When you think “Massachusetts witch trials,” you think Salem, 1692. But what if we told you that 44 years before Salem, Massachusetts was already executing people for witchcraft in Boston?
Between 1648 and 1693, more than 200 people were formally charged with witchcraft across Massachusetts. In 1957, the state cleared 31 Salem victims. But Boston’s victims have been forgotten.
On November 25, 2025, Bill H.1927 goes before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on the Judiciary to finally exonerate 8 individuals convicted of witchcraft in Boston and recognize everyone else who suffered accusations across Massachusetts.
Co-hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack, descendants of Salem witch trial victims and co-founders of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, explain why Salem’s story is incomplete without Boston—and how YOU can help Massachusetts finish the job.
Before Salem: Boston’s Forgotten Victims
Five women were executed in Boston:
Margaret Jones (1648) – First person executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, 44 years before Salem
Elizabeth Kendall (1651)
Alice Lake (1651)
Ann Hibbins (1656)
Goody Glover (1688) – Executed just 4 years before Salem, her case influenced Cotton Mather
Three others were convicted but not executed:
Hugh Parsons (1651)
Eunice Cole (1656-1680) Eunice was brought to court on witchcraft accusations over and over!
Cotton Mather was deeply involved in Goody Glover’s 1688 trial in Boston. Her execution influenced his thinking about witchcraft—thinking he brought to Salem just four years later.
The same fears, the same accusations, the same injustice—Boston laid the groundwork for what happened in Salem.
When Massachusetts cleared Salem’s victims in 1957, they left Boston’s victims behind.
What Bill H.1927 Does:
✅ Exonerates the 8 individuals convicted of witchcraft in Boston between 1647-1688
✅ Recognizes all others who suffered accusations across Massachusetts
✅ Completes the work Massachusetts started in 1957 when they cleared Salem’s victims
✅ Acknowledges that Salem wasn’t the beginning—Boston was
✅ Costs nothing – zero fiscal impact
How You Can Help RIGHT NOW:
1. Sign the Petition: Change.org/witchtrials – Over 14,000 signatures and growing
2. Contact Massachusetts Representatives: Email or call members of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary before November 25th
3. Submit Written Testimony: Even if you can’t attend in person, your voice matters
4. Share This Episode: Help spread the word before the November 25th hearing
Why Salem’s Story Is Incomplete Without Boston:
For decades, we’ve told the story of Salem 1692 as if it appeared out of nowhere. But Massachusetts had been executing people for witchcraft since 1648.
The fears, the evidence, the methods—all of it was already established in Boston before it exploded in Salem.
You can’t understand Salem without understanding Boston.
Connecticut Showed It Could Be Done:
Josh and Sarah co-founded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and launched their podcast in 2022 to support the legislative effort. With help from listeners like you, Connecticut passed House Joint Resolution 34 in May 2023 with overwhelming bipartisan support, absolving 11 individuals and recognizing all others who suffered accusations.
You were part of Connecticut’s success from the beginning. Now Massachusetts needs you to help finish what they started in 1957.
Key Facts:
Boston’s first execution was in 1648—44 years before Salem
Goody Glover’s 1688 execution influenced Cotton Mather just 4 years before Salem
More than 200 people were formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts (1648-1693)
Massachusetts cleared 31 Salem victims in 1957, but left Boston’s victims behind
Massachusetts has already amended the 1957 Resolve twice (2001 and 2022)
Bill H.1927 simply continues this established pattern with zero fiscal impact
The November 25th Hearing:
When: November 25, 2025 Where: Massachusetts State House, Joint Committee on the Judiciary What: Public testimony on Bill H.1927
Even if you can’t attend, you can submit written testimony or contact committee members.
Why This Matters Today:
When we clear the names of historical victims, we acknowledge that witch hunting is not a relic of the past—it continues in the same form globally. The same patterns of accusation, fear, and injustice that started in Boston in 1648 and exploded in Salem in 1692 continue in witch hunts around the world today.
The Thing About Salem Co-hosted by Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack Descendants of Salem witch trial victims Co-founders of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project A project of End Witch Hunts nonprofit organization
Massachusetts’ witch hunt history didn’t begin in Salem—and justice isn’t finished yet.
The Thing About Salem explores the 1692-1693 Salem witch trials in depth, examining the people, the trials, and the lasting impact on Massachusetts. But Salem wasn’t the beginning of witch hunting in the Commonwealth. Between 1647 and 1688, five women were executed for alleged witchcraft in Boston: Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Kendall, Alice Lake, Ann Hibbins, and Goody Glover.
These women were executed decades before the Salem panic began. Yet while Salem’s victims have been exonerated, these five Boston women remain the only people executed for witchcraft in New England who have never been cleared.
Massachusetts has an opportunity to honor all its witch trial victims. Bill H.1927 will finally bring them justice.
The Scale of Massachusetts Witch Trials
Between 1638 and 1693, more than 200 individuals were formally charged with witchcraft by Massachusetts courts. During this dark chapter:
At least 250 individuals were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
More than 200 were complained of, implicated in court, questioned, arrested, and/or imprisoned
38 people were convicted of witchcraft (30 in Salem, 8 in Boston)
25 people died: 19 hanged in Salem, 5 hanged in Boston, and Giles Corey pressed to death in Salem
At least six additional people died in jail while awaiting trial or execution
The witch trials spanned over five decades across Massachusetts, from the earliest accusations through the Salem panic. Most attention has focused on Salem, but the Commonwealth’s witch hunting began much earlier in Boston.
Massachusetts State House
The Boston Eight: Those Convicted in the Capital
Bill H.1927 seeks to exonerate 8 individuals convicted of witchcraft in Boston between 1647 and 1688:
The Five Executed:
Margaret Jones (executed 1648) was a woman whose medicines were deemed too effective, her skill too powerful. When neighbors’ misfortunes occurred, she became the scapegoat. She maintained her innocence to the very end. Margaret was the first person executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts.
Elizabeth Kendall (executed between 1647 and 1651) was falsely accused by a nurse who blamed her for a child’s death, a child who had actually died from the nurse’s own negligence. Even after the nurse’s fraudulent testimony was revealed, Elizabeth was never exonerated.
Alice Lake (executed c. 1650) was a mother of four who had been judged harshly for choices she made as a young woman. That judgment haunted her and was weaponized against her when witchcraft accusations arose.
Ann Hibbins (executed 1656) was called “quarrelsome” for speaking her mind and refusing to accept unfair treatment. Her husband had been an Assistant in the Massachusetts General Court, but even her connections couldn’t save her from being targeted as a widow with property.A character based on Ann Hibbins later appeared in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Goody Glover (executed 1688) was an Irish Catholic widow whose first language was Gaelic. An outsider within her community, she became an easy target when children exhibited strange behaviors. Her execution came just four years before the Salem panic began. A plaque dedicated to her memory describes her as “the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts” and stands on a Catholic church in Boston’s North End.
The Three Convicted But Not Executed:
Hugh Parsons (convicted 1652) of Springfield was tried in Boston. He was initially convicted but the General Court overturned his conviction and he was released from jail in June 1652. He moved to Rhode Island with his daughter Hannah.
Eunice Cole (convicted 1656 and 1673) of Hampton was convicted and imprisoned, though records are incomplete. She was whipped and spent years in and out of jail over witch hunt accusations spanning from 1656 to 1680. She may have been spared execution for reasons unknown. Hampton, New Hampshire formally recognized her in 1938, but Massachusetts never officially cleared her name.
Elizabeth Morse (convicted 1680) of Newbury was convicted and sentenced to death, but her sentence was reduced and she was eventually released. Her case involved accusations from her grandson and neighbors who claimed spectral evidence and mysterious occurrences.
These eight individuals—five executed, three imprisoned—all suffered grave injustices. None have been officially exonerated by Massachusetts. None have received an acknowledgment.
Bill H.1927: Completing Massachusetts’ Work
Massachusetts has already taken steps to address its witch trial legacy. The Salem witch trial victims have been exonerated through legislation passed in 1703, 1711, 1957, 2001, and most recently in 2022, when Elizabeth Johnson Jr. became the last Salem victim to be cleared.
