The Thing About Tituba

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.