elizabeth Kendall was convicted. She was accused by a nurse from Watertown of bewitching a child to death. Kendall was hanged despite maintaining her innocence. After her execution, it was revealed the child’s own parents did not suspect Kendall at all. They blamed the nurse for leaving the baby in the cold.

A mother of four from Dorchester, Alice Lake, denied being a witch when accused around 1650, but confessed to having concealed a pregnancy in her youth. She believed she deserved death for that earlier sin, even while maintaining her innocence of witchcraft. Anne Hibbens was hanged in 1656, the widow of a wealthy Boston merchant and magistrate, her troubles rooted in a dispute over work done on her home by carpenters. She was executed, never having confessed. Minister John Norton later remarked that she was hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbors.

Then there was Goody Glover in 1688. An Irish Catholic laundress and Gaelic speaker, Goody Glover was accused after an argument with the Goodwin family over stolen laundry. When the Goodwin children suffered convulsions and fits, Glover was arrested. She was hanged November 16th, 1688, just four years before Salem. Cotton Mather wrote the primary account of her case in Memorable Providences and noted that he required an interpreter because she spoke Gaelic. Her execution directly shaped his thinking about witchcraft, thinking he brought with him to Salem.

Three others were convicted but not executed. Hugh Parsons was a brickmaker from Springfield at the center of a witch panic that gripped the entire town. His wife Mary accused him of witchcraft and confessed to killing their child. Mary died in prison. Hugh was convicted, but the General Court overturned the verdict and he moved to Rhode Island. Eunice Cole faced accusations repeatedly from 1656 to 1680, was convicted at least once, whipped and jailed, and appears to have been imprisoned more than once. A New Hampshire exoneration effort for Cole in 2022 passed from committee through the house but failed in the Senate. Elizabeth Morse was convicted in 1680 and allowed to live under house arrest. Increase Mather included her case in An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences.

More than two hundred people were formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts between 1648 and 1693. Massachusetts has already amended a 1957 resolve twice, in 2001 and again in 2022, to fully exonerate Salem’s convicted. This bill will clear the names of those overlooked in the Boston trials.

To help: sign the petition at change.org/witchtrials, contact your Massachusetts representative and senator, and share the episode.

February 24, 1692: Under an Evil Hand

Something had been wrong in the Parris household since January. Betty Parris, nine years old, and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams had begun behaving in ways no one could explain. They barked like dogs, quacked like chickens, made sounds like sheep, hid beneath tables, and alarmed their family by moving toward the hearths and wells in the house. The household turned to prayer, fasting, and medicine. Nothing worked.

Around February 24th, a local physician widely believed to be Dr. William Griggs was called in to examine the girls. Minister John Hale later recorded what he found, or more precisely, what he did not find: at length, one physician gave his opinion that they were under an evil hand. No natural medical explanation. No diagnosis a physician could treat. Just two words that redirected an entire community from medicine to law.

Hale was not alone in documenting what observers saw. His account described physical torments that defied ordinary explanation: these children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again. So as it was impossible for them to do of themselves and beyond the power of any epileptic fits or natural disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move a heart of stone to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them.

Minister Deodat Lawson, who would soon travel to Salem Village to witness the afflictions for himself, later recorded his own observations. The girls’ motions in their fits, he wrote, were preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into and as to the violence also, it is preternatural being much beyond the ordinary force of the same person when they’re in their right mind. He also observed: the eyes of some of them in their fits are exceeding fast closed, and if you ask a question, they can give no answer, and I do believe they cannot hear at that time, yet do they plainly converse with the appearances, as if they did discourse with real persons.

“Evil hand” terminology indicated diabolical influence. The devil had entered Salem in some form, whether afflicting the girls directly or working through a witch acting as his earthly agent. Hale recorded the community’s response with economy: the neighbors quickly took up and concluded they were bewitched. The diagnosis immediately shifted attention from medicine to the question of responsibility. Who was doing this?