But Massachusetts has never issued an official acknowledgment of any non-Salem witch trial victims, and the eight Boston-area victims have never been exonerated at all.
Bill H.1927, proposed by Rep. Steven Owens of Cambridge and Watertown, will:
Clear the names of the 8 individuals convicted of witchcraft in Boston
Recognize all others who suffered witchcraft accusations in Massachusetts
Finally address the incomplete justice that has left these victims behind for nearly 400 years
The Hearing: November 25, 2025
The Joint Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing on Bill H.1927 on November 25, 2025. This is a critical opportunity for Massachusetts residents, descendants, historians, and anyone who cares about the Commonwealth’s history to voice their support.
Massachusetts residents’ voices carry particular weight. Written testimony can be submitted to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. Consider including:
These people were innocent
Why Massachusetts should exonerate all its witch trial victims
How this legislation honors the Commonwealth’s commitment to justice
Why an official acknowledgment matters for descendants and for Massachusetts’ historical record
The connection between understanding past injustices and preventing modern persecution
3. Contact Your Massachusetts Legislators
Find your state representative and senator. Tell them you support H.1927. Massachusetts exonerated the Salem victims but left the Boston-area victims behind. Ask your legislators to honor all the witch trial victims and ensure every person wrongly convicted receives justice and an official acknowledgment.
4. Spread the Word
Share this post and information about H.1927. Use hashtags like #H1927, #WitchTrialJustice, #MassachusettsHistory, #maswitchhuntjusticeproject.
Listen to The Thing About Salem: We explore Salem witch trial history in depth
Listen to The Thing About Witch Hunts: Our companion podcast connects Massachusetts history to witch hunting worldwide
Why This Matters for Massachusetts
The patterns that led to executions in colonial Massachusetts—scapegoating outsiders, targeting vulnerable women, using fear to justify injustice, denying basic rights—didn’t disappear after 1693. Understanding this history helps us recognize similar patterns today, both in Massachusetts and around the world where witch hunts continue.
By formally exonerating these victims and acknowledging what was done to them, Massachusetts demonstrates that confronting injustice honestly matters. This legislation acknowledges that:
These people did not have a diabolical pact with the devil. They were innocent people falsely accused.
It was human agency that executed alleged witches, not a community deluded by the devil. People made these choices and people must take responsibility for the injustice.
Previous efforts are incomplete. Massachusetts has exonerated those convicted during the 1692 and 1693 Salem witch trials, but has never issued an official acknowledgement of any Massachusetts witch trial victims outside of the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Justice delayed is justice denied. These eight individuals have waited nearly 400 years. Massachusetts can honor them now.
Massachusetts’ Opportunity
When Connecticut passed its exoneration resolution in 2023, it set an example for how a state can fully address its witch trial legacy—with both exoneration and apology. Massachusetts can follow this model and complete the work it began decades ago.
The Commonwealth has a chance to demonstrate that it values truth, acknowledges injustice, and honors all who suffered under its colonial courts.
Eight people convicted of witchcraft in Boston have waited nearly four centuries. Five were hanged. Three endured imprisonment and lifelong stigma.
Will Massachusetts finally bring them justice?
The Thing About SalemExploring the Salem witch trials in depthA companion podcast to The Thing About Witch HuntsCo-hosted by Josh Hutchinson and Sarah JackA project of End Witch Hunts
Does this work? I’ve added the overall Massachusetts statistics and details about Hugh Parsons, Eunice Cole, and Elizabeth Morse—the three convicted but not executed.
In this episode of The Thing About Salem, co-hosts Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson examine one of the most invasive and degrading practices used during the Salem Witch Trials: the search for witch’s marks and devil’s teats. Discover how this invented “evidence” was used to convict innocent people—including the hosts’ ancestors.
What You’ll Learn:
The Origins of Witch Mark Theory
How English legal writers like Michael Dalton (1618) and William Perkins created detailed instructions for finding “devil’s marks”
Why Richard Bernard claimed these marks appeared in “secretest parts” requiring invasive searches
The shocking truth: none of this evidence appears in the Bible
Familiar Spirits in Salem
Cotton Mather’s definition of familiar spirits as “devils in bodily shapes”
Strange creatures described in testimony: hairless cats with human ears, rooster-monkey hybrids, and hairy upright beings
How these supposed demons were believed to feed from witch’s teats
The Salem Examinations
Documented searches of accused witches including Rebecca Nurse, Bridget Bishop, and Elizabeth Procter
George Jacobs Sr.’s brutal examination with pins driven through his flesh
Four-year-old Dorothy Good’s traumatic examination and the “flea bite” used as evidence
Why some marks disappeared between examinations—and what that tells us
Dehumanizing Practices
The invasive nature of stripping and examining prisoners in their “most intimate areas”
How postpartum scarring from childbirth was twisted into evidence of witchcraft
Why the Court of Oyer and Terminer convicted all 27 people tried in 1692—whether marks were found or not
Modern Connections As Robert Calef pointed out in More Wonders of the Invisible World, witch marks weren’t biblical—they were man-made tests designed to find guilt. This pattern continues in modern witch hunts worldwide, where accusers still decide what constitutes “evidence” against innocent victims.
Perfect for listeners interested in:
Salem Witch Trials history
Colonial American history
Wrongful convictions and false evidence
Women’s history and bodily autonomy
Modern witch hunts and human rights
Historical witchcraft accusations
Legal history and justice reform
Featured Historical Sources:
William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft
Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1618)
Richard Bernard, The Certainty of the World of Spirits
Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World
Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World
Deodat Lawson, A Brief and True Narrative
Original Salem Witch Trial examination records
About the Hosts: Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson are descendants of Salem witch trial victims and co-founders of End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit addressing modern witch hunts globally. Together, they co-host The Thing About Salem and The Thing About Witch Hunts (265+ episodes).
Support Our Work: Learn more about modern witch hunts and how to help at EndWitchHunts.org
How does a town infamous for executing twenty people for alleged diabolical witchcraft rebrand itself as “Witch City”? Salem spent centuries trying to forget 1692, then something changed. Join descendants Sarah and Josh as they uncover the surprising story of how grief, guilt, and capitalism collided to transform Salem into America’s Halloween capital. From the first witch-themed business to the controversy over memorializing victims, this is the untold story of who chose to remember, who profited, and what got lost along the way.
What You’ll Discover:
Why did Salem stay silent about the trials for over 150 years, and what finally broke that silence? Who made the first move to capitalize on witch trial history (the answer might surprise you)? When the city had a chance to build a memorial in 1892, why did descendants of the accusers fight so hard against it? And how did a fish company, a souvenir spoon, and a Knights Templar march help pave the “yellow brick road” to Witch City?
Keywords:
Salem witch trials | Witch City | Salem Massachusetts | Halloween tourism | dark tourism | historical memory | commercialization of tragedy | Salem history | 1692 witch hunt | American history | New England | modern witchcraft | Pagan community | tourism | memorialization | historical injustice | colonial America | Arthur Miller | The Crucible | Haunted Happenings
About The Thing About Salem:
Sarah and Josh are descendants of Salem witch trial victims investigating how their ancestors’ tragedy became a tourism empire, and what that transformation reveals about memory, commerce, and identity.
What happens when an entire city becomes Halloween for a month?
Salem’s Haunted Happenings started with the Salem Witch Museum as one weekend in 1982. Now it’s a month-long community event of costumes, crowds, street performers, and pure October magic.
This episode captures the spirit of it all—the performers who show up year after year, the locals that go ALL OUT, the Grand Parade that kicks it off, and the chaotic, joyful energy that makes October in Salem unlike anywhere else.
What to expect:
How a single weekend became a month-long phenomenon
The vibe, the crowds, the performers
Costumes that stop you in your tracks
Why “don’t drive in Salem in October” is essential advice
The magic (and reality) behind the Halloween capital of the world
Whether you’re planning your first visit or you’ve been coming back every October, this one’s about what makes Haunted Happenings unforgettable.
🎃 Ready for Salem’s October?
Keywords: Haunted Happenings, October Salem, Salem Massachusetts Halloween, Salem October events, Haunted Happenings Grand Parade, Salem Halloween capital, The Thing About Salem podcast
Discover the shocking truth about ghosts in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. This isn’t your typical ghost story. These supernatural encounters were used as courtroom evidence that sent innocent people to the gallows. Join hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack as they explore the different types of apparitions that appeared in Salem testimony, from murdered wives seeking vengeance to protective angels revealing hidden crimes.
Some Featured Historical Cases
– George Burroughs. Former minister accused by ghostly wives appearing in winding sheets
– Ann Putnam Jr.’s Testimony: Multiple ghost sightings including murdered wives, children, and victims
– Martha Carrier’s Examination. Thirteen ghosts appearing as evidence against her
– Spectral Evidence. How ghost testimony became critical courtroom evidence leading to convictions
The Role of Ghosts as Legal Evidence
Learn how supernatural testimony functioned in 1692 trials.
Historical Figures Mentioned
George Burroughs, Ann Putnam Jr., Bridget Bishop, John Willard, Martha Carrier, Rebecca Nurse, Mary Bradbury, Giles Corey, Mary Easty, Susannah Sheldon, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard
The Salem Irony
The ultimate twist: In 1692, innocent people were executed for supposedly appearing as ghosts. Today, tourists pay for ghost tours hoping to encounter those same spirits. Salem, Massachusetts—where historical tragedy became supernatural entertainment.
Episode Hosts
– Josh Hutchinson- Co-host, The Thing About Salem
– Sarah Jack – Co-host, The Thing About Salem
Keywords
Salem Witch Trials, ghost evidence, spectral evidence, 1692 Salem, Ann Putnam Jr., George Burroughs, Salem ghosts, witchcraft trials, historical ghosts, Salem Massachusetts, witch trial testimony, supernatural evidence, colonial America, Salem history, ghost tours Salem
What connects a 2014 internet horror tragedy to the fear of 1692 Salem? In this captivating 15-minute clip from our full conversation, Josh and Sarah—along with Ain’t it Scary? with Sean and Carrie podcast —draw haunting parallels between the young girls involved in the Slender Man stabbing case and the afflicted girls of the Salem witch trials.
How do fear, belief, and community pressure transform young people into actors in real-world tragedies? From oppressed accusers in colonial Massachusetts to pre-teens acting on digital folklore. A thought-provoking exploration of monsters, morality, and the girls who became part of history’s shocking moments.
Episode Highlights
🔮 Girls Under Pressure – Comparing the afflicted girls of Salem to the Slender Man crime perpetrators ⚖️ Belief Gone Wrong – When fear of something unseen leads to tragedy 🎃 Monster or Victim? – Society’s struggle to categorize young people who do terrible things 👻 The Power of Narrative – How stories—whether Puritan theology or internet creepypasta—drive real-world actions 🕯️ Panic Then and Now – What the Salem trials teach us about modern viral panic
About Our Returning Guests
Sean & Carrie host Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie, where a skeptic and a believer explore the unknown, unsolved, unbelievable, and just plain weird. With their passion for history and uncovering truth, they bring complementary perspectives to every mystery they tackle.
Keywords
Slender Man, Salem witch trials, afflicted girls, creepypasta, true crime, digital folklore, witch hunts, moral panic, paranormal podcast, horror podcast, Ain’t it Scary, historical parallels, Salem Massachusetts, youth violence, folklore
Listen & Subscribe
Don’t wander off the path—subscribe to The Thing About Salem and join us every episode as we explore the trials, mysteries, and untold stories of Salem and beyond.
Also check out: Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie wherever you listen to podcasts!
In this episode of ‘The Thing About Salem,’ hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack explore the various ways the Salem Witch Trials have been depicted in films and TV shows over the decades. They discuss the historical and fictional elements in productions like ‘The Crucible,’ ‘Maid of Salem,’ the ‘Bewitched’ TV series, and ‘Hocus Pocus,’ highlighting how these portrayals have shaped and transformed Salem’s image in popular culture. The episode also covers works such as ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ and ‘Three Sovereigns for Sarah,’ emphasizing the ongoing cultural fascination with this dark chapter in American history.
00:00 Introduction to Salem in Pop Culture
01:04 Maid of Salem and The Crucible
02:37 Salem Witch Trials miniseries and Hocus Pocus
05:01 Bewitched and Sabrina the Teenage Witch
10:07 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Three Sovereigns for Sarah
13:49 Conclusion: The Legacy of Salem in Pop Culture
It’s a relevant question for The Thing About Salem podcast: Did Cotton Mather influence Washington Irving? It’s so fun considering this inquiry due to The Salem Witch Trials’ broad and lasting influence on the world. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was foundational creative horror storytelling. So, what inspired Irving?
The Origins of a Classic
Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1819, remains one of America’s most enduring ghost stories. But the tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman didn’t emerge from thin air; it is rooted in the very same colonial New England fear of the unexplainable that enveloped Cotton Mather a little over a century earlier.
Irving penned his famous short story as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent setting it in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, New York, around 1790. The story follows superstitious schoolmaster Ichabod Crane’s terrifying encounter with the legendary Headless Horseman while pursuing the hand of the lovely Katrina Van Tassel.
Cotton Mather is in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Irving directly referenced Mather in the story itself. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane is described as an avid reader of Mather and mentions a book called History of New England Witchcraft. This is a fictional title that serves as a composite reference to Mather’s multitude of supernatural writings. Ichabodspends his afternoons devouring tales of the supernatural before traveling through the gathering darkness, his imagination inflamed by accounts of specters and apparitions.
This is no coincidence. Mather’s writings, particularly The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), discuss supernatural occurrences, witchcraft, and spectral encounters throughout colonial New England. By placing Mather’s doctrine directly in Ichabod’s hands, Irving makes the explicit connection between colonial New England’s supernatural anxieties and his protagonist’s vulnerability to superstition. The very book that fills Ichabod’s mind with terrors becomes the lens through which he interprets his fateful encounter with the Horseman. What lens interprets your encounters with the unexplained?
The Horseman from Hell in American Pop Culture
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has delighted American popular culture for over two centuries. From a silent film in 1922 to Disney’s classic 1949 animated adaptation to Tim Burton’s 1999 film Sleepy Hollow starring Johnny Depp, the Headless Horseman continues to gallop through our collective imagination. Burton’s version notably expands the supernatural elements by adding a witch character into the plot, an evil stepmother who controls the Horseman and ultimately meets her doom as he drags her to hell, bringing the story full circle to its witchcraft roots.
Here’s something you might not expect: this cinematic image taps into something far more ancient than Irving’s tale. As explored in The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast episode “Speak of the Devil,” with Devil history expert Dr. Richard Raisewell, the motif of demons on horseback dragging the damned to hell stretches back to medieval Europe. The 12th-century tale of the Witch of Berkeley, recorded by William of Malmesbury, tells of a devil who burst into a church, shattered the chains binding a witch’s coffin, and placed her on a monstrous, spike-covered horse that carried her away to torment—her screams echoing for miles.
The Horseman Rides On
The image of the demonic horse and its doomed rider has traveled through the centuries from medieval legend, through Mather’s doctrine, Irving’s tale, and finally Burton’s film. The tale has inspired countless other retellings, including the TV series Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017), which reimagined Ichabod Crane as a time-displaced Revolutionary War soldier.
Every headless horseman costume, every dark autumn night spent telling ghost stories, is an acknowledgment to Irving’s creation and a nod to Cotton’s legacy of devil fear. The connecting thread endures from Mather’s accounts to Irving’s tale, and ultimately to the screens and stages where the Headless Horseman’s story developed. Just as Ichabod felt pursued that fateful night…is that thunder you hear, or hoofbeats?
The Thing About Salem concludes our exclusive three-part series with Ben Wickey as we explore the modern implications of his debut graphic novel More Weight: A Salem Story in Part 3. With the book released September 23, we examine why this Salem Witch Trials story resonates powerfully with contemporary readers.
Wickey discusses Salem’s modern identity and how his work addresses the town’s complex relationship with its tragic past. We explore the visual challenges of depicting historical horror, his artistic influences including Alan Moore’s impact on his creativity, and why he chose a mature rating for responsible storytelling about historical brutality.