February 25, 1692: The Witch Cake

While Reverend Parris and his wife were away attending a lecture, their neighbor and church member Mary Sibley decided to try and help. She went to Tituba and John Indian, the enslaved servants of the Parris household, and instructed them to bake a witch cake. According to historian Marilynne K. Roach, this happened on February 25th.

The cake was not meant to be a treat but a tool of sympathetic counter magic. Tituba and John gathered rye flour and mixed it with the urine of the afflicted girls, baking the concoction in the ashes of the fireplace. In seventeenth-century folk belief, this practice relied on the idea that the witch had a sympathetic connection to her victims, and that her dark magic or effluvia remained inside the girls’ bodily fluids. By taking that urine, binding it into a cake, and feeding it to the family dog, the colonists believed they could manipulate the spell. Theories varied: some believed the dog chewing the cake would physically harm the witch and force her to cry out; others thought it would break the spell; some believed it might transfer the bewitchment to the dog itself.

The folk magic did not cure the girls. Instead, it seemingly opened the floodgates for the Salem witch trials. The girls soon began naming their alleged tormenters. When Parris discovered this folk magic had happened while he was away, he was furious. In the Puritan worldview, utilizing folk magic was a sin, effectively going to the devil for help against the devil. Parris confronted Mary Sibley privately, then publicly reprimanded her before the congregation. His official stance: the devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible.

February 26, 1692: The First Witchcraft Accusation

Sometime between February 26th and the end of the month, a group of neighboring ministers and gentlemen from Salem called upon Parris at the parsonage. The town of Beverly minister John Hale later reported that the visitors observed Betty and Abigail’s afflictions firsthand and concluded that the hand of Satan was involved. They were not prepared, however, to act on that conclusion. Parris should sit still and wait upon the providence of God to see what time might discover.

Hale wrote that the men interviewed Tituba, who confessed to being involved in the witch cake affair. She told them her mistress in her own country was a witch and had taught her some means to be used for the discovery of a witch and for the prevention of being bewitched. She never said which country, so we do not know. Tituba said she herself was not a witch.

On February 26th, the finger pointing began in the Parris household. Betty and Abigail named Tituba as the source of their afflictions. Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr. later testified they had been afflicted by Tituba since the 25th of February, a day before anyone called her a witch out loud. After six weeks of sickness in the Salem Village parsonage, the first witch accusation had been leveled.

February 27, 1692: The First Devil’s Book Accusation

The devil’s book had been part of the theological imagination for two centuries before Ann Putnam Jr. claimed to have seen it. It appears in the Malleus Maleficarum, in King James I’s Demonology, and in the confessions extracted by English witchfinder Matthew Hopkins in 1640s East Anglia. By 1692, the mental image of a literal book carried spectrally from house to house and pressed into unwilling hands was as familiar to Salem’s ministers and magistrates as any passage of scripture. When it appeared in Salem, it arrived fully formed.

On February 27th, Ann Putnam Jr. claimed that the specter of Sarah Good had grievously tortured her and vehemently attempted to get her to sign the Devil’s book. It was the first such accusation in the Salem crisis. In the Puritan worldview, the devil’s book was a collection of diabolical contracts. Individuals pledged their souls to Satan by signing their names or making a mark, often in their own blood or red ink. What struck observers then and historians since is how inconsistent the physical description of this book remained throughout the trials, constantly changing in color, shape, size, and material, depending on who was testifying.

Elizabeth Hubbard also named both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne as her tormentors and claimed she had been chased and frightened by a wolf while going to the Proctor’s home and tavern. Accusers believed the wolf was either Sarah Good shapeshifting into the animal, or a spectral beast that Good had specifically ordered to attack Hubbard.

We know about this wolf incident because when Tituba was questioned on March 1st, Hathorne asked if Tituba had seen Good upon Hubbard, and Tituba replied: I did see her set a wolf upon her to afflict her. When the evidence against Good was later detailed, a note stated that Sarah Good appeared like a wolf to Hubbard going to Proctor’s.