What aspects of the 1692 witch trials feel most relevant today? We discuss modern witch hunts, the importance of authentic historical narratives in pop culture, and how Wickey’s ancestral connection influenced his approach to Salem’s psychological darkness.
This final installment reveals why critics are calling this an “appalling masterpiece” and how More Weight will reshape how we understand Salem’s legacy for future generations.
Keywords: Ben Wickey, Salem modern relevance, More Weight final review, contemporary witch hunts, Alan Moore influence, Salem today historical horror
The Thing About Salem continues our conversation with Ben Wickey in Part 2 of our three-part series about his groundbreaking graphic novel More Weight: A Salem Story, releasing next week. This installment focuses on the heart of Wickey’s narrative: the psychological transformation of Giles Corey.
We explore Corey’s devastating journey from testifying against his wife Martha to his defiant final moments uttering “more weight” as stones crushed him to death. Wickey reveals his meticulous research using historical documents and his innovative dual-timeline narrative featuring Nathaniel Hawthorne interludes that bridge past and present.
As a Mary Easty descendant, Wickey discusses the emotional weight of bringing his ancestor’s story and Salem’s broader tragedy to authentic life. We examine how he balanced historical brutality with responsible storytelling, his striking use of color and its absence, and why maintaining historical accuracy was crucial to honoring the victims’ memory.
This is essential listening for anyone interested in Salem Witch Trials history and how graphic novels can illuminate our darkest chapters.
With his highly anticipated debut graphic novel “More Weight: A Salem Story” releasing, Massachusetts-born author Ben Wickey joins us for an exclusive pre-launch interview about this Alan Moore-praised “appalling masterpiece.” The Edward Gorey Award-winning artist’s first solo work tells the harrowing tale of Giles Corey, the only person pressed to death under stones during the infamous 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
What makes this upcoming graphic novel release extraordinary? Beyond Wickey’s stunning and unmatched visual storytelling that brings historical horror to visceral life, he is a descendant of Salem Witch Trial victim Mary Easty, bringing deeply personal perspective to this decade-long project that Publishers Weekly compared to “From Hell.”
We explore the pre-release excitement, Wickey’s meticulous research using historical documents, and his innovative dual-timeline narrative featuring Nathaniel Hawthorne interludes. Using the graphic novel format, Wickey cuts through pop culture mythology to restore the genuine horror and humanity of Salem’s history.
Discover how Corey transformed from testifying against his wife Martha to defiantly uttering his final words “more weight,” and why this Salem witch hunt story will captivate readers everywhere.
Not all witch trials were the Salem Witch Trials. To truly understand the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, we must examine the broader context of witch hunting that swept through colonial America. This episode explores the extensive history of witch trials in British North America that preceded and influenced the Salem events, revealing how witch hunts affected dozens of communities across New England and beyond.
Key Topics Covered
The Context Behind Salem
Why Salem didn’t happen in a bubble
European influence on colonial witch trials
How English writings shaped Salem court decisions
The role of European witchcraft tales in accuser testimonies
Pre-Salem Witch Trials in New England (1647-1691)
Connecticut Witch Trials
Alice Young of Windsor – First execution, May 26, 1647
How the Goodwin children became the model for Salem’s afflicted
Witch Trials Beyond New England
Virginia
First accusation: Joan Wright (1626)
William Harding conviction (1656)
Grace Sherwood, “Witch of Pungo” – water ordeal trial (1706)
Maryland
Multiple accusations investigated
Rebecca Fowler execution (1685)
John Cowman conviction
Maine, New Hampshire & Vermont
Goody Cole trials across jurisdictions
Massachusetts Bay control influence
Salem’s Wider Impact
The 1692-1693 Salem Witch Trials affected numerous communities:
Andover
Boston
Maine and New Hampshire territories
Connecticut spinoff: Katharine Branch case (1692)
Episode Highlights
First witch trial execution in colonial America: Alice Young, 1647
Total colonial witch trial scope: Over 65 indictments across multiple colonies
Geographic spread: From Connecticut to Maine, Virginia to Maryland
Timeline: 45+ years of witch trials before Salem
Legal precedents: How earlier trials shaped Salem procedures
Resources & Further Learning
Check out the hosts’ companion podcast: The Thing About Witch Hunts for deeper dives into European witch trial history and modern witchcraft persecution worldwide.
SEO Keywords
Salem Witch Trials, colonial witch trials, New England witch hunts, Alice Young witch trial, Connecticut witch trials, Massachusetts witch trials, Goody Glover, Cotton Mather, Grace Sherwood, Hartford Witch Panic, colonial America witchcraft, pre-Salem witch trials, New England history, colonial justice system
The Thing About Salem podcast explores the real history behind one of America’s most infamous events. New episodes dive deep into the social, legal, and cultural factors that led to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693.
What caused the Salem Witch Trials? It wasn’t moldy bread, mass hysteria, or girls dabbling in magic. Join hosts Josh and Sarah (whose ancestors lived through these events) as they uncover the real forces that created one of America’s darkest chapters.
What You’ll Discover
The Real Causes: Multiple explosive factors that turned Salem into a powder keg
Political Chaos: How governmental instability set the stage for tragedy
Community Tensions: The deadly mix of wealth gaps, frontier trauma, and religious conflict
The Spark: What actually triggered the first accusations in January 1692
Modern Relevance: Why these lessons matter for recognizing witch hunts today
Key Topics Explored
✓ Belief systems that made witchcraft accusations believable ✓ Political upheaval following the revocation of Massachusetts’ Royal Charter ✓ Controversial judicial decisions like allowing “spectral evidence” ✓ Economic anxieties from King William’s War and previous conflicts ✓ European witchcraft beliefs that influenced New England thinking ✓ The snowball effect that made accusations spiral out of control
Why This Episode Matters
Learn the complex, interconnected causes behind one of history’s most misunderstood events. Discover how fear-mongering, scapegoating, and abandoning rational thinking can lead entire communities astray—and why these patterns still matter today.
Perfect for history buffs, true crime fans, and anyone who wants to separate Salem facts from fiction in just 15 minutes.
What happens when your only defense against a death sentence is a handwritten letter? In 1692 Salem, petitions became lifelines for the accused, their families, and entire communities caught in the witch trial hysteria.
In this episode, we explore:
Mary Easty’s remarkable final petition that prioritized saving others over herself
The creative legal strategies colonists used to challenge “spectral evidence”
How torture was used to extract confessions (and documented in writing)
The economic reality of having family members imprisoned for witchcraft
Community petitions that reveal the social chaos engulfing entire towns
Why some people recanted their confessions—and what that tells us about coercion
From character witness statements to desperate pleas from prison, these historical documents reveal the human cost of mass hysteria and the courage it took to speak truth to power with nothing but ink and parchment.
Plus: The meaningful modern connection—how middle schoolers in 2022 successfully petitioned to clear a victim’s name, and why there’s still a bill before Massachusetts legislature today.
Perfect for history buffs, true crime fans, and anyone fascinated by how ordinary people navigate extraordinary circumstances.
Keywords: Salem witch trials, historical petitions, spectral evidence, Mary Easty, colonial justice system, Massachusetts history
The thing about witch hunts is what happens after can be just as revealing as the hunt itself. After 20 executions and over 150 arrests, Salem had a serious PR problem on its hands. How do you explain away one of colonial America’s most notorious legal disasters? Simple: you control who gets to tell the story.
But here’s the thing about cover-ups—they rarely go according to plan. Join us as we dive into Salem’s messy aftermath, where the real question wasn’t who practiced witchcraft, but who was willing to admit they’d been wrong. Because the thing about truth is it has a funny way of surfacing, even when powerful people are trying their hardest to bury it.
What if history’s most infamous witch hunt could have been stopped with just a few different decisions? We’re examining the pivotal moments between January 1692 and May 1693 when someone—anyone—could have pumped the brakes on Salem’s runaway train of accusations.
From the shocking arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good to Martha Carrier’s unfortunate promotion to “Queen of Hell,” we’ll explore how escalating choices transformed a local crisis into colonial America’s most notorious legal disaster. We’ll meet the key players who either fanned the flames or tried to douse them—including Cotton Mather’s mixed messages and Governor Phips’ late-in-the-game reality check.