The concept of the devil’s book quickly escalated the witch hunt. During her March 1st examination, Tituba confessed to serving Satan and admitted she had made her mark in the devil’s book. Crucially, she testified that she saw nine names already written inside it. That detail confirmed fears of a widespread satanic conspiracy and triggered a desperate hunt to find the remaining witches who had signed the book.

February 28-29, 1692: Tituba’s Visions and the First Warrants

Heavy rains fell on this Sabbath. Governor Bradstreet, aging and unable to travel in the weather, did not make it to the meeting. In Salem Village, Betty, Abigail, Ann, and Elizabeth continued to suffer. According to historian Marilynne K. Roach, on the 29th in the parsonage, Tituba was reported supposedly being visited by the devil and four witches who instructed her to hurt the children or else. At prayer time, the devil and Sarah Good appeared again, this time with animal familiars in the shape of birds, cats, and a dog. Tituba reported that one bird had a human head that turned into Sarah Osborne and that Good and Osborne purportedly put Tituba on a pole and flew her to Thomas Putnam’s house, where they told her to kill Ann Putnam Jr. with a knife. In her story, Tituba described how when she refused to harm Ann, the witch specters told her they would cut her head off.

Now Joseph Hutchinson, Thomas Preston, Thomas Putnam, and Edward Putnam filed a complaint against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, alleging they had afflicted Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard. Salem magistrates issued warrants. The three women were to be brought to Ingersoll’s Tavern the following morning for their preliminary examinations.

March 1, 1692: The First Salem Witch Examinations

Constable George Locker arrested Sarah Good and Constable Joseph Herrick arrested Sarah Osborne and Tituba. Before questioning began, Hannah Ingersoll, wife of the local tavernkeeper, inspected all three for witches’ marks and found none. William Good then reported that his wife had a possible witches’ mark below her right shoulder.

The crowd that gathered was too large for Ingersoll’s Ordinary. The examinations moved to the Salem Village meetinghouse. Magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin presided. Ezekiel Cheever, son of Boston’s schoolmaster, was appointed to record the proceedings. Joseph Putnam kept his own account. What followed ran less like a legal proceeding than an interrogation, with Hathorne driving every question.

Sarah Good was the first to be examined. Hathorne began with a series of leading questions. What evil spirit have you familiarity with? None, she said. Have you made no contract with the devil? No. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. I scorn it. Later, Hathorne asked why she went away muttering from Mr. Parris’s house. I did not mutter, but I thanked him for what he gave my child, she replied. Under pressure to name who was doing the hurting if not her, Good blamed Sarah Osborne.

Hathorne asked Sarah Good’s husband William why he said his wife was a witch or would be one very quickly. William replied: she is not in this nature, but is her bad carriage to me. And indeed, I may say with tears that she is an enemy to all good.

Osborne was interrogated with a similar line of questions. What evil spirit have you familiarity with? None. Have you made no contract with the devil? No, I never saw the devil in my life. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. Who do you employ then to hurt them? I employ nobody. When Hathorne told Osborne that Sarah Good had said it was she who hurt the children, Osborne replied: I do not know that the devil goes about in my likeness to do any hurt. That answer went to the heart of a debate that would run through the entire Salem crisis — whether the devil could assume the shape of an innocent person without their consent, and what that meant for the reliability of the testimony being heard.

When it was Tituba’s turn, Hathorne pressed her directly. What evil spirit have you familiarity with? None. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. Who is it then? The devil for ought I know. Did you never see the devil? The devil came to me and did bid me serve him.

Who have you seen? Four women, and sometimes they hurt the children. Who were they? Goody Osborne and Sarah Good, and I do not know who the others were. Sarah Good and Osborne would have me hurt the children, but I would not. I did also see a tall man of Boston. When did you see them? Last night at Boston. And did you hurt them? No, there is four women and one man. They hurt the children and then lay all upon me, and they tell me if I will not hurt the children, they will hurt me.