Join us as we dissect the moments when cooler heads could have prevailed and discover how 45 residents of unlucky Andover got swept up in accusations that would make even the devil blush. Sometimes it takes a village—or several villages—to create a catastrophe.
Josh and Sarah tell the TL;DR version of the story of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, where 156 people faced formal accusations and over 1,000 became entangled in a legal system that had lost its moral compass. They examine what transformed a small Massachusetts community into the epicenter of mass persecution, from the unprecedented scale of the proceedings to the types of people targeted. This wasn’t just colonial paranoia—it was a perfect storm of social tensions, legal failures, and human frailty that contemporaries recognized as extraordinary even by their own standards. The hosts discuss why Salem continues to captivate us centuries later, serving as both historical cautionary tale and enduring reminder of how quickly justice can derail when fear takes the wheel.
Sarah Good’s final words to the minister who demanded her confession—”God will give you blood to drink”—would echo through Salem long after her death. In a community where everyday foods like butter, bread, and pudding became evidence of witchcraft, the line between nourishment and damnation blurred beyond recognition. Explore how Salem’s fears transformed the most basic human need into suspicions of a pact with the devil, from spoiled butter that doomed a sea voyage to cheese found in an accused witch’s pocket.
Is Superman your Salem Witch Trials cousin? Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a descendant of a Salem Witch Trials victim.
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Josh Hutchinson: Mary Bradbury was supposed to die on Salem’s gallows in 1692, but she pulled off the greatest vanishing act in witch trial history. Centuries later, her descendant Christopher Reeve would make another kind of magic, convincing the world that superheroes are real. Welcome to The Thing About Salem, where we discover that the real superpowers were in the family tree all along. I’m Josh Hutchinson, and I’m descended from several people involved in the Salem Witch trials, including victim Mary Esty, accused witch Mary Osgood, minister Francis Dane, and accuser-turned-defender Joseph Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I am Sarah Jack. I’m also a descendant. Mary Estyand Rebecca Nurse are my ninth great grandmothers, and they were sisters who were both executed in 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and guess what? Sarah and I are distant cousins because of [00:01:00] Mary Esty.
Sarah Jack: And our friend Mary Bingham is also a Mary Esty descendant.
Josh Hutchinson: And we had no idea about that when we met each other and started this show.
I find that incredible that the three of us wanting to speak for our ancestors came together to work on exonerations, not even realizing that we were gonna have the connections. And you may have connections, as well. Dr. Emerson Baker says there are probably a hundred million descendants of the people accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch trials, let alone everybody else who was involved in the Witch trials in other roles. We are just two of these people. You may be, as well. If you are, let us know.
Sarah Jack: I think that is really powerful to realize when you consider how recent those witch trials really were, 1692, less than 400 years ago, and here we are [00:02:00] at over a hundred million descendants.
And there are other Witch trials, of course. Salem’s not the only one, and you might be descended from someone involved in a witch trial in Connecticut or Europe or some other place. And we’re interested in knowing about those connections, as well, if you wanna share that on our Patreon.
There are descendants that come from other witch trials in Boston. I had a 10th great grandmother, Mary Hale, who stood trial in Boston, and then her daughter and granddaughter were then tried later in Hartford, Connecticut. So a lot of us are descendants of women who were accused of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson:
Sarah Jack: One group of descendants that has come together for centuries, in fact, are descendants of Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty. Their parents, William and [00:03:00] Joanna, came over from Great Yarmouth, England and had several children, and there is a Towne Family Association, and there are thousands of descendants, and we have a Facebook group, there are family reunions, and there’s a lot of those cousins who tie back to several of the siblings. I myself go back to both Mary and Rebecca. It’s so interesting to, look at all those family lines in the Towne Family Association. Back in the nineties when I was growing up, it was still your family who gave you an idea of your family history. Many of us had family historians, and I had one of those, her name was Darlyn, and she did research by writing cousins and going to archives and visiting [00:04:00] cemeteries. And I had a high school assignment to build out a family tree, and so she was the first one I went to on that side of my family, and she gave me one of these handy little, typed up pedigree charts, and at the very end it says, Rebecca hanged in 1692. That didn’t really mean much to me back in the nineties,but that’s the first time that I knew Rebecca Nurse’s name. I hadn’t read The Crucible. I wasn’t familiar with that story. It came from my own family history, just on a loose piece of paper of typed genealogy, and that was the beginning of this story.
Josh Hutchinson: One day, I was at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, when I was 16 years old, with my family. We had gone to my grandfather’s hometown of Danvers, Massachusetts, which used to be Salem Village. And so we were wandering around [00:05:00] the property of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, and in the cemetery area, there’s a marker to Rebecca, but there’s also a little marker, a stone that lists the names of the people who defended Rebecca in a petition that was submitted to the court.
And I was looking at this marker, and I saw my name on it. It said Josh Hutchinson. I was very sure it said Josh Hutchinson. Until I looked at the picture closely that I had taken of it, and I saw a little apostrophe, and it said JOS apostrophe H Hutchinson. And so I did some digging in family history materials and found out that there was a Joseph Hutchinson, who was my 10th great-grandfather, and he was involved in the Salem Witch Trials, and that was his name on that marker.
So that meant that he defended Rebecca [00:06:00] Nurse, who, as it turns out, was his neighbor. They were cattycorner to each other, their properties, so they would’ve been close. And that’s probably why he came to her defense, because he probably knew her pretty well.
There’s a funny story about Joseph Hutchinson. He had donated the land for Salem Village’s first meeting house, but he got mad at the minister, Samuel Parris, and he fenced off the meeting house so nobody could come in and go to service. And of course, everybody was irate, and they tore up the fence and went to meeting anyways.
And Joseph Hutchinson, another interesting thing about him is that, as I said, he was an accuser turned defender. He was one of the four men who filed the first complaints against [00:07:00] Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba.
So he was part of this process of getting the whole witch trial episode underway, but then later he appears to have changed his mind, because he defended Rebecca by signing this petition and also by testifying in court against one of the accusers of Rebecca, pointing out how she had contradicted herself and was basically lying. And today you can visit Joseph Hutchinson’s land anytime you go to see the Witch Trial Victims memorial in Danvers, that’s Joseph Hutchinson’s land.
And as we’ve said, Sarah and I are both descendants of Rebecca’s sister, Mary Esty. She was special in that she wrote a very strong petition urging that no more innocent blood be shed. She [00:08:00] knew that it was her time to die, but she didn’t want anybody else to suffer the same way in the witch trials because if she was innocent and she knew it, then she was sure that others were innocent as well, and suffering needlessly.
Sarah Jack: But she firmly believed that she had to be respectful and not question authority. I can’t imagine what that conflict is like when your life is on the line. So she used her energy to beseech them to really consider who they were convicting, because, like Josh said, she knew she was innocent and she didn’t want anybody else to to die who was innocent. And unfortunately, as we all know, many, many more people have gone on to die because of witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: We were able to visit the place that she hid from [00:09:00] her second arrest in 2023. We were able to visit that spot andwe had that experience with advocate Leo Igwe, who is with Advocacy for Alleged Witchesof Nigeria. I bring this up, because as a descendant of Mary, her petition is one of the things that drives me to speak about the modern witchcraft accusations. Being in the place where she hid and visiting it with an advocate who’s on the ground every day trying to save lives from these same witchcraft accusations, it’s something that I think of very regularly, and so I appreciate that I had that experience. I’m also really sad to be able to have an experience like that and for it to be something that’s so critical.
It was really powerful to be with him on that trip [00:10:00] and take him to the monuments and memorials so he could pay his respects, because he doesn’t have that opportunity in his own country where these things are happening every day. There’s no place to go in remembrance of the victims yet.
Another one of my ancestors I mentioned at the beginning is the minister Francis Dane of Andover. He was the senior minister in the town, and this was the town that unfortunately had the most accusations of any community in Massachusetts or in New England at all in the Salem Witch trials. It outdid Salem plus Salem Village combined by a good margin.
Andover wasn’t a very great big town. 500 some people and about 45 or [00:11:00] of them were accused of witchcraft. Many of them were related to Francis Dane. So I bring him up, because of all these connections he has through his own descendants and his wife’s sisters and cousins and things. He had 28 members of his extended family accused of witchcraft in 1692, 28. There were 156 people total accused of witchcraft that we know for sure, may have been more, but 28 is a big chunk of that for one family. His wife was Elizabeth Ingalls, her sisters and nieces, and everybody that she was connected to basically got accused and not exactly sure why, but probably because one of her relatives was Martha Allen Carrier, [00:12:00] the Queen in Hell, as she was said to be by Mary Lacey Jr, who accused her of that, of receiving that rank from the devil. Martha Allen Carrier. There’s Abigail Dane Faulkner, Mary Allen Toothaker, and who was the wife of Roger Toothaker, who’s an interesting character because he was a unwitcher,so he was trying to reverse spells and also to inflict pain and death on witches. And then there’s Elizabeth Johnson Jr, who was recently exonerated in 2022. And many, many more. As I said, there’s 28 of them.
And then beyond the witch trials, 12 of Francis Dane’s 20 grandchildren married into other Andover families that were involved in the witch trials, many of them being related to accused people, but a few of them actually being [00:13:00] related to accusers. Who were you gonna marry after the witch trials were over? It was probably somebody that was involved, because pretty much everybody in Essex County seems to get involved, especially in Andover.
Sarah Jack: We opened today thinking about Christopher Reeve, and as a human, he really proves that heroism isn’t about superpowers, but he’s also a symbol of superpowers. We want you to think about perseverance. We all take different, poignant things away from the Salem Witch Trials. It’s so complex, there’s so many layers, and there’s a lot of positive things to pull out, but we wanted you to think about perseverance today, that the gift of every Salem descendant is carried by the perseverance of our ancestors, but you don’t have to share those bloodlines to share that lesson. Salem teaches us about the price of silence, the power of [00:14:00] standing up, and the importance of questioning authority. Please don’t be as polite as Mary Esty was.
Josh Hutchinson: Those aren’t genetic traits. They’re human traits. And please come join us on Patreon. We’ll have a chat there about this episode, and you can tell us about your family stories and tell us what you respect and admire about your ancestors.
Sarah Jack: Show us your support by liking and subscribing at our YouTube channel, in our Patreon community, in our Facebook posts. If you’re on LinkedIn, share our work there.
Josh Hutchinson: We can’t promise you’ll be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but you’ll have a great time. That’s patreon.com/aboutsalem.
Sarah Jack: Join our organization, End Witch Hunts, live on [00:15:00] World Day Against Witch Hunts to learn from leading experts about the survivors of witchcraft accusations in Ghana outcast camps.
Sunday, August 10th, End Witch Hunts Events is bringing together specialists from Amnesty International, the Sanneh Institute, the Total Life Enhancement Center Ghana Action Aid,and Songtaba for a crucial discussion on supporting survivors of witchcraft accusations with a special focus on women and children in Ghana’s outcast camps.
Josh Hutchinson: The World Day Against Witch Hunts isn’t just about history. It’s about understanding a crisis happening right now. Vulnerable people, especially women and children, still face violence and exile due to witchcraft accusations in communities that desperately need our support.
This is your opportunity to learn directly from researchers, advocates, and organizationsworking [00:16:00] directly in these communities to address their needs. Events are happening globally to honor this day of remembrance and education, please share the event details with your network.
Sarah Jack: You can register for free at endwitchhunts.org/day. Attending this event will help you gain insights that can help turn awareness into meaningful action.
Josh Hutchinson: Because understanding and then starting an important conversation is where meaningful change starts.
Sarah Jack: Hear the special expert panel Sunday, August 10th, 2025 at 5:30 PM GMT. That’s 1:30 PM EDT. Find the link to this free online webinar at endwitchhunts.org/day.
Christopher Reeve proved that heroism isn’t about superpowers—it’s about perseverance. That’s the gift every Salem descendant carries, but you don’t have to share their bloodline to share their lesson. Salem teaches us about the price of silence, the power of standing up, the importance of questioning authority. Those aren’t genetic traits—they’re human ones.
Hosts Josh and Sarah explore their own ancestral connections to the trials and reveal how descendants of Salem’s victims number in the millions today.
On the night of May 20th, 1692, between about 8 and 11, Mercy Lewis was reportedly bewitched so badly that six eyewitnesses described it as if death would’ve quickly followed and said that she could not continue long in this world without a mitigation of those torments.
Sarah Jack: Mercy
There were men attending to Mercy, but she couldn’t speak, so they sent for Elizabeth Hubbard so they could find out who was afflicting Mercy.
Josh Hutchinson: But once Elizabeth Hubbard arrived on the scene, she and Mercy began having alternating fits, that one was afflicted while the other was well, and so one could speak while the other was in a fit. And so eventually they revealed that Mary Esty was the one that they saw coming to afflict them in her spectral form, and Mary Esty had only recently been released [00:01:00] from jail because the afflicted girls didn’t agree on whether Mary’s specter was the one that was hurting them.
So Esty’s specter supposedly brought the devil’s book to Mercy Lewis and threatened to kill her by showing her a winding sheet and a coffin. This, the men took to be a grave threat, meaning that her death was imminent. In fear, they rode to Salem Town to get a warrant for her arrest in the middle of the night to wake up the magistrates and say, Hey, we need to arrest this woman and get her back in chains so that her specter is not roaming any longer. So they rode to Salem, got the warrant, rode back with the constable, arrested Mary Esty, and took her back to the jail, and got all that done sometime between the [00:02:00] start at eight and 11 and midnight, this imposing deadline that seemed to be in place on Mercy Lewis’s life.
Sarah Jack: She lived, but she still had afflictions.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and poor Mary Esty went to jail and stayed there for four months before her trial in September. Welcome to The Thing About Salem. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I am Sarah Jack. We are descendants of Mary Esty. Did that sound like hysteria to you?
Josh Hutchinson: Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines hysteria as behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess.
Sarah Jack: Hysteria is not the most accurate way to explain the Salem Witch Trials. Though the Salem Witch Trials are considered a witch [00:03:00] panic and there was certainly widespread fear, we cannot diagnose clinical hysteria from a distance of 330 years, and accusers definitely were not all hysterical all the time.
Josh Hutchinson: The Salem Witch Trials proceeded through orderly legal channels, and months went by before the first trial. And during all this time, there’s no reports of any extrajudicial actions, any vigilante style justice, or people just taking the law into their own hands. And also the non-afflicted witnesses and accusers were quite composed in court hearings, as were the jury members, and of course, the judges seemed to be of sound mind the entire time.
Sarah Jack: Hysteria has turned into a buzzword when it comes to witch hunts. It’s just an adjective. It’s a description we just throw [00:04:00] on there. But when we label any witch-hunt the result of hysteria, it is a way of not accepting what causes a witch-hunt and not accepting that we’re capable of the same injustices today.
Josh Hutchinson: We still have the same emotions. There’s the same kind of quick spread of fear that happens when scary situations arise in our society. The quick spread of the panic in 1692, it was a function of several things happening in the colony at that point in time. There was economic uncertainty, there was war, political uncertainty, religious strife and uncertainty, and the list goes on, so many stresses on people’s minds at that time that when they found an enemy they could pin all of this uncertainty and disarray, basically, [00:05:00] on, they went with that enemy.
Sarah Jack: So you know, all of these conditions, the economics and war, and politics and religious and social, and every other factor that went into the Salem Witch Trials, those are things that just regularly happen during human history. You could look at any period of time and you’d see similar things going on in societies, and it’s just when there’s a big enough combination of all of those factors that panics happen and witch-trial-like behaviors occur. So today we call those things witch hunts when we recognize them, but so often we don’t.Since 1692, there have been several moral panics. We’ve had them recently in our world. I don’t have to say what they are. You’re thinking of them [00:06:00] right now and we need to recognize it. Reactions to injustice can be extreme, because injustice is an extreme negative experience. It doesn’t mean the reaction’s hysteria, and we need to recognize that it’s ordinary human behaviors that responsible for those panics.