Tituba’s claim that multiple witches were operating in Massachusetts, not only in Salem but also in Boston, was an alarming allegation. She then admitted that she had hurt the children, but only under the threat that she would be hurt even worse if she did not comply.

The questioning continued. A man came to me and said, serve me. What service? Hurt the children, and last night there was an appearance that said, kill the children, and if I would not go on hurting the children they would do worse to me. What is this appearance you see? Sometimes it is like a hog and sometimes like a great dog. This appearance I did see four times. It is the black dog that said serve me, but she told him she was afraid. He said if she did not comply, he would do worse. I’ll serve you no longer, she said. Then he looked like a man and threatened her. This man had a yellow bird that he kept with him, and told her he had more pretty things that he would give her if she would serve him.

Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morning? The man brought her to me and made me pinch her. Why did you go to Thomas Putnam’s last night and hurt his child? They pull and haul me and make me go. How did you go? We ride upon sticks and are there presently. Why did you not tell your master? I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.

Hathorne questioned Tituba about other creatures she had seen. She said she was visited by cats, a red one and a big black one the size of a small dog. Did the cats feed from her witches’ teats? No, never yet. I would not let them, but they had almost thrust me into the fire. What attendants hath Sarah Good? A yellow bird, and she would have given me one. It did suck her between her fingers. Goody Good and Goody Osborne told Tituba they had hurt magistrate Jonathan Corwin’s son and would have let her hurt him too, but she did not.

Of Osborne, Tituba said she had a thing with a head like a woman with legs and wings, and another thing, hairy, going upright like a man with only two legs. Did you not see Sarah Good upon Elizabeth Hubbard last Saturday? I did see her set a wolf upon her to afflict her. What clothes does the man go in? He goes in black clothes, a tall man with white hair, I think. How do the women go? In a white hood and a black hood with a top knot. Do you see who it is that torments these children now? Yes, it is Goody Good. She hurts them in her own shape. Who is it that hurts them now? I am blind. I cannot see.

After Tituba was questioned, she and Sarah Osborne were taken to Salem jail. Sarah Good, to be placed in Ipswich jail, spent the night under guard at the home of constable Joseph Herrick, who was distantly related to her.

That same day, Salem Village residents held a meeting and appointed Captain John Putnam and Jonathan Putnam, his son, to send a petition to the General Court pressing for separation from Salem Town. The meeting also appointed Daniel Andrews to go to Salem Town and decline the town’s offer, which would have exempted villagers from maintaining town roads in exchange for the village maintaining its own poor.

William Allen and John Hughes saw some sort of beast. When they approached, the beast transformed briefly into Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, who quickly dematerialized. Elizabeth Hubbard reported that Good’s specter was afflicting her. With his cane, Samuel Sibley struck at the place where Elizabeth said the specter was, and she claimed that Sibley had nearly killed the supposed witch. Sarah Good escaped from her guards and cut her arm. Failing to get anywhere, she returned herself to custody.

The Weekly Podcast: The Thing About Salem

This week’s full-length Thing About Salem episode, How the Salem Witch Trials Began: The First Week of March 1692, extends the timeline from the final days of February through March 7, 1692. Josh and Sarah place the examinations in the broader context of everything that preceded them, tracing how the witch cake, the first complaints and warrants, and the dramatic proceedings of March 1 set a province on edge. The episode follows events day by day through March 7, including the examination testimony in detail, the devil’s book with nine signatures, and the spectral evidence debate that would shadow the entire crisis.

Progress Tracker

The bill to exonerate Boston’s forgotten witch trial victims is now in the House Ways and Means Committee.

• Sign the petition at change.org/witchtrials
• Contact your Massachusetts representative and senator and urge their support
• Find your legislators at malegislature.gov/Search/FindMyLegislator
• Share the podcast episodes so others can get involved

Sources and Links

• Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub
• Salem Witch Trials Daily YouTube Playlist
• The Thing About Salem
• The Thing About Witch Hunts
• Sign the petition
• Massachusetts Witch Trials
• Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection
• Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
• Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
• Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft
• Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare
• End Witch Hunts