Now the affliction stories are colorful. They were modeled over and over, over decades and through other hunts for witches, colorful and imaginative, but not hysterical. You know, sometimes we feel hysterical or we see someone we love have a really extreme response to a trauma and we might say it was so bad we were in hysterics. But that’s a generalized description. [00:07:00] Shock, anger, sadness, fear, those are the things that we need to pull the threads out on and look at to honestly reflect on the Salem Witch Trials.
Salem wasn’t the only witch panic that happened in New England, so these things happened periodically. Salem of course, dwarfs the others in its absolute scale, but fears like this came up many times in New England, and it’s crucial to understand that they weren’t all merely an irrational outburst of hysteria. They were actually profound panic born from deeply held beliefs and very real societal pressures. The colonists genuinely believed in the existence of witches and their diabolical powers, as did pretty much any Christian at the time. They viewed these powers as an existential threat to their community and their faith.[00:08:00]
Extreme fear is fear. It can cause panic, but the hysteria isn’t what would propel the judicial conviction of an accused witch.
Josh Hutchinson:
Salem
began in mid-January when Betty and Abigail began displaying the first symptoms. Late February, they were diagnosed as being under an evil hand, a witch cake was baked to test who was the first witch, and the first accusations were made on February 26th. So March 1st, you get the first arrest, legal examinations, and incarcerations, but it’s not until June 2nd that there’s the first trial. So this is five months between January and June that the children are ill. The illness is spreading through the village and then surrounding communities. Somehow they allow five months to go by while they’re supposedly [00:09:00] hysterical this entire five months before they have the first trial of a defendant.
Sarah Jack: It is obvious that the events are just too complex to simply write off to hysteria and move on. Moving on afterafter labeling it hysteria is one of the reasons that we’re, generation after generation, still trying to figure out what’s going on. If we stop labeling it as hysteria, that’s one point. Now I’m not gonna go hunt who’s using the label still and criticize you, but just think about, if we take that word out of there, it leaves more space for talking about the story of our ancestors. More nuanced and sophisticated explanations help us to learn lessons from these witch trials, and the way people reacted then is just how we react to fears now. Fears about immigration, terrorism, nonconformity to gender [00:10:00] norms today, those reactions. It’s us. They’re humans. We’re humans. Same reactions.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and we started this episode with the story of Mercy Lewis accusing Mary Esty of imminently planning to murder her. Even this midnight horse ride illustrates that people went through legal channels, even when they were at their most frantic.
Sarah Jack: The Salem Witch Trials were a human reaction to great fear during a time of stress and uncertainty. And when we consider that, we can have more empathy for both sides, for accusers and the accused, I even think this hysteria label kind of takes the humanity out of the accusers, and we really need to recognize what they were experiencing also.
Josh Hutchinson: And it’s so important just to recognize how ordinary the people and the emotions [00:11:00] involved in the witch trials were. They’re us, we’re them, people haven’t changed that much in 333 years, so we need to know and acknowledge that they had the same feelings and fretted about the same things that we do, and so reacted in ways that we react to things still today. So we’re much closer to thinking like the people did then than we choose to believe.
Sarah Jack: It is so true. You know, the United States is celebrating the, 250 years of independence and we act like that was, just yesterday. Well, 1692 was just a few generations before that. So if we can identify and recognize ourselves in the founding fathers of the United States, then we can do the same with those who were [00:12:00] founding the colonies and hunting witches.
Josh Hutchinson: And it’s true that the afflicted people were energetic and noisy and just got wild in the court sessions, but in between attending the hearings against the accused, they were reported to have behaved normally. Thomas Brattle, in a letter to an unnamed clergyman, wrote that, “many of these afflicted persons who have scores of strange fits in a day, yet in the intervals of time are hail and hardy, robust and lusty, as though nothing had afflicted them.”
And so he tells about here about the chief justice giving the jury their instructions. “He told them that they were not to mind whether the bodies of the said afflicted were really pined and consumed, as was expressed in the indictment, but whether the said afflicted did not suffer from the accused such afflictions as naturally [00:13:00] tended to their being pined and consumed, wasted, et cetera. This, said he, is a pining and consuming in the sense of the law.”
Hysteria, while possibly affecting individual witch trial accusers at specific times, is not a satisfying explanation of why witch hunts occurred in the past or why they’re occurring today.
The hysteria explanation leaves open the possibility that witch hunts happen randomly whenever a person or group is hysterical. They understate the factors that contribute to witch hunts, the social, economic, political, religious and cultural factors, the emotional stresses and fears, the familial and neighborhood strife, the sudden disaster that serves as the impetus for the hunt.
To address witch hunting and in the future, we have to understand the ordinary human emotions and behaviors involved in the hunts. We are who [00:14:00] we always were. We’re as capable of witch hunts as any people at any time in history.
America has seen numerous moral panics, including the Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, over the years. But rather than citing hysteria as the cause of these more recent panics, historians and other researchers reason that societal pressures caused these panics. So why do we insist that the witch trials 300 some years ago were the products of hysteria, when we know that people today are involved in the same kind of panics? Let’s be realistic and address the human factors that lead to widespread human rights violations during periods of panic.
Sarah Jack: We’d love to chat with you about this in our Patreon community. Come say hi and tell us what you think of hysteria. I.
We kick off with a midnight ride that would make Paul Revere jealous—except instead of warning about the British, townspeople were frantically summoning help for a girl supposedly being tortured by a witch’s specter. But before you roll your eyes and mutter “mass hysteria,” consider this: What if the Salem Witch Trials weren’t the product of unhinged women with wandering uteruses (yes, that’s a real historical medical theory), but rather ordinary people responding to extraordinary fear in disturbingly familiar ways?
Join us as we trace witch panics from Springfield to Hartford, uncovering a pattern that’s less “crazy town” and more “calculated legal proceedings.” We’ll explore why dismissing these events as hysteria might be the most dangerous mistake we can make—especially when the same human behaviors that fueled 17th-century witch hunts are alive and well in. Spoiler alert: We’re not as evolved as we think we are.
Fair warning: Contains references to wandering uteruses, midnight rides, and uncomfortable parallels to contemporary society.
We look at the reported use of oomancy—egg divination—allegedly preceding the Salem Witch Trials. The discussion centers around a haunting account from Reverend John Hale about an afflicted girl who used an egg and glass to divine her future, only to see a coffin appear in the reflection. This ominous vision allegedly led to her eventual death, serving as what Hale callously called “a just warning” about dabbling with divination.
The hosts explore the ancient origins of divination practices, tracing them back thousands of years to early civilizations. The episode examines various divination methods documented in Salem records, including the sieve and scissors technique, key and Bible, and other techniques for fortune telling. Several fascinating Salem cases come to light, including Samuel Wardwell’s admitted fortune telling abilities and Dorcas Hoar’s reputation as a local fortune teller who specialized in predicting the deaths of men. The hosts share intriguing testimonies from neighbors who witnessed these practices firsthand, revealing how common divination was in 17th-century New England communities.
Throughout the episode, the hosts address common myths about Salem, including the popular but inaccurate image of girls gathering in circles for magic sessions. They also explore the mystery of which afflicted girl Hale was referring to in his account, as her identity remains unknown to this day.
Join Josh and Sarah as they uncover the surprisingly relatable human desire to glimpse the future, one cracked egg at a time. Connect with them on Patreon at patreon.com/aboutsalem to continue the conversation about Salem’s divination practices and their modern echoes.
You’ve heard the theory: ergot-poisoned rye bread caused hallucinations that sparked the Salem witch trials. It sounds so logical, so scientific, so… wrong.
When the afflicted girl Elizabeth Hubbard accused alleged witch Sarah Good of witchcraft through spectral torture – pinching, pricking, and demanding she sign the devil’s book – was she describing a fungal poisoning? Or something far more complex?
Join Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack as they finally address one of the most popular silver bullet “explanations” for the Salem Witch Trials. They’ll show you why this tidy medical explanation crumbles: convulsive ergotism is actually a syndrome with a constellation of symptoms and variables.
This episode will sharpen your critical thinking. The ergot theory’s problems show us how easily we can be drawn to explanations that sound scientific but don’t actually fit the evidence and why we need to dig deeper than the theories that simply make us feel better about difficult history.
In Salem, people were hanged based on crimes no one else could see.
In Salem, accusers claimed to see the ghostly “shapes” of their neighbors tormenting them from miles away. These spectral attacks left real bruises, real terror, and real questions: Could the Devil impersonate innocent people? Why did Connecticut reject this evidence decades earlier while Salem embraced it with deadly consequences?
From midnight visitations to courtroom chaos, discover how testimony about invisible crimes became the most dangerous evidence in American legal history.
The shadows cast by Salem’s trials reach far beyond 1692—and the question of what we’re willing to believe based on what we cannot see remains as relevant as ever.
One month in, and we’re finding our rhythm with The Thing About Salem podcast.
Running two weekly podcasts keeps us busy, but dedicating one entirely to Salem has been a blast. We’re enjoying the focused approach, and each week brings new aspects of the story to life.
Our First Four Episodes
The Thing About Tituba started us off with the real story about the “witch cake” and how it set everything in motion. We started to separate the documented facts from the legends that have grown up around Tituba.
Salem Witch Trial Judges Played with Poppets examined how judges brought poppets into the court proceedings and experimented with their power. Be sure to catch the extended cut on Patreon.
Why The Crucible Never Gets Old examined Arthur Miller’s play and its continued relevance. We discussed how its themes connect to modern culture and society.
Dining with the Devil in the Pastor’s Pasture explored how accusations evolved from simple claims to elaborate stories being accepted as evidence. These witches’ sabbath tales marked a significant escalation in the 1692 trials.
What We’re Pulling from the Records
Salem’s court records and contemporary accounts reveal many complexities. The documentation shows patterns that extend far beyond 1692—connections between legal procedures, community tensions, and individual motivations that help explain not just what happened, but why it happened the way it did.
Looking Ahead
Next up is an episode on spectral evidence, which was central to the accusations and convictions. We’re looking forward to breaking down this complicated view of the natural and unnatural worlds and how it played out in the courtroom.
What happens when a few cryptic accusations transform into elaborate tales of midnight gatherings with the Devil himself? In Salem, the introduction of witches’ sabbath stories didn’t just add fuel to the fire—it created an inferno that would consume an entire community. These stories reveal how panic spreads and conspiracies grow, transforming neighbors into enemies and turning familiar landscapes into theaters of supernatural warfare.
Episode Highlights:
European Origins of Sabbath Stories • In the western Alps in the 1430s, stories spread after religious conferences • Originally called the “Synagogue of Satan,” not sabbath or sabbat • 1669 Swedish trials in Elfdale Province featured children confessing to journeys to Blockula • Accused described calling “Antecessor come and carry us to Blockula” three times at crossroads • The Devil appeared in a gray coat, red and blue stockings, and distinctive high-crowned hat with red beard
Salem’s Transformation • European sabbath tales were fresh in colonial minds when Salem’s hunt began •Stories evolved from simple accusations into vast conspiracy narratives
Impact on the Witch Hunt • Each confession built upon previous stories, creating coherent mythology • Details seemed to confirm worst fears about supernatural conspiracy • Stories recorded as evidence and treated as truth by authorities • Transformed the scope from individual accusations to community-wide threat
Related Content: Join us on Patreon for bonus episodes and behind-the-scenes content
Arthur Miller’s timeless play, The Crucible, transformed the Salem Witch Trials into America’s most powerful allegory for McCarthyism. When The Crucible premiered in 1953, Miller—who would later marry Marilyn Monroe—created a dramatized version of Salem that exposed the dangerous parallels between witch hunts and communist hysteria.
Hosts Josh and Sarah explore Miller’s deliberate historical changes and why he chose fiction over fact to reveal deeper truths about accusation, confession, and moral courage under pressure.
The episode breaks down how Miller’s allegory connected Salem’s witch trials to 1950s Red Scare tactics, showing why both historical moments reveal the same pattern. Whether fearing witchcraft or communism, communities turn on perceived traitors through panic and make false accusations.
Explore The Crucible’s lasting cultural impact from high school literature classes to multiple film adaptations. Whether you’re studying the play for school, preparing for a performance, or simply curious about its enduring relevance, this episode explains why Miller’s work remains essential reading in our current age of political polarization.
Perfect for students, theater enthusiasts, and anyone seeking to understand how The Crucible connects Salem’s 1692 tragedy to timeless themes of integrity, community panic, and moral choice that still resonate today.
Explore one of the more bizarre forms of evidence used to convict witches in colonial America. When the Salem Witch Trials judges accepted poppets as deadly proof of witchcraft, they turned dolls and rags into evidence that cost innocent people like Bridget Bishop their lives. The judges admitted all kinds of evidence that wouldn’t survive five minutes in a modern courtroom, including poppets—dolls crafted with malicious intent—that were allegedly used to afflict targets from afar.
The hosts reveal how law enforcement searched accused witches’ homes for “pictures of clay or wax,” turning up everything from rag dolls stuffed with goat hair to knotted handkerchiefs filled with cheese and grass. In the most shocking cases, judges conducted live magical experiments in their own courtrooms while watching the “afflicted” witnesses writhe in apparent agony, then using these theatrical displays as evidence to send people to the gallows.
Listeners discover the tragic stories behind Salem’s most infamous poppet cases, like those involving Bridget Bishop, Candy, and Abigail Hobbs, who claimed the devil personally delivered poppets to her. The episode also explores pre-Salem cases like Goody Glover. This is another chapter in understanding how Salem became America’s most infamous example of justice gone terribly wrong.
In the inaugural episode of The Thing About Salem, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack take you inside the Salem Witch Trials, focusing on the early events that triggered the infamous witch-hunt. Discover how Tituba became the unwitting catalyst for America’s most infamous witch hunt. This isn’t the sanitized version you learned in school or saw in The Crucible—this is the raw, documented truth about three pivotal days that changed history forever.
When 9-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams began barking like dogs and trying to walk into fireplaces in January 1692, their desperate community turned to folk magic—baking a grotesque “witch cake” made with the girls’ urine and feeding it to a dog. This bizarre ritual, unique in all of New England’s witch trial records, appeared to succeed when the girls began naming witches the very next day. Their first target was Tituba, the enslaved indigenous woman in their own household—the most vulnerable person in Salem Village and the unwitting catalyst who would spend 15 months in jail as the witch trials exploded across Massachusetts.
Listeners are provided with a detailed account of the strange behaviors exhibited by Parris’s daughter Betty and niece Abigail, the mysterious witch cake baked by Mary Sibley, and the subsequent accusations against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. The podcast also highlights Tituba’s lasting impact and a commemorative brick in her honor at the House of the Seven Gables. The episode is the first in a weekly series exploring different facets of the Salem Witch Trials.
On May 12, 1692: * The Salem magistrates issued arrest warrants for Ann Pudeator and Alice Parker * John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin questioned Abigail Hobbs, Ann Pudeator, Alice, Parker, and Mary Warren * Mary Walcott was allegedly assaulted by the shape of Sarah Buckley * Mercy Lewis and Ann Putnam, Jr. supposedly saw the specters of John Willard and Sarah Buckley assault Bray Wilkins, to keep his bladder stopped.On May 12, 1693: * Connecticut’s General Court granted Mercy Disborough a reprieve. * The Superior Court cleared the remaining witchcraft suspects and would release them from jail once they paid their jail fees.
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There are so many things about Salem for us to discuss, and we are determined to get to all of them, no matter how long it takes.
Welcome to The Thing About Salem, where each week we have a lively discussion about a different facet, person, or event from the Salem Witch Trials. We are going to cover all the things, so buckle up.
Episodes we already have lined up include discussions about Tituba, poppets, the witches’ sabbath, The Crucible, the ergotism theory, confessions, afflictions, and familiar spirits. The Thing About Salem also features talk on the legal, economic, military, social, religious, and political circumstances in which the witch trials occurred, as well as the procedures used in the witch trials. Basically, we are covering all the things.
Each episode features our hosts Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson, who tell a dynamic story and then talk about the ramifications. Enjoy all the feels as we cover all the things about the Salem Witch Trials.
